by Cole Baxter
I hadn't, not this time. But I was tempted.
Sometimes, I felt that Mackendy acted like I should be fine by now, and he was confused about why I was still in rough shape.
But then, he seemed to have no trouble continuing his career when his partner left him.
Sam and I had been colleagues on the Seattle police force. We had basically started on the same day. We didn't end up as partners, though, because we were both assigned someone else. Sam's former partner, Jared, was older than him and showed him the ropes. The two of them had a grand old time together until Jared suffered a heart attack.
Sam just went about police life alone for a while, and he expected everyone else to do the same. Like it didn't matter at all, like we weren't human. Like all we had to care about was the law.
I did care about the law. I joined the police force because I cared about the law and all the things that came with it. I wanted people to feel safe and I wanted the world to be a better place.
I thought that Lola and I could make the world a better place.
Lola. What a stupid name for a police detective. I told her so on the first day, and she told me that I was stupid, and that was when our bond was sealed. From them on, Lola and I were inseparable. We went everywhere together, on shift and off shift.
You were never supposed to fall in love with your partner, but I did, which made everything worse. I felt like I had my best friend with me all the time. Everything was perfect. We were on top of the world. We were a crime fighting duo who couldn't be broken.
Until we were broken.
There were some statistics that said almost fifty percent of police officers would be shot at some point in their career. That meant that between Lola and me, one of us would be shot.
I wasn't afraid of guns. We were well-trained, we were good shots ourselves, and of course, we wore a lot of protective clothing.
That didn't mean that we were invincible. It was the one fact that I hadn't realized. I didn't actually think we would die.
When Lola was gunned down in front of me, I kept telling her that everything would be fine, even though she was bleeding out on the sidewalk. Logically, if I had listened to my medical training, I would have known that she wasn't going to be fine. But in the moment, I honestly believed that she would be all right. I believed that the paramedics would get there in time and she and I would be back on the beat in no time.
She wasn't fine. Lola died before the paramedics even got there. She died in pain and she died afraid. No amount of tourniquets, of my holding her, or of miracles could save her.
She deserved better. I was the one who deserved to die. I was the one they should have taken.
I couldn't do it after that. I couldn't just walk into work every day, like Sam did, and pretend that I was fine. I was going solo or I would look for a new partner.
I mean, I'm sure Sam hadn't been sleeping with Jared, but it was basically the same thing, and I just couldn't do it anymore.
I tried to hide my pain at first. I turned to alcohol. I even dabbled in drugs, but that obviously wasn't a particularly good idea as a police officer on the force. I thought that maybe, just maybe if I numbed myself enough, everything would be all right.
But it wasn't, so I left the force.
The time off had been one of the darkest moments in my life. I had fought so many battles in my head, and I had almost given in several times.
Eventually, I found that I could survive, even if it wasn't the existence that I was used to. I found that I could use the skills I learned as a police officer in order to work as a private detective. It wasn't the best, but I enjoyed it.
A private detective worked alone, so no one expected me to partner up. Mackendy and the rest of my friends on the Seattle force called me whenever they had something I could take on, and I had private clients as well.
It was a life I could live. I didn't carry a gun. I didn't fight crime, but I still managed to bring down bad people for bad things. Justice was still served, which was what Lola and I lived for. I was sure she would want me to keep living and keep fighting, even if that was the hardest thing in the world.
She lived a stubborn life, and I’d often hated her for it. She would push through anything. She would come to work sick or exhausted, and she would always have a smile on her face and positive words. Don't get me wrong, she would also kick ass, but it was like nothing bothered Lola enough to stop her from her mission. She was insane and she was stubborn, but she was also my motivation and the reason I drew breath every day.
If she hadn't been that way, I was sure I would have thrown myself off a building a long time ago.
Lola was on my mind as I showered and dressed and then headed into the office. It was hard to walk in the same doors that I used to walk in with her every morning and pretend like I wasn't about to have a breakdown.
Luckily, I didn't have to hide it. Almost everyone there knew, and those who didn't know were told. To be honest, I had been a bit of a jerk in the months following Lola's death, so anyone who didn't know me before mostly avoided me.
"Blake!" Sam said from his desk. He got up and came over to shake my hand. "Look at you, right on time."
"Yeah, yeah," I said as I sat down in the chair opposite his desk. "When you're working as a private detective, you learn that time matters. If someone tells you that their husband is going to be out of work at 3:00 p.m. and you need to follow him, you don't show up at 3:05 p.m."
"That's fair," he said with a grin. "You could teach all of us a lesson. How are you?"
"What do you have for me?" I asked. I didn't really want to talk about how I was because it was the same as the time before that and the time before that. I wasn't awesome, but I was getting by, and that was all that mattered.
"Oh, I've got a whopper for you," he said and handed me a file folder.
I opened it and began to page through it as Sam talked.
"So, we have this girl," he said. "Laurie Whitman. rose from the dead."
"What do you mean?" I asked, confused.
"She arrived in the hospital a few months ago. Her husband said that she was strangled and raped. She died of her injuries."
"Oh?" I said. I failed to see why he needed me for the case.
"But here's the thing," he said. "She hasn't died from her injuries. She vanished from the hospital and everyone's lives for three months."
"What? But how can a hospital be unsure that someone died? Or do you mean her body disappeared? There are some screwed up cases of body snatching going on out there."
"Yeah, I know," he said. "I'm not talking about body snatching, though. She died, she vanished, and now she has resurfaced."
"She has? That's . . .interesting."
"Right," Sam said. "Like, why would you fake your own death if you are just going to show up again?"
"So, you want me to go and find her?"
"No, we can find her," Sam replied. "That part is easy. What isn't easy is finding out the whole story. Someone obviously helped her fake her own death, and somebody hid her for three months. We need to know who those people are. The people who have come to us . . . they are willing to pay extra to keep this whole story on the down low, out of the news, everything."
"Who is it?" I asked.
Sam shook his head. "Doesn't matter," he replied. "What matters is that you find out the real story. Because when Laurie was brought into the hospital, her husband said that there was a break-in and that she was raped and strangled."
"But that doesn't add up?" I asked.
He pointed toward the medical files in the folder. "Doesn't quite seem to," he said. "She didn't struggle for a lot of the trauma."
"Interesting," I replied. "So, she's recovered, and what is she doing now?"
"Writing books about being abused by her husband," he said.
My jaw dropped. "Oh. Oh. But . . ."
"But her husband is dead," he said. "From a fire."
"So, did she murder him?"
&n
bsp; "I don't know," Sam said. "That's where you come in. If we start diving deep into this, this is going to be all over the press and all over the news."
"And you don't want that," I repeated. The folder was incredibly thick, and it would take a lot of time for me to go through it. "But none of this makes any sense. I mean, maybe she murdered him, but then to resurface and talk about the abuse? That makes her a prime suspect. Why would she do that? Surely, no one is that dumb."
"Blake, you know as well as I do that many people are that dumb," Sam said.
I sighed. "Unfortunately, I do," I said. "But come on. We deal with abused women all the time. There are exceptions, of course, Sam, but for the most part, these women don't kill. They get strong, they write books, but they don't kill. He died in a fire, you said?"
"A terrible fire," Sam replied. "There was no way he could have survived it, and yes, it does look like arson."
"It looks like or it's confirmed to be arson?" I asked.
Sam shook his head. "We don't know," he replied. "But this is all stuff that has to be kept quiet. You are the only one who has access to this."
"Well, it certainly is an interesting one," I said as I continued to turn the pages of the document.
"Do you think you can do it?" he asked.
I nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do it. It would be a lot of money, though."
He wrote down a figure and pushed it toward me.
My eyes widened. "Yeah, that's a lot of money."
"So, you accept?" he asked.
I nodded. "I accept. I'm going to find out which of them is the guilty one. And if it's her, it will certainly go down in history. That takes balls, to do what she's doing."
"I know," he said with a grin. "I knew you'd like this case. It'll be good for you."
Chapter Three
Laurie
I did remember when things were good. I had to remember when things were good because if I didn't, I wouldn't have anything to compare it to. I would just assume that things were bad all the time, and then it wouldn't matter. But I did remember when things were good, and that was what made it worse.
When Devon and I first met, I thought he was the sexiest, most attractive man on the planet. He was so handsome and so kind, and I was just a little wallflower who didn't know any better.
Of course, I now knew that it had all been an act. He had been putting on an act to lure me. How the hell was I supposed to know?
I had only been nineteen when I first met Devon. He was absolutely beautiful, handsome and kind. I had been at college, and he was twenty-six when he swept me off my feet. He was older, he was rich, and I thought that I had met the man of my dreams. I mean, he was a firefighter, for God’s sake. How was I not supposed to fall in love?
And so, fall in love we did. Everyone told me that I was too young to get married, and everyone told me that it would probably go bad quickly. They told me that they didn't think a twenty-six-year-old and a nineteen-year-old had anything in common, but I told them that they were crazy and they should probably just worry about their own relationships.
Nobody seemed to appreciate that, but I didn't really care. After all, it was my relationship and my happiness, and if I was the one who had to deal with it, then I was strong.
At least, I'd thought I was strong. I was strong enough for Devon, anyway, and he wasn't really a problem in the beginning. I liked his sexy muscles, and I liked that he was dominant. I hadn't realized it until I was with him, but I was a bit of an old-fashioned girl, and I liked that he took care of things.
Devon was the type of guy who held the door for you. He was also the type of guy who ordered your meal and insisted that you wear modest clothing so that your body was saved just for him.
He wasn't particularly religious or anything. He was just like this, and I thought that was sexy. I thought I would enjoy basically being owned by him. I desperately wanted to be the old-fashioned wife, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. So happy.
I wanted him to come home from his shifts at the firehouse and kiss me on the cheek and have dinner waiting for him.
For a while, we did that, and it was perfect. Of course, I had aspirations and dreams of my own, but they didn't matter. Devon provided for me and gave me everything I wanted. Devon was the one who made me happy, and Devon made sure everything that I even thought about, I had.
Eventually, my friends started to get married, and they started to see that perhaps married life wasn't so bad. When we started attending weddings together, I was overjoyed. I felt like we were the experts, and we could give advice on anything that was going wrong with my friends’ marriages. We were the wise old couple and they were the young new ones.
But then Devon started to say that he didn't like my friends. He started to say that my friends were rude or controlling or that they had said horrible things to him.
He told me that I shouldn't bring it up to them because it would cause too much drama. He told me that I should cut them off. And because we were so happy and he made me so fulfilled, I believed him.
One by one, I stopped talking to people I had known since middle school. I deleted their numbers, I blocked them on Facebook, and then I blocked Facebook altogether. I stopped caring about their lives and I stopped responding to the rare messages that got through.
A few of them showed up in person and told me they were worried about me, that they wanted to know that I was all right.
Devon told me that they were just mad, that they were just trying to control me, and I believed him. I believed everything he said. As far as I was concerned, Devon was the be all and end all and he was the best source for anything.
In the beginning, our sex life was white hot. He and I were perfectly in sync, and I was comfortable telling him anything. I told him that I liked some things a certain way, and I told him I liked it a little rough, and at first, it was good, but then after a while, he seemed to take it a bit far.
In the beginning, he didn't drink too much, either. He had a beer here or there, but then, so did I. So did everyone. It didn't really matter. Sometimes, after a long shift, he just wanted a few beers and then he got horny.
I didn't mind having sex with him when he was drunk. I didn't mind because he was still Devon and I still loved him just as much. He was just a little sloppy and a little silly, and that was fine.
But then, it went from silly to out of control. He started to choke me, and at first, I didn't mind. I was willing to try anything. Devon was older than me, and he had more experience than me, and he knew what was good and what wasn't . . . or at least, I thought he did. I listened to him, and I was willing to try anything, even if it hurt.
So, I tried anything he wanted. I tried anal sex, I tried BDSM, and I tried getting bitten or licked or whatever he wanted. However as the years went on, the more he drank, the more he wanted to choke me until I passed out.
I remembered the very first time it was a problem. We'd had sex the night before, and I woke up the next morning to find faint marks on my neck.
They were so faint that I was able to cover them with makeup. I told Devon, and he laughed and said it was like a love mark.
But the next time, there was nothing I could do to hide them with makeup. So, I just wrapped a scarf around my neck and managed to go about my day. A few people were suspicious, but no one said anything to me.
I thought it was fine, but I still mentioned it to Devon. I said that I was a little bit uncomfortable and I didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.
He took that the wrong way, and sex after that began to get more and more violent. There was nowhere for me to go and no one for me to even say anything to. It wasn't like I had any friends left. It wasn't like I had even spoken to my family at all. It wasn't like I could even call a crisis line because he took my phone away. He took away my laptop, and I was only able to be on it when he was home. He would look over my shoulder and make sure everything I was doing was something he approved of.
Most of the ti
me, though, I wasn't allowed to watch anything or do anything, while he could watch hours and hours of porn. He would watch it and jerk off, or he would watch it and tell me to watch it with him and act like those girls.
I regretted acting like those girls because they weren't me. I wasn't judging them, but I didn't particularly want to act like them. I wanted Devon to want me, to love me, but it was like he looked right through me and all he wanted to see was the porn. All he wanted was a porno girl to be with, day in and day out. He even suggested that we make videos.
I was super resistant, but we made a few of them, which he said he watched in place of real porn. However, I didn't really believe him. I didn't really think he did anything except lust after fantasy girls and then try to kill me during sex.
The first time I said that he was doing that, he laughed and said that it was just sex games. He would never get violent with me when he was sober and when he wasn't horny.
I told myself that it was fine, that a lot of people had fetishes during sex that they didn't necessarily live out in real life. Like, for example, I liked to fantasize about gentle sex on the beach, with the waves crashing in. In reality, though, I didn't like the sun and I didn't think I would be able to stand it if the sand were all up in places I could never properly reach. I think I would also die of embarrassment if anyone walked in on me.
Devon said that he would never have sex on the beach because anyone who saw would never understand us. I didn't know what that comment meant, so I just left it alone. Did he mean that they wouldn't understand why he choked me out, from beginning to end, or did he mean that they wouldn't understand us as a couple?
I had always felt like Devon was more attractive than me. He was a catch, and I had no idea how I’d bagged him. He was tall, handsome, and strong, and I was small and timid. Why would he even look twice at me when he was the type of guy who could attract super models or power businesswomen?
But for some reason, he did look twice at me, and the rest was history.
The marks started getting worse a few years into our marriage. I started passing out during sex and coming to after he had finished. Because he was a firefighter, he always told me that it wasn't dangerous and that he knew when to stop. He said once I passed out, he would back off right away. He said he never did anything to hurt me and that I shouldn't tell anyone because it was just between us.