Exposing a Killer

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  She’d once thought herself unbreakable. Simple, stakeout jobs bored her. She wanted chases and excitement.

  She still did, but not with the same ferocity as before. Being chased wasn’t as much fun as she had imagined it would be. A few weeks or even months sitting behind a computer researching databases sounded like the most exciting work she wanted for a while.

  She would do that. She would have her agency. But not until they caught the person or persons behind the Cahill murder.

  So now she was heading into an alley to look for a cat, as though a cat could give her answers or clues. Or maybe she could rescue it and feel as though she were accomplishing something.

  The alley was empty. No people. No cat.

  Megan’s limbs felt limp, heavy like waterlogged newspapers. She turned back to her building, thinking of the forty-two steps she had to climb.

  “I need to pack some things,” she said. “I need to figure out where to go.”

  She didn’t move. She leaned against the corner of the building, brick rough and smelling earthy against her cheek. Visions of her parents’ home raced through her head. Solid brick a quarter mile past a gate, perched on a little bluff above the lake. She should go. She should swallow her anger with them—no, she should abandon her anger with them—and beg them for a place to live. Listen to their smug acknowledgement of their superior knowledge of what was good for her. Neither of her brothers, neither of her parents, had ever experienced a life-threatening situation.

  She shouldn’t have, either. She had simply wanted to close that case so quickly she wouldn’t bide her time for Cahill to give herself away.

  She reached for her phone and discovered it was no longer in her pocket.

  “My phone is gone.” She couldn’t even exclaim with any enthusiasm.

  Jack strode over to lean one hand against the wall. “It probably fell out when you fell. Let’s look.”

  They rounded to the street side again and found what was left of her phone—a leather case with broken shards of plastic, glass and electronic components.

  “One more thing to take care of.” Megan gathered the pieces Jack handed to her. She would take them to an electronics recycling location when she could. “I guess it’s a priority.”

  She couldn’t go without a phone. Sadly, she barely remembered phone numbers anymore and wouldn’t be able to contact anyone other than Amber and maybe a couple more people, without those stored on the cloud.

  “I’ll go with you.” Jack looked at the front door. “How do we get in?”

  “The landlord’s here to let the cops in. I can call—” She let out a little laugh. “We can ring the bell for my apartment.”

  The landlord responded to her call up to her apartment. In a moment, he had released the lock on the front door and Megan was climbing the steps, Jack behind her, close, as though he believed she would fall backward.

  She might. From being able to run up those steps on a good day, she now crept along one at a time, then sat on the first landing to catch her breath and climb the next set.

  “You should have gone to the hospital to get checked out,” Jack said.

  “I hate hospitals.”

  “Who doesn’t? They still have their uses.”

  “I’m fine.” Megan leaned on the bannister. “Or I will be.”

  She managed the last twenty steps and entered her apartment. It seemed full of people, chaotic. Invaded. She waved Jack to have a seat wherever he could find one and closed herself into her bedroom. A duffel, a few clothes and other personal items, and she was ready to go.

  She was just shoving a few books into the outside pockets when Jack called to her and knocked on the door.

  “It’s Amber,” he said.

  Megan took the phone. “What’s up? You aren’t—nothing bad’s happened, has it?”

  “We’re all fine.” Amber’s shaky voice didn’t match her words. “But my mom...” She took a deep breath. “My mom broke her hip, and I have to go home to take care of her for a while.”

  “Oh no.” Megan reached for something solid to hold onto and found Jack’s hand, fingers curling around hers, warm and a little calloused. “When... How...”

  “Mel’s bringing me home to pack more things, and I have a flight out tonight.”

  “About the apartment,” Megan began.

  “I know. Megan, I’m so sorry. You should be in the hospital or something. You can’t be all right.”

  “I am. Really.”

  Except for feeling like she was dangling above that pavement again. Amber leaving felt like abandonment. Like she was being forced to go to the place she had called home for twenty years.

  “Where will you go?” Amber asked.

  “I don’t know.” Megan sighed. “To North Point, probably.”

  She wished they wouldn’t be at home.

  “Then don’t wait for me. I’ll be fine with Mel with me.”

  “And half a dozen cops making a mess of things looking for clues.” Megan swallowed a lump in her throat. “Take care of yourself and keep in touch.”

  “You know I will. I’ll be bored to death in that suburb of Mom’s without any public transit.”

  They said their goodbyes, then Amber was gone, and Megan felt hollow.

  “I need to find the nearest cell phone store.” She reached for her duffel.

  Jack picked it up before she could. “Let me help you, Megan.” Jack’s voice was soft, his gaze intense. “You can’t do all this on your own.”

  “I already dragged you into danger.”

  Gazing into his eyes, she knew she couldn’t stay around him, or she just might want to kiss him again. She wanted to kiss him again at that moment. Stupid. Reckless. Playing with hearts without a purpose other than comfort that wasn’t the sort of comfort she needed.

  She tore her gaze away and grabbed her handbag. “I’m ready to go.”

  But they were stopped by a cop wanting a statement and another telling her the railing had definitely been tampered with. Bolts anchoring the railing to the floor of the balcony had been cut partly through. The balcony was off limits. They would take bolts and other pieces of the railing retrieved from the sidewalk into the crime lab for investigation. Some fingerprints, but probably hers and Amber’s. By the time he finished with his explanations, Megan felt numbed by fatigue and shock.

  Maybe she should have gone to the hospital. She felt as though she walked through vanilla custard. Every step was an effort, every word harder to process. Without Jack’s help, she doubted she could have gotten into a rideshare vehicle and arrived at a cell phone store.

  That process seemed to take hours. Fortunately, she had insurance on her phone, so she only had to pay a relatively small fee to replace it. But she needed to download everything from the cloud in order to have phone numbers. Phone numbers and pictures. That infamous video of Cahill. Megan fell asleep waiting for her phone to receive all its new data. Jack woke her when the transfer was done and a dozen texts and missed call signals pinged across her screen. “Do you want to go to your parents’ now?” he asked.

  “No, but I don’t see any choice at this point in time.” She looked at her messages. Most were from Amber. Two were from Janet.

  And Megan’s mother had left one, too.

  FOURTEEN

  Megan stared at her phone, at the voice mail message indication. Her mother had called her. Her mother had left a message.

  This wasn’t the first time her mother had called in the past seven years. She never failed to remember Megan’s birthday. She invited her to dinner on the major holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. She wanted Megan at the celebration when she’d been elected mayor of North Point. Other than that, they communicated through the attorney who controlled Megan’s college fund, then the trust fund. Megan’s refusal to continue her education as her pare
nts felt fit had driven a wedge between them that prevented exchanges beyond the formalities. Other than wanting Megan around for a show of family unity, her parents didn’t seem to mind the separation any more than Megan did.

  Until now. Now her mother’s name glowed on the screen like a lighthouse beacon—bright, clear, penetrating the darkness between them.

  “What is it?” Jack asked. “Unless it’s none of my business, of course.”

  It kind of wasn’t his business. If she told him, he would tell her she had to forgive and should contact her family. That she fully intended to do so wouldn’t matter. He would want her to return the call that minute.

  But the first contact, the first cry for help she would be giving them in three quarters of a decade should not be through the impersonal means of a wireless phone. She would go to their gate, their door, and she would ask them in person if they would give her shelter.

  She swiped the screen clear. “It was my mother.”

  Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “She has your number?”

  “Yes, of course. I don’t want them to tell me what to do with my life when it’s nothing that I want. That doesn’t mean I’m a monster. My mother asked for it, so I gave it to her. Other than that, she’s respecting my boundaries.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “How’s that?” Megan glanced at him.

  “Odd she would call now. You know, just when you need her help.”

  “She more likely wants to make sure I won’t embarrass her somehow.” Megan stuffed her phone into her pocket.

  “If you’re going to ask your mother for help,” Jack said, “I think you should listen to her message.”

  Megan suppressed a momentary irritation. “I will.” She spoke with more of a snap than she intended.

  Jack merely shrugged off her ill-humor. “Does she watch the twenty-four-hour news cycles?” Jack asked in an offhand manner, his gaze going past Megan’s shoulder.

  Megan swung around to follow his line of sight to the television mounted on the store wall. The sound was turned down, inaudible, but the picture was loud and clear. There, nearly as large as life on the wide screen, Megan hung from the broken balcony balustrade.

  With a groan, Megan ducked her face into her hands. “Of course I’m on the news. That was a spectacular show for everyone else.”

  “Including the killer,” Jack murmured as though he were talking to himself.

  He never took his focus from the screen, from the crowd shown around the balcony. His lips moved, but he didn’t speak loudly enough for Megan to hear any words. She just read his expression through her fingers and wanted to remain hidden.

  He was furious. His blue eyes glowed like lightning. Spots of red burned along his cheekbones. And his lips were thin and tight.

  She wanted to soothe him, calm him, assure him this would do no more harm than had already been done. The news feed wouldn’t tell the killer or anyone else where they were. Where she was.

  She raised her head to look at him directly. “It’s done. I can’t change it. I couldn’t change it while everyone was taking pictures. It’s probably all over social media sites.”

  “Look at the crowd,” Jack said. “No, wait.” He held up his own phone and began to search. “Look for some of those clips. We might see Cahill’s friend in the crowd.”

  Ignoring dirty looks from the customer service people behind the counter for taking up seats intended for new costumers, none of whom were present in the store, they divided up the social media sites and began to scroll, finding different versions of the video, different angles of the crowd. After a few minutes, everyone appeared the same. Faceless. Nameless. Harmless.

  But someone out there was far from harmless.

  Megan swiped and squinted and swiped again. She paused streaming content and expanded the size of images. She saw no one familiar after several minutes of scrutinizing at least two dozen videos of herself dangling above the sidewalk. The pictures made her queasy. That wasn’t a stranger. That was her looking terrified and helpless.

  The helplessness angered her, and she scrolled faster, swiped with more vigor.

  And nearly missed the heavy-browed man at the far edge of her building.

  Only half of him showed. The corner of her triplex shielded the rest of him. She had, however, looked at the video of him on Cahill’s deck enough to recognize that half a face.

  “We can’t continue like this.” She rose and strode to the door. “We’re just running, not catching, and I’m tired of being a fugitive.”

  Sure she would start jumping up and down and screeching if she didn’t move, Megan opened the door to a rush of chilly air. It refreshed her, revived her, cleared the cobwebs from her brain. The man was out there. He was around every time something bad happened, waiting for the consequences. She felt like being foolish and making a target of herself so the man could be captured.

  She stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “Megan, wait.” Jack strode after her, still looking at his phone. “Look at the woman beside him.”

  Megan paused to study the face of the woman beside the heavy-browed man. She was tall, slender, blonde. She appeared to be Cahill, but not quite. Her eyes were slightly closer together, her lips wider. Other than those slight differences, they could have been the same person. A sister? A cousin?

  “At least we know we weren’t seeing things that first night.” She gave Jack his phone. “I’m sure she’s the one with the gun we saw when we were on the bus.”

  “Me, too. That confirms it. Elizabeth Cahill is the woman I saw dead in her house.”

  “She stole money for these people, and they killed her.” Sadness clutched Megan’s spirit. “Why would someone ruin one’s life like that? She had a good life, a nice house in a good neighborhood, a good job, no debt other than her mortgage. Millions would sell their souls for less than what she had.”

  “Millions have sold their souls for less. And millions will continue to do so.”

  “My soul’s worth more than that.” Megan brushed her hand across her eyes. “I suppose I should head to my parents’ house.” She pulled her phone out once more and let it scan her face so she could get to her voicemail. For some reason, her heart began to thump hard and fast, restricting her breathing, the edge of a panic attack at the mere anticipation of hearing her mother speak.

  “I can see you are all right,” the message began without preamble. “I can also see that job is far more dangerous than you told us it would be. But I need to tell you that you can’t come here for shelter.”

  Megan gasped and pressed her hand to her middle. She was going to be sick. Her last place, her best place, of refuge had just been swept from beneath her feet.

  “She can’t mean it,” Megan whispered, jabbing her thumb against her phone screen until the voicemail message disappeared.

  “Mean what?” Jack rested his hand on her shoulder, a warm, solid comfort. “What’s wrong?”

  “She won’t let me go to her house.” Megan’s eyes watered, burned. “The safest place I know, and she won’t let me go there for shelter.”

  “Is she afraid?”

  “Probably. But I’m her daughter.” Megan swiped at her eyes as though that would erase the tears as easily as a swipe of her finger erased messages on her phone.

  Jack’s lips parted as if he were about to speak, then closed them. He glanced away, then back, expression determined. “She needs to think of her safety.”

  “Right. She’s a mayor of a community of rich people. But what about me?”

  “Did she offer her help in any way, or was that all she said?”

  “She... I...” Her cheeks heated. “I was so angry I deleted the message.”

  Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that kind of...of...”

  “Childish? Yes.” Megan blinked hard. “I seemed to get that w
ay around her.”

  “I was going to say irresponsible,” Jack said.

  “Same difference.” Megan heaved a sigh. “I still have to go and ask for help.”

  “Can she keep you out, if her home is so secure?”

  “She can, but I’m counting on her not being able to if I show up at her gate.”

  “What about going to her office instead. Townhall in North Point?”

  “Not at all secure. They only scan people for guns who are going into the courthouse side. Besides, it closes at five o’clock.”

  “How will you get there?”

  “I’ll catch a commuter train at Ogilvie Station and take a taxi or rideshare from the other end.”

  “Then let’s go.” Jack hefted her duffel over his shoulder.

  “What do you mean by let’s?”

  “I mean let us be on our way.”

  “But you can’t go to North Point.” Megan reached out her hand for her bag. “It’s out of your way.”

  “I can’t let you go...alone.” The intensity of his blue eyes, the way they bored into hers made Megan suspect that the hesitation between go and alone held significance. She couldn’t help but think he intended to simply say he couldn’t let her go.

  But of course he could. He would. He was leaving the state in March.

  And suddenly she knew she didn’t want that to happen.

  Wanting it not to happen couldn’t stop it, though. She had no right to stop him from fulfilling his dream.

  She knew she should have kicked him out of her car on that nighttime street what felt like a lifetime ago.

  “I can’t go back to my house yet,” Jack pointed out. “So the only place I have to go is my aunt and uncle’s.”

  So true, and she would like his companionship. A wingman was better than no man, than being alone.

  “Then we should get a move-on.” She began to trot to the nearest L station that would take them downtown. The Metra trains left from a station west of the Loop, and they had several blocks to walk once they reached the center of the city.