by Jane Blythe
Eli had been honest with her from the beginning, he’d told her he was interested, and despite her many attempts to push him away, he hadn't budged. He had fought for her, supported her, spoiled her, and he was still sitting here in her bed, holding her in his arms after learning every sordid, dirty detail of her life.
Ever since she was eight years old she’d felt dirty. The kind of dirty that nothing could wash away.
At least that’s what she’d thought.
“Kiss me,” she said, taking Eli’s face between her hands and drawing it down to meet hers. Each time he kissed her he wiped away a little of the dirt that marred her soul.
* * * * *
10:34 A.M.
Eli kept see-sawing between soaring to the heights of the heavens because Florence had finally opened up to him, stopped fighting what was between them and let him in, then plunging to the depths of Hell as he thought about what had been done to her.
Knowing that she had been hurt made him want to rage, scream, beat his fists against the wall, rip something to shreds, and destroy something so that his feelings didn't consume and then destroy him.
How had Florence lived with this for almost two decades?
He’d known for a couple of hours, and he felt like he was losing his mind. He had never thought of himself as a violent person, but knowing that Florence had been violated twice, both times when she was so young, both times without someone to be there and hold her hand and absorb her tears, made him want to kill the monsters who had taken something from her she could never get back. She’d lost her innocence, a part of her soul, her ability to trust others, and yet despite all of that, she had triumphed. She’d escaped the life that would have been so easy to fall into, she hadn't followed in her mother’s footsteps. Instead, she’d blazed a bright trail through life as a respected and decorated cop who risked her life to keep others safe.
Eli found himself in awe of her.
In his life he’d suffered loss after loss, losing his brother, then his sister-in-law, his mother, and then his father. Each time he’d had to stand beside a coffin watching it get lowered into the ground, knowing that he’d never get to see or speak to that person again, a little piece of him had gone with them. But through all of that, he’d always had his family, even after his father’s death he’d had his nephew, he’d had connections, people he could go to when the loneliness became overwhelming.
Who did Florence have?
A brother who didn't even know half of what she’d gone through, and who seemed to have spent more time with his friend’s family than he had looking out for his little sister.
Florence had no one.
At least she hadn't until now.
“Please tell me you are not looking at engagement rings.”
“Okay, I'm not looking at engagement rings,” Eli told Graham with a grin.
“Then why are you on a jeweler’s website with engagement rings on the screen?” Graham asked, peering over his shoulder at the laptop open on his desk.
“Because I'm looking at engagement rings,” he replied, stating the obvious.
“You’re asking Florence to marry you?”
“Not today, but yeah, in the near future.”
“You’ve only known her just over a week.”
“So?”
“So don’t you think that’s kind of soon?” Graham walked around to the other side of the desk and pulled out a chair, dropping down into it.
“I'm not known for waiting, hanging back, and taking my time. When I see something I want, I go after it.”
“Only Florence isn’t a thing, she's a person. A person who has been a lot more hesitant at going out with you than you were about going out with her,” Graham said.
“She’s had a rough life, absent father, drunk mother, lots of Mom’s boyfriends in and out of her life, some bad stuff happened when she was a kid, she has trust issues. Trust issues that she overcame this morning when she opened up to me.” He wasn't going to betray Florence’s trust by going into details, but he wanted his friend to understand that just because Florence had had doubts, it wasn't because she didn't feel the same way about him that he felt about her.
“You’re really serious about her?”
“Deadly,” he said, then winced at his choice of words. Given how they’d met and Florence’s job, it probably wasn't the best way to describe his feelings for her. “I knew when I first laid eyes on her that there was something about her that called out to me. Yeah, that first day I wanted to get her to go out with me because I was attracted to her, and I wanted to get her into bed, but that first time she turned me down, everything changed.”
“You wanted her because you couldn’t have her, because she was a challenge.”
Although he hated to admit it, yeah, at first that was what it was, but it had quickly changed to something much deeper. “I won't say that at first the fact that she turned me down when most women jump at the chance to go out with me wasn't intriguing, but it’s so much more than that. I can't explain it, when I saw her I just knew that she was the one for me. Love at first sight I guess, just like my parents.” After spending his childhood and adolescence watching his parents trust their guts, both in their business and personal lives, it had taught him that sometimes your body instinctively knew things well before your brain figured it out.
“Things are still really new between you two, what if once you get to know her better you find out you're not as compatible as you think?”
“Won't happen. I know what I feel, man. I'm falling in love with her, and the more I know about her, the more I like her.”
“So, you're already all in?”
“All in. She’s everything that I want in a woman, she’s strong, smart, compassionate, caring, and underneath her tough cop exterior she’s vulnerable and even a little insecure. She makes me feel needed and not just for my money, she needs someone to be there for her, and I want to be, Graham, I want to be, man. I've never felt like this before, she consumes me. I miss her when I'm not with her, like miss her with this gut-wrenching, stomach-knotting, raging emptiness. When I'm with her I'm torn between wanting to ask her a million questions to find out every single detail about her, and wanting to take her to bed and never let her leave. All I do is think about her, count the seconds until I can see her again, I want her and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. So, yeah, I'm not going to propose to her today, but I'm also not going to wait forever just because society thinks it’s too soon.”
Graham leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying him. Then he nodded, “I get it, and I'm happy for you. I can't say I would have pictured you falling for a cop, but then again, I don’t think anyone expected me to fall in love with someone like Soraya. So you’re all in, and you said Florence is letting her guard down, did you think any more about Soraya’s advice that you try to connect with her on a different level?”
“I did,” he couldn’t help but grin as he thought of what he had planned for his date with Florence tonight. When he’d dropped her off at the precinct and told her he’d pick her up and take her out for dinner after work she hadn't protested, just kissed him and told him she couldn’t wait. “Actually, I got the idea from you.”
“From me?” Graham asked, eyes wide.
“Yep.”
“So, you going to tell me what it is?” Graham asked.
“Nope. Not until I tell Florence, but I know she’s going to love it.” After thinking that there was a chance that she’d been hiding a relationship from him he’d felt like he had to make that up to her, especially knowing that while he’d been thinking the worst, she’d been lying unconscious in her apartment. When they’d been curled up in her bed this morning, the idea had come to him, and the second that it had, he’d known it was the perfect way to show her rather than just tell her how much he cared about her and how important she was to him.
If Florence needed reassurances that he wasn't playing around, then that’s what he’d give her. If she needed
to hear a million times that he was serious about her and them, then he’d say it a million times. If she needed them to date for a while before they were intimate, then he’d take as many cold showers a day as he had to.
Whatever she needed, he would give her because she was already his.
It didn't matter that they’d only known each other a few days, it didn't matter that she had issues from her past that made her wary of people but men in particular, it didn't matter that she was unaccustomed to having someone in her corner. As a kid, he might have been the carefree, irresponsible rich playboy, but caring for his mother as she battled cancer, and helping to raise his orphaned nephew had grown his nurturing side.
Florence didn't just bring out that side in him, she also brought out his protective side, he wanted to tuck her away someplace where nothing and no one could ever hurt her again, he wanted to take care of her and make sure she never wanted for anything again.
It wasn't a side of him that most people saw, no one had ever whittled through the charming, sexy, playboy veneer to the man underneath.
No one had ever cared enough to try, to even see that there was more to him.
Florence saw, she saw every part of him, and that was both terrifying and exhilarating.
He was already in too deep and couldn’t walk away from her even if he wanted to.
And he didn't.
Florence had had a grip on his heart since he saw her in that alley, and it only tightened the more he got to know her.
* * * * *
1:06 P.M.
“So, he was right,” Florence said as she looked around the apartment of thirty-year-old Michael Stypes. “The man in my apartment knew that Michael was the killer. He said he was there when I was almost run down. Do you think he followed the car and found out who the driver was?”
“Makes sense, although what I'd really like to know is how he knew that we were onto Michael. He had to have been at the precinct at some point, seen the files on our desks. You think it was the Coffin Killer?”
Florence shrugged. “My guess would be yes, but I didn't know he was stalking me. He sends letters, sometimes pictures of some of his victims, but as far as I knew, he wasn't following me around. Obviously, I was wrong since he was there when I was almost run over.”
“I don’t like that,” Jake said, getting that protective look on his face.
“Can we just deal with one serial killer at a time please?” she asked, taking a step closer to the large corkboard that covered most of one of the living room walls in Michael’s apartment. “Lucky for us, our guy is a meticulous planner.”
“Lucky,” Jake agreed as he stood beside her.
Spread across the board were pictures of every single victim of the Dumpster Killer, both alive and deceased, and maps marking where each body would be disposed of. “Jake, look at this,” she said, directing her partner’s attention to a photo of a pretty blonde in her mid-twenties. “She’s not one of our victims.”
As far as she was concerned that could mean only one thing.
Michael had already chosen his next victim.
Apparently, Jake thought the same thing. “Michael isn’t here, and he isn’t at work.”
“He’s at her apartment.” Florence was already running out of the apartment and down the stairs, there would be time later to work through the treasure trove that Michael had left for them, but this woman’s time would be running out. Michael was already veering off his path, killing more and more frequently, there was every chance he wouldn’t keep any future victims alive for forty-eight hours, which meant that every second counted.
Jake was on her heels as they ran out onto the street. The apartment listed next to the woman was only a block away, it would be quicker for them to get there themselves than to call it in and have uniforms deployed to the building.
It was early afternoon, and the streets were busy, Florence had to weave her way around people as she ran as fast as she could and made it to the building in minutes.
At the apartment door, she and Jake paused, silently coordinating how they would proceed. They’d worked together long enough that they didn't need to go through things in detail, they knew each other well enough to know what the other was thinking, and knew how to play off each other.
With a nod, Jake reached for the doorknob. Florence had her gun out and ready to aim at Michael the second the door swung open.
As soon as it did, two heads snapped in their direction.
The woman—Rachel Oaks—began to weep in relief as she realized the cavalry had arrived and she wasn't about to die.
The man—Michael Stypes—looked panicked and then angry as his gaze darted to the table where a gun lay discarded. In that millisecond, he appeared to weigh his options, decide he would never make it to the weapon, and instead lunged for the chair the woman was bound to and ducked behind it, using his victim as a shield.
“It’s over, Michael,” she called out, weapon trained on the chair. Although she believed Michael to be unarmed, she wanted to try to talk him down before they did anything that might get an innocent victim hurt.
“It’s you,” he called back. “You saw me, but no one sees me, how did you do it?”
So he definitely knew who she was, Florence was sure that it was Michael who she’d felt watching her that morning Eli had arrived to take her to work. Maybe he viewed her as a threat who had needed to be eliminated. “I look for details, Michael. The little things, the things no one else notices, that’s what makes me a good cop.”
“You ruined everything,” he seethed.
“What did I ruin, Michael? What are you trying to achieve by killing these women?” If she could get him talking, keep his focus on her, then hopefully he wouldn’t notice that Jake was slowly circling around the edge of the room to get behind him.
“They deserved what they got.”
“Why? Why did they deserve to die, Michael?”
“They didn't see me. They looked at me, and they saw straight through me. Take Rachel here.” He did something to the woman to make her cry out, and when she looked, Florence could see that Michael had his fingers tangled in the woman’s long hair.
“What did Rachel do?”
“Rachel is a friend of my older brother’s wife, at their wedding I was a groomsman, she was a bridesmaid, we walked down the aisle together. I asked her if we could dance together at the reception, she said yes, only then she spent the whole time gyrating against one of the other groomsmen. She left with him, she was drunk, filthy thing didn't even spare me a second thought.” He ripped Rachel’s head back, exposing her thin white neck, and Florence had no doubt that if he had a knife in his hand he would have slit it.
“I'm sure she didn't mean to hurt you, did you, Rachel?”
“N-no. The other g-groomsman was my boyfriend at the time. I l-looked for you, but I d-didn't see y-you,” Rachel stammered.
“Of course you didn't,” Michael roared. “No one ever does. Not my parents, not women, not you. No one ever sees me. Except you,” he growled in her direction.
“I'm sorry that you’ve felt invisible, Michael. I'm sorry that you feel like no one cares about you, but you have our attention now. I see you, I hear you, you are not invisible.” She knew what it was like to feel invisible, to think that no one cared about you, and it hurt. It made you feel like there was something wrong with you, like it was your fault that there was no one who cared whether you lived or died. She had felt that way all her life, even after she’d built a new life for herself in New York, she’d felt more alone than she’d ever realized.
Until Eli came into her life.
Now for the first time ever, she felt like she had someone.
“Are you patronizing me?” Michael demanded.
“No,” she said honestly. “I understand, Michael. Maybe it’s why I could see you. My dad split before my first birthday, my mom was more interested in getting drunk and her newest boyfriend. There was no one to make sure I did my homew
ork or ate dinner, no one to care about my grades in school, or if I did extra-curricular activities, or applied to colleges. No one cared that I went to bed hungry and had to bathe in a river, so trust me, Michael, when I say that I know what it feels like to be invisible. But this isn’t the way to go about being seen. Killing women who you feel ignored you or looked straight through you doesn’t change anything.”
“Yes it does,” he said firmly. “They all saw me then. For those forty-eight hours, I was the center of their world, they saw me, they got to feel my humiliation when they had to pee in their pants, and when they had to beg me for a glass of water. They learned, they sat there and listened as I told them every time someone has looked past me without seeing me.”
“You’ve made your point, Michael. The whole city has lived in fear of you for over a year. They all saw you, they all heard you, sixteen victims, you’ll never be invisible again, you’ll go down in history as one of the worst serial killers the city has ever seen. It’s time to end this.”
Michael didn't say anything, and she could feel the change in the air.
He had made his decision.
He wasn't going to go quietly.
He’d made his point, and now he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
Well, too bad for him that she and her partner weren't going to let that happen.
Michael shoved the chair with Rachel still tied to it forward, sending it toppling to the floor causing the woman to cry out as she landed along with it, unable to break her fall. When Michael moved to lunge at her in an attempt to get her to fire so he could commit suicide by cop, Jake—who had successfully circled the room so he was behind the other man—tackled him.
Just like that, it was over.
Michael fought, but they got him cuffed, read him his rights, and freed what would have been victim number seventeen.