Forgotten Pieces

by Tyler Anne Snell

  “Did you do that with your body?” she asked, surprised.

  He nodded. No-nonsense.

  “I had to get to you.”

  Maggie felt a butterfly dislodge in her stomach. It fluttered around, spreading warmth. She reached out and touched his hand.

  But now wasn’t the time to indulge in how Matt Walker made her feel.

  Maggie left his side. She went for the picture frame she had dropped on the floor when she’d run earlier. Thankfully, it was still in one piece. She held it up to her chest but motioned to the locked cabinet.

  “I think the key unlocks that.”

  Matt didn’t need to be told twice. Still wearing the gloves Detective Ansler had given him, he pulled the key out and put it into the lock. It came undone without any issues. Maggie took a step closer.

  They remained silent as he handed her a worn notebook while he pulled out a stack of pictures and newspaper articles. Separately they examined their pieces of evidence before Maggie finally understood.

  Which made things even harder.

  “She was investigating him.”

  Matt looked up from the picture in his hands. Maggie recognized their gunman in the top one, younger but definitely still him.

  “Who?”

  Maggie put the notebook down and gently took the photos from his hand. She then handed him the picture frame.

  “Erin,” she answered. “Matt, I think this is Erin’s storage unit. Which means she was investigating the man... And I think that’s why she was killed.”

  Maggie had never seen him look so confused before. It pained her to see a man like him, one built up on confidence that rarely failed, looking so lost. That expression only became more pronounced when he looked at the picture between his hands.

  It was of a young woman dressed in a graduation robe and smiling for all she was worth. Maggie might not have known the woman but there was no denying that it was Erin in the picture.

  Once more Maggie touched his hand.

  Then she left him alone with his thoughts.

  * * *

  ERIN WALKER HADN’T trusted the new janitor who had started working at the hospital. His name was Seth and whatever their initial meeting was, it inspired suspicion in her. Enough that she began to dig deeper into who he was. Which led to the list of three names Maggie had found in the woman’s locker five years ago.

  Joseph Randall, Jeremy Pickens and Nathan Smith.

  How she had gotten from Seth to those men, Maggie didn’t know by reading her notebook alone. However, she did understand the thread that wove all four men together.

  Erin Walker had suspected that, not only had the hospital’s new janitor assumed each man’s identity, but he’d also killed them to get it. Joseph had been in his early thirties, Jeremy had been in his midthirties and Nathan had been forty. Each man resembled the next and, now that Maggie had met Seth in person, she couldn’t deny how similar he looked to those men.

  In her notes, Erin called him the chameleon killer.

  Finding men who looked like him and causing their deaths to look like accidents. As hers had.

  A chill ran up Maggie’s spine at the moniker.

  However, there was nothing concrete that proved Erin’s suspicions, which made Maggie wonder if Seth had already taken care of that evidence or if Erin had still been looking for some when she’d died. When he’d probably realized what she was doing. Then he’d found a felon, Ken Morrison, and managed to get him to take Erin out of the equation completely.

  But what had brought him out of hiding after all these years?

  Matt opened the door as if he could hear her thoughts.

  “Ralph is in surgery but the doctors are very optimistic,” he said. “His wife, Emily, was calm enough to answer a few of the sheriff’s questions about the twelfth unit after promising to keep us updated on Ralph’s condition.”

  Matt settled into the driver’s side of the patrol car they had driven over in. Maggie had been seated in the passenger’s side for half an hour as Matt, Detective Ansler and Sheriff Reed had gone over every inch of the storage unit. He’d taken pictures of the pages in the notebook they’d found and given it to Maggie to look through while he finished up to see if she recognized or remembered anything. She hadn’t. At least nothing they hadn’t already figured out.

  “The storage unit was under Erin’s father’s name,” he started, turning over the engine and getting out of Park. Without the immediate danger of Seth he’d suggested they stop by her house to get cleaned up before picking Cody up from the hotel. Dried blood caked on her outfit wasn’t the best accessory when greeting a young child. Or anyone, really. “Erin and her dad were never close and he passed away a few years before we got married. Almost everything in there is from when she was a kid with a few random pictures and memorabilia from her high school and college years thrown in. I don’t think she used the unit often, if at all, except for what was in that locked cabinet.” He navigated back to the main road and kept his eyes focused out the windshield. His jaw was tight. His entire body was tense. “After she passed away and the unit stopped being paid for, it fell into the legacy category. When Ralph’s wife, Emily, started digging into who each of the units belonged to she couldn’t remember Erin’s name and called someone she thought might be able to help. Gabriel Thompson.”

  Maggie snapped her fingers.

  “That’s what changed,” she exclaimed. “Gabriel owns the Kipsy City Chronicle, the newspaper I used to work for. He knows everyone in the city, heck, the entire county. His family has been here for generations. He must have known Erin’s father. When he got to Erin’s name he called me?”

  Matt nodded.

  “Detective Ansler just got off the phone with him. He said that Emily left a message about the unit, hoping to find someone. He knew your history with Erin. He thought it might help bring you some closure for a case that made you lose your reputation. His words.” He looked pained. Apologetic.

  “It’s okay,” she assured him. “I made the choices I made and that’s that. We can’t change the way we handled the past. I’m happy with who I am now.”

  Matt kept his eyes forward. His sharp expression didn’t lessen.

  “Gabriel thought it might win you some points in my book if you were the one who gave me the news of a forgotten storage unit that might have things I’d want of Erin’s. That was Wednesday morning.” His fingers tightened around the steering wheel, turning white. “If I’d only listened to you that morning, then...”

  Maggie reached out and, for the third time that day, placed her hand on one of his. This time, though, she didn’t let go. Instead, she moved it to the middle console and held it there.

  “You got him now,” she said softly. “That’s all that matters. Okay?”

  He glanced down at their hands and then her face. He let out a short breath and nodded.

  Maggie didn’t let go of his hand.

  “But I do wish I had a better idea of everything I did that day. Like how did I get the key to the cabinet in the first place?” she asked. “And how did Seth hear about the storage unit anyway? Last Wednesday, without my memory, is still really confusing. Even if we know now that it started with a call from Gabriel, it doesn’t explain why I broke into the storage facility, then took the key to the cabinet, went to a hotel room and hid the same key, and then at the end of the night, wound up at Dwayne Meyers’s.”

  “That, I think I have a theory on,” Matt said, coming to a stop at a red light. “Emily said a woman matching your description came in Wednesday morning and asked about the unit. You couldn’t provide any ID showing you were related. They want to get rid of the legacy units but not without giving family who might be out there a fair shake first. She turned you away. So you took matters into your own hands and broke in.” He gave her a sly smile. It was nice to see him smiling. Even though she
’d had to break a law to get it. “The brand of lock that was used on the cabinet usually comes with a set of two identical keys.”

  “You think Erin left one of the keys in the storage unit.”

  Matt nodded.

  “She didn’t want me to know about the unit, so what better place to keep the copy safe?”

  There wasn’t any bitterness in the detective’s tone but there was definitely a sadness there. A question. One he wanted to ask someone he couldn’t. One Maggie couldn’t answer.

  While Erin’s notes had given them answers, one she never wrote down was why she didn’t tell her husband what she’d found. Maggie knew that question would weigh heavily on the man for a long, long time.

  “So let’s say I found the notes, decided to keep them in the unit because they’ve been safe there for years, and then what? I went back to my house then freaked out because Seth followed me? And who did I meet in the hotel?”

  Maggie let out a long, long breath and dropped her head. It brought the blood on her blouse back into view. She let go of his hand. They didn’t talk for a while.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thanks to the Riker County Sheriff’s Department, Maggie’s front windows had been replaced and the inside of the living room cleaned. Matt looked out through the windshield and couldn’t tell that anything had even happened. Let alone a madman had tried his best to scare Maggie away with the old brick-through-the-window trick.

  Seth.

  That had been his name. Or at least his current one. If what Erin had suspected was true—a fact that Detective Ansler had jumped on as soon as he’d shown him and the sheriff the contents of the cabinet—then Seth might have been the last man the chameleon killer had killed. And he had just been walking around pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  Matt leaned back in the seat, making no move to get out of the car.

  There was just something so surreal about feeling lost while knowing exactly where you were. Matt stared out the window but was now as blind as a bat to everything past the hood. Instead, he was cycling through memory after memory of his marriage.

  Of Erin.

  Looking beyond the pain of knowing she’d been intentionally killed to examining everything he thought he knew before any of that had ever happened. Trying to find the cracks in their marriage that he’d missed. The cracks his wife had fallen into while his attention had been on his job. The cracks that had created a cliff she’d been pushed off by a madman.

  In hindsight it all made him feel like a fool.

  And an even worse husband.

  Why had she taken it upon herself to investigate Seth? Why not come to him?

  “Matt.”

  Maggie’s voice was becoming a normal part of his days, but the concern in the way she said his name was enough to break his trance. But not the lingering emotions attached.

  He was mad, angry at himself and ashamed of what he hadn’t seen all those years ago. What he hadn’t done.

  And what he had.

  Looking into the green, green eyes of the woman who had fought harder than he had to solve his wife’s murder. He’d been angry at her for such a long time and now he knew exactly why.

  “Maggie, I was never really mad. Not at you.”

  Her eyebrow arched up in question.

  “Back then, after Erin passed. I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at myself. I thought of a thousand different scenarios of how I could have saved her had I done something different that day. But in none of them did I think I could have changed her fate. Changed her being there when she was. Changed what happened. And because of that, I felt helpless. I thought that maybe that meant she was supposed to die there regardless of anything I did or could have done. That it was fate.” Matt felt the hole he’d pretended didn’t exist start opening up. That darkness he’d tried to ignore for years.

  “That’s a kind of helplessness that destroys someone. One I knew I couldn’t live with. So I tried to move on. I tried to put it all behind me. Pretended to accept that my wife had died alone on a sidewalk,” he continued. “But then there you were, accusing me of having something to do with her death and then asking questions I should have been asking myself. And it made me mad. Angry. But it wasn’t just at you, it was at myself, too.” He paused, searching for the words he’d never said out loud. “I didn’t want to listen to you then because I didn’t think I could handle what it would do to me if you had been right. If her death hadn’t been an accident. I’ve seen good men and women become obsessed, losing themselves in cases that, more often than not, lead nowhere. The closer you are to what’s happened, the more you can’t see the damage it does to you. To the soul. And I—I didn’t want to lose what little I had left in my life, my job included. It grounded me. It gave me purpose when I didn’t even want to get out of bed in the morning.” He gave her the smallest of smiles, comforting himself by explaining it to her. To Maggie. To the woman who had been fearless at his side. “They say people grieve in different ways. Trying to pretend I had healed was mine.”

  Maggie’s expression softened, but he wasn’t done yet. What they’d found in that storage unit had shaken him. He needed to get it out.

  “But how did I think I could be a good husband in death if I wasn’t in life? How did I not know about everything we just found?” He hit the steering wheel, more anger spilling over. Or, really, self-loathing. “How could I have not known my wife was tracking a serial killer? How could I have missed that? Tell me, how does a good husband lose that much perspective about his partner that I wasn’t even suspicious of what she was doing? Tell me, Maggie, how?”

  Maggie answered by opening her car door and getting out. For a moment he thought she was going to leave him, go into the house, done with his outburst. But then, she curved around the hood and came up to his door, opening it wide.

  “Step out,” she ordered.

  He listened, though there was hesitation.

  Maggie reached out and took his hands in both of hers, planting herself firmly in front of him. Her face was open but hard. Stern. Then she spoke with words that were sharp, cutting and very clear.

  “You want to know why you, the no-doubt good husband, didn’t know what Erin was up to?” She squeezed his hands. He couldn’t look away from her. He was locked in. “It’s because your wife didn’t want you to know,” she said. “And so you didn’t.”

  It was a simple explanation that, he realized now, compounded an entire side of his wife’s life that he never knew existed. And somehow, the way Maggie said it, or maybe the way she looked at him now with those big, true green eyes, that it was enough of an explanation. Still, she sweetened the pot of her argument. Her words were softer but still just as clear.

  “Wives. Husbands. Detectives. Reporters. We’re all just people in the end. People who make decisions. Erin made them, I made them and now you have a decision to make.”

  “I do?”

  She nodded.

  “You can beat yourself up for the rest of your days, doubting yourself, or you can take a breath and move on. Happy with the fact that you helped get a crazy man off the streets.” She smiled. “And saved a crazy woman in the process. More than once. Now, I’m going to go inside and clean up. Come in when you’ve made your decision.”

  Maggie didn’t wait for his response. She took out her house keys and started to open the door.

  Despite himself, Matt smiled.

  “Erin would have liked you,” he called.

  Maggie paused in the doorway, long enough to respond.

  “I think I would have liked her, too.”

  * * *

  MAGGIE WAS FEELING GOOD.

  While they didn’t have all the details, they’d still managed to stop Seth. She had the utmost confidence the sheriff’s department could fill in any holes that remained. Eventually. Until then she was relieved that the target w
as off her, and her son’s, backs, grateful to be able to help finish Erin’s investigation, and happy that the detective had finally opened up to her. However, that feeling of everything starting to look up didn’t last past her shower.

  She sat down on her bed, wrapped in a towel, and caught a glimpse of the blouse she’d stripped out of on the floor. The dark crimson that stained most of it was dry but she still felt its wetness against her skin. She looked down at her hands, remembering how Ralph’s blood had covered them. How he’d cried out when she pressed down on the wound. How he’d been barely hanging on to consciousness and still made sure to ask about his mother, worried she’d been hurt.

  Maggie slapped a hand over her mouth as a cry escaped her throat. Her vision blurred. She thought about the car crash, the way Matt hadn’t moved, lying against crushed metal and broken glass, and how Seth had dragged her away with no idea what would happen next.

  Then all Maggie could think about was the blood on Seth’s chest—and his lifeless body.

  Maggie hung her head, burying her face in her hands.

  The weight of everything had finally become too heavy. No amount of humor or sarcasm could hold it back.

  Another sob racked her body; tears began to drench her hands; images she wished she could forget filled her mind.

  She didn’t even hear when Matt called out to her from the other side of the door. This was her breakdown. This was the price she had to pay to process the danger and fear she’d experienced in the past two weeks.

  “It’s okay. Let it out.”

  The bed next to her sank lower.

  Maggie didn’t look up as two strong arms wrapped around her. She felt embarrassed. Dealing with danger and death was part of Matt’s job. She bet he’d never broken down. Not like this.

  That embarrassment escalated as Matt turned her into his chest. Yet it somehow felt right. He just was there.

  What felt like hours, but had to be only minutes, went by. Maggie slowly disentangled from the man. She hung her head and used her towel to wipe at her face. If there had been a mirror in front of them she was sure she wouldn’t like her reflection. Swollen, red eyes plus cuts and bruising from the past week without an inch of makeup to lessen the marks.