Sin and Swoon

by Tara Brown

  Mark continues whatever he’s doing for me as the guy and Dash finish the sale.

  Everyone’s face drops, including mine, when he says England. The cost of the tables isn’t even half the cost of the shipping, but Dash doesn’t bat an eyelash at spending that much. I’m ready to stab Dash, but I don’t, mostly because I need Mark to focus on the paperwork and not on the spurts of Dash’s blood getting on the store’s merchandise.

  The pretty salesgirl continues eyeballing Dash and then stink-eyeballing me. I ignore it. I’m actually excited to leave so Mark can tell them what was going on. I can imagine just the way he’ll do it, flailing his arms and exaggerating the whole thing. He seems the type—enthusiastic.

  Mark slips me a bag of thumb drives and paperwork as Dash completes the paperwork for the shipping. Mark winks on the sly, only not on the sly. I offer an awkward wave and walk out. “Why are you shipping that to England?”

  Dash shrugs. “We don’t have Barrel & Barn in England; it’ll be a novelty there. Besides, it suits a lodge we have in the north for hunting. The wood is similar to the mounting my great-grandfather had done in Africa. I’m almost curious if that was rubberwood he used. So I’m sending it home, and we shall see.”

  I don’t know what to say, beyond maybe make a face. Mounting things from Africa certainly means animals, often rare animals. The sort that are endangered.

  He offers up a look like he’s annoyed with me. “Not that any of that nonsense matters. From the look of things back there I have to assume he hit on you. Did he?”

  “What?”

  “He winked, I saw him.”

  I roll my eyes. “Yeah, guys are hitting on me in front of you, ’cause they know they stand a chance at getting me out from under your fat thumb.”

  He grins. “You like my fat thumbs.”

  I walk faster to escape his version of a dirty joke as he chuckles to himself like an old pervert. I don’t know how to respond to dirty jokes about stuff we have actually done.

  17. Frequent flyer miles

  I don’t understand why in the gods ya had to go all the way back to Seattle to do that. Isn’t Dash getting a wee bit suspicious about the file that doesn’t seem to be ending? Does he suspect you’re avoiding the new job?” Angie asks, gazing over the pages I have brought back to DC. Meeting her at the office for nighttime chow and research hasn’t ever happened before. We meet for random things, usually involving my health and welfare. Or things not work-related at all.

  “No, he thinks this is routine. You and he are never part of the debriefing afterward, so I have been able to buy a bit of time with that. And whenever anyone from the team flies, we use one of the Fed jets, so it’s no hassle. Or helicopters for short distances. It isn’t like going through the airport.”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “Right, but you and Rory have never had a file unsolved before.”

  “I know. It’s driving me insane. I don’t know what to do. The Feds are on it, the locals are on it, everyone is on it, and it’s going nowhere fast.” I sigh, feeling a sickness wash over me every time I think of it. “We are searching high and low for connections to possible avenues we haven’t searched yet.” I lean on the desk and sip my tea.

  She has an orange highlighter, and I have a yellow one. She marks down the bed purchases, since Mark was only able to print out the days where one sold, with all the other sales included. After spending three hours searching the Internet for the exact bed and then flying all the way to Seattle, this is nothing.

  I highlight the customers who left an address to run in the system. I’m assuming we won’t find Mr. X in the system, but weirder things have happened, directly to Angie and me.

  “So, on a scale of one to ten, how bad was Thanksgiving?”

  I scoff. “Forty.”

  She laughs. “They were that evil to ya?”

  “Hands down, Dash’s family are the most evil people I have ever met. I mean aside from this job and criminals, but then again I never spent enough time with them to know what they were truly capable of.”

  She stops laughing. “You’d know right away if you were sitting next to evil, true evil! You’re very good at judging people. I’m shite. One drink and I love everyone.”

  “Except the English and all the Irish, apart from Rory, and none of the Germans, and—”

  “All right, all right, ya sassy wee thing. I don’t hate all of them; just more often than not they are assholes. And don’t be fooled, I do hate Rory. Who ya kidding on that one? The man’s a savage. And when he kisses, he spits too much. Got a glandular thing. You have to rein him in or you’ll drown.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Oh gross, too much!” I shake my head, still scanning the page. “No. I don’t think I’m that good a judge of character. And even if I were, everyone has a preconceived notion of people they know through someone else, which changes everything. You would not know in a case like that.”

  “Enlighten me, O wise one,” she snarks and leaves another orange mark on the page.

  “Firstly, you go into something like meeting a person’s family with preconceived notions. These people raised Dash, how bad could they be? They’re upper class and clean, so you assume they aren’t half bad. We can’t even fight it; as a people we find it hard to find attractive people guilty. Secondly, your preconceived notions are usually confirmed in your first few minutes of meeting them, when they’re on their best behavior. You’ve already given them several chances, and they have behaved in the way they have, so you automatically make a judgment. It’s called a first impression, and we absolutely do it. So that means that later on, when they fuck up, we make excuses for their behavior, instead of seeing them for what they are. Thirdly, the moment someone is family or friend or friend of a friend, we offer them more of a chance. We don’t want to hurt the person we love, and we offer the offender an olive branch out of the kindness of our hearts.”

  She rolls her eyes. “All but you, ya mean.”

  I shrug. “I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to see that most people are awful, and watching a person make excuse after excuse for their loved one’s terrible behavior is hard, but you learn a lot by seeing it. I don’t trust people because I have to, not normally. I trust them because they earn it, and there are not many who have. But it’s always someone I least expect to trust.”

  She scoffs. “I have yet to see ya make a bad call as far as a man went, friend went, or suspect went. You even nail it when it’s a vic and the rest of us believe, but you’re not sure. It’s ’cause you’re so quiet and creepy, sitting there taking it all in.”

  “Well, it’ll happen the other way one day, and you’ll see. No one is a perfect judge of character.”

  “Dogs are.” She looks up at me and sighs. “But to make fun of and try to ruin the happiness of an orphan who has made her way in the world? They really are special people.”

  I lift my cup of tea and she lifts hers, and we clink glasses before returning to our work.

  She passes out an hour later, and I want to too, but I have to keep going, scanning through the videos on the thumb drives Mark gave me. Angie doesn’t have the show in her head that I do. I have to solve this. It’s never happened before.

  My eyes are closing and the clock strikes three when I finish cross-referencing all the people who bought the beds with the information left in the system. My phone vibrates with a message from Dash—Miss you, come home! Binx is making me pet him. He’s worried.

  I roll my eyes and plug the next thumb drive into my laptop and fast-forward to the time of the purchase. Each person resolves themselves in my mind when I can cross-check them in the system, check their social media, and scratch them from the list.

  In my head I know it’s likely I’m looking for law enforcement or a spouse of an officer. Or I’m looking for someone who works with the City of Seattle and has access to inside information. When I come across a banker who’s five feet tall and chubby, I don’t even bother with the social media.

&nb
sp; There were seventy-nine of those beds sold in the time frame I have. I believe the bed was purchased in January or February, when he knew he was going to abduct or kill her. He’s made himself vulnerable then.

  The majority of the purchases were made by women; I eliminate them immediately. I might not have seen Mr. X, but I know he was handsome enough to land a bunch of college girls, and he wasn’t a she.

  My eyes grow heavy, so I get up to make another coffee. From the kitchen I am still sort of watching the video as I fill the water reservoir in the coffee machine. I am yawning and stretching when I swear a section of the video glitches. I hurry over, rewinding and watching as a man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses comes up to the counter. He points as he talks, waving his hands back to where the beds are. He’s white, tall, broad, and fit, and that’s about all I can see. All shit I knew before we started this.

  He turns his face toward the camera, and it glitches as he makes eye contact—well, as his sunglasses do. There’s a halo for half a second, and then the whole picture goes black. If it were in color I suspect it might be red.

  The coffee finishes brewing as I rewind it again.

  “What the bloody hell is going on?” Angie lifts her face, sputtering and moaning. “I wasn’t asleep. I was resting my eyes.” She rubs her eyes and lays her face back down on Rory’s desk.

  I grab the coffee and hurry back to the picture. I rewind and watch three more times, but there’s nothing. He’s wearing a generic pair of pants and a hoodie. He looks like a criminal if you ask me, but I know that’s the first choice cops go for when they disguise themselves.

  I sit back and watch him walk. Of course he’s familiar to me, I’ve spent months in my head with him. I watch it over and over, knowing it’s him. He knows about the cameras; he knows about using a laser pointer against a camera.

  He doesn’t go anywhere else in the store, and he pays with cash. I scan his order of the bed and mattress, raising my eyebrows when I see the purchase was shipped to the fucking townhouse in downtown Seattle. The one the old man owned—the dead old man, who also owned the cabin where the girls were tortured.

  Damn!

  Someone is using that house still. I close up the computer, remove the thumb drives, and put the papers in my bag, before waking Angie with a nudge. She gets up from Rory’s desk and stumbles out of the office and down the corridor with me guiding her. I will have to go back to Seattle in the morning. And I’m making Angie come along.

  I nod at the guards as we leave and head for the car parked out front. She falls asleep in the car, while I plot.

  18. Surprise

  I chew my licorice, watching the house. My cell phone rings again, another angry call from Dash. How do I explain I know what’s going on, that even though I’m not supposed to be doing the job, I can’t let it go? All it does is confirm his hatred for my work. It proves he’s right and that I can’t separate from a file.

  I text Angie: Cover for me if Dash calls, huh?

  Her response is immediate.

  I would if a huge and spicy doctor wasn’t sitting here eyeballing my every move from our little apartment here in Seattle . . .

  I wince. “I’ll tell him where I am, don’t bother,” I type. But that isn’t as easy as texting Angie. I watch the house, a brownstone townhouse in an older but wealthy downtown area in Seattle. I can’t believe he flew here. It’s my eighth flight to Seattle in three weeks. Thank God for our plane. Everything is easy and at my disposal, so stalking this house from my rental car is simple. Far simpler than explaining to my fiancé why I can’t let go.

  I text the address I am at and the color of my rental car.

  We need to talk!

  His message makes my insides clench but not enough to stop me from texting: Be astute, please!

  I scowl at the word astute, not confident I am correct in what it means. I had meant to write cautious but my crappy spelling got it autocorrected to astute. I send one more message: And by that I mean careful to not be seen!

  Thank you, Jane, I am completely aware of what ASTUTE means!

  I slump, dropping the phone on the console, and sit back to watch the house again.

  The passenger door opens far faster than it should, but he has hate driving him on when he sits in the seat next to me. I can tell by the way he’s breathing. “Hello, love!”

  I jump when Rory gets in. “You scared the piss out of me! Why are you here too? Did they fly you down? Did we find something?”

  “Too?” He grins widely. “I think the question is what in the bloody hell are you doing here? The cops over there watching the house phoned you in. I was already here, never made it back to DC yet. I was meant to go home a couple of days ago, but the boss man wanted me to ensure everyone is being wrangled and none of the uniforms or Feds are going to leak any information.” He chuckles and sits back. “So what has made you and Angie circle back here? Angie never told me she was coming back.”

  “Nothing. Women’s intuition is all. We decided to take a quick trip and see if a couple of stupid leads turned out to be anything.” I scowl at him, not sure he hasn’t blabbed to the police. He always gets chatty with them, whereas I stay behind. He does seem to learn more from them, but I feel like the relationship is reciprocated. Someone leaked that the girl was found; someone let him kill all those other girls. And I can’t rule out Rory. He might have let it slip by accident.

  “Women’s intuition?” He wrinkles his nose. “I think it’s something more. I think you found something and you aren’t sharing it.” His eyes flash a little hurt. “Ya know Angie doesn’t keep secrets from me.”

  To crack the awkward shell we seem to be encased in, I mutter clumsily, “Yeah, me either. She never told me you were staying behind. In fact, no one mentioned it. Did you volunteer?”

  “Wow, that woman doesn’t check her messages. If I had feelings they’d be bloody hurt.” He turns, scowling, and it’s in that moment something feels off.

  I laugh, but it’s weird, uncomfortable. He pauses, no longer smiling. His face slowly drops. “You all right, Jane?”

  I nod slowly, but my vision starts to fill with a thousand images, each one slowly progressing into something worse. His face, his laugh, his smile, his snarl. The way his teeth gnash when he speaks with a sneer. I swallow hard.

  “What is wrong, Princess?” he asks, lifting a hand and dragging it down my cheek. Everything inside of me screams but I sit frozen; a small piece of me is still the girl he tormented. I feel everything she felt, every moment of horror and agony.

  It takes approximately seven seconds for me to completely realize he is Mr. X. Mr. X is him. Every piece of the puzzle slips into place.

  “How?” The word falls from my lips, my eyes flood with tears, and my brain points out all of the clues that are now so obvious. “I know you tricked Dash into changing the recording when you recognized who Ashley Potter was. You must have panicked when you realized she was alive. That she had survived the river. This is why you got Dash to confuse me by introducing you as the bad guy so you could make a cover for yourself. I see now how you knew we were coming and killed all those girls, and how you used all of your skills to avoid detection. I guess I only have to ask you one thing, Rory. How could you? Being who we are, and seeing what we see, how could you?” I press a button on my phone, something he doesn’t see me do as I pick it up from the console.

  “How could I? How could I not? Each one of them was mine.” His eyes lose the Irish charm and roguish flair. Instead, the dark-blue seems to blacken as he tilts his head forward, casting a shadow over his eyes. His smile becomes menacing as evil—the pure evil in his heart—takes over. His eyebrows even arch differently. He is sick, which I can see. “You can’t be surprised, Jane. Not after everything. You were attracted to me in there, in Ashley’s mind. You wanted me. You moaned and writhed while you were in there like I have never seen you do. Angie, that twat, was jealous that you got to have me as your Dr. Russo, Derek the sex machine. You�
��re the only mind runner I’ve ever seen who uses sex in someone’s head.” He twirls a strand of my hair that’s escaped my ponytail. “You want a dark and scary man to hate-fuck, to conquer you.” His eyes light up. “You like it in there, don’t you? You’ve gotten addicted to riding their minds and feeling their pain. In there you’re a real girl. Having family and friends and a life that’s real, beyond this bullshit lot you’ve been handed. That wanker Dash never deserved you. He sees the light, but I see you, Princess, I see you for who you are. I know you want love in all the wrong places.”

  He grips the side of my face, pulling me into him. His lips bubble over with spit, but before he can attempt to kiss me the door is opened and he’s thrown from the car. “What in the hell are you doing?” Dash grabs him but shouts at me. The conversation with Angie over his drooling problem mixes with the spit-filled kisses he gave Ashley. The whole world feels like it crumbles, but I manage to point as my hand shakes and my eyes dart. “It’s—it’s him.”

  Dash sees the look on my face and spins, but he’s no match for Rory. Dash swings, and Rory punches him twice, knocking him to the ground, and breaks into a sprint.

  I get out, running after him, before I’ve even given it much thought. I point at the police in the car across from us. “Get them to help us!”

  Dash scrambles across the road for the cop car as I kick my legs into high gear.

  I’m not like Rory. I’m not crazy. He runs through the traffic once we get onto Queen Anne Avenue from the side street we were on. He slides over the hoods of moving cars and dashes into traffic like a madman, almost as if he’s toying with me. He wants me to come and get him. I stop running, sending a quick video message and calling a number much more powerful than 911.