When No One Is Watching

by Natalie Charles - When No One Is Watching

  “That was just round one.” He drew back the curtain to the shower and turned the on faucet. “I need another shower. Care to join me? I promise to make it worthwhile.”

  Mia’s pulse began to kick again. He didn’t need to ask her twice.

  Chapter 14

  Gray didn’t want to classify whatever was happening between him and Mia. Throwing a name on it felt cheap. Besides, he didn’t even know what he and Mia should call themselves. He’d had girlfriends before, and this was different. He’d been married before, and it didn’t compare. This was something, but he and Mia weren’t weighed down by the details. Only other people would care where the relationship rated on some imaginary scale of seriousness.

  They’d spent every night of the past two weeks together. He would leave his shift and come to her apartment, and if Mia wasn’t there, he’d use his key to let himself in. They’d settled into some kind of domestic situation where he would take out the trash and cook her dinner, and she would bring him coffee and toast in bed. They stayed up late talking, slept with their limbs intertwined and enjoyed each other’s company, and no one else in the world knew about it. The secretiveness was part of the allure.

  Valentine’s capture was splashed across the headlines, and not one of the stories mentioned Mia’s involvement or her precarious position as a person of interest in the murder of the Globe reporters. Once the dust settled, Gray decided, he would be more open about his relationship with Mia. Maybe he would talk with her, and they would agree on a name that would make it easier to explain.

  “I think I’m going to meet with Kate Haley,” Mia said one night as she settled onto the couch next to him. She was wearing a long sundress that showed a lot of skin, and her feet were bare. She tucked them beneath her and leaned her shoulder against his.

  “Really?” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders to pull her closer to his side. “What are you going to talk to her about?”

  “You know. The whole...incident.”

  This was how they’d been referring to Valentine, as an incident. An event and not a human being. “Mia, I doubt she has any information about Lena.”

  “It’s not that. I’m a psychologist, and I’ve done a lot of work with victims, and I thought I’d reach out to her. Encourage her to talk to someone when she’s ready.”

  He stroked the pad of his thumb across the soft arch of her shoulder. “That’s nice of you.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised him, because he was learning that Mia was just nice. She tucked little love notes in the pockets of his pants and set towels out for him before he took a shower. She learned how he liked his coffee and his eggs, and she bought him a toothbrush to keep at her apartment so he didn’t have to worry about forgetting his. She was thoughtful in a lot of ways that he wouldn’t have expected when he’d first met her.

  “I’ve been remembering more about that time last summer,” she said softly. “All of the anguish and desperation I felt, and the powerlessness. When Lena vanished, I realized that I’d ordered my life around this illusion of control, and that was like building a house on sand.” She reached for his hand and intertwined their fingers. “Would you go back with me to the place where I was attacked?”

  “What...now?”

  She raised a shoulder. “Sure. Why not?”

  Gray pressed his free hand over the two of theirs but didn’t respond. She was searching for healing and for answers, and everything he’d done to help her in those arenas had panned out to nothing. Valentine was a dead end. The murders of Jake Smith and Samantha Watkinson were still unsolved, leaving Mia in limbo as far as the fingerprints on the gun went. He’d never found the person who’d entered her sister’s apartment and sent that email, let alone the person who’d attacked her. He’d been working around the clock to deliver the closure he’d initially promised to Mia, and he’d come up empty. He owed her everything. Still, he mulled over her request.

  “Are you sure you want to go back there?”

  “I need to see it. I think it will help me remember that night.” She paused. “Why are you looking like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re coming up with a reason you can’t go with me.”

  He shook his head, trying to order the thoughts that were flying through his brain. “That’s not what I’m thinking.” Which was a lie. He stopped, forcing himself to gaze into her beautiful eyes. “If that’s what you want, then I’ll go with you.”

  They took the T and walked in silence toward the riverfront. The closer they came, the tighter Mia’s grip on Gray’s hand was. “Do you know where it happened?”

  “Over there, by those trees.” She pointed to a small grove sliced by a thin line of asphalt.

  “And so here we are.”

  She dropped his hand and stood alone, staring at the river. He thrust his hands into his pockets and waited for something to happen. The area wasn’t exactly busy, but a few cyclists and a jogger passed as he waited. “Mia?”

  She turned to him, shaking her head. “It’s fine. We can leave now.”

  “We don’t have to. We just got here.”

  “No, it’s all right.” She walked past him, heading back the way they came. “I thought I would remember something, but I didn’t.”

  She walked away from the spot with long, determined steps. He quickened his pace to keep up with her. “What happened? I thought you’d want to take a look around—”

  “I did,” came the crisp response. “And now I want to leave.”

  Gray looked behind him, half expecting to see some monster dredging itself from the banks of the Charles. “The river’s not on fire....”

  She halted and spun to face him. “We did what I wanted us to do. I saw the place where I was hurt. I’ve avoided this spot for almost a year, and now that I’ve been here, I’m ready to move on with my life. Close that chapter and do whatever other clichéd things I need to do.”

  Her words spilled too quickly to be convincing. Gray opened his mouth to point out that he could tell something was bothering her, but something in the frantic darting of her eyes told him that the issue was best left untouched. It had taken a year for her to come back to this place, and it might take another year still before she would be able to talk to him about what coming here had meant. Forcing the issue wasn’t fair.

  “Okay,” he said. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.”

  Her face relaxed. “Thank you.”

  He extended his hand to her, and she took it. Then they headed back toward the T, walking slowly to enjoy the rose-colored sunset.

  * * *

  Mia had been dreaming about the attack. Every night, the dream was the same: she was walking with a man, and they were laughing. She was wearing a light jacket because the August evening was cool, and as they walked, the gun in her pocket knocked against her hip. She felt safe, in spite of the gun. Maybe because of it. Then, when they reached the small grove of trees, her companion turned to her, and she knew that he was not her friend and that he intended to hurt her. She screamed, but nothing came out. Then she awoke to the sensation of her heart’s desperate flutters.

  Maybe Gray knew about the dreams, but she couldn’t be sure. Once, she’d woken to find him leaning over her, smoothing tears that she didn’t know she was crying from her cheeks. Embarrassed, Mia had rolled over to face away from him and his concern, pretending to still be asleep. He hadn’t asked her about the incident the next morning, and she’d never offered any explanation. After that, she was determined to make the dreams stop. If she’d hoped that revisiting the place where she’d been attacked would provide some closure, she’d been wrong.

  She’d long suspected that she’d known her attacker, but now she was sure. She knew the moment she saw the trees that she’d taken a walk by the river with someone she’d once trusted, and she’d brought a gun with her. Gray didn’t need to know. He believed wholeheartedly in her innocence. Sometimes that made her sick to her stomach.

&nbs
p; Whatever had happened that night, she knew it was about Lena. It had to have been. She’d had the gun because of Lena, and she’d been talking to the man she’d been walking with about Lena and sharing some of her suspicions. Ever since Valentine had been captured, Mia had realized that a part of her had known all along that he wasn’t responsible for Lena’s death. It had all been there in her file. She was taller than the other victims. She’d never frequented the Boston Public Library. Her body had never been recovered, and her blood hadn’t been found at the scene. Lena was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

  The anxiety pills no longer worked. Mia was beyond that kind of help, which presumed a chemical imbalance that could be rectified. This was fear. Someone she knew had wanted her dead because of something she’d once figured out, and that person could decide at any moment to eliminate her. She would have told Gray all of that, except she suspected that wasn’t the entire truth. This was about more than someone watching her.

  Her greatest fear was that last summer, she’d known who’d killed Lena, and she’d taken a walk with the killer down by the Charles with the intention of killing him.

  * * *

  Mia met Kate Haley at a pub, but they both passed on alcohol. Mia had an iced tea, and Kate ordered a lemonade and an extra glass filled with ice. “They never put enough ice in,” she explained as she spooned the cubes from one glass to the other. “It doesn’t matter whether you ask them to fill the glass with ice. It doesn’t happen.”

  Mia smiled and rested her forearms on the table. Even though they weren’t far apart in age, Kate could be one of her students. She was dressed in a pink T-shirt and long, loose-fitting black cargo pants that concealed the wounds on her ankles. “How are you holding up, Kate?”

  She exhaled, making a sound like air leaking slowly from a balloon. “My boyfriend was murdered in my kitchen, and I was chained up in a basement by a serial killer. How do you think I’m holding up?” She shook two white packets of sugar and poured them into her lemonade. The grains sank right to the bottom. “I don’t usually put sugar in anything. My body’s a temple, blah, blah. But I feel like I don’t care anymore. Like, sugar? What a stupid thing for me to have been so concerned about.”

  She took a sip of her lemonade and then set it aside. “I’m not opposed to us meeting like this,” she said, “but I don’t know what you’re looking for. I’ve told the police everything I know about...him.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Mia said. “I just wanted to encourage you to speak with someone, that’s all.”

  “No offense, but why do you care about that?”

  “Because it’s my profession, for one thing. But more than that, I wanted to share that my sister vanished last summer, and right up until the police caught Valentine, I thought she’d been one of his victims.” Mia toyed with the straw in her glass. The not knowing was still so painful. “I took matters into my own hands. Tried to find answers myself. I’m a psychologist, and you would think I would’ve been smart enough to get some professional counseling, but I didn’t.”

  “So?” Kate’s question wasn’t unkind, but matter-of-fact. “You seem like you’re doing okay.”

  “I appreciate that.” Mia couldn’t help but laugh drily at the compliment. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.” Especially not as she was only beginning to understand the depths to which she might have sunk the previous summer. “The anxiety can be difficult to manage.”

  Like now, when she felt the full heat of the graduate student’s scrutiny. Mia’s mouth went cotton dry. She took a sip of her iced tea. “I’m guessing that you think you can handle this, right? Valentine’s in prison. Your physical wounds are healing. You’ll be fine, and you don’t want to have to think about what happened and deal with the ugly feelings. But you can’t will those feelings away. It’s not fair, but the only way for you to survive this intact is to fully confront those horrifying days. I can give you some names of people I’d trust to the ends of the earth. Just think about talking to someone, okay?”

  Kate looked down at the table as if she was considering Mia’s advice. Then she nodded. “Okay.”

  Mia didn’t know why she was shaking. Maybe because she was a hypocrite, so full of advice for others, so unwilling to face her own pain. She changed the subject, asking Kate about her studies and her undergraduate experience. By the time they’d finished their drinks, Mia felt as if the two women had forged some kind of bond. Maybe they hadn’t been joined by Valentine, but those details no longer mattered. They were survivors.

  When the check came, Mia picked up the tab. She fished through her bag, setting her keys on the table before lifting out her wallet to count the right amount plus tip. She placed the bills on the table. “All set.”

  Kate picked up her own bag and pointed to Mia’s key chain. “Hey, that key,” she said, touching the leopard-print novelty key to Lena’s apartment. “Is that, like, a thing?”

  “A thing? What do you mean?”

  “It’s just that that’s the second key like that I’ve seen this week. I didn’t know if it was trendy or something.”

  Mia wrapped the keys with her hand and dropped them into her bag. “I don’t think it means anything. My sister gave it to me. It opens her apartment door. I don’t know how she convinced her landlord to allow her to make a copy.”

  Lena was a natural salesperson, and she usually had no trouble convincing anyone to do just about anything. Mia smiled to herself at the memory.

  “That’s funny.” Kate shrugged the straps of her bag onto her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have noticed it on this other person. It’s just that I thought it was weird for a man to have a leopard-print key.”

  “Really?” Mia laughed. “Yeah, that seems like something I’d notice, too. Where did you see it?”

  “At the police station,” she said as they stepped out into the sunshine. “I made cookies for the guys who saved me. Is that stupid?” She brushed her hair behind her ears. “I felt like I needed to do something, but what do you do when someone breaks down a door and saves your life?”

  A chill passed through Mia. “A cop had a leopard-print key like this?” She tried to keep her tone conversational, but her sudden excitement was forcing her voice higher. “Just out of curiosity, do you remember which cop? I do a lot of work with them, and I never miss the chance to give them as hard a time as they give me.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can imagine.” Kate laughed. “It was that officer who saved me. Augostine?” She squinted. “Am I butchering his name?”

  Mia’s heart stopped in its tracks. “D’Augostino,” she whispered.

  Kate snapped her fingers. “That’s it. D’Augostino.” She shook her head, laughing. “I didn’t ask him about it at the time, but I definitely noticed. Hey, if you ever find out why he has that key, let me know, okay? I’m kind of dying to know.”

  Yes, Mia thought to herself, her stomach tensing. That makes two of us.

  Chapter 15

  Gray let himself into Mia’s apartment, turning the key carefully so that the sound of the lock wouldn’t wake her. It was after eleven o’clock, and she had class in the morning. She would almost certainly be asleep. But as he opened the door, he saw a sliver of light radiating from the bedroom. “Mia? You’re still awake?”

  “Yep.”

  She was sitting up in bed, half-covered by the light green comforter, wearing her dark-rimmed glasses and reading a stack of papers. As he came closer, he saw that she was reading from a copy of a police file. His stomach sank. Lena’s file.

  It wasn’t as if he were pressuring her to let it all go, because that would have been thoughtless of him. He admitted that he didn’t have the first idea what it might be like to have your only sister go missing and be presumed dead and to not have any answers as to who might have been responsible. Sometimes, though, he wanted to talk about something else. It was as though this tragedy consumed their relationship and held them back, and every time Lena’s name came up in conversation, G
ray was reminded of how he’d failed to find the answers he’d promised Mia.

  He cleared his throat. “What are you reading?”

  “You know.”

  Yes, he did. He sat himself on the end of the bed and removed his shoes. “How was your day?”

  She set the papers down in her lap. “Gray, you remember when you said you wanted to question anyone who had a key to my sister’s apartment about the email that was sent to me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You questioned me. Who else did you talk to?”

  Gray didn’t like the direction this was going. “Morrison hammered away at Mark Lewis for a while. The guy showed us his calendar and gave us a list of alibis. He has every minute of his day accounted for. He’s clean, Mia.”

  She set the papers beside her and pulled her knees to her chest. “What about D’Augostino? Did you question him?”

  He turned to face her. “What? Why?”

  “Because he has a key to Lena’s apartment.” She reached over to the nightstand and lifted her key ring, dangling it on her finger. “See the one with the leopard print?” She tossed the ring to him. “Lena gave it to me. It’s the key to her apartment. I met with Kate Haley today, and she said she’d just seen another one like it. With D’Augostino.”

  Gray turned the key between his fingers. He couldn’t exactly claim that it was a common design. “Lena and D’Augostino were friendly,” he murmured. “He would’ve told me if he had a key.”

  “Not if he sent that email to me.” Mia started to shuffle through the papers again. “That’s not all. D’Augostino was the lead investigator on Lena’s case. He’s the one who concluded that Valentine was the killer. He’s the one who missed the fact that the blood found in Lena’s apartment didn’t belong to her.”

  This was lunacy, and Gray’s shoulders tightened at the suggestion that one of his closest allies in the department might have murdered Mia’s sister. “So he made mistakes on the file. That doesn’t make him a killer. And as for this—” he tossed the key ring back to her “—it means nothing that he has a leopard-print key when we’re not sure what door that key opens. Why would he have something like that on his key ring if he was guilty, anyway? It doesn’t make sense.”