by Ruth Parker
“Maybe an hour and a half, two hours tops,” she said. It was time for another cycle in the centrifuge. Then another bath of acid. Then another rinse. Then counting and weighing the pollen. That took the longest, counting and double counting, doing the math, counting again, doing the math again. Then counting again.
“Okay,” he said. She relaxed a little. She liked the sheriff well enough, but would be glad to have him gone. It was always easier to work alone. It was easier for Laurel to do everything alone. “I’ll go get someone who can take over for you.”
“Can’t it wait?” she said. She was so close to the end.
“No,” he said.
“But—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. That cold edge in his voice sounded stronger than ever—dangerous even. “I’m going downstairs to find someone. There’s a bunch of people downstairs. Wrap it up as best you can.” He left without saying anything else. A bunch of people downstairs? Downstairs was the county morgue. This definitely wasn’t good. What was so important that he needed to talk now?
Did they find Leigh?
Every time an unidentified female body came into the morgue, Laurel was wracked with a sick wave of panic mixed with hope mixed with bile. She’d sneak down there and take a look at the sad, gray body. Hoping it was Leigh. Knowing it wouldn’t be.
If they ever did find Leigh, there’d be nothing but bones and moldy strands of hair.
Stella was back by the time she’d finished washing the sample. He had strong-armed a lab tech, an older woman named Priscilla, into coming up to the lab. Priscilla was a solid technician, and even though Laurel hated letting someone else take over, at least she knew her project would be in capable hands.
“Let’s go to the staff room,” he said, leading her there. The old refrigerator hummed in the quiet room. She sat down on the couch, only after Stella gestured for her to sit. She did not want to sit. She wanted to pace and grind her teeth.
“What’s all this about?” she asked, annoyed at being kept guessing for this long. Her imagination was running wild and her imagination was a dark and depraved thing to let loose.
“You’ll want to hear this,” he said. He let out a sigh. She couldn’t tell before, but now that she was sitting so close to him, she could see that Stella did look older. He was the top sheriff, involved in mostly administrative business, but at heart he was a wiry, tough cop. He’d gotten older over the years—but now he just looked old. “There’s been two murders—and they’re bad.”
“You already said that,” Laurel said, still annoyed. Why couldn’t he just get to the damned point?
“And I’ll say it again because you don’t seem to understand,” he yelled at her. “I’ve been doing this shit for twenty-five years and never has there been anything so fucking terrible. But that’s not all.”
She restrained an urge to pull on his jacket and shake him against the ratty old couch. “What’s going on?” she asked. She let an edge of impatience sneak through her voice and hated the way she sounded. He took a moment to compose himself. Whatever was so horrible, it had gotten to him. Gotten to him in a bad way.
“We’re going to need your help,” he said. “This morning a hiker was out by that bald eagle sanctuary, that large stretch of county land off of Route 26. There were two bodies. Girls. About twelve years old. Twins.” He let the weight of his last word sink in.
Stella had been wrong. Laurel did not want to hear this.
Her arms tingled and her chest felt hot and itchy. It felt like she was having a heart attack. She stood up.
“Hold on,” Stella said. “Listen.”
“I can’t,” she said. She had to get out. She walked towards the door. She didn’t know where she was going to go, but she couldn’t listen to this. He had been right to get her out of the lab—she would have dropped the test tube on the floor. He followed her into the hallway. She went straight towards the employee locker room. She almost made it, when he grabbed her shoulder and turned her around.
“We need you,” he repeated. “You can help us. Help the girls. Their parents—” His eyes were pleading. This day had taken its toll on him, but she didn’t care.
“Don’t try to manipulate me,” she yelled at him. She jerked her arm away from him. She was furious. At the lab and in the Sheriff’s Department, she always worked hard to keep a careful and controlled demeanor. Most of the people knew her sister had been abducted, but she hated the idea of them talking about her. Or worse: pitying her. “Don’t try your cheap fucking tactics on me.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just… If you’d seen them,” he said. “You can help. I know it.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said. “So don’t tell me what I can do.” She pushed through the door into the locker room, letting the door swing shut on him. He blocked the heavy door with his arm so it didn’t hit him in the nose, and followed her inside. “If you want me to run some tests, I’ll do it. If you want me to extract some DNA, I’ll do it. But if you think I have some—what is it that you think I have? Inside information? Some important evidence that I’ve been conveniently holding back all these years?”
Except that was exactly what she’d been doing. There were some things she would never tell the police. Not then, not now.
There was a loud rhetorical cough from a few rows of lockers over, some employee who happened to be retrieving their belongings at the most awkward moment of the day.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Just come to the briefing meeting tomorrow morning. We’re assembling a task force.”
“And I’m the guest of honor,” she said. Her rage had peaked and was starting to wane. Did she actually just yell at Sheriff Stella? “Go find a clue or something. All I know is the biology and the chemistry. Don’t put all your hopes in me.”
“Tomorrow morning at nine,” he said. He looked worse than ever. “Hopefully I’ll see you there.” He turned and walked out of the locker room.
She slumped on the bench in front of her locker, putting her head in her hands. She rubbed her eyes, all of a sudden feeling very tired. The urge to flee was still strong. She should have left this town—hell, she should have left the state—the second she’d turned eighteen. She should go now. Go anywhere. She could be in a brand new city by the time the sun came up tomorrow. With her experience, she could get a job anywhere. There was nothing in this town keeping her here—no boyfriend, no family, no mortgage payment.
Nothing but ghosts.
And now, a killer.
Three
Laurel pulled her car into the driveway, her mind racing. She’d been on auto-pilot ever since Sheriff Stella had told her about the murders. She’d been trying to convince herself that it was a coincidence. Twin sisters were killed. So what? People got killed all the time.
Except she knew that was bullshit.
What did Stella always say? Coincidence is for people who lack imagination. In her heart, Laurel didn’t believe in coincidence either; things didn’t just happen. People made them happen.
Usually bad people.
Laurel would have to talk to the sheriff, but not tonight. She needed to take some time to calm down. She was afraid if she started talking, it would all come out. And then what? She’d probably lose her job. Might even go to jail.
She turned off the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition. She leaned over and got the gun out of her glove box. She had a permit to carry it and never left the house without it. Another perk of her job was that the sheriffs let her use their training range if she brought her own ammo. She trained three times a week.
Laurel got out of the car and hit the alarm. Before she could go inside her house, she had to follow her routine—although ritual might have been a better word for it. There was more than a healthy dose of superstition attached to her actions. She racked the slide, chambering a round. Stella sometimes let her sit in on police training sessions, if the lab work was slow. As a result, she’d been state certified in firearms ha
ndling, hand-to-hand combat and restraint, and what they called urban security—which was a fancy term for going into a house with a gun.
Before she could go inside, she had to secure the perimeter—which meant walking down one side of her house, across the backyard, and up the other side. Every day, rain or snow. No matter if she was tired from a long day or had only been gone five minutes. She couldn’t rest until she had cleared the inside of the house, checking every closet, behind every door.
Even then, she couldn’t ever really rest.
She slung her purse over her shoulder, crossing the strap over her chest with the bag at her back, out of the way. She held her gun down low, by her legs, so as not to alarm any neighbors who might happen by—but if anyone on the street had noticed her obsessive securing the perimeter every time she returned home, they said nothing. Most people in the neighborhood had been there a long time and they knew the reason why she was so strict about her home security.
She approached the right side of her house; the security lights detected her motion and turned on with a soft, comforting click. There was a permanently bolted gate made of iron bars that cordoned off her property. She had torn out all the overgrown hedges a long time ago, not wanting to give any intruder cover. She could see all the way down the side of her house into the backyard. Everything looked good. No one crouching behind her trashcans or climbing in through a window, no broken glass, no footprints. Station one of the perimeter was secure. Time to check the front door. She went across the lawn, stopping at the porch.
The screen door was open.
Not wide open, but the lock hadn’t latched; the bolt was resting gently on the jamb. As if someone had opened the screen, then let it close without closing it tight. She always closed it tight and gave it a little tug to make sure. She felt a hot wave in her stomach as the old fear started to roil, and willed herself to stay calm. Just because someone came by and opened the screen door didn’t mean anything. Probably someone wanted to share an exciting, limited-time offer to slash her electric bill in half by installing solar panels.
Despite her reassurances, her hands still shook as she gripped the gun. Time to go down the left side and check the backyard. She unlocked the gate, triggering the motion lights. As the lights came on, she noticed the glare reflected on something on the window. It was the first window, the one that looked into the living room. She always kept the dark drapes closed, but on the window glass, there were several oily smudges. Two long smears like parentheses bracketed two smaller smears—it was obvious to her keen and paranoid eyes that someone had pressed their forehead and nose against the window and then cupped their hands around their face to block out the glare from the lights to see if they could get a better look. Her heart thudded suddenly, hard and almost painful in her chest.
Someone had been at the front door, hopped the gate, and tried to peek in through the window.
She held the gun out in front of her, using the tactical two-handed stance she’d learned at her police training, crouching low and taking long, tentative strides. She tried to be as quiet as possible, straining her ears to hear footsteps or voices, but her own heartbeat was pounding in her ears and all she could hear was the rhythmic thump of her own fear.
She took out her cell phone and called the Sheriff’s Department direct line. She told the officer at the desk there was suspicious activity at her house and to send someone. She gave him the address and hung up while he was telling her to stay away and wait at a neighbor’s house instead.
Laurel was not going to run away and wait for the cops to save her.
Fifteen years ago, she’d run. She’d run and found an adult who called the police. The police had promised that they would save her sister. It had been fifteen long years, but the police had never managed to bring Leigh home.
Laurel had learned the hard way that you could only save yourself.
She crept along the side of her house, gun drawn. She tried to calm herself, to breathe regularly and focus on her routine—her ritual. Nothing had changed. She was still securing the perimeter and clearing her house like she did every single day. The gruesome murders that had disturbed Sheriff Stella had nothing to do with the face-print on the window.
Stella’s words, so disjointed and sorrowful, still rang in her ears: Two bodies. Girls. About twelve years old. Twins.
It wasn’t him. It wasn’t the man who’d taken Leigh. That was absurd and she knew it. But over the last fifteen years, she’d imagined him—his narrow, crooked face and his weird blue eyes, the color of washed-out denim—around every shadowy corner, inside every dark closet, in every empty parking structure, and on the other end of every late night telephone call.
It wasn’t him.
The man who took Leigh was not lurking around her house right now. Maybe if she repeated it a few hundred more times, she’d actually start to believe it.
Laurel examined each window as she made her way along the outside of her house, but none of the others had the same oily smudges as the living room window. She had security lights on the four corners of her house, angled to illuminate her entire property. As she approached the backyard, another set of lights flicked on.
That was when she saw him.
A tall man—a muscular man—was trying to look through her back sliding glass door.
“Hands up,” she yelled. The man startled and turned to her. He was in the shadows, the security lights creating a ghostly glare. For a split second, her amped-up brain refused to process what she was actually seeing. She saw the hollow cheeks with that knobby, jutting chin. The pale blue eyes that never seemed to focus. The long fingernails with crescents of purple filth underneath as he reached for her…
“Hold on,” the man said. He put his hands out in a placating gesture. His voice was deep and confident, not the nervous stutter she heard in nightmares. The voice brought her back. Of course it wasn’t him.
But there was still someone in her backyard, and he was taking a slow step towards her.
“Don’t come any closer. And get those fucking hands up in the air,” she yelled. She closed in, keeping the gun pointed at the man’s chest. In the police training, they’d taught her to shoot to kill. Shooting in the leg to wound was bullshit from the movies.
“Let me explain,” he said. He’d put his hands up in the air, but there was a casual slackness in his arms. He wasn’t afraid of her.
“Lay down on the ground,” she said. “Get on your stomach, on the ground, hands above your head. I already called the police.”
He took a step towards her. “Call them back. My name is Fletcher Reed.”
Why did that name seem familiar?
“I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck who you are,” she said, taking another two steps towards him. Keep advancing, do not retreat—that was a sign of weakness. The security lights were casting shadows on his face, but now that she was closer she could see he was younger than she’d originally thought. Maybe late thirties or early forties, just a little older than her. It wasn’t the shadows; he was dark. He had dark olive skin and dark hair and dark intelligent eyes. Eyes that took in everything and missed nothing. He wore a suit and a heavy wool overcoat, but it did nothing to hide his broad shoulders and muscled physique. He didn’t look like a burglar or serial killer: he looked like he belonged in the Fall Fashion Spectacular issue of GQ. But his good looks didn’t cut any ice with Laurel. She knew that scumbags didn’t all look disheveled and grungy. Evil lurked everywhere, in the hearts of the handsome and grotesque alike.
But he was handsome. No denying that. When was the last time she’d even noticed a man’s good looks?
“I’m working the murder investigation,” he said. He took another step towards her; he was only about six feet away. Almost close enough to grab her if he lunged suddenly. Laurel didn’t hesitate, didn’t stop to calculate her odds or think about how stupid she was acting. She leapt at him, bringing the gun down as hard as she could towards his head. He moved aside at the las
t second, managing to move his head out of the way, but catching the blow in the side of the neck. She kicked at his knee and when it buckled, she hooked her leg behind his and brought him to the ground. He landed on his back and she heard the air whoosh out of his lungs; he struggled to breathe for a moment as his muscles seized.
Holding the gun straight in front of her, she positioned herself at his side and kicked him in the ribs as hard as she could. “Roll over onto your stomach and put your hands above your head. I don’t give a shit who you are and what you’re doing. The only thing that matters to me is that you’re sneaking around my house. You’re trespassing and I will press charges. So get on your stomach.”
He groaned as he rolled over onto the cold, wet ground. He stretched his arms above his head, wincing when he raised his right arm. “I think you broke a rib,” he grumbled.
“Good,” she said.
A purple, underwater quality took over the light in the backyard. Laurel knew it for what it was—hell, she’d seen enough cop cars to last her a lifetime. The sheriffs had arrived, their red and blue lights swirling together, illuminating the backyard. “Cops are here, asshole,” she said. She poked him with her foot and he sucked in air, cringing at the pain. “You’re lucky it’s just a rib. I should have shot you on general principle.”
Fletcher got back to his motel room just a few minutes before midnight. It took over an hour to clear things up at Laurel Gates’s house. He’d declined a trip to the hospital to get x-rays. He’d had a cracked rib before and he knew that he’d cracked one tonight. He found a late-night pharmacy and got some Tylenol and Ace Bandages to bind his chest. It would hurt like hell to sneeze for the next few weeks, but he’d be okay.
After leaving the crime scene earlier that day, he’d gone to his father’s house. His dad had gotten copies of old case files about the abduction of Leigh Gates, Laurel’s twin sister. He was convinced that the same man who abducted Leigh Gates fifteen years ago had murdered the Clark girls.