by B. B. Hamel
She nodded slowly. “Okay. Fine.”
“Call if you need anything.” I walked into my back room and reached under my mattress, grabbing my own pistol. I checked the clip, shoved it into a holster, and shoved the holster into my pants.
“Be careful,” Laney said as I left.
“You too.” I shut the door behind me and headed down the steps, all thoughts of Laney’s body banished from my mind.
“Are you ready to see this?” Sloan asked me.
We were ten minutes outside town. It was a small wooded area not five minutes from a small subdivision of houses. Whoever put the body in this area had huge hulking balls, because he’d been within easy sight of anyone.
“Show me.”
Sloan nodded and we headed through the police tape. Up ahead, I saw the body propped against a tree, just like the last one.
As I got closer, I began to use my analytically-trained mind to understand what I was seeing. The girl was young, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and Hispanic. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly.
Like all the other killings, her hands were mutilated and her fingers were removed. Like the new killings only, her hands were placed gently in her lap. She was fully clothed, which meant I wasn’t sure if she had been sexually assaulted or not. The girl was younger than the victims normally were, and whoever did the killing may not have been able to rape a minor.
Good for him. I doubted it mattered in the long run whether the sick fuck could get it up or not.
Finally, the strangest part of the whole scene: Nailed above the girl’s head was a wooden board with the word “TON” carved into it.
“What do you think?” Sloan asked me.
“Odd,” I said, distracted. I walked around the tree again slowly, being careful of where I stepped, looking for any evidence. A single boot print had been marked out, but it was faint. Otherwise, the scene was clean, as usual.
“Some differences,” I said. “Her hands are folded gently, like the killer cared. Normally she’s left splayed open, or just tossed on the ground. The sign is also new.”
“Any clue what it means?”
“No. Not right now.”
“Tech says they don’t think she was raped.”
I nodded. “I heard him say that. Another oddity.”
“Maybe he’s not into young girls.”
“Good for him.”
Sloan grunted. “I’ll let you look around. We set up over there in the east.” He pointed back the way we’d come.
I followed his gaze and then stopped. It hit me suddenly like a ton of bricks. I’d had this feeling before in the past; it always happened when a big break suddenly happened.
Sloan walked off back toward camp. He had said something, but I hadn’t heard. I was too busy staring at that sign.
“TON,” etched clearly into the wood.
The girl was facing east.
“’EAST-TON.’”
I shook my head. It couldn’t be; it was just so improbable. But nothing about this killer made sense, and nothing about what he did was meaningless. He was breaking all the rules, and now suddenly he was sending me a personal message.
He wanted me to know that he’d been thinking about me when he had killed this girl.
I walked back toward camp almost in a haze. Ahead I saw a small group of techs photographing something on the ground.
“The girl,” I said. They all looked up. “Who is she?”
The one guy looked at the other. He flipped open his clipboard. “I.D. just came back, actually. Luisa Suarez, age sixteen. Local girl.”
I stumbled back toward the body in a haze, not saying anything else. I could barely think, barely breath. I stopped in front of her and knelt down, staring into her face.
Mrs. Suarez from forty years ago stared back at me.
I didn’t know if Luisa was Mrs. Suarez’s granddaughter or daughter, or something else, but it was obvious that they were related.
And she had been murdered because of me and me alone.
That was the obvious meaning of the sign and the direction. Subtle enough that the cops likely wouldn’t connect the two, but obvious enough that I might. Even if I didn’t get the east-facing thing right away, I’d know something was up when the girl got identified.
I stared at her, my head ringing. Ever since the killings had started months ago, I’d known it had something to do with me. Seed was dead, but somebody was killing like him. And with each new dead woman, the killings drew closer and closer to me.
Five dead women—six now that Luisa was gone—each coming closer and closer until finally a woman was killed with a direct connection to me.
Luisa Suarez. I didn’t know her, but she didn’t deserve to get fucking killed.
The piece of shit. The son of a bitch. The mother fucker was going to burn. He was going to fucking pay for this.
I stood up, seething with rage.
The fucking game was changing. I had hoped that the real law enforcement was going to help fix this fucking mess, but they were clearly inept. They couldn’t fix shit unless I got involved.
I couldn’t sit by anymore and let this fucking bastard kill again.
I was going to have to find him and end it myself.
15
Laney
I sat there staring at the gun for longer than I realized.
One second he put the thing in front of me, and the next it was almost an hour and I hadn’t so much as moved.
Shoot to kill kept ringing through my head. I kept imagining picking the thing up, feeling the weight of the metal, and squeezing the trigger.
It looked so easy in movies. You squeezed and it made a little popping sound. But I knew the truth was completely different, that the gun would jump in your hands and the sound was deafening.
And someone would get killed at the other end of your gun.
I stood up and carried my laptop into the back room. I hadn’t spent much time in here, mostly because it was Easton’s private space. I didn’t feel like I was welcome.
But tonight, I didn’t much care.
I sat down on the futon and opened my laptop, scrolling through Facebook. I needed to keep my mind occupied. I could easily spiral into fear and uncertainty, but I needed to avoid doing that.
Easton was clearly worried. He wouldn’t leave a gun with me unless he thought I was in danger. I knew he’d felt that before, but now it was just so clear.
I didn’t know how long I just sat there, staring mindlessly at Facebook. It had to have been at least an hour.
But suddenly I heard the sound.
The sound I had been dreading and imagining all night long. A scratching at the door, and the jiggle of the knob.
I got to my feet, fear spiking through me, and walked into the main office. The handle was moving, and someone was clearly about to come inside.
I grabbed the gun without thinking. It was heavy, substantial. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and way more terrifying.
The door swung open.
“Hey, sis.” Easton looked at me, a small grin on his face.
“Easton.” I slowly lowered the gun.
“You can relax. It’s just me.”
“Okay.” I put the gun back down on the desk, relief washing over me.
He shut the door behind him. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Why didn’t you knock?”
He just shrugged and walked past me.
“We’re heading out,” he said from the back room. “Come grab your laptop.”
I followed him and closed the lid, picking it up. He was packing another bag full of stuff.
“Two murders in two days,” I said softly. “It’s crazy.”
He looked at me seriously. “We’re closing the office.”
The words hit me like a hammer. “No way!”
“Sorry, sis. We have to.”
“No. We can’t close this office. We’re helping people!”
He
gave me a wry smile. “We’re taking pictures of perverts and cheaters.”
“We’re saving marriages and getting people out of bad ones.” I paused. “And what about Mrs. Suarez? We helped her.”
His face clouded over at the mention of Mrs. Suarez. “We can’t help anyone anymore,” he said softly, and he went back to packing.
What was he talking about? We couldn’t just give up. We hadn’t even started investigating the murders.
“Easton,” I said, walking over to him. “Stop.” I put my hand on his arm.
He looked at me sadly. “We’re going to do more harm than good if we keep seeing clients, Laney.”
“What happened?”
I could see the pain in his face. But more than that, I could see the anger. Brutal anger, fierce and intense.
“The girl was Mrs. Suarez’s daughter. She was only sixteen.”
My mouth dropped open and my hand fell away. “What?”
“Get your stuff together. We’re leaving.”
He continued packing and I stood there, completely numb.
Mrs. Suarez’s daughter had been murdered? Easton clearly thought that we had something to do with it. Because we were helping people, they were getting killed.
I shook my head. That couldn’t be true. What we were doing was good. Sure, it wasn’t the most important or vital thing in the world, and mostly it was catching cheating husband, but still. We brought peace into people’s lives. We did things for people that they couldn’t do for themselves. We found the truth.
I didn’t want to give that up, not when I had finally found it.
Easton stopped in front of me. “Laney,” he said, snapping me out of my trance. “We’re leaving.”
“No,” I said, but he was already walking into the front office. I followed him out there. “No, Easton. Wait.”
“Listen to me,” he said, wheeling around and staring at me. “This young girl is fucking dead because of me. Do you understand that?”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, barely a whisper.
“Her fingers were cut off. She was strangled to death. All because her mother asked for my help.” He shook his head, practically vibrating with rage. “We have to close the office until this piece of shit is dead or caught.”
I nodded slowly, stupidly, unable to say anything more. How could I argue with that?
He slung his heavy bag over his shoulder and grabbed the pistol from the desk, slipping it into his pants. He gave one more look around the office and then nodded.
“Come on,” he said.
I followed him out. He locked the door behind us.
I felt like my world was suddenly shifting again. The last two days had been an insane rollercoaster. I had gone from being annoyed that he had moved into the room next door to suddenly afraid and nervous when he wasn’t around.
And the bodies were beginning to pile up.
I followed him silently out to the car, nervous about where this left us, or if that even mattered anymore.
16
Easton
I couldn’t believe I was so fucking stupid.
As we drove back to Laney’s house in silence, I kept going over and over in my mind all of the idiotic mistakes I kept making, over and over again.
Mistakes that distracted me. Mistakes that kept me from hunting down this murdering fuck and bringing him to justice.
Sure, I wasn’t in the FBI anymore. I wasn’t in law enforcement. But whoever was doing this was clearly somehow targeting me, somehow sending me a message. In a lot of ways, it was all my fault that these women were getting killed. Plus, I was closest to the case, knew the most about it. The sheriff had even directly asked for my help, which only proved that they were out of their league. I was the reason, the catalyst for everything, and people were being yanked into something they never wanted to be a part of because of me.
Especially Luisa Suarez.
While the poor girl was getting strangled to death, I was probably too busy fucking my distracting stepsister in my car. I was thinking with my cock and not with my head, and someone had lost their life because of it.
Would I have caught the guy before Luisa had died? Probably not. But maybe I could have been better informed, more engaged, and maybe I could have changed something. Maybe Mrs. Suarez would have reached out to me sooner if I were more interested in her. Maybe I could stop the next killing, at least.
But I needed to get my head out of my ass. Actually, I needed to get my mind off Laney’s fucking pussy.
Because her cunt was distracting. Hell, her lips and teeth and eyes were distracting. The way she smiled at me uncertainly as I made some dirty comment was distracting. The tilt of her head, the wave in her hair, the way she dressed and spoke. Everything about her made me want to fall deep into the black hole that was her body and never fucking come back out. I wanted to hear her speak and moan and the soft slap of my skin against hers.
I needed to give her up.
As much as it hurt to think about, I needed to concentrate entirely on the case, to give myself up fully to it again. Otherwise nothing was going to happen, and this sick bastard was going to keep on killing over and over.
We pulled up outside the house and I parked. I killed the engine and sat there, stewing in my thoughts.
“Easton?” Laney said softly. “Are you okay?”
I glanced at her. “Fine.” I opened the door and climbed out.
She followed. “Did you tell our parents that you’re staying here?”
I nodded. “They know.”
“Okay.” She bit her lip. “It’s going to work out, you know. We’ll figure it out.”
I whirled on her. I felt so much anger bubbling inside me, and even though I knew none of it was her fault, I couldn’t help but let my own self-loathing rise up to the surface.
“There’s no ‘we’ here, Laney,” I said. “The office is closed. We’re just stepsiblings now.” I paused, letting that sink in. “And it’s already not okay.”
Her eyes widened slightly in surprise, and the hurt I saw there mirrored my own hurt. I only hated myself even more for saying it, but it was for the best. She needed to put distance between the two of us or else risk getting sucked into my whirlpool of fucked up shit.
“I can still help you,” she said. “I know we’re not really working together anymore.”
“No,” I said, grabbing my duffel. “It’s over. Go back to doing whatever it is you did before you met me.”
The hurt in her face quickly shifted to anger. “I don’t get it. You said you wanted my help.”
“You don’t need to get it, Laney.”
“Fine. If you want to be a prick, be a prick.” She held out the Seed case file. “Take your precious file.”
I took it, looking at her grimly. “Just forget about everything. You’ll be better off.”
“You don’t know as much as you think you do, Easton.”
“Maybe not.”
I turned and walked off into the house without another word.
I didn’t look back. I knew that if I did, she’d see the pain in my eyes, see how badly it hurt me to walk away from her, to try to push her away.
And she’d also see the rage. The killer rage, the desire to tear apart the world.
I wasn’t sure which was more terrifying.
17
Laney
I woke up early the next day, Easton’s words ringing in my ears.
I wasn’t surprised that he was being a dick. Honestly, I half expected it. He was normally such a cocky person that I was wondering when he’d decide to lash out or something like that.
It wasn’t so much his words that bothered me. Rather, it was the look in his eyes, like he was haunted, haggard, angry, and above all, afraid.
He wanted to handle everything himself. He didn’t want help because he thought he could make everything happen completely alone. And maybe that was true. Easton was an incredible person, both inside and out. He had a sharp mind
and was about as physically fit as a person could be.
But I got the feeling that he was too wrapped up in his case. I wanted to help, wanted to be a part of it, but I was afraid he was going to push me away.
I rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom, brushing my teeth and doing my usual morning routine.
I hated that he said we were finished, that we were just stepsiblings again. I thought we were something more than just coworkers and stepsiblings, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had misread him. Maybe in the end, all he cared about were his cases and himself.
Frustrated, I went downstairs and into the kitchen. Susan was sitting at the table, which surprised me. She was rarely at home, always so busy with her job and her city council seat.
“Good morning, Laney,” she said.
“Morning.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. “You’re not normally home around now.”
She smiled. “I’ve been working too hard. Decided to take the morning off.”
“Lucky you.” I paused, sipping my coffee. “You know Easton is staying here now, right?”
“I sure do. I suggested it, actually.”
I cocked my head at her. “Why?”
“Well, you’ve heard about what’s happening.”
“Sure. The murders.”
“Sheriff Sloan thinks Easton can help. And I want to offer as much support to him as possible. I figure he can get more work done here than he can in that little office of his.”
“Maybe,” I muttered. “Or maybe he’s better off alone there.”
Susan laughed. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“You seem a little annoyed.”
I sighed, sitting down across from her. “Your son is a real asshole, that’s all.”
My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe I had just said that, but Susan only laughed harder.
“He is a stubborn boy, that’s for sure. What happened?”
“He closed the office and is finished working with me.”
“Really?” She seemed mildly surprised. “He had said you’ve been a huge asset to him.”