by M K Farrar
Erica pulled up onto her drive, and they all climbed out. Poppy carried on with her stream of consciousness, standing right in the way as she told Shawn all about things other children he’d never even met before had done at school.
He held out both hands. “Wow, slow down, Poppy. Remember to take a breath.”
“I’m taking a breath. Look.” She sucked in a lungful of air.
“Okay, okay. Don’t forget to breathe out again.” He grinned. “Now are we going to go inside, or not?”
“Yes, let poor Shawn in, Poppy.” Erica laughed.
Poppy jumped back and then did a dramatic bow like a courtier to a member of royalty.
“Cheeky monkey,” Shawn said as he passed.
“I need to talk to Shawn about boring work stuff,” Erica told her daughter. “You want to go and watch some television for a bit?”
“Do I get my snack?” Her eyes were bright. Poppy might only be seven going on eight, but she knew exactly how to work a situation.
“Fine, you can have some crisps, but just this once, okay?”
Both of them knew it was never going to be just the once.
Poppy clapped. “Yay, thank you.”
Erica got Poppy settled in front of some terrible cartoon on the television. She was grateful Poppy hadn’t yet discovered the joys of YouTube, though she’d mentioned it a few times when she’d come back from spending time at Natasha’s house. Her cousins liked to watch annoying YouTubers doing annoying things—unpackaging toys, or playing computer games, or doing mindless challenges. Erica dreaded the day arriving when Poppy decided they were more entertaining than normal TV.
That made her think of the victim, Naomi Conrad. She’d made her living from that site and others like it. Had it also been what had got her killed? Right now, it was impossible to say.
She went back to Shawn in the kitchen.
“Drink?” she asked him.
“Sure, I could use a beer, if you have one.”
“Absolutely.” She took a couple of bottles from the fridge and cracked the lids off. She handed him one. They clinked the necks together, and she lifted the neck to her lips and took a gulp, the liquid cold and fizzy.
“So, what is it you’ve got to show me,” Shawn asked after taking a swig of his own beer.
Confession time. “I went to see Lara Maher.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Lara Maher, as in Tristan Maher’s sister?”
“That’s right.”
“Why? I thought Gibbs said it wasn’t worth following up.”
“I know he did, but I just kept feeling like Naomi Conrad’s murder was too similar to the ones Tristan Maher carried out.”
“Why would speaking to Lara help? Her brother is in prison. It’s not as though she would know anything.”
Erica sighed, her shoulders dropping. “I know that.”
“You don’t think she might be involved, do you?”
She waved the beer bottle. “No, not at all. I don’t know why I thought she’d know anything about Naomi—it’s not as though they were connected in any way. The thing is, Lara has been having a pretty rough time of things. She’s stayed in that damned house, and of course, everyone in the area knows what her brother did. She’s been receiving hate mail, and people have been graffitiing the house.”
“Did she report it?”
“Yes, but other than taking a statement, no one has done anything.”
“How did it feel going back in that house?” Shawn asked, frowning.
“Weird. I don’t know how Lara can stand to stay there, but she says it was her parents’ house and it felt like deserting them if she sold or moved. She’s still in contact with her brother. She writes to him, but she doesn’t read his letters, or at least that’s what she told me.”
“I wish you’d said you were going back there. I’d have come with you. I don’t like the idea of you being back in that house on your own after what almost happened.”
“The house didn’t do anything. Tristan is behind bars. I was perfectly safe.”
A muscle in his jaw ticked, and his hand tightened around the beer bottle. “Even so, I don’t like it.”
Erica couldn’t help smiling. “Are you about to go all alpha-male on me, Shawn? You know I’m more than capable of looking after myself.”
His lips thinned disapprovingly. “Hmm. I’m not so sure about that.”
“I’m not the one who ended up in hospital with a stab wound not so long ago,” she pointed out.
“All right, it’s not a competition.” He was teasing her now, and the mood lightened a fraction.
She smiled. “Anyway, Lara gave me a folder of letters that she’d had pushed through her door. I haven’t opened the folder yet, but from what she’s said, they’re the threatening kind. I didn’t know what to do with them, since they’re not officially part of our investigation, and I can’t imagine Gibbs would be happy if I tried to bring them in. I didn’t know Lara was going to give me something like this—I’d just planned on popping in for a chat, that was all.”
“Let’s take a look at them then.”
“Here,” she said, handing him a pair of gloves and slipping on a pair herself. “Just in case.”
She opened the folder and took out the first of the letters. It was folded, so she spread it out. It was short and not terribly sweet.
Brother Fucker. Get out of our neighbourhood, you sick bitch.
Erica put it to one side and opened the next one.
You helped kill those girls. How could you not know? Lara and Tristan Maher will burn in hell.
Erica opened another letter, and another, and kept reading. Most of them had a similar tone.
Shawn blew out a breath and shook his head. “Jesus. How could she stay there on her own when she was getting all this abuse? She must be terrified knowing they all know where she lives.”
The strange thing was, Lara hadn’t seemed particularly afraid. Tired, maybe. More than tired. Weary, exhausted.
“She’d lived with Tristan her whole life, while he’d controlled and abused her. Perhaps, after that, living alone, even with all the threatening letters and the graffiti, still felt like a better option.” Erica shrugged. “You’d think going through something like that would make someone weaker, but perhaps in Lara’s case it made her stronger? She took on Tristan, and a few letters are nothing compared with him.”
“You could be right.” He looked down at the letters again. “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with all these, though?”
“No, me neither. She put security cameras up, but they just spray-painted them, so she didn’t get any footage.”
“We’re not going to figure out who sent these just from the letters. We can try to get some prints off them, but that’s going to mean submitting them and the paperwork that comes with it.”
Erica chewed at her lower lip and stared down at the hateful words scrawled across the pages. “I feel like I might have to do that, and deal with Gibbs when the time comes. I made a promise to Lara, and if there’s a possibility we can nail one of the people who are doing this, it would send out a message to the others that they won’t get away with it.”
“You think it’s more than one person?”
“Most likely, yes. There was a lot of media coverage of the case, and the press didn’t exactly portray Lara in a good light. Plenty of them hinted that she’d helped her brother pick out his victims.”
Shawn shook his head. “There was never any proof in that. She’d lived under her brother’s coercive control her entire life.”
“I know. That she’d sat for his paintings didn’t look good on her either. Some of the portraits were leaked. Some people were more upset by a brother painting his sister naked than they were about the brother murdering innocent women.”
“What is it about sex that upsets people so much?”
Erica shrugged. “The crazy thing is that it never was about sex. He never laid a finger on her, or so she says. He g
enuinely was just practising his art. He was good as well. He could have had a good career ahead of him.”
“If he wasn’t a murderous motherfucker, you mean?”
Erica smirked and glanced towards the kitchen door in the hope that Poppy hadn’t overheard the swearing. “Well, yes, if it wasn’t for that.”
They grinned at each other. The kitchen door opened, and quickly, Erica gathered the letters and put them back inside the plastic folder.
“Mummy, I finished my crisps,” Poppy moaned. “Can I have something else?”
“Absolutely not. You were lucky to get them, and I need to start dinner in a minute.”
“But Shawn is here. I shouldn’t have to go to bed when Shawn is here.”
Shawn pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Sorry, kiddo. I was only here to help your mum with a work thing. I’m not staying.”
Her lower lip stuck out. “Not fair.”
Shawn jerked his chin at the folder. “Do you want me to send those to forensics? I can do that now. I’m happy to take on the paperwork.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Thanks, Shawn. I appreciate your help.”
He ducked his head in a nod. “Anytime, you know that.”
She did. He wasn’t just a colleague, he was one of her closest friends as well, plus he was good with Poppy. Her daughter always got excited when Shawn came around. It must be hard for Poppy as well, not having her father in her life. She had her uncle, but he wasn’t around a whole lot—Natasha did the vast quantity of parenting in their family. It wasn’t that Erica wanted to replace Chris, just the thought tightened her chest, but she felt good when Shawn was around. There was a line she couldn’t bring herself to cross, though, and that wasn’t only because of her grief for Chris or her ongoing sense of betraying her dead husband. She and Shawn worked well as a team, and her work was the one place where she felt she had control. If something happened to mess that up, she didn’t know what she would do. While she had her little family at home, her work family were just as important. They were a solid unit, and she didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise that security.
“Say goodbye to Shawn.”
“Bye, Shawn,” Poppy said, obedient for once.
“Bye, Popsy,” he teased.
Poppy stuck out her tongue and then scurried up the stairs, and Erica saw Shawn to the front door.
Chapter Sixteen
Three Months Earlier
Nicholas had received another letter.
They didn’t arrive often—only one every few months or so. The content of the letters still didn’t make any sense to him. They talked of things that he had no interest in such as bird-watching and oil painting. Nicholas still believed that whoever was writing to him had the wrong prisoner even though Nicholas’s prison number was written on the envelope. He wondered if perhaps one day his pen pal would decide to pay him a visit and come to the prison in person. If that happened, he was quickly going to discover that he’d been writing to the wrong man all this time.
The idea of the letters stopping made Nicholas sad in a way he couldn’t quite voice. Prison life was incredibly lonely. He’d believed he was used to loneliness. After all, hadn’t he been alone most of his life? But, in the outside world, there were distractions. He’d even had a job working in that old people’s home—the same one the detective’s dad had ended up in. What a curious twist of fate that had been.
Perhaps people would think him strange, but he’d enjoyed the job. It had been the one place where others hadn’t looked down on him. The residents had been more than happy to exchange a few kind words with him and had appreciated when he’d taken time out of his day to speak with them. Like him, many of them were the population’s forgotten people, the ones who were ignored, who were put away so their family didn’t have to think about them.
The detective hadn’t been like that with her dad, he’d noted. Whatever else he’d thought of her, Nicholas couldn’t deny that she’d gone in to see him practically every day. She had listened to what he had to say and not just dismissed him as being old and senile. But seeing that kinder side to her hadn’t been enough for Nicholas to change his mind. She’d signed her death warrant the day she’d allowed his brother to jump in front of that train, and nothing would have changed Nicholas’s mind on that.
He pulled his thoughts from the past and focused on the letter in his hand. Just like with all the previous letters, the envelope had already been opened, the contents checked by a drug detection machine. Paper letters could be sprayed with drugs like spice, which was almost impossible to detect by the naked eye, and the paper was then used to roll cigarettes. Paintings sent in by children could also be used to hide drugs inside of—not that anyone sent anything like that to Nicholas. His letters appeared innocent, and he doubted any of the officers really cared what was being said. After all, there were a thousand prisoners in here, and that meant there was a lot of mail to go through.
Nicholas unfolded the letter and started to read.
Dear Mr Bailey,
Is it easy to follow the passing seasons from inside those walls? It must be strange, being so cocooned from the rest of the world. Is cocooned the right word? It suggests that you are becoming something different while you’re incarcerated. Are you? Spending years behind bars must change a man, I imagine. Of course, I’m just speculating—I’ve never spent any time in prison myself.
Anyway, I digress. I was talking about the seasons. One of the ways I’ve been able to tell that autumn is almost upon us is from the scent of bonfires on the air. Is it the falling leaves that encourages people to start their own little fires in their gardens, or is it the promise of Bonfire Night on the horizon?
Nicholas rolled from his back over to his stomach. He propped himself on his elbows, the letter on his pillow as he read.
Whatever the reason, I love the crackle and pop of a bonfire, and the scent of smoke on the air. Sometimes, I imagine the people gathered around them. The old man raking his leaves and garden clippings into the pile or children holding marshmallows or hot dogs over the flames. The smell of meat roasting on a hot flame is something to be savoured, isn’t it? I always think the same when I walk past people having a BBQ. What about you, Nicholas? Do you like the smell of meat roasting? I wonder if there’s something primal about it, like it takes us back to our ancestors’ days as cavemen. Isn’t that why men gather around a BBQ when those same men wouldn’t be seen dead in a kitchen?
Back to you, Nicholas. Do you feel you’re changing over your time spent inside? Like the creature inside a cocoon, or the shifting of seasons? Do you find yourself looking back over the things you’ve done and wishing you could have acted differently?
Perhaps there is still time?
Yours, M Cimi.
Did this M Cimi want him to repent? Was that his motive behind writing? He might be some religious nut who first planned to worm his way into Nicholas’s life and win his trust before trying to convert him. It wouldn’t surprise Nicholas at all. If anything, knowing something like that was going to happen made him feel a little better about the reason he’d been receiving the letters. There was a reason behind them, a reason he could understand. He didn’t need to feel guilty thinking that he was reading letters that belonged to someone else or was writing back to someone who thought he was someone else. Not that Cimi had any chance of converting Nicholas. God or religion had never been present in his life, and he had no intention of going into it now. Some people in here, people who’d done terrible things, suddenly found God, as though it might make them a different person. Nicholas thought that was bullshit. Who you were didn’t change just because you suddenly decided to believe in something that may or may not be real. That wasn’t to say that Nicholas wouldn’t go along with what Cimi wanted, however. He liked having someone to talk to, even if it was only through pen and paper. He could pretend to agree with his new pen pal, while knowing that he had no intention of e
ver finding God. How could someone like him ever find God? He didn’t really believe in all of that, but if he did believe, he was fairly certain that when his time came, he’d be heading down instead of up.
Chapter Seventeen
Even though it was the weekend, Erica was back at work first thing the following morning.
Natasha’s son was feeling better the next day, so Erica was able to drop Poppy off. She felt bad for being relieved that she was able to do so, but with such a big case on, she needed to work. It wasn’t ideal that she hadn’t been able to put in the hours last night due to childcare, though she had sat up at the kitchen table long after Poppy had fallen asleep and worked on her notes for both cases. She was lucky she had a boss who understood. It hadn’t always been that way, but Gibbs had softened over the past couple of years, and they were less likely to butt heads now than they had been in the early days. Maybe it was just that she’d proven her worth over the years, or perhaps he simply liked and respected her more now. She knew his stroke had knocked his confidence, too, and while he was still perfectly capable of doing his job, she had noticed that he’d leaned on her a little more than normal. She didn’t mind in the slightest. She liked to feel needed.
“Any updates with either case,” she asked Rudd as she dropped her bag down beside her desk and hooked her jacket over the back of her chair.
“No new developments on the Skehan case, sorry.”
“Shit. That seems to have gone cold already.”
“I know. It’s frustrating. There simply aren’t any leads. No real witnesses, except for those who saw what happened after the attack, and nothing substantial from forensics. We don’t even have anything on CCTV.”
Erica released a breath. “It happens. As much as we’d like to catch the culprit in every case, sometimes we just don’t. We just have to hope this is a one-off attack.”
