“How?”
“That’s something we don’t know yet. There’s no sign of him, and I’m just waiting on results of DNA found at the house. I should have those later today. I just wanted yours rushed through,” he said.
Corey was officially in charge of the investigation; a couple of his colleagues had joined us. I was grateful that he had insisted I stay on. The chief had wanted me removed from the case, ‘a conflict of interest,’ he’d said.
“You need to go home and get some rest, or at least a shower,” Dean said.
I hadn’t left the station in three days. I’d caught a couple of hours sleep every now and again, but my hair was a mess and stubble covered my chin. I nodded.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he added. I nodded again. Sleep deprivation had begun to affect my vision; I wasn’t capable of driving.
I followed him from the room and to the passenger side of his car. I slumped into the seat as he started the engine.
“She committed suicide, how the fuck did he have her?” It was a question I’d asked so many times over the past few days.
“I don’t know, Mich, I really don’t know. Eddie is going to meet us, she wants to talk to you.”
I hadn’t spoken to her since that day, she’d had two autopsies to perform, the one on my mother, had taken her two days. Louis’ death had been easy to record. He’d been shot up with a drug to sedate him, and then his cock had been removed with a rusty wood saw. The saw had been left at the premises. Although there were no fingerprints on it, the house had been a goldmine for evidence.
I didn’t speak to Dean as I climbed from his car. I was simply too exhausted for any more conversation and my mind was still whirling with shit. I didn’t notice the broken fence, or the overgrown yard, as I walked the path to the front door, I normally always did. The locks had been changed, as per my instructions some days ago. In fact, I couldn’t remember which day, but I struggled to find the right key, trying three before the new lock opened. I unhooked the spare from the ring and placed it in the hanging basket by the front door. Eddie never accepted a key from me, leaving it in a place she’d suggested had been our one and only compromise.
I didn’t bother to turn on any lights; instead I made my way to my bedroom. I stripped off my clothing as I walked into my bathroom. I stepped into the shower before turning the dial and shivered as cold water hit my skin. It took a moment for it to warm and I stood letting the water cascade over me.
When I felt clean enough, I shut off the shower, wrapped a towel around my waist and stood in front of the sink. I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me from the mirror as I shaved. I brushed my teeth which had furred through lack of care, then headed to bed. I put my cell on the bedside table, making sure it wasn’t set to silent, and placed my gun under the pillow.
At first I struggled to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw either my mother or Louis, I saw Casey and Dale, Mr. Webster, Vicky. At some point their images meshed together. In my mind’s eye Casey had gold eyes, Mr. Webster was slashed across his stomach instead of stabbed. Louis was impaled on a cross, and my mother was still sitting in the wooden chair.
It was a hand stroking sweat sodden hair from my forehead that had me bolt awake. I grabbed the wrist, twisting it back and away from me before my eyes could focus on Eddie. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. I released my grip and slumped back into the pillows. I sighed.
“Hey,” she said. “I just wanted to check up on you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and no one would expect you to be.”
I watched as she kicked off her boots and slid onto the bed beside me.
“You must be going through hell right now,” she whispered.
“Not quite there yet.”
“Dean gave you the DNA results?”
“Yeah. That wasn’t a surprise. I recognized the brooch,” I said, then told her how my mother had come to own it.
“Tell me about Canada, Mich.” I looked at her. “Dean told me,” she said.
“He shouldn’t have.” Anger laced my voice. Dean had no right to betray my confidence.
“Why?”
“Because I told him in confidence, that’s why.”
“But we’re…”
“We’re what, Eddie? Partners? No, that would imply we had some kind of a relationship beyond fuck buddies.” I knew my words were harsh, I heard her sharp intake of breath.
I reached out for her, not caring that she might pull away, stiffen at my touch. She surprised me when she relaxed into my side and we slid down the bed. She rested her hand on my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. She didn’t reply.
For a moment we lay in silence. “I watched my father be murdered, Eddie. We went to Canada for a job he’d been contracted to do. I don’t know why he was shot. We returned to the U.S. and my mom fell to pieces for a while. One day, I walked into her bedroom and she was dead. She was naked, lying on top of her bed, in this very room. Her eyes were staring at me as I stood at the doorway. I guess I lost it. After a month or so, I hitchhiked back to Canada and stayed with my grandma for a few days. I spent time tracking him down and…
“I should have told the police, I knew the man who’d shot my dad but my mom had begged me not to. I don’t know why. I guess she was scared for us. Instead, I killed him. I shot him through the head, lied, and was never charged. The rest you already know.”
“What happens now?” she whispered.
“I imagine this will all get out, I could be rearrested and jailed. Or they could decide, since my grandma is now dead, to leave it as a cold case. I don’t know, to be honest.”
“It will only get out if you want it to, Mich.”
I looked over to her. “You know, Corey and Dean know. The chief believes I was innocent and the investigation fell apart.”
“Then it stays that way. There’s no reason for us to say anything. It was a long time ago, Mich. What good will come of confessing now?”
Her comment surprised me. “Those kids, Eddie, are dead because of me, somehow. How do I carry on, knowing that?”
“You just do, Mich. You just do.”
We fell silent for a while. “There was further DNA. Your semen was found on her dress.”
For the second time I sat upright, pulling Eddie up with me. “My what…?”
She didn’t answer, not needing to. “How?”
“You said you thought someone had broken in here. What if he was here when we…”
“Jesus! I thought I heard a noise, outside the window. I saw someone jogging past; it went out of my mind after that. And then I thought someone had been in here. There was a file on the kitchen table that was open, yet I know I left it closed. It’s why I had the locks changed.”
“What do you do with the condoms?” she asked.
“I put them in the trash…Shit, you don’t think he…he had to, didn’t he?”
Sam had to have taken a used condom, which meant he had to know we were having sex, for the semen to be ‘fresh’ enough to then deposit on the dress.
“What a fucking…sick fuck!” I said.
“I think he had intentions of framing you,” Eddie said.
“Maybe, although there’s no possible way that would have stuck. Or…”
I chuckled, bitterly. “No, it had nothing to do with him framing me. He wanted you to find my DNA; he knew you would have to test her to identify her. What better way than to have your results come back and find out we were related?”
“Maybe he didn’t know about the brooch, assumed you’d never recognize it, so he wanted to be sure. But then surely everyone knows, because you're a cop, your DNA is on record anyway?”
“Yeah, but he’d also assume we wouldn’t run a match using our own, would he?”
My phone began to ring; I looked over to see that Corey was calling me.
“Hi,” I said, once I’d answered.
“Time to get your ass back here
, my friend. I think I might have something I need you to see,” he said.
I told him I’d be there as soon as I dressed. Eddie fixed me a quick mug of coffee as I changed into clean clothes. She drove my car to the station, and I sipped on my black coffee during the journey. I expected her to drop me off but she followed me in.
“Don’t you have reports to write up?” I said, regretting my words as her face hardened a little.
“All done, Corey has them,” she said.
I nodded and gave her a small smile. I felt out of the loop, I’d have been sent those reports normally. I hated being down the pecking order. We walked in to the incident room together.
“We might have something interesting here,” Corey said.
He slid a piece of paper over to me. At the top were the words, Sinners Case #7823. It was a list of the three men that had left town immediately after the murders in Millbrook. One name stood out, enough to have me close my eyes, take a sharp breath and curse myself for not looking sooner.
Thomas Jameson
“What is it?” Eddie asked, reading over my shoulder. I pointed to the name.
“That was the name of the man I killed,” I said.
“How does that help now?” she asked.
I looked up to Corey. “James Thomas, maybe he shortened and reversed it?” He slowly nodded.
“Who the fuck is James Thomas?” she asked.
“Teacher at Montford. A philosophy teacher, to be exact.”
“And missing,” Corey added.
I didn’t like living rough. I had left the ‘cave’ shortly after the house had been raided. Although I was sure I wouldn’t be found, it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take until the task was complete. I still wore my ‘work clothes.’ I missed my neatly pressed t-shirts and pants. I didn’t miss the house. It had been fun to recreate the same living room as Mich. It had, for a while, made me closer to him and also gave me the childhood I’d missed out on. I remembered when I’d found the old photograph album. I think Mich must have been renovating his house at the time. He threw away so many childhood memories. He clearly had no pride in the things our mother worked hard for. It showed contempt for his past, as far as I was concerned.
The house on Perry Street had belonged to my father, not that anyone would be able to trace it back to me. He had put it in his daughter’s name, another product of an affair. She got that house, Mich got our mother’s; I got nothing but years of being beaten. I was nothing to them, a nobody. But I’d shown them, hadn’t I? I was a somebody; I was practically famous.
I chuckled as I sat in a diner one town over and watched CNN give an update on the case. I wanted to tell everyone that it was me they were talking about. I wondered how Mich was faring. It must have been a huge shock to come face-to-face with his mother. Oh, how I would have loved to be there.
I decided that I would tell him how I came to own his mother. It was a rather funny story really, but only when the time was right. Only when I was able to look into his eyes and watch him take his last breath. I wanted to steal that from him, like he’d stolen my life. When I was done, I was heading home, back to my real home; back to the only group of people who understood me. I rubbed the tattoo on my forearm. I’d done a good job inking that symbol into my skin. My tattoo was my passport, my initiation into a family that had embraced me for who, what, I was…
A man of God, well, a cult, but we don’t need to split hairs, do we?
“How the fuck did we miss this?” I asked, mainly to myself.
“Mich, why would we connect it? We have now, so let’s not dwell on the past. I’ve already spoken to the head of Montford. James, or Thomas, didn’t show for work, as of three days ago. He did, however, leave a message that he was sick.”
“He left a message?”
“Yep, and I have a copy of it ready for comparison.” Corey smiled. This was the fucking breakthrough we needed.
“The house, that was his wasn’t it?”
“Yes, leased, but registered to him.”
“The furniture had traces of your DNA on it,” Eddie said.
“So, somehow he’d gotten the things I threw out? Fuck! How long has he been stalking me?”
“At least a couple of years, I remember when you threw that sofa out, finally. It had been sitting in your garage for years,” Dean said.
“He only lived in two rooms, it seemed: the kitchen and the bedroom. The living room was staged, as you know. He had every intention of drawing you to that house,” Corey added.
“And the house on Perry Street? What do we know about that?” I asked.
“As I said, it belongs to a woman who lives in Florida, she inherited it from her father. A father she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Although the name on the deed isn’t Thomas Jameson,” Dean said.
“Is there a chance he’s is related to her, though?” I asked.
“Possibly,” Dean said.
“At least we know who we’re looking for,” I said, a bubble of excitement burst in my stomach. All traces of tiredness left me. “We need to make contact with him. Call another press conference.”
“How do you know he’s still around?” Eddie asked.
“Because he isn’t done yet. He still has pride, the ultimate sin,” I said.
“So which kid does that relate to?” Dean asked.
“None of them.”
Corey, Dean, and Eddie looked at me. “It’s me, he’s coming after me next.”
For the second time, I stood on the steps of the station, except this time I wore a creased and stained grey t-shirt, crumpled jeans, and dirty sneakers. When silence reigned, I looked directly at the TV camera, having identified CNN and knew they’d play the messaged on a loop.
“Thomas, it’s time. Let’s end this,” I said, then turned and walked back into the station.
Chaos erupted outside. Two officers had to hold back the hoard of reporters that thought they were getting an update; that they were getting more. I heard calls, shouts, and I carried on walking, pulling off Thomas’ t-shirt as I did.
I kicked off the sneakers and allowed Pete to bag them up; I threw in the t-shirt and pulled off the jeans. I dressed in my own clothes and we sat and waited.
After three hours I began to get twitchy. Maybe my plan had backfired. I wanted ‘Sam’ to know that I knew who he really was. I wanted to show him how much I disrespected him by wearing his clothes, not only wearing them but trashing them first. It was clear from the house that the guy had some form of obsessive compulsions that maybe fit in with him being on the autism spectrum. I also wanted to throw down a challenge.
The data team was collecting as much information on him as possible. We had a Social Security number; fake of course. We had a copy of a birth certificate, another fake. The child on the birth certificate had died in infancy. The Social Security number related to a poor soul who had died in a vehicle accident.
“Who is Thomas James then?” Corey asked, as we scanned through paperwork.
“The son of the man I killed, obviously. This is about revenge, I guess.”
“Okay, what do we know about Thomas Jameson Sr., then?”
“Owned a carpentry business, part-time logger, jack-of-all-trades by the looks of it. In fact, he owned the company that made the caskets for the local…” I looked up from my notes. “Shit!”
“Funeral home?” Corey asked. I nodded.
“The same funeral home that had my mother,” I said.
“But he was in Canada, wasn’t he?” Dean asked.
“He didn’t live in Canada, just traveled there for contracts, same as my dad.”
“How long after your father died, did your mother?” Dean asked.
“A year, I think. I can’t remember. We left Canada pretty soon after my father died and came back here. I went back to Canada a couple of months after her suicide. I stayed at my grandma’s until…Well, you know the rest.”
“So at that point, Thomas could have been living here as well?�
�� Dean said.
“His father owned a sawmill, not here though, next town over. He traveled a lot for certain woods to make furniture and caskets, that he sold,” Corey read from his notes.
“A mill?” Dean and I looked at each other. “The cross.”
Although we had expanded our search to barns or anything we considered a clinical facility, that search had been concentrated in our town and the outskirts. Unfortunately, or maybe it was fortunate, because the FBI was now leading the investigation, there was no protocol needed for them to search the mill. It did mean though, that Dean and I were confined to the station while they did. It was a shame that possessiveness occurred between our neighboring police forces; we didn’t always work that well together. Although it was unlikely, had I taken the role of chief, it was something that I would have wanted to eradicate.
“A search is being organized as we speak,” Corey said, and I nodded.
“Did he take the DNA test?” I asked.
“Not that I’m aware of, but it doesn’t matter, we must have enough evidence of him in that house,” Dean said.
Eddie had been to rustle up some coffees; she came back into the room carrying a cardboard tray with four takeout containers. Between her teeth, she held a stack of papers. I took the tray from her.
“Preliminary autopsy reports,” she said, as she placed the papers on the desk.
I started to read, scanning through the medical details for Louis until I came to the second one, my mother. I read slower.
I paused over the words, death to be confirmed.
“What does that mean? She committed suicide,” I said, looking up at her.
“How?” Dean asked.
“She took a load of pills.”
“We can’t test for that, not now. There are no obvious wounds but I was waiting on a second opinion for something. That report will be updated with exact cause of death,” Eddie said.
Eddie very rarely sought a second opinion; she was a qualified forensic pathologist, having ranked top of her class every year she’d been in training, so she’d told me. Something wasn’t right.
“A second opinion on what?” I asked. She looked at Corey before she spoke.
A Deadly Sin: An epic dark thriller that will have you wanting to leave the lights on. Page 14
