by Blake Pierce
“Don’t be.”
“Well…you got stuck with me on your first day back and I still don’t really even know the full details about why you left.”
Avery recognized this as a not-so-subtle way for Kellaway to ask about the last few months. Avery didn’t mind. Surprisingly, she welcomed it. It would be good to speak to someone other than a therapist about it—especially someone who knew very little about her personal life.
“I left because everything seemed like it came falling down all at once,” she said. “My ex-husband died, killed by a man I was trying to track down…all while my daughter was also being tormented. And then Ramirez died—and I don’t know how much you know about him but…”
“You guys were involved, right?” Kellaway asked.
“Yeah. It was more serious than I admitted to myself. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me until he was right there at the edge of death. He had a ring…was ready to get married.”
Kellaway nodded solemnly, perhaps feeling that she had opened a door she wasn’t ready to step through just yet. “Well,” she said quietly, “how is your daughter doing after all of it? At least you still have her.”
Avery tried to muster up a fake laugh but couldn’t manage it. “You’d think. But…no. Rose is more distant than ever. She blames me for her dad’s death. And she claims my career has always kept her in harm’s way. And the hell of it is that she might be right.”
It was strange to talk to Kellaway about Rose. After all, Kellaway might be five or six years older than Rose…it was far too close to speaking to Rose herself.
“So…if you don’t mind me asking, what made you come back?” Kellaway asked.
Avery knew the answer. It was an easy one but that made it somehow harder to answer. “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense to me,” she said. “I tried to tell myself that I didn’t miss it, but I did. It’s all I know. And really, I think Ramirez would be disappointed in me if I didn’t carry on.”
Somehow, the conversation had sped the strip along. Avery took the final turn as directed by Kellaway. It brought them to a nice apartment complex about twenty minutes away from the precinct. Kellaway paused a moment before opening the door. She looked back to Avery thoughtfully.
“You know…I know it’s not the same,” she told Avery, “but my folks divorced when I was twelve. Then my father died in a car accident when I was fifteen. I hated my mother. If I’m being honest, I still haven’t fully forgiven her. But I have reached out, especially now that she’s not well. I’ve talked to her and she’s not completely shut out anymore. So, the thing with your daughter…give it time. She’ll come around.”
“That’s the hope,” Avery said…without much hope at all.
Kellaway stepped out and closed the door. Avery watched her go, trying her best not to let the unexpected conversation pull her toward grief. She pulled away before it had a chance to sink its claws in, though her thoughts remained very close to Rose.
Give it time. She’ll come around.
It was a pleasant thought, a bit of encouragement wrapped up nice with a little bow on top. But Avery seriously doubted that it was true.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Avery spent a portion of that night in front of her laptop. She was trying to determine the types of places someone might order a funnel web spider. There were an alarming number of places, a few of which seemed highly illegal yet given a very professional façade. She then allowed herself to slip down a bit of a rabbit hole in doing more digging on Stefon Scott—not because she believed him to be a suspect but because he seemed to have been something of a central character in the little online communities he had talked about.
She read a few of his posts from one of the arachnid-centric forums, getting his user information from an article that had been linked to a bio page on the Boston Science Museum’s website—a bio that she was sure had not yet been removed solely because someone had not thought to take it down. She also discovered on those forums that acquiring venomous spiders that were not considered “local” was often considered illegal and immoral.
As she looked back over Lawnbrook’s case files, something peculiar struck her for the first time. Whoever had brought those spiders to Lawnbrook’s apartment had not bothered trying to collect them up afterward. If the person had been a spider enthusiast, it seemed unlikely that they would just leave the spiders there. On top of that was the fact that Stefon claimed Lawnbrook wanted to get over his fear.
So maybe the spiders aren’t the central focus here, she thought. Maybe his fear is where the case needs to be explored from. Maybe his fear was the motive…
It seemed flimsy but certainly worth some thought.
Only, it was harder to think about than she cared to admit. Truthfully, ever since her conversation with Kellaway, Avery’s attention had mostly been turned toward Rose. It’s why she had such a hard time connecting with anything she read on the forums or in Lawnbrook’s case files.
She checked her phone and saw that it had somehow already gotten to be 9:20. She was pretty sure Rose was at work, getting some of those amazing tips she had boasted about. Still, Avery tried to give her a call. It rang once before going straight to voicemail. Avery toyed with the idea of sending a text but ultimately decided against it. She figured it would have to be Rose’s decision if there was to be any repair. Rose would have to make the next move.
But her personal life had never been too different from her career; Avery was not one to rely on patience to help resolve problems. She knew Rose was a master at the silent treatment and worried just how long she’d be able to hold up.
“Shit,” Avery said into the empty cabin.
She slid her phone away from her and shut her laptop down. For her first day back on the job, it had been an exhausting one. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to bed before eleven, but it was happening tonight. Alternatively, she could not remember the last time she had set her cell phone on her bedside table when going to bed—but that was happening for the first time in three months as well.
She was working again…on the clock again. And while there was a certain amount of pressure and weight to that fact, it also helped her to fall asleep faster than she had since Ramirez had died. Now, instead of focusing on what she had done wrong during the case that had resulted in his death, she was able to instead focus on the things she could do right on her current case.
***
There were spiders crawling up her arms. One had reached her shoulder and was scurrying its way to the curve of her neck. She opened her mouth to scream and another one—a spider the size of a quarter—came leaping off of her tongue.
It was this one coming out of her mouth that clued Avery’s subconscious brain into the fact that this was nothing more than a bad dream. A very bad dream.
The spiders were coming from everywhere—from webs on the ceiling, from under the bed, from within her hair, from under her clothes. She shot up in bed, realizing that she wasn’t in bed at all but on one of those metal slabs in the morgue. Alfred Lawnbrook was lying beside her. He was dead yet his head lolled back and forth. When he looked over in her direction, he smiled. Numerous tiny spiders came skittering out from between his teeth.
He then spoke. When he did, it sounded like a drawbridge opening. “Who are you, Avery?” he asked, miming Howard Randall’s letter.
He opened his mouth and she watched as an enormous spider leg came inching out. Lawnbrook made a retching noise as the leg came out of his mouth. It was huge and hairy, easily the size of a large lobster’s claw. The body attached to it, along with the other legs, started to show in the back of his mouth, glistening and tight.
The dream shattered with that absurdity and Avery sat up quickly in bed—in her real bed this time. No metal slab, no smiling corpse beside her.
She gasped, unaware that she was brushing at her arms and shoulder to rid herself of the phantom spiders. She slid out of bed, feeling that they were in the covers.
She caught her breath and walked to the bathroom for a glass of water.
That’s when she realized that the dream itself had not stirred her awake. It had been the buzzing of her phone. She had purposefully left it by her bedside in the chance that she got a call at night but the habits of the last three months had caused her to turn the ringer off when she had gotten ready for bed.
She ran to it and picked it up with hands that still felt as if there were spiders crawling on them. She saw Finley’s name on the screen, as well as the time in the top right corner: 3:07 in the morning.
“Hey, Finley,” she said.
“Welcome back to work,” he said. “Don’t you miss the late hours?”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“We found a body,” he said. “Pretty sure it’s not related to Lawnbrook but still sort of creepy all the same. You want in on it?”
She considered for only a moment before responding. “What’s the address?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The searchlights bordering the small cove along the western edge of Jamaica Pond looked like something out of a sci-fi film from a distance—like several UFOs had come down to the body of water, waiting to kick off an invasion. There were a few police vehicles parked fifty or so feet away from the water and a few people scattered around the scene.
Avery parked behind a police cruiser and found Finley right away. He was standing over near the water, next to a small pier that extended out into the pond for a distance of about twenty feet. The pier looked very rickety, the sort of thing that had been well used several years ago and then neglected and abandoned.
Finley and three other officers were huddled around a body that had been laid down on a plastic tarp. It was a woman of about twenty or so—far too close to Rose’s age as far as Avery was concerned. Her hands were bound behind her back and there was something around her neck, a cloth of some kind.
“Any ID yet?” Avery asked.
“Not yet, but we’ll have it soon,” Finley said. “There was a debit card tucked into her back pocket. We’ve got the info being run right now. Should be any minute.”
Avery knelt down by the body for a closer look. The searchlights were some help, but Finley assisted in aiming a small flashlight at the body. Avery looked her over, doing everything she could to push images of Rose out of her mind.
The girl was quite pretty and surely weighed no more than one hundred and ten pounds. She had blonde hair that was a bit longer than shoulder-length and her blue eyes were wide open, staring up into the night sky. She was fully dressed, wearing a white long-sleeved top and a pair of tight-fitting jeans. Her hands had been bound with basic cord, a thick rope that had been expertly tied. The cloth around her neck was tied in the same type of knot, but it was loose-fitting. It had not been used to strangle her but looked dangerous nonetheless.
“This cloth on her neck,” Avery said. “I put my money on it being used as a blindfold. Her killer didn’t want her to know where they were going.”
“I don’t see any visible bruising,” Finley said. “No scratches or abrasions. No signs of a struggle from what I can see and—”
Another officer approached, walking quickly from the direction of the parked cruisers. “I got an ID from that debit card,” he said. “The victim is Abby Costello. Twenty-two years old, an employee at an accounting firm here in Boston.”
“Did you get an address?” Avery asked.
“Yes. We’ve got three officers headed over that way as we speak,” the cop said.
Finley looked down at Avery with a playfully suspicious look. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Her eyes,” Avery said. “They’re wide open. She was scared when she died, I think. Very scared.”
“Well, yeah. What’s so crazy about that?”
“Nothing at first glance. But if she was killed prior to being dumped, I don’t think there would be this expression of horror on her face. Besides…I see no indication of foul play before she was dumped into the water.”
“So you think the killer blindfolded her, brought her out to this random-ass pier, tied her hands behind her back, and tossed her in the water?”
“Yeah. I think the cause of death is going to be drowning. Her body wasn’t just dumped in an attempt to get rid of it.”
“Well, the ambulance is on its way,” Finley said. “The coroner should be able to verify that pretty quickly, I’d think.”
Avery stood up and walked out onto the pier. On its face, Abby Costello’s death bore no similarities to Alfred Lawnbrook’s. Still, the concept would not leave her alone. Maybe she still had spiders on the brain from that jarring nightmare…but she felt like there had to be some sort of connection.
Or maybe you’re trying to make one already messed up case much bigger than it is, she thought. Maybe you want that sort of trophy case in front of you after being gone for three months.
“Who discovered the body?” she asked.
“A guy out walking his dog,” Finley said. “Or so he said. When the first officers on the scene arrived, they said they smelled pot on his breath. The guy said he saw what looked like a lump of weird weeds floating out there. Hard to tell because it was so dark. As he got closer to the pier, he saw that it wasn’t weeds but blonde hair.”
“How long has the body been out of the water?” Avery asked.
“Forty minutes. She’d only been out for five or ten minutes before I called you.”
Avery looked around at the scene. She knew that there were sections of Jamaica Pond that often drew sizeable crowds, especially on the weekend. But this little cove was off the beaten path, the sort of place teens came to make out or smoke pot. The chance of finding a witness to what happened was slim to none.
“Was the debit card the only thing on her?” Avery asked.
“Yeah,” Finley said. “No cash, no phone…which I found strange. A girl this pretty at this stage of life…they’re supposed to be glued to their phones, right?”
“The killer probably took it,” Avery said. “That or it’s somewhere at the bottom of the pond.”
She looked at Abby Costello again, trying to determine how long her body had been in the water. Her clothes were soaked and her hair was matted. Avery hunkered down next to the body again and saw that Abby’s fingers were covered in wrinkles that often came from sitting in a tub of water for too long—only Abby’s were very wrinkled. Her palms had also gone a hard shade of white.
“I’d estimate that she was in the water for at least two hours,” Avery said. “Maybe the coroner can tell us more. Given that span of time, I doubt it would do good to make a perimeter of the area. We’ll hope we can get some fingerprints from her body or the blindfold.”
In the distance, she could see the ambulance lights. She once again looked back out to the water, wondering what secrets it might be hiding.
***
Within another fifteen minutes, the officers who had been dispatched to Abby’s apartment called back. They’d broken the news to her roommate, another woman in her early twenties. She was distraught by the news and the only bit of information she could offer was that Abby had gone out on a date that evening. She didn’t know the guy’s name, as Abby tended to be very reserved and quiet about her love life.
When the police had searched Abby’s room, they’d discovered a box from an online retailer. The box had been open and inside was a brand new smartphone. The phone had been powered up but not yet set up or programmed. The package receipt inside gave an order date of two days ago. A quick call to the delivery service confirmed that the phone had arrived earlier in the day—maybe a few hours before Abby Costello had been tossed into Jamaica Pond.
It was this bit of information that Avery, Kellaway, and Finley were discussing in an A1 conference room twenty minutes after Abby’s body had been removed from the scene. It was 4:30 in the morning, the coffee was brewing, and Avery’s day was just getting started.
“This could maybe actually work out
in our favor,” Avery said, pouring a cup of coffee.
“Having no phone at all?” Finley asked. “How’s that?”
“Because if she has a brand new phone, it means that her contract for her old one was probably up. That or it was just crapping out on her. How many times in the past when you have upgraded your phone did you simply just throw the old one in the trash?”
“Never,” Kellaway said. “I usually keep mine as a backup music player.”
“And when Rose was younger,” Avery said, “I’d keep my old ones for her to play games on. But either way…if Abby Costello had just received a new phone, the old one is probably still around somewhere and not at the bottom of the pond, as I had feared.”
“The cops at her apartment never found the old one, though,” Finley pointed out.
“So then we contact her service provider,” Avery said. “If they can’t get us the physical phone itself, they probably have records of phone calls and texts that we can use to find the killer.”
“There are those ecoATMs, too,” Kellaway said. “Those little things that look like miniature recycling bins where you can get rid of your old phone. It’s like a recycling initiative or something.”
“Great point,” Avery said. “We’ll need to assign someone to all of these tasks as soon as the local mobile and wireless stores open up.”
“So what do we do in the meantime?” Finley asked.
“You do whatever O’Malley and Connelly have you doing around here,” Avery said with a bit of pride in her voice. The smile he gave her warmed her heart. “As for Kellaway and I, we’ll start talking to the roommate and the family. And please, if you don’t mind, direct the calls from the coroner to me as they come in.”
“Aren’t you more worried about the spider case?” Finley asked.
“I am,” she said. “But I have a hunch…”
“That they’re connected?” Finley asked. “Really?”
