Particles of Obsession (A Shadow of Death Romantic Suspense Book 2)

by Charlotte Raine

  “You know I love to spend time with you,” I said. “That’s what I figured we would do once we got back from the reading. But if you want to start right now, I’ve been working on my splits today, so I’m all limbered up.”

  I moved my hand toward his groin. He grabbed my hand and shoved it away from him.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t try to distract me with sex. I’m not as stupid as you like to pretend I am. I could look the other way from your obsession with Dr. Zimmer because I thought you saw him as a parental figure, considering the circumstances of your own family…but I’m beginning to doubt that’s what it really is. You’re in love with him and you just see me as a means to an end.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “You know I only care about him when it comes to my work. I look up to him, but I love you.”

  “You’re so full of shit, I should have seen it from the moment I laid eyes on you,” he said. “Fucking gymnastics with that fake smile on your face.”

  He was nearly shaking with anger. It was frightening, but I’d seen it before. He had been rough with me a few times, but it never got to the point that I thought I was being abused.

  “Alex,” I said. “Come on. You know how I feel about you. I trusted you enough to tell you how I felt and what I wanted to happen with those other students. I’d never tell those kinds of things to Dr. Zimmer. He couldn’t ever understand me the way that you do. He’s not like us. We both have that bit of darkness in us and he doesn’t, so even if I was in love with him, we wouldn’t be compatible. He would reject me and I could never be happy with him. It’s always been you. You will always be more important to me than he is.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, turning away from me.

  “Then, we’re not going to go see your professor,” he said. “I don’t want you see him again.”

  “I have a class with him next semester,” I said.

  “You need to drop out of that class,” he said. “In fact, with how unhappy classes are making you, I think it would make sense for you to drop out of college completely. You had mentioned that you were thinking about it. You’re not even sure how you’re going to pay for your books and shit next year.”

  I nodded. When I had mentioned that to him, I had been at a low point—grades lower than I had expected, no recognition in any of my classes, and the one friend I had made here had dropped out after her father died, but it did make sense. I came here to get experience—a degree in English with a concentration in creative writing wasn’t going to exactly open up doors for me in the job market, so my intentions were purely to learn, absorb, and expand my mind with new concepts. But, honestly, I hadn’t learned anything. Everything in college had been busy work and I felt like I was keeping my nose to the grindstone for a useless piece of paper they would hand to me at graduation, where my parents wouldn’t even care enough to show up.

  “I will absolutely do that if you think that’s what’s best for me,” I said. “All I care about is you. I just…you know how I felt about these other students. They’re trash, but they’re treated like treasures. It has nothing to do with my professor.”

  He set his hand on my shoulder and slid it up to my neck. With his fingertips pressing against my skin, he pulled me closer to him, kissing me so hard that it felt like he was still angry and trying to leave a circle of bruises around my mouth.

  He pulled down his jeans and boxers in one movement. He grabbed me around the waist and carried me over to the sofa. He dropped me onto it and quickly draped himself over me, his kissing more insistent than before. He yanked up my white dress—the hem of it draping itself over my throat—and pushed inside of me. I closed my eyes. He would never be able to see I had my eyes closed the whole time because his face is pressed against my chest, rubbing between my breasts with each thrust.

  It would never be like this with John Zimmer. He would kiss me into tiny, joy-filled pieces and then put me back together. I just had to make him see that.

  Chapter Seven

  Mira

  There are two police cars in front of Costume Artillery. I can see Detective Macmillan, but not Detective Stolz. She could be busy with searching for me, but I can’t be certain. I pull my hood up and get closer to Macmillan.

  “The costume shop closes during the winter,” Macmillan says to another officer. “This was a good place to kill somebody.”

  “This is the fifth student murder in the last two weeks,” the officer says, shaking his head. “You’re certain that this Alex Shirokov was the one who murdered Glassman and Pine?”

  “Yeah, all the evidence was in his secret apartment, along with Andre Fortier’s body,” Macmillan says. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Do you think it could be Solano?”

  I wince at my name, taking a few steps back.

  “No,” he says. “I mean, killing Shirokov makes sense, but why would she kill this girl?”

  “Maybe she was involved in a way that we don’t know yet,” the officer says.

  I wander away from the two of them. So, there’s a girl’s body in Costume Artillery and she was a student at Tuskmirth College. There’s a pretty good chance it’s Kiona.

  Why would the killer choose to murder her in such a public area? And why does it happen to be right next to my parents’ store? Is the killer trying to send me some kind of message?

  As I try to get closer to the store, I spot John on the other side. I stride over to him, creating a wide berth between Macmillan and myself.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “All of the campus employees received a text, mentioning the murder,” he says. “How did you—”

  “The murder?” I ask. “Did you get specifics? Is it Kiona?”

  “Yes,” he says. “How did you know to come here if you didn’t know it was—”

  I punch him in the shoulder. “Why the hell wouldn’t you text me the moment you found out?”

  “I wanted to figure out more before I told you anything!” he says. “Would you let me finish a sentence now? Yes, she was found dead in the Costume Artillery, but that’s all the police would say. It must be pretty suspicious, though, if they’re all lingering here.”

  “It is suspicious,” I agree. “I’m going to go through my parent’s shop. There’s a basement that connects the two stores. My grandfather used to own both places and he liked the idea of a costume shop and a magic shop working together.”

  “Your family didn’t keep the costume shop?”

  I shake my head. “There’s no money in it. The only time there’s a good amount of customers is Halloween.”

  “How are you going to get in?”

  I pull out my key ring. “You didn’t think my parents would give me a key?”

  “Just be careful.”

  I nod before slipping in between the crowd. I unlock the Magician’s Suitcase and step in. It feels like my parents haven’t been here for a couple days, which would make sense after my brother was poisoned. The door to the basement is in the back, so I start walking back.

  As I pass by a fake replica of Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture Cell, I hear the floor creaking. I take a step back, but the floor has never creaked where I just stepped. I spin around.

  “Who’s in here?” I ask, feeling foolish. Nobody else should be in here and if they are here, then they aren’t going to reply to me. I hadn’t turned on the lights when I walked in because they’d advertise my presence. The only reason I haven’t walked into anything is because my parents haven’t changed the placement of anything in years.

  Do I keep going toward the basement or back toward the light switch?

  As I turn my head forward, somebody grabs me from behind. I barely see their elbow before their arm is held against my throat, crushing my air supply. Just like before, at the greenhouse. I try to grab them, my fingernails scratching at their skin, but their grip doesn’t tighten.

  Before I black out, my last thought lingers, that’s why they
killed her near my parent’s shop.

  First, I feel cold. It’s the kind of chill that covers my feet and creeps up my legs.

  Then, I can hear a car honking from the street, the volume decreasing as it goes by.

  When I open my eyes, I see a window, mostly covered with dark green drapes. The shades are drawn shut. The sun is shining bright enough to make the shades opaque.

  I try to sit up, but my wrists are locked together with handcuffs, which is looped around the metal bars in the headboard. Instead of sitting up, I scoot back and do an awkward lean against the headboard.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  I don’t hear anybody else moving around. I check the handcuffs. They’re not toy or sex handcuffs—they look like they’re made out of steel, and they can’t be broken by any amount of force I can muster.

  The room is plain white. There’s the bed, a nightstand, a couple of lamps, a painting of a farm, a small desk, and a door that looks like the entrance to a bathroom.

  It’s a motel room.

  The door opens. The person walks in as a bulldog mascot, completely disguising any feature of themselves.

  Costume Artillery.

  “I guess you have tons of costumes now, right?” I ask.

  The person walks over to me. It looks like the gray uniform is a little bit too big for them, but it doesn’t seem to faze them.

  I continue, “Well, if you’re going out of your way to hide who you are, that must mean that you plan on letting me live, right? I mean, I’m alive right now, so you must need me for something. What is it?”

  She holds up a small paring knife. Or, at least, it looks small in a bulldog mascot’s paw.

  “Okay, I don’t know what that means, but I’m pretty certain that you don’t need to do whatever you think you’re going to do,” I say. “This is all about Dr. Zimmer, right? John? Look, let me call him and we can get this all sorted out. There’s no reason to stab or cut anybody.”

  She puts the knife under her paws and pulls them off using the blade. This allows her to never let go of it.

  “Tell me something,” she says. “Were you in love with Andre Fortier or were you simply pretending to be involved with him, so John would be more interested in you?”

  “If you know enough to know his name, then you should know I was involved with him before I even met John,” I say.

  The bulldog head nods. It almost makes me want to laugh—I’m talking to a person dressed as a bulldog while she’s dragging a knife near my ankles. It’s like a bad joke.

  “That’s true,” she says. “But there was no reason to involve him in your life again after you met John. As far as I could tell, you two hadn’t conversed with each other at all until recently.”

  “He did something that caused me to not trust him,” I say. “And then I was tracking down a serial killer, so I wanted protection. He could offer that to me and I trusted him more than anyone else.”

  “More than your fellow policemen?”

  “My fellow police officers didn’t trust me and they didn’t want me investigating the case,” I say. “You’re really questioning whether I was using a con man?”

  “You can’t have been that in love with him if you’re referring to him as a con man.”

  “That was his job. I would be in denial if I referred to him as anything else,” I say. “Now that you’ve asked me several questions, I think it’s time that I asked you some.”

  “No.” She gestures to my whole body with her knife. “I need you to help me get John.”

  “Why?” I ask. “How do you expect your relationship with him to be so much better after you keep killing people? You really think he’s going to like you after that?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I mean, come on. Can you imagine being a professor, watching all these students come by, and they’re likely to have more success than you because their parents are rich and they have better connections? You do know he grew up in a foster home, right? He didn’t have a lot of options, but he still persevered. Persevering can only take you so far. It rarely takes you to the top.”

  “So, you think you’re killing off his competition.”

  “And his distractions,” she says. “He spends way too much time on these students, pouring his heart out to them, pushing them up so they can succeed. I don’t want him to get old one day and realize he wasted his whole life placing himself second to everyone else.”

  I sneer. “Let me guess—you imagine that he’ll be so grateful to you for killing these people that he’ll marry you and spend the rest of his life with you? You clearly don’t know him as well as you think. He is grieving over these deaths. He would never be happy to think someone is killing for his sake. It might very well destroy him.”

  “It won’t,” she says. I can almost hear her smirking. “He’ll have me. And I don’t need to imagine that we’ll end up together. It’s the natural order of things.”

  “Woman kills several people for man. Man feels grateful. They get married,” I drawl. “Yeah, that sounds real natural. A classic fairytale.”

  “God killed hundreds of people as an act of love for humanity,” she says. “And we’re made in His image, aren’t we?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t read the Bible lately,” I say.

  She places the blade near a vein that protrudes near my ankle.

  “Then, I suggest you start praying.”

  “Wait, wait,” I say. “What is the point of sending any body part to John? What is the point of threatening him if you’re in love with him?”

  “I’m not threatening him,” she says. “Can’t you see? I’m showing my dedication. How close are you willing to linger near prison for somebody? How certain are you that someone will still love you after you’ve done things that society would deem unspeakable? He will look at me, he will realize that I am still his soulmate, and it will create a bond between us that nobody else can replicate. Romeo and Juliet were willing to kill themselves over their love for each other, but that’s nothing compared to bearing the weight of the sins I’ve committed.”

  I stare at her bulldog mascot head, trying to see if I can get some idea of what her eyes look like, but there’s a black screen over them that I can’t see through.

  “You don’t seem to feel guilty at all,” I say. “I think you just like killing people and you’re using John as an excuse to do it.”

  She brings the knife up to my throat. The edge of the blade tickles my skin.

  “If that were true, you would be dead,” she says. “But John hasn’t attached himself enough to you for you to be a threat to his quality of life and you can be the crossroad I’ve been waiting for.”

  “Crossroad?”

  “You’ll help create the moment where John has to decide what he truly wants,” she says. “He can’t be an advocate for all his students and successful and happy at the same time. He has to choose one.”

  “You don’t think he found success and happiness in teaching?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, the mascot head looking like its twisting its neck. “No.”

  She moves so quickly, all I know is that I have a sharp pain radiating up my thigh. I look down to see the dark red stain of blood as it seeps through my jeans.

  She sets the bloody knife down on the desk—too far away for me to even imagine grabbing—and pulls out the desk drawer. She takes out an old instant camera and snaps a photo of my leg. She sits down at the desk as I try to hide my pain.

  “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” she quotes as she writes under the photo. “Ernest Hemingway said that. John had us read Hills Like White Elephants once. It’s a very dialogue-heavy story.”

  She stands up.

  “I’d provide you with medication, but I have a feeling that you’ll try to kick me, so I’ll give you some time to think. I imagine that you’ll want some water, though.”

  She walks into the bathroom and comes back out with a glass of water. I i
magine that the glass isn’t that clean coming from this motel, but when she leans the cup toward my lips, I drink eagerly from it. It’s not a time to be picky when I have no way to take care of myself. I’ll just scream for help the moment I’m sure she’s gone.

  After I drink all of the water, she sets the cup on the nightstand.

  "How did you know my parents owned the magic shop? And how did you know that the magic shop and Costume Artillery have a connected basement?" I ask, hoping to get more information out of her. Maybe she worked at the costume shop at one point. When I get free, I’ll use that information to figure out who she is.

  "I did a lot of research on you and your family," she says, sounding slightly amused. "There was a newspaper article about how the basement was there and it saved the life of a man who escaped using the connected basement when his store was on fire."

  "Well, I'm so glad that something that could be used to save someone's life could be used for your own psychotic desires."

  “Don’t worry. One day you’ll look back at this and realize it made you into a better person,” she says. “You’ll know how some of your victims feel and it will make you better at forensics. You’ll be more compassionate. More empathetic.”

  “I’m not a forensic scientist anymore.”

  “You could always find another company to work for.”

  “I don’t want to be one anymore,” I say. “I’ll always have to get involved with the politics of police work or even private investigations. I…I just want…to…write.”

  The last word isn’t one I expected to say, but my head is suddenly feeling very heavy. I can sense the killer moving away from me, but I can’t see her as my eyelids begin to droop. The last thing I see is the water glass, some powder residue still clinging to the side of it.

  My leg is cramping.

  Or maybe it’s not cramping, but it hurts like it’s cramping.

  I’m thirsty, but I know I can’t trust anything the killer gives me.

  At least I’m still alive.

  When I open my eyes for the first time since I drank the killer’s drugged water, the sun has set. It’s mostly dark in the room except for orange lamplight outside that casts a glow through the curtains and onto the opposite side of the bed.