This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Brianna Labuskes
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503953130 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503953130 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503954090 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503954099 (paperback)
Cover design by Damon Freeman
First edition
To Katie Smith and Abby McIntyre
For Wednesday nights at Olivia’s
CONTENTS
START READING
CHAPTER ONE CLARKE
CHAPTER TWO BESS
CHAPTER THREE CLARKE
CHAPTER FOUR ADELAIDE
CHAPTER FIVE CLARKE
CHAPTER SIX BESS
CHAPTER SEVEN CLARKE
CHAPTER EIGHT ADELAIDE
CHAPTER NINE CLARKE
CHAPTER TEN BESS
CHAPTER ELEVEN CLARKE
CHAPTER TWELVE ADELAIDE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN CLARKE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN BESS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN CLARKE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN ADELAIDE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CLARKE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN BESS
CHAPTER NINETEEN CLARKE
CHAPTER TWENTY ADELAIDE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CLARKE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO BESS
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CLARKE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ADELAIDE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CLARKE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX BESS
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN CLARKE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT ADELAIDE
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE CLARKE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
—Ernest Hemingway
CHAPTER ONE
CLARKE
March 4, 2018
Special Agent Clarke Sinclair barely flinched as the icy drops of rain slipped into the space between the collar of her leather jacket and her neck. It didn’t matter. The cold. The wet. The thick Missouri mud coating her boots. Nothing mattered.
Except that wasn’t true. The girl had mattered.
Charlotte.
Charlotte, who was now being lowered into the ground, while the quiet little cemetery held its breath and the sky turned gray in mourning. The girl’s parents stood at the edge of the grave, beneath an overlarge black umbrella, and the space between their bodies spoke volumes even at a distance. Would they ever recover? Probably not.
When she felt the press of a shoulder against her own, she didn’t need to look over to know it was Sam. Her partner had been scouting the edges, on the outskirts of the tombstones, looking for the bastard, while she’d taken up a post on the far periphery of the group, hesitant to move any closer lest she disturb the already-fragile tableau. They were both dressed casually, not necessarily wanting to broadcast that the FBI was patrolling the scene.
“I really need you to not talk to me at the moment,” she said, her voice so quiet it was possible it got drowned out by the rain. But he stiffened next to her, so she knew he’d heard.
There were three heartbeats’ worth of silence before Sam broke it. Always had to poke. Always had to prod.
“He’s not here,” he said.
She rounded on him. “Are you kidding me? What did I just say?”
Sam stared back at her, the water catching on his eyelashes and running into the canyons that shaped the landscape of his face. His hair, a touch too long, like always, was slicked back, the abundance of silver in it almost masked by the dampness of the strands. He’d turned toward her when she’d shifted, his feet slightly staggered, his stocky body held at the ready like a boxer waiting for the first bell.
“You still have a job to do, kid, or did you forget that part?” The gentleness in his tone made the scolding sting worse than it would have if he’d raised his voice. He’d always been like that, ever since he’d secured her a place at Quantico. Always the disappointed father figure to her unruly, rebellious teenager. There were days when it seemed like he actually saw her as a capable adult, responsible enough to take care of herself. And then there were times when she didn’t know if he would ever see past the damaged girl he was always trying to save.
Resentment licked hot at the edges of her frayed emotions, so intense it felt almost like hatred.
“No, you don’t get to pull that shit,” she said. “Not you. Not now.”
His thin lips pressed together so tightly that the pink of them disappeared into a straight line. “Do you think I don’t care?” It was just a slight head tilt toward the grave, but she caught it.
“I think this guy has gotten the best of you three times now, and your massive ego can’t stand it,” she said, not because she believed it but because she wanted to see him blink. “Do you know how many dead girls I found when I was in Florida? Before you dragged me into this cesspit of a situation? Zero, Sam. Zero.”
He wanted to say something. It was there on his face. Maybe about how she’d been wasting her life chasing after pricks committing white-collar crimes that didn’t hurt anyone but their millionaire investors. Maybe about how he’d seen that life she’d been living, with her broom-closet office and stained takeout containers, and was not impressed. Maybe about how she’d once been an FBI prodigy who wouldn’t have blinked twice at stumbling upon a dead body but had now gone soft after trading it all for the safety of a desk job in a field office.
Maybe it wasn’t important what he was going to say. Whatever it was would have been painful. The movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention anyway. The burial was over.
Sam sighed, and she felt it. The weariness of it sank into her bones as easily as the rain was soaking her jeans. He reached for her then, but his stubby fingers hovered uselessly just behind her elbow before he let his hand drop. “I’m going to do another pass.”
She just nodded. Because what else was there to say as the mourners trudged over the saturated earth to the soundtrack of quiet sobs?
Sam took off, blending into the shadows of the trees ringing the cemetery. Clarke watched him go with little hope. She knew if Simon Cross was here and he didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be found.
It had been more than a year since the bastard had first started contacting them with his mocking Polaroids and pretty postcards of unfamiliar places they grew to know too well, and they still hadn’t gotten the drop on him. In her experience, that type of communication with authorities meant mistakes. It meant that he thought he couldn’t be caught, which was a dangerous mind-set for criminals. They began to take shortcuts. Hubris turned meticulousness into sloppiness in the blink of an eye.
But not Cross. He was fastidious, bordering on perfect, and far too brilliant to do something as amateur as show up at his victim’s funeral. He’d led them on a countrywide scavenger hunt and hadn’t left a single fingerprint or fleck of DNA behind, and they thought he’d make the most basic mistake in the book?
&
nbsp; No. He wouldn’t be there.
She didn’t want to be impressed. She wouldn’t be impressed. Three girls were dead, brutally murdered because they happened to have red hair and bad luck. Lila Teasdale. Eve McDaniel. Charlotte Collins.
Even the elaborate clues he set up in his sick little game weren’t about the girls. They were about manipulation and control and power. That’s what it came down to. The postcards that promised false hope if only the FBI could solve the clues in time. The relentless countdown that ticked away the seconds until the next deadline. The dead girl as the final prize in a twisted scavenger hunt Clarke had never wanted to play in the first place.
All of it. The whole mess was about Cross’s fingers curled around puppet strings, him watching with glee as they all danced so prettily.
Clarke shifted as the mourners swept by her. It was a bigger crowd than it had seemed when they’d gathered around the grave site. Their collective grief had made them smaller, had weighed on their shoulders until they curved into themselves, had erased boundaries so that one body seeking comfort was swallowed up by another desperately wanting to offer it.
The gravitational force of it all pulled her along, dragged her in. Suddenly there were people around her, on all sides. She lost track of herself, of who was behind her, who was beside her, which she never let happen. It was because she’d been off balance, unfocused.
Sam had been right. Again. She still had a job to do.
Clarke slowed a bit, not enough to disturb the wave of bodies trudging toward cars but enough to maneuver out of her vulnerable position.
A flash of movement caught her attention, and she turned to steady the woman to her left whose heel had sunk in the softened earth. As Clarke’s fingers pressed into the thick wool of the woman’s coat, she heard her name, whispered like a vow into the wind. She whirled to find nothing but air beside her and the retreating backs of mourners who all looked the same.
The rain. The rain was too heavy to really see.
She crushed the palms of her hands to her eyes to clear away the excess water, then took off running, no longer caring about making a scene. She latched onto one arm after the next, studying the face of each shocked and angry person she dared to disrupt. There was hardly any air left in her lungs to utter a “Sorry” to them as her fingers grasped for the next suit-encased shoulder.
Not him. Not him. Not him.
Desperation and the rain had turned her vision into something she couldn’t rely on, but as the adrenaline crashed back to normal levels, everything righted itself a bit.
Had she even seen him at all? Or was her mind playing tricks on her, as it so liked to do? It had taken years to banish the voices in her head that whispered insidious lies, the ones that were crafted to undermine her grasp on reality. The fragile stability she’d established in the quiet spaces between the doubts shook at the mere thought of becoming untethered once more. Those days were supposed to be a memory.
But still she felt the breath on the soft spot just behind her jaw.
Scrubbing there, as if that would rid her of the sick shivers it sent along her skin, she crested the little hill at the edge of the cemetery, ignoring the glares from the men she’d just assaulted. Sam didn’t ignore them, though. He was watching. He was wondering about their anger.
“What did you do?” he asked, his gaze lingering over her shoulder.
“Oh, that’s nice. Thanks for the trust.” Years of practice had made her an expert at deflection. But years of knowing Clarke had made her easy for Sam to read. His eyes flicked over her face, and she immediately regretted drawing his attention. He always saw too much.
“What happened?” The lazy edge was gone from his voice this time. It was sharper now. Pointed.
Every instinct honed from years of training, from years in the field—God, even from years at her boring desk job—was throbbing at her to tell him. To say the bastard was here, to call in the cavalry, circle the wagons, scour every inch of this place. If she didn’t, it would be more than just grounds for termination; it would mean their blood would be on her hands. Any girls that came next. If nothing else was certain, there was that. There would always be more girls.
But the words didn’t come out. Instead, she shrugged. “It was nothing. I thought I saw . . .”
Sam’s entire body went rigid. “You thought you saw?”
“It wasn’t him,” she said.
“That’s not like you.”
It wasn’t. Not at her job. She didn’t make mistakes. She didn’t panic. She was a professional.
“First time for everything.” She didn’t meet his eye as she pushed past him to slide into the passenger seat of their rental.
They were quiet as they drove past a dilapidated McDonald’s and strip malls advertising fake tans and cheap wigs. But when they pulled into their little motel, Sam reached over, his thumb resting on the sharp jut of bone at the edge of her wrist.
“You know I can always tell when you’re lying to me, right? You have a tell.”
She knew. “I have to change. We’re leaving for the airport in a half hour.”
“You twist your hair around your finger,” he said, ignoring her attempts to pull away.
“Sam . . .” What was she supposed to say? She got spooked by a shadow? That she wasn’t even sure if she could trust her instincts anymore? That it was Sam’s fault anyway, because she’d been doing just fine until he’d thrown a grenade into her life, one he knew she wouldn’t be able to handle?
Sam. If it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t even be here, chasing after the bastard.
It wasn’t like she’d been happy in Florida. It wasn’t like she’d been happy anywhere. But there, well, she’d come as close as she’d thought would ever be possible. Her position may have shifted away from the excitement brought on by chasing down big bad wolves in the night. But the nightmares had stopped. Waking up drenched in sweat with the claw marks from her own nails leaving drops of blood on the sheets was no longer a thing. She’d even walked by an AA meeting. Yes, she’d kept on walking right back to one of the bottles of wine she’d kept in the fridge, but she’d paused to read the flyer at least. It had felt like growth.
When she’d been the hot, young recruit in DC, the idea of voluntarily moving to Florida to ride a desk was as foreign as somehow living a normal life. She’d just graduated from Georgetown with a master’s in criminal justice and the belief that submerging herself into a life of monsters would be enough to keep her own at bay. Special Agent Sam Gallagher had the right connections to open any doors her degree and her field testing couldn’t.
The help hadn’t always served her well. Even though Sam was openly gay, there’d been rumors that she didn’t earn her spot through merit, a cringeworthy suggestion she hadn’t had to live with for very long. At the young age of twenty-five, she’d helped catch the infamous TST Killer, and it had promptly shut up the gossipmongers. Or at least made them whisper behind her back instead of deliberately loud enough for her to hear.
The rush from catching the bad guys didn’t last forever. It was like a drug: with each progressive hit the high would be shorter, until she was all but shaking in withdrawal in the months between cases. It got to the point that it was either leave it behind or burn in the flames.
Her coworkers had been smug when she’d put in for a transfer after only three years of being with the bureau. But celebrating when the mighty fell was so purely human she couldn’t even blame them for it.
Plus, those two years in Florida had been the closest she’d ever come to normal.
The highs hadn’t been as intense, but the lows hadn’t crushed her, either. Maybe happiness wasn’t something everyone could get. But emotional stability was certainly underrated.
Then Sam had come along. Because he always came along.
At first he’d just wanted her on his team. Didn’t she miss fieldwork? Didn’t she realize she was wasting her potential? He’d call or visit to try to persuade her, and it had
become a joke between them. Until it wasn’t anymore.
Sam had hopped on a plane straight from the autopsy of Cross’s first victim, turning up at her door at one in the morning with a plastic evidence bag and regret stamped into the deep furrows of his brows. She’d almost collapsed to the floor right then because she’d known whatever he was about to tell her would be devastating. He wouldn’t have looked like that otherwise.
When he’d handed her the bag, she’d wished she’d allowed herself those few seconds of unconsciousness. She’d taken it with shaking hands.
Catch me if you can, Clarke. Don’t worry, I won’t be gone for long.
The message was scrawled on a piece of thick, plain ivory paper.
She’d met Sam’s eyes. It wasn’t the first time some psycho had tried contacting her directly, especially following the arrest of the TST Killer. It was the first time Sam had come down in person, though.
There was a selfish part of her that resisted. She wouldn’t even deny it. The deep cracks that spiderwebbed her psyche were too fragile to handle hunting another serial killer. It had taken five days of Sam camped on her ragged, little beige couch for her to give in. Of course she had, in the end.
He’d promised it would be only for as long as it took them to catch the bastard. Then she could return to Florida and put it behind her, go back to her life of almost contentment. Now, after months of hunting him, she realized the end that Sam had promised her was not going to come anytime soon.
The note they’d found pinned to Charlotte’s body guaranteed that.
You couldn’t solve my puzzle in time? I guess you’ll have to try again, pet.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have . . .” He dropped his head, looking tired. So tired. “Maybe I shouldn’t have dragged you into this—what did you call it? A cesspit. Maybe if I cared about you a little less, or a little more, I wouldn’t have. I don’t know.”
And wasn’t that everything that was wrong with them?
“I get it,” she said. In his position, she would have done the same. That didn’t make her like it. That didn’t make her not resent him. But she understood it. “You had to.”
It Ends With Her Page 1
