It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  He turned, as if he could feel the bad vibes, and raised a thick, bushy eyebrow at her, silently asking, “What bug crawled up your ass?”

  She shot him a look that clearly said, “Which bug do you think?”

  They’d gotten to the point where they could even curse at each other without words.

  There was an ease in that. Knowing someone, so well, for so long. The politeness, the caution, had long faded into something that probably had too few boundaries, but there was at least brutal honesty left in its wake, and she appreciated that far more.

  They’d spent the night working until an hour that some would call uncivilized, but they deemed normal. Even when they weren’t on a case, it wasn’t unusual to find them parked on her couch with Indian food, watching the 1950s movies that Sam loved so much, both of them pretending it wasn’t because they hated being alone when they couldn’t sleep. At least this time they’d had an excuse.

  This time there was no Indian food and no black-and-white Hitchcock. It was just the two of them poring over maps of the town, old photos and every single piece of information they’d ever collected on Anna. When the sun broke the horizon, Clarke felt no more prepared than she had when they’d arrived, but at least they’d been able to move. To do something.

  They’d brewed the crystallized shit coffee they’d scrounged from the back of the cabinets and then piled in their rental as the sky began to lighten. The silence was comfortable between them as they made the short drive to the cabin—the one in the picture Simon sent. As expected, there had been nothing there yet; they still had days before the deadline, after all.

  If he was in town, there’d be no reason to leave a clue there days in advance. Still, it made her want to dunk her head into the slick black water of the lake until the carbon dioxide dulled the frantic pacing of her thoughts. They’d lingered with nothing left to do but take pictures for Della and then make sure a surveillance detail would be set up on the location.

  Clarke turned her attention to the young pup at the reception desk, who was giving them his fiercest impression of a guard dog.

  After cursory greetings, they handed over their badges to the boy—OFFICER MILLS, read the pristine name tag pinned to his uniform. He ran strangely long, elegant fingers over the raised letters on their FBI shields, almost reverent, before returning the soft leather cases.

  “I’ll see if the chief is in,” Mills said, pushing to his feet. She watched his lanky frame disappear into the long hallway that separated the waiting room from the real action. The bull pen.

  “Have you checked in with Roger?” she asked Sam, not looking at him.

  “Of course,” Sam said, an edge to his voice he rarely employed. He wanted to shut down the conversation before it started. “I inform him of all major developments on this case.”

  She slid her eyes away from his. “Wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity at a press conference, would he?”

  “Clarke.” It was a warning. And she took it to heart, dropping the subject of their boss. It was a sensitive one for more reasons than Sam’s past relationship with him. Roger Montoya had poured money and resources into their eager, open hands in the first months of the case after Sam had dragged her up to DC, as if she was going to be their savior. Then with each failure, everyone started realizing that maybe Clarke wasn’t the Golden Goose to catch the sick psychopath, and murmurs calling for her to remove herself had begun to haunt her in the hallways. And Roger had done nothing to quiet them. If anything, he sowed the seeds of doubt, at one point threatening to pull her off it himself in front of several gawking agents. It was only Sam’s intervention that had kept her working it. That, and Roger knew—deep down knew—that she was their best chance.

  It had left an even sourer taste in her mouth for the man. The man who swooped in when there were cameras pointed at them when they had a lead but was nowhere to be found when they were catching their one hour of sleep a night on crap purple-flowered couches. Roger had an eye on a political office, and dead girls weren’t really the right aesthetic for that.

  Plus, he’d screwed Sam over. And nothing would ever make her forgive him for that.

  “Let’s just get some more proof while we can,” Sam said. His gaze scoured the room, the way it always did when he went into an unfamiliar building. Searching for the exits, looking for threats. She had already performed her own sweep.

  “It’s him. I feel it. He took her.”

  Sam was saved from a response when Officer Mills came trotting back up the hallway. Such a good puppy.

  He was slightly out of breath but trying to hide it when he pulled to a stop before them. “Chief Bradley will see you now.”

  Clarke pushed away from the desk, and she and Sam followed Mills down the hallway. It was a small town, and the bull pen reflected as much, she thought, as they weaved their way through empty desks piled high with messy files and plastic sandwich wraps. Three different phones were ringing, and they would go unanswered, as the room was all but empty. One plainclothes detective slumped back in the desk closest to the chief’s office, guzzling from a small Styrofoam cup. Poor man didn’t know the storm that was coming his way. He didn’t look up as they passed. Maybe not such a good cop. It was hit-and-miss in small towns. Hell, it was hit-and-miss in the cities, too.

  Mills gestured them into the office that had a little gold plate outside its door that read CHIEF KATHLEEN BRADLEY.

  It was the woman’s hair that Clarke noticed first. She wore it in a classic nineties Mom cut: all volume at the top and hair-sprayed within an inch of its life to rest just above her shoulders. She finished off the look with a blazer that was just a little too big, over a flowing flower-print blouse that was tucked into a khaki skirt, which hugged generous hips. Her badge was hooked to a loop at her waist. Any lipstick she’d put on had long worn away, and a black smudge underneath her left eye was the only sign that betrayed her effort to swipe on some mascara that morning.

  She was smiling at them, though, and the warmth of her expression made the stress lines that came with the job of running a police department disappear.

  They all shook hands, and then Bradley waved at them to take a seat in the metal and polyester-cushioned chairs in front of her desk. Every single precinct.

  “Now,” Bradley started, her palms facedown in front of her, “how can I help you folks?”

  Clarke nodded for Sam to go ahead. They had perfected their spiel at this point.

  “About a year and a half ago, I received a photo. Printed out and everything, not digital. On the back was the message ‘Ready. Set. Go. 10 Days.’ The picture itself was just a blur of colors and shapes to me. We get that kind of thing all the time, so I didn’t think much of it. But I kept the photo on my desk, and a coworker happened to see it. Turns out he was born and raised on the Strip in Vegas, and the photo was of a casino on Fremont Street. I thought it might be worth the trip,” Sam said.

  “Did you find something there?” the chief asked, her gaze swinging between them. She didn’t see yet how this led to her. But she would.

  “Another photo. Taped behind this famous little slot machine, which is how the coworker recognized the spot in the first place. It sent me off on a . . . well . . .”

  “Scavenger hunt,” Clarke said, filling in the pause. It might sound flippant to outsiders, but it was what best described the games the bastard played.

  Sam’s eyebrows raised in agreement. “A scavenger hunt. And there was a countdown that led to a final clue.”

  “I have a feeling there was not a prize at the end of all this,” the chief guessed.

  “No.”

  She nodded.

  “At the final location I found a woman named Lila Teasdale. She had been missing for two months. The two months he had me scrambling around the country,” Sam said.

  “She was dead?”

  The chief was blunt in a way Clarke could appreciate.

  “Yes.” Clarke took over, knowing Sam was still seeing Lil
a’s blank eyes. He’d walked in expecting another photo. “And then three months later we got a picture of the next victim. Her name was Eve. She was found in Michigan in an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of Detroit.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Bradley said, her fingertips brushing against her temples before coming back to the desk. There, her hands clutched at each other, her knuckles white. “Yeah, I think I read about this. Cross, right? Simon Cross. But it kind of died down, right? That was more than a year ago?”

  “Yes. And we’ve been chasing him ever since,” Sam answered.

  “How many?” Bradley asked after a beat of silence.

  It was the kind of question that didn’t need to be clarified. They all knew what she was talking about.

  “In the past two years or so? He currently has his fourth girl,” Clarke said, wondering if Bradley would catch the phrasing. It was a delicate balance they always had to strike. Give enough information to be helpful, not enough to be dangerous. It was really tiring, sometimes.

  Bradley’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t follow up. “So, while this is all very sad . . .”

  “You want to know why we’re sitting in your office right now,” Sam finished for her.

  “Right,” Bradley said. She knew, though. Clarke could see it in the tightening of the thin skin around the corners of her eyes and lips.

  “He’s here.” Clarke confirmed what Bradley must have been thinking.

  “Yup. Okay. All right.” Bradley dipped her chin in a small nod, more to herself than to them. She was already strategizing. Maybe canceling dinner plans or the weekend barbecue.

  Clarke glanced over at Sam. They weren’t done.

  “There’s also a possibility he has his next victim,” Sam continued.

  “More than a possibility,” Clarke said, earning her a sharp look from Sam.

  “Well. Goddamn it.” Bradley stared at them, the desperation of the situation evident in the white-knuckle grip she had on her pen. There was resolve there, too, though.

  “Can you tell us more about your missing female?” Clarke asked. “Finding out where she fits the patterns and where she deviates is crucial.”

  The chief shifted to her computer and tapped at her keyboard for a moment, her eyes on the bulky monitor. “Bess Stanhope was reported missing by her boyfriend, Jeremy Peterson, on July seventh around midafternoon,” she started. “They were visiting here from New York—we get a lot of those, especially around the Fourth—and she never returned from her run. After a few hours, he came to us. We couldn’t officially file her as a missing person until the ninth, but we took all his information. He seemed pretty torn up.”

  “Address for him?” Clarke asked. The chief rattled off a combination of words and numbers, and Clarke scribbled them on a piece of scrap paper she’d found in her purse.

  “What was your take on him?” she asked, looking up in time to see a quick flash of emotion flicker across the chief’s face.

  Bradley glanced at them. “Something was off with him.”

  Clarke could relate to that feeling. Sometimes it was just a gut reaction that something was not quite right. Really, it came down to reading body language, decoding wording choices, even registering micro expressions that could flit across a suspect’s face in a hundredth of a second. People just didn’t realize they were processing all that, so they called it instinct. “Too concerned? Not concerned enough?”

  “The former,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m making sure you think it’s this guy, this Simon Cross.” She waved a hand at the folder Sam had slid toward her. “Otherwise, I would bet my lucky lotto ticket it’s the boyfriend.”

  “There’s always a chance it could be coincidence,” Clarke allowed. There was a chance she was wrong here. Not likely. Possible, though. “But part of his MO is to choose women who are considering leaving abusive relationships. So if you’re getting that feeling from the boyfriend, that would fit.”

  It was the worst part of Cross’s victim methodology. He preyed on the survivors, the ones who were starting to think there was an escape from the unrelenting darkness. And then he snuffed out the light, locking them in a world of pain and fear and death just when they’d started holding on to hope. The night she and Sam put those pieces together, she’d thrown an entire bottle of wine at the wall and let the shards slice into the calloused skin of her heels as she cleaned it up. She’d barely felt the cuts.

  Bradley looked between them, lost. “What do you mean?”

  “It fulfills several needs for him,” Sam explained further. “They’re already vulnerable, usually having been isolated by their partner away from family and friends. It makes them easier to target.”

  “It also provides him with a way of finding his victims,” Clarke said. “He’s stalked self-defense classes, hacked into domestic abuse hotlines’ databases, things like that.”

  “God, that’s awful,” Bradley whispered.

  “It’s also . . . we believe it’s tied to a woman leaving him,” Sam said. “His first victim. Adelaide Young. It was a domestic abuse situation that escalated.”

  Clarke’s mouth went dry at the name. Too often she forgot to add it to the list she repeated to herself at night when she couldn’t sleep. The victims. Lila Teasdale. Eve McDaniel. Charlotte Collins.

  Adelaide Young.

  None of them had survived Simon Cross. Anna Meyers would be next. She’d become the name that sat familiar on Clarke’s lips, a penance and a prayer for forgiveness all at once. How many more girls would there be?

  “The first victim was the one from a year and a half ago?” the chief asked.

  “Unfortunately, no.” Sam took the question, and Clarke was thankful. Dwelling on the ones she couldn’t save did nothing for the case, and she needed a moment to find her footing again.

  “His first victim was when he was younger,” Sam continued. “Then he went quiet for years. I thought we’d lost him completely, actually. I’ve kept my ear to the ground, of course, but cold cases are the first to get cut when budgets need tightening. When he reemerged, I didn’t realize it was Simon Cross, at first. But he wanted me to know. He started signing his work.”

  Clarke leaned forward. “We’ve never been able to fill in the missing years, despite all the information Sam and the rest of the team have been able to collect on him. In truth, there could be an untold number of victims we don’t know about.”

  A certain grimness settled into the room with the shared knowledge of just how bad it could be.

  Clarke swallowed hard, her fingers numb where they gripped the chair. “He has many of the same thought patterns as abusive partners. We believe Cross felt deeply betrayed by Adelaide Young. She tried to leave him, which he saw as an unforgivable breach of loyalty. He seems to have transferred that rage he felt toward her onto these women, as placeholders for her. The amount of torture he inflicts on them while he holds them hostage is indicative of that.”

  Bradley nodded. “Okay, I get that. I don’t want to, but I guess it makes a twisted kind of sense. How does he . . . ?”

  The chief trailed off, waving a hand. Clarke understood the question without it needing to be voiced.

  “Strangling,” she said. “He strangles them. It’s a particularly personal method of killing. There’s no distance between the killer and the victim, no weapon to hide behind. Just hands on skin, controlling the very air they need to survive.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then the chief cleared her throat, shifted in her chair.

  “So Bess Stanhope may fit that pattern.”

  She was still 90 percent sure Bess fit into their case. Maybe even 93 percent. She’d learned to listen to her instincts, especially when it came to the bastard. And now? They were screaming at her.

  “Bess is a runner, right?” Clarke asked. “That’s another thing he likes. Three of his other victims were runners.”

  Bradley glanced at her screen again. “The boyfriend said it wasn’t unusual for her to go for long
runs. He didn’t even start to worry about her until she’d been gone for four hours.”

  Clarke raised a brow at that. “Either that girl is an avid runner, or something’s rotten in the state of Denmark with the boyfriend.”

  “That’s my thinking. I’d been keeping my eye on his group since they rolled into town for the Fourth.”

  “Rowdy?” Clarke could just picture it.

  “Drunk and disorderlies just waiting to happen,” Bradley affirmed. “And they’re still there, long past when they were supposed to leave.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “So was the original . . . um . . . Adelaide Young . . . a runner?” Bradley asked.

  Clarke ran her tongue along her teeth. They were fuzzy, and it was easier to concentrate on that. “Yes. But I think it has more to do with opportunity. Again, isolate the target. Easy getaway if you can get them near a road. Few witnesses. Most runners have routes they follow every day. Things like that.”

  “So we’ve got two for two with Bess,” Bradley said, glancing back at the computer. “Or likely two for two. What else?”

  The amount of information they could dump on the woman could fill days. Clarke debated what else to even say. How could she condense years of living inside the bastard’s head, crawling around in his dirty thoughts, into any sort of useful dossier?

  “He likes power,” Clarke finally settled on. “And he doesn’t like to lose.”

  Bradley waited, as if expecting more. But she soon realized that’s what she was getting.

  “That’s something that’s been bothering me,” the chief said. “The logistics. You know his name and presumably his face?”

  Clarke nodded.

  “Okay. So how is he setting up these elaborate cross-country games? Without you guys catching him?”

  It was a sore point. A wound that was infected and just kept rupturing every time she picked at it. Because at the end of the day, she just wasn’t good enough to stop him.

  “His IQ is off the charts,” Sam added. “Which, despite popular culture, is actually not typical with serial killers. They tend to have just slightly above-average intelligence. But Cross is scary smart. There’s a missing decade or so in which he went completely off the grid. We have linked that time to some offshore accounts that reroute to nowhere. But from what we’ve found, he has significant funds to finance his sick little games.”