There was fear in the back of her throat. There almost always was. That this was the time she’d gone too far; this was the time she succeeded in driving the only person she truly cared about out of her life. That other time, the time he left her in the bar, drunk off her ass, about to self-destruct, hadn’t even lasted a day.
She’d been so scared, not that she would have admitted it at the time. But him dropping that twenty on the bar, walking out without looking back. It had been a blow to the solar plexus. Instead of chasing him out, begging him to not give up on her, she’d grabbed the bartender and let him screw her in the dank alleyway feet away from a bin of rotting garbage. She’d dragged herself home, only then letting herself cry.
The tile was blessedly cool against Clarke’s cheek, where the black-mascara tears had dried. The tiny bathroom reeked of the alcohol that had been the only thing for her stomach to rebel against. She prayed she wouldn’t start heaving, dreading throwing up bile. The burn alone as the yellow poison scorched her esophagus almost had her swearing off drinking completely.
Her head pounded, and the room tilted and shifted and swirled, and she wondered if she could possibly be hungover already.
She reached up to the door handle of her shower stall, managed to pry it open, and then dragged herself over the little lip. Somehow, with great amounts of fumbling, she got the water on.
By the time she slipped between the cool sheets of her bed, she felt almost human again.
Sleep, however, proved elusive. As if she should be shocked.
The file mocked her even though she refused to look at it where it sat on the makeshift desk that was really an old folding table she’d found in the alley three days after she moved into her shithole apartment. Grad-school students couldn’t be choosers. Especially scholarship kids such as herself.
Or former grad-school kids. Was she ready to throw it away? She hated that she was tempted to. She hated Sam. Hated his disappointment. His hurt-puppy-dog eyes. It was her life. She didn’t owe him anything.
Except she did. Sometimes she thought maybe she owed him everything.
She sat up and waited for the room to steady. Then she padded over to the cheap plastic chair that matched the decor perfectly.
Clarke curled her legs under herself and grabbed the file that had started it all. She rested her palm on the unassuming front and took a deep breath in from the nose.
Screw this. Two minutes later she was resettled with a comforting, cool IPA clenched in shaking fingers. She brought the bottle to her lips and savored the bite of hops and how it clashed with the mint of the mouthwash, then erased the sick that had been lurking in her throat.
She opened the file.
Florence Shute’s empty eyes met hers. Her pale, bloodless hand clenched her husband’s. His was just as lifeless.
This case had hit her hard. But the worst of it was that she’d been so unprepared for it. There had been so many other cases she’d sailed through, to the point where she was starting to think she might have a reputation for being cold-blooded. But this one. This one made her rage-dial Sam and tell him she was done. Done with this life he’d planned out for her. Done with the murders. Done with the dark places. But, mostly, done with him.
Maybe he would have actually believed her if she hadn’t told him about the bar she was headed to after she finished the bottle of wine. So he could find her.
She looked at the picture again.
If she had called Sam, begging him to come over, to hold her while she cried, to tell her everything was going to be okay, he would have been there. But that wasn’t her style.
When she hurt, she wanted those around her to hurt. To feel the cuts and bruises as deeply as she did. When she’d skinned her knee, falling off a bike, she wanted her best friend to fall off his so they could share in the pain and cry together. That was the only way it felt real. Valid.
She forced herself to read the details now. To not let her eyes pull back to the damp, red mattress, heavy with their collective blood. Or to their faces that didn’t look frightened in their death masks, but peaceful, accepting. Even though she knew the process had not been gentle or kind.
It wasn’t a serial killer. This was personal. Seventeen stabs to the chest were nothing if not personal.
Rage. That’s what she saw when she looked at the picture. The couple had recently won a court case to gain custody of their two-year-old grandson from their son. There had been no serious outward signs of psychosis in the son, but there were several police reports of domestic violence against him before the child came along. The wife died giving birth.
There were some other red herrings thrown in. But it was the son. She knew it—with the same certainty that she knew she’d be a good FBI agent. But that didn’t mean she was actually cut out to survive that life.
She drew the pad of her finger over the murdered woman’s white hair, loose around her shoulders. The grandson had found their bodies. And had screamed for two hours before a neighbor walking his dog had heard. Then the kid had stopped making sounds altogether.
She wondered how old the case was, and where the kid was now. In the system? That rarely worked out.
She swallowed the dregs of the beer and then walked the three steps it took to get to her kitchen. The only clean thing to drink out of was a flower vase that she never filled with flowers. She ran the tap, then drank three-fourths of it, the water dribbling down her chin when she couldn’t keep up with the flow.
She unlocked her phone and flipped to recent calls. She hit the first name on the list.
“I hate you sometimes,” she said when the groggy voice answered.
“Back atcha, kid.”
She felt perverse pleasure in knowing she’d woken Sam up. It never seemed like he would make himself so vulnerable as to sleep like the rest of the mortals.
She refilled the vase. “I may have spiraled,” she admitted. It was as much of an apology as he was going to get.
“I noticed.”
She rolled her eyes in her empty apartment. “I’m going to be a good agent, Sam. Damn good.”
“I’ve been telling you that for years. As long as you get out of your own way,” he said. She heard a comforter rustle, and she imagined he was pushing himself into a seated position, to lean against the headboard.
“What if I can’t, though?” she asked. She had all the classic signs of someone who was self-sabotaging. It was the closest thing to a call for help as she could manage.
The static that wasn’t really static anymore in this day and age crackled over the line. She knew he wouldn’t bullshit her, and found herself holding her breath for his response.
“You think your two options are waitress or special agent, Clarke,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “You’d be great at either, despite your astonishing lack of people skills. You’d be great at anything, if you let yourself be. But your job path isn’t the problem.”
“Oh yeah? And you know what my problem is, then.” It came out more a plea than the challenge she’d been intending.
“Honey, you don’t need me to tell you what your problem is. That’s the point.”
She sank to the floor, resting the vase in the valley between her tummy and her thighs.
“Will I ever stop wondering? Will I ever stop feeling guilty?” she asked, her voice catching on the sob she couldn’t contain.
“Wondering what, kid?”
“Why I survived.”
There was that nonstatic again. The tears had already started flowing once more, and she didn’t even try to stave them off. She was sloppy drunk and exhausted. What else could she expect?
She counted the seconds as she pictured him debating the merits of telling the truth versus making her feel better at four in the morning after she’d drunk enough for her liver to be crying for mercy.
The answer she’d been expecting came simply and in true Sam fashion.
“No.”
She watched Sam as they crossed th
e parking lot. Forgiveness was always there, just waiting for her to reach out and ask for it. It always had been. At the end of the day, she knew he loved her like the daughter he never had. Wanted what was best for her even if he missed the mark on what that was some of the time. Wanted to forgive her. Always wanted to forgive her.
He slid behind the wheel, and she opted for the passenger seat and still said nothing more. Instead, she flipped open Bess’s file.
“You think because she’s different, she’s the key to this?” Sam asked, apparently willing to talk to her about the case itself. He kept his eyes on the road as he peeled out of the station, but he knew what she was looking at.
“What do we know about him?” she asked. “He’s all about patterns. It’s always the same. Always. Except with her.”
She tapped a finger against the picture’s forehead. “What is it about you?” she whispered, almost to herself. She caught Sam’s sharp glance, but she didn’t look up. There was something about the girl. Around the nose and the mouth that looked almost familiar. But not like the other girls. There was the hair, too, of course. Straight as an arrow and the color of burnt honey. Not red.
“She was in an abusive relationship,” Sam commented.
“One in three women are,” she said with an absentminded wave. Sam knew the statistics. “Doesn’t mean it fits the pattern.”
He nodded. “Then she’s why we’re here.”
“I think so.” Clarke looked up to the road, not even seeing it. “He set the stage around her.”
“Anna was just to get us here,” he said, and she heard the grimness in his voice. Which meant Anna was no longer useful. But as painful as it might be to admit, this wasn’t about Anna. Thinking about her wouldn’t help them solve the case. Her being a person to Clarke would not help solve the case.
Clarke was as bad as Cross on that front, in being able to see the girls as pawns when she needed. It was also the reason she was going to be the one to catch him.
Anna wasn’t going to help her do that. Bess was.
The file in her lap gave her so little, though. Who was Bess? How did she think? What were her hopes. What were her fears? Was she even still alive?
Why her, Simon? Why her?
CHAPTER TWENTY
ADELAIDE
April 2002
Adelaide didn’t know where she was. All she knew was she couldn’t let him catch her.
The fear turned branches into angry arms, ready to lash out at her as she tripped over roots and rocks in her mad scramble to get away. Just get away. As far as she could, as fast as she could.
Hours or minutes or seconds later, she finally stopped when her legs threatened to give out from beneath her completely. She crouched behind the trunk of the nearest tree, her back pressed up against the bark. Her thighs burned even as the cold air sliced at her skin. Panting, she tried to listen for a pursuer, but even as she struggled to control her breath again, she didn’t hear anything. Just the sounds of the woods at night.
It took another eternity for her to relax enough to sit down. There was an ache there. She dipped her fingers inside her shorts, and they came away with blood. She closed her eyes against the sight of it in the thin sliver of moonlight and wiped her hand against the hem of her shirt.
The tears started falling again, thick drops against her upturned kneecaps. Before she knew it, she was blinded by them. She finally let herself go. Deep, gasping, shaky sobs. The kind that came directly from the gut. The heart. The lungs. That burned at the back of her throat and had snot running down her face unchecked.
Time became irrelevant. Adelaide had no idea how long she sat with her back pressed up against the tree. She didn’t even know how long she’d been running to get to where she’d stopped.
At some point she would have to move. But right now, everything hurt too much. So she let herself sink into the floaty place. The one that didn’t have any pain in it.
The place where Simon was still that little, rebellious boy. The one who maybe wasn’t always nice. Was maybe a little mischievous. Especially when he was bored or, worse, feeling attacked. When he lashed out because he was cornered.
He wasn’t intrinsically bad. He couldn’t be. He’d loved her so much. So fiercely. In a way that may have warped and bent and disintegrated into something twisted and dark. But it hadn’t always been like that. Sometimes it had been sunshine. Sometimes it had been the only thing that kept the molecules in her body grounded, kept them from flying off in every direction.
There had been times when he’d held her as she wept for parents she barely even remembered. For the empty feeling she carried around with her. For missing the idea of something more than the thing itself.
He’d never judged her for it, either. He’d rocked her and told her everything would be okay. Even though they both knew it wouldn’t.
He had his own demons that crawled out of the shadows of the night and clawed and bit at him. One time he’d screamed out, waking her. She’d climbed into his bed and wrapped her arms around his shivering, bony body.
What hurt her the most wasn’t the rape. It wasn’t.
It was that he’d completely ruined her memories. The good ones, the ones touched with shimmering molten gold.
She’d been so young when her parents had died that she didn’t know who she was before that time. Her personality must have been formed, but when she thought of her core memories, the ones that shaped her, well, they involved Simon. But now—now what was she? Without those?
The floaty place wasn’t working. It was becoming dark, burning and curling at the corners like charred paper.
Pull out of it. Before it consumes you.
Somehow she managed to shake off the tendrils of panic that coiled at the base of her spine. Find something to focus on. Anything.
She glanced up toward the moon. Home. It was a thought. Something to latch onto. She needed to get home.
But how?
There was no way to tell where she was. Had they crossed over state lines? How long had she been unconscious? How far could he have taken her?
Get up. Move.
Those were the first steps. Find civilization again. That was the next.
There was a numbness in her bones, though. A lethargic hand on her shoulder keeping her in place.
Some part of her realized it came from both shock and the cold that was inch by inch slipping beneath her exposed skin. But another part wanted to burrow into the nook of the tree and succumb to the sleep that whispered to her in the quiet of the night.
Move.
It was only a thought. Only a quiet voice in the recesses of her mind. But she let it drive her to her feet.
Move.
She couldn’t go back the way she’d come. That’s where Simon was. But maybe if she ran parallel to the edge of the woods.
It was slow going, picking her way through the undergrowth. Maybe her feet were bleeding. Maybe her arms were. Moving forward was the only thing that was important at the moment, though.
Her mind wanted to fly off in too many directions, but she kept a tenuous control over it. There was no room for anything other than what it would take to get her home.
The moonlight kissed her skin whenever the trees would thin out, but she wasn’t skilled enough to use it to help her guess the time.
So she just kept walking. And not thinking. And not feeling.
Moments away from giving up, from collapsing to the ground, she heard it. The purr and rumble that could mean only one thing. Cars.
It must have been a highway for there to be enough traffic for her to hear in the waning moments of the night.
She walked toward the sound. It was salvation. It was hope. It was the only thing that made her put one foot in front of the other.
When she finally saw the beam of headlights cutting through the darkness, relief, sweet and heady, crashed into her, almost taking her out at the knees. But still she kept moving. Forward. Always forward.
It didn
’t take much longer for her hands to meet steel. The guardrail. She swung a leg over it, not even flinching as the loose gravel cut into the soles of her feet.
She was on the road.
But no one was stopping. Three cars flew by her without even slowing. Desperation licked at the edges of her brain.
Maybe they couldn’t see her.
She stepped, just a little bit, over the line painted on the blacktop. The oncoming minivan jerked and swerved, and she felt the air brush by her arm.
As she turned to watch it, she realized it was pulling off into the shoulder. A woman, about midthirties, threw open the passenger side door, all Mom haircut and worried eyes and frantic limbs.
“Honey, are you okay?” she was already asking as she made her way toward Adelaide. Then hands were on her. Petting, stroking, comforting.
Someone had found her. That’s all that was important.
Her body seemed distant now. She let the woman shepherd her into the back of the minivan. Let her pull the seat belt over her chest. Let the hot air send prickles of agony along her skin. But she didn’t seem to be a part of it.
Everything was detached. She knew she gave her an address; she knew that was where they were headed. But along the way, there was a blur of colors and shapes and rain-splashed windows. Had it been raining in the woods? She hadn’t thought so.
It wasn’t until she began to recognize the houses that the spell broke. Everything that had happened sat heavy on her bones.
“Everything will be okay, love,” the lady said, trying to comfort her, seeming to recognize that Adelaide was back with her. Somewhat present.
It grated on her, though. The words slipped like little knives along her skin, trying to comfort but failing all the same. The empty promise hung in the air as damning as anything that had been said before or since.
Adelaide simply shook her head. “No, it won’t.”
Adelaide collapsed into her foster mother’s chest and immediately felt all of seven again. The musky cloud of her White Diamonds perfume was as soft and welcoming as the doughy arms that came around Adelaide’s waist.
It Ends With Her Page 18
