THE SIX: A Dark, Dazzling Serial Killer Story

by Anni Taylor

  Collapsing onto my bed, I tried to grab a quick sleep. Lilly had woken three times last night with night terrors, and I felt waves of exhaustion moving through me. Lilly had always had night terrors, only it was usually Evie who got up with her during the night.

  The ring tone of my phone sounded, muffled under the pillow. Twisting around, I fetched it.

  Constance.

  She was calling again? What did she want? Updates?

  Well, I wasn’t interested in giving her updates.

  I went to switch the phone off when a text message from her popped up. Gray, we need to talk! It’s urgent!

  She was exaggerating—surely.

  I spoke a guarded hello into the phone.

  “Gray. It’s going to be difficult to talk where I am right now, but I need to tell you some things.”

  “Okay?”

  “Look, I’m at a police station. In London. I can’t talk for long. You know how I told you I hired a P.I.?”

  “Yup.”

  “She’s dead. Murdered.”

  “Hell . . . That’s rough.”

  “It’s awful. Really awful. I found the body. But I need to tell you what she found out. She found out that your wife came here, to England, and then went to Greece.”

  I sat up bolt straight. How did your wife and England and Greece fit together?

  “Gray,” she said, “did you hear me?”

  “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “Rosemary showed Evie’s picture to some airport staff in London. They identified Evie. She was here a few days ago.”

  “Evie doesn’t even have a passport.”

  “I don’t know how they got her out, but it seems that they did. On a private aircraft. She was seen here, Gray.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “I don’t know. Rosemary had something to tell me about that. But now she can’t. I’m all alone with this now.”

  “You said you’re at a police station? Tell them all you know.”

  “That’s the problem, Gray. Rosemary said there are people in the police force who we can’t trust. She also said it’s too soon and we need to find out more first, or the doors that are open now will be slammed shut. She was a detective and then a P.I. for years. I trust her judgment.”

  “Look, I don’t know why your P.I. was showing Evie’s photo around, but the people who said they saw her were mistaken. I think you must be upset because of what happened to your investigator and—”

  “No. Of course I’m upset, but you have to listen to me. There’s one thing more the crew member remembered. When he was guiding Evie onto the jet in London, he saw her bracelet. And he remembered it because it had tiny charms of war hammers and swords and things on it. He thought that was strange for a woman.”

  The muscles along my spine pulled tight. “I bought her that bracelet. Only a couple of days before she left me. She’d seemed really down, so I bought her something to try to make her laugh. I’d forgotten about it . . .”

  “Gray, listen to me. This is real. This is happening.”

  Constance’s sharp voice pulled me back. But was the bracelet enough proof? I didn’t know Constance’s P.I. and what she was all about. Something flashed through my mind. The bracelet hadn’t been found at the site of the burned car.

  I exhaled a tightly held breath. “I don’t understand who would go to all the trouble of getting two women all the way from Australia to Greece. I know what Evie and Kara were involved with, but still, there must be thousands of women in Europe these people could have picked instead. And how did they get Evie and Kara to go along with it?”

  “I don’t know the answers,” she said. “Maybe these people blackmailed them. Or threatened them. Look, please don’t tell any of this to the police yet. I can’t talk long, but I’ll be in contact again soon. I’ve bought a new phone, and I need you to take down the number. Don’t tell it to anyone. Buy a new phone yourself and don’t call me on anything but that.”

  “Okay, I will.” Constance sounded so different. I wrote the number down with a stub of one of Lilly’s crayons, my head whirling with everything she had just told me.

  “I’m frightened,” she told me. “I’m certain Rosemary was killed because of what she was trying to find out. She was worried that Kara was being trafficked. It’s possible that both Kara and Evie are in the hands of traffickers.”

  I let out an expletive. “Traffickers?”

  “Yes. Or worse. In our first meeting, Rosemary mentioned a strange group named Yeqon’s Saviours. It’s possible they have a connection to this. She wasn’t sure. The man my daughter’s been with is apparently a member.”

  Browsing on my phone to an internet search engine, I began typing in the name. “Y-e-q-o-n?”

  “Yes.”

  I had a quick search, but all I found was mumbo jumbo about fallen angels.

  “Gray, I have to go. The police want to talk with me again.”

  The line went dead.

  Wheels slowly revolved in my mind.

  Evie had been gambling and dabbling in escort work and trying to make money. Someone could have offered her an incredible gig, some kind of work she could do in a week and come home again. Someone rich enough to get her out of the country without a passport. It all fit. Maybe it made a crazy kind of sense after all.

  And if she’d been busy with a special gig, then it explained why she’d been too busy to meet up with random men from that companions website. That conversation still bothered me. There was nothing of Evie in that conversation. Like she’d suddenly turned into someone else.

  A sudden thought pushed in. What if it wasn’t really Evie on the other end of that conversation?

  I recalled the crime scene that the police had shown me in the photographs. Evie’s personal effects had been half buried, not buried in the way someone would bury things if they seriously didn’t want those things to be found.

  I held my head in my hands. Evie, you sure left behind one hell of a mess.

  I jerked my head up again as Verity’s voice pierced the air. She was standing in the door frame. “Detective Devoe and Sergeant Moss are at the door.”

  I nodded at her.

  Running my hands through my hair, I checked that the girls were still in their beds and then headed downstairs.

  The faces of the police were deadpan serious.

  “Did you find out something else?” I asked.

  “Yes,” replied Lena Devoe. “We’d like you to come down to the station to give a statement. I tried to call, but your phone was busy.”

  “Yeah, I—” No, don’t tell them about the call from Constance. “You want a statement from me? Why?”

  “Please come down, and we’ll discuss it there.”

  It wasn’t hard to tell that they hadn’t found Evie, but they’d obviously found out something that made things look bad for me. But I needed to ask the question anyway. “Have you found out where Evie is?”

  “No, I’m afraid we haven’t yet located her,” said Devoe.

  “Do I have to come down to the station?”

  “No, you don’t have to come,” she said. “You’re free to refuse at this point.”

  “You make it sound like I soon won’t be free to refuse. What’s going on?”

  “We can’t discuss that here.” Devoe took a step back, as though she fully expected me to do as she’d just asked.

  I glanced back at Verity, and she gave me an anxious nod.

  I might as well find out what they knew.

  Grabbing shoes and my wallet, I walked out the door to my car. And drove for the second time to the police station.

  When I walked into Devoe’s office, there was a pile of objects lying beneath a sheet of plastic on top of her desk.

  “Sit down, please, Mr Harlow,” the detective instructed.

  I sat.

  Devoe and Moss didn’t sit. They arranged themselves near the items.

  “Do I have your permission to record this session?
” Devoe asked me.

  “Record away,” I told her.

  She cast a steely look at me. “First, I need to tell you that you don’t have to talk to us. You have the right to stay silent. And any statements you make might be used as evidence against you.”

  “Hell, I’m getting that speech. You’re actually giving me that speech.”

  “It’s just procedure, Mr Harlow.”

  I eyed her directly. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “You’re sure? You can get a lawyer before you talk to us, if you wish.”

  “Just . . . get started. You’ve hauled me down here, and now I just want this over with.”

  Thoughts ran haywire through my head. A dead investigator. Evie in London. Evie in Greece. The string of online messages that were nothing like Evie . . .

  “Okay. I’m about to start recording.” She pressed a button and then repeated her Right to Remain Silent speech. “Do you understand and want to proceed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, first thing I need to ask before going any further is a routine question. Are you under the influence of alcohol or drugs?”

  “No. None of the above.”

  “Have you had either of those today?”

  “No.”

  She snatched the sheet of plastic away from her desk. I didn’t need anyone to explain the items to me. They were bad. A dirt-encrusted rope, a knife and thick tape.

  Panic rippled through my stomach. Had someone hurt Evie after all? But then Evie’s online messages slipped back into my mind.

  Evie didn’t send me those messages.

  Whoever it was, it wasn’t her. It was someone who knew nothing about my wife. I was being set up in every which way.

  “Okay then,” Detective Devoe continued. “We have three items on the desk. A length of rope, some tape and a knife. Do you recognise any or all of those things?”

  I studied the items. “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you tell me who they belong to?”

  “They’re mine.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes. They’re normally in our garage.”

  “You said they’re normally in your garage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, now can you tell me where we found these things?”

  “I’m going to take a wild guess that you found them at the place where Evie’s car is.”

  “Did you put them there?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Can you tell me how they got there?”

  “No.”

  “No? Even though they’re your things?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr Harlow, you don’t seem surprised that these items of yours were found at the site. They were buried, just like Evie’s personal things. Why weren’t you surprised?”

  Wherever Evie was now, she was still wearing the bracelet I gave her. She didn’t throw it away in disgust. That meant everything.

  “Mr Harlow?”

  “I don’t know why they were there.”

  “That’s not what I was asking. I’m a little confused that you don’t appear concerned that these particular items were found at the site. A rope? And a knife? Those are some very concerning things to find, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes. I don’t really want to think about it.”

  “What don’t you want to think about?”

  “She’s my wife. I don’t want to think about anything bad happening to her. I hope you can understand that.”

  “Did you know these three items were missing from your garage?”

  “No, I haven’t been out there. I’ve been busy looking after my daughters. The youngest was in hospital this week.”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter. Let me go over everything we have so far. It seems that your wife was afraid, which fits with her leaving you and with what Marla told us. We’ve seen you pretending to be someone else online in order to find out where she is. And now we’ve found your rope, knife and tape at a site where we suspect that Evie came to harm.”

  “That forms quite a picture.” I didn’t need her to spell it out any clearer.

  “Mr Harlow, do you know what happened to Evie?” she said.

  Sergeant Moss glanced from Devoe to me, raising her chin and pretending hard that she wasn’t holding her breath.

  “No. I don’t. Can I leave now? You said I didn’t have to be here.”

  She crumpled her shoulders, deflating a little like she’d been pricked by a needle. “Yes, you’re free to go. We would like to get a bit further with this, though, and—”

  I stood. “I’ve answered your questions and now I’m done.”

  “Okay then. Please do stay local. Let us know if you intend going away. We might have important findings to tell you about.”

  She was suddenly friendly again. A distant kind of friendly.

  They thought I’d done something to Evie. I would have sounded even guiltier if I’d started raving on about the whole thing being a setup.

  There was one thing I was sure of. They were moving close to an arrest. I didn’t know whether talking to them had bought me some time or made it worse. It’d probably made it worse.

  Far worse.

  Hell, I could probably be arrested on the answers I’d given. I’d admitted to those things being mine. And apparently hadn’t shown an appropriate amount of shock.

  I walked out without another word and sat behind the wheel of my car, my heart banging away in my chest. The people who were involved with this, whoever they were, were dangerous. So dangerous Constance couldn’t go to the police and tell them about what she knew. They’d killed her investigator without a second thought. Evie was in danger. And Detective Devoe was moving close to arresting me.

  Things dropped into place.

  Evie had been desperate to make some money. But she’d trusted the wrong people. Either she had no idea that Lilly had been sick, or someone was preventing her from contacting me or coming home. And Kara was somehow mixed up with the same people.

  Nothing else made sense.

  Now that I knew where Evie was, I had to go find her. But I only had a few hundred bucks in the bank now. Maybe less. Not even enough for a plane ticket.

  It was an insane thought. People like me didn’t go charging off around the world to search for a missing person. I wasn’t like Constance with all her money and no responsibilities. And Lilly needed special care.

  I wasn’t even going to be able to look after my daughters if I got arrested. My girls would lose both parents.

  Everything was closing in on me at a hundred miles an hour.

  39. CONSTANCE

  I SAT STIFFLY IN THE CHAIR the detective offered.

  “Mrs Lundquist,” said the London detective, “we’ve been busy trying to put together a picture of Lydia’s last hour. I—”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Detective Chief Inspector, Michael Hurst—a blonde, long-faced man in his mid-forties—seemed momentarily confused before nodding. “The victim’s name is Lydia Garner. You knew her by her working name.”

  “Oh. Can we call her Rosemary?”

  “Yes,” he said gently. “We can call her that. Okay, we’ve been able to gain access to the security footage of floor twenty-four. The footage shows a maintenance person heading in and out of Rosemary’s room about twenty minutes before you arrived.”

  “Could you identify him?” I breathed, sitting forward.

  The DCI sighed. “I’m afraid he wore a cap down low over his face—and no, they couldn’t identify him. We know that he’s Caucasian, about six foot two and a large build. He entered a bathroom on the next floor down, washed off a knife and changed into everyday clothing. We can be pretty certain that this is our guy. We’re running searches on sexual-assault offenders that are a match.”

  “You think it was a sexual assault?”

  He looked at me strangely. “We won’t have the lab report back for a while yet, but it seems apparent that something of a s
exual nature occurred. Her underwear had been removed. Do you have reason to think it’s something other than that?”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but then I heard Rosemary’s voice distinctly in my mind. Don’t tell the police more than you need to.

  “Of course,” I said. “I just keep seeing all the blood and the terrible gash in her throat, and I—”

  “Very understandable.”

  “I hope you can catch him quickly. Poor Rosemary. She didn’t deserve this to happen to her. She was doing so much good. Finding missing people. We need more people like her in this world.”

  “Can you tell us more about that? You said you contracted her to search for your daughter?”

  “Yes, Kara. She vanished while studying in Australia. Sydney police told me that she’d caught a plane for London.”

  “And Rosemary was attempting to locate her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm, can you tell us anything that might help? Is there a possibility your daughter was mixed up in anything such as prostitution or drug running?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Well, there’s a possibility that Rosemary was investigating something that triggered the murder. Or the man could have been a thief looking for cash or jewellery. The sexual assault—if it did occur—might have been just an afterthought. Of course, it’s all speculation at this point.”

  He studied me thoughtfully. “We discovered two phones belonging to Rosemary. One of them was completely destroyed. We believe that Rosemary destroyed it herself, possibly at the time the intruder accessed her hotel room. Would you happen to know what she was using it for? It could help greatly in our investigation.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Well, do let us know if you remember anything during your conversations with Rosemary that was unusual in any way.”

  “I will.”

  “And Constance, there’s a concern that this person might come after you, too.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “There’s a possibility. But what we can do is offer you a secure place to stay.”

  “I’ll be all right. Maybe I’ll even return to America,” I lied.