by Jenn Vakey
Wilcome looked like he wanted to argue, but just shook his head before motioning her towards his desk.
He reached into the box that was sitting on end and pulled out an evidence bag containing what looked like an old book. “We found this in the mausoleum. It looks like Nicole started keeping a journal after Justin Davis died. I haven’t had a chance to look through it yet. You can start here if you want,” he said, holding it out.
Rilynne grabbed the book and headed back to her desk. She was only a few pages in when she heard a familiar voice coming from just outside the door. When she peeked out, she found Ben showing off his wounds to a group of officers.
“Now, I know you were told to rest for two week before returning back to work,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. He turned around and smiled. “You are one to talk,” he said. “You were told to take the rest of the week off, and here you are.”
“Yeah,” she said defensively. “But you were ordered by a doctor. Mine was just a recommendation.”
He shot her a look somewhere between disbelief and amusement.
“Oh shut up,” she said with a grin. “Do you really think I could sit home while we still have all of this to go through? Besides, I just had a little bump on the head.”
“What, did you get tired of putting your apartment back together after Nicole trashed it?”
“I know,” she groaned. “I really need to get to that. I just really don’t want to. It was bad enough having to unpack everything once. Then it all gets thrown into a big pile and I have to do it over again. It’s just not on the top of my list of things I want to do right now.”
“Uh huh,” he said before motioning to the tattered book in her hand. “What do you have there?”
Rilynne thumbed through it. “Nicole left a journal. I’m reading it looking for anything important. It’s not something I’m really looking forward to, to be honest.”
Ben took the book and opened it to the middle. After a few seconds of reading, he closed it again. “Wow, she really goes into detail there. That just said how she was dressed like a clown when she lured the second victim. See,” he said handing the book back. “That is why you never trust a clown.”
“I haven’t even made it that far. I have a feeling I’m going to have nightmares after reading it, though.” In fact, she knew that she would. It would be inevitable after delving that deep in Nicole’s mind. “So what are you doing here?” she asked.
“Honestly, I thought I might actually die from boredom if I sat home any longer. Not to mention I was pretty curious about what y’all were finding out,” he said.
“Well, I can’t help you much there. I just got in a little while ago myself. But, I have been wondering something,” she said. “You knew didn’t you? I mean, about your brother and Nicole. You knew they were involved.”
Ben took a deep breath, dragging his knuckles across his chin. “I knew they had been seeing each other for a while before he got sick. I didn’t know they were talking about marriage, though. Actually, to me it seemed that is was nothing more than a fling to Nicole. Especially since she seemed to have moved on so quickly after Justin passed.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.
“I didn’t want to get her in any trouble. Besides, how was I to know it was relevant to the case? Justin died before he had his leg amputated, and he was only bald that last month,” he explained. “I feel pretty foolish now, though. Especially with how clean the crime scenes were. I don’t think anyone would be able to leave a scene as clean as someone who investigated them for a living.”
He did have a point there.
“Well, I will let you get back to work,” he said. “Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Even if it’s just helping you get your place reorganized. I would hate to actually die of boredom after you went to the trouble of rescuing me.” He gave her one last warm smile before walking back over to the group of officers.
Rilynne was still smiling when she dropped back down in her seat and opened the journal back up.
Ben had been right; Nicole really had gone into great detail. In addition to the bereavement she was feeling after her loss, she had expressed a great deal of resentment towards the department. She had spent several pages ranting about the unfair rules that were set up to try to keep her and her soul mate apart.
Ben, who had sat down in a chair in front of her desk, found that bit quite amusing. “She didn’t seem to care at all that it was actually her fault that rule was enforced in the first place, did she?” he asked, shaking his head.
“You have to admit,” Rilynne said casually. “It is a pretty stupid rule.” Although she could see Ben look up at her, she kept her focus on the page she was reading. It wasn’t until after she started to feel her cheeks growing warm that Ben looked away and answered her. She had a feeling he had actually been waiting for such a reaction.
“Yes, it is,” he said simply.
Ben went back to the crossword puzzle on his tablet as Rilynne continued reading.
“This is interesting,” she said a few minutes later. “Apparently, it was a complete coincidence the first victim had been from a case she had worked. She had seen him walking his dog, and the way he walked reminded her so much of Justin that she just grabbed him. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that she realized she had worked his vandalism case just two days before. She panicked, and decided to place the first card at the scene when she was called to investigate it. She thought it would throw any suspicion off of her as a suspect, which for some reason she doesn’t mention, she was sure she would be. She had actually intended to keep him, but when he died she decided to continue with ‘the game’ as she called it.”
“Does it say why she waited such a long after him before taking the second victim? Or why they were all a month apart after that?” he asked.
“Well, from what I can tell, she was not really delusional when she took the first victim,” she explained. “But during the four months after his death, she seems to have just snapped. She had convinced herself by December that she had actually gotten Justin back during the week she had the victim. She wanted to recreate it, so she started looking through her past cases to find men that would work. It doesn’t say why they were all a month apart after that, though.”
“Interesting. So what was the significance of the final meal?”
Rilynne flipped a few pages back in the book. “Apparently, it was the only thing she knew how to cook. She made it for your brother on every special occasion while they were dating, and at the end she said it was one of the only things he could keep down.”
“Does it say why she did it, or why she used these men?” Detective Wilcome asked walking up behind her.
“To punish us,” she said frankly. “Some part of her knew these men were not actually Justin Davis, so she decided to use the pattern set by the first victim with all of the others. She wanted to get back at the department, because she blamed it for Justin’s death.”
Ben sat upright. “How is this department in any way responsible for my brother dying?” he asked.
“She says if they had been able to make their relationship public, she would have been able to gather support for Justin, prompting him to have the surgery to remove his leg. She said he would not discuss the matter with anyone, and since she was not able to without losing her job, he did not get the push needed,” Rilynne summarized the pages.
“That is ridiculous. Justin was a fighter, and was determined to beat his cancer. He honestly thought he would be able to get through it without having to lose his leg. No one would have been able to convince him otherwise,” Ben said. “Furthermore, if she had felt so strongly at the time, she would have gladly risked her job rather than let him die. The truth is, she supported him when he made his decision, and actually thought right up until the end that he would be able to beat it.”
“It was just guilt then,” Rilynne said. “She felt so guilty about not pushing him
more herself, but she couldn’t face it so she picked someone else to blame.”
“Good,” Detective Wilcome said. “At least now we have a reason. It is a disturbing reason and it’s not going to go over well with the public, but it’s still a reason behind the killings. Let me know when you have more.”
“I would recommend getting cadaver dogs out to the cabin,” she called out to him as he started walking away.
He turned back around to her, waiting for an explanation. “She said she wanted to keep the legs close, so after his amputation, she could transplant a healthy limb. It doesn’t say where she put them, but the cabin would probably be a good place to start,” she said. She looked not at Detective Wilcome, but at Ben sitting in front of her. He just closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Sorry,” she offered softly.
He opened his eyes and met hers. “It’s okay,” he replied sincerely. “It’s actually nice to know that someone loved him as much as she had.”
Rilynne couldn’t help but smile at his response. Only he could find the good in a situation like this.
Nicole’s journal just got more and more disturbing as Rilynne went on. It was clear the further she read, that Nicole’s delusions had been growing stronger every day. In the end, she did truly believe she had been able to transplant Justin’s soul into the men’s bodies, and she was getting him back for one week at a time.
At the same time, she still held on to enough reality to be able to clean and stage the scenes. She said on several occasions she even hid and watched the abduction scenes, as well as the dumpsites, being discovered. She wanted to watch the terror the police department was inflicting on their faces.
It was close to nine when she finally finished the journal and sat it down. “I think I really am going to have nightmares forever,” she told Ben, who was still sitting across the desk from her.
“That bad, huh?” he asked, putting his tablet down.
Rilynne glided her index fingers gently around her temples. “She even went into detail about what she said to the men, and their responses. She thought it was a game she and Justin were playing when they denied being him.”
“Wow,” Ben said on a long breath.
“And she talked about how excited they both were to have you in the wedding, and how anxious your brother was to meet me.”
Ben’s ears reddened for the first time in days. “Really? Does it say why?”
“No, not really. You know, groom wanting to meet the maid of honor stuff, I guess,” she rattled off quickly. In fact, Nicole had gone into great detail about it. From the first day they had met, Nicole apparently was convinced Ben and Rilynne were together in secret, the way she and Justin had been. Her belief was only compounded the morning she saw Ben leaving Rilynne’s apartment. She said Justin had been ecstatic when she told him, and he could not wait to meet his future sister-in-law. However, Rilynne had no desire to have that conversation with Ben.
“You will never guess why Nicole broke into my apartment,” she said, hastily changing the subject. “It was to get my dress size.”
“Should I still guess?” Ben chuckled.
“Oh, hush. That means she trashed the entire apartment just to trash it,” she continued. “She could have easily slipped in and out and I never would have known. She just wanted to make a spectacle of it.”
“So what you are saying is she left you a giant mess to clean up as her brides maid gift,” he said jokingly as they stood and walked out the door. “Well, you have to admit that it’s original.”
“You think you are so funny, don’t you?” she asked, walking with him to the elevator.
He gave her a big smile. “I happen to know that I am. It is one of my more charming attributes.”
“If you say so,” she countered, stepping into the elevator. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t keep the smile off of her face.
The cool breeze hit their faces as they stepped through the doors, onto the street. The whole city seemed to have relaxed when the news came out that the Pirate Killer had been stopped, and people were now adventuring out again.
“Tell me you drove today,” Ben said to Rilynne, looking around for a car.
“And I thought you knew me better than that,” she smiled. He rolled his eyes, and took her arm as she started towards her apartment. “You didn’t drive?” she asked, remembering how much difficulty he had just getting around a couple days before.
“No, I figured the exercise would be good for me,” he said. “Besides, my car is still in the garage at the station.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I had forgotten about that. Were they able to find anything wrong with it? I know they said your clutch was fine. And trust me, that did not go over well at the station. Wilcome ordered your car be taken completely apart if they had to. He wanted to be able to prove there had actually been something wrong, and you weren’t just saying that to plan your daring escape.”
“Well, I appreciate his support,” he said. “Although they really did take the entire thing apart and are being a little slow with putting it back together. And yes, they actually found a piece of a branch jammed deeply into it. Apparently when Nicole was borrowing my car to transport body parts, she ran over a bush of some kind.”
He was still holding a great deal of resentment towards Nicole for setting him up to take the fall for her. Rilynne knew there was a very good chance that that feeling never went away. Honestly, she couldn’t blame him.
“Well,” Ben said timidly. “Since the case is over, does that mean you will be leaving town?”
“I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately,” she replied. “I was actually walking into the office to tell Detective Wilcome I was going to be leaving when he told me Derek Hartley had woken up.”
He looked over at her, but she kept her eyes on the happy faces littering the street. “You were going to leave because it looked like I was the killer?” It was really more of a statement than a question, but Rilynne gave him an answer anyway.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I didn’t actually think you could have done it, but if it turned out that you had, it would have been too much for me to take.”
“Well, I’m glad that it wasn’t me killing people then.”
“Me too,” she said lightly.
“So, does that mean you have changed your mind?” he asked. “Or are you still planning on leaving?”
She glanced over at his moonlit face and smiled before looking back towards the street. “I think I will stick around for a little while. It’s just starting to get interesting around here.”
“Good.” She could hear the smile in his voice, which even when she looked over and caught it, he made no attempt to hide.
Epilogue
Although it had been a month since Nicole Benson’s death, the backlash from the case had still not died down. Nearly all of the cases Nicole had been involved in had been called back into question. Several of them had even been overturned, allowing the criminals to be returned back to the streets.
The detectives were working overtime just to try to secure the convictions, even if it meant revisiting the crime scenes to look for more evidence, and re-running every piece of evidence they already had.
District Attorney Greene was now a regular face in the detectives’ office; stopping by nearly everyday to discuss the status of the stack of cases she had crossing her desk. Rilynne had a feeling that her presence would not decrease even once the cases started dying down, since next year would be an election year.
The public’s trust in the department had also taken a blow, which would inevitably take some time to rebuilt. Sadly, the fact that a member of the department had killed Nicole did actually seem to put many people at ease.
“Evans,” Detective Wilcome called from across the room. “I know it’s a little late, but you are receiving a commendation for last months events.”
“I don’t really think being kidnapped by a serial killer qualifies me for a commendation,
” she replied. In fact, having violated several regulations just to get herself kidnapped, she was sure of it.
“You literally brought a knife to a gun fight and still walked out on top,” Detective Matthews laughed. “I would say that qualifies you for a little recognition.”
“And you saved the life of another member of this department,” Wilcome stated.
“All while wearing a cocktail dress,” Steele jokingly added.
She looked around the room to find everyone’s eyes upon her. “Really, I just did my job. Nothing more.”
“I don’t think Ben Davis would agree with you there. He will actually be presenting the award to you at the ceremony tomorrow night,” said Wilcome.
“That’s right,” she heard from the doorway behind her. She turned to see Ben, an evidence box balancing on his still fiberglass encased arm, walking in behind her.
Between Ben being ordered not to come into the building until he had taken enough time to heal and Rilynne’s caseload, she had only seen Ben a few times over the last few weeks.
“When did you come back?” she asked as he sat the box down on the corner of the desk beside hers.
“Today, actually. They wanted me to take another week, but I put my foot down,” he said, imitating a stomp. “Besides, there is too much work around here for them really to argue with me. Plus, there was no way I was going to miss the ceremony tomorrow.”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I really don’t deserve a commendation for any of it. You were there, I disarmed a delusional woman who had her back to me. There is nothing above and beyond about that.”
He leaned close to her, his lips just inches from the side of her face. “You allowed yourself to get kidnapped to save me. And you shot someone who had been your friend to keep me from being shot. I owe you my life; I would say that deserves a little recognition.”
As much as she wanted to argue with him, somewhere between the feel of his warm breath tickling her cheek and the flashes of Nicole aiming her gun at him, she couldn’t.
