by Zoey Parker
“That’s why I have to go back. You can’t be inside the compound, but I can. I can keep looking for clues. Do you have any suspects? I could do some digging.”
I shook my head. “Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous.”
“You didn’t think it was too dangerous before.”
“Exactly,” I said, kissing the tip of her nose. “That was before.”
“Oh, now that you know how good I am in bed, I’m indispensable.”
“Precisely.”
Her mouth fell open in shock and faux horror, and I laughed. “I’m just kidding. You were indispensable even before having sex. I don’t want you putting yourself in any dangerous situations.”
She ran her hand over her stomach. “I’m about to be in a dangerous situation regardless. We are working under a strict time frame. If you aren’t back in the compound by the time I start to show, there won’t be anyone there to look out for me. If you want to be there to help me, you need my help first.”
I buried my face in her hair, nuzzling against her neck. “Ugh.”
“I know,” she said, tracing a finger down my spine. “It’s a real predicament we’re in.”
“I still have Declan on the inside,” I said, though I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Declan was my friend, but it was too risky to trust anyone else right now.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You think I’m going to let you tell Declan O’Riley my biggest, darkest secret? Yeah, no.”
“I know,” I confessed. “I just want there to be an alternative. I don’t want you snooping around where you shouldn’t be and getting caught. People have been killed for much less.”
“I can be sneaky,” she said. “Give me a mission. Let me help.”
I raised myself up on my elbows. “Fine. I think I might have a lead.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice prodding me to continue, excitement bubbling out of her.
I couldn’t know how she’d take what I said next, and the thought of ruining what we had… or could have, terrified me.
“I need you to look into your brother.”
“Caleb?” Her excitement turned to confusion immediately. “Why?”
“I never called off your father. He was supposed to be there that night, but he swears I sent him a message. The person who sent that message needed to have access to your dad’s schedule and Caleb is one of the few people who would have known his plans.”
She scrunched up her face, her eyes narrowed. “This isn’t a fake mission, right? You’re not just setting me after my brother because you know he wouldn’t hurt me as a way to distract me?”
I grabbed both her hands in mine, kissing her fingertips. “I swear I’m not. You have to be careful. Don’t take this lightly because he’s your brother. He may be innocent, and I really hope he is, but he may also be guilty. I want you to be prepared for either outcome, and I want you to watch your back. Don’t trust anyone.”
She nodded, her eyes still suspicious of me. “Okay, fine. Mission accepted.”
###
Heather
Leaving Killian’s small, dingy apartment was significantly harder than I thought it’d be. For the first time in weeks, I felt safe. I had a safe place to land and someone looking out for me. I didn’t want to leave.
Still, I did. We needed eyes inside the compound to clear Killian’s name, and I was those eyes. Investigating my own brother felt like a betrayal, but we had to start somewhere. So far, there had been zero leads and clearing Caleb’s name could at least narrow down the suspect list.
Killian and I kissed in the doorway for far too long. It was late, just a few hours before sunrise, and I had to get back home, but the draw to stay with him was strong. He smelled warm and earthy, and I wanted to bottle it up. Standing there with him, I was shocked by how strongly I felt about him, considering our limited experiences together.
I wanted to believe I was different, that our relationship was different, but I couldn’t be sure. Was I another conquest? Another girl to add to his list of booty calls. These thoughts helped me pry myself out of his arms and get out the door.
“Be careful,” he called again as I walked down the hallway. “Call if you need anything.”
Sneaking back to my room wasn’t an issue, and I crashed into my bed and slept until nearly noon. When I woke up, the full sun was shining through my sheer curtains, casting my room in a warm afternoon glow.
Everything in the room looked the same. My white desk pressed against the wall littered with journals and books, my yoga mat rolled up in the corner next to my small coffeepot and my speakers, and my easel with paints and brushes and cups of water littered on the floor around it.
The room had shifted as I’d grown up, always displaying my current obsessions. At one point, it had been punk bands, so my walls were collaged with posters of men wearing too much eyeliner with safety pins pushed through their ears. Before that, horses were the main focus of my life. I drew pictures of them in my sketchpad and taped the pictures to the wall, and I had a porcelain figurine collection that I displayed on a shelf above my bed.
Dad bought me one every year for my birthday for years. Caleb even took me horseback riding a few times a month for a while. Mom and Dad adopted him a few years after me, but he was five years older.
I hadn’t thought about this memory in a long time, and it made me feel sick. Though, that could also have been morning sickness. Either way, Caleb was my family. He’d been in my life since I was a little girl, and after Mom died, he was there for me. He and Dad did their best to make sure I was taken care of. They weren’t always great at the girl chats, and they were way too protective, but I loved them. How could I now consider spying on him? Rooting through Caleb’s things?
I sat up in bed and tried to take a few calming breaths. Going through Caleb’s room would simply clear his name. I’d do it, get it over with, and then Killian could think up another theory.
As it was already noon, Dad and Caleb were both out of the house and wouldn’t be back until dinner at the earliest. I had the time, and getting it over with seemed like a good idea. The sooner I got it over with, the sooner the guilt would die down.
Our house was small compared to some of the others. Dad and I had bedrooms on the second floor, separated by a bathroom, but Caleb had chosen to remodel the attic so he could get out of the dank basement. It got a little humid in the summer, but he seemed to like the privacy it afforded him, though he still talked often about moving out on his own.
The stairs to the attic squeaked with each step, and even though I was alone in the house, I still winced every time, afraid someone would hear and find me. There was a lock on the outside of his door, but I twisted the handle, and it opened. I said a silent prayer of thanks.
It had been years since I’d been in Caleb’s room. He didn’t have any particular rules about people being in his room, but there just weren’t many occasions when I needed to be in there. Since the last time I’d seen it, he’d added blackout curtains to the circular window that faced the front yard and had bought a gun rack for the corner of his room.
As an enforcer, Caleb always carried a gun, and he trained with them quite frequently, but it was still strange to see a gun cabinet in his bedroom. It would be like going into an accountant’s room and seeing a shelf of calculators. I’d always assumed Caleb had hobbies outside of work, but the sparse décor of his bedroom gave very little away. If he did have a secret obsession with hip-hop dance or playing the piano, his room told no secrets.
Aside from the gun cabinet and his bed, he had one desk that desperately needed to be refinished and a mini-fridge next to his bed that doubled as a nightstand. I began to doubt whether I’d find anything in his room at all. There didn’t seem to be enough items for what I was doing to constitute as snooping. Still, I began my work.
I opened the mini-fridge first. Mainly because I knew there wouldn’t be any incriminating evidence in there, and I wanted to start small and build towa
rds full-on spying on him, but also because I was curious what would be in it. It revealed exactly what I suspected. A few opened cans of half-full energy drinks sat in the door, bottled water was stacked on the top shelf in a pyramid shape, and cans of different sodas littered the bottom.
Then, I moved on to the desk. Like my desk, Caleb’s contained a few notebooks and some books, but unlike my desk, Caleb’s was meticulous. He had his journals stacked according to size in the left corner with a coffee mug full of pens next to it. Then he had his modest collection of fiction books—mostly classic war novels and contemporary detective books—standing up in the middle, spines facing out.
Lastly, his laptop was at the front of the desk in the direct center, so perfectly placed it looked like a picture from a home décor magazine. The laptop was closed, and I mulled over whether I should open it. Would he notice? I wanted to believe he wouldn’t, but the room was sparse and pretty well organized. Perhaps Caleb had a little bit of OCD in him that I was unaware of. Maybe he’d notice one of my hairs on his floor or see my fingerprints on the matte black case of his computer.
I shook my head. Paranoia is not a good look on you, Heather. Get it together.
I started with the journals first. Even though they seemed infinitely more personal, flipping open the cover of a book felt less intrusive than breaking into someone’s computer by guessing their password. Caleb’s password would likely be easy because, as far as I knew, he’d been using the same one since he was fifteen—bigpimpin1. He’d gone through a very serious Jay-Z phase.
The first journal, the small one on top of the pile, seemed to be mostly a series of lists. To-do lists, grocery lists, movies he wanted to see, etc. I flipped all the way through it for the sake of thoroughness, but it revealed nothing. I set it to the side and reached for the next one. Upon opening it, I was greeted with a pencil sketch. But not just any pencil sketch. A very pornographic sketch.
I closed the book, repeatedly blinking as if I could wash the image from my brain. Finding a stash of porn would have been less jarring. Something about thinking of Caleb taking the time to sit down and sketch out the image of an impossibly muscular man plowing into the nether regions of a ridiculously petite woman as she screamed was worse than thinking about him watching porn.
This drawing had taken time, and he was a stickler for details, down to each and every vein. Taking a deep breath, I opened the book and began flipping through the pages. A lot of the pictures were, disturbingly, erotic in nature, but some weren’t. Pressed between the pages of men and women taking part in various forms of depravity was the occasional sketch of a pimply kid riding a skateboard and dropping into a half-pipe or an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of groceries down the street.
When the pictures weren’t so jarringly graphic, I could appreciate Caleb’s skill. He had talent. Way more than I had at painting. My paintings were typically abstract, but only because I wasn’t good enough to paint anything realistic. I had an eye for color, but my hand could never seem to produce what my brain was able to imagine. The back half of his sketchbook was blank, and I was glad to set it aside and move on to the third and final journal.
Being much more cautious this time, I peeled back the cover and was relieved to see that it was a planner. I studied the pages; my worries about going through Caleb’s things being drowned out by the absolute monotony of his life. Page after page of work, meetings, workout sessions with his trainer, and dates… I had no idea my brother was going on so many dates. At least two per week. Good for him.
Then, just as I was about ready to give up, an entry from the month before Niall’s death caught my eye.
The first part of the page was normal:
-training session @ 7 AM
-lunch w/ Ronald @ 12 PM – Locos Tacos
-meeting with Liam @ 3 PM
-exchange @ 8 PM – docks, pier 12
The bottom half, however, was madness. In direct opposition to the orderly lines and clean handwriting I’d grown used to reading, the bottom was scribbles, angry slashes across the paper. At one point, he wrote so hard that the paper tore under the tip of his pen. In huge block letters, he’d written: NIALL AND HEATHER?!
Nothing else.
I checked the date. It was a Monday, and by my previous estimations, the day of conception. That was the first time Niall and I hooked up. I’d been on a walk around the compound, and I ran into Niall. One thing led to another, and we were sneaking through the back door of his house and into a storage closet in the back. But how could Caleb have known about any of that?
I looked back at the top of the page and blanched; I physically felt the blood drain from my face. Caleb had met with Liam at 3 PM, which was roughly the same time Niall and I were together. Had Caleb just seen us walking together and assumed we were up to something or had he actually seen us slipping into the O’Donnell house, Niall pulling me along by the hand? He’d written the angry words with a question mark at the end, implying he wasn’t sure.
I turned the page, dread slowly replacing the blood in my body. Immediately after the day he saw Niall and me together, Caleb’s daily entries changed. He still had scheduled workout sessions and meetings and jobs, but he had added a section in the bottom corner of the page, a small list of times and places. I didn’t understand at first, but after several pages, I realized what was going on. Caleb had been tailing me. Whether he was doing it himself or he had recruited others to help him, he had a detailed list of where I was, who I was with, and what time I was there for nearly every day of the week.
I rifled through the pages, growing angrier as I went. This went on for weeks. Almost two weeks after he first spotted Niall and me together and made his angry note, Caleb made another. This time, there was no question mark:
NIALL O’DONNELL AND HEATHER SLEEPING TOGETHER.
I felt naked, stripped bare. As if someone had peeled back my skin, leaving me nothing but muscles and bones. He knew. Caleb knew Niall and I were sleeping together and, if the angry slashes of his handwriting were any judge, he wasn’t happy about it. I knew Dad didn’t like the O’Donnell’s, but I didn’t realize Caleb had anything against them.
My breath felt ragged in my throat, and my chest heaved as I tried to catch my breath. This didn’t mean anything. Caleb knowing about Niall and me didn’t mean he was a murderer. And Dad hadn’t said anything to me about it, which he definitely would have if Caleb had told him, so that had to mean Caleb had kept this news to himself.
I scooted forward in his desk chair, literally on the edge of my seat, and kept flipping pages in the journal. I watched as Caleb’s tracking of my daily movements continued and, a few days after the second hookup with Niall, Caleb began tracking him, as well.
My heart sputtered in my chest like an old car engine, and I begged it to keep beating, to keep running until I could find out the truth, until I could cross Caleb off the list of suspects. However, all hope of that died when I reached the entry for the day of Niall’s death. In the bottom corner of the page was the list of my movements, quite short since I’d stayed inside the compound that day mulling over what to do about my pregnancy—which Caleb thankfully didn’t seem to know anything about. Next to it, though, was a list of Niall’s movements:
-Left house @ 9 AM
-Lunch w/ Killian @ 1 PM
-Meeting @ 3 PM - conf. center
-Dinner @ 6 PM – home
-Exchange @ 8 PM w/ Killian
This last item on the list was circled in red pen. Then, a line had been drawn from the circle to another list on the opposite side of the page. It was a to-do list:
-send dad message from Killian calling off exchange
-arrive early and complete exchange
-FIRE AWAY
###
I felt nauseous. Caleb had hatched the plan. Caleb knew about the exchange because Dad was supposed to be the enforcer, and he knew it was the perfect opportunity. He impersonated Killian, though I still wasn’t sure how, and called Dad
off. Then, he took the money from the job for himself and waited for Niall and Killian to arrive. Then, just as cruelly as he’d written it in his own handwriting, he’d fired away.
Suddenly the room felt too small. I put the journals back in a stack on the corner of his desk, made sure everything looked the same as it did when I’d entered, and I stumbled down the attic stairs to my room. I paced the floor for a while, unsure what to do with my nervous energy. My brain felt too full, like it would burst any second. I needed to get out.
I grabbed the emergency car keys, ran out the front door, and hopped in the car. I was on my way to Killian’s before I could even process what I was doing. I was on autopilot. By the time I made it to his apartment landing and was knocking on the door, tears had collected in my eyes, and were threatening to spill down my cheeks.
