“Look, Agent Blue,” he started, speaking very slowly. “It’s cut and dry — the only reason we were called in is because the bastard took his wife and daughter from Baltimore across state lines to Washington. That’s it. Nothing else to do here; nothing but sign off on this and hope that Mother Justice puts this asshole away forever.”
“Oh, o-okay,” Agent Blue said with a slight stutter.
Stitts started toward the door, but when he opened it and looked back, he was annoyed to see that Danny was still hovering over the woman’s body. He strode over to the man, grabbed his arm roughly, and gave it a sharp yank.
“I said we’re done here, Agent Blue. Now let’s go outside so I can have a fucking smoke.”
***
“This isn’t… this isn’t working,” Stitts said, rubbing his temples again. He wanted to say more, to complain about all the rookie partners that he been teamed up with over the past few months, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
“If you have something to cry about, go talk to a therapist — go see Dr. Thompson. I’m not a shoulder to cry on, much less a sleeve on which to wipe your snot, Stitts,” Director Hampton began. “But if you want to talk about how we can fix this problem, then you need to come to me with some genuine ideas of what you want to do. The truth is, Stitts, the partners that you were so quick to discredit, all four of them, scored very highly on all tests. So, before you go off on a rant about what’s wrong with them, maybe you should look somewhere else first, if you catch my drift.”
Stitts felt his blood pressure start to rise. It wasn’t the man’s lack of sympathy that angered him — he had expected as much from the director — but that the man’s words had some truth to them. Maybe the problem wasn’t them but him.
“You need a break, Stitts? Some time off? A little—”
Stitts’s eyes shot up.
“No,” he replied quickly. The last thing he wanted right now was time off. Time away from the job meant more time to think, to consider what he’d done, to reflect on how he had betrayed one of the very few people he genuinely cared about.
Stitts stood and was met with a searing pain inside his head. His headaches were back; there was no questioning it now. Before, he had attributed the dull throb to a lack of sleep and maybe dehydration.
But now he knew differently; he was being punished.
“All right,” Stitts said softly. “Maybe I will go see the doctor, but that doesn’t change the fact that Agent Danny Blue is green as they come. I want a new partner. Someone who has experience. Someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”
Chapter 3
“Chase, it’s been a while since we’ve heard from you. Care to share some thoughts?” Dr. Matteo asked with a warm smile.
Chase, surprised that she’d been called upon, glanced up. Dr. Matteo was a thin man and where he lacked hair on top of his head, he made for with an illustrious mustache. Dr. Matteo was the first person she’d met after Jeremy Stitts had dropped her off at Grassroots, and she found him to be a kind, caring, and gentle man. Good at reading people, Chase also knew that he genuinely wanted to help her.
The problem was, Chase wasn’t sure that she was amenable to help. Sure, she’d managed with considerable strife to kick her heroin addiction, but exorcising the demons from her past was another issue altogether.
Aside from the doctor, there were four others in the room, all of whom were female: Randy, a meth-head who was present only to avoid doing time for shoplifting; Joelle, who claimed to be 23 but who looked 15, with alcohol dependency issues; Corey, a successful businesswoman who mixed alcohol and cocaine far too often for her partners to overlook; and perhaps the most intriguing of the lot, Louisa, a plump woman who was the mother of two young children, with schizophrenic tendencies that were exacerbated by the consumption of hallucinogens. What Chase found so interesting about the latter was that Louisa had readily admitted to being abducted for 48 hours when she’d been very young.
Like, six or seven years young; Georgina young.
As for Chase, she had fabricated a story about herself that kept evolving so rapidly that it was a wonder no one had called her on it. You know, safe spaces and all that. There was simply no way that she was going to talk about her time in the FBI, or before that, about what she’d been through, what she’d seen.
That wouldn’t do anyone any good.
Only Dr. Matteo was able to tease some truth out of her, mostly because he was attuned enough to pick up on her tells, to identify when she was lying.
“I’m having trouble sleeping,” Chase said. One of the things she’d learned very early on at Grassroots was that not speaking was one of the worst options. She’d observed first hand the badgering that ensued, the subversive glances, the frowns, the sheer disgust aimed at those who refused to share. Normally, none of this bothered Chase. The real problem was that if you didn’t speak at one session, you were bound to get asked to do so at the next.
And the next.
And the next after that. Wash, rinse, repeat.
“Is it because of your son?” Dr. Matteo asked softly.
Chase nodded. The most recent iteration of her story was that a car accident, in which both her husband and son had perished in, had pushed her to heroin.
This was close enough to the truth that she could react genuinely, but far enough from reality that she could distance herself from it.
“I just keep seeing his face,” Chase said. True to form, Felix’s face suddenly appeared in her mind. It had been a long time since she had spoken to either Brad or Felix, which was in part imposed by herself — she didn’t want them to see her this way — and also because Chase wasn’t sure she could handle the rejection if they refused to speak to her again. The fact was, Chase simply wasn’t good for them. She had tried — Lord knows, she had tried, first with the move to New York from Seattle, then to Quantico after that. But her past kept following her and it was hellbent on destroying her future.
It was only a matter of time before it happened all over again.
“He’s in the car with acrid smoke billowing about his round face. He’s yelling at me — no, not yelling, screaming. He’s asking mommy to help him, to save him. He keeps repeating that he doesn’t want to die.” Chase was surprised when her voice hitched during that last part.
“Guilt is the most common reaction humans have to loss. Be it survivor’s guilt, or guilt that we weren’t there to help the one we love. But the thing about guilt is that when we acknowledge it as such, it loses some of its power,” Dr. Matteo said. This was a common refrain from the man, the idea that we need to acknowledge feelings rather than suppress them. Chase couldn’t count the number of times the doctor had reiterated that these feelings don’t exist outside of our head and that they are a fabrication of our own making.
It made sense, of course, but this realization didn’t seem to impact just how terrible these fabrications made Chase feel.
“I just wish I could switch places with him,” Chase said softly, lowering her gaze. “It seems so unfair that I get to live for thirty-five years and counting, while he got less than a decade.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Randy said suddenly, and Chase’s eyes shot up. She was about to say something, to snap back at the woman, when Dr. Matteo intervened.
“Let’s focus on what we know to be real,” he said sharply. “Your son was killed in an accident, and while you can live your entire life second-guessing every decision that you made that led up to this event — for instance, I should have done the groceries the day before and then he wouldn’t be in the parking lot at that time, or if only I had picked him up 10 minutes earlier from school, etc., etc. — these are all rear-looking observations that hold no value or merit. And while I believe that it is valuable to hold onto specific memories, it is not useful to look back on what could’ve or would’ve happened. Our reality at present is what actually happened and that is
the only thing that we need to process in order to continue moving forward.”
“But the Lord—”
Dr. Matteo’s mustache bristled.
“Randy, please. Whether you believe in God or not, the fact that he may or may not have played a role in the events that took place is irrelevant. Again, this is a backward-looking approach. What we need to do is focus solely on the present.”
“At present, I would like to punch Randy in the face,” Chase blurted.
Randy recoiled as if she had been struck.
“I’m only trying to help,” she shot back.
Chase looked to Dr. Matteo then, and while she wasn’t one hundred percent certain, she thought she saw a hint of a smile form on the man’s lips. But rather than intervene, the doctor turned to Louisa and gave her a gentle nod.
“When I was first taken,” the woman began, speaking in her characteristic slow, monotone voice, “all I could think about was how I would live my life if I ever got out of there. And even though I was only gone for 48 hours, even over that short a period of time, I grew to understand that my present reality was what really mattered. Not what I should’ve done to avoid being taken, or what I would do if I got out of there. Living in the moment afforded me the ability to take control of my surroundings. To survive. To escape.”
Chase stared at Louisa as she spoke, really stared at her. After a few moments, the woman’s face grew distorted and Chase was surprised to find that her cheeks had grown moist. She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand.
As she did, her thoughts moved from Felix, who was still very much alive and safe with Brad, to Georgina.
Is that what happened to you, Georgie? Did you think about your future, about what you would do when you finally saw me again? Or did you just accept your reality and give in to the bastard that took you?
Chapter 4
Stitts didn’t go see Dr. Thompson. Despite what he’d told Director Hampton, he didn’t need to see the doctor. What he needed was a fucking partner with some idea of what they were doing.
What he needed, was Chase.
Stitts cupped his hand around a cigarette and lit it. As he walked to his car, he inhaled deeply and relaxed when the warm smoke filled his lungs.
For several minutes, he just sat in the parking lot of the FBI training headquarters with his window down. He continued to sit there even as the clouds rolled in and started to block out some of the bright midday sun. When he was done with his first smoke, he lit another.
As he smoked, his mind began to wander, eventually turning to the day when he’d confronted Chase, as it tended to do lately.
When he had given her an ultimatum: go to prison or go to rehab.
It had taken all of his clout, all of his moderate influence, to convince those who mattered to even consider the latter.
After the mess that Chase had made in Chicago, there were a lot of people who wanted to see her in prison, not the least of whom was Detective Bert Marsh. In fact, despite the agreement that Director Hampton, himself, and an unwitting Chase had come to, it was probably best if she didn’t go back to Chicago for a very long time.
Stitts wanted to visit her, of course, but every time he called, Dr. Matteo suggested against it. He said that she was in a fragile state and that seeing him might stir up memories, which, in turn, had the potential to trigger a relapse.
And even though he had saved her from prison, Stitts still couldn’t help but wonder what other options might have been available to her, to them.
“There is no us,” he scolded himself.
After a final drag from his cigarette, he flicked the butt out the window. A recruit happened to pass by his car then. She first stared at the still burning cigarette as if it were enriched plutonium, then offered Stitts a sour look.
Stitts gave her the finger and rolled up his window.
He owed Chase his life. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have been murdered at the hands of his once partner Agent Chris Martinez. And while he had done his best to help Chase get her own life back, it still wasn’t enough.
“Fuck,” he swore. It had been four months since he’d last seen her, four months that had been some of the worst that Stitts could remember.
He was about to take out a third cigarette when the phone at his side buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number, but grateful for the distraction, Stitts answered anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this… is this Jeremy?” a female voice asked.
“Who’s this?”
There was a short pause before the woman replied.
“My name is Belinda Torts, and I’m a neighbor of Maria Stitts.”
Stitts sat bolt upright in his car seat.
“Is she okay? What’s wrong?”
“Well, I’m not sure… It’s just that… I was sitting—”
“Is she okay?” Stitts demanded. “Is my mother okay?”
Even before Belinda answered, Stitts started the car and backed out of his parking space.
“She’s fine… but…”
Stitts exited the parking lot and then jammed the accelerator as he pulled onto the main road.
“Well, then what the hell is going on? Why’re you calling?”
“It’s just that, well, she’s been acting strange lately and today I saw all these guys coming out of her house. Taking things out of her house.”
Stitts was flying now, ignoring stop signs and stoplights alike.
“What the hell you talking about? Has she been robbed?”
There was another pause, during which Stitts felt his heart race and adrenaline flood his system. His pupils dilated and he swerved just in time to avoid an old man crossing the road.
“Well, not really.”
Stitts was gripping the steering wheel so tightly now that he could feel blisters forming on his palms.
“What are you talking about?” He shouted.
“I’m sorry, this is very—”
“Just tell me what the fuck is going on!”
“Your mother… it seems like she just giving all of her things away. I’m not sure… I mean, I think she might be, you know, confused. And now… oh, dear me… Maria… Maria! Please don’t take that off. I think you should come quickly, Jeremy. Your mother… she’s getting undressed now. She’s in the middle of the street and she’s getting undressed.”
Chapter 5
“You’re lying.”
Chase raised her eyes from her plate of food and stared at the woman across from her.
“Excuse me?”
Louisa put her tray on the table and took a seat.
“I said, you’re lying.”
Chase turned her attention back to her food. Only after eating a healthy portion of rice did she bother replying.
“Yeah, I heard what you said. Perhaps some context would be helpful?”
Louisa fell into silence, and when she took a scoop of her own rice and ate it, Chase figured the woman was just having an episode.
Chase shrugged and continued eating her meal. When they were both nearly done — despite the considerably larger portion size, Louisa was a fast eater — the woman across from her spoke again.
“Were you in law enforcement?”
Chase froze.
“A police officer, maybe? No — no, I don’t think so; you’re too small to be a police officer. I would have pegged you as some sort of analyst, but you rarely use your cell phone or any of the computers here at Grassroots. So, what is it, then?”
Chase squinted at Louisa. Not only was she attentive, but intuitive as well. But it was her pleasant face and friendly demeanor that, despite the charge, disarmed Chase.
“FBI,” she blurted. The moment the word exited her mouth, Chase wondered why in the world she had said it.
She glanced around furtively and was relieved to note that no one was within earshot. Except for maybe Randy, but she was deep in conversation with her spoon.
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Chas
e said quickly, rising from the table. To her surprise, Louisa didn’t stand with her; she just continued to sit and finish what was left of her meal.
Unnerved, Chase took her plate to the sink and rested it inside. Then she paused for a moment, trying to catch her breath.
Why did I say that? Why did I tell her that I used to be in the FBI?
This was the first time that she had been truthful in months now — really truthful — and it put her on edge. She’d spent four months making up a persona and all it took to cause it all to come crumbling down was a simple question from a friendly, albeit strange, woman.
Drawing Dead Page 2
