Already Lured, page 7
“Nothing.”
That was it, then. Their clever idea of looking into Granger’s patients had been a bust. And nothing in this office, from the key to the cabinet, the files to the desk and computer, had triggered a vision. Laura was starting to think this was enough evidence to suppose the killer had never been inside the office at all.
“We have to move on,” Laura said, even though she was floundering to figure out where she was supposed to go next.
“Back to the first victim,” Nate said. “What was her name again?”
“Brooke Ware,” Princess supplied.
“Brooke Ware,” Nate repeated. “We go back to her and see if there’s anything we can discover.”
“Do you know where we can speak with her family?” Laura asked, addressing the two detectives.
“We can take you there,” Princess replied, jumping up immediately. Like her superior, Cortez, she was obviously eager to impress.
Laura wasn’t going to argue with it, or tell her that she had no intention of recommending anybody to join the FBI and never did. With the way this case was looking, it was probable that they were going to need all the eager hands on deck they could get.
She was only too aware of the deadline Rondelle had pointed out: Tonight, the killer was likely to strike again, and they needed to work faster if they had any hope of stopping him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The second Laura stepped foot into the house, she knew that this family was different.
Where Ginny had been lost in her grief, like a ship trying to sail through fog and ending up crewed only by ghosts, the husband and sister of Brooke Ware were already into a different stage of the grieving process.
Anger.
“Have you caught someone yet?” Jerod Frank, whose name his wife had apparently not taken, demanded as soon as they entered the living room. He was sitting there with what had to be Bree Ware, as well as a detective who looked extremely harassed.
“Not yet, sir,” Nate said, stepping in behind Laura. They’d made Princess and Frat Bro stay behind. This detective was one Laura hadn’t seen before – probably on family duty and therefore not available as part of the main task force.
“Why not?” Bree demanded. “It’s been two days. Two days! They say on TV if it takes longer than two days, you lose your chance!”
“I assure you we haven’t missed the chance to catch the person who did this,” Laura said. She and Nate stood at the front of the room, both of them perhaps sensing the need to remain dominant in the space. If they conceded and sat down, taking a weaker position, they would be verbally attacked by Brooke’s loved ones until they left.
Laura didn’t want to mention the fact that it was now less than forty-eight hours since his last attack, thinking that probably wouldn’t bring them much comfort, but it was true. If the old adage about the first two days had any reality to it, they had another twenty-four hours now to get the results they needed. Unless, of course, he struck again tonight, in which case they had even more time.
Not that extending the deadline via the death of another victim was a course of action Laura wanted to take.
“Well, what are you doing?”
“Right now,” Nate said, as calmly as possible. “We’re here to ask you some questions and see if we can’t get some new leads from talking with you about your sister and wife.”
“We’ve already answered so many questions,” Bree complained.
Nate raised an eyebrow, a masterful stroke that Laura wouldn’t have been able pull off herself. “Are you against answering more if it might help us to find her killer?”
There was a general sense of sheepishness in the room, albeit tempered by the anger that still simmered palpably at the surface. “What is it, then?” Jerod demanded. His tone very much implied that he thought they should have been able to investigate well enough to find out all the answers on their own.
“First of all, we need to know if Brooke had any contact with a woman named Jessika Granger,” Laura said, leveling her gaze at the husband and then the sister in order to try and catch them reacting to the name.
Instead, both of them shook their heads slowly and blankly, looking to one another for ideas. “Never heard of her,” Jerod said. “Wait – is she the other woman who…?”
“I’m afraid she is,” Laura confirmed. “We need to know if there’s any connection between the two victims. If there is, it will help us to identify their killer much more quickly. This could be the missing piece of information that reveals everything. Is there any possibility that Brooke might have consulted a therapist or thought about seeing a therapist? Or did she know anyone who was seeing one, to the point of having spoken about it?”
“A therapist?” Jerod snapped. “Why would she need a therapist? Brooke was happy!”
Laura looked at Bree pointedly. If there was something a husband didn’t know – or wanted to hide from the police – then the sister might.
“She was happy,” Bree confirmed. There was a little less heat in her statement. Like the memory of exactly how happy her sister had been was hard to bear.
“Alright,” Laura said, conceding that perhaps these two couldn’t shed any light on it. It didn’t mean Jessika and Brooke hadn’t run across one another at all, or that there was no connection. It could be that they both knew the killer, but they knew him independently of one another. That was entirely possible, but it was also a depressing possibility – she and Nate could be chasing their tails for a long time before they discovered the connection. “Is there anything else you think we need to know?”
“Well, have you looked into that stalker yet?” Bree asked, her voice pointed once more.
Laura exchanged a glance with Nate, then looked at the detective in the room.
“What stalker?” he asked, speaking up at last. “You haven’t mentioned a stalker before.”
“We didn’t need to,” Jerod said, hesitating now but not enough to stop his anger. “You already know about him. Brooke filed a police report.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” the detective asked, grabbing a cell phone out of his pocket and dialing.
“Because you already have it in your records,” Bree said, repeating the point. “Why would we need to tell you about that? You’re supposed to know!”
The detective was muttering something quietly and furiously into his phone, retreating into the hall. “It’s really important that you tell us absolutely everything, even if you think it’s obvious,” Laura said, doing her best to keep her voice even. “There’s no way for you to know if we’ve caught something, so you need to tell us every little detail. Who was this stalker?”
“He was a guy she met at work,” Jerod said. “She was a barista; he was a customer at the coffee shop. She worked at the same place for the last few years, and I guess he got to liking her too much. He started following her home after her shift ended.”
“What happened? Did he ever get violent or aggressive?” Laura asked.
“No.” Jerod pushed his chest out. “He came too close to the house once and I let him know he wasn’t welcome. Put on a little show for him so he knew she was mine and he had to back off. He never came back after that.”
Laura winced internally. That kind of behavior… if this stalker was in the wrong place mentally, it might not have made him back off. It might have made him more determined to ‘have’ Brooke, by any means necessary. And it also might have just pushed him further back into the shadows to avoid getting caught.
“How long ago was this?” she asked.
Jerod shrugged. “Three months or so.”
The detective returned to the room, putting his cell phone back into his pocket. “There’s no record of a stalker in Brooke’s file. It looks like she did come into the station to make a complaint, but she retracted it not long after. It’s there in the notes, but not in her main file – it wouldn’t have flagged up automatically.”
“She retracted it?” Bree frowned. “Why?”
“The notes say she felt she was mistaken as the stalker didn’t return,” the detective said. “Are you sure this was definite stalker behavior and not just a coincidence? Was there more than one incident?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Bree said. “He was creeping her out for a long while before he started to follow her. She told me she was scared of him. I don’t know why she would retract it.”
“Maybe she felt bad about making the report?” Laura suggested. “Was she that kind of person? Would she want to avoid getting someone else in trouble?”
“Probably,” Jerod said. For the first time, sadness seemed to overpower his anger for a moment. “She was a good person. Really good. I didn’t deserve her.”
“Don’t say that,” Bree snapped.
“It’s true.”
“And now it came true,” Bree said, looking furious. Like she thought the opinion alone had been enough for fate to do away with her sister.
“Do we have a name for this stalker?” Laura asked. She needed to interrupt whatever pettiness this was – something that could be solved between the two of them – and get to the meat of the matter.
“Floyd something,” Bree said. “I always remembered that – Floyd. Sounds like halfway between an old sad man, and that boxer guy.”
“Floyd Reedy,” the detective said. “That’s what it says in the file.”
“Right,” Laura said. There were more questions to be asked about Floyed Reedy, but they needed to be done away from the listening ears of Bree Ware and Jerod Frank. “Is there anything else you think we already know that you haven’t actually said out loud?”
Jerod and Bree looked at the floor. “Nope,” they both said, almost at the same time. They looked like guilty kids. They were probably only just now realizing that they themselves had ended up costing the investigation time, just by making assumptions that turned out to be incorrect.
“Then we’re going to go and follow this lead and see if it gets us anywhere,” Laura said, turning for the door. “In the meantime, please cooperate with the detective here. It’s imperative that we have as much information as possible to make sure we don’t miss anything.”
They nodded, and Laura and Nate walked out of the house with the detective following behind them.
“Do you need me to do anything?” the detective asked, clearly just as annoyed as they were about the way the family members were acting.
“Just keep an eye on them,” Laura said. After a moment’s thought she added. “And if one of them goes out, try to get someone to watch them. I wouldn’t put it past them for one of them to go and try to find this Floyd and take justice into their own hands.”
The detective nodded grimly. “Wouldn’t surprise me either.”
“In the meantime, we’d better go and try to track him down,” Nate said.
“You’re going to love this part,” the detective said. “I asked for his address when I was on the call – I figured you’d need it. Guess where he lives?”
“Where?” Laura asked, her heartbeat jumping in her chest. Was this about to be a big revelation in the case?
“Less than a block from the therapist’s office,” the detective said triumphantly.
Laura stared at Nate.
It looked like they had a viable suspect already, after all.
CHAPTER NINE
He sat down in the café and took the book out of his bag, taking great care with it. It was so old and dog-eared already, he was afraid he was going to end up knocking the cover right off one of these days. It didn’t matter how many times he read it over – each time, he discovered something new. He didn’t want to have to carry it around as looseleaf pages because he hadn’t taken good care of it.
He placed the book on the table and then saw with chagrin that his sleeve had ridden up. He tugged it back down quickly, hiding the scarring on his left arm. He knew he had been lucky that the damage was only to the surface of the arm and not his nerves or muscles, but it didn’t always feel that way. Not when people were staring at him or making comments.
Not when they were saying things behind his back like how it was such a shame, because he might have been good-looking if he didn’t have that. They might have hung out with him if it wasn’t for his weird scar. If he didn’t have that hiding under his clothes, they might have been interested in getting to know him more.
It was always the same.
He sniffed, taking a quick glance around to make sure no one had seen his skin before he hid it, then picked the book up carefully and reverentially. He placed his coffee cup further away on the table just in case someone came by and barged into the table and made it spill. He couldn’t risk it going over the book.
“Here’s your cake, sir,” the pretty barista said, coming by to drop it onto the table in front of him. He gave her a polite but uninterested smile and made sure that was far away from the book, too. He didn’t like raising his hopes by smiling at people, these days. And he definitely didn’t have time for anything that smiling might lead to, as if it ever was for him.
He carefully opened the book to his current favorite passage and reread it, going over each word carefully and turning it in his head, trying to get a feel for it. These words were important. These words needed to be held individually, then put back into their places, to be fully understood.
Things were like that sometimes since the accident. Needing to take it slow, consider it carefully. But he didn’t mind that part. That was something that made sense. Everyone could do to slow down a little more these days – that was what he thought. Not that he had been any different from any of them before.
He shook his head to rouse himself away from old dreams and old memories, pushing them aside. There was no point in clinging onto something that was long gone now. He had to focus.
He read the words one more time, but in reality he was thinking about the next one. He was looking forward to this one. He was looking forward to them all, really. He felt like he was moving his way through a checklist, a to-do list. It had that satisfying feeling one got when finishing a task and being able to cross it off or check the box. It was a good feeling. The kind that triggered the pleasure centers in your brain. He liked to look back at his list, whether mentally or physically, and see that two names were already removed from it. That made him feel like he was getting somewhere.
There was still far enough to go, of course, and it was too early to celebrate yet. But it was good to know that the work you were doing was actually making a difference. To feel those miles still yet to travel starting to disappear under your feet.
He refocused his thoughts as he set the book aside for a moment and sipped at his coffee, bringing the cake closer to take a bite. It was sweet, but nothing would taste as good as getting his whole list checked off. Of course, with any project, once he had finished, there would be another goal to aim towards. But this one would be perfect for now.
Tonight, he was going to check one more thing off his to-do list. His bucket list, even. And it was going to feel so good that the cake was like a celebration in advance – a celebration that couldn’t even come close to comparing to the high of the real thing.
CHAPTER TEN
“We’re nearly there.”
Laura looked up at Nate’s words, startled out of her thoughts. “Right,” she said.
Nate made a sound in the back of his throat.
“What?” Laura asked.
“Just text him,” Nate said. “I mean, you’re not up to the level of sending fifteen texts a day yet, right?”
“God, no,” Laura said, horrified. “I’ve sent him maybe ten texts total across the last couple of weeks. And he replied to one, so it’s not even ten in a row.”
“Okay, so text him,” Nate said. “Stop staring at your phone miserably and text him. Then you can get back to the case. Or better yet, give him a call. If he answers, I’ll take this interview on my own.”
“With a suspect?” Laura said, dubiously. What if the suspect tried to run and Laura wasn’t there to help?
“Just stop making up reasons not to and do it,” Nate said. “When it’s done, you can join me.”
Laura decided the best thing to do was what Nate told her, and she hit the call button on her screen without allowing herself to think too much about it.
It was when she put it to her ear and heard the dial tone that the nerves hit her.
What if Chris didn’t answer? What if he did answer and told her to go away? What if he blocked her number because she was calling him too often?
The tone rang again. Again. Again.
The voicemail kicked in, telling her in an electronic voice to record a message for Chris for when he got back to the phone.
She canceled the call and sighed, slumping deeper in her chair.
“He’s probably busy,” Nate said easily, and Laura wished she had his confidence.
In reality, he was probably screening her calls. She’d spoken to him when he was at work before. Outside of actually doing surgery, he had plenty of other responsibilities that kept him in his office – paperwork, training, and all kinds of other things she didn’t even know about. And if he was unable to answer at the time she called or messaged him, he always got back to her later.
Always – except for the last two weeks.
He was avoiding her, wasn’t he? She already knew that, but – not avoiding: ghosting. That was what people called it nowadays. Laura had been out of the dating scene for so long before Chris that she was almost unfamiliar with the lingo, but she knew that was what he was doing. Just ignoring her, letting her drift away without an answer. She was never going to hear from him again.
This was how things between them ended.
Laura groaned, holding a hand against her forehead. This had all happened because she had been stupid enough to try to tell him the truth. Why had she suddenly had this urge to be open and honest? Lying had worked with her for everyone else in her life for thirty-three years, give or take. Telling the truth to Nate had been an anomaly, but she’d treated it like it was a new rule. What had she even imagined was next? Admitting it to Lacey? To Marcus? To Chief Rondelle? Amy Fallow? Where did it end?
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