“A dental convention,” he muses. “Do you know her little finger was removed with a surgical instrument? One, say, that adentistmight have access to?”
I shake my head at the implication.
Mace leans in, those dark caterpillar brows of his do a little dance along his forehead. “Do you remember who else had a finger missing?”
“Shit.” It’s as if someone unplugged the entire world, and the room grows strangely dim. The music grinds down to destitute levels. It’s all I can do to remain upright.
“Hey”—Mace grips me by the arm and gives a hearty shake—“do not pass out on me. Pull it together.”
I drag my eyes to meet with my brother’s. Growing up, it was always Mace who came to my rescue. It was Mace who warded off the bullies and the bad guys. After our father took off, it was Mace who was the man of the house, thereby allowing me to be the carefree kid who would eventually make enough mistakes for the both of us—for the neighborhood, hell, for the entire Western Hemisphere.
“Who’s doing this?” The words crawl out of my throat like maggots. “And why?”
“Pete, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be tracking down the motherfucker with a machete.” The muscles in his jaw pop because he meant every word. “But I do believe somewhere in that ball of knowledge that sits on your shoulders lies the answers. Who did you infuriate?” He shakes his head, his demanding stone blue eyes heavily glued to mine.
I gulp down half my beer trying to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. “Erwin Wilson is serving a life sentence under psychiatric care for the murder of my wife.” I glance to Mace, and he shakes his head.
“Try again.”
A moment of strained silence thickens the air between us. The moment I stop believing that Erwin Wilson bludgeoned Simone in our living room all those frightening years ago is the moment I begin to unravel.
“That’s the real reason I called you here.” I rap my knuckles against the bar as if calling court to order, a foreboding irony in and of itself. “I think we need to peel back the past, one painful layer at a time.” I hold him firmly in my gaze while my heart does the death rattle on its way up my throat. Once I say the next few words, all hell is going to break loose. Who am I kidding? It already has. “Deep down, I have always questioned Erwin’s involvement with Simone’s murder.”
His eyes widen just a touch. “Forensics—”
“I don’t give a shit about forensics.” I lean in hard, glaring at this older version of myself without meaning to. “I do not care about the judicial system that put him behind bars either. Something nefarious has been eating up my existence and those around me ever since I lost Isla and Henry.” My vocal cords threaten to knot up when I say their names. My God, I don’t think I’ve so much as whispered them ever since that night I shared their names with Ree. I haven’t even spoken of them to Lilly and Jack. Ree has been the translator of all things macabre. She’s been the rock I’ve needed her to be, my mouthpiece, the binding which holds my sanity together.
Mace takes a deep breath, widening his chest to the size of a city. “You want me to reopen my investigation?”
I give a single nod. I know what shit ride it was the first time. The endless hours that were lost all dragging us in one slow, bloody circle. We ended at the same place we started, with nothing. The police arrested Erwin relatively quickly, less than twenty-four hours into their investigation. It all seemed like such a relief at the time, but in the back of my mind, it felt a little too easy, a little too convenient for my complicated life. I was still guilty in the court of public opinion.
Erwin was prosecuted quickly and shuffled off to what amounts to a detention center for the criminally insane, and that was it. One big neat judicial bow was put on the case, and I was free to go on with the rest of my life. But that nagging feeling that this was wrong, that this, whateverthisis, was far from over, never quite left me. Not before Ree, not after.
I have never been able to shake the feeling that lurking in the shadows of my life was someone, something waiting to burn everything down around me. My dead children, my dead wife were not enough. I could feel its thirst for me ramping up. And yet I wondered what more there was to give. But now there are three things, three people I would go to the ends of the earth to protect, and I will.
“This is where you come in,” I whisper as I knock my beer softly to his. “You, my brother, are going to figure out this jigsaw puzzle that something far more evil than fate has thrown at my feet. I don’t think it was a coincidence anymore that Ree found that body at the school function a few weeks back. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Loretta St. James ended up dead at the same hotel I was staying at. And I don’t want to wait until another seeming coincidence pops up in my life.”
A thought hits me, a brick wall of a revelation that I had openly overlooked up until now.
“Her finger was missing.” I blink over at my brother, stifling the urge to vomit. “The woman Ree found. The prostitute.”
Mace looks dazed as if I had thrown him. It’s not uncommon for us to berate my shitty life when we get together, but today I took it up to a whole other level. Not to mention the fact I’m dragging him right back into my personal wormhole.
“Where do I start?” He gives his beer an absentminded twirl. “I’ll see about getting in and speaking with Erwin again.”
“Good.” Something in me loosens as if our feet had finally hit terra firma again after all these years. “I’m going with you.”
“I didn’t think you’d miss it.”
“I will miss everything once they pin Loretta’s death on me. And that prostitute?” I shake my head, afraid to verbalize the obvious. “I’m not being paranoid, Mace.”
“I never said you were.” And those are the most frightening words my brother has ever spoken. “I suggest we move quickly. The clock is ticking, and the minute hand is not in your favor.”
“It never has been.” I can’t think of a single thing that has.
Slowly, ever so painfully, we’re opening Simone’s proverbial casket one creak at a time as the foul stench of the past permeates everything good about my life and smothers me once again in those dark, inescapable days that I’m forever trapped in.
My God, let me be wrong. Let this all be a mindfuck of a coincidence. Let there be nothing to see. Let us move on.
But deep down in my gut, I know better than that.
