Rue had always been skeptical about a sexual assault motive when it came to our case. Ford hadn’t been a student for years, and his social circle was nonexistent. Navid Kordestani didn’tfit Jesse’s crowd. We explored it minimally, but with no further supporting evidence, we hit a wall, and it was quickly dismissed.
The other suspects didn’t pan out either. Fatemeh’s alibi cleared her. Laurent St. Pierre’s did the same for him. From there, we had little to work with.
Four weeks passed with no new bodies. Interest in the case waned. By week six, the case got shifted aside for new ones. It didn’t vanish, but it accumulated dust. Golding wasn’t pleased, but when she spent an evening scouring the collected data and interviews, she had to admit we were right. Unless new evidence presented itself, the case was stagnant.
Yates haunted me like a tormented ghost. I waited for his conscience to surface, anticipating he would come forward with the truth at any moment, but it never happened. More than once at the start or end of his shift, I caught him watching me from across the bullpen. I never filed the report for misconduct, nor did I learn how he knew about Angelique’s death. As time passed, I wondered if his comment to Jolie that fateful day had been nothing more than a desperate man’s means of placating a woman he’d wronged.
Bastian was supposed to relay to his sister that I would not be pursuing Yates, and since she didn’t grace the police department again, I assumed she got my message.
Yates could have been waiting for me to ruin his career, or he could have been seeking confirmation that I knew about Dominique. We locked eyes only once, and in that brief glance, he tried to translate something I didn’t understand. I feigned ignorance, and he dismissed me with a wave of his hand.
From that point forward, I pretended he didn’t exist.
I stopped sleeping. Elifet knew I’d broken up with Dominique, but he couldn’t understand my slump, nor could I explain it. We hung out on Sundays to watch football, but I’d lost my perky edge. Nothing was the same anymore. Things that hadonce brought me joy barely penetrated the shell that had grown around my heart.
Every day, I reminded myself that I’d made the right decision, but every day, I questioned if that decision was a mistake.
Refusing to ignore my obligation to Émeric, I took him out twice a week, but my energy was low, and he noticed. Delphine asked if I was okay, and I smiled and lied to her face.
I was not okay, and the longer I sat with it, the more I realized it had nothing to do with letting a killer walk free.
I missed Dominique. His crooked smile. His affinity for strong drinks. His passion for cooking and the endless summaries of the dry nonfiction books he adored.
I missed watching him be a father to Cosette, seeing the way she snuggled against him when she got tired, tucking her head under his chin and playing with the ends of his hair. Every stage of her life was depicted in photographs around Dominique’s house. A story of love I couldn’t ignore. One I had wished to someday be part of. Summers in the pool. Birthdays with cake and ice cream. Jumping in the fall leaves. Making wishes on dandelions.
I spent countless nights at the station, poring over the case with fresh eyes, ensuring there was nothing that could draw a line to Dominique. In my examination, little things stood out. The Timberland boot print, a man’s size ten and a half. I’d absently watched him lace those boots before a trip to the hills to toboggan. The cursive writing on the notes left at the crime scene, which I’d said on day one pointed to someone over thirty-five. I’d seen the same writing in the margins of his books and on the grocery list pinned to his fridge.
Two distinctly prominent clues, yet our suspect pool had consisted primarily of young, female university students.
Something about the forensics surrounding perfume extraction from the rose bothered me. Delving deeper intoGoogle, I discovered the science behind it wasn’t as impossible as Dominique’s friend, Dr. Housing, had claimed. From there, I researched Dr. Delmar Housing himself and could find no doctor in the field by that name living in Ontario or Quebec. The email address Dominique had given me was a clever misdirection, and I’d bought it hook, line, and sinker.
When I originally reviewed the video footage from Dominique’s gym, it was to confirm Fatemeh’s alibi. Viewing it a second time, something stood out. I’d missed it in my initial perusal because I hadn’t been focused on Dominique. His name was on the list of patrons who had swiped in early on Christmas morning, but he did not appear on any of the cameras. He had never entered the building.
I thought of his return to the house on Christmas morning. Waking to his hungry appetite. Freshly showered, Dominique had taken me with a heightened level of fervor. I’d been left marked, but so had he, a realization that had surprised me later that morning since I hadn’t been nearly as rough in return. The bruise by his eye. The scratch along his jaw. They weren’t from me. Malik had fought back. Whatever happened during that encounter, I might never know. One thing was for sure. Dominique had been off his game that night. Things had gone wrong.
I should have felt disgusted or horrified to discover that the man I’d been sleeping with had killed four men in cold blood, but those emotions were absent. I’d never been able to summon pity for our victims because I’d suspected from day one that they were despicable human beings.
Did that make me any better than Dominique?
Instead of revulsion or dismay, I felt vacant. The world passed me by, and I was no longer part of it. People talked around me, but I couldn’t properly engage. Was it guilt? It didn’t feel like guilt.
It felt an awful lot like heartbreak.
The first letter arrivedin mid-February. A simple white envelope with my name on it was mailed to the police station and left on my desk. Inside, I discovered a crayon drawing of what appeared to be a person, done by an artist who I assumed was quite young. Odd arcing marks I didn’t understand had been added to the arms and legs. At the top, in rough, nearly illegible letters, was what passed as a signature. It took a second before I identified enough letters to form the name.
Cosette.
My eyes stung as I flipped it over and discovered more writing on the back. Printed in tiny letters at the bottom of the page, encased in quotation marks, was what I assumed was a direct quote. “C’est Kobe. Il fait un ange de neige.”
A snow angel. I saw it now, and my heart ached for the little girl I didn’t get a chance to know better.
The second letter arrived in late April. The case had long since died, but my unrest had not. Inside the envelope, I discovered a photograph of a sunset over a body of water. Although breathtakingly rendered in a multitude of pastel colors, it was not what the photographer wanted me to see.
A handful of budding trees lined the shore, their shadows stretching across the short expanse of terrain to a low wooden fence in the foreground. The fence seemed to mark the perimeter of a backyard. The yard was populated by dozens of bright yellow dandelions.
Mid-May, a new letter arrived. A new photograph. The sun sat higher in the sky. The trees boasted vibrant spring leaves. In the yard, the dandelions had gone to seed. The angle of the photograph was different than the first, like the photographer was crouching. Floating close to the camera’s lens were a handful of loose seeds, traveling on an unseen air current as though they had been recently set free with a puff of breath.
The envelope also contained a folded piece of paper. On the paper was a single line of text.What would you wish for?
