Rowan told me how they went through everything, the whole list of questions we ask people who have had their identity stolen. About IDs and credit cards. About new friends, theirs or their family members’. Wade Austin is married with two grown kids, and he called them while Rowan stood by. He checked his credit cards and bank statements while our office ran his social security number for any loan applications or title searches.
His identity wasn’t stolen. Just his name. Just as a cover.
There was no way to know how long the tall man had been using it.
They went through other possible leads and came upempty-handed. There was nothing found on me or my car—no fibers or skin or hair. The flowers were cheap and came in no wrapping. Probably from a grocery store.
Rowan sent me photos of blue trucks, hoping I could narrow the search by make or model, or even the shade of blue. But I had not been focused on the truck. There might be something on the surveillance cameras from the parking lot at the station yesterday to compare with what they had from outside Nichols. Maybe we could get a glimpse of the license plate sticker taped inside the back window. Maybe we could get an expert to ID the make and model. Lots of maybes.
An hour later I’m still in my kitchen, the sky pitch black, wearing the scarf, two bags of frozen vegetables pressed to my hip bones. I stare at a cup of coffee, piecing together what happened on that deserted road, seeing it in flashes of fragmented moments. I try to distance myself, to see it as a case, one we’ve just pulled from an old file.
What would we notice? How he turned on a dime when he stopped believing that I trusted him. When he lost hope that he could forge some kind of connection between us. Was this what Dr. Landyn had warned me about? The worship of rescuers? The need to believe that something larger than chance had brought us together? Because then the horrors of that day would not be random, but purposeful. Preordained. Random acts implied they could happen again for no reason and with no warning. They could happen walking to the park or going to a movie or shopping for pants at a department store.
Or was it something deeper? A personality disorder? A dissociative psychosis? A more dangerous pathology?
He accused me of knowing things about him. He’d cast himself as a hero, willing to draw fire to save those who’d run or hidden. To save the pregnant woman. Did he believe this? Or was he using it to pull me in?
I search online and see that Rowan is right. Nothing comes up for Wade Austin except abare-bonesLinkedIn profile. The last name—Austin—makes it impossible to home in beyond this. He’s an insurance employee. If I take away that one word,insurance, I start to see every man named Wade who lives in Austin, Texas.
I get pulled deeper into my mind by the growing fear of this stranger I let into my world.
The clock ticks on the wall above the sink. The sky turns from black to blue with the rising sun. The frozen peas and carrots have thawed. I put them back in the freezer. The swelling has gone down, so I wipe off my skin with a dish towel, zip up my jeans.
I’m good at thinking, I tell myself. I’ve learned to channel the disquiet in my brain. Now it’s my job. It’s what I’ve done as a teacher and, before that, as a student. Spinning thoughts. Tornadoes. Rabbit holes that have no end, burrowing deeper and deeper into darkness. But sometimes they lead to the truth.
I go back to the beginning. To why I followed Wade Austin out of town.
It was basic. Primal. The screaming toddler that had hijacked my brain.
Human need.Every crime I’ve ever studied. Every crime I’ve ever solved. Every story I’ve lived and heard about people hurting people. It all funnels down to this one concept.
The need for love. The need for money. The need for revenge. The need for justice. The need for safety,self-defense, the protection of others. The need for power. The need to protect pride and ego. The need to soothe some beast inside. A beast of anger. A beast of fear. A beast of disquiet. A beast of pain.
What I needed from Wade scares me. The chorus had been loud, telling me it was irrational. That I had done everything right, regardless of the unanswered questions about Clay Lucas and his reason for firing his gun in that store. That it was just my anxiety taking control. I didn’t listen. Not to Mitch or Rowan or Dr. Landyn.
What I did to satisfy that need is terrifying.
But the question lingers in my mind—what had this man needed from me? His crime against me does not feel like the place to begin this investigation.
A stripe of orange appears at the edge of the sky that I see through my neighbor’s backyard, just as I hear heavy feet come down the stairs in the front of our house. They stop in the foyer outside the study, then continue, growing closer.
Mitch joins me in the kitchen. He looks surprised. “I thought you’d gone to the sofa,” he says.
I shake my head, and he pulls me into an embrace. He’d held me through the night, and for the first time since the shooting, I’d stayed in our bed. I run my hand down his back, press my face into his shirt. He sighs before releasing me.
“There’s coffee,” I tell him.
He pours a travel mug to the top, screws on the cap.
“Is that for the girls?” he asks, peeking behind the scarf to see the bruising.
“And the office. They don’t need to know the extent of it.”
He moves through the room, grabbing a PowerBar and a water bottle. Mitch is a proud man, but he knows he can’t get involved. He knows Rowan and the rest of the department will be looking for Wade with resources he can’t begin to match.
None of this placates him. He needs to do something more than hold me while I sleep.
“Hey...” I stop him as he begins to turn away. “I couldn’t get through this without you.”
