I tell him that yes, I might be able to help. After all, this is what I do. Solve impossible cases.
“Be my guest,” Aaron says.
ChapterThirty-Eight
the kill room
I use my key to go in through the back door. I smell coffee. Really shitty coffee.
“Elise?” I call out. I hear movement upstairs, which concerns me. She hasn’t left the house since she put that envelope on my windshield. I found her here the next day.
She sleeps all day. Scours the file on the 404 all night, watching the footage from the cameras, fueled by the shitty coffee and the voice inside her head that’s fighting to climb out of the depression. This is the next stage, Dr. Landyn has assured me. It’s normal. It’s progress. Don’t I remember? Landyn has no idea how good I am at making myself forget.
“She couldn’t let herself go there until the crisis was over,” he explained.
The first trauma was the shooting in the men’s department of Nichols Depot. The second was the assault. And the third, the stalking by Brett Emory. The ongoing threat has kept her in an elevated survival state. Now that it’s over and she’s come down from that high, the pain of each trauma has to be processed. So now we wait. Me. Mitch. The little wardens.
She carries a prepaid phone with her so she can call them, which she does throughout the day. Mitch wants to come home. The wardens are on the fence. They miss their mom, but not school and homework. Amy, though, has been doing her assignments online. Fourth grade can be a bitch. I check in with them after each call with their mom. They all know something isn’t right, so it falls on me to reassure them.
Elise says she doesn’t want anyone else to know she’s here, holed up in her house. So she leaves her real phone off. But I think maybe she doesn’t want to be reminded of the messages that used to come. The live feed of her girls at school. The warnings that he could get to them if he wanted to. I make a note to buy her a new phone. Erase the history.
Sometimes I sit with her in the dark while she stares out a window. I ramble about work, benign stuff. Nothing about wrapping up the 404 case or the ongoing search for the gun dealer. I tell her that when she gets back, I’ll let her pick the oldest box in the basement, the worst dogshit case we’ve got. And I’ll work it with her start to finish, no matter how tedious it becomes. Hell, I’d help her find a missing cat if she’d dig herself out of this hole.
Other times she tries to respond, talking about what the wardens did with their grandmother and Mitch that day. Now that the threat is gone, they’d been venturing out. Disney was on their agenda, and I got her to smile by talking about Mitch riding on “it’s a small world.” But that smile led to tears like the emotions were walking in lockstep. Joy and despair.
She says she’ll never be the same, having killed Clay Lucas. She says she sees his eyes, his face, in her dreams at night. Twisted, dark dreams that replay that moment. It doesn’t matter what I tell her. How many people I’ve killed. How it gets easier to live with. We all go to our graves covered in the scars from the things we’ve done and the things done to us. Nothing helps her.
There has to be more. I know there is. But now is not the time. Dr. Landyn says to be patient, so I am. But covering her ass on the job just got a hell of a lot harder.
“Elise? I’m coming up!”
I walk through a house that used to bustle with energy. Lights on, kids playing. Food in the oven or waiting in a takeout bag on the counter. Mitch always had shit to talk about, guy shit because he was outnumbered here, his deep voice bellowing about the cost of lumber or some project in the garage. And Elise, quietly soaking it in, letting it fill her up and now there’s, what? Dark. Quiet. This can’t be helping.
I find her asleep in Amy’s bed, ahalf-emptyglass of scotch on the floor beside it. I kneel beside her and touch her shoulder.
“Hey. It’s me. We need to talk.”
Back in the kitchen, I make a fresh pot of coffee. She sits at the table and stares at nothing. The next stage is supposed to be acceptance, then hope. I’d settle for some caustic sarcasm.
I start out slowly. “They found a body, Elise. Remains.”
This gets her attention. I thought it might.
I tell her everything, start to finish. The similarity to her posts. The drugs. The Kill Room.
“And Laurel Hayes—she’s alive. They found her, which, frankly, makes us look like schmucks. They used our file to track her to her friend’s house. It was all right there.”
Finally, she speaks. “What did we miss?”
I see a spark of light and hold my breath, praying for another. “The camera outside Clear Horizons. We were looking for Clay Lucas. They were looking for anyone suspicious—a man, in particular.” I tell her about the young investigator from the state team who spotted the guy at the bus stop day after day. “Sometimes he wore a red jacket—and they found a red jacket hanging on the back of the door inside the shelter.”
It takes her a second, but then she draws a long breath. She’s coming back to life. “It couldn’t be seen when the door was open,” she says, more to herself than to me.
“Right.”
“Still...”
“I know. A serious fuckup. They found traces of drugs in the pockets. Then more of the same in the well outside.”
