I bite the inside of my lower lip, dragging it between my teeth until the burn steadies me.
“Kade Rourke thinks Mercer is connected to the Ozark Butcher from the eighties,” I say. “He believes Mercer had something to do with the explosion in 1998.”
Her eyes widen. Her hands press flat against the table, her palms damp from sweat.
“Not here,” she whispers.
“That will be all, Dr. Beckett,” she says. “Kade Rourke is a man dealing with loss. He doesn’t know what to think.”
She knows something.
“Can you take me home, Detective Collins?” I ask. “That would make me feel safe.”
She nods, standing quickly, and gestures toward the door.
“Of course.”
I hold Daisy closer. Poor soul hasn’t made a sound ever since we got to the station.
The hallway swallows the cold room behind us, but the chill stays lodged in my bones. Officers look up as we pass. Their eyes fixed on me, on whatever they think I might be hiding.
Detective Collins doesn’t help the unease. She moves quickly, as if slowing down would let something slip out.
Outside, the air is cold and wet, the rain still clinging to it. I’ve only been inside the station for an hour and a half, yet the morning hasn’t moved on. It’s still not even nine. I still have to go to the Institute.
She unlocks her gray sedan without looking back. I climb in. She waits until the seatbelt clicks before turning the key.
Daisy presses against my chest, her nose tucked beneath my collarbone. She’s still shaking.
The engine hums. Tires roll over wet pavement.
Neither of us speaks.
“What I say now,” she exhales as she pulls onto the road, “stays between us.”
I look at her, blinking.
“Got it?” she says, her voice sharper now.
“Okay,” I reply, irritation creeping in. “I got it.”
“The station is corrupt enough,” she says, her hands firm on the wheel, eyes fixed straight ahead. “I don’t want the wrong information getting into the wrong hands.”
She takes a breath before continuing.
“There was an explosion in 1998. Police and firefighters discovered four bodies. All four were patients locked inside the Halden Institute, convicted as criminally insane. The head of the hospital was Dr. Alistair Cermer Morrell. He opened a secret government project called Project Gemini,” she says. “All I know is that he experimented on convicts. When one of them died, he claimed to shut the project down in the late summer of 1980. No one knew it continued until the explosion. That is when they found the doctor dead.”
She turns her head slightly toward me.
“The government silenced everyone. They sealed the case as X-Files. Rourke was one of the officers on desk duty when those files were locked away.”
“He thinks Mercer is connected,” I say.
Her jaw tightens. “The doctor who performed the autopsy on Mercer’s last victim found DNA. When it was matched, it came back as the Ozark Butcher. And as Zayne Mercer.” She swallows. “Not just a match.”
She looks at me.
“Identical.”
