Relief flooded through me, though I couldn’t quite explain why it mattered so much. She could have left—should have, probably, given the complications this would inevitably create. But she was here, warm and solid, and I found I didn’t want to let her go just yet.
We lay there in comfortable silence, her breathing gradually evening out. My own thoughts drifted, circling back to the note, to the reason I’d gone to the precinct in the first place. She was safe here. Whatever the note had meant, whatever threat it implied, it hadn’t materialized tonight.
Tomorrow I’d have to think about it more carefully, analyze what it meant, what I should do. But for now, with Detective Shay Sawyer sleeping in my arms, I let myself just be.
* **
Once morning came, there was little of the woman from the night before. It was like a switch had been flipped. The intimacy of the previous hours had vanished, replaced by a wall of professional detachment. Detective Sawyer was already halfway dressed, her fingers making quick work of the buttons on her shirt.
I sat up, the sheets pooling around my waist. “Do you want any coffee?” I asked, my voice rough with sleep. “I can make a pot.”
She didn’t look up, her focus entirely on tucking her shirt into her waistband. “It’s fine. I should get going anyway. I need to shower and change before I head in.”
“Right. Of course.”
It looked like I had nothing to worry about, after all. Detective Sawyer gave every impression of wanting to treat the previous night as a one-time thing, which was… for the best, really. I told myself I was fine with that. Not that I needed the reminder. It wasn’t as though I’d expected anything else.
An odd sound cut through the room, low and insistent, making Detective Sawyer groan. She leaned across the bed to retrieve her phone from the nightstand. “Sawyer,” she answered. There was a brief pause. “What’s the address? Yeah. Okay. I’ll meet you there.”
And here I was beginning to wonder…
After the night passed without any incident, it became obvious that my friend had chosen to make a different stop. Was it my presence that derailed their plan, or had I worked myself up over nothing? I wondered.
Detective Sawyer grabbed her jacket and paused at the door, looking back at me. “Are you coming or not?”
I got out of bed, nearly stumbling over the jeans left on thefloor. “Give me five minutes.”
We drove in silence, interrupted only by the occasional chime of the GPS system.
Detective Sawyer was focused on the road, her thumb tapping against the steering wheel in a rhythm only she could hear. I studied the way the morning light caught her profile, tracing the edge of her cheekbone while shadows settled into the hollow of her throat. It was strange to think that I had my lips pressed against that same spot only a few short hours ago.
Detective Sawyer turned her head in my direction, as if sensing where my thoughts had headed. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, looking back at the road. Thankfully, a pair of police cruisers came into view, their lights casting restless streaks of red and blue across the row of houses up ahead. When we pulled up, Naomi was waiting outside the perimeter, a heavy winter jacket zipped to her chin. She ducked beneath the yellow tape once she spotted us.
“Walk me through what we know.” Detective Sawyer got straight to business.
Naomi fell in step beside her as we crossed the street. “Victim is male, late-twenties. A neighbor called it in about an hour ago.”
On the floor near the threshold, a rolled-up towel had been shoved against the base. The hinges gave a long, complaining creak as we stepped inside. The place was mostly bare, save for a few necessities. A battered coffee table blistered with cigarette burns sat in the center, flanked by an old armchair and a couch that sagged in the middle, one of the cushions ripped halfway down the seams to reveal yellow foam. To the right, a small kitchenette shrank into the corner like an afterthought. A single burner hot plate sat in place of a stove,its coil blackened from overuse. A stack of unopened mail was left out beside it, held down by a cracked ashtray filled with pennies.
The body itself was sprawled in the center of the room, limbs angled out like a crude star drawn by a child.
The sheer volume of blood made it hard to make sense of the injuries at first. It pooled thick around the torso, dark and viscous, spreading outward on the carpet like a jagged halo. Arterial spray marked the wall to the right, the spatter tapering off near the rusty sink in grim, abstract art.
But it was the left arm that caught my eye. Or what remained of it, anyway.
The hand had been severed just above the wrist; however, it wasn’t a clean dismemberment. There was no precision in it, no finesse, which surprised me somewhat. The cut had been made in a sawing motion—savage, almost frantic. The bone was splintered, jagged shards poking through the flesh. Some of the muscles had retracted into the forearm, tendons exposed like wires fraying under strain, with blood spattering in a radial arc outward from the wrist.
It seemed that the killer had decided not to take a trophy this time around. The hand lay a short distance away, palm-up, fingers curled in a frozen spasm.
This wasn’t what I had expected.
I’d seen my friend’s work before. While they weren’t indifferent toward the victims, the killings themselves always struck me as somewhat detached, systematic. This was something else.
Detective Sawyer stood a few feet away, her gaze steady on the scene. She hadn’t spoken a word since we entered, her eyes tracking the spatter and pooling like she was mappingsomething invisible, building a story from the evidence scattered across the room.
Whatever had happened here, it hadn’t gone entirely to plan. Even I could see that. This felt rushed. Emotional. Sloppy. There were footprints in the blood—partial smears, slipping, sliding. A struggle that went on too long.
