‘I know. You’re a good person.’
‘Thanks, but it’s not my morals here. It’s my professionalism. This case … it started out as who killed Ash Aspen. Well, we’re all but certain the answer is Troy Fairglass. I’ll see what he says when we can speak to him as opposed to Jingo – and I’m certain we will – but as Judge, Jury and Executioner, I’m betting he did it in defence of a third party. He did it to save Kate from whatever horrors Aspen spewed at him. Troy hasn’t got a single ding on his record. Now that could be his daddy dearest bribing people to wipe things clean, but his penthouse suite didn’t show any weird perversions, no weapons, no unusual wads of cash. No red flags besides the fact that the place is a little cold.’
‘You’d clear him of killing Aspen.’
‘Yeah, I would. I’ll speak to him first, but if it falls out the way I expect it to, yeah, I would. So the heart of the case shifts, because we know who did it and almost certainlywhy. Now the case is trying to save Troy from Jingo. And if I can’t get Jingo out and have Troy breathing at the end … then I’ve failed. And I really hate that.’
‘It might happen,’ Robbie said grimly. ‘You have to brace yourself for that. You can’t win them all.’
‘No, I can’t, and there are open cases and cold cases that prove that. My dad’s murder, for one. But …’ I shook my head. ‘Kate wouldn’t get over it if we failed. She’d blame me, I think. And our friendship would be over before it got a chance to start.’
Robbie squeezed my hand. ‘I think you underestimate her and your budding relationship, but I understand your fears. I’m just not sure we can save Troy.’
I let out a sigh. That was the crux of the issue. Could he be saved? Or was hosting a doppelganger always a death sentence?
When I entered my flat, the tension was so high it was like slamming into a wall.
I looked between Ji-ho and Channing. ‘Hey, what’s going on?’
Channing looked down at the table, jaw working.
‘Ji-ho?’ Iasked.
My friend was unnaturally still. He wasn’t bopping or bouncing, but frozen, his face a rictus of misery so intense that I closed the distance between us and pulled him into a hug.
‘It’s okay,’ I murmured. ‘Whatever it is, it’s okay.’
I was surprised when I felt him shake, when tears started to fall. When he pulled back from me, eyes haunted, my gut clenched.
‘You were so fucking young, Stacy, to go through that.’ Ji-ho’s voice was barely a whisper.
Robbie came up behind me and rested a hand on the small of my back, offering silent support.
With effort, I kept my voice brisk and businesslike. ‘You found my file.’ It was a statement, not a question. I knew that horror. I remembered it in my mum’s eyes when she saw what had been done to me.
‘I – yes,’ Ji-ho admitted. ‘I found a lead. A small one. An addendum, buried in a footnote in a file, stated that someone claimed not to have been responsible for his actions. He claimed to have been controlled by a doppelganger. I dug into it and … well, none of the usual procedural steps were taken. He was shuffled into Wraithmore without a trial.’
I went cold. Everyone who went to Wraithmore got a trial. That was the deal. The Inspectors were Judge, Jury and Executioner. When the kill order came in, we followed it. But some deserved to suffer. Deserved the humiliation of a trial and the constraint of imprisonment. There was no rehabilitation programme at Wraithmore, no parole for good behaviour. There was just the damned and locked up, with little to no hope of freedom ever again. In some ways, it was the crueller fate for the very worst of us. For some, death was too easy.
But everyone there was supposed to get a trial. That’s why we compiled evidence so thoroughly – for those few we confined and chucked away the key.
I swallowed hard, because I was no idiot. There was a reason Ji-ho had brought up my case first.
‘Who?’ I asked tightly. ‘Who claimed they were controlled by a doppelganger?’
‘Vance Broadlake.’
My ears rang as the name of my childhood kidnapper dropped from Ji-ho’s lips.
Chapter Thirteen
Robbie’s soft touch on my back had become a firm hold around me, his arms all but holding me up. I tried to fight my racing heart, the ringing in my ears, the tunnelling of my vision.
The living space tilted, like the floor had decided straight lines were optional. The air felt too thick in my lungs, and my fingers went cold and clumsy at my sides.
I fixed my gaze on a single point on the wall and forced myself to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way my therapist had drilled into me until it became muscle memory.
I’d been braced for that name to fall from Ji-ho’s lips, yet the visceral rip of pure fear at hearing it left me wanting to vomit.
