I need you here assessing pies immediately. It’s a pie emergency
I don’t even put my phone down because I know Noah’s probably sitting at his kitchen table plotting to take over the world.
Noah
you are a weird fucking dude
also, be right over
I snort and head to my coffee machine to prepare a fresh pot to go with the pie assessment.
I tracked Callie long enough yesterday to make sure she got back to Portland safely. She visited with her half-sister—which I know because Noah had Meadow’s address as he’s apparently as much of a stalker as I am—and then she took the train home. I haven’t been able to bring myself to disable the tracking devices and software on her phone, which I know is fucked up, but I’ll get there eventually.
I press the blue blinking light to start the coffee machine and sink into one of the kitchen chairs. This is the chair that I zip-tied Callie to on that first day, after I slid a needle in her neck out in the woods. She was so angry.
In hindsight, I wanted her from the first second I saw her watching me outside of Maine Coffee Co, and even more so when she was screaming at me to untie her instead of crying or begging. Even when Ididuntie her, she was still mad. Especially because I then gave her spiked hot chocolate.
She has trust issues for sure, but Callie never looked at me like I was a monster. Even when she followed me and Noah to that alleyway in Boston and watched us take out Chad Smith. She was far more pissed that I’d left her alone in the apartment than the fact that I’d helped Noah murder a guy. It was only in our last conversation that she looked at me like I was something bad.
Part of me wonders if she was purposely pushing me away, but the thing is, Iambad. For her, at least. I’m not what she wants or needs, and I have to respect that, because I can’t change it. I drop my head into my hands just as the door swings open.
“Christ.” Noah shakes his head and closes the door behind him. “Are you crying about Callie?”
“I’m not crying.” I lean forward and press my palms to my cheeks. Yup. I’m crying.
“Wes—” Noah’s face softens, and he approaches the kitchen table.
“No.” I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say about this. I know letting her go is the right thing to do. I’m doing that. But I don’t have to fucking like it.”
“If you?—”
“Please. Noah. I don’t want to talk about it.” Part of me is desperate to know what he was about to say, but there’s no point in torturing myself further. “Not yet, anyway. I’m not ready.”
Noah takes a breath as if to talk but seems to think better of it.
“Can we just taste the pies?” I plead. “Ruth Roy’s been posting again and it’s driving me nuts.”
Noah stares at me for a long minute, then nods.
“I swear to god, that old lady is a serial killer.” He slides his jacket off and tosses it onto my couch.
I chuckle. “She’s a horrible human being, but I highly doubt she’s a serial killer.”
“I found out more that I haven’t told you.”
“Yeah?” The coffee pot steams and beeps as it finishes brewing. I head to the kitchen as Noah sits across from my chair. “Go on. What do you think you know about Ruth Roy?”
“Well. There was a serial killer who stopped killing around twenty years ago. It would’ve put Ruth in her sixties. The killer targeted men who were total scumbags. Domestic violence, rape, etc. Murder too, but it was the everyday abuses that triggered her.”
“Is this what you do in your spare time?” I pour coffee from the carafe into our favorite mugs—hackerandI just want to take naps and watch serial killer documentaries—and glance over at my brother. “Although I guess it’s better than adding people to your list.”
Noah ignores my comment.
“They were active for at least a decade. It was a couple. A man and a woman.” His eyes are wide and eager. Jesus fuck. I would say Noah needs another hobby, but he already has one that I struggle to keep a handle on. “Sometimes it would be a year or two between killings, and the authorities would think they died or retired or whatever. But then they’d hit again, up and down the Northeast.”
“First, how did they know it was a couple? And second, how’d they know it was the same people? Did they leave a calling card?”
“I’ve got answers to all of that.” Noah raises his eyebrows and rubs his hands together, looking self-satisfied. “Two pairs of footprints. It was winter, and they found frozen prints of impractical high-heeled boots and a man’s Timberlands.”
