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Chapter Seven

Graves

My mind races the entire drive back to the crime scene.Mallory’s house is a crime scene.The thought threatens to bring up the crispy chicken sandwich I forced myself to eat before I left town. Someone fucked with my baby, and I’m going to get my revenge, ever so fucking slowly.

My knuckles whiten under the strength of my grip on the steering wheel and I slam the gas pedal to the floor. The speedometer climbs to treacherous heights as I fly down the highway towards the turnoff to Sawmill Road. In an attempt to redirect my thoughts, I try to remember every detail Mallory let slip that raised my hackles. The ones I was too swamped with work to remember. Fuck, I’m such a piece of shit for not lending more credence to the inconsistencies she made known. I need to relay every detail to my uncle, I can’t leave out a single thing. Mallory’s life may depend on what I can fucking dig up from the clusterfuck of my mind.

Most recently, she said Ghost had been around butthey haven’t talked. That sends a chill through my entire body. Who was watching you, little siren? I know you thought it was me because of the mask.

The knowledge that someone took what we had, twisted it, then wielded it like weapon in order to take you from me, has me seeing red.

Focus.

There was the hide and seek text, the footprints in the mud, the man at the post office, and the few times she mentioned seeing me when I wasn’t there. My thoughts flow back farther, to the night of the open window, the scrape in her fresh paint job, and the broom on the floor. I wondered what woke me up that night, and why I was on alert. Could it really have been going on this long? How was I so oblivious to her being in danger? That same night, I thought I was seeing things on my drive home. The red car without its headlights on, only visible for a moment before it disappeared. I was so fucking tired, I told myself it wasn’t there. Now, paired with the small tire treads in the mud by the broken syringe, it seems I wasn’t hallucinating after all. I don’t have a make and model on the car, but I’m curious to know if Graham or Jaydon have had any headlight repairs in the last few weeks. It’s a flimsy lead, but a lead nonetheless.

“FUCK!” I yell, the sound reverberating around the cab of my truck. Her car! I can’t believe this slipped my mind. The memory of her fucking slashed tire, and the trap someone laid to yank her from me that night barrels into me with the force of a tank. Sweat breaks out across my skin as anxiety threatens to take over my ability tothink clearly. I shift my body and retrieve my phone from my pocket, calling the Silverberry Hotel.

“Silverberry Hotel and restaurant, how may I help you tonight?” The voice is light and cheery, but not Rita’s.

“I’d like to speak to Rita, please.”

“Can I ask what this is in reference to?”No.

“It’s confidential. Tell her Officer Graves is on the phone.”

“Okay. Yes, sir, right away. Please hold.” Music starts to play in my ear and it’s annoying as hell, so I put the call on speaker mode and place my phone in the cup holder. Rocks tumbling under my tires as I speed down the dirt road to Mallory’s house.

“Hello?” Rita’s inquisitive voice puts a stop to the irritating on hold music and I try not to unleash my anger on her.

“Where’s that surveillance footage I asked you for? From the night Mallory’s tires were slashed.” I grind my teeth.Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus.

“Oh, umm… Unfortunately the cameras in our back parking lot weren’t working that night.” What the fuck? This can’t be happening.

“What do you mean ‘they weren’t working’?”

“Well, they actually haven’t been working for quite some time, and?—”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Rita?” My voice increases in volume until I’m full-on yelling at her, the sound echoing around me. “I need that footage!”

“I’m sorry, Officer Graves, if you need it for insurance purposes, the hotel is more than happy to pay for the damage to Mallory’s car.”

I hang up on her before I say anything else that will have her lodging a complaint against me. Rein it in, Graves. I will myself to calm down.Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus.

The anger starts to dissipate, and before I think better of it, I call Graham. Our conversation is short and to the point. There have been no headlight repairs for a red sedan in the past month, the past few months actually, not that it matters. I thank him, and hang up. The last few minutes of the drive are quiet. I don't know what to do, or think, or even say. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be a person. I pull into Mallory’s driveway and my uncle steps out of his cruiser. His somber expression has dread pooling in my gut, did he find something? I know it’s not her body, he would’ve called it in, not wanting to lose precious evidence to the elements.

I make my way over to him, hand him the lukewarm coffee, and wait for him to speak first. The longer the silence stretches between us, the more nervous I become. Finally, he takes his eyes off the forest, locking them with mine. I wait with bated breath for him to tell me whatever it is he found that has him looking like there’s a porcupine in his ass.

“Why don’t you tell me what you found first, that way I can tell you if I found anything else.” Fuck, my gut is telling me he didn’t find anything, not anything that I hadn’t already found first anyway. The outlook is bleak as all hell when I’m done relaying absolutely everything to him.

He places his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find her, Lennox.” My uncle infuses his voice with as muchcomfort and support as he can. I don’t doubt we will find her. It’s actually quite the opposite. I know we will find her. The only question in my mind is if she will be dead or alive when I finally hold her again.

After my uncle heads back to the station to try to find any lead he can, I flop onto the big sectional in Mallory’s living room. I’m aimless, twisting in the wind, and it’s driving me nuts. I pull her phone from the duffle bag and begin to go through it more in-depth than before. There are no alarming messages which is really quite a set back. As sick as it is, it would almost have been better if this piece of shit was messaging her. At least then I’d have a number to track and try to get a location on. Her emails give nothing away except an unhealthy addiction to online shopping. Aside from her calls with me and Victoria, there is nothing in the call log.

Shit, this is going nowhere. I’m on the cusp of spiralling again, I can feel it. I need to do something.Think, Graves, think.She said she had been reading up on the murders, and she made the connection with the victim’s initials. Was she digging deeper into things?

I open her internet browser, then her search history. To say I’m shocked by what I see is an understatement. There are links to the mill murders, other unsolved cases in the area, and she was looking into missing person reports. Fuck, she’s a better detective than I am. Well, not really, but I am surprised by everything laid out before me. There’s an open search window explaining how totriangulate a killer’s location by using math to figure out their killing radius. Fuck, she’s so smart. My heart stalls in my chest when I see the title of the next link in her history, ‘When stalking becomes deadly’. Were you worried about me, little siren? I guess my absence affected her more than I thought it would. Was she worried I was the killer? She couldn’t possibly think that. She was never afraid of me, right? There’s another page about the psychology behind sexual sadists, and one listing the “Top Ten True Crime Podcasts”. Whatever knowledge she absorbed during all this research is sure to give her a fighting chance at survival, and that’s the first flicker of hope I’ve felt in all this time.

My eyes start to droop as exhaustion sinks its talons in deep. I can’t sleep, I need to work. I spring up from the couch, slap myself in the face, then cross to the kitchen and get a pot of coffee brewing. Leaning back against the counter, I open the security camera feed. I rewatch every old ‘Motion Detected’ alert. Sometimes there’s nothing, which is probably just a bug or small animal. Then, there are clips that are clearly me. I walk in through the front door like I own the place, finding my way to Mal immediately. The others are unsettling, and a lot more frequent than I could have imagined. There are at least fifteen clips of this man in my mask, standing around the property…just watching. Oh, I’m going to gut him. My wrath knows no limits when it comes to Mallory’s well-being. I methodically make my coffee, then return to the couch.