Page 9 of Obsession (Temptation 4)

“And how did the visit go?”

“Terrible. We got nothing out of him, other than the fact Claire seemed to focus on Nick’s early years. Before he and Julia first met. Or met for the second time, since they were at the same foster home as kids.”

“That’s something, though.”

“Ethan thought so, too. Started looking through Claire’s things again. See if anything stood out.”

“And did it?”

“Actually, yes.”

“What?”

I heaved a sigh, then proceeded to run Nikko through everything Ethan had shared with us this morning.

How he’d uncovered an incident report from when Nick was a PhD student at Brown.

How a woman named Lucy Ellis reported a sexual assault that fit Nick’s MO —leaving a night out with friends early after not feeling well, making it to her apartment, then not remembering anything until she woke up the following morning, only to discover blood between her legs, sore in places that shouldn’t have been sore.

How the complaint was never pursued or investigated.

How Lucy ended up pregnant.

How she married a man named Alton Shea, then gave birth to a boy seven months later, naming him Daxton.

“Just because this report fits what we know about Nick doesn’t mean—”

“There’s more. Ethan found proof that Daxton knew Autumn Quinn, the copycat’s first victim. The Emory student who volunteered at Homes for the Homeless. In fact, it appears Dax and Autumn dated.”

“Again, that’s—”

“Dax also volunteers with a prison outreach ministry. The same one that has visited Nick.”

“Is there proof Dax visited Nick?” Nikko asked.

“Ethan’s working on that.”

There was a brief pause before Nikko sighed. “I won’t deny it’s suspicious, but I doubt any judge would sign an arrest warrant based on this information. There’s no smoking gun, so to speak.”

“Ethan also mapped out the kills. Want to know what he found out?”

“What’s that?”

“While a majority of the kills occurred within a 200-mile radius of Atlanta, all the kills that took place outside his comfort zone, with one exception, occurred on a date the team had away games in that particular city.”

“And the exception?”

I lowered my voice. “You know what it is, Nikko.”

“Of course.” He paused, then asked, “As part owner, does Dax travel with the team to away games?”

“Not all of them, but he does go to quite a few. He’s the only owner who does.”

Another brief silence passed as I waited for Nikko to see how suspicious all of this was. Instead, he blew out a long breath.

Which he did whenever he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“I don’t mean to burst your bubble, Lachlan, but none of this is an indicator of guilt. The fact Daxton Shea was born nine months after his mother reported being drugged and assaulted on campus doesn’t mean anything. Unfortunately, rapes on college campuses aren’t rare. They’re pretty fucking common, as awful as that sounds. And the use of drugs to subdue a potential victim is just as common. Simply because one or two of Nick’s other victims reported the same thing doesn’t mean he was the perpetrator, even if he was attending the same college at the same time.”