Page 33 of Stay Away from Him

They ended up at a family restaurant plunked next to a gas station and auto shop at the intersection of two roads. The cop was already sitting at a booth when Melissa came through the door, a bell chiming above her head. Seconds after she sat, a server materialized at her shoulder.

“Coffee,” the cop said, then raised an eyebrow at Melissa. “Coffee?”

“A little late in the day for me,” she said. “Iced tea.”

Then the server was gone, and Melissa and the officer were just looking at each other.

“So, I should probably introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Derek Gordon.”

Melissa nodded. “I’m guessing you already know my name. Don’t you?”

Derek grimaced, like maybe he knew it was a little creepy for him to have this information, to have been invading Melissa’s privacy the way he and Kelli Walker had been. But to his credit, he admitted it.

“Melissa Burke,” he said. “Yes. I know your name.”

“Did you use your cop databases, or whatever, to find that? Run a background check on me? You know my social security number too? My parking tickets?” She didn’t actually know what kind of information police officers could gather on people, but she figured they must know something .

Derek shook his head. “I didn’t do anything like that. I’m part of a Facebook group.”

Melissa gave a dark chuckle, shook her head. Of course he was. “Is it called Justice for Rose Danver?”

“It is.”

“So you saw the picture of me and Thomas that Kelli posted? The one of us kissing at that restaurant?”

“I did.”

“And then you followed me that night. Didn’t you?”

Derek blinked. “Huh?”

“You found out where I lived. Followed me to my apartment. Broke in while I was there with Thomas. And left a note on my dining room table.”

Derek grew still and quiet. After a moment, he shook his head slowly, a look of wide-eyed confusion on his face.

To Melissa, it looked less like he was denying her accusation than he was struggling to process it, marveling at the wildness of its disconnection from reality. If it was an act, it was a good one.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you have any idea how that sounds? Even aside from the part about breaking into your apartment—which I’d never do—how the hell would I know where you lived?”

“You found out where I lived eventually,” Melissa said. “You found me today. Snuck through my backyard. Followed me, pulled me over.”

“What did the note say?”

Melissa sighed, sat back, closed her eyes. She pictured it, the jagged writing, the threatening words.

“‘Stay away from him unless you want to die.’”

When Melissa opened her eyes again, Derek Gordon was staring at her with a horrified look on his face, and in that moment, she knew he didn’t write the note.

“Someone really wrote that to you?” he asked.

“They did.”

“It wasn’t me.”

Melissa sighed. “I believe you. But it’s what you want to tell me, isn’t it? That if I stay with Thomas Danver, he’ll kill me?”

Just then, the server arrived with the drinks, and both of them were quiet as she put them on the table.

When she left, Derek leaned forward and started talking.

“I don’t know if Thomas Danver is going to kill you.

I couldn’t possibly predict that. But I do know he’s dangerous.

And I know this for certain: He killed his wife.

There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Melissa figured he’d come to something like this eventually, the bald accusation—but still, it hurt, actually hurt , to hear him say it out loud.

Melissa had come to trust Thomas, to love him; she’d shared moments with him that were as intimate, as vulnerable, as two people could have together.

By contrast, she had no reason to trust Derek Gordon, and more than a few reasons to distrust him.

Still, there was something about his cop’s authority, about his hard certainty, that cracked something in her, brought a sharp, burning pain to the pit of her throat.

“How do you know?” she asked, her voice gone meek.

“Because I investigated him,” Derek said. “I questioned him. I sat across a table from him and looked into his eyes. He’s a killer, Melissa.”

His voice was still hard, certain—but there was something not right about what he was saying.

“Hold on a second,” Melissa said. “You’re a Saint Paul cop, aren’t you?

But the case against Thomas was a county case.

Which means the Saint Paul police weren’t involved in the investigation.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office was. You couldn’t have investigated Thomas. ”

Derek suddenly looked embarrassed, and for a moment, Melissa thought she had him, had caught him in a lie.

“I’m in the Saint Paul PD right now. But I used to be part of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. I was an investigator. But then I got…” He trailed off and couldn’t meet her eye.

“Got what?” Melissa prodded.

“I was fired,” he said.

She sat back, thinking. So the investigator in charge of Thomas’s case was fired, then had to get a job in another police department. Not only that, but he got busted back from investigator to beat cop. Must have been pretty bad, whatever got him fired. “What did you do?” Melissa asked.

“It was bullshit.”

“Just tell me.”

“I was the investigator who caught Rose’s stalker complaint before she went missing,” he said.

“I looked into it but couldn’t find anything.

Then, after Rose went missing and we brought charges against Thomas, Thomas’s lawyer did some digging and found out, made a big stink in the press about how I was incompetent, the case was tainted, all kinds of shit. Really smeared me.”

Melissa couldn’t hold back a surge of smug satisfaction at the thought, felt it curl in her lips. “Sounds like he may have had a point.”

“The stalker theory was bullshit from the beginning,” Derek growled.

He was hunching over his coffee, barely talking to her anymore—more like he was indulging in an angry internal monologue, nursing a grudge he’d held for a long, long time.

“Thomas and his lawyer cooked it up just to create another suspect. But they couldn’t even come up with a name. ”

“Rose did report a stalker though, didn’t she?”

“Rose had problems,” Derek says. “She had a long history of struggling with her mental health, and she’d just recently pulled out of therapy.

She was in a bad place when she made the report.

I honestly couldn’t figure out if someone was really following her, or if it was all in her head.

Honestly, if anyone was tormenting Rose, it was Thomas .

You know there was an allegation that he was physically abusive with her, right? ”

Melissa let out a breath almost involuntarily, as though she’d been punched in the stomach. “Rose reported it?”

“No,” Derek said. “But you know that’s no proof of anything. Plenty of women don’t report their abusers. A couple weeks after Rose went missing, it was actually Kelli who went public with the allegation that Thomas was violent.”

Kelli. Another person Melissa still wasn’t sure if she could trust. In her experience, Kelli had been more violent than Thomas had. She was the one who’d hurt Bradley—even if accidentally—while Thomas was the one who mended the wound.

“They were friends,” Derek continued. “Kelli was actually there when Rose had to go to the ER. Rose was too scared to report what really happened. But Kelli knew.”

“Was that what made you start looking at Thomas?” Melissa asked. “It started as a missing persons case, didn’t it?”

“It did,” Derek said. “And it landed on my desk. We treated it like any other missing persons report, for about a week. We had search parties walking local fields, wooded areas. Calling her name. Beating the brush for bodies. We got her photo on the local news, asked the public for information that could lead to her safe return.” He took a sip of coffee, grimaced as he swallowed it down, then kept talking.

“With her mental health history, the depression and whatnot, we started off figuring there was a pretty good chance she just had a breakdown and ran off. Or worse, killed herself. But we had a late start because Thomas had waited a while to report her missing. He had an excuse, said he’d had an idea about where she might have been and went to find her before reporting anything. ”

“The cabin,” Melissa said. “Up north.”

“Right. It sounded plausible enough, at first.” Derek absently moved his coffee cup in small circles on the table, twisting it like a combination lock with his thumb and forefinger on the rim.

“But then we got a tip. From a neighbor. Said they’d seen Thomas sneak into his neighbor’s house through the back door, past few days.

Amelia Harkness. We dig into it, turns out they dated years ago, before Thomas and Rose got married, and then stayed close ever since.

Amelia was even watching the girls that weekend, when Thomas was gone and Rose went missing.

So I immediately think, affair? That’s motive. ”

Melissa’s jaw tightened. Derek was speaking her fears aloud—her fears about the relationship between Amelia and Thomas. She closed her eyes and shook her head, half rejecting what Derek was saying, half trying to push the thoughts out of her own mind, to tamp them back down.

“No,” she said. “Amelia is a therapist. He was going to her for support. During a difficult time.”

“That’s what he said,” Derek said. “But it’s a perfect cover, isn’t it?

He makes up an excuse for stepping out on his wife while she’s a missing person—pretty shitty behavior, if it becomes public.

And he and Amelia get to claim doctor-patient confidentiality, so none of what gets said between them is admissible in court. ”