Page 78 of Vengeance of Childhood Proportions (Till Death Do Us Part #7)

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Mal

I no longer had a badge to show, but one of the cops recognized me quickly from my television interviews about the Atelihai Killer. And though I had explained I was on suspension, one of them still made the call that ended with Delroy Carr pulling up on scene. Fucking fantastic.

Things then really went to shit when Dr. Robinson showed up. And with all eyes on me from the start, it wasn’t like I could give the man a head’s up about the chastity belt.

From outside the pizzeria, I was brought down to the station.

Carr kept asking me if I wanted a lawyer present, but I declined.

I wasn’t a suspect and I knew the presence of a lawyer would only piss off the cops.

As much as I did not want to be where I was, I knew it was better to be there under my own influence than under theirs.

It was the hours-long wait that got to me.

I had no choice but to give them my little owl’s name.

All they needed was to subpoena my phone records and they would know it, anyway.

Denying who she was would not help her in the long run and it would only make me look suspicious.

I was not currently in handcuffs, but that could change at any time and I would be of no help to my little owl from behind bars.

I wasn’t ashamed of my lifestyle. Never had been, never would be.

The looks I got after certain discoveries were made were nothing more than annoying to me.

I did not care what they thought or said.

Unfortunately, the subject of consent was raised.

Of all the things to lie about in regard to what had happened, why Dominique was in a chastity belt was not one of them.

However, that did bring Valentino and his lawyer down to the station, with Dominique’s employment record and her contract with the club stating what she did and did not consent to.

Dr. Robinson wasn’t needed much. There was no question of time of death due to the witnesses, including myself, and the recording of the 911 call when the man on the phone announced that he believed the mugger had been killed.

He stuck around for my sake, which I appreciated, even though it was unnecessary.

Carr was enough of an annoying presence that I didn’t need Dr. Robinson too.

The reason I was even asked to go to the station instead of being released from the scene was because there was no record of Phoebe Snetsinger.

At least, not a current one. Carr insisted I remain as a sign of good faith between the Bureau and local police while they tried to figure out just who I was with tonight.

I could have left, could have said “fuck you” to both Carr and the locals, but they weren’t the only ones who needed answers.

Because Phoebe Snetsinger died in 1999.

Dr. Robinson, Carr, and I were in an interrogation room looking over what was discovered about Phoebe Snetsinger. At least, the real one. The more I saw, the more I knew that my little owl had lied to me.

And the bigger the fool I felt.

“You never did a background on her?” Carr asked, and I could hear the judgement in my boss’s voice.

“Did you do one on your wife when you first started dating her?” I shot back, my eyes never leaving the tablet in front of me.

Phoebe Snetsinger had been a fucking birdwatcher .

“Yes,” both Dr. Robinson and Carr answered.

My head shot up. “Well, I didn’t. I consider myself to be a good judge of character and I did not need to—” I stopped talking and waved them off.

“Why the fuck am I explaining myself to you? No, I did not do a background on her.” That was all they were going to get from me on the topic.

Clearly, they did not understand that I wanted to earn my little owl’s trust. I wanted her to tell me everything, not read about it in a dossier.

Phoebe Snetsinger had been gang raped on a tour abroad.

Had my little owl lied about her own attack? I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d misjudged her. In fact, I think my judgement of her character was spot on. It was her history, which I’d been slowly unraveling, that was the mystery.

Carr put down the file folder he was studying. “I don’t understand, Mal. You’re sleeping with this woman, practically moved her into your home, but you don’t know who she is?”

He wouldn’t understand. My eyes landed on the owl mask in the evidence bag on the corner of the table. Fuck, I hated seeing it in that clear plastic bag with red tape over the seal. The police had found it in my car, and I wished I’d never brought it with us tonight. Who knew when I’d get it back.

Phoebe Snetsinger was an author.

I’d never learned what type of an artist my little owl was. It was such a broad title, but I assumed painter. I internally scoffed, because I’d never asked and yet I was prepared to build her a studio at my house.

I ignored Carr’s inquiry. I owed him no explanation, nor did I feel like telling him how the bond between my little owl and I extended beyond mere trust.

Or it should have. It was supposed to.

No wonder she hated it when I called her ‘Phoebe’.

Hell, even in my own head, I referred to her as ‘my little owl’.

I’d like to say that was because I’d subconsciously known that that wasn’t her real name, but I hadn’t.

I’d learned her name, and it simply hadn’t mattered to me.

She’d already been ‘my little owl’ by then.

I’d been slowly stripping away her layers. To get down to the root of her. She’d removed her mask for me, and more recently her wig. Would she have eventually removed her contacts and let me see the color of her eyes?

The police had no usable pictures of my little owl.

I had plenty, as did Valentino on his security cameras.

However, his lawyer was currently staying firm on not turning over any camera footage from the club.

All the pictures I had would never be seen by the police or be made public—and not just because I had signed a contract stating that any pictures or video taken between us would never be shared or shown to another being.

Those pictures were mine , and I was too much of an asshole to offer them up as evidence. I would be the one to discover who my little owl really was, not some Facial Recognition Software…

I blinked, and something clicked inside my head. It wasn’t knowledge or even suspicion. I’m not even entirely sure what it was. Instinct maybe, or some subconscious comparison.

I pull out my phone. Why was I even contemplating this?

It was crazy. It would mean… It would mean my life was fucked up beyond anything I could have even imagined.

Because there was no way , no fucking way, that she had been right under my nose, right under me , this entire time and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t suspected.

But why would I? What logically sane person would think that the girl who is supposed to be dead is the same girl he’d been sleeping with for the past month and a half? Why would that thought even cross my mind?

And yet, it was now.

I didn’t know if Dr. Robinson had studied the pictures before he emailed them to me. Natural curiosity hinted at likely. But he didn’t have anything to compare it to.

I did. I knew every inch of my little owl, with the exception of what color her eyes were. Another memory came forward as I pulled up my email.

“Her mole.” Jerome Roberts had said to me as he reached his left arm over his right shoulder and tapped around his shoulder blade. “I keep seeing it. Every time I close my eyes, every time I try to sleep… It’s all I see, every fucking day.”

My little owl had a mole on the back of her right shoulder. But that wasn’t proof. A birth mark would have been, but a mole? People had moles. Hell, I had one on my ass cheek that was so close to my crack that it had been mistaken as a smudge of shit on more than one occasion.

It wasn’t proof. It was just…coincidence.

Both Carr and Dr. Robinson were sitting opposite me at the table. Neither could see what I was doing or had an inkling as to why.

The email was big. There was a reason the FAS the government used was more advanced and expensive than anything available to the public.

The system didn’t just give one rendering of a person.

As fun as those free apps were to see what you or your friends would look like in fifty years, they were not so accurate that they could hold up in court.

The FAS we used at the Bureau gave six to twelve, sometimes fifteen, different images.

The more pictures you had of a subject, the better the renderings.

I had only emailed Dr. Robinson Holly Marteen’s ninth grade yearbook photo because that was all I had.

There was no picture above her name in her tenth grade yearbook, the school year in which everyone believed she’d committed suicide.

There were eleven possible renderings, including one with possible cosmetic surgery to change the shape of her nose.

Had she meant to kill herself or had it been a ploy the entire time? Had she known that she would need to disappear in order to exact her revenge with such precision?

“I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to find out like this.”

I stopped on the eighth picture. I’m not sure what my feelings were in that moment.

Logic would dictate that I would be shocked, angry, betrayed, maybe even disturbed.

I couldn’t say. I was honestly too numb to really remember.

I do recall barely excusing myself from my audience before rushing out of the interrogation room in search of some privacy.

I did not want anyone to see what I was looking at, to guess what I had just discovered. I wanted no one to know that I now knew the color of my little owl’s eyes.