Page 30 of What’s Left of You (What Left #2)

“Go over it again.”

Gabe stares at me, the board behind him half erased as we change our theory. A gain. “I think you need some coffee or maybe even something stronger, Sterling.”

Coffee makes me think of two people in particular and it’s become more of a distraction than a help. I just end up thinking about smooth skin and rough sex and Vinny’s sad story about his childhood. “No thanks.”

“Maybe we need to do another grid search,” Tyler suggests, looking over at us.

She gestures to the area we’ve circled, assuming that if Porscha and Alastair are still in Florida their travels would take them somewhere between here, Tallahassee, and Panama City.

If they went too far north, they could cross into Georgia and that would change everything.

“We’re not getting anywhere with all of this.

No reports on either of them means they’re staying off the grid. ”

“Not that far off,” Jensen chimes in. “Victim eight is also body three since the breakout. One or both of them are still out there killing.”

“Victim eight is from a week ago,” Tyler points out. “They could be long gone by now.”

Shaking my head, I look around at the evidence, trying to make sense of every little detail and where this is all supposed to go.

Everything from the first fourteen bodies sits to one side, as we’ve turned all of our attention to the eight new bodies.

Anything regarding body fifteen is being disregarded for now.

She’s her own mystery, sitting unidentified in the morgue.

We don’t know who she was, and Briggs couldn’t identify her when we last spoke.

Everything since victim 5 who turned out to be April Underwood, has started to devolve.

Underwood looks like more of a distraction for the jailbreak than anything else.

It’s sad that she had to die, but she and the four previous victims are the ones we’re certain were killed by Porscha.

It’s extremely unlikely that anyone else intervened while Alastair was still behind bars.

From five onward, it’s messy. April’s body shows more aggression and violence, the cuts in her skin deeper and more crooked than anything ever done to Jo.

Six is still unidentified, and it’s sad that no one’s recognized or claimed her.

We’ve done sketches and put out notices of what the forensic artist thinks she looked like since her face is unrecognizable but there haven’t been any hits.

Even Soto hasn’t connected any missing person cases listed anywhere online, even outside of Florida.

Seven and eight have the same sort of violence as five.

It’s like a crueler, messier version of the kills from fifteen years ago.

On one hand it could mean Alastair is at fault for all the previous bodies, or Porscha played a part and now that no one’s trying to hide who they are, she’s not bothering to be careful.

“Most of the bodies are found near this highway,” Jensen says, stepping towards the map.

We’ve marked where the previous and the new bodies were discovered in different colors.

“She’s smart enough to know she’s going to be recognized walking down the street.

Before we knew Porscha was alive the bodies were dropped in town.

Since then everyone has been outside of town or just on the outskirts of Citrus Grove. ”

“We know she’s hiding but we have no idea where.” Tyler grumbles, propping her chin on her hand, looking tired.

“We don’t know how much Alastair is helping, if he even is,” I agree. “Briggs said that the wounds on each body are all different depths, different angles, different lengths but he also said they were likely inflicted by the same person each time.”

“So Porscha,” Gabe replies. “We know she is at fault for Victim 5. We can pin at least one murder on her. What we don’t know is if Alastair is at fault, at least for these four.”

“Do we know if he’s at fault for anything?” Tyler asks.

“He admitted as much in court,” I remind her. “He accepted fault for fifteen murders-”

“Fourteen,” Jensen reminds me. “Porscha’s alive. Do you really think he had no idea?”

I shrug. It’s impossible to tell. I try not to think of Jo or Vinny when I offer an answer, because that might cloud my judgment.

I’m too invested in them. “Hard to say. He never stumbled when asked about her body. He admitted to killing her too, it’s on record.

He knew the correct type of tool used to remove the corpse’s hands and knew the teeth we’d find in her head too. ”

“Porscha could have coaxed him,” Gabriel reminds us.

“Do you think Porscha is the mastermind behind this?” I ask, peering around at all three of them. “He accepted fault. He’s on Death Row because he admitted to murdering all of those people. That’s a hefty debt to pay if he wasn’t the only killer.”

“Any time I chatted with Alastair he was cocky, not concerned,” Tyler agrees. “If he was worried about taking the fall, he never showed it. He seemed resigned to his fate.”

“Yeah,” I grumble, stroking my chin. “He did.”

“I’m exactly as I’ve always been, Joelle. I’ve never pretended to be anything else.”

Alastair said a lot of cryptic shit in prison, but the most he ever spoke was with Jo.

Even Vinny couldn’t get the rise out of him that Jo did.

If ever there was a person he didn’t lie to when questioned, I think it was Jo.

He appeared hurt every time she visited, like seeing her was almost too much. For her he would speak his truth.

Jensen is pitching another idea but I zone him out.

It’s nothing personal, and happens all the time among the team while we’re trying to figure out a puzzle.

My eyes drift to the wall instead. We took pictures of the walls of Alastair’s cell after his disappearance, and I’m certain there’s an empty cell just waiting for his return to Citrus Grove.

But with things up in the air with the prison, we elected to take the drawings he had on the walls.

The interim warden had no problem with us taking them to study, and other than the pencils and markers he had in the cell, there were no other personal items. He didn’t even keep the letters from his fans.

According to CGP staff, Alastair always returned them unopened in the later years.

I’ve studied the pictures for way too long. Some are clearly images of the surroundings of the prison, the spaces he saw more often than anywhere else. There’s one that reminds me of the high school, and another of the local park. The others are harder to decipher.

It took a short amount of time to realize one is of the cellar doors that went to the torture room in the abandoned house.

I compared his drawing to one of the old photographs from fifteen years prior and it’s amazing the details he remembered.

Another shows two silhouettes – a dark, heavy-handed one in the foreground, obviously male while a lighter, almost blurry silhouette of a woman in the background.

Tyler is convinced that he had been drawing Porscha’s ghost.

It sounds silly now, since Porscha is among the living, but maybe it was the ghost of his troubled thoughts.

Another is just a bunch of lines, but it’s got his initials like the others so it’s meant to be a drawing. We’ve tried connecting them, laying maps over them, and it does no good. From where I’m standing it just looks random.

There’s a few more that appear to be nature drawings of nothing in particular, and then the one that bothers me the most. It appears to be stones, each growing in size down a long line. There’s fourteen in total.

Maybe it represents the victims. But does it mean Alastair killed fourteen himself, or are we reading too much into this looking for clues? He put all these things on the walls that surrounded him for years, so they have to mean something.

Tyler’s phone goes off, and I pull my attention from the wall of art. Jensen walks up to my side, staring at the same pictures. “Heard from your father?”

My mouth goes dry. I didn’t tell any of them about the chat I had with Bradshaw earlier in the month, but I did phone my father afterwards for answers. He didn’t pick up, and Mom finally took my calls when I blew up the house phone. She told me he was off playing golf.

That was weeks ago.

“He’s avoiding me,” I reply, not looking his way. It’s a touchy subject, and I’m not even sure I want to talk about it until I’ve spoken to him. My father might lie, but I want to hear things from his side and see if it even lines up with what others have told me. “Let’s just… focus on this.”

“I wish the book she wrote told us a location,” Jensen replies, flipping back to the topic at hand without question. He’s good at backing off when he needs to. “It’s like a fetish story.”

“It’s creepy,” I agree. I didn’t end up telling my team Vinny read the book first. Usually when it comes to a case I keep no secrets between myself and my team members regarding anything that could affect our work.

Vinny read the book, and I’m certain he’s set his sights on Porscha now.

I don’t know if he would actually ever make a move against her, being Jo’s mom and all, but he wasn’t a fan of Porscha to begin with. The book definitely didn’t help.

“All it proves is she had a thing for Alastair,” he goes on. “But why? He was dating Jo.”

“Maybe she didn’t know that in the beginning.

If the two of them were in on the murders together, they likely crossed paths before Jo would’ve introduced them.

She said in her interviews that she avoided doing so until she felt she absolutely had no choice.

Vinny was already her boyfriend and mommy dearest didn’t like that.

I can’t imagine Jo thought it would go over well to mention a second boyfriend. ”

Jensen chuckles. “Probably not. But Porscha writing a love story between herself and a high school kid is pretty gross. And what about the Professor? Hermes?”

“Artemis.” I correct and he smirks. Jensen thinks he’s funny. “She’s still unemployed after being let go by the university.”

“And no suspicious activity since?” I confirm.

I haven’t been following the professor much.

Gabe’s been focused more on suspects from the school, and Jensen’s keeping his eyes on the Ajellos so he can learn more about the family and organized crime.

He isn’t as familiar with them as Gabe, and I want fresh eyes watching them.

Xeno bringing the book to Vinny was a show of good faith, but the family still isn’t really on our side.

“Not that we can tell. Soto said she hadn’t had any new activity on her socials, and the only people appearing at her house are delivery drivers.”

That’s unhelpful. “And nothing about the tunnels at the penitentiary?"

“The interim warden is a little bitch, remember?” Gabe tells me with a chuckle.

“She’s hellbent on keeping everyone out of there.

We did our initial search, but the tunnels aren’t structurally sound.

Porscha probably didn’t have the time to reinforce them, and when we did a sweep through there initially there didn’t seem to be signs that she preplanned.

She’s lucky it didn’t collapse while they were escaping. ”

“Porscha got the penitentiary blueprints from someone,” I sigh. “Bradshaw is adamant it wasn’t him. It could have been Kyle, but he shouldn’t have access to them. He was just a guard and a new transfer at that. Keep looking into it, though.”

Jensen nods, clearing his throat. “There’s also the part about the original case missing details-”

“Uh, guys?” Tyler says, shoving her phone into her pocket as I turn my attention to her.

“That was the tipline. I was checking to see if anything new came in. While I was on the phone, someone called about a woman matching the description of Porscha. They said she’s bleeding, wandering down the side of the highway. ”