“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
Her head nodded slowly, in a way that he wasn’t sure he could interpret. “So what do you want to know.”
There was no beating around that bush—and if their circumstances had been different, he might have eased into the subject. Like, started out by asking her about her job. Or how long she’d lived in the townhouse.
Instead, he set them both upon a cliff. And jumped off first.
“I want to know what happened June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
There had only ever been one part of Erika’s past, it seemed. And that was not merely true from an outsider’s perspective, whether the questions from other people were generated out of pity, compassion, or morbid curiosity. For her, too, there was only one thing.
A single night, on June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago, had wiped out all her birthdays and holidays. Her summer vacations. Good grades, bad grades. Best friends and frenemies.
Afterward? Nothing else had particularly mattered. Or would.
She’d been eliminated with the rest of them.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Balthazar repeated.
“It’s okay. I’ve run through the story a hundred times.”
Yet she struggled with where to start, which was a new one—and that was when she realized that she had a down-pat speech she gave people. The recitation was a rote A-to-B-to-C of it all, and she was prepared for the peaks and valleys of emotions that inevitably arose in her audience. She knew the places she had to steel herself against the reflexive, unsolicited empathy that would always come back at her.
And she braced herself not because such displays of human connection would make her get teary or something. It was because she really wanted to tell whoever was pulling the soppy bit to fuck off. If she could suck up the pain of going through it, they could leave their stupid compassion at the door when they merely heard the story.
“I shouldn’t have pressed. I’m sorry—”
“Dispatch called me the night before last.” He immediately stopped speaking when she interrupted him. “Dispatch is how detectives find out about cases and get assigned them. In the homicide division, we have a rotating schedule and whoever is covering a given night gets whatever comes in. You ever heard of that TV show Forty-eight Hours? Every second counts in the beginning, if you want to find out who the killer is, so you have to be quick about getting to the scene, finding witnesses, gathering evidence.”
She took another draw from the mug and didn’t taste a thing. “My partner, Trey, he starts lighting up my phone. He doesn’t want me to go over to Primrose. He tells me to stay away, he’ll handle it. I refuse to listen to him, and that was my first mistake. See, when dispatch rings, they’ll let you know basic details. Number of victims, status of victims, location, any preliminary suspects who may have been apprehended. There were four victims at the house. A man, a woman, and two teenagers. So I knew…”
As her voice trailed off, she had to clear her throat. “I knew why Trey was calling me and why he was probably right. That I shouldn’t go to that scene. That I wasn’t going to be an asset.”
A slideshow of images flickered through her mind’s eye, and with them came a hopelessness that fit her like a hand-tailored suit of clothes, covering the contours of her body as a second skin.
“I threw up in their bathroom. After I went upstairs to the girl’s bedroom. It was pink. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend raped her before she shot him. He’d murdered both her parents before he went upstairs to get her. She shot herself after she put two bullets in his chest, while she was on with nine-one-one.” Erika felt her brows lift. “Their bathroom was blue, now that I think about it.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“If the parallel is not obvious to you, the same thing happened to me. Except I survived.” As her heart rate sped up, she felt as though she were living through the actual events, for some reason. And she let her mouth go. “I’d forgotten it was my mother’s birthday and I was late for dinner. I stopped at a CVS and grabbed the first card that had the word ‘mother’ on it. I didn’t even bother to look at the message inside.” She shook her head. “That’s among the things that hurt the worst, by the way. Her last card, which she never read—and I didn’t even give a shit when I picked it out.”
Horrible, too-clear images assaulted her. “I parked outside the garage and walked to the front door. It was open, which was weird. As soon as I stepped inside, I smelled the blood. I ran back to the kitchen—and I slipped in the pool that was under my father.” She frowned. “I’m pretty sure I started screaming then.”