Page 69 of Twisted

“Be sure to give Lindsay my…sincerestregards.”

Detective Cooper

3 Days Before Trial

Head in hands, he silenced his phone. Again. He knew it wasn’t his wife. Or their kids. She’d taken them abroad to London to see her sister, saying she didn’t know when she would be coming back.

Hays clapped him on the back as he passed by, reminding Cooper that at least he was still young enough to be married and divorced a few more times. But he didn’t want that; he wanted his wife, their kids, the picket fence. Not divorce lawyers calling every ten minutes. Not the division of their retirements and assets and parenting plans.

He’d thrown himself into his work for years and neglected the things in life that should have been the most important. But those families who’d lost loved ones brutally? Didn’t they deserve answers, closure, compassion? He’d solved almost as many murders as Hays, who’d been at the job for much longer. This current one—the Hale case—was impossible, but Lindsay was to take the stand in three days, and it would all be over. Damn his intuition. That bitch was guilty of something, he knew it, and he knew that his gut was right; Maisie had done it somehow, but they would never knowhow.

Call him a terrible detective, but as his life crumbled around him, the least he could do was not pursue a woman who’d been battered and beaten into a submissive whore for her pompous husband. He wasn’t sure how the videos had snuck onto his phone, but they were gut-wrenching; watching beautiful Maisie cower in corners as lamps were thrown, watching as her husband pinned her down and forced his cock down her throat, watching as Lindsay slashed her pretty face with a beer bottle.

The videos had come at a price. If he told anyone, the blackmail was there on his phone as well; photos of hisrealtranscripts, of the two tests he’d cheated on to become a police officer. He felt sick to his stomach, knowing how low he’d stooped to get what he wanted, but then he’d had his epiphany; Maisie Jane Walkup had stooped low to obtain what she wanted: her freedom from those monsters.

And Cooper could never fault her for that.

It was a secret he promised himself he’d take to the grave.

His phone began to buzz again, and he lifted his head and peeled one eye open to see—against the reality—if it was his wife.Ex-wife. But it was only his work-wife, Hays.

Groaning, he answered it on the third ring.

“Yes, I am prepared for the trial, ass—what?” he said, voice low, back straightening as though a steel rod had been rammed into his spine. Hays repeated his sentence again, voice harried, but it still took a few moments for the new reality to sink in.

Slow, sure, a small smile curled onto Cooper’s lips. Leaning back in his chair, he threw one arm up, smile morphing into a grin. It was over like that, like a candle being blown out on a harsh gust of wind. The trial. The case. It was over in the blink of an eye, and the best part of it was how deeply and ironically satisfying that end was.

Maisie Jane Walkup was truly and irrevocably free.

Lindsay Garfield had just committed suicide.

Epilogue

“Beauty is that Medusa’s head

Which men go armed to seek and sever:

It is most deadly when most dead,

And dead will stare and sting forever.”

—Archibald MacLeish

Maisie

A Few Months Ago

She stared down at the two vials clacking together in her shaky hands. She only had moments; everything had to be precise, or she would take the fall for these murders. Pressing the back of her other hand to her lips, she stifled the urge to vomit. Her nerves were about to get the best of her again. She’d spent the entire morning puking out of sheer fear for what was to come.

But as she replayed in her mind on a loop every fucking thing they’d put her through, her resolve turned to something tougher than steel.

She texted her burner phone so police—if they triangulated her calls—would see she’d been at home all day, until this evening when she left for the store. Lindsay was currently with Carter out in the country having fun target practicing, leaving Randy home—the jackass barely worked anymore after learning that Maisie’d become pregnant from his assaults. She hoped that guilt ate away at him, festered in his heart. Just like he would soon be festering on the ground, choking as the venom raced through his veins.

Raising her hand, she grasped the ornate and ostentatious knocker on their front door—one she knew Lindsay had picked out to match the one on her childhood home.Daddy issues, much?She thought with acidity. Gone was her fear. Gone was the thought that soon—within minutes—she was going to commit a double homicide and frame that cunt.

The snake venom stolen from Marie’s office felt heavy as she awaited his footsteps. Copperhead, naturally. She’d pursued the cabinets and fridges at her sister’s office; a small company that procured things like anti-venom and other toxins for the purposes of science and experimentations.

She knew copperheads were deadly, knew they were a local snake. Hell, she’d seen them on hikes or when she was a teen barefoot and reckless in fields full of mice and their predators. She could even picture the pattern of the snake’s skin, clear as day as Randy’s footsteps set her heart racing.

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