Page 88 of Girl, Sought

Reeves chuckled. ‘Well, we appreciate it, me especially. If you hadn’t outwitted this guy, who knows how many more bodies we’d be looking at?’

‘As many as possible until you caught him. Killers like Winters don’t stop.’

'Well, we'll get answers soon when he's conscious enough to talk.'

Luca said, ‘He’s got the victims’ possessions in his apartment, Reeves. That’s three life sentences right there.’

‘Ain’t that gospel. Got some of my guys there now.’

Right on cue, three uniformed officers escorted a man in chains out of the door. Lawrence Winters looked nothing like he had an hour ago. His face was obscured by dried blood, and he could barely walk without support. He kept his gaze firmly on the ground as all eyes in the parking lot turned to him. A coward right until the end.

‘There he goes,’ Luca said.

‘I better make sure he gets to the holding cells in one piece,’ Reeves said. ‘You two take care, and don’t be strangers.’

‘Thanks for everything, detective,’ Ella nodded.

‘Peace,’ Luca finished.

Ella waited until Reeves had joined Winters in the cruiser. She turned to Luca and asked, ‘Peace?’

‘Thought I’d try something new.’

‘It suits you. Ready to get out of here? We could get home before midnight.’

‘Can I meet you at the precinct in an hour? I just need to go and pick something up.’

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Pick something up? Should I be scared?’

‘A little bit.’

‘Alright. Meet you at the precinct in an hour.’

The cruiser containing Lawrence Winters disappeared around a corner. Ella watched it go, thinking about collections and collectors and all the ways humans tried to possess pieces of perfection. She and Luca had their own sort of gallery - built not of dolls or insects or holy relics, but of moments like these. Cases solved, lives saved, monsters caught.

Maybe that was the most precious collection of all.

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Ella's desk at the Chesapeake precinct looked like a crime scene in miniature. Case files scattered like evidence markers, paperwork stained with coffee rings that could've been blood spatter under different circumstances. Her laptop disappeared into its bag with a satisfying zip - one more case packed away into whatever box her brain reserved for the solved-but-never-forgotten.

Chesapeake had chewed her up and spit her out, but that was the job. You went where the monsters were and let them leave their marks on your body and soul until you forgot what it was like to sleep without seeing blood on the inside of your eyelids.

Her head still throbbed where Winters had introduced it to that jar of preservative fluid. The medics said the concussion would fade, but right now her skull felt like someone had used it for batting practice. Her photographic memory might take a few days to come back online, but at least she'd been coherent enough to give her statement before the painkillers kicked in.

According to Reeves, Lawrence Winters was a self-employed tax accountant. He was a contractor for the Curated Value Group, processing payments between the appraisal firm and their clients, which gave him access to collection details, security arrangements, and owners' schedules. He’d also been employed by the National Trust to deal with payments relating to St. Andrews Museum, which was presumably how he’d discovered the place had sat empty for years.

A chirp from her pocket yanked her back to the world outside this stuffy closet the local yokels called an office.

Director Edis’s name flashed on her screen.

Need to see you in my office when you get back. Urgent.

Ella squinted at the screen, waiting for letters to rearrange themselves into something that made a lick of sense. It was 9 PM so even with good traffic, they wouldn't hit DC until midnight. Edis had always kept vampire hours, but midnight meetings at the office were usually reserved for the high-rollers. On more than one occasion, Ella had seen the Vice President and District Attorney stumbling around on the top floor after dark.

Something about this felt off, like walking into a room and finding all the furniture shifted two inches left. She'd solved the case, caught the killer, prevented a fourth victim. By any metric that mattered, this was a win. So why did her gut feel like it was trying to digest barbed wire?

But still, you didn't say no to the guy who signed your checks. Not in this line of work.

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