Page 16 of Sinful Reality

“Aubree…” I want to say I’m sorry. To make her understand. I don’t mean to use her or to make her feel usable. I want her to know my heart, since clearly my words are lacking. But my phone buzzes with an incoming call, and try as I might, I can’t ignore it. So, hastily, I pick up the device and turn it over to see Paxton’s name on the screen. Swiping to answer, I bring the phone to my ear. “Chief Mayet.”

“Hey.” His voice is like a time machine, tossing me back four years to a whole other city and a completely different life. His gruff tone, a promise of sleepless nights and long days since he caught this case. His slow drawl, proof he’s nearing the end of his tether for today. “Sorry to call you again. I know you’re busy.”

“It’s okay.” I set my elbow on my desk and my face in my hand, if only so I can close my eyes and pretend Aubree’s beady stare doesn’t warm my forehead. “What’s up?”

“I’m running through the M.E. reports for the first seventeen. But some of this language is fuckin’otherfor me.”

“One of those reports has my name on it. She was mine.”

“Yeah, Alana. Which means I don’t have to feel guilty for discussing the case with an outsider since you’re technically part of the original team. The samples you took from her belly?”

“I replied to your text already.” My mental exhaustion makes me more irritable than usual, and my complete inability to add flowers and rainbows to my words offends most.

But not Archer. Never him.

And oddly, not Pax.

“I pulled cotton fibers and what I believe was lined paper. The New York office will have the samples in storage.”

“But what do you mean bylined paper? Specifically.”

“Like, in notebooks. School books. That sort of stuff. She, and every other victim before and after her, starved while in captivity. By their time of death, they weighed, on average, eighteen pounds. They would have been so hungry, I’m not surprised Alana ate her clothes.”

“Can we trace the clothes back to the source?”

“Not so far.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and swallow the groan I want so badly to release. “We could compare and connect it to the original article if it ever surfaced. But tracing it back to a particular shirt or sheet manufacturer isn’t happening.”

“And the paper?”

“If you get the rest of the book, we could match it up. But short of that, it would be next to impossible. The way I see it, the girls were kept for so long, it’s not really a stretch to think they were, in some twisted way, given things to keep them entertained. This person essentially parented a new five-year-old for a year, every year, for seventeen in a row. Even five-year-olds fighting for their lives are gonna get bored after a while. It’s sick, but after a few months had passed, they’d probably stopped asking for their mom and adapted to their new normal. He gave them paper and crayons to keep them busy. Books, maybe. Dolls, even.”

“So, she’s eating her clothes and swallowing wads of paper,” he growls. “Literally handing us evidence from the environment she was kept in, but we can’t identify it?”

I roll my eyes, even behind my closed eyelids. “Everything is identifiable, Pax. It’s just that no one thought to try that until you came along. But now you’re here, so strong, so smart, I bet we’ll have this tied up before dinnertime.”

He scoffs, too exhausted to do much more. “Snappy. Seems absolutely nothing has changed since we last hung out.”

“Mmhm. I didn’t see all seventeen autopsy reports. Just Alana, Diane, and Misha so far. They all presented the same way: starved, tortured, and, in the end, naked. Sexual assault was evident in all three. Can the same be said for the rest?”

“Yeah.” He blows out a heavy sigh and scratches his stubbled jaw. “They’d all been sexually penetrated at some point, though not all were entirely recent in conjunction with their death.”

“So he was…” I drag my head up and blink my eyes open. “So he controlled himself for some of them? Assaulted them, but it wasn’t constant, and not all were immediately, or even soon, before death?”

“That’s how it appears. None, except Alana, had conceived a child, and as we know, she was one of the later cases. All of them carried his DNA, and each M.E. cross-tested it over the years.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I draw a deep breath into my lungs until the action broadens my chest and puts an ache in my throat. Then I exhale again and squeeze my eyes shut. “All seventeen connect via his DNA, but his DNA isn’t popping in the databases. Has that changed?”

Though, of course, the answer is no. Because if it wasn’t, he’d already be behind bars.

“No. The last girl who went missing?—”

“Elouise.” I know every name. Every face. Every birthday and mother’s name and sibling, if they had any. I know where they went to school and if they had pets. What their favorite television shows were, and when they typically went to bed. I made damn sure I knew it all. Because what Ididn’t,I dedicated my time to finding out while we waited for the next to go missing. “Elouise Phelps was the last to go before he stopped.”

“Yeah. Well, she carried his DNA, too. Semen, at a minimum. Skin samples under her nails, which means she scratched and fought all the way to the end. Just like with the others, the labs worked with what they were given, they matched them with the sixteen before, but have yet to connect them to a person. Whoever he is, he’s not in the system.”

“What about now, though?” I sit back and tilt my head to stare up at the ceiling, hopeful that gravity will keep the itchiness in the backs of my eyes,in the back. “He stopped for years. I assumed he’d died. But since he didn’t, that kind of implies he might’ve been locked up for something else. If he was, then no matter the reason, he’ll have a file in the system. He’ll pop now if they re-run the results, no?”

“Tried it,” he mumbles. “Came up with a big fat zilch.”

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