Page 37 of Her Last Promise

Cheap strings of colored bulbs were draped haphazardly across chain-link fences and broken gutters, as if someone had tried to inject holiday cheer into a place that had long since rejected it.A plastic Santa lay face-down in someone's yard, half-buried in dirty snow, its cheerful red suit a jarring splash of color in the monochrome darkness.

"Three minutes," Rachel muttered, still staring at her phone, its blue glow illuminating the tension in her face.The red arrow pointed them toward what she hoped would be the end of this case.The address where Marjorie Mitchell had raised her sons.Twenty-two years in the same house, before everything changed.Before their mother's accident, before the court case, before Michael Mitchell's crusade of revenge had begun.

"You know this area?"Novak asked, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as they turned onto Maple Street.The street sign was barely legible, covered in rust and tilted at an awkward angle.Their headlights caught a stray cat darting between garbage cans, its eyes reflecting back at them like golden coins before it disappeared into the shadows.

Rachel nodded, her breath fogging the passenger window."It wasn't always like this."She gestured to a burned-out convenience store they passed, its windows covered with plywood, graffiti sprawled across its facade like open wounds.The faded sign still advertised cigarettes at prices from a decade ago.Sometimes she forgot that Novak had been transferred from Raleigh three years ago and wasn’t overly familiar with Richmond."Ten, twelve years ago, this was solid middle class.Working families, block parties in the summer.The Mitchell boys probably rode their bikes down these streets, played baseball in the vacant lot over there."

She pointed to what was now a dumping ground for old appliances and construction debris.A broken washing machine sat in the center like a twisted monument."Then the Reynolds Chemical Plant shut down, and everything just..."She trailed off as they passed another abandoned building, this one with a Christmas wreath hanging crookedly on its door, plastic pine needles scattered on the crumbling steps below."Dominoes falling."

The streetlights were sparse here, many of them broken, creating pools of darkness between islands of sickly yellow light.Rachel could see the progression of decay in the buildings they passed—houses that had once been well-maintained now sagged with neglect, their paint peeling, porches listing to one side.Some had already collapsed in on themselves, like bodies giving up the fight.A child's bicycle, long abandoned, lay chained to a fence, its wheels missing, chain orange with rust.

"The fire three years ago was the final nail," Rachel continued, her voice low, remembering the news coverage."Started in one of the abandoned warehouses, spread to three blocks of homes.Insurance companies already wouldn't cover most properties here.People just...left."She paused, studying the shadows.“But according to what we know, it looks like Marjorie Mitchell had moved out of here before things got really bad.”

Novak slowed the car as they approached their target street.The Mitchell house would be at the end of the block, according to the address.But something caught Rachel's eye before they reached it—a car parked along the curb in front of one of the condemned houses.Her fingers flew across her phone screen, pulling up her case notes, heart pounding against her ribs.

"Stop," she commanded, her heart rate quickening.She looked at the car info on her phone and then to the license plate of the parked car."That's Jessica Martinez's car."The vehicle sat silent and dark, a thin layer of frost already forming on its windshield.Rachel checked the plate number three times, though she already knew.

Novak killed the engine and the headlights, plunging them into near-total darkness.The only illumination came from a half-moon partially obscured by clouds.Rachel found that she actually missed the Christmas lights now.There was nowhere in this neighborhood to hang them, no families to put them up.The silence that fell was absolute—no traffic noise, no voices, not even the usual urban soundtrack of sirens in the distance.

They exited the vehicle in perfect sync, closing the doors with barely a click.The cold hit Rachel like a physical blow, seeping through her coat and making her fingers ache where they rested near her weapon.Their footsteps crunched softly on frozen grass as they approached the Mitchell house, each sound seeming unnaturally loud in the stillness..

The house was simple and dark, though appeared almost sinister—a dark, cancerous mass against the night sky.The porch was a broken-toothed smile, boards missing from its steps, rails hanging at dangerous angles.Ice had formed in the gaps between boards, gleaming dully in the weak moonlight.The front door had been officially sealed by the city—Rachel could make out the remnants of the notice, yellow paper faded almost white with age, stapled beneath a heavy steel plate bolted across the entrance.Someone had spray-painted "KEEP OUT" across the plate in red.

She caught Novak's eye and tilted her head toward the side of the house.He nodded, understanding her intent without words.They moved in tandem, staying close to the building's shadow, their breaths creating small clouds in the frigid air.They ran side by side in silence, their breath forming little clouds of vapor that puffed out alongside them.

The side yard was overgrown, dead weeds crackling under their feet like tiny bones breaking.Rachel could smell decay—wet wood, moldering leaves, the musty scent of abandonment.An old garden hose lay partially buried in the frozen ground, its green plastic bleached almost white by years of sun exposure.

They rounded the back corner, and she felt Novak tense beside her.There, descending into the earth like the entrance to a tomb, was a concrete stairwell leading to a basement door.Old toys and debris had collected in the corners of the steps—a plastic soldier missing its arms, a baseball so weathered the leather had split.The sight of these abandoned playthings, possibly left by the Mitchell brothers themselves, made Rachel's chest tighten.

The boards that had once sealed the basement entrance were now splintered and torn away, leaving jagged edges that reminded Rachel of broken bones.Fresh scratch marks in the wood showed where someone had recently forced entry, the pale exposed wood standing out against the weathered gray of the older surface.The sight sent a chill down her spine that had nothing to do with the December air.The marks of forced entry looked to have been caused by a crowbar; much of the frame had been torn away, its remnants lying on the old concrete.

Rachel drew her weapon, feeling the familiar weight settle into her palm.The grip was cold, and she had to consciously prevent her fingers from trembling.She locked eyes with Novak and began a series of precise hand signals:Me, kick, door.You, lead, entry.

He responded with a short nod, shifting his position to give her room to maneuver while staying ready to surge forward.The trust between them in this moment was absolute.Rachel wasn’t sure they’d ever faced such a moment together—where they would have to deeply rely on the skill and precision of the other.

The stairs were treacherous in the dark, ice forming a thin glaze over the concrete.Each step had to be taken with careful precision; a fall now could be disastrous in more ways than one.Rachel positioned herself carefully, aware that a slip now could be catastrophic.She removed her small flashlight from her inner coat pocket, slipping it out like a secondary weapon.The small, bright beam revealed the wear and rot of the door in even more detail.When she reached for the knob, the door handle was a cold lump of rust under her hand, confirming it was locked despite the damaged frame.She took a deep breath, centered herself, and channeled every ounce of strength into her leg.

The kick landed just beside the handle, where the frame would be weakest.The sound of splintering wood and tearing metal seemed impossibly loud in the quiet night, like a gunshot.Rachel had not expected the wood and other materials to be so weak.The door flew inward with a crash that echoed through the empty house, pieces of the frame flying far into the darkness beyond.Novak was moving before the door had swung all the way back, his figure a dark blur as he crossed the threshold.Rachel's heart hammered in her chest, each beat seeming to count down to something inevitable.

Rachel's flashlight beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a scene frozen in time.Wood-paneled walls straight out of the seventies, water stains creating dark continents on their surface.Shag carpet, once presumably blue, now a mottled mess of mold and decay.The beam caught movement to their right—a door opening, a figure emerging quickly.

The man from the security footage…Michael Mitchell.He wasn’t wasting any time, it seemed.

His eyes were wild, his mouth set in a grimace of determination.Rachel saw the gun in his hand right away; it looked enormous in the flashlight's beam, the barrel swinging toward Novak with terrible purpose.Rachel saw everything with crystalline clarity: the tension in Mitchell's trigger finger, the way the light caught the gun's blued steel, the small Christmas tree air freshener hanging from a nail in the wall behind him, swaying slightly in the disturbed air.

“Michael Mitchell, drop the g—” Rachel started.

But she was interrupted by the booming thunder of his gun, pointed squarely at Novak.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

In the immediate aftermath of the gunshot, Rachel could only think of the bitter irony—that after everything, after all the planning and deception, it would end here, in the house where it all began.In the home where two brothers had once played and fought and grown up, now transformed into a battleground where one of those brothers was hiding away…and had just taken a shot at her partner.

The gunshot echoed through the basement, its report impossibly loud in the confined space.Rachel's heart seized as she watched Novak stumble backward, his hand instinctively clutching at his shoulder.But there was no time for horror or worry in that moment.Her training took over, her Glock already raised and aimed.She didn't want to kill Mitchell—that, to her, had always been a last resort, even in moments like these.But she had to do something to stop him.

So she fired.She aimed low, targeting Mitchell’s leg as he tried to dive back into the darkness of the room he had come out of.

The muzzle flash illuminated the small hallway beyond for a fraction of a second, and Rachel knew she hadn't missed.Mitchell's scream of pain confirmed it, followed by the spray of blood that painted the wall in a crimson arc.In the harsh beam of her flashlight, the blood looked almost artificial, like something from a cheap horror movie set.But there was nothing artificial about Novak's labored breathing behind her.

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