Page 8 of Spark
“I’m glad you know them,” Chloe said, “and you’re one hundred percent correct.Neither the police nor CFS can keep you here.But I think you saw something pretty terrible in that warehouse last night, and I know what it’s like to be so scared, you can’t think or move or even breathe.I also know what it’s like to have to hide every single one of your feelings, and I think that’s what you’re doing right now.”She took a deep breath, even though it did little to calm her free-flowing pulse.“But I do want to help you.Even if you don’t talk to me about what happened, if you shut me out and tell me to eff off, I’ll still get it, and I’ll still want to help you.”
“Oh, really?”Esme asked, tossing her black-and-purple hair from her eyes to stare daggers at Chloe.“And how exactly doyouknow what it’s like to be so scared?”
Before she realized it might be a bad idea, Chloe said, “I was stalked by a serial rapist-killer two years ago.He wanted to murder me, but the Intelligence Unit stopped him.”
“Someone tried to kill you?Like, for real,killyou?”Esme’s stare went saucer-wide across the table, her lips parting slightly in surprise.She didn’t want to throw gasoline onto the flames of Esme’s fear—God knew the poor kid had been through enough in the last twelve hours.
But that was precisely why she deserved some solidarity.“Yes.Someone tried to for real kill me.”Chloe nodded.“I’ve been where you are, Esme—literally here, in this office—feeling so scared, I was sure the police couldn’t help.They did, though, and I think they can help you, too.But you have to let them.Us,” she corrected.“We just want to know what you saw last night so we can find whoever is responsible.Then, we can work on you not feeling so scared anymore.”
It took all the patience Chloe had, and even some she didn’t, to let Esme think it through.
“I’m not going down for sneaking out,” she said, half statement, the other half question, as she looked at the camera.
Chloe’s head shake was firm.“Nope.You’re not in trouble.”
Still, Esme wavered.“Do I have to…say what I saw in front of everyone?With, like,allthose cops watching me?”
Chloe looked at the GAL, who shook her head.“They don’t all have to be in the room, no,” the woman said, “but they’ll need to keep the camera on while you talk for the record.You can stop any time if you have legal questions, and I’ll answer them for you, same as before.”
“And if you want me to call the psychologist back in, I can do that, too,” Chloe said, knowing full well that some things were best left to the pros.“Any time.”
“No.”Esme wrapped her arms around her rib cage, but she didn’t drop her stare from Chloe’s.“I was there, last night.When that guy was…” She broke off, and Chloe’s heart twisted in her chest.“Stabbed.”
“Can you tell me what you saw?”Chloe asked as gently as she could.
Esme’s answer slammed into her even though it was barely a whisper.“Everything.I saw everything.Including the man who did it.”
3
Chloe fully expected someone to come barging through the door to say, hey, thanks so much for getting us started, but you’re way out of your depth now that we’re at the murdery part of things, so we’ll take it from here.To be fair, it might not betotallyinaccurate.She was sure there was protocol for this kind of thing, just as she was equally sure she’d be best-guessing what that protocol involved if Addison or Sinclair or Tom didn’t rap on the glass to stop her next question.But she understood what it was like to have to lock down her feelings to survive, and what’s more, she’d promised to help.She wasn’t going to scale back on that.Not even when faced with a scared teen and a dead body.
“Why don’t we start from the beginning?”Chloe asked, knowing Intelligence would want as many details as possible.“Can you tell me how you got to the warehouse last night?”
Esme shrugged in reluctant agreement, staring at a spot on the table in front of her.“I snuck out of the group home after lights out.”
Chloe tried to be patient and give her room to elaborate.It’s what Addison would’ve done, she knew.But the silence stretched on with no end in sight, and yeah, let’s just say restraint wasn’t her thing.
“You snuck out to…?”she asked, brows up, and Esme exhaled, giving all the way in.
“I snuck out to hang with Kayleigh and Alex and Oliver.They’re my friends from school.We met at the park, three blocks from the group home.”
Chloe remembered what Tom had said about Esme running with a bad crowd lately.Looked like she’d found the source.“Okay.What did the four of you do after you met up at the park?”
Esme hesitated, but, thankfully, not for long.“Normally, we’d just stay there and chill, but Kayleigh said she wanted to party.She’d swiped her mom’s credit card, and she used it to order a ride-share to North Point.”
The deep breath Chloe intended didn’t go as far as she would’ve liked, but she clung to her cool.“What happened once you got there?”
“We tried going to a couple of clubs, but we couldn’t get in.Which I told Kayleigh would happen, because we didn’t have IDs, but she didn’t listen.”Esme paused to roll her eyes, her dark lashes disappearing momentarily beneath the sweep of her bangs.“Alex said it was no big deal, though.He knew a place we could go.We walked forever—like,reallyfar from where we’d started, on the main strip.I thought we were going to someone’s house or something, but then, Alex finally stopped at some old building close to the entrance to the docks.There weren’t any lights on or people around.”
“It was abandoned,” Chloe translated, dread growing in her belly at Esme’s nod.
“The windows were all boarded up, but one was missing a panel in the back, so it wasn’t hard to get in.Alex had some pot, and he and Kayleigh and Oliver started smoking.I’d never seen them do it before,” Esme said, biting her lip in a way that made Chloe believe her.“They only ever talked about it.I’d always kind of thought they were full of shit, but…anyway, I didn’t want to, so I said no.”
Chloe let out a breath of relief.She might not know much about witness statements, but she was sure that if Esme had been high, this one would have probably gotten complicated.
Esme continued, “Kayleigh didn’t like that, though.She said I was being a buzzkill and that smoking pot was no big deal.That getting high might loosen me up.”Esme’s chin lifted, all teenage defiance.“But she was just being a bitch so she could look cool in front of Alex and Oliver, so I decided I’d had enough of her crap and dipped.”
“You left?”It was a ballsy move for anyone, let alone a thirteen-year-old kid.Then again, ballsy seemed like a recurring theme for Esme.
