Page 43 of Follow Her Down
My stomach clenches as I read through the details.She was a librarian at the Kansas City Public Library.He was in town for a friend’s wedding.They happened to be at the same bar.
What followed sounds like a night of hell.
The photos attached to the report show horrid bruises in the shape of fingerprints on her thighs, her throat, her wrists.Cigar burns on her back.Lacerations from a belt.Evidence of sexual trauma so severe she required surgery.
She filed charges, and the case went all the way to court with a final verdict of not guilty due to lack of evidence.
This was before my time here in Wichita, but still, how did I not hear about this before now?
The ice in my veins turns to fire, and suddenly I feel like vomiting.This is why she’s here.This is why she’s leaving flaming bags of dog shit on Vincent’s porch.This isn’t about finding peace in a small city like she’d told me.
It’s about revenge.
***
“Did you find out who it is?”
Vincent’s text comes at 7:30 the next morning, and I’ve been avoiding him ever since.He’s been in a foul mood all day, snapping at deputies, making the coffee girl cry, kicking a chair across the break room when someone used the last of the creamer.
Because people are accusing him of not doing enough to capture Red Hands?Or because dog shit has shattered his ego?
While I stare at his text, I sit very still, listening to my heart betray me with every beat.I should tell him.It’s my job.He’s my boss.He’s the law in this town.
But he’s also a monster who tortured and raped a woman and got away with it.A monster now hunting the woman he traumatized because she had the audacity to leave burning shit on his doorstep.
I have no reason to believe he didn’t do it.No justifiable reason can explain why Sera—Penelope—relived her trauma over and over all the way to the end of a trial if she wasn’t absolutely, one hundred percent certain who did it.
In these kinds of cases, I believe women.To doubt them about something like this… It’s unfathomable to me.
Instead of texting him back, I look up the number Sera called the station from yesterday about the body in her basement and then type out a message:
We need to talk.Now.– Detective Eddie
Then I answer the sheriff:
Just dog shit.Maybe you should get a Ring doorbell with a camera?
I immediately delete that second part, then I hover my thumb over the send button.
If I help Sera, if I lie to Sheriff Harrow, I’m betraying my badge, my career, everything I’ve worked for.If I don’t, I’m betraying something more fundamental—the reason I became a cop in the first place.To protect people from predators like Vincent Harrow.
I press send.
20
Sera
Hewasinmyhouse, touching what belonged to me and leaving with the nonchalance of zipping up his pants.
He touched my kitchen counter with those same hands that had left bruises shaped like fingerprints on my throat.He breathed my air and contaminated it with that godawful spicy cologne that still makes my skin crawl.
The whole time he was here, he hardly looked at me.I was just a body to him.Interchangeable meat that served a purpose and was discarded.
The other officers swarmed my house, their boots tracking mud over my already filthy floors, their voices loud and overbearing.They’d bagged the body, but not one of them truly looked around.Not one saw the crimson footprints pointing straight to the basement door.Or if they saw them, they dismissed them as the whimsical stains of an old, decaying house.
Are they even real?The footprints?Or is this house, with its damp breath and groaning bones and writhing shadows that fuck me every night, just a mirror for the rot festering inside my own skull?
Only Shadow Daddy knows.I can feel him coiled in the silence now, a cold, watchful presence in the walls.
