Page 3 of Shattered
“I think so.”
I dropped the gun and fell to my knees. I pushed his body, rocking him from side to side, until finally, Haley had enough room to get out from under him. She stood up. Blood pooled beneath him, like he could drown in it.
The permanence of it hadn’t hit me yet. Didn’t seem real. Even looking at his body. Lifeless. Gone. A dream.
I had pulled the trigger. Twice.
“He’s dead,” I whispered.
“He would’ve killed me,” Haley said.
She said the words confidently like she had known all along that he had placed a target on her back.
Haley was trying to do something on her phone, but the blood was making it hard for her to do anything on the touch screen. She had known that this was coming, hadn’t she? I had spoken to her hours ago, and she hadn’t told me that she was planning on killing Aldrich. That she even had a gun with her. That he deserved to die. She must have known that he was a killer of women, and yet she had encouraged me to pursue him. She hadn’t warned me. She had put me at risk by keeping that secret.
So much for the sisterhood I had believed in.
“You saved me,” Haley said, touching my arm. “Thank you.”
I flinched, pulling out of her grasp. “You knew, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Knew what?”
“That Aldrich was crazy. That he killed women.You knew.” It hurt to say those words, to accuse her, but I needed to understand where she was coming from, and that was the only way it was coming out. “You knew and you let me get close to him.”
She raised a brow. “I told you he was a bad man.”
“Are you fucking serious? A bad man?” I pointed to the body on the floor. “That murdering rapist is a bad man?”
“It’s not my fault that you didn’t take me seriously,” Haley said. “Everyone in the Dahlia District knew to stay away from him. I don’t talk to anyone, and Istillheard those rumors. You knew what he was like. You chose not to listen.”
Maybe that was true; I wasn’t sure. It was hard to keep track of everything that happened inside of the brick walls of the Dahlia District. I crossed my arms.
Haley lifted her phone to her ear.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Dahlia,” Haley said.
Our boss? “What? Why?”
“Doesn’t she have some sort of connection to a company that deals with this kind of thing?” She nodded at the body. “We can’t clean this up by ourselves.” She turned away. “Aldrich is dead,” she said into the phone. “What serial killer?” I crouched down next to the body and gave his shoulder a hard shove. He rocked back to stillness. Or his shell of a body did. I don’t know what I was expecting.
“Don’t move him,” Haley said. I glared at her. She continued talking on the phone. “Mel.” She paused, listening, then added, “No.”
After she hung up, I paced the entire house. It was an out of body experience to walk through the house of the person you had killed. To see where they lived. To see their existence frozen in time. The empty champagne glass in the bedroom. The pictures on the walls. Photographs of his first and second wives. How had they died? Had he killed them too, like he had killed Haley’s mother and her unborn sibling?
Would knowing what he had done make his death any better?
The most troubling part was that I didn’t feel anything. A familiar emptiness crept inside of me, clouding my vision in a black cloud. Nothing mattered. Not his life. Not his death.
An hour later, a white van arrived, designed to look like a landscaping business. Dahlia ushered her way inside and rolled her eyes when she saw us. Ah, Dahlia, the mother of the sex trafficking ring she liked to proudly call an entertainment club, rolling her eyes because one of her servers had defended another from rape and death. It was quite an inconvenience to deal with us.
Dahlia pointed at the van behind her. “They brought you some clothes,” she said. “We need to erase any surveillance footage from tonight. And Mel,” she turned to me, “you killed him, yes?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“You know what that means.”
