Page 132 of The Echo Man (Major Crimes)

Cara still can’t reconcile what she saw with the man she’s spent practically every day with for the past three years. Every time she tries to think about it, her mind spits it back. She wants to believe he didn’t do it; her brain drifts in and out of denial. Not Deakin. Not Noah.

Cara feels like she’s suffocating every time she thinks about him. He’s been checked by doctors, now handcuffed in a cell in her own police station, but she can’t go and see him. Her failure is absolute; she’s a fool. She hadn’t seen a single sign.

Marsh had been kind, the press less so. “Nobody realized,” Marsh had muttered, but she knows the whispers. She was the detective chief inspector. The SIO. He’d been her partner.

They’d raided his house. Reports came back: it was filthy, dirty crockery filling the sink, mold, mud, who knows what else. She’d looked at the photos in disbelief; with shock she’d realized it had been over a year since she’d been there. She’d dropped him off and picked him up practically every day, but she hadn’t been inside. She’d been too busy. With her own worries. Her family. Too selfish.

But even with all their searching, they didn’t find any ammunition, no guns. No souvenirs of the kills, no knives—and no evidence of a pit where the dead woman had been kept. No sign of blood: even the dogs had been in. He must have another property, they said. Like apartment 214. They’d find it.

They’d searched the lodge. Found evidence of someone having lived there for the past few months. They’d found Deakin’s fingerprints and DNA, unsurprising since he’d been there multiple times before. Sometimes with her and the family. Sometimes by himself, wanting a getaway for the weekend, she’d assumed with a woman in tow. Now Cara wonders what else happened there. How much pain and torture happened within those four walls.

She’ll never go back, she knows. They’ll sell it. Or burn the fucking place to the ground. She doesn’t care.

She walks out of the hospital, back to her car. She sits in the driver’s seat, but she can’t bring herself to start the engine. It’s worse at the police station. At every turn she subconsciously looks for him. She listens for his voice. She finds herself still wanting to ask his opinion, talk to him, feel his dark eyes watching her. She always believed they had a connection. She’d thought that maybe even it was more than that. But everything he had been doing invalidates what was between them. What was an act, and what was true? And what had he really been thinking about all these years?

She’s still been going to work, despite Roo’s disapproval. She has a team to run, a case to put to bed. But she’s not sure how much longer she can do it. Every time she enters the police station now, she feels the doubt grow. An uncertainty, a fear: that once again she’ll miss the obvious.

Cara knows her brother blames her. And he’s right to, she thinks. She rakes her mind, remembering her conversations with Noah. The man that she once thought understood her better than anyone else. She scours her memory for a moment, an inkling of the killer she might have missed. But there’s nothing.

I’ll take some time off, she resolves. Get some counselling, see a professional. Poor guy, she thinks, and lets out a sudden inappropriate hysterical snort. She pities the therapist that has to listen to her woes.

Her phone rings and she jumps. On autopilot, she answers it.

“DCI Elliott? It’s Professor Barnet.”

It takes her a few seconds to place the name. The expert on ciphers, the man that had the code.

“Are you there? It’s just—we’ve solved it.”

His voice is breathless and eager. He hasn’t seen the news. Someone’s forgotten to update him. But she doesn’t know what to say. In the space, he carries on.

“So, we did as we said. We had a look at the duplicated letters, at the words we thought he might use. We had a few wrong starts.” He chuckles. “But we hit the lottery when we started looking at your names.”

His levity grates. Cara wants to tell him to go away, but her curiosity overshadows her anger. It’s not his fault, after all. “What do you mean?” she asks eventually.

“We looked at the double L and double T in your name, and the double F in DS Griffin’s. And they both appear. This led us to identify the words “fuck” and “kill”, and from there we could solve the whole cipher.”

He pauses, obviously waiting for a round of applause that Cara isn’t going to give. “Shall I email the solution across?” he adds, more subdued in the face of Cara’s silence.

“Read it to me.”

She hears him take a deep breath. “Um,” he hesitates. “There’s a lot of bad language.”

Cara grits her teeth. “I won’t be offended.”

The professor clears his throat. “Fuck you, Elliott. Fuck you, Griffin,” he reads. “You think you know me. With your profiles and your reports. But you don’t know shit. I know you.” He pauses. Swallows. Continues: “You’re just like the other bitches. I will beat you. I will kill you. I will cut you until there’s nowhere for Andrew’s dick to go when he fucks you. Fuck you, Elliott. Fuck you, Griffin.”

The professor stops.

“And that’s it?” Cara asks.

“Um, yes.” It sounds like Barnet very much regrets having solved the cipher. She feels bad for him; he’s not from this world. The poor man shouldn’t have been exposed to such evil.

“Thank you, Professor,” she says. “I appreciate it.”

She hangs up, then sees a ping as he emails it through. She reads it again. She frowns. There’s something wrong about the words, she thinks, but then she shakes her head. This whole thing is wrong. Everything is so fucked-up right now, she doubts she’ll ever be able to recognize right again.

She needs to go and see him. To look Noah in the eye and listen to him confess. But she’s terrified. She can’t predict how she’ll react when faced with the man she thought she knew. Will she cry? Scream, shout? Or maybe it’ll be the thing that’ll tip her over the edge into an abyss she’ll never leave.

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