Page 17 of Stalked

The dead body seemed the most reasonable place.

“So the woman I identified in the morgue—”

“Like I said, my identical twin, Lindsey Rose Mellinger. My mom—in a fit of soberness—thought it was quite clever.”

Rosalyn and Lindsey Rose. “The reversal of each other. Well, almost.”

She nodded. “Yeah. And it ended up being true in just about everything. We were twins, but we were complete opposites. Very different from each other except for how we looked.”

“When was the last time you saw your sister alive?”

Tears came to Rosalyn’s eyes, but she brushed them away. “At least a year and a half ago. We’ve never been close but grew even further apart as adults. Lindsey was in and out of drug rehab all the time. She still lived in Mobile.”

“And that’s where you’re from?” Steve already knew the answer to that but wondered if she would lie.

“Yes, but I haven’t lived there for nearly a year.”

Steve wondered where she’d been for the past six months, but he’d get to that.

“Do you know anything about your sister’s death?”

She shook her head. “No, but she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

“What makes you say that?”

This time the tears overflowed before Rosalyn could wipe them away. “Lindsey was in Pensacola because I asked her to meet me. We were supposed to meet at a restaurant a few blocks from here two days ago, but she never showed up.”

She gave him the name and address of a local café. Lindsey’s body had been found inside her car very close to that area.

“Lindsey’s pretty flighty,” Rosalyn continued. “I thought she’d just gotten the day or time wrong. Or that she was high again. I didn’t know she was dead until a waiter showed me a tiny section of the local paper that stated the police were looking for information about a deceased Jane Doe who looked exactly like me.”

Rosalyn stood up and grabbed a tissue from the box on the small desk. “I was coming by this afternoon to identify the body when I saw you.”

“You said she did drugs a lot, so what makes you think she was murdered? Don’t you think it’s more likely something happened with her drug abuse?”

“Normally, yes.” She sat back down. “But I suspect foul play because she was meeting me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Rosalyn’s blue eyes bore into him. “You saw her body, right?”

Steve nodded.

“I’ll answer your questions, I promise. But first please tell me, was she murdered?”

Steve couldn’t see any good in lying to her. “Yes, I’m sorry. She was strangled in her car.”

Rosalyn began to cry quietly, holding her face in her hands. Steve moved to sit next to her. No matter what had happened between the two of them, he would never deny comfort to someone who had lost a family member.

“I had hoped you would tell me something different. That it was related to drugs,” she finally said.

“I don’t understand why you don’t think it would’ve been.” In Steve’s experience, when regular people heard a family member had died, they did not assume it was murder. And if Lindsey had been involved in illegal drugs, Steve didn’t know why Rosalyn didn’t assume the murder wasn’t centered around that.

Because Rosalyn knew something. Something she wasn’t telling him.

“Rosalyn.” He tilted a finger under her chin so she was looking directly at him. “Tell me. Whatever is going on, I need you to tell me.”

She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her.

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