Page 27 of Investigate Away
Whoever it was, they wore a ski mask and dark clothes with black sneakers and black gloves. She could tell they were black set against the stark white envelopes, which the person carefully tucked into the newspaper.
“What time is your newspaper dropped off?” she asked.
“Usually around five. But all this is time-stamped, so that happened at five eighteen.”
“Huh. I was awake,” she said.
“Pisses me off to admit this, but so was I, though I was in the shower.”
“I was just lying in bed, watching the news, but I was up.” She leaned in, trying to get a closer look. “Whoever that is knew where your cameras were because they made sure their face was never captured.”
“I noticed that,” he said. “Sort of tall for a woman, short for a man.”
“Could be either,” she said. “I remember when Stephanie started to really transition. I thought I would always see my brother Steve, but it was like one day he melted away and there was my sister Stephanie, but oddly, in the dark, other than she grew breasts and long hair, she looked the same. I told her that once, and she didn’t like it.”
“Because you told her she looked like a man, which is the one thing she was trying to get away from.”
Callie smiled. It had been hard for Stephanie. Most people didn’t understand, and she got bullied a lot as a teenager. Even as an adult, Stephanie struggled to fit in to society.
Jag always made her feel like she was a beautiful woman. He even went as far as to set her up on a date with his cousin, Zane’s brother. It didn’t work out, but that’s when Callie really knew Jag had stolen her heart forever.
“Good point,” Callie said. “I have no idea who that is.”
“Neither do I, but I sent it to the lab. Maybe they can enhance it.”
She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder. “Kara warned me what coming back might do.”
“It’s not the first time someone decided to remind me that the Trinket Killer is still out there. When I first took this job, someone thought it would be funny to leave twelve different trinkets on my porch with a big sign calling me a murderer.”
“You didn’t kill those women.”
His strong hands came down on her shoulders. He spun her around. The chair screeched on the tile floor. “That’s not what you told the world the day we broke up, or your last day reporting for Channel 5. And then you went and told everyone about your theory and how I blew you off.”
“Well, you did.”
“Actually, I didn’t,” he said. “Ajax Bond and I sat and discussed that theory one night for hours. The problem with it was the blood DNA.”
“But now we know that Armstrong tampered with those samples and actually placed Adam’s at the scene,” she said.
“But we didn’t know that until after your sister’s death. And since Armstrong is dead, we haven’t been able to figure out a motivation for why she did that,” he said, holding her gaze. “Had it not been for that evidence, I would have considered your theory that we had the profile all wrong and Adam wasn’t our killer.”
“This is a big never-ending fucking loop that has driven me crazy for the last year. The publisher is mostly fine with the book the way it is, but it feels unfinished. I agree.”
“Because he’s still out there.” Jag took her chin with his thumb and forefinger. “But have you ever thought he might be done? That whatever triggered him, or whatever he wanted to accomplish, is over? I stayed in Seattle, and it’s been hard to let this all go, but part of taking this job was doing exactly that.” He leaned in and kissed her softly. “Finish the book and move on.”
“Let me interview you. I need a chapter just about you. A personal anecdote of some kind. That’s really all I have left to do.”
“If I agree, do you think you’ll be able to walk away from the Trinket Killer once and for all?”
She nodded.
“All right. I’ll do it on one more condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I get to kill anything in the chapter I don’t like.”
“I can live with that,” she said.
