Page 53 of Run for Her Life
She exhaled, arms crossed, resisting the urge to drum her fingers on the table.
“Almost there,” he murmured, not looking up. A strip of paper slid into place. A sentence emerged. “Shit.”
“What?”
Aiden froze. “It was Jackie.”
“What do you mean?”
He showed her the pieces. Words stuck out—ticktock, rock, marrow, blackens… words from the first poem that had been sent to Zoe. Words scribbled in Jackie’s handwriting as if she were trying to come up with a riddle and jotting down words and rhymes.
Zoe stared at Aiden in shocked silence. Her brain tried to restart. “Jackie sent that letter? Did she kill Annabelle?”
“Then who killed Jackie?”
THIRTY-TWO
“Jackie killed Annabelle?” Lisa wasn’t convinced, her eyes darting between Zoe and Aiden. She looked down at the pieces of paper that Aiden had carefully assembled. “This is from her garbage? Are we sure someone else didn’t write this? Perhaps the person who had access to her home.”
Images came to Zoe’s mind unbidden—a frenzied Jackie scrawling words, her heart pounding, her eyes coated with a violent glint—an obsession that had quickly spiraled into a delusion and needed to be acted upon.
“The handwriting is an obvious match,” Aiden said. “Though, of course, when evidence is handed over to the DA it will be verified by an expert.”
“Could someone have coerced her to write this?” Lisa asked.
“If she were coerced, she wouldn’t have been the one coming up with the riddle, testing out different words and rhymes,” Zoe pointed out. “This riddle was her brainchild. The pollen came from the flowers in her apartment. The two victims knew each other.”
“But why?”
“Obsession isn’t static. It escalates. It feeds on itself. The more you indulge in a thought, the more it demands. What startsas fascination becomes fixation. Fixation becomes immersion,” Aiden explained. “A moment like that—a tragedy, an act of chaos—becomes an itch, a loop that won’t stop playing until they step into it themselves. Until they become a part of it. Especially in this case, Jackie, who was related to one of the original victims, Michael. This wasn’t just an intellectual interest in the fire. She was connected to it. One of the victims was her family, her blood. This is what we call identity fusion. When someone can’t separate their identity from the trauma they’re fixated on.”
Lisa removed her sheriff’s hat and held her head in her hands. “Annabelle washuntedtoo with those darts. That wasn’t part of this real-life video game.”
“Fantasy can become more real than reality itself and the boundaries start to disappear. And once those boundaries are gone? The only way to make the fantasy real… is to turn it into action. Which is what happened here.”
“But who killed Jackie?” Zoe asked. “Someone else who has a personal connection to the tragedy?”
“Most likely.” Aiden removed his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. “Though in this town, even someone with no direct link could feel they are connected and develop an obsession.”
“But we are looking for someone Jackie would know,” Lisa surmised. “How else would the killer have known that Jackie sent a riddle to the FBI?”
“It also explains why there were differences between the notes,” Zoe said as the realization dawned on her. “The second riddle was stylistically very different from the first one. Because they were written by different people.”
“So we are thinking Jackie had an accomplice,” Lisa said. “But then they turned on her.”
Aiden nodded. “This person knew Jackie had sent a riddle, which is why they did the same thing, and they used the game on Jackie.”
“What’s the point of sending us these riddles? Pure psychopathy?” Lisa asked.
He shrugged. “He’s playing. He needs someone to play against. That’s us.”
A cold nub settled in the pit of Zoe’s stomach. Outside the wind lashed against the windows, rattling them against the hinges. The trees swung and writhed; resisting being uprooted. She swallowed hard. “Now that Jackie is dead, are they going to take someone else to torture and kill?”
Zoe didn’t head back to her motel. She should have, but a lot was playing on her mind. Two women were dead—an innocent victim and her killer. Whoever killed Jackie had to be in her orbit. Her hands fidgeted at the leather wheel. Annabelle stole the game—but what if Jackie had encouraged her?
Zoe pictured how it could have played out. Annabelle and Jackie becoming friends, Annabelle confiding in Jackie about an immersive game related to the fire, and Jackie, with ulterior motives, convincing her to steal it. But there was a third person involved. Someone else who shared Jackie’s obsession and was still playing the game.
She chewed on a sucker and glanced at the rearview mirror and side mirror every few seconds. Her mind drifted to Darren Galanis. At least Darren wasn’t following her anymore. She wondered if he’d given Viktor her message and if Viktor was going to retaliate. She hoped he would. This time she would be prepared—this time all that poison and rage that lived inside her would be vented on someone who deserved it.
