If I let her in, what would happen? I asked myself.
She might not understand.
She might leave.
She might get scared.
She might see you for what you really are.
A monster.
Someone who shouldn’t be loved.
She’ll leave you.
Just like you deserve.
CHARLOTTE
Strangulation was a horrible way to die. The victim was aware of everything that was happening until their very last breath. There was usually a struggle as they clawed and fought and raged against their attacker until finally they were pulled down into the abyss of unconsciousness.
I’d read about it back when I wanted to be a doctor, when I would spend hours in the public library, forcing myself to read study after study about the ways people could die. I learned about how people would stop eating as they got closer to death, how they would become more and more tired, about how you should never say something around a dying person that you didn’t want them to hear, since hearing was the last of the senses to go. I forced myself to learn all about death, because I was terrified of dying.
And it had worked, at least a little, to calm my fear.
But when I saw Katie’s body lying there on the ground, her body covered in leaves, her face calm, her lips blue, I almost threw up. I dry heaved into the bushes, thankful that Professor Worthington couldn’t see me. He was over on the other side of the trees, talking to a police officer.
We were right off the jogging path in the park, and it was that weird time of morning where the early birds, the people who got up at five, six, seven, even eight or nine, had finished their runs. It was also unseasonably cold, and so it was relatively quiet for a Sunday morning. But there were still people walking on the path, and I ran over to one of the police officers who’d blocked off the area with yellow police tape.
“You should cover her body,” I said. “She can’t just be… she shouldn’t just be visible like that.”
I was surprised I’d been allowed to get as close as I had. This was an active crime scene, and the police were supposed to be taking every precaution necessary to make sure it wasn’t compromised. I’d read about things like that happening in my case studies, police letting crime scenes become a trampled-on mess, so that no one could trust the evidence that had been collected. I’d thought those were the exception, but now I was beginning to realize how easily it could happen.
I shook my head as the police officer just kind of shrugged at me, obviously blowing me off as a concerned citizen and not someone who knew what they were talking about. It made my blood boil, and any discomfort I’d had at seeing Katie’s body was replaced with righteous anger.
I stomped through the leaves over to Professor Worthington. “The police are totally screwing everything up,” I declared when I saw him. “They haven’t even covered the body.”
Professor Worthington looked at the police officer he was talking to, who held his hands up. “We were told not to touch anything until homicide got here,” the officer said. “Not my call.”
Professor Worthington shook his head and led me a few feet down the path, out of the officer’s earshot. “Jesus, Charlotte,” he said. “You need to learn to keep your mouth shut. This is a police investigation into a murder, not some excuse for you to come down here and start playing Big Shot Lawyer.”
I frowned. “That’s not what I was doing,” I said. “I was trying to make sure that none of the evidence got tampered with. There’s a dead body in full view of anyone who’s – “
“They’ve cordoned off the other side of the path,” he said. “No one’s being allowed down here.”
“I got through no problem.”
“Yeah, well, you must have been let through right before they blocked it off.” He pointed down to the other side of the path, where sure enough, there were roadblocks set up. Two policemen stood on one side of them, directing people to either turn around or veer off onto the side trail so they could loop back around to the other side of the park.
“Oh,” I said, feeling slightly stupid.
My phone buzzed with a text.
I looked down.
Noah.
Awake? Been thinking about fucking you all morning.
I hesitated. Obviously, he hadn’t heard about Katie. Which was kind of weird. Shouldn’t Professor Worthington have told Noah that his secretary was dead? Unless… was it possible Noah knew, and was just acting like everything was okay?
“Professor,” I said. “Did you… I mean, does Mr. Cutler know about Katie?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to tell him until we had more information.”
“But don’t you think we should have gotten in touch with him immediately? It will be imperative he has an alibi.” I said a silent prayer that Katie had been killed last night, while we were at the BDSM club. It would be embarrassing to have to be Noah’s alibi, but I couldn’t have been the only one who’d seen him there, and if it was a matter of proving Noah’s innocence, well, then, I’d just have to deal with it.
If Katie had been killed this morning, well… my breath caught in my throat. Noah had gone out for a jog. Maybe right through this park. He could have been in the vicinity of the murder right when it had happened. Katie’s body hadn’t looked like it had been there for a long time, but it was hard to tell from the quick glace I’d gotten.
And then I remembered. Katie couldn’t have been killed last night. Because I’d seen her name on Noah’s caller ID when his phone rang. My heart began to race, my pulse pounding in my ears. What was it he’d said when he’d hung up? Something about how Katie had been having a problem but that he was taking care of it?
It had been pretty late – so unless Katie had decided to head out for a run in the middle of the night, it was most likely she’d been killed this morning.
The taste of bile filled my mouth and my stomach turned inside-out. The thought of Noah killing someone made me want to wretch again. I started to feel queasy, and I forced myself to take deep breaths. I remembered Noah coming home this morning, in his running clothes, taking a shower and then dressing in his suit before leaving for work. Could he have killed Katie in that time? Killed her and then just come home and gone to work like it was nothing?
I thought about last night, how he’d held me close, how his lips had felt against the back of my neck, how his arms had felt around me. Heat flooded my body as I remembered how he rushed over to my apartment as soon as he’d heard what had happened with Josh.
The thought that I could have been sleeping next to a murderer, that I could have been falling for a murderer, made me sick.
You’re not falling for him, Charlotte, I told myself. You barely even know the guy. He took you to a BDSM club and gave some vague excuses about how he couldn’t let you get close to him because of his emotional barriers. Don’t confuse that for real intimacy.
But it did feel like real intimacy.
It felt so intimate that I let the girl part of me take over, the part of me that was a woman who was falling for a man. I ignored the law student part of me, the part that was at an active crime scene, the part that was supposed to be listening to Professor Worthington.