Chapter 80
I can almost feel the hum of her return to the city. Detective Samantha Jazz. The name has a ring to it. Samantha Jazz. For tonight, I allow her a quiet return home, but I have a proper greeting planned. It’s my duty, in fact, as her master to ensure her homecoming is about progress forward. It’s time for her to open her eyes and see all there is to see. It’s time for me to step out of the shadows.
For now, this night, I sit in the library, with Ava Lloyd at a distant table, and watch her study a poetry book. She’s a pretty girl, brunette, with big green eyes, and I favor her over others I’ve judged for the simple fact she favors Samantha Jazz. She’ll be another profound ending, one that will remind Detective Jazz that those who resemble her are not like her, not at all.
Ava’s twenty-three, single, and alone, which I find to be the case in most who have sinned. They’re incapable of attracting love. In her case, her parents are no longer living; her one sibling, a brother, is too wrapped up in his Wall Street career to think of her. Ava herself is a student at the university, with big plans to be an English professor. That will never happen. I won’t allow her to spread her sin to those who wish to study the great works.
Ava gathers her books together and packs them away inside a leather bag before heading in my direction. I expect her to walk by, but she surprises me by stopping at my table. “Hi.”
Isn’t this an interesting twist? “Hello.”
“You’re here often.”
Her tone is flirty, interest in the depths of her eyes. I do like to think I’m a respectfully attractive man, with a bit of a movie star look, I’m told, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. “I am.” I don’t offer more. I never offer more than necessary.
“Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?”
I indicate my wedding ring. “I’m a married man.”
She offers a coy look. “I won’t hold that against you.”
The book she’s signed and checked out here in this very library requires that I assess her and judge her. This process demands time and observation. She’s certainly offering me an exceptional opportunity that I’m not foolish enough to take. “With regret,” I say, “I must decline.”
She pales, disappointment bleeding into her expression. “Right. Of course not. You’re married. Sorry about that.” She doesn’t wait for my reply. She hurries away and I push to my feet, prepared to follow her.
Chapter 81
After hours of work, I sit in my bed with the air cranked to arctic, a cup of hot chocolate in my hand, and fighting the sleep I need desperately for one reason: it’s a nightmare kind of night. That’s a secret I keep. When I’m high strung before bed, as I am now, and since my father’s murder, I suffer from intense nightmares. Somehow in those weeks after his death, with Wade by my side, I endured them without him finding out but they were part of the reason I needed a break in our relationship. I thought if I could just get some time to myself to heal, I’d conquer them.
I was wrong.
I stare at the clock: one a.m. Two. I force myself to turn out the lights and lie down. Now the room is dark and icy cold, the kind of cold that can freeze a person to death, not the kind of cold that allows a deep, restful sleep. Shivering, I pull the blanket to my chin, blinking into the inky black of my bedroom. The heaviness of nights spent tossing and turning weigh on me, but I dread the moment I drown in my own mind. I command myself to sleep. I command myself to stay awake, to fight the sleep where I have suffocated in nightmares for the past five nights, but I fail. The haze of a light slumber is a merciless quicksand dragging me under. And then I’m there, in my own personal hell, inside yet another nightmare, but it feels as if I’m awake, a spirit hanging over my own comatose body, watching a distorted reality of my past life events playing out in the present day.
This night, it starts with me on a playground, on a swing, the wind whipping viciously around me. Leaves and dirt gust in the air, wickedly twisting and turning, tormented by the force of the storm. It’s calm where I am, where I swing and sing a song that I can’t make out. I’m always on this swing, and I try to figure out how old I am, but I can’t.
Another second later, I’m in a pitch-black walkway behind the fence, shouting at the man running away from me, but he’s still running. Pushing past the burn in my legs, I charge toward him, ready to make an arrest. I’ve almost caught him when he halts, turning to face me, a flash of steel following. His gun is pointed at me. My heart dances to the beat of a scared animal prepared to attack to survive, ready to claw its way to its next breath. That’s where this chase has taken us. It’s me or him, and he doesn’t live and I die. I pull the trigger and time stands still, the swish of my own blood in my veins echoing in my ears. The man collapses on the ground, a limp rag doll. I fight the rest of the nightmare. I refuse to approach the body. I can’t approach the body. I can’t relive what happens next.
I can feel my body thrashing around, fighting my mind, but I can’t escape its torment. As if punishing me for my resistance, I’m transported to another place, back at another familiar crime scene. I’m kneeling in front of Dave’s dead body, where it’s bound to a chair, just one of many victims, another victim of a killer who seems indiscriminate in his choices. It’s true he kills the young, the old, the beautiful, the deformed, but they all have one thing in common: they’ve been judged unworthy.
I frown at the fresh knife wound on Dave’s chest, the perfect U dripping with blood, but some part of my mind knows that’s not what happened. The Poet didn’t damage Dave’s body as he did his earlier victims. He simply, so very simply, poisoned him. Clean and cautious in every way, he limited his risk of leaving DNA evidence.
Reaching my gloved hand into Dave’s mouth, I pull out yet another poem and message left for us by The Poet. I unroll the piece of paper and read the words of a poem credited to bestselling poet, Mary Oliver:
And this scar I then remember
is a medallion of no emotion
Obviously, I now know why he cut him. He wanted him to have a scar to match the poem. No, my mind wanted him to have a scar to match the poem. This isn’t real. This didn’t happen.
Grimacing, I’m right back in the nightmare, and I start reading again, finding Oliver’s words replaced now by The Poet’s:
I know how those scars got there.
You know how those scars got there.
You cut her
You killed her, Detective Samantha Jazz
Bugs start crawling out of Dave’s mouth and then they are all over me.
I gasp and sit up, hitting at myself, shoving away the bugs that don’t exist, nor did they exist at that crime scene. My mind just seems to want to punish me in new ways. The hot Texas sunlight beams through the curtain, piercing my irises, while I might actually have icicles clinging to my eyelashes. Shivering, I all but sprint to the thermostat, turn it back up to a reasonable level, and then head to my closet.