“It’s his work I want to look at. But I need your help. I don’t know this town or these people like you do. I need you to give me the CliffsNotes on these cases, especially where a body was never found. Please, Captain. For Eddie.”
Captain looked down the hall to the room where Eddie was detained. He pressed his lips together, then glanced back at Martin.
“Convince Eddie to stay of his own free will. That way we can help delay formal charges and keep his face out of the public eye for a little longer. Set him up in the spare office.”
“There’s a spare office?” Martin asked, swinging his gaze over his shoulder.
Captain pointed past Martin at the door no one ever opened. “The detective we had a while back was set up in there. Liked to keep all his boxes with him instead of in storage. Crowded the whole damn main room, so we stuck him and all his stuff in there. In hindsight I think that was his goal all along.”
“You told me that was the janitor’s closet,” Martin responded.
“Have you ever seen a janitor around here? And you call yourself a detective.” Sarcasm turned the captain’s voice nearly playful. Then he shook his head. “There’s a desk and a couch in there, probably still covered in boxes. Guy was a hoarder. Get it cleaned out for me and move all the boxes into storage. Eddie will at least have somewhere to sleep. There’s a mini fridge you can stock with water and food for him, and it has its own little bathroom with the world’s smallest shower. There’s no window or door to the outside, and the interior door locks. Better than a cell, but it should still get the point across that he’s not off the hook for this yet. We’re going to keep his phone for now, too. See if anyone calls. Once you get all that squared away, bring Eddie’s research and the evidence from Ama’s shooting, and meet me in room two.”
Martin stared back at him, speechless and altogether irritated. His blood throbbed with stress and fatigue, and he tasted the bitter trail of swallowing a pill dry. He’d wanted this case back—begged for it.
“Oh, and, Detective,” Captain continued as he began walking away, “if you want your name on that office door, you’ve got to earn it.”
Martin watched him disappear into the filing room, but all he could think about was the mental image of that stone sailing through a sheet of paper-thin glass, and at his feet were broken shards scattered in all directions.
AMA Chapter 33 | 11:45 AM, December 2, 2006 | Dalton, Georgia
EVERYTHING HURT. HER HAIR HURT. Her toenails. Ama twisted from her left to her right. She sandwiched her head between two flimsy pillows and stared at the mist condensing in beads on the outside of the windowpane. A cart clattered by her closed door, and she made a mental note to suggest that ICU rooms be made soundproof. Unless those carts could bring her a few shots and a decent chaser. Then she would welcome their arrival on the hour, every hour.
She picked up the button for her morphine drip and put it down again. She needed to remember what had happened. She’d been shot—it was hard to argue with a bullet hole. She knew victims oftentimes didn’t remember much after the initial blow of a violent attack, a phenomenon called barrel focus, where the survivor can’t remember anything visual past the end of the gun. It was easy to discredit witnesses with shaky descriptions to start. By the time Ama was done with them, they weren’t usually sure if they’d been attacked by her client or their own mother.
This side of it—the not-knowing, the darkness, the void in her brain—was utter hell. It was as spongy and thick as the swelling on her sprained ankle, too crowded yet undefined, and when she prodded the space for reaction, it hurt just as bad as a hard jab to the injured joint.
She stared at the window and watched a morning storm thrash the world outside. Beads of rain gathered on the glass, forming streaks, then trailed down the pane and pooled on the sill. She stared and stared and stared, but nothing came. A gust of wind sent rain pattering against the pane, blowing the streaks sideways. Stray light from outside refracted in the beads and lines as they blurred and bent. Pain stabbed straight through her eyes and into her brain. Ama breathed in and out through her mouth, trying to slow her pounding heart, the rush of blood in her veins like someone had opened an internal floodgate.
The beads turned to a haze, drawing her eye past them, and in the gray bloomed the whites of two eyes and the silver nose of a gun. She could see it, short and gleaming, pointed at an angle just beyond her.
Another cart hit an uneven lip of tile outside and something must’ve fallen out, striking the floor with a sharp and sudden sound. Ama jumped in her bed, her fingers strangling the pilling bedsheet. A flash of light played on in her mind’s eye, a platinum starburst of discharged gunpowder, and she felt herself move into it, lurch toward the explosion.
“Hazel.” The name whistled between her teeth.
Hazel. Hazel. Hazel.
She jerked upright and swung her gaze from side to side in search of a phone, pulling at every tether with her fingers. Then her blood ran cold and she froze, her hand suspended midair, her lips ajar with an inhale.
Michael Jeffery Walton.
In an instant, she remembered jumping in front of the bullet, the need to set something right, to tell someone Hazel was alive, somehow greater than the need to save herself. She alone knew who had Hazel. But she also had a very good idea of what he was capable of, of how obsessed he could be, how careful. If she knew where to send police, she’d be screaming his location from the rooftops. But she had no idea where he was, only that he’d never been found or found out. If Michael got wind she was sending the law after him, he’d either kill Hazel and disappear, or run and take her with him.
Seventeen years ago, she knew as she walked out of that courtroom that Michael would kill again, that he would escalate to humans. But she also knew she couldn’t look back. She’d defended other patterned killers since then, studied two or three times as many as that. Nearly all of them shared one trait in common: they would not have stopped on their own. They had to be stopped. Once their need was triggered and the ritual began, completion was the driving goal.
Ama was Michael’s trigger, ritual, and completion. There was a very good chance he knew she was alive. Ama could only hope he didn’t know she was awake and talking. Michael was unique in that he didn’t live for the hunt, didn’t stalk, didn’t chase. He allowed. He waited. And he remembered.
But what if Ama didn’t remember? He needed to cross paths at random three times, isn’t that what he’d said? That it was critical—necessary, even—for an instrument to remember all three encounters? He’d even let one go because he didn’t remember. That man went home never knowing how close he’d come to never going home again.
What if she didn’t remember the attack, Hazel… how far back could she pretend to forget? Would people buy it? Would it buy Hazel more time? Could Ama survive Michael then? And if she did, could she live with what she’d done?
Her thoughts turned to the man who’d fired the gun. She’d pull what strings she could to reduce or dismiss whatever charges he was facing. But what the hell was a grown man doing in the woods at night in the pouring rain with a gun, anyway? He might not have meant to shoot her, but Ama doubted he was up to any good.