If the caller was one of our men—Flynn, Miles, Norton, Ned, or Jasper—it would go a long way toward validating my theory about the killer being after Camilla’s money. “Anything else to go on?” I asked.
“No notable accent,” she said.
“That rules out Ned. He was born in Ghana. His accent’s faint, but it’s there.”
With fondness in her voice that warmed me like broth in my belly, McIntyre said, “Getting closer, kid. One more thing, nearly forgot. Carson called.”
I never used to be an anxious person. If my parents were an hour late coming home from date night, I didn’t assume they’d been in a terrible accident, I just squeezed out a few extra minutes of TV. When McIntyre said Carson’s name, though, my stomach dropped. They’d met before, but Carson and Mac weren’t in the habit of gabbing on the phone. Given the way he felt about me going back to work, I’d partitioned off my fiancé from the force. If he called her, something was up.
“Apparently,” she said, “he’s concerned about your health.”
“My health?”
“Your mental health. He thinks I should pull you from the case and send you straight home to Daddy.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Look, you’ve been nothing but honest with me,” Mac said. “But you know I was a tad uncertain when you came to me about this job.”
Again my gut twisted. “I was, too. That’s why I volunteered to be screened. I’m not going to lie, Maureen, I’ve had a few iffy moments out here.” What would she say when she found out about Flynn’s gunshot wound? I tried not to think about it. “But I talked to Tim.”
“Ah. That’s good.” She paused. “Isn’t it?”
“It is. You were right, as usual. He was amazing. Is amazing.” I said it with a smile. “I think I can do this, I really do. Carson doesn’t have a clue what’s happening right now. He doesn’t want me here, and whatever he said to you is just his way of trying to pull me back.”
On the other end of the line I heard a door click shut. “I haven’t told you this,” McIntyre said, “but I dated someone like Carson once. Controlling. Paranoid. I’d be at work and get these phone calls accusing me of cheating. In the same breath he’d tell me I wasn’t good enough for him.”
McIntyre didn’t gush about her personal life. She’d never once mentioned an ex. Controlling and paranoid. These were the words my friend selected to describe my fiancé. I’d never thought of Carson like that, but the endless questions about Tim, the accusations against him, the ceaseless efforts to convince me I was defenseless . . . it added up.
“What did you do about it?” I didn’t feel totally comfortable asking, but McIntyre had brought it up for a reason.
“I left,” she said. “It wasn’t as simple as it sounds. I broke the rules. Me leaving him was the ultimate act of disobedience, and he wasn’t about to sit back and wish me well. But that’s a longer story, and you’ve got work to do.”
“Right, yeah,” I droned absently, mulling over what she’d said.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I will say this. You might want to step back and analyze the situation before the wedding day rolls around.”
I hung up and stood in the kitchen, stunned into a state of inertia as I thought about what Maureen McIntyre had said. Broke the rules. It was a good way to describe what I’d done, too.
And I wasn’t done yet.
TWENTY-SEVEN
People are simpler than we give them credit for. We imagine our species is composed of complex beings with extensive wants and needs, but we really only yearn for two things: to feel safe and to feel loved. It sounds elementary—but there’s a problem. If we’re deprived of these things long enough, it gets to the point where we can’t take it. We’re desperate, and desperation activates our survival instinct. Makes us do inconceivable things.
When I remembered Carson on that first day, wearing his kitten socks and smelling of fresh sage, I had to fight with myself to stay angry. I’d found safety and love with him at a time when I thought I’d never have either again. In return, he tried to turn me against Tim; hell, he’d called my boss mid-case to convince her I was hanging on by a thread. By no means was I back to my old self, but I needed to believe I could get there. Until McIntyre took me in, my career was DOA, and I’d always blamed Bram. But Carson was equally guilty of killing it.
I understood why he did it, didn’t doubt his motivation for a second. It was just like McIntyre said. He was always distant and dismissive when I brought up work. Even the texts we’d exchanged hours earlier were rife with admonitions. My fiancé had embarked on a full-fledged crusade to remove me from the force, and there was a whole lot more to it than fearing for my mental health.
I was back out in the world now. No more sitting at home waiting for him to psychoanalyze me. I’d dared to stray outside the neat parameters of his life. Carson needed to dominate me, and whether because I didn’t trust my own judgment enough to question his behavior, or because I needed to relinquish control of the life I’d let spin off its axis, I’d let him. Tapping my deepest fears and summoning my demons was his pet pursuit.
I’d been a fascinating hobby for him at first. He quickly recognized that damaged, docile Shana would make an obedient wife. He’d doled out his diagnosis then, used my condition to keep me right where he wanted me. I felt like an idiot for not spotting Carson’s trickery sooner. Caught up in my own thoughts and actions, I didn’t think to monitor his.
What really got me, though, was how Carson looked straight at my face and lied. Dozens of times I’d heard him say it’s a bad idea for people who have suffered psychological trauma to put themselves in high-stress situations. He made his professional feelings about that known whenever he read about a cop who’d done something insane, like gun down a kid in the street or sexually assault a witness. Carson always chalked it up to the officer’s mental state. In the same breath, he’d tell me I was different. The second he saw how determined I was to go back to my job despite the horrors of a homicide detective’s daily life, he swore to me I could, and would, prevail. He’d figured out what I needed to hear and was clever enough to oblige. I clung to his insistence that one day I’d be a good detective again. Banked on his pledge to help. But from denigrating my condition to proposing Thai food for dinner, it was all just a strategy designed to strip down my self-reliance and make me question whether I’d survive.
When I thought back to Tim’s account of his childhood with Carson, I felt an overwhelming urge to toss my engagement ring in the river and bring up my lunch on the shore. Carson’s behavior as a kid proved McIntyre’s point. Power was my fiancé’s favorite high. My dynamic with him wasn’t so different from Tim’s: doctor and patient, enabler and pawn. And that filled me with a boiling, bottomless rage.