Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(13)

Well, this was getting her nowhere except maybe an early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and no, that wasn’t a facetious hypothetical.

In her experience, people who had had near-death experiences or lived through violent tragedy went one of two ways. They either became fearless, and coasted on a Death Pass card that made them feel as if the biggest worry of mortals no longer applied to them… or they became hypochondriacal shut-ins who were paranoid that every hangnail was an amputation in disguise, each cold was viral pneumonia, and all the normal aches, pains, and forgetfulnesses of daily existence were cancer, cancer, more cancer, and/or dementia.

She was the latter.

“But I’m fine,” she said as she looked around numbly.

Throughout homicide’s open floor plan, the cubicles of her fellow detectives as well as those of the shared administrative support staff were unoccupied, all kinds of office chairs pushed out from under after her colleagues had stood up hours ago to go home for the night. Here and there, a blazer or a coat was draped over the short-stack walls of the workstations, and there were plenty of travel mugs, notepads, files, and pens scattered around any flat surface that presented a set-down opportunity. Although most of the monitors had been turned off, there were a couple that had been left on, CPD badge icons floating as screensavers over the CPD-branded network sign-in page.

As her nose tickled and she sneezed, she brought up the crook of her elbow to cover her mouth and nose.

“Excuse me,” she said to all the absolutely nobody.

Putting her hand to the side, she palmed up her coffee cup—and the good news was that the java was so cold, so bitter, so nasty, that the taste of it re-grounded her.

Grimacing, she put the mug back down.

Trey was right. She shouldn’t have gone into that scene. She’d known from the dispatch call that the victims were an older couple, their teenage daughter, as well as an unrelated teenage male—and that there were no signs of a home invasion. She’d known what all that meant. But she’d refused to get real with herself because she’d been pushing through fear and sadness and anger for so long, she didn’t know how to turn the perseverance off. Didn’t even know when she was doing it.

Frustrated and edgy, she checked her cell phone to make sure that it was still working, had the ringer on, and was getting adequate service.

As she set the unit faceup, she refused to wish for another new case to come in tonight. It was hard to believe in karma after what had happened to her and her own family, but on the outside chance that the what-goes-around-comes-around stuff was real, she was not going to hope for somebody else to get murdered tonight in Caldwell. She was, however, willing to pray that if anyone did because that was their destiny, she hoped like hell dispatch would call her again. And hey, she was the backup detective on duty—which was why she’d been pulled into that scene at the Primrose house even though Trey had been put in charge.

She just wanted to prove that she could do her job right, after undermining her reputation as a hard-ass cold fish in front of so many colleagues by bolting off in her unmarked like she had. After she’d thrown up in the victims’ downstairs bathroom.

“Damn it,” she said as she put her hand on her mouse.

Signing in to the case board, which listed the active investigations and provided status updates as well as links to filed reports, she checked all twelve ongoings. She and Trey were leading several of them, including the one on Primrose that involved the Landreys, Peter, 48, and Michelle, 43, and their daughter, Stacie, 16, and their murderer, Thomas Klein, a.k.a. T. J., 15, a state-ranked wrestler for Lincoln High School.

So he was a jock, just as she’d assumed. And she was going to be right about everything else, too.

Struggling to stay inside her own skin, she would have taken a cigarette break, if she’d smoked, or had a glass of wine, if she’d been off the clock. Instead, after considering all her options, she gave in to a secret vice she’d recently been indulging, one that was every bit as unprofessional as her cracking open a bottle of Chablis right on her desk.

Within seconds, as if her mouse knew the way to the file, a video was up on her screen. Before she hit play, she had a thought that she shouldn’t go down this rabbit hole again—

Yeah, that hesitation didn’t last longer than a heartbeat. And this was going to be better than sitting here doing nothing but wondering why she couldn’t remember what email she’d been thinking of sending. Plus it was related to work… right?

Hitting the play button on the footage, she leaned closer and settled in at the same time… and there it was, an interior shot of a filthy trailer, the furniture ratty and stained, all kinds of clothes and drug paraphernalia everywhere, a bar-sized sink full of crusty dishes by an equally cluttered counter.

Directly across the way from the camera, a door was loose in its hinges and she stroked her throat as she re-memorized every detail about it, from the scratches around the knob to the bend in the metal panel itself.

God, she’d watched the file so many times, she could count down the cue for the mouse to scamper across the cloudy windowsill over the sink.

“Three… two… one—”

There it was. And there it went.

Just before that door opened, Erika felt her breath get tight, but it wasn’t because she was back standing over the body of a sixteen-year-old girl who had killed herself. No, this constriction was more like Storytown-rollercoaster-excitement, that special, tingling sense of awakening you got when a thrill was about to hit you in the right spot—