Chapter 15 – Greg
“I told you I wasn’t going to give up on her. Tell me what you’ve got.”
Captain Monroe didn’t look very happy about it. I’d been looking for Mariah for well over a month, though, and if the man had some information on her, he’d better give it to me.
“I’m just asking if you’ve really thought this through, Greg.”
“Yes. Now give me the information. I haven’t been wasting all this time and money on her for nothing. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for Mariah to come around? I’m not going to let her just walk away now. We were meant to be together. I was going to marry this girl.”
“If she doesn’t want you, there’s nothing that you can do about it. She left for a reason, and I don’t want to see you get hurt any more than you already have. I told you that the girl was a mess and that you shouldn’t get involved. Never get involved with the victims of a case, it just gets too complicated.”
I didn’t need the lecture. I’d heard it before, years ago when we’d first gotten together. Nothing had changed. I still didn’t care about rules and protocol, not when it came to Mariah. That was why I had no problem asking my friends to use all of their power to help me find her. I had the police database at my disposal, and after some detective work, we finally had something.
“So what is it?”
He sighed and sat down across from me. We were in his office since mine didn’t have a door. “I really like her too, Greg. I always told you that she was a sweet girl, but things change.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Mariah. She has changed, and I don’t think you’re going to like what she’s doing now. It’s been a couple of months since she left, and it looks like she has changed.”
“Has it been that long?” It didn’t feel like it. It felt like it was just yesterday I came home to an empty house and a short letter apologizing and thanking me for everything that I’d done for her. She was just gone, and I was lost without her. I didn’t care what she was doing now. Mariah was mine, and I was ready to claim her and bring her back home.
“Yes, it has been over two months, and now Mariah is into things that you’re not going to like.”
He kept saying that, so I knew that it had to be pretty bad. Did I really want to know? The question was answered when I grabbed the paperwork from him. I had to know. I had to know that she was okay, and I wanted to know where she was so I could go get her. I wasn’t going to live my life without Mariah a day longer than I had to.
“Just tell me.” I was looking at a bunch of reports and I just wanted to know what they said. It was like a bandage: I wanted him to rip it off instead of me slowly tugging on it.
“She’s working at a fetish shop.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Well, you know what a fetish is, a sexual fetish?”
I nodded that I knew. I knew that Mariah had fetishes, but I didn’t see how that translated into a shop or a job. “Yes, I know what it is. What does that have to do with Mariah?”
I was still reading the papers while the captain went to his phone. “Do you have an important call that can’t wait?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, old friend. I’m going to show you something that I don’t want to, but I have to, so just know that I don’t take pleasure in this at all.”
My partner and friend might as well have been speaking in Greek. He had something to tell me, and he was holding out.
“Why don’t you just go back to Marla and be done with Mariah? That would be the best thing that you could do. Marla is sweet and she’s pretty. What more could you want? I don’t see why you’re digging up bones if you don’t have to.”
“Because I love her.”
He just shook his head and made a comment that nothing he said was going to help. “I know that you’re not going to listen to me, but you’re going to have to do something. I wish I didn’t have to show you this, but maybe then you’ll finally understand what I’m trying to tell you.”
Captain Monroe handed me his phone and the first thing that I saw was a compromising picture of Mariah. I was about to get mad, curse him out for having a picture of her like that, but then I realized that it was on the internet.
“What’s this?”
“Scroll down and see for yourself, old friend. Greg, I warned you that you didn’t want to go down this route. Maybe now you’ll see that she’s a lost cause. There’s no coming back from that lifestyle.”
I read the description of the woman I loved. It wasn’t flattering at all, but it was made to entice. It described her as a beautiful virgin who liked a little bit of pain. Make her beg for it, the ad suggested.
As I scrolled down further, I got to the phone number of the place where she was working. I wrote it down, as well as the address. I was going to go find Mariah. The distance didn’t deter me, but it did make me realize that I was going to have to go right now. At least now I knew where she was. To me, that was a whole lot closer to her than I’d been in a very long time.
“I’m sorry that you had to see this, Greg. I know what she means to you. Now you can see why I said that there’s really no point in going to find her. She’s lost.”
Mariah was definitely lost in a way that she hadn’t been before, but this was not going to stop me from loving her. I was always going to love her, and none of this mattered. She must have felt that she had to. Something had made her do such a thing. Her friend was gone too, so I was sure that it was Kimmie who’d talked her into it. If she’d stayed here with me, this never would have happened.
“She isn’t lost. I still love her, and I’m just going to have to save her again.”
“Did you ever think that maybe she doesn’t want to be saved? She goes from one bad situation to another. That’s not coincidence.”
“You just don’t understand what she’s been through. She’s been through more than you could ever imagine. She doesn’t think that she deserves to be loved, even though she does. It’s all in her head, and she just needs someone to remind her of that. That’s all it is.”
He shook his head. I knew that he wasn’t going to see it the way I did. It was hard to explain, admittedly. It was always hard to explain Mariah, and this time I wasn’t even going to try. He’d found her, and for that I owed him, but for now, all I was worried about was finding her and getting her back in my arms where she belonged.
“So what are you going to do?”
“You know what I’m going to do.”
“You’re going down to see her?”
I nodded. “I guess I’m going to have to take a week or so off. I need some time down there to see what’s going on before I bust in and get her to leave with me.”
“What if she doesn’t want to go?”
That wasn’t even a thought until he put it into my head. Before I wasn’t even thinking of that, but now I had to wonder what I was going to do if she didn’t want to see me. She’d left, after all, and that didn’t seem to be a sign of someone who was in love. It was the sign of a woman who wanted to get away from me. I wanted to think that she was just scared, overwhelmed, something. I didn’t like to think that she’d left because of me. I’d pushed a little on sex, but I didn’t think she would leave just because of that. How could she just walk away? I couldn’t.
***
Ever since I’d found out about Mariah, I’d become obsessed with the website, the one Captain Monroe had shown me. I couldn’t stop looking at it, reading everything that I could to figure out what Mariah was doing there. What had gotten into the sweet girl who’d left just a couple of months before? Where and how had everything gone so wrong? I knew that she liked pain. That had been a surprise to me at first, but I thought that it was something special between the two of us. Now it was something else altogether.
I was on the first flight out of Kalamazoo. The connection had me on the red-eye to Louisiana, nervous as hell about what was going to happen when I got there. I tried to play it out in my head, what I was going to do and what I was going to say to get her to come home with me. She had to. She just had to, and once again I had to think about the other options as not even there. Mariah loved me and she was going to come home with me. That was the end of it.
Getting off the plane, it took me a little while to get a hotel booked for the week and then hire a rental car to get me around the city. I wasn’t going to just jump into all of this right away. I had some investigating to do first. I wanted to know what was really going on and what Mariah was up to now.
By the time I got settled in for the night, the sun was coming up and I was exhausted. I was going on too many coffees and too many highs and lows. One minute I was missing her and had no idea where she was; now I knew and I was in the same town as her and I had addresses for her house and her work. It was going to happen, something was, and although I thought I knew what, I realized that it was still up in the air. My friend was right, things had changed. I just needed to find out what kind of things had changed, and how much.
It didn’t take long for me to find the house she was supposed to be living in. It was registered to somebody by the name of Sasha Marks. Since I’d heard Mariah talk about a Sasha from time to time, I had to think that it was one of her and Kimmie’s friends. Kimmie had left town about the same time as Mariah, and I still assumed that they’d left together. I couldn’t prove it, but I had a feeling I was about to. I was about to find out the truth, but I wasn’t finding the courage to walk up to the door and knock.
What was wrong with me? I was there and she was just on the other side of the wall. Had I let the captain get into my head? Was that why it was so hard to move? Maybe I needed to observe things for a little while and see what was going on before I charged ahead.