The Faint Island police department wasn’t equipped to deal with a murder, especially not one like the one in my bedroom. The first responding officer let his puke join mine in the crime scene. The second one looked like he was going to pass out at any moment.
They asked me solid questions, though, and I could tell they were trying. They were out of their league, however. Almost immediately, the police chief called in the Corpus Christi PD.
They took another hour to arrive and then things sped up considerably. The main detective working the case took one look at me and the scar at the side of my face and nodded. He’d demanded that I be taken to the station to be questioned and when I asked for a rape kit at the local hospital, he’d laughed at me.
Gritting my teeth and getting through it didn’t seem like much fun to me, but I could only assume that if I snapped and punched him, it would encourage them to think that I was capable of the murder in the other room. So I had calmly sat down on the couch and folded my hands into my lap. I needed to be tested to prove that I’d been drugged. If they messed around and waited too long, it would be harder to find the trace amounts in my blood.
After politely insisting that they take me to the hospital, the detective gave in. I texted Ramsey on the way to let him know that I was being taken to the hospital and then grimaced when the cop who was driving me drove like an asshole and barely avoided driving us off the bridge and into the ocean. The hospital on Faint Island was actually a medical clinic in a small office building at the other side of the island from my house, but it was well-equipped and run by a stern doctor named Alvin Manning.
The cop escort ensured that I didn’t have to wait behind the pregnant woman and her four children who were waiting to be seen. With their screaming, I couldn’t say I minded. Dr. Manning put me in a small exam room in the back of the office and he and his nurse completed the rape kit. It was horrible and I’d had to dig my fingers into the chair I was in to keep from screaming at them. It sent me straight back to being at Sallisaw’s fingertips and I wanted to run away.
They were as fast as they could be and gentle with me, despite the doctor’s blunt bedside manner. The nurse even apologized as she drew blood and had me pee in a cup behind a thin privacy curtain.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when I stepped back into the waiting room, the cop wasn’t alone. Sitting beside him was a giant of a man with a frown on his face that I instantly felt like I had caused. That just pissed me off, too. I’d just gotten finished with a rape kit and he was frowning at me? Fuck that.
Both men stood and I found myself staring up, up, and up at the new stranger. He was probably close to six-and-a-half feet tall and muscled to match the height. With an odd pair of eyes, one vivid blue and the other bright green, he kept frowning down at me.
“If you’re finished up here, Detective Jennings would like you to come to the station to answer some questions.” The cop beside the giant said.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “The station here on the island?”
“Our station, ma’am.” In Corpus Christi. No, thanks.
“There’s a perfectly good station here on the island. I have a dog that needs to be taken care of and I’d appreciate him conducting the interview here. Let him know I can meet him on the island or back at the house. It’s completely up to him.”
I tried to add a smile at the end but the look on the officer’s face said I didn’t do a very good job. I wasn’t that worried about it. I didn’t want to be treated like a suspect and I didn’t want to be yanked around all of Texas at the wishes of a man who’d clearly made up his mind about me in the first thirty seconds of meeting me. The detective calling the shots clearly already assumed that I was his perp.
“Faint Island PD, it is, then. This is”
“Thad Brooks, Crimson Security.” The giant shoved his hand at me and didn’t stop his frowning. “I’ll be with you through this process and on.”
I stared at his hand and then back up at his face. Deciding to play nice, I shook his hand and barely hid a wince as his hand engulfed mine and his rough fingers tightened just a bit too much around mine. “Why?”
He dropped my hand and stepped back, his arms immediately going behind his back like he was secret service, guarding the president in a threadbare T-shirt and jeans that rode just a tad too low to be anything near professional. “Why?”
I sighed and gestured between the two of us. “Why are you here? Why will you be with me through this process and on?”
A low growl rattled his chest before he shifted on his feet and frowned some more. “Cash thought you needed looking after. Captain Ramsey called him and explained to him what was happening.”
I sighed. By the way he’d said explained, there was no way that Ramsey had calmly explained anything. Ramsey was still livid over Cash involving me in something so dangerous without his permission. The men often worked together because of their jobs, but it hadn’t been easy sailing after Sallisaw.
“I’ll call Cash. I appreciate the offer to have someone babysit me, but like I told Ramsey, I don’t need it.” I searched my pockets for my phone and realized I must have left it in the car. “Thank you, though.”
“You don’t need it? No offense, but you woke up next to a dead man. Someone was in your house, with a deadly weapon, intent on hurting you. You think that you’ve still got it covered?”
Anger flooded my body, along with a healthy dose of anxiety at the forced thought of Sallisaw standing over my unconscious, naked body. “It’s not every day that I get drugged.”
“So, you were drugged?” The cop, Smith, according to his badge, popped in.
I frowned. “The test will take a few hours here. It’s not a big facility. The kit is ready to be taken and tested. They’ll call me, and I assume the lead detective, when they know about me being drugged.”
“Alright, well, let’s get you to the station.” Smith gestured for me to lead the way out of the building, but Thad scowled and headed out ahead of us.
He escorted me to the police cruiser and then nodded towards a large, black truck in the parking lot. “I’ll follow you there.”
“I’m calling Cash.”
“Go right ahead. Maybe he’ll tell you more shit that he isn’t telling his team.” With that little parting remark, he slammed the door shut and stalked across the parking lot to his truck.
I watched him go and then turned to Smith. “I don’t think he wanted this job.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
I found my phone in the cup holder and dialed Cash’s number. Of course he didn’t answer. He never answered. When his voicemail picked up, I decided to leave a message, knowing he’d check it eventually. “Cash, thanks for thinking of me, but I don’t want this guy following me around. Call your dog off.”
“Why don’t you want him around? It seems like, if what you’re saying is true, you’re in danger,” Smith commented.
I tried to remain calm. “It is true. And because I can take care of myself. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I can’t take care of myself. It doesn’t.”
Only, since before I could remember, that had been implied and I’d been fighting that idea for just as long, but after Sallisaw, I worried that maybe my femininity was a weakness. It wasn’t anything I would ever tell anyone, but I worried. Sallisaw wouldn’t have taken a man. He took me because he liked what he saw when he looked at me. My female body.
“I wasn’t trying to imply anything about your gender, ma’am.”
I sighed and leaned my head against the window just as he swerved to miss a pothole and nearly took out an Oldsmobile Cutlass. With a sound eerily close to a yelp, the first one of my life, I turned a glare at him. “If you could try not to get us both killed, that’d be great.”
He laughed. “Nothing wrong with my driving. It’s just a little exciting.”
A little exciting. Just like my life was a little messed up. If we were sticking to gross misrepresentations, I would also say that my current situation was just a little disturbing and that my outlook was just a little negative.
He got us to the station in one piece and I managed to sit through the interview with a very pissed off detective without screaming at anyone. I told him what I could remember and everything else relevant that I could think of.
Ramsey arrived at the station halfway through the interview, but wasn’t allowed back to see me. The lead detective, Jennings, wasn’t letting anything fly. He was being a hard ass when he didn’t have to be, making his presence known. He wasn’t going to have some big shot chief of police from Dallas come into his neck of the woods and flex his muscles.
Jennings was thorough, but to my dismay, he was like a dog with a bone. He was directly thorough with what he wanted to look for. Instead of asking any follow-up questions about Sallisaw or anything else, he focused on my relationship with the bartender. He was positive there was one and if he asked the same question in fifty different ways, I’d give it up.
Finally, the drug test results came over and proved that I’d been drugged with a hefty amount of ketamine. That, plus the knot on my head, should’ve been enough for Jennings to understand that I couldn’t have done the crime. It seemed to just irk him, though.
I knew cops like him. They didn’t like to be wrong. Didn’t believe they could be wrong and anyone suggesting they were would face consequences, one way or another.
When I was finally released and told to stay on the island, because I was somehow still a suspect, I found Ramsey and his wife, Ginny, huddled together with Thad. I cleared my throat and wrung my hands together behind my back, suddenly overcome with the urge to cry.
Ramsey came to his feet and pulled me into a tight hug. Ginny was right behind him, her thin arms squeezing me tight. They’d been married for longer than I’d been alive and had both been close to my father and grandfather. After my mom died when I was young, Dad had sent me on plenty of trips to Ginny’s to avoid leaving me alone in our house that’d once been in a good neighborhood, but by the time I was old enough to ride my bike alone, I hadn’t been allowed to without someone with me.
The familiar smell of Ginny’s perfume calmed me enough to get myself together. I pulled in the unwanted emotions and blew out a hard breath.
“Thank you for coming.”
Ramsey patted my cheek, his hand warm on my cold skin. “You’re in trouble, Rain. Of course we came.”
Ginny frowned at Jennings, who was still watching us from the doorway to the back of the precinct. “If he tries anything, I will chew him up and spit him out like bad fruit. We heard about the drug results. I talked to Jennings earlier and they’re rushing the sexual assault kit, but it’s a small town and they won’t outsource to Dallas. It’ll probably be a couple of weeks.”
My heart sped up and, once again, the anxiety that I’d managed to get control of since being on Faint Island rushed back. “I don’t think anything happened.”
Ginny gasped. “Oh, God, honey. I just meant the trace evidence. I’m so sorry. Let’s get you out of here.”
Jennings stepped forward. “Don’t leave the island, Ms. Willows.”
Ramsey snarled at the younger man. “She’s not a suspect. Is this how you treat victims of assault and harassment?”
The word victim triggered my back into a steel rod and I balled my fists at my sides. I wasn’t a victim. “It’s fine. Let’s just go. I’m supposed to be on vacation, yet here I am in a police station again.”
My poor attempt at a joke was met with a frown from Ramsey. I shrugged and turned to leave. Of course, Thad was still there, hovering on the outskirts of everything.
He walked towards the door in front of me and looked around before holding it open so I could step through. His eyes flashed over me before moving back to the parking lot. “You’ve got something on your face.”
I reached up and ran my hands over my face, just to feel wetness pooled under my eyes. Swearing, I wiped it away. I hadn’t even realized I’d cried. When had it happened? And was I so beyond fucked up that I just cried without knowing it?
Once outside, Ramsey and Thad rushed me into the back of Ramsey’s SUV and then we were on our way back across the island with Thad following us in his truck again.
“I stumbled across your neighbor, Mack. He said you were okayed to be moved into the property next to his. Are you going to be okay staying there?”
I resented the sound of the doubt in Ramsey’s voice, but I’d called him crying that morning. I couldn’t blame him for doubting my strength. “I’ll be fine. Mack’s an ex-cop, too.”
The car went even more silent at my use of the word “ex.” Ramsey cleared his throat and clearly chose to ignore it. “Cash assigned Thad to you until this is cleared up.”
I resisted the urge to snap out. Until what was cleared up? The body in my bed or Sallisaw? Because I didn’t see Sallisaw being cleared up. I looked out the window as we crossed the bridge to my house and stayed quiet.
I couldn’t help the fear that crept through my body when I thought of Sallisaw. He was a monster and he’d done more than haunt my nightmares. While I’d questioned his involvement in my bedroom at first, it was ignorance and fear that made me do it. I knew that it was him. He’d come out of hiding to taunt me. As much as a dead man could be considered taunting.
Before I knew it, we were back at the little row of homes. Mine, or what had been mine, was roped off with police tape and there was still a cruiser parked in front, next to my car.
My car. A surge of the instinct I’d used to feel hit me and I sat up, my hands locked on Ramsey’s headrest. “Did anyone check my car? I couldn’t have driven it home.”
He met my eyes in the rearview mirror and nodded, his eyes full of sympathy. “Yeah, Jennings had it checked. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
The adrenaline zapped out of me and I slumped back into the seat. I wasn’t a cop anymore. Any instincts I had were pathetic. Of course he’d checked the car. What had been a lightbulb moment for me was normal procedure for real detectives.
I hadn’t turned in my badge, but it occurred to me in that moment that I might as well have.