Fifteen minutes after I’ve left Jacob on the other side of my bedroom door, I’m in thermal pajamas, sitting on my bed cross-legged, ready to start my own investigation. My service weapon is also on the nightstand next to my phone where I always keep both ready to use, my version of two bodyguards. Only tonight I have a towering brooding man as my bodyguard as well and I’m trying not to think about how close he came to kissing me, or how much I actually wanted him to kiss me. Which would be a distraction that neither of us can afford. Not with the Butterfly Slayer potentially becoming the slayer of someone I love: like my father.
On that note, I refocus and open my MacBook to pull up a blank word document where I type one word: Butterfly.
Where does that lead me?
The past.
Tabitha’s murder.
My dead, murdered, best friend, who my father didn’t even know. That means I’m being led to my past, not his. This is personal. It’s about me, not my father. Unless…I thrum the metal beside the spacebar, considering what to type and where this is leading. Many of my friends from the past were headed into a medical field, and my father’s merger is in the pharmaceutical industry. It doesn’t have to be about me. I could just be the weapon someone is using against my father.
I start keying in names of people from my past who might know about the butterflies, with the intent to search for connections to my father and/or his company. I’ve typed twenty names when the text message window connected to my phone pops up with a message from Jacob: Hello?
Hello, I type.
Nothing on the security feed, he replies.
The security feed I wasn’t cleared to review. My lips thin and I type: You don’t know what you’re looking for.
You can come and help me, he offers.
“We both know that’s not a good idea,” I murmur, as if he can hear me.
And as if he did indeed hear me, my cellphone rings with his name on the caller ID. I grimace and hit the answer button. “Are you really texting me from the other room while calling me from the other room?”
“Asher’s wife works in forensic psychology. I’ll email you her resume but it’s impressive. She’s looked at the letters and she now knows about the butterfly. She thinks—”
“That butterfly is personal to me, and that makes this about me, not my father.”
“Exactly.”
“To which I say: possibly. But as we both know, I was headed to medical school back then. I had people in my life who were headed into medical fields, and could now have connections to my father in some way.”
“Did Tabitha?”
“Not directly. She wasn’t one of the medical students, but she hung out with me and my group.”
“Darren Michaels?”
“Yes. She knew my then-fiancé well.”
“Your then-fiancé who is now a surgeon.”
“And married to someone else with two small children. He’s an unlikely suspect and I know where you’re going with this. I’ve already started making a list of everyone I knew in college who is in the medical field.”
“Save yourself the time. Asher pulled a list of everyone who went to school at the same time as you and Tabitha. He’s cross-referencing any connections to you, your father, his company, and anyone connected to the company. And that means digging into extended family member links from every direction. The data search will be extensive and of course, he’ll do the deeper dissection of those closest to you. He’ll have a report for you in the morning.”
“He needs names to know who was close to me.”
“There’s an internet imprint that shows those connections.”
“Right,” I say, feeling as if I have absolutely no control over this investigation. “Of course, you can, but yet, I can’t see the security footage of my own apartment.” I disconnect and look at the time on my screen. It’s somehow one a.m. and I have court in the morning. I shut my computer and that’s when Jacob knocks on the bedroom door.
Grimacing, I push off the bed and walk to the door, yanking it open to find him crowding the doorway. “The part where I said goodnight and goodbye, didn’t sink in, did it?” I challenge.
“You didn’t, in fact, say either.”
“Okay. Goodnight and goodbye.” I try to shut the door.
He catches it. “Not yet,” he says, too close now, but I won’t back up and risk him joining me in the bedroom. “You hung up on me,” he says, “before I could tell you that Savage looked through two days of security footage for your father’s work and home locations. There’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“I should look at it,” I say instead. “I might recognize someone.”
“Do you have the time to do that?”
“This is my father’s safety. I’ll make the time.”
“I’ll get you all of the security footage you want, and clearance on your computer as of tomorrow. I’m not trying to exclude you. I’m a resource. It’s okay to—”
“Use you?” I challenge before he can throw out the “need” card again.
“Yes,” he says, his eye glinting, reactive instead of flat and hard. “You can use me, detective.”
“Some of the women you protect might find you confusing.”
“You mean you.”
“I’m simply making an observation.”
“If we’re going to take the liberty to make observations about each other, here’s mine of you. You’re a control freak and if using me makes you feel more in control, have at it.” He releases the door, and adds, “Goodnight, detective,” and nothing more. He simply walks away but there is nothing simple about that reply. I don’t know why, but I know that he’s angry. In other words, he’s finally human. I’m probably too satisfied with that fact.
I shut the door and walk back to the bed and lie down. I stare at the ceiling a moment and then turn off the light. An image of the butterfly flashes in my mind, and with it a memory of Tabitha’s funeral. Of a casket. Of tears. Of a sunny afternoon that was so damn hot that my tears evaporated on my cheeks, and that became a challenge to make more.
I shove the memory aside, when I should embrace it, and the clues it might lead me to discover. I dream about my cases. I answer questions in my sleep. It’s how this has always worked, but in this case, doing so means embracing the pain and the guilt from the night of Tabitha’s death. So much guilt. I could have saved her. I should have saved her. “Damn it, Jewel,” I murmur. “Stop. This won’t solve a case.”
I shut my eyes and go ahead and use Jacob. After all, he said I could. I picture him standing in my doorway, broad and all leanly muscled, that perpetual firm set to his mouth. A mouth that was incredibly close to mine just this night. I relive that moment when his hand was on my face and mine was on his. I think of the kiss that didn’t happen and won’t happen. And tonight, Jacob is my hero. Tonight, he protects me from a brutal memory, a past with guilt, pain and murder. A memory I never let visit me in the darkness of any night, ever.
Sleep begins to overtake me, and it’s all Jacob in my mind, until he’s not. Suddenly, I am sinking into a nightmare, into the past. Into the exact place I didn’t want to go. I try to wake up, but I can’t. I’m stuck in the past. I’m back in college, in my dorm room with Tabitha, her sitting at a vanity against the wall. Me on the bed with books in front of me.
“You have to come to the party,” she says, spraying a layer of hairspray on her brown, bouncy curls. She rotates in her chair to face me. “Pull all that gorgeous blonde hair of yours from your headband, and fluff it up into a bedhead look.”
“A bedhead look? Are you serious?”
“Bedhead is sexy. So do it and then throw on some jeans and red lipstick. Come on. Do it. Come with me.”
“I’m preparing for the MCAT. You know that.”
She gives me puppy dog eyes. “You know that I get nervous at these parties alone.”
“I know but—”
I never finish that sentence. Not this time. Everything goes black again, fading into sleep, ending, only it doesn’t end. Suddenly, I’m back in the dorm room and I’m watching her walk out of the room. It’s the last moment I’ll see her ever again. And so, I live it, over and over and over. I see her open the door and disappear, the memory is on repeat.
There is more blackness and then: I’m standing over her casket, staring down at her, and she won’t move. I want to shake her, and I swear I lean in to touch her, to actually shake her, when I’m transported to my uncle’s funeral. Back to the graveyard. I can feel the cold wind, the sorrow, the pain. My father’s hand on my arm. My gaze lifting and finding the man in the distance, watching us. And then it’s darkness again.
Now, I’m back, living that night when I’d seen the stranger again. I’m back at my apartment gate, when I spot him, but I know he will get away. I don’t walk as I did the first time to follow him. I run and I shout, “Stop! Stop now! Stop!” I run harder. “Stop now!” I can’t see him. I’m in the darkness but I still have a sensation of running. “Stop!”
The bedroom door bursts open, shocking me awake and in a fast move I grab my gun from the nightstand. Twisting around, I aim at the door as Jacob stands there a gun in his hand. “What the hell happened?” he demands, scanning the room.
“Why are you in here with a gun?” I demand, trying to get a grip on the fact that the sunlight beaming through the thick gray curtains to my right means I’ve been asleep for hours.
“You screamed,” he says. “You were shouting at someone. Who?”
“I didn’t scream.”
“You did,” he insists, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. He’s already at the bathroom, entering, and I quickly scramble to my feet when the realization hits me. I’d been screaming at the man in my nightmares.
Since my gun does nothing to battle my nightmares, at least not in the present, I set it down on the nightstand, and freeze with an “oh shit” realization. The butterfly isn’t the first thing I’ve found by that security panel in front of the building. That’s what my mind was telling me in that nightmare. Jacob exits the bathroom. “What the hell happened?”
“Nothing,” I murmur, but I’m already moving toward the door, rushing away.
I exit the bedroom, crossing the living area, and entering the kitchen to stand in front of the fridge, where that note is still pinned to the center.
“You’re not ready yet,” I read out loud, and where I’d thought it was a statement that I’d simply chosen to take out of context—perhaps someone late to a date—now I’m not so sure. Maybe the man I’d been chasing left it for me. If that’s true, then that leads me to ask two very big questions:
How long has that man been watching me?
And what does he want?