Chapter 19

Twatapotamus: a thing you’re being right now.

-Text from Krisney to Reed

Reed

“Do y’all have a minute?”

I wanted to snarl that we didn’t, but I knew that this couldn’t be avoided any longer. I’d been putting him off for over a week to have his discussion with Krisney. It was time.

I’d given my family all the time I could. If they hadn’t found Caria by now, it was time to involve the cops.

My eyes took in the detective.

He wasn’t anyone that I knew, which meant he was probably new.

Which was a good thing seeing as Hostel hasn’t had the best police department for years. Anything had to be better than what they had.

At one point, the entire police department had been put under investigation. They wouldn’t have put a new guy in there unless he could prove himself.

I hoped.

“Kris,” I murmured. “This is the detective over your case.”

Krisney wasn’t stupid. She was, in fact, rather smart when it came to life in general.

And she saw, just as well as I did, that this man wasn’t the laid-back man he was trying to portray.

Then again, we’d both been active duty military for a while before we’d gone reserve. We weren’t new to the game.

Krisney offered her hand to the detective, and then gestured toward a couple of seats at the end of the hall.

“I’m about to fall over,” she admitted. “If I don’t sit, I might fall.”

The detective didn’t even hesitate.

He let go of her hand and held his arm out for her to do what she needed to do.

Which made me proud of her.

I was happy that she wasn’t trying to push her limits.

She’d just gotten released from the hospital earlier that morning. Technically she should’ve been at home, resting.

But I knew better.

At least this way I’d been able to keep an eye on her, and make sure that she didn’t overdo it.

But now I wondered if I’d have to do that at all. The woman was so fucking smart that it hurt.

“Your fiancé is right,” the detective said. “I’m the detective over your case. My name is Officer Cree, Tyler Cree.”

“Nice to meet you,” Krisney said as she sat.

The relieved look on her face made me wonder if I’d need to get a wheelchair for her to get to the truck with. The one she’d taken down here was gone the moment she got out of it.

“I wish we’d met under different circumstances.” He paused. “How are the children?”

Krisney’s smile lit up her entire face. “They’re small, but they’re fighting.”

He nodded. “Good to know.” He sighed and took a seat, the one opposite us, and started. “I want to know what happened. Do you have time…are you up for it?”

Kris looked down at her hands. “Where do you need me to start?”

“Start with how you met Caria.”

Krisney looked at me.

“That would be where I come in, I suppose.” I cleared my throat. “I started work here when Krisney was sixteen weeks pregnant. That was four months ago.”

He nodded, his eyes on me. “Okay.”

“Caria was already at the doctor’s office when I started. We’ve had no relationship beyond that of co-workers whatsoever. There was one occasion when we went out to get coffee for the entire clinic, and another after I had just started, when we went out for lunch as a group with a few other members of the staff.”

I could feel Krisney’s eyes on me as I spoke, just as curious about my relationship with Caria as the detective was.

Krisney and I hadn’t spoken much about anything after our surgeries. At least when it came to Caria, and why she did what she did.

Honestly, I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to think about it.

If I thought about it, then I wanted to commit murder. And that was in direct violation of my oath as a doctor.

Surely there was an exception, though. One that said if she tried to murder the love of my life while she was pregnant with my children then she was allowed to get what was coming to her.

“I had no further involvement with her outside of work other than that one coffee run and the one group lunch,” I told them both.

The same coffee run that I knew for a fact that Krisney had seen me while on. The one that had convinced me never to go anywhere alone with Caria again to do anything, no matter how much she begged me to go.

“Okay.” Detective Cree nodded. “Tell me about your experiences with her.”

A command, though put rather nicely, but still a command, nonetheless.

“I didn’t have much of any relationship with her. I barely ever saw her other than at the office, and all of those times were never alone. The other nurse, Opal, who is Reed’s personal nurse, was with her ninety nine percent of the time. The other one percent, Reed was with her.”

“Opal is my nurse, and not a suspect from what I can tell,” I told him. “She’s the one who goes with me to the hospital and helps me by performing vitals, like blood pressures, reading results, sitting in on exams and is basically my right hand.”

He nodded. “We’ve cleared Opal, as well as others in the office. They all corroborate your story.”

“It’s not really a story,” Krisney admitted. “It’s the truth.”

He nodded. “Then they’ve corroborated your truth.”

She nodded.

“Tell me about the day she gave you the oil.”

So Krisney did, recounting everything that happened, including waking up later that night, scared to death.

“Pennyroyal, you say?”

I nodded. “Pennyroyal.”

“I’ll have to research that,” he said. “Dr. Torres, as well as the lab, explained that this was detrimental to pregnancy.”

“Not only pregnancy, but yes,” I said. “Very dangerous.”

Detective Cree pulled out a tiny notebook from his left breast pocket.

“I have two more things,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Are either one of you aware that Caria tried to buy the property that Krisney now owns?”

Krisney’s mouth dropped open in surprise.

Mine didn’t.

I’d known that almost a year ago.

I hadn’t put two and two together, though, until much more recently.

“I blocked her from buying the property,” I admitted. “Apparently her family had owned it at one point. Her grandfather wouldn’t sell it to her, though. His family blocked his wishes for how his wife was to be buried, and he hadn’t talked to them since. When I came along a few years later, I started paying the taxes on his land, as well as ‘rent’ as you could say.” I looked at Krisney. “I don’t know how much of our relationship you know, but we were high school/college sweethearts.”

He nodded. “We had a tragedy occur in my family, and we broke up.”

He nodded again.

Krisney made a weird noise in her throat, making me wince.

“Anyway, that property was by the apartment complex where I used to live during the time we were together. It meant a lot to us, and I wanted to make sure that it was there if she ever moved back home.”

Detective Cree blinked.

“How did you know that Caria wanted the property?”

“The owner told me. He explained that he was struggling financially and that he was going to have to sell. I paid him ten grand not to, and he was happy to do that, because again, like I said, he disliked that entire side of his family for putting him into a bad position during such a hard time in his life.”

Cree watched me, and then sighed.

“Did you know that Caria was in the same school as you, Reed?”

“High school or college?” I asked in confusion.

“Required classes in college…” he pulled up the paper. “Both of you were in the same biology, microbiology, statistics, calculus…”

I held up my hand. “Okay.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that she’s likely had you on her radar for a very long time,” he paused and looked at Kris. “From what I’ve been able to gather from looking into her background, she’s always been mentally unstable.”

“Great,” Krisney mumbled under her breath.

Cree’s mouth kicked up at the corner. “She spent two years in a self-imposed psychiatric ward because she said she heard voices telling her to harm other people. Since the institution was privately funded and staffed to maintain the highest levels of patient confidentiality, her nursing background check didn’t pick up that she was institutionalized.”

I growled under my breath.

“I’m not sure when she started to become obsessed with you, but either of those two times would be my guess.” He paused. “Had y’all been together,” he looked between the two of us, “when she first caught sight of Reed, my guess would be that she would’ve done this a whole hell of a lot sooner than she did.”

“Where is she?”

Cree didn’t say anything for a very long moment, and I knew without him saying that he didn’t know.

“We haven’t been able to locate her,” he admitted. I also didn’t admit that my family hadn’t, either. “We’ve gone through her apartment, got the super to let us into her place. Found her clothes gone, and that’s it. She’s hiding.”

Rafe had said much the same. Him, Travis, and Baylor, as well as Baylor’s friend Parker who was recently hired, had done a lot of investigating on their own. Caria was nowhere to be found.

“She knows that I’ll fuck her up if I ever see her again,” I mumbled under my breath.

Krisney punched me gently on the arm. “Now that’s not any way for a doctor to talk.”

I chuckled, the hard rasp of it tickling the back of my throat.

I honestly didn’t give one flying fuck how a doctor was supposed to ‘talk.’ What I gave a fuck about was the fact that she’d tried to take everything away from me just because I wasn’t paying her any attention.

“What now?” I asked.

Detective Cree replaced his notebook before saying, “We wait for her to come out of hiding. There’s nothing we can do until she makes another appearance.”

I saw red.

“You want to give her another chance to do what she couldn’t last time?”

Detective Cree looked me dead in the eye and said, “She can try...”

He didn’t have to finish that sentence.

He wouldn’t let her get that far.

“You’re watching us?”

He nodded. “As is half the town, to be honest.” He looked between the two of us. “And don’t think I don’t notice those repo-boys of yours. Two of them aren’t as obvious as the other two, but I know they’re doing it. Not to mention y’all are the town’s ‘golden’ couple.” He tilted his head slightly. “I’ve heard from quite a few people that y’all were the couple that everyone was rooting for. Once y’all finally got back together, they were none too happy to find out that the relationship had been threatened.” He stood up to leave. “Plus, your brothers have been working with me, as well as Raphael, after a little persuasion.”

“Who’s Raphael?” Krisney asked.

“Rafe,” I said at the same time that Detective Cree said, “Raphael Luis, he works with Dante.”

My eyebrows rose at the way he said ‘works.’

He didn’t sound like he believed that Rafe was actually working.

“You know Rafe?” I questioned him.

Detective Cree nodded once. “Yep. He and I used to be in the military together.”

The way he said it, though, made it sound like he was unwilling to say anything more than what he’d said. Which meant I shut the hell up about it, because although Cree had been helpful and somewhat careful with Krisney today, being mindful of her delicate nature, I didn’t for one second forget that the man wasn’t anybody that I knew.

I didn’t know him from a random Joe I met at the grocery store.

But if he knew Rafe, then that meant that he had to be vouched for, at least partially.

If Rafe didn’t like him, I would’ve already heard.

Rafe was weird like that, though.

A couple of months ago, I’d found out that although he was working for Travis, he was also down here on his own agenda, helping set up safe houses for a corporation out of Kilgore that helped rescue abused women.

Rafe also knew shit that nobody else knew.

However, I never knew when he was going to pop up.

I trusted him with my life, though.

And now, those of my children.

I offered Cree my hand, and he took it.

“Congratulations on the children.”

I shook it and let it go before answering. “Thank you.”

With that parting comment, he left, leaving Krisney and I staring at each other.

“I won’t let her hurt you or the children again,” I promised.

She smiled sadly. “I never said you would.”