Annalise and I stopped in front of a four story apartment building about half an hour away from the field office. We stepped off the car, taking a quick scan of the surrounding area. All seemed calm. The neighborhood was considered relatively safe, so it would be a little weird that the killer would live here. The building was in the middle of the street with houses filling out the rest of the street. This seemed like the kind of place where people knew the comings and goings of their neighbors. The lawns were perfectly manicured, the street nice and tidy. Every car sparkled under the sun, meaning most were newly washed.
A killer like the one we were tracking needed to move freely and at all hours of the night and day. Living in a place like this would make that difficult. We walked up to the gate, looking at the list of the tenants marked on the buzzer. IT had managed to trace the IP address down to the unit, Unit C. The name for Unit C was Chloe Rojas. Annalise pressed for Unit A, identifying us as FBI agents. The resident of Unit A buzzed us in, opening the door as we approached. It was an elderly woman with a friendly face.
Annalise took the lead, asking routine questions before diving into the heart of the matter. The woman was talkative, eager to give any information that Annalise asked for. Since she lived in the first unit, she often saw the other tenants leave or come home. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, everyone was friendly and most of the residents were in their apartments by midnight. She had a camera that looked out of her window towards the entrance.
A few months ago, there had been a break-in at one of the upper units, so she installed a camera as a precaution. She offered up the stored footage before we even had to ask. Annalise smiled and accepted waiting a few minutes while the woman gathered the laptop the camera fed into. I had taken the time to look around. No curtains moved, none of the other tenants had come out.
If the killer did live in Unit C, then they hadn't noticed our presence just yet. When the woman returned, Annalise produced a plastic bag from her back pocket and slipped the laptop inside. We thanked the woman for her time, stepped back and waited for her to shut the door. We passed by Unit B, approaching Unit C carefully.
The name Chloe Rojas had not come up in any of the evidence we had gathered. But jumping from Chloe to Chrissy wasn't a huge leap. Chloe could be her real name, and if it was, maybe she was working with someone else. I banged my knuckles against the door, stepping back a couple of feet. My hand instinctively drew back over my exposed holster.
We heard the shuffling of locks, then the door was pulled open. My muscles went slack and my stomach seized with shock. Annalise turned to me then back at Chloe. Was I imagining things? Impossible, Annalise had seen her, too.
"Can I help you?" Chloe asked.
Her voice was deeper than I expected, which brought me back to the moment.
"I'm Special Agent Valentine and this Special Agent Aleksandrov, we're with the FBI." Annalise said.
We flashed our badges, but I was too stunned to speak. She was... she was identical to Marina.
"Are you alright?" Chloe asked me.
Her voice was much deeper than Marina's, so it couldn't be her.
"Yes ma'am, it's just been a hot day." I managed to get out.
"Can I see your badges again?"
We obliged her request. She took a better look at them, then invited us into her apartment. Chloe had had the air conditioner running so it was a cool blast of air that welcomed us. I breathed out, starting to feel some relief. She brought us each glasses of cold water then asked us to sit down.
Annalise, being the amazing woman that she was, took the lead again. While Chloe was distracted, I let my eyes wander around the apartment. It was tidy, everything in its place. The carpet was a little dingy, but it was probably like that when she moved in. She had a lot of pictures on the walls and frames on almost all of her surfaces.
"How long have you lived here?" Annalise asked, after confirming that she was in fact Chloe Rojas.
"About five years. It's a nice area, the rent is low." she said.
"Do you live alone?"
"Yes."
Annalise nodded, taking a look around the room.
"It's a rather large apartment, two bedrooms."
I loved her eye. As much as I was good at observing, Annalise saw everything.
"I used to have a roommate."
I looked down the side table beside me. It had one frame, a picture of three woman, all identical. I studied the woman on the right, noticing a mole on her neck. I stiffened again. That was Marina. I knew that mole. I had kissed that spot on her neck often.
Marina had never told me much about her family. She alluded to having no family left. When we first met, she said that her family had died in a car accident when she was a teenager. This Chloe, was related to Marina, and from the look of that photo, they were triplets.
"Can you give me the name of that roommate?" I asked, finally chiming in.
Chloe furrowed her brows.
"What is this about?" Chloe finally asked.
"We're investigating a string of murders and a woman who might be connected to them. An IP address was traced here, so we are following up."
I'd found my confidence again.
"The roommate was my sister. Her name is Nadia Rojas."
Not Marina. Maybe she was the other sister.
"Are you triplets?" I asked, lifting the frame and handing it to Annalise.
"We were. My other sister is dead. Her name was Chrissy."
The tension built up tenfold. Chrissy was dead, and yet she had relationships with all of the victims.
"Tell us about your sister Nadia. Does she ever come back here?" Annalise asked, returning the photo.
Nadia Rojas. Had Marina lied to me? There was only two of them left, and neither was named Marina Galindo.
"No. Nadia has... a troubled life. She used to live here when I first moved. We were attending college. Our other sister Chrissy died of a drug overdose. She had gone to a party at one of the frat houses and she took fentanyl. She had already been drinking too much, so combined with that, she died within two minutes. Just dropped dead in an upstairs bedroom. The person who gave her the drugs got scared and left her there. About a couple of hours later, some guys found her. They thought she was unconscious and lifted her up. When they touched her, they felt how cold she was. They too got scared and didn't call the police. It wasn't until her friend started looking for her that she found her and called an ambulance, but it was too late. It's hard enough losing a sister, but a triplet that you shared the womb with... that's hard to recover from. Nadia took it hard. She dropped out of school and just couldn't stay in one place for long. She would disappear for months at a time then come back like nothing had happened. I've stayed here because she can't go to our parents' house. I don't ask questions, I just accept her."
Annalise was dutifully writing everything. I wasn't liking where this was going.
"Chloe, does Nadia have a key to this apartment?" Annalise asked.
"Yes, I never changed the locks. She's not dangerous, she's just lost. And when she finds herself, she comes here." Chloe said, sighing.
"Does she have a room here?"
Chloe nodded, pointing to one of the doors behind her.
"Does she have access to a laptop or a desktop?" I asked.
"I don't know if she has one, but I have one. When she's here, she uses it sometimes. Is Nadia in trouble?" Chloe was becoming nervous at our line of questioning.
"Nothing illegal about borrowing your sister's laptop. However, we would like to search her room with your permission. Messages to the victims have come from this address."
Chloe fiddled with the ring on her middle finger as she thought over our request. My gut was pulling me towards that bedroom. It was likely we'd find nothing, but we had to go in there.
"Did my sister do something?"
"That's what we're trying to figure out." Annalise said.
Chloe stood, nodding for us to follow her. She led us to the back bedroom. The place was tidy, bed made, and everything put away. A layer of dust coated most of the furniture, but that was to be expected from a room that hardly ever saw its owner. Pictures also covered the walls, along with movie posters.
I thought back to Marina's bedroom. It was minimalist, something she said gave her peace. But maybe she had it that way because it would be easier to just pick up and leave. Here, there was more personality.
On the desk beside her bed was a stack of true crime books. The titles caught my attention immediately. One book was about Ted Bundy, but the rest were about The Doll Collector and The Mistress.
"She was really into that crap." Chloe said, as if it were a shameful secret.
"Quite common." I assured, but my throat was growing dry again.
Nadia had an interest in our parents.
"When was the last time she was here?" I asked, as Annalise slipped on a pair of gloves.
"A few months ago. I didn't see her, but the place looked disturbed. She must have just grabbed something and left." Chloe said.
I slipped on a pair of gloves too and started to open the drawers to the desk. Inside were more books and printed online reports of The Doll Collector. Nadia had been thorough in her research. I found some notebooks with notes on my father's crimes, almost as if she were writing some kind of story or report herself.
Annalise rummaged through the clothes drawers, but suddenly my attention was drawn to the closet. My father had kept a dirty secret in there, one that my mom found on the night he took her.
I wrapped my fingers around the knob of the closet. There obviously wasn't going to be a body in there. Chloe would have smelled it. My heart thudded anyway as I pulled the door open. A body would have been better than what was in there. Annalise stood beside me, bearing half the weight of this revelation.
The closet was covered from top to bottom with newspaper cutouts of the Doll Collector and Mistress murders. Though unrelated, because they had died together, their crimes went hand-in-hand. This was a shrine to her idol, Kristopher Marner. Crime scene photos were plastered in between the newspaper clippings. On the floor were several half burned candles with a picture of Kristopher Marner's mug shot in a frame.
I turned to find Chloe had blanched at the sight of the closet. Had she never seen it?
"I-" she cut herself off, shaking her head.
"Chloe, does the name Marina Galindo mean anything to you?" I asked.
Annalise was snapping photos of the closet, but I could feel her stealing glances in my direction. Chloe opened her mouth and made noises of hesitation.
"It's our full name, Galindo-Rojas. Her name is Nadia Marina Galindo-Rojas. When she would talk to guys, she used the name Marina Galindo, so she could ghost them whenever she wanted."
My heart dropped into my stomach and then that dropped down to my feet.
"Chloe, we need your laptop." Annalise said, but it was really an order.
Chloe was still too stunned by the closet to react to Annalise. I reiterated the order, my tone much more stern. It finally sunk in and she hurried to the living room to grab her laptop. Annalise turned to me, eyes full of concern.
"Jordan, we don't know anything." She said.
"Oh, we do. Marina Galindo never existed in the way I knew her. She told me not to follow, she's ghosted me, and that's because she has something to finish." I replied.
"Jordan, don't jump to conclusions."
"Annie, there's a very real possibility that all this time the person we've been hunting has been my own girlfriend."
Annalise pressed her hands to her face. History did tend to repeat itself.
"It makes sense. She inserted herself into my life, gaining my trust. It explains how the notes got into my house with no sign of forced entry. She wanted to meet my family, and was eager to get to know them as soon as possible as soon as she met them. It's why she was jealous of you, because you've always been the voice of reason for me. I'm always working, so I wouldn't have noticed if she was gone for long periods of time. But now that we're closing in, she needed to disappear and that's why she's gone away towards family. But here's the problem. When we met, she said she didn't have any family, but they're alive. We're in her sister's apartment. Look at this closet, she was obsessed with my father and your mother by association. She's going after my family. If she's disappeared it's because she's going to do something big."
A figure at the door drew my attention away in an instant. Chloe was clutching the laptop to her chest, like it was the most precious thing to her.
"My sister did something, didn't she?"
Tears were pooling in her eyes.
"Chloe, we can't give any more information on an ongoing investigation." Annalise said.
I took the laptop and thanked her for the information. She shakily took our cards, begging for us to tell her what was happening with her sister.
Annalise promised to give more information when we had it, but we all knew that was a false promise.
We hurried out to the car once we were clear of the gate. I could still feel Chloe's eyes on my back, even as we drove away. I pulled out my phone to call the SAIC, only then realizing that he'd sent me a message already.
SAIC Sherwood: The Mimic has taken your sister, and your mother has offered herself in her place
My body numbed, making it hard to hold onto my phone. This was it, this is what she was preparing for. She was reuniting the last survivors of that night.
Hello! Not as late as usual, but it seemed easier to write this time!
The truth has been revealed! Did anyone see it coming??