I ran my gloved fingers across the package. What was inside? A small bump in the bottom left-hand corner told me it wasn't simply a letter.
I pulled out my phone. "Nick, can you find out whether Luke's expecting a package? Something small in a padded envelope?"
"Have you got something?"
"Maybe. Can you ask him?"
"Gimme a second."
Muttering followed then Nick came back. "The only thing he's expecting is a portable hard drive, and that's being sent to his office."
Unless this was Barbie's portable hard drive, it looked like we had a problem. "Can you get the lab on standby?"
"I'm on it. How long will you be?"
"Leaving now."
We had our own forensics lab in the basement at the office. It didn't do the flashy stuff—we contracted that out—but the small team could cover most of what we needed. As I pulled into the car park, Nick was waiting.
"Where is it?"
I held up the envelope between a thumb and finger.
"Let's go."
In the lab, the head technician, Test-tube, pushed back his chair and sauntered over. Of course, his mother didn't actually name him Test-tube, but I'd never known him as anything else.
"All right, boss?" he asked.
"Just peachy. Let's see what we've got, shall we?"
He ran the package through a scanner, much like the ones at airports. An indistinct blob showed up in the corner. What was it?
Test-tube donned a pair of latex gloves, gingerly sliced through the flap, and peered inside.
"Well?"
He looked up at me. "Have some patience."
He'd known me too long to take my shit. Dammit. I nearly snatched the bloody thing off him, but I forced my hands to my sides as he tilted it over a tray. Something tumbled out, and I took a step closer.
"Oh, fuck."
It was a fingernail. As in a whole fingernail, yanked out at the root. The gaudy paint job, shocking pink with silver and black stars, spoke of happier times for its owner.
"Tia's?" Nick asked.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat and nodded. No doubt about it. My toes sported the same design, painted by her last week as we'd watched a movie. I borrowed a pair of tweezers and angled the nail under the light. Yep, I even recognised the wonky star where the brush and her language had both slipped. Luckily, Luke hadn't been around to hear her turn the air blue.
While I planned which parts of the kidnapper's anatomy I was going to remove, Test-tube fished around in the envelope and extracted a note. One line, typed on plain white paper:
Further instructions will follow.
Relief jostled with my anger. We had another chance.
Meanwhile, Test-tube dug out evidence bags and gathered everything up.
"I'll take this lot for analysis."
He'd cover all bases, but I doubted we'd find anything. Everyone and their dog watched CSI nowadays and knew not to lick the envelope, and I couldn't believe we'd be that lucky.
"Where was it posted?" I asked.
Test-tube turned it over. "Penge, South London."
Two minutes later, I was in the Aston.
Traffic wasn't kind, and it took me almost an hour to reach the post office, a tiny kiosk at the back of a convenience store.
"Hi." I smiled at the blond kid sitting behind the counter, and he looked at his hands. "Were you working yesterday?"
He shifted nervously on his stool, struggling to make eye contact. Was he even old enough to have a job?
"Hang on, I'll check the rota." He made a show of flipping through a wedge of papers. "Uh, yeah."
If he couldn't remember being there yesterday himself, how would he remember if the kidnapper came in? I should have brought a shovel to dig for his IQ. His answer to my question about the package was an echo of the gardener's.
"It might have been a man that posted it."
I dropped a tenner onto the counter. His eyes lit up then rolled back in his head as he tried to remember.
"His hair might have been brown."
Arrrgh!
"I don't suppose you've got CCTV?"
He shook his head. "Do you want to post a letter?"
I refrained from suggesting he return his brain to sender and left before I kicked something. A quick walk along the residential road didn't reveal a single camera. This was a game of snakes and ladders, and I'd just slid all the way down a boa constrictor.
We were back to square one again. I ground my teeth, something I hadn't done since my teenage years because it gave me a headache. The kidnapper had promised further instructions, so all we could do was wait.
I ate dinner alone in the office, picking at the pizza I'd had delivered with the enthusiasm of a sloth. I'd told myself I needed to stay in case we got a break in the investigation, but I was lying. In a quiet corner of the canteen, there were no reminders of the husband I'd lost. At home, the reminders lay everywhere.
The rest of Sloane's saved emails held nothing of interest, and my calendar stretched ahead, empty. My mind had nothing to distract it from memories of my husband and Tia, fighting it out for prime position. And as I'd told Sloane I wouldn't return to the States until Tia was found, I'd have to live with that.
Back in the control room, I found Nye had gone to get some sleep, and Tom, who was running things in his absence, took one look at me and told me to do the same.
"I should stay. What if something comes up?"
He gave me a gentle push towards the door. "Then we'll deal with it. If this becomes a rescue situation, we need you ready to do what you do best."
At that moment, the only things I felt capable of were drinking coffee and staring into space.
"Fine. Promise you'll call if you need me?"
"You know I will. Now, get out of here."
I drove home, sticking to the speed limit for once as I didn't want the journey to end. Luke was pacing around the kitchen when I arrived, and my heart seized when I saw him. Not because he was upset, but because his hands held my husband's mug. To the casual eye, it was nothing special—oversized china with black is the new black written on it—but it had been his favourite, and I wasn't ready to see another man drinking from it.
As Luke turned, tea sloshed out and hit the tiles. "Why the hell aren't you doing more? This'll be the fourth night she's been gone. What's that maniac doing to her? He ripped her nail out for fuck's sake. She must be in agony."
Dan and Nick looked on, silent, and it was me who spoke. "I know it's not easy, but believe me, we're doing everything we can. There's so little to go on, we don't have much choice but to wait."
"Believe you? Yeah, right. How would you like it if your nail had been ripped out?"
Been there, done that. "It hurts, but it'll grow back. He could have done a lot worse."
I'd seen everything from fingers to ears being sent to parents. One poor bastard got sent their kid's foot, still stuffed into the tiny Nike trainer he'd got for his birthday the previous weekend. A fingernail was nothing compared to that.
But I had a feeling Luke wouldn't appreciate me pointing that out, so I stayed quiet.
And he didn't like that either.
"How can you act so calm? I suppose it's because it's not your sister that's been abducted. You've got me stuck here in this bloody palace with this pair..." he jerked his thumb at Nick and Dan, "who could be doing something far more useful than babysitting me. I should have called the damn police."
"I'm calm because getting worked up won't solve the problem," I answered, although at that moment I felt anything but calm inside. "We've got over fifty people working on this, most of whom were cherry picked from the police or military for being the best in their field. We've chased down every lead as it's come in, but there's been precious little to go on."
Luke paused in his steps to glare at me, but this time I didn't back down.
"Nobody's got a good look at the kidnapper, and if I hadn't followed you to the woods that night, you'd be lying dead, and I'd be the only one who even knew Tia was missing."
His eyes softened slightly, but still he didn't speak. Well, fuck him. He wasn't the only one hurting right now. I walked from the room with a parting shot of, "If you don't want to be here, Dan will call you a car and you can go home."
Yes, the bitch was back.
I wandered the house aimlessly, ruing an awful day that only got worse with each passing minute. Even though people surrounded me, I felt horribly alone. Part of me wanted to grab a bag, climb into the Aston, and run again, but I couldn't break my promise to Nate. While it might have helped my sanity, I'd done quite enough damage when I left the first time, and I needed to search for Tia.
On the first floor, my feet carried me to the study I'd shared with my husband. Small and cosy, we'd used it as an alternative to the control room downstairs when we needed peace.
I hadn't been in there since he died, and it looked like nobody else had either. His favourite pen still sat in the middle of his desk. A book he'd been reading sat on the coffee table, the bookmark showing he'd never get to finish a quarter of the pages. One of his jumpers hung over the back of the couch under his favourite painting.
It was on the couch that Nick found me, squashed into one corner, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around my legs, and my head resting on the jumper. I could have sworn it still smelled of my husband, but it had been three months, so perhaps that was just my imagination.
"Why are you sitting here in the dark?"
"I don't really know. I thought it might help."
"Has it?"
"No."
Nick sat down beside me. "Want to talk?"
I wasn't sure what to say, but I couldn't keep everything bottled up inside any longer. The pressure had built, and it was either let it out or end up exploding, and that wouldn't be pretty. I smacked my head back on the couch.
"I'm so fucked up, Nicky. Inside. I'm not capable of having a normal relationship without making a mess of it. Everything I do ends up hurting someone."
"That's not true, Emmy."
"Yes, it is. Look at my track record. My mother disliked me so much she didn't bother to see me after the age of ten. When I moved to the States, I upset Jimmy, and after that, there was my succession of sleep disasters and..." I counted on my fingers. "Six relationships I managed to screw up. Seven if you count my marriage. Then with Luke, I lived a normal life for the first time and managed to make a mess of that too, and to top it all I've made you, Nate, and Mack hate me. The only person who can stand to be near me is Dan, and that's only because she's made of bloody Teflon."
I turned away from Nick, gulping in air as I tried to control my runaway tongue, but he shuffled closer and laid a hand on my thigh. "I don't hate you, and neither do Nate or Mack. We were just hurt you didn't talk to us. We only wanted to help."
"Logically, I know that, but three months ago all I wanted to do was get as far away as possible. I had visions of that maniac picking you off one by one."
Running had seemed like the best option at the time, and besides, avoidance was a tactic that had worked well for me in the past.
Nick sighed and shook his head, showing me his opinion of my thought process. "And I don't blame you for the whole sleep episode; I've made that clear," he said. "Nobody, least of all you, knew that you'd react like that."
A decade had passed since I'd tried to kill Nick, but it seemed like yesterday. "It wasn't just you, Nick. What kind of woman tries to stab her own husband?"
For me, that was perhaps worse than what I did to Nick. CCTV had shown me wandering through the house, my movements smooth, my face blank. Moonlight glinted off the four-inch Sabatier paring knife I'd selected from the block on the kitchen worktop—perfect for getting in between a person's ribs.
I moved with purpose, looking for something. Someone. I found him in the study. My husband had been sitting at his desk, concentrating on paperwork until I'd darkened the doorway, and he only had time for half a smile before I launched myself at him, knife in my outstretched hand. Luck was on my side, and he managed to fight me off long enough to Taser me. If it had been anyone else, I'd have woken up with a body in the house.
And to this day, I have no idea why I did it.
"He never blamed you for that either. He loved you more than anything," Nick said.
"Loved me? Did he really? Because he never once told me that. I was more of a project to him, and perhaps that's just as well. It's not like I could ever have been a real wife."
"You were far more than a project. Maybe that's how it was at first, but he'd moved on a long way since the beginning. Don't underestimate the strength of his feelings for you."
"He kissed me once," I blurted. "Then told me it was a mistake."
"I know."
Huh? He'd told Nick that?
Nick chuckled. "Don't act so surprised. Men talk occasionally too."
That kiss happened four long years ago. At first, our marriage had been purely one of convenience. The training my husband put me through was hardly compatible with a romantic relationship. He pushed me. Hard. So hard I almost broke. He had more confidence in me than I had in myself, and he understood my limits better than I did.
Some days, I hated him.
No, most days. Back then, it never occurred to me to sleep with a man whose death I plotted over breakfast each morning.
The change happened gradually. As I became stronger, my animosity turned to gratitude because it was him who'd made me that way. He was always there for me, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. And finally until death do us part. My husband became more than just my mentor and trainer—he was my confidante, my rock, and my best friend.
I fell in love with him, but until that night, he'd never shown the slightest inclination he might have felt the same way.
Hungry and tired, we'd stopped for a break halfway through a journey upstate. Heavy rain soaked us as we ran from his Porsche to some little honky-tonk bar, the only sign of life in the middle of nowhere. Dinner was nothing special, but sick of the cramped car, I dragged him onto the dance floor afterwards to delay our journey a little more.
An upbeat country song on the scratchy jukebox turned to "Desperado" by the Eagles. I went to sit down, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me into him. Never before had I felt his heart beat so hard against mine. I recalled resting my cheek on his shoulder while we danced as if it had happened last night.
Then his eyes darkened, and he kissed me.
Lost in the music and lost in him, I kissed him back. The magic lasted as long as the song, and then my brain short-circuited. What had I done? I'd fucked up every other important relationship in my life—I didn't want to lose what I had with my husband by trying to change it into something never meant to be. So I flipped out and took off. See? Avoidance—it was my speciality.
That night, I walked for miles, until the rain soaked me to my knickers and blisters blossomed on my feet. By morning, my mind had twisted my thoughts. What if we were meant to be together? I couldn't shake the feel of his lips on mine, and my soul craved his touch.
At breakfast the next morning, the words got stuck in my throat. How could I tell him I wanted more of what he'd given me?
It turned out I didn't have to. As I picked at my plate of eggs, he spoke first.
"Diamond, I'm sorry. What happened last night... I shouldn't have done it." He shook his head. "I need to lay off the beer before I make any more mistakes."
A mistake? I was a mistake? Shattering my already damaged heart was a fucking mistake? I swallowed down tears and pain and lust and longing, and the whole mess settled in my stomach like a bad ulcer.
But he wasn't done. "Can we turn the clock back? Forget it ever happened?"
What could I do but nod?
That night still played on my mind, years later. Why had he told Nick about it?
"So, what did he say?" I asked.
"Just that the moment felt right, and he'd kissed you."
"That's it?"
"Not quite. He said you broke away, looked at him like he'd gone crazy, and sprinted out the bar. He didn't know where you'd disappeared to, and he spent the rest of the night terrified you wouldn't want anything to do with him again."
"He was terrified of nothing."
"Except losing you."
"But he said the next day it was a mistake."
"He only thought it was a mistake because of the way you reacted."
"I was scared," I admitted. "Scared that if I fucked things up the way I do any time I get close to someone, I'd lose him. And I couldn't lose him."
"You never would have."
"You think? He always was way out of my league. Anyhow, I decided I'd rather keep what we had than put all my chips on black with a chance of losing the lot. Except now I've lost him anyway." I smacked my palm on my forehead. "I'm so fucking stupid."
"Not stupid, Em. Nobody could ever describe you as stupid."
"Well, I am. I wish I'd told him how I really felt, because I'll never feel that way about anyone again. He was it for me."
My heart ached once more, a yawning chasm that would never be filled. What if Nick was right? What if my husband had felt the same things for me as I did for him? I'd never know. But I did know I'd always blame myself for not having the courage to find out.
"You need to stop being so hard on yourself. You can't change what happened, so you need to get closure and move on. Learn from the past, but don't live in it."
"How the hell do I get closure? There are reminders of him everywhere in this house. Everywhere. He's all I've been able to think about since I've been back." I motioned at the jumper draped over my lap, the photos of us on the wall that I couldn't look directly at.
"When Jana died, it helped to talk."
Except six years on, Nick's voice still cracked when he mentioned her name.
"I'm not one for talking."
He squeezed my hand. "I've noticed. I guess it doesn't work for everyone."
"If someone got a look in my head, they'd lock me up and chuck the key down a mineshaft."
"How about writing a letter? There were so many things I wished I'd said to Jana, and that's what hurt more than anything—knowing I never would. The therapist I saw made me put them down on paper."
"How does that help?"
"It lets the grief escape. She told me to leave the letter somewhere I associated with Jana—I left it under the tree where the eagles live at the back of my house. Maybe doing that would help to get the grief out of your system?"
"Maybe."
And then I made the mistake of thinking about what I would write. When I felt the words "I love you" on my tongue, I lost it. Big time. I guess not crying for over twenty years meant I had a lot of tears stored up because I dissolved in a puddle of them in Nick's lap.
The old Nick came back, and he held me until I had nothing left inside. My eyes were as empty as my soul, and my dead hopes dampened his shirt. When I stopped shaking, he kissed my hair and hugged me tighter, then lifted me into his arms and carried me upstairs to bed.