Highway Butcher – Chapter Nineteen

**I had most of this chapter written before everything happened with the animals and then my grandpa. I was actually in a Bo and Jensen mood last night, so finishing this chapter wasn’t too big of an issue, which was nice. I hope you enjoy ❤

NOT EDITED

Chapter Nineteen

8:45 PM; LOS ANGELES, APARTMENT COMPLEX, PARKING LOT

The drive to the apartment building had been silent, save for whatever songs had played on the radio. Jensen hadn’t been able to focus much on them. Bo had sat practically motionless in the passenger seat, head turned to the side to stare out the window. A time or two, Jensen had been certain the blonde had been sleeping, but the occasional check of his dimmed phone had served as proof he was awake. He had just been… far away.

Now, as Jensen pulled into a parking space, Bo undid his seat belt and leaned up enough to tuck his phone into his back pocket. “The place has been condemned for a few years, and before that, my little bit of sleuthing indicated most of the residents moved not long after your mother’s passing,” Bo said. “It’ll be empty, but if you don’t want to come with, there’s no shame in that. I won’t be long.”

“Is it… is it wrong to want to see it?” Jensen asked as he shut off the car.

Bo only shook his head. “No. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the place your life began. But I don’t know what it looks like in there. Without trying to track down online records of the previous landlord’s contracts, I can’t say how many people have lived in that apartment since, before the condemned status began. I can’t say if anyone did, or if the landlord ever cleaned anything up. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Unfortunately, he did. For all they knew, the place still looked exactly as it had the day the police had finally found him and his mom in the apartment. It was possible her blood still stained the floor.

“Yeah,” Jensen managed to force past the lump in his throat. “Maybe… maybe seeing it will trigger something. Like, I’ll remember something. That’s possible, right?”

“Yes,” Bo said after a moment. “But it’s playing a bit of a dangerous game with your trauma and mental stability.”

“I call Kathy my mom. I haven’t been stable in years. Let’s roll.” Jensen slid out of the car before he could second-guess himself.

After a few seconds, Bo climbed out of the passenger seat. “The door to the main lobby is likely locked, so we’ll need to pick it.”

“Got it,” Jensen proclaimed, walking out ahead of Bo. At the door, he pulled a little leather case from his pocket and squatted down. He had the lock picked in record time — Jamal would be proud. Once he stood up, Bo flicked the hem of his shirt out of the way just enough to grab his pocket knife, the backs of his fingers grazing Jensen’s abdomen.

Okay. He clearly was not hiding his crush on Bo very well because that was very much not something you did to a straight guy who didn’t have a crush on you. Right? That or Bo just liked stealing Jensen’s shit. Given their track record thus far, that was admittedly a possibility too.

Bo flipped open the pocket knife and cut through the CONDEMNED sticker on the door. He held the knife back out to Jensen, who closed it and clipped it back onto his belt. The door creaked and groaned as Bo pushed it open, dropping out of the frame a bit as it went. Bo tilted his head back a little, pulling the door back and forth. Jensen followed his gaze, landing on the hinge at the top of the door that wasn’t quite screwed all the way in anymore.

Bo let out a breath and stepped inside. Jensen followed. He pushed the door back up into the frame, launching them into darkness. Jensen swallowed roughly. Jesus. How many times had Jamal made him train in the dark? Prepare for unknown attacks in the dark? Overcome his fear of the dark?

But now, standing in the lobby of an abandoned apartment building, he felt all his training unravel. What the hell was all that training worth if he couldn’t even move his damn hand to get his light? “Th-there’s a flashlight on my belt. I-I’m sure you’ve seen that too.”

“I have,” Bo said, his voice soft. He reached around Jensen’s back, hand patting his hip twice before landing on the flashlight. He clicked it on and held it out to Jensen. “If you can’t—”

“I can,” Jensen assured, snatching the light from his hand.

Bo’s expression only further softened. He grabbed Jensen’s arm. “But if you can’t, there’s no shame in that. If you need to leave, you can. If we need to leave, we can. I can come back alone or we can try again tomorrow, when the sun’s up. There’s nothing wrong with needing time or space. Okay?”

Jensen couldn’t help but look down at Bo’s hand, where his fingers were still gently wrapped around his bicep. His eyes flickered back to Bo’s face. “Okay.”

Bo offered a smile and gave his arm a squeeze. “Come. We’ll have to take the stairs.”

“A-are you sure you can handle that? We can wait until tomorrow, till you have a fresh dose of your pain meds.”

Bo shook his head, already on his way to the staircase. “I’ll be fine.”

Jensen hurried after him. He couldn’t help Bo’s pain, but he could at least illuminate the stairs for him. On the sixth floor, Bo stilled in the doorway, a hand pressed to the frame. “Do you need to sit? I-I can go break into an apartment and get you a chair.”

Bo chuckled, shaking his head. “No, I’ll be all right. I just want to make it to your mother’s apartment. If I need to sit, I can sit there. Okay?”

“Okay.” Jensen cleared his throat, turning as he shone his light down the hall. “Do you… know what apartment it is?”

“Six o’ eight.”

“Can I help you at all? Like, umm, give you an arm for support or something?”

Bo tilted his head back to smile up at him. “I’m okay. I have the wall.”

“Okay,” Jensen whispered. Still, he didn’t venture very far from Bo as they made their way to the fourth door on the left. Like the main door to the building, the apartment door had a sticker on it too, preventing anyone from opening it without tampering with the sticker. This one, however, had CORONER’S SEAL written in bolded letters. “What does… what does that mean?”

“Umm,” Bo cleared his throat, “someone died inside and… no one can enter without proof that they’re next of kin. Next of kin has legal claim to the victim’s property inside the apartment.”

“So they never found anyone? Not… not a sister or her parents? No one?”

“Not that came to the apartment.”

“What does that mean?”

“The, uh, file indicated that the police spoke to her mother.”

Jensen turned, wincing as his light shone right in Bo’s face. “Sorry,” he whispered, turning the beam toward the wall. “They found her mom?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she say?”

“The… the file doesn’t have transcripts from the interviews in it, just notes the officers and detectives wrote.”

“What do their notes say she said?”

“It isn’t relevant to finding who murdered your mother,” Bo said. “Are you… going to pick the lock?”

“If I wanted to work with someone who would hide shit from me, I would’ve asked Jamal for help. Or Kathy. But I asked you.”

Bo let out a breath. “She said your mom was a… homewrecker and that you were a bastard affair child, and in no world would she lay claim to you.” He cleared his throat, rocking back on his heels. “So, umm… Yeah. That, umm, that’s what the notes say she said.”

“I was practically a baby,” Jensen whispered. “H-how is it my fault that…? How? How am I a bastard she wants nothing to do with for something I didn’t do?”

“I know it’s easier said than done, but it’s better to try not to focus on why some people believe the things they believe. Why they are the way they are. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to rationalize it. Many people get stuck in their ways. And your maternal grandmother was one of them.”

“Their ways?” Jensen asked. “Their ways of abandoning babies when their moms are beheaded?”

Bo cleared his throat again. “I don’t… I don’t know what kind of answers you want me to give, Jensen. I-I’ve tried honesty and I’ve tried not giving you information that isn’t directly related to your mother’s death and I’ve tried softening the blow. I don’t know what you want. Just… just tell me what kind of answers you want. Please.”

Jensen closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t have the best… role models.”

Bo chuckled. “I know. You respond much in the way Kathy always has when I answer a question.”

“Yeah. I bet.” Jensen cleared his throat, forcing his eyes open. “I’ll be better about it. I promise. We can have, like, a code word or something for when I’m being an asshole.”

“A code word,” Bo echoed. “Sure. Let’s say that’s a reliable option. What kind of code word?”

“I dunno. Like, ‘hey, you’re being an asshole again’. Something like that.”

Bo snorted. “That would be a code phrase, and the whole point of a code is that it doesn’t say exactly what it means.”

“Gah, we’ll work on it.”

“Deal.” Bo nodded toward the door. “So?”

“Yeah. Here.” Jensen handed his flashlight over to Bo and squatted down, pulling his lockpick kit from his pocket again. Picking the lock for the main door had felt like just another task from Jamal, just another thing he trained for. Picking the lock to his mom’s apartment felt… distinctly different. He had spent the first few years of his life in there, happily oblivious to what the future held for him. For her.

Life had been a hell of a lot simpler back then.

With the final pin pushed into place, Jensen unlocked the door and rose to his feet. He took a step back as he tucked the small kit back into his pocket. “You, uh… you go ahead and open it.”

“Of course,” Bo said, his voice soft. He twisted the door knob and pushed the door open. Jensen was almost surprised that it didn’t creak ominously. It simply… opened. Bo stepped inside and Jensen followed, closing the door behind him. Bo held the flashlight out to him. “I’d like to request you stay here so I can take a look around first, check on the, umm… state of things. If that’s all right.”

“You mean seeing if her blood’s still all over the floor?” Jensen asked. Bo offered a nearly timid smile rather than a verbal response. “Yeah, I figured. I’ll… I’ll stay.” He grabbed the light. “You got a—?”

“I have my phone. I know what it’s like to hate the dark. You hold onto that one, and I’ll hold onto mine. I’ll be right back.” Bo pulled his cell phone from his pocket and tapped the flashlight on. Finding the kitchen was relatively easy. He knew what to expect on the floor, given the dead woman’s family affairs. But that didn’t make seeing the tiny hand-shaped voids in the long-since dried blood any easier.

How long had a toddler-aged Jensen sat next to his mom’s body, hands in her blood?

The little handprints led away from the rest of the blood pool, under the table. The notes in the case file indicated Jensen had been under there during the murder too. It was horrifically brutal, the whole damn thing. There was no way in hell Jensen had stayed silent the whole entire time the killer murdered his mother, beheaded her. No way in hell. But the killer had left him alive anyway. Some kind of code of conduct? It was okay to cleave a woman to death and behead her in front of her toddler, but killing the kid afterward somehow crossed the line?

It was impossible to know what truly went on in the minds of people like the man who killed Jensen’s mother, people like the killer the LAPD was after now. There would always be guesses and assumptions and probabilities, but the only person who would ever truly know was the killer themselves, and the liklihood they’d sit down and spill out their truth without any lies spilling into the mix was rather low. Bo never exactly held his breath for that.

“Mister Austen?”

“Bo. Mister Austen is my father.” Bo walked out of the kitchen and back to the entryway. “I need to sit for a moment. I think we should do that somewhere that isn’t the kitchen.”

“Yeah,” Jensen whispered. “So it was never…?”

Bo shook his head. “It normally isn’t, not unless the family or landlord pays for a biohazard crime scene clean-up. The shape most of these places — crime scenes — are left in is… Well, it’s not great.”

Jensen nodded, but he seemed a little further away than usual. Bo figured that was only reasonable. “I, umm, I think the bedroom is just past the kitchen there.”

“Excellent.” Bo walked alongside Jensen, using himself as some sort of wall between the man’s flashlight and the kitchen. In the small apartment, there weren’t many walls dividing each living section. If Jensen so much as turned his head and light at the same time, he’d be staring at the blood-stained wooden floor in the kitchen, the small dining table he’d spent days hiding under all those years ago. If Bo could prevent that direct visual contact, he would. Being in the same apartment was more than enough.

The kitchen, living room, and bedroom were all essentially one massive room, with only the bathroom and the small laundry room having actual walls. A long curtain rod stretched from the exterior wall to the short wall near the bedroom closet, and several long window curtains had been hung from it, acting as a partition between the bedroom and the living room. One of the curtains was pulled away from the others, tucked behind a small hook on the wall.

There were two beds aligned against the middle of the wall — a twin and a toddler, side-by-side. Bo sat down on the twin bed, and Jensen sat down beside him. Shining his light toward the nightstand, Bo grabbed the dusty photo frame leaned against the small bedside lamp. After wiping the glass with his shirt, he held it out to Jensen. “I can only assume that’s your mother and you.”

“Wow,” Jensen whispered, grabbing the corner of the frame with shaky fingers. “I-I don’t even remember what she looked like. O-or sounded like. She’s…”

“Beautiful,” Bo said, his voice soft.

Jensen nodded. Her eyes were the same emerald green he saw every morning in the mirror. Her skin was paler than his, her face painted with far more freckles than his own. Her hair was some sort of brownish-red. A beautiful, soft brown in some places and an auburn-red in the spots the sunlight in the photo touched.

She wore an off-white sweater in the photo, Jensen hiked up on her hip. They both looked so damn happy. Oblivious. Jensen’s little head resting on her shoulder. His chubby little toddler fingers wrapped around the collar of her sweater. Absolutely oblivious.

“You were probably two or three in this photo here. It looks like your freckles were beginning to come in,” Bo said. “You were very cute.”

“Were?” Jensen asked. “So I’m not cute now? Rude.”

“Oh, I definitely never said that.”

For the first time in his life, Jensen was thankful for the dark. Today, it hid the flush of his cheeks from the cute blonde seated beside him. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Bo grabbed Jensen’s free hand and placed it on the other side of the frame. “Do you mind if I go through the nightstand drawer?”

“That’s what you’re here for. I mean… right? Looking at stuff?”

“Yes, but it’s still your mother’s drawer. It seems polite to ask.”

“Go for it.”

Bo pulled open the drawer, shining his phone’s light inside. An small, empty notepad. A couple pens, a pencil. An MP3 player and a pair of cheap headphones. An uncashed check. Bo picked up the check. “Do you know a Luca Gutiérrez?”

“No. Should I?”

Bo handed over the check. “This is dated the day before your mother was murdered.”

“Six hundred bucks. The fuck for?”

“The… the memo line says ‘Jensen’. I… I think it’s child support.”

“The check with my dad’s name on it was right here in the damn drawer and no one found it?” Jensen asked.

“Well, the check I think has your dad’s name on it. Kathy usually did the picking around crime scenes. Sometimes with an analyst, sometimes not.”

“Because it allowed her to hide evidence if she deemed it… important?”

“Yes.”

Jensen stared down at the check, at the half-cursive words and numbers scrawled across it. “I want to ask Kathy about it. About him.”

“I would try to steer you away from that decision.”

“You could come with.”

Bo snorted, a hand moving to his abdomen. “In no world is that a good idea.”

“I’m gonna do it with or without you.”

Bo sighed. “How about you sleep on it and see how you feel after a couple hours of rest?”

“Sleep on it where? My dark, empty apartment?”

“I’m staying at David’s. I can… ask if you’d be welcome, as well.”

Jensen’s brow furrowed as he turned to look at Bo. “You’d do that”

Bo lifted his shoulders. “I know what it’s like to not want to be left alone in a dark room that doesn’t feel like home anymore.” He patted Jensen’s shoulder. “I’ll see what David has to say.”

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