A/N: This is the first time I’ve even opened this book since November, and the first time I’ve written words in it in even longer. The ending of this chapter probably feels stilted and stunted, but my writing muscles aren’t quite what they used to be. I’m still struggling to find the best idea of book one of Jacob and Alice’s series, so I thought I’d try getting back into Bo Austen’s series to try and spark something. Hopefully you still enjoy it despite that, and thank you for your patience. This year has very much not been kind to me, but I’m trying to work around that without pushing it too much. With that said, let’s get into it
NOT EDITED
Chapter Ten
12:30 PM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, MORGUE
After completing the man’s autopsy, Bo picked up the bone snips from the metal cart at the side of the autopsy table. With his free hand, he lifted the victim’s right hand and cut off the index finger. He carefully stripped the skin from the bone and pulled it over the tip of his own gloved finger, like a little finger hat. A hat made of human flesh, sure, but a hat, nonetheless.
He picked up his phone with his free hand and rolled his index finger over the scanner he’d plugged into the charging port. He set his phone aside as it worked on finding a match. He slid the skin from his finger and bagged it. With a shake of his head, he set the bag aside. Like he’d done so many times in his life, he transferred the body to the pull-out drawer in an empty morgue drawer and pushed it inside. With the door shut, his gaze drifted to the drawer Tess Brown’s body still lay in. She’d go unclaimed. Eventually, she’d probably be handed over to a medical school so her corpse could be poked and prodded by students.
Bo couldn’t help the little twitch of his lips. It wasn’t her fault that she had been hand-picked and murdered by whatever monster was running around in Clinstone. It wasn’t her fault that her family was dead, that her boyfriend had died in a car accident, that there was no one left to claim her.
She deserves better than this. He’d work on finding out exactly how much more she deserved later. For now, he had a man to identify. Back at the table, he leaned over to look at his phone. No match in the system. He blew out a harsh breath. Of course. It was rarely that easy. He tossed his gloves into the garbage beneath the autopsy table, washed his hands, and wiped down his phone and the fingerprint scanner. He pulled them apart and set them in his UV light sanitizer. He set the six-minute timer and turned to grab his notebook from the counter.
As he started for the door, he scanned the morgue. With a sigh, he set his notebook back down. No matter how badly he wanted to go into the lab and work on getting the victim identified now, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the morgue a mess, even with the self-promise that he’d clean it after he was done. For most people, ‘later’ was very likely to turn into tomorrow, and ‘tomorrow’ turned into the day after that, and ‘the day after that’ turned into next week. Banking on that mentality simply meant no work ever got done, and although Bo usually had the discipline to make sure it did, he couldn’t risk it. If he let one thing fall behind, it would add up fast, and he would crumble.
In the lab, Bo set his notebook down with his others and headed back into the morgue. As soon as he finished cleaning, he’d finish up his notes on the crime scene and the autopsy. He had already marked down the important details in his shorthand, but that wouldn’t do the detectives upstairs any good. After he’d gotten the detective copies of his notes made, he’d get the man identified.
But first, he had some cleaning to do.
1:42 PM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, LAB
Finished with the morgue clean-up, Bo barely stepped foot in the lab before he could feel that something was just wrong in the room. As he walked in a little further, the pieces of the wrongness fell into place. His blue pen sat on the table by itself, his blue pen that had been tucked neatly between the pages of his red notebook. He did his best not to run to the table as he hurried over to investigate what all was missing.
His red notebook. His blue notebook. One of his black notebooks.
A muscle ticked in his jaw as his teeth ground together. The smell of perfume was still pretty strong at his workspace, the same perfume he’d smelled once already that day. He knew exactly who had stolen his notebooks, and he knew exactly what was being done with them.
Gwen Tanner was making sure everyone upstairs knew just how far from normal he truly was.
1:45 PM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, DETECTIVE JACOB MASON’S DESK
“I need you to see something.”
Jacob frowned as Gwen dropped a small stack of notebooks onto his desk. “I’m working.”
“Well, your job’s about to get a whole lot more interesting.” Gwen tapped the top of the stack with her fingers. “I knew something was wrong with that man, Jake. I knew it.”
“Bo?” Carter asked.
Gwen nodded. “He’s not normal. He’s not just a lab geek,” she said, shooting a glare at Jacob. She flipped open the red notebook on the top of the stack. On the first page, a yellow sticky note had been pressed to the upper right-hand corner. Jacob recognized Bo’s neat, almost computer-like handwriting, the words written in blue pen.
Tess Brown – TH Jan 2, 2020
- 1st fnd vic
- TOD: 11 PM T Dec 31, 2019
- MPR: M Dec 23, 2019
- H: 5 f 11 in
- NHC: blonde
- EC: green
- DOB: W Nov 5, 1975
- LKM: AL 6-8 hrs BTOD
- No D, SA, PA
- CHCl3
- TL: PS 5 in TPB (PK)
“So what?” Jacob asked after a moment. “So he uses shorthand when he’s writing the notes down for himself. Everything he gives us is written out in extensive detail. Who cares how he keeps track of it for himself?” He cleared his throat. “Where’d you get these, Gwen?”
“The lab. He was busy in the morgue.”
“So you stole it?”
“Technically. Shut up.” Gwen flipped the page and tapped her finger against the sticky note in the upper right-hand corner. “And then there’s this one. I think it’s the victim you guys found this morning.
? ? – M Jan 6, 2020
- 2nd fnd vic
- TOD: 10:30 PM T Dec 31, 2019
- MPR: UK; IP
- H: 5 f 10 in
- NHC: brown
- EC: brown
- DOB: UK; IP
- LKM: UTD
- no SA, PA
- PDW: H/CM
- CHCl3
- NOI
“Gwen, come on. This is stupid,” Jacob said.
“No, it’s not,” Carter said quickly, leaning over Jacob’s shoulder for a better view of the sticky note. “There’s no way he could keep track of all these acronyms. I mean, sure, time of death, date of birth. But the ones that mean nothing to literally everyone else?”
“You’re both annoying.” Jacob closed the notebook. “Look, guys, I get it. I worked with both of them longer than you guys did put together. I mean, Jesus Christ, Anderson knew I was in love with Alice before Alice did. We were friends. Went to the gym together, saw a couple baseball games together, went out for drinks together. I get it. We’re on edge, it’s hard to trust people. But Bo’s just a damn lab geek.”
Gwen rolled her eyes and grabbed the black notebook from the bottom of the stack. She flipped it open and dropped it onto Jacob’s keyboard. “He keeps notes about every single killer. Not just the ones he’s worked, not just the ones in his department, every single killer that has ever existed in the history of ever. The amount of detail he keeps on them is insane, Jacob. No one needs to know as much shit as this guy keeps.” She flipped through the pages before pointing to the title. “This one’s Dallas Silver. They called him Hangman. He’d—”
“Gwen, that’s enough.” Jacob pushed his chair back into Carter and stood up, notebook in hand. “Come on, Gwen. Get your shit together. Is it paranoia? Or are you really that jealous of the guy?”
Gwen’s eyes narrowed as she opened the blue notebook and tossed it back down on his desk. “Yeah? How about now, Jake? Is he still normal?”
Jacob Mason
- Sapphire blue eyes
- Brown hair
- Glasses
- 6 ft
- Engaged, Alice Tangwerai (Allie, Al)
- Three children (Katie, Charlotte, Elijah)
- Friendly, extroverted, loud, blunt
- Too trusting and willing to defend
- Concerned
- Loving father
- Younger than fiancee
- Too kind for his own good
“Oh,” Jacob whispered. His eyes scanned the page for a second time. “I-I’m an open book. He’s just good at reading the pages.”
“You wish. It’s not just you. There’s one for everyone, even people that don’t work in the station. Every single person he’s glanced at since he arrived in Clinstone is tracked in this notebook, like he’s looking for which of us is the easiest target.” She flipped through the pages slowly, allowing both detectives to see just how much information Bo had gathered in his time in Clinstone. “Misty’s child, Jake. He’s vetting every single one of us.” She leaned in closer to Jacob as he picked up the notebook. “He was best friends with Hangman, Jake. He lived with him, switched departments to keep working with him. Jesus, Jake, he was fired from his job in L.A. because he wouldn’t testify against the serial killer when they finally found the damn fugitive. And this guy, he’s toted as the most intelligent analyst out there. Do you know what kind of mastermind a person could be with an IQ like his? For all we know, he’s already killing people. He’s tracking our every move to pick which of us is next, and we’re just standing here, letting him.”
“I actually thought you were better than this, Detective Mason.”
Jacob flinched, dropping the notebook. He lifted his gaze to Bo’s face. He stood in front of Jacob’s desk, hands locked behind his back. Jacob swallowed. “What’s… what’s with the notebook, Austen?”
“With all due respect, what I keep track of in my personal property is none of your business.”
“You’ve been stalking us,” Gwen cut in. “How the hell do you know all of that about us? About Jake?”
“He’s on the phone with his fiancee every chance he gets. He’s mentioned the names of his children in conversations with her and Detective Lehmann. As I’m not blind, I know what he looks like. The rest of it is simply behavioral, the way he acts around myself and others. It’s my job to read people, Miss Tanner. Whether Clinstone wants to utilize that or not is up to them, but my job in Los Angeles involved reading people and profiling them.”
“Why are you doing it?” she asked.
“Again, it’s my job, and the rest of it is simply none of your business.”
“What’s with the cryptic bullshit when you write about the victims?” Carter asked. “Keeping track of which parts you like the most?”
Bo’s gaze slowly shifted to Carter’s face. “I’m sure you can all appreciate that I, too, am paranoid about my coworkers being murderers. My ‘cryptic bullshit’ is so that when one of you turns out to be a killer, you only know the things I want you to know. I’m not this horrid monster that Miss Tanner is trying to make me out to be. I’m just a lab geek trying to survive in a world that has quite literally come down around me. Twice now, apparently.” When he took a step forward, Gwen countered it with one back, bumping into the corner of Carter’s desk. Bo winced. “Miss Tanner, you’re almost taller than I am. What exactly do you think I’m going to do to you? Both of these men have known you far longer than they’ve known me, and they’re both carrying guns on their hips. Do you really think I’d get away with anything in here?”
“You’d be surprised at what people have gotten away with in here in the past,” Gwen bit out.
Bo tilted his head back toward the ceiling and, after a moment, turned his back to the trio. Jacob’s gaze drifted to Bo’s hands. They stayed behind his back, his index and middle fingers constantly pulling at the blue rubber band around his wrist, snapping it against the underside over and over again.
Finally, he turned back to them. “When I start a new case, I go home and compare the M.O. of the killer to the cases I keep in my black notebooks. If the M.O. matches one or more killers, I track it so we can be aware of the potential of a multi-state killer or a copycat. Being aware of homicides in this country helps cut down on any instances in which a killer could have been caught much sooner had the police departments been communicating with each other.” He nodded toward the red notebook still in Jacob’s hand. “The sticky notes. The one for Tess Brown. The date beside her name is when we found her. Thursday, January second. She was the first victim we found. Her time of death was Tuesday, December twenty-third around eleven PM. A missing person’s report was filed on Monday, December twenty-third. Her height is five feet and eleven inches. Her natural hair color is blonde, and her eye color is green.
“Her date of birth is Wednesday, November fifth, 1975. Her last known meal was at least six to eight hours before time of death. There are no drugs present in her system, and there were no signs of sexual assault or physical abuse prior to death. She was drugged with CHCl3. In lamen’s terms, chloroform. Her throat laceration was accomplished with a partially serrated five-inch tanto-point blade, likely something like a pocket knife.”
Bo’s adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed roughly. “The victim in the morgue hasn’t been identified yet. The acronyms that we haven’t gone over primarily relate to that. UK is unknown and IP is identity pending. UTD on his last meal is unable to determine. He was poisoned with a flower known as hemlock or conium maculatum, and he was also drugged with chloroform. There is no outside injury present on his body. No scrapes or cuts or bruises. A-and that one?” he asked, nodding toward the desk again. “The blue one is how I keep track of you all. Because if one of you is a killer, you can bet your ass that I will be the first to know because I will never accidentally befriend a goddamn serial killer a second time in my life. I will not be duped again. I will not be the last person to find out you are a killer. I will not.”
Jacob closed the notebooks and stacked them together. With them in hand, he started toward Bo, who countered him with several steps back until he hit the empty desk behind him. Jacob stopped. “Bo.”
“I’m not here to make friends, Detective,” Bo whispered. “I don’t want an apology. I don’t want a big speech. I don’t want understanding. And I sure as hell don’t want that concern all over your face. I-I just want my notebooks so I can go back to the lab and identify this man so I can get this damn case finished so I can quit and go back to California to be with my serial killer friend and his criminal concealing wife. A-and then I’ll be out of your hair, and you can all go back to your normal lives without me in them. I am sorry that me being a freak has upset you all so terribly. But you aren’t the only ones with killer trauma, and at least I keep my trauma contained in those notebooks, away from the way I treat you, and my trauma will never bring me to steal your things and sneak around to try and make our coworkers think you’re planning to kill them.”
“I’m sorry anyway,” Jacob said. “Whether you want it or not.” He held the notebooks out to Bo, but the blonde made no attempt to take them. Jacob squatted down to set them on the floor and pushed them over to Bo. Bo pulled his bottom lip into his mouth, brow furrowed as he stared at Jacob. “I’m not a killer either, and my trauma is contained too. I won’t let it affect the way I treat you. I… I let your notes on me and my kids get the best of me for a few minutes, but I will never hold that against you. We all handle our shit differently, and those notebooks are how you handle yours. End of story.”
“I… believe I said no speech,” Bo whispered.
Jacob couldn’t help the little smile that tugged at one corner of his mouth. The whisper had been less shaky than the last one, and hell, he’d consider words in general a good sign from Bo. But words or not, he wasn’t okay. Even with the notebooks sitting at his feet, he hadn’t moved an inch, and he was still watching Jacob like he was waiting for an attack. “You did, sorry. No more speech. For now.”
“Forever,” Bo said. “No more speech… ever.”
“Yeah, I can’t promise that. I’m a real speech guy.”
Bo chewed on his bottom lip for a moment before finally squatting down to grab his notebooks. He hugged them to his chest like his very existence depended on how close they were to his body.
“I’m gonna have a little talk with Gwen and Carter, and then I’m gonna have my fiancee come to the station and down to the lab so she can make sure you’re okay, even if you don’t want her to. Okay?”
Eyes on the floor, Bo nodded. He rose to his feet, side-stepped his way along the desk, and hurried off for the lab. Jacob let out a long breath before pushing himself to his feet. He turned back to his desk, genuinely surprised to see Carter and Gwen still standing there. “I’m choosing not to tell Myra about this unless Bo wants to report it, but what you did today? It’s unacceptable. I don’t care if he writes down who he killed, how he killed them, and where he dumped their bodies in those notebooks. We do not have access to them without a warrant unless he hands them to us. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Gwen said, her voice quiet. “But I still don’t like him.”
“And he doesn’t like you, so I think you’re even on that one.” Jacob pointed over his shoulder, toward the stairwell. “That lab geek has been through hell and back. The same kind of hell we have been through. I know it’s hard to just put our faith and trust in a new person, but we can’t go through life thinking every single person who joins us at this police station is a serial killer or a drug peddeler or a criminal of any and every kind. We can’t live that way, Gwen. We can’t. And the people we subject to that treatment—they don’t deserve to live that way.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, eyes on the floor. After a moment of silence, they drifted back up to Jacob’s face. “I just… he lived with the guy, Jake. How do you not know your roommate is a serial killer unless you don’t care if he is?”
“They do it to their spouses and their parents all the time. Why not to a coworker? To a friend?” Jacob asked.
Gwen lifted her shoulders, but she didn’t look anywhere near as angry or confrontational as she had before Bo had come upstairs.
“Anderson was practically a warlord amongst the cartels and gangs and mob families by the time we knew what was going on,” Jacob said, his voice soft. “Not a single one of us had any damn idea. I know it’s hard not to be paranoid about it. I know it’s hard not to assume that every guy who comes in here could be the next Anderson. I know. But he’s living that shit right alongside us, just with a different name and a different police station. His trauma presents differently than mine or yours or yours. And that’s okay. Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Gwen cleared her throat and shifted her weight uncomfortably between her feet. “I guess so.”
“Good. Carter?”
“He’s taking notes on children like they’re potential serial killers,” Carter said. “If we believe his reasoning, that’s what he’s doing. Children. You want your kids in his little notebook, Jake?”
“He’s not hurting anybody with his notes. You wouldn’t know they existed if Gwen hadn’t stolen them. If writing down my kids’ eye colors and personality traits makes him feel like he has some semblance of control in a crazy fucking world, that’s a-okay with me.” Jacob held up a hand, pointing at the both of them with his index and middle fingers. “For the foreseeable future, neither of you should go anywhere near him. If you have to be near him, you shouldn’t speak to him. He doesn’t want to hear it, and he doesn’t deserve to have to hear it. Are we clear?”
Chewing on the corner of her bottom lip, Gwen nodded.
“Carter?”
“Sure, dude.”
“It’s not a fun little game, Carter. He’s a human being, and you hardly fucking knew Anderson. You weren’t being betrayed by the guy like the rest of us were. Whatever you feel about that situation, you don’t get to take it out on random coworkers. All right?”
“All right,” Carter said, making sure to over-enunciate the last T. “Got it.”
After a phone call to his fiancee, Jacob headed out to the parking lot and waited. It didn’t take horribly long before Alice pulled into a parking space next to Jacob’s car. Jacob walked over to meet her, unable to stop himself from smiling as she pulled Elijah out of his car seat in the back. “This is so much better than Grandpa babysitting.”
Alice offered a soft smile and held the baby out to him. “Charlotte was still asleep when you called, but Lijah was still a little too clingy to leave with Baba.” She closed the door and leaned back against it, arms crossed over her chest. “So what the hell happened?”
“Bo, the new guy? He has these notebooks of information. Gwen stole them and brought them upstairs to convince us he’s a serial killer, like that Hangman guy in California.”
Alice raised a brow. “What kind of information is in these notebooks of his to lead to that?”
“Notes on previous killers, notes on this killer, and, umm…” Jacob cleared his throat. “He takes notes on the people he’s met here. Which is a little weird, okay, I can admit to that. But it doesn’t make him a killer. It makes him paranoid, and rightfully so, clearly. Gwen and Carter proved that today.”
“Carter joined in?”
“Big time.”
“Mm.” She reached out to smooth a hand over Elijah’s curly hair. “What do you want me to do about it? Kick his ass so you can keep your pacifist title?”
Jacob snorted. “You wish. I want you to talk to Bo, make sure he’s okay, make sure he knows it’s not his fault. I’d try to, but I don’t think I’d help the situation any. He said he thought I was better than this, so I think he thinks I was, like, in on it. I don’t want him down there in the basement thinking that I think he’s a monster or a killer. I need him to know I’m on his side, but I don’t think me going and being the one to tell him is, y’know, beneficial right now.”
After a moment of consideration, she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. Are you okay watching Elijah?”
“Literally the best part of my day. I’ll be okay.”
“Perfect.” Alice pressed a kiss to Elijah’s forehead and Jacob’s lips before heading into the police station. Gwen and Carter congregated by the desks, eyes on Alice. She did her best not to actually acknowledge them. As much as she intended to try and help Bo know he wasn’t in the wrong, she still didn’t truly want to be deeply involved in some sort of Clinstone PD feud. One of the best parts of being a stay-at-home mom these days was that raising babies held a hell of a lot less drama than working with adults did. As long as she stayed off the Facebook mom groups, anyway.
Downstairs, Alice found the lab geek exactly where she expected to, though he sat on the floor in the lab rather than at the table. His knees were pulled to his chest, his forehead resting on them. He was the physical embodiment of ‘defeated’.
Lightly, she rapped two knuckles against the open door.
Bo lifted his head, blue eyes slowly coming to focus on her face. “Detective Mason’s fiancee, I presume.”
“You presume correctly. Alice.”
“Bo Austen,” he said, his voice only slightly louder than before. “You’ll excuse me for remaining seated here?”
“Of course. You don’t have to get up on my behalf.” Alice cleared her throat. “I heard about what happened upstairs.”
Bo’s brow furrowed. “I’m normally not like that.”
“Like what?”
“I… don’t know. Defensive, I suppose. Argumentive.”
“You stood up for yourself and your property, from what I’ve been told. That’s not a bad thing, Mister Austen.” She crossed the room and lowered herself to the floor a few feet in front of him. “It’s not wrong to stand up for yourself. Gwen stole your property and rifled through it, exposed it to two other people. You aren’t wrong for being ‘defensive’ about that.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t know what you’ve been through, Mister Austen, but you don’t have to continue going through it on your own. There are people here, people like Jake, who will help lift you up instead of tearing you down. You’re intelligent, Mister Austen, and that intimidates people. I’m sure you’re more than aware of that. But you shouldn’t have to be ashamed of that intelligence, not on behalf of people looking to cause drama and trouble and stir the pot.”
“I’m… used to it.”
“You shouldn’t have to be. That’s the point. You shouldn’t have to be ‘used to’ the abuse of society. You shouldn’t have to learn to tolerate it. It’s okay to be defensive and argumentative toward people who are going out of their way to try and tear you down.” Alice reached out to lay a hand on his knee. His leg tensed beneath her palm, but his eyes finally settled on her face again. “You aren’t a monster, Mister Austen. Your paranoia doesn’t make you a killer. Your trauma doesn’t make you evil. It makes you a victim of circumstance and society and God only knows what else. But it doesn’t make you a bad guy. And there are people here, like Jake, who know that.”
“So… he doesn’t believe that my… notetaking habits make me a danger?” Bo asked.
Alice shook her head, though she was beginning to wonder what these notes had detailed for them to cause such a rift. “Not even a little. You’re just a person trying to wade through his trauma to come out on the other side. If your notes aren’t hurting anybody, you’re just doing what you need to in order to survive, and that’s not a bad thing.”
“Thank you,” Bo said after a long moment of silence. “You may tell your fiance that I no longer believe him to be part of Miss Tanner and Detective Lehmann’s little coup.”
Alice smiled, doing her best to hold back a little laugh. “I’ll be sure to let him know.”
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