Page 96 of Ballistic

Suddenly, everything clicked. Made sense why they’d tacked it on to the end, because anyone who’d have done some snooping around might’ve stumbled upon Dawn Richardson, well-adjusted and living the good life. No one would’ve known it was Nicoleta who’d been tossed into that river and left to die.

“Who commissioned it?”

The pounding at the door increased with intensity, telling me Nancy was about to lose her shit.

Still locked on the video, Dawn’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know.”

“Are you certain?”

Indignant eyes met mine, brimming with the kind of scorn that made me back off. “Absolutely certain.”

As fucked up as it sounded, part of me was relieved. Just to know that Nicoleta had been telling the truth. She wasn’t crazy. Not about that, at least. “Thank you. I’m sorry for all of this, but you’ve been a big help.”

Swiping at the tears in her eyes, she pointed at me in warning. “You’re to destroy that video. I want no trace of it.”

“On the condition that you don’t say a word about today. To anyone. And that Officer Daniels, in particular, was never even here.”

“You have my word.”

With a nod, I turned back toward the door, setting my hand on the knob. Through the obscured glass, I could see Nancy pacing in the hallway. “Can I just ask you … why? Why did you do it?”

She rolled her shoulders back and kept her chin high. “Sometimes, you have to sink to the very depths of humanity in order to find your own. People deserve second chances. Detective.”

Nodding a second time, I swung the door open to Nancy, who stood red-faced and fuming, her eyes razor cut to tear into me. We left the facility without a word spoken, until we arrived at the cruiser and climbed inside.

“I’ll tell him … I’ll tell him you put a gun to my head. You forced me to do it.” She bent forward, gripping her temples, and rested her head against the steering wheel. “I should just shoot you now. Better yet, I should shoot myself.”

“It’s okay, Nancy.”

“It’s not okay! Do you have any idea how much shit we’re in? No, fuck that. How much shit you’re in. I’m not associating myself with you.”

“She’s not going to go to your superiors. Relax. What’s she going to say? My name is Dawn Richardson, and I’d like to report Officer Daniels for inquiring about a snuff film I starred in back in college?”

“Fuck, Dax! Is that what this was about? You said it was about a missing girl!”

“It is. She’s not going to say anything. Trust me, she gave me her word.”

Throwing her hands up in the air, Nancy shook her head. “Oh, well, she gave you her word. Forget that she happened to be locked in a room with a fucking lunatic at the time.”

“It’s her reputation. She’s not going to fuck with that.”

“Why? Why was this so important to you?” Face in her palms, her voice arrived muffled, but nowhere near as furious as before.

“They tried to murder an innocent girl, Nancy.”

“And so … what is she to you?”

It’d been almost a week since I last saw Nicoleta, and yet, the question weighed as heavy as that first night she’d walked out on me. “Everything. She’s everything to me.”

36

Dax

If I didn’t think about her, it was only for fleeting second, or two. Perhaps a distraction that gave me some reprieve from those amber eyes seared into my brain. Artists had their muses, stalkers had their obsessions, and I had Nicoleta. From the moment I’d laid eyes on her, tied and bound in the back of Tesarik’s SUV, I knew she’d be the elusive butterfly, impossible to net.

Even if she was bat-shit crazy, and had made up a rival crime lord to give her enough brass balls to go after someone like Tesarik, it didn’t change the fact that my body had begun to mourn her touch. Needed her like blood to a cold, dead heart. Every day without her, I could feel myself slipping deeper into the darkness.

I closed the medicine cabinet, leaving the bottle of fentanyl on the shelf, just like the day before, and the day before that.