Malevolent (2 page)

“Hello?” A woman’s voice sounded from the front of the apartment.

Shaye frowned and stepped through the doorway from the kitchen into her future office. A young woman with auburn hair and pale skin stood in the doorway, clutching the door handle and looking nervously around.
 

“Can I help you?” Shaye asked, figuring the woman was lost.
 

“Are you Shaye Archer?”

Shaye hesitated a second before answering. “Yes.” She wasn’t expecting company, and she’d never seen this woman before.
 

“My name is Emma Frederick. I, uh…I think I have a problem that needs a detective. Your website gave this as your office address…”

Shaye’s puzzlement switched to amazement. When she’d launched her website two days before, she hadn’t anticipated clients before she’d even gotten them a chair to sit on. But then, she hadn’t anticipated clients showing up at her front door without an appointment, either. Apparently, there were a lot of things she hadn’t expected when setting up her business.

“You’re in the right place,” Shaye said. “I’m just moving in today and some of the furniture hasn’t arrived yet.”

Emma’s expression shifted to disappointment. “Oh, well, I can come back. Can I make an appointment?”

Shaye started to say yes and schedule something for next week when everything would be in better shape, but then she took a closer look at Emma. Her hand on the doorknob shook, and with her other hand, she pulled at the bottom of her blouse. Two threads stuck out and the hem in one spot sagged a tiny bit. Her skin, while pale naturally, wasn’t only naturally pale right now. It was beyond that, almost blanched.
 

Emma Frederick was scared.

“No, please,” Shaye said. “Come in. There’s a couch in the living room, and I have my laptop to make notes.”

Emma hesitated a second, then stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She followed Shaye into the living area and took a seat at the end of the couch where Shaye indicated.
 

“I would offer you a drink,” Shaye said as she grabbed her laptop from the kitchen counter, “but I don’t even have a cup unpacked yet.”

“That’s okay,” Emma said. “I’m too nervous to drink anything. I guess you noticed.”

Shaye pulled the end table she’d just stuck in the corner over to the middle of the room across from Emma and sat on it. “Right now, you’re in the safe zone,” she said, repeating the words Eleonore had said to her so many times. “Tell me about your problem.”

“I think I’m being stalked.”

“You think?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I’m sure I’m being stalked.”

Emma’s responses grew more hesitant, and Shaye knew she was reconsidering being here at all. Shaye’s heart went out to the woman. Her confusion and fear were things Shaye understood all too well.

“Do you have any idea who’s stalking you?” Shaye asked.

Emma nodded. “It looked like my husband.”

Okay, Shaye thought. At least they were moving into normal territory. Spousal stalking was far more common than people might think, and often deadly. “I assume you’re separated?”

“Not exactly.”

Shaye’s back tightened. If Emma had felt she had no other option left other than running away, and her husband had found her, the situation could be even more dire than Shaye had originally thought. “Are you hiding from him, and you think he’s found you?”

“I…no.” Emma took a deep breath and blew it out. “You see, I killed my husband last month.”

Shaye blinked. Surely she’d heard incorrectly. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

Emma nodded. “I met my husband, David Grange, a little over a year ago at a party in the French Quarter. I had just moved back to the area from Dallas. I got a scholarship to nursing school there and stayed for a couple years for a great job that I got after graduation, but the city never fit, if you know what I mean. So I packed up my car and headed back home to NOLA. David was an army sergeant stationed at Fort Polk and was in New Orleans for the weekend. He was charming and handsome, and we had a whirlwind courtship. We married just six weeks after we met.”

“Grange? You didn’t change your last name?”

“No. Given my professional licenses and contacts, it was easier to keep my maiden name.”

Shaye typed some notes on her laptop as Emma talked, trying to fathom marrying someone she’d known for only six weeks. Imagining herself married was a big enough stretch, but the six weeks thing had her completely stumped.
 

“The first six months were great,” Emma said. “David worked four days on base and then could be here for three. We lived in an apartment here in the French Quarter. I’m an RN at New Orleans General in critical care, so I scheduled my shifts to match his. It didn’t always work out, but we spent as much time together as possible. We never fought. Never even argued, not about anything important.” She paused for several seconds and appeared to be gathering her thoughts. “Then he was deployed to Iraq. When he returned, he was different. Nothing that you could specifically point to at first, but I could feel it the moment he arrived.”

Emma gave Shaye a sad smile. “I suppose it sounds melodramatic, but I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Shaye said. Shaye had a finely honed ability to zoom in on any difference in someone she knew. She only had to glance at Corrine when she walked in from work to know if her daily dose of stress had been from her caseload as a social worker or the bureaucracy she continually railed against, but Shaye doubted anyone else noticed the same subtleties that she did.

“While he was deployed,” Emma continued, “some things changed here. My aunt passed away, and I inherited her home in Algiers Point. My parents died in a car accident when I was five, and my aunt raised me. She was my parents’ only living relative and she never married, so she was the whole extent of my family.”

“I’m sorry. That must be hard.”

“Thank you. I spoke with David, of course, and we both agreed that selling the house was foolish. More people were moving to Algiers and restoring the old homes. Property values were starting to rise and were only going to get higher. Besides, I had no intention of leaving Louisiana again, and Algiers is a short ferry ride from the French Quarter. After Iraq, David’s time in was over and he would be home for good.”

“So when David returned, you’d already moved to the house in Algiers Point?”

Emma nodded. “After our tiny apartment in the French Quarter, I thought he’d be happy with the space we now had. It’s a beautiful old house and my aunt was meticulous about maintaining it, but he was totally disinterested. It was as if he’d walked into a hotel room rather than his own home. Before he deployed, he used to always talk about finding a place with a garage so that he could work on old cars. It was a huge interest of his, but when I showed him the oversize garage, he barely nodded, then went back inside and sat in front of the television the rest of the day.”

“PTSD?”
 

“Probably. Given my profession, I’ve seen it before, but every time I made an attempt to get him to talk, either to me or to a professional, he shut me down.” She took a deep breath and blew it out. “Then he got mean. It was subtle at first—insults that he claimed were just joking—but it progressed to direct and abusive. When he hit me, I knew I had to get away from him. If you could have seen the look on his face…the absolute rage. I knew, that given time, he would kill me.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Yes. I did everything by the book. I’ve worked enough emergency room shifts to know the drill. Everything was documented, then I got a restraining order, and the judge ordered him off the property. Since it was inherited, he had no claims to it.”

“I’m going to take a guess that he didn’t feel the same way.”

“You guessed right. The police hauled him away in handcuffs, but he was out the next day.”

“Did he come after you?”

“Not like you’d think. He was smart about it. He knew the exact distance he had to remain from the property. Every morning, on my way to work, he was standing on the same street corner, just far enough away from the house to keep him from being arrested, watching me as I drove by.” She crossed her arms and shivered. “The worst part was the smile.”

“He was enjoying torturing you.”

“Yes, and there was nothing I could do about it.”

“What about David’s family or friends? Couldn’t they help?”

“He told me he didn’t have any family living. Every time I asked him about his childhood, he clammed up and refused to talk. I got the impression it wasn’t very good. He always said I was his family and his future, and that’s all that mattered. As for friends, he didn’t really have any. Not close, anyway. He’d been in the military for eight years, but the guys he knew there were either still serving or had gotten out and scattered to their home states. Sometimes he went for a beer after work with coworkers, but there wasn’t anyone close to him. Except me, and now I wonder if I was ever as close as I thought.”

“Given a probable bad childhood and the strain of combat, you might have been the only person he let in.”

“Maybe so, but looking back, I don’t feel like I got very far. I realize I didn’t know him for very long before we married, but I swear, I didn’t see any signs of the complete turnaround he did. I’m trained to notice these things, and I’m far too practical to have stuck my head in the sand because I was in love.” She blew out a breath. “I’m sure you know the facts about stalkers.”

Shaye nodded. “If they want to get to you, they eventually will. A piece of paper is little defense against obsession. You have to be prepared to protect yourself.”

“And I was. I knew how to shoot a pistol, so I dragged my aunt’s out of her closet and made sure it was in working order. I loaded it and kept it on me, even at the hospital. I knew it was illegal, but I figured I’d rather take my chances with the police than walking across a dark parking garage without protection.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I thought I was being safe, but as it turns out, the gun didn’t protect me at all.”

Emma stopped talking and her jaw flexed. Shaye knew it was hard—telling someone the worst thing that had ever happened to you. Reliving every moment. Every moment that felt like a year.
 

“How did it happen?” Shaye asked, hoping the prompt would push Emma past the mental block she’d constructed to protect herself.

Emma stared at the wall behind Shaye. “I was cooking. It was my day off and it was sunny with a cool breeze. The kitchen window was open and I remember a lawn mower running somewhere nearby. I didn’t hear David come in, but I’ll never forget that moment when I knew he was there. I had just finished washing a cucumber in the sink and was about to slice it when the whistling started.”

“Whistling?”

Emma swallowed hard and nodded. “‘Three Blind Mice.’ When he came back from Iraq, he’d whistle it every time…every time he changed into the monster.”

Shaye frowned as she made a note. Professionalism required her to be objective and focused on the facts, but she couldn’t deny that was creepy as hell. “I can’t imagine…” She started her reply but stopped when she realized she was being disingenuous. Shaye might not be able to imagine exactly how Emma felt, but she had a damned good idea.

“It was the most terrifying moment of my life,” Emma said. “Even more horrifying than when I killed him.” She looked directly at Shaye. “When I have nightmares, I don’t see his death. I only see that sink, the water still running, the knife in the bottom—stainless steel gleaming against white porcelain. I feel my pulse racing, the blood draining from my face, my hands shaking, my heart pounding in my chest that’s constricted so tight I can’t take in even the smallest of breath. And then I hear the whistling. I wake up screaming, soaked with sweat, sometimes violently ill.”
 

Shaye felt her back tighten and her pulse tick up a notch as Emma talked. She knew all about those kind of dreams—the kind where you lived everything as if it were happening over and over again. The kind that made you wish, in the darkest moments, that you’d just drift on to the never-ending dreamless kind of sleep.
 

Emma shifted on the couch and shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s not the kind of information you need.”

“I’m here to listen to anything you want to tell me,” Shaye said.
 

Emma shot her a grateful look. “I couldn’t move. Not at first, but then he grabbed my shoulder. His fingers dug into my skin and I’m sure it hurt, but I don’t remember anything except the rage that coursed through me. Anger and fear and a million other emotions that all arrived at the same conclusion—he was there to kill me.”

Shaye nodded, no doubt in her mind that Emma was right.

“I felt the cold, hard butt of the pistol as he pressed it to my temple,” she said. “I actually saw it, just like everyone says, my life flashing before me. I always thought it was a cliché, but it was real, my dad teaching me how to ride a bicycle, the mermaid cake my mom made for my fifth birthday. It was all there, for one suspended second, and then it was gone.”