What Lies Beneath

Chapter 15

“Olivia, I need to head…damn stubborn…into danger…just make sure he…and don’t take any of…thanks.” Olivia scowled at the voice message. How was she supposed to decipher that? Was Kat driving? It might explain the terrible noise and why the signal kept dropping. Olivia called her back but only got her voicemail. She would have just waited for her to call back, but she mentioned danger, so Olivia headed upstairs.

Mason was pacing up and down in their small office when he noticed her. He held a finger up to show that she should wait.

“Yes, send the security footage. I also must speak with the guard on duty.” He listened for a moment. “Thank you.” He ended the call and shoved the phone in the back pocket of his jeans. “Can I help you with anything?” he asked.

“Kat left me this voice message and I cannot make sense of it.” She handed him her phone. “Just press play.”

He frowned as he listened, Olivia imagined her face had looked exactly the same moments earlier. He sighed when he handed her phone back. “Kat had to go to her parents in Kingston. I told her I’d be able to handle the case on my own.”

“So, she wants me to check up on you? Or help you with the Weser case?”

“Both, I suspect.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and placed it on his desk before he sat down.

“But you don’t want my help?”

“I don’t need it,” he said matter-of-factly.

She nodded. He is a grown a*s man, and she would not be his babysitter. She turned and walked right into Detective Daniels in the hall. “Sorry,” she muttered and took a few steps back, back into Mason’s office. Daniels gave her a jerky nod and quickly headed down the stairs. He had his tongue down her throat on Friday and now he couldn’t get away from her fast enough. Olivia smiled a little. Perhaps he finally received the message. Olivia turned to say something to Mason, but it flew right out of her mind when collided with him as well. “Geez!” Her hand landed on the doorframe to steady herself. Mason was looming over her, staring daggers to the back of Daniels’ head. “What’s going on with the two of you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he muttered.

“Right.” This was a waste of time. “Anyway, I have to get back to work.”

Mason was now looking down at her, his features smooth and his eyes calm.

She would like to think that he saw someone beautiful and interesting, but she knew he was staring down at the shadow of her former self. The girl she was had died that night her mother drove them off that bridge. In her place darkness had taken up the vacancy, filling the empty vessel, making it whole once more.

Whole, but not better.

“I’ll ask if I need help, Olivia,” he said finally, almost tenderly. Olivia seemed to have misplaced her voice, so she just nodded and made haste for the stairs.

Not even an hour after Mason had declined her help, he was in her office, laptop in hand, asking for exactly that. Olivia couldn’t decide whether he was really this stubborn or if he indeed found himself in need of her help. Either way, she had some time to help.

“I need someone to go over the security footage with me. There’s a lot more happing than I thought.”

“What are we looking for?”

“We have photos of the residents and their apartment numbers, but there’s maintenance being done to the building, so there’re a lot of faces we need to comb through. The murderer must have left the apartment between one and five in the afternoon, but the maintenance workers are up and down the entire day. We need to spot the killer.”

“Alright, have a seat and let’s get to it.”

“This is the footage of the back entrance.” Mason handed her a flash drive and set up his laptop on her desk. “I’ll be doing the front.”

A few hours in and they were no closer than they were when they started. Even with the photos of the tenants and the maintenance workers, it seemed an impossible task. The maintenance workers were easy to spot with their hardhats and yellow work-vests, but just as hats or sunglasses would obscure the tenants’ faces, so did their safety equipment hide their identities.

“There!” Olivia jumped in her chair at Mason’s excited exclamation. “Weser went inside. We need to check if he comes out again or who comes out after he had entered.” Pressing pause on her footage, Olivia went around to Mason and sat down next to him to make a list of who they saw coming out after Mr. Weser went inside. When the first police car had showed up on the screen, they didn’t have a very long list. Only a few more residents and maintenance workers had come and go. “I’ll head on in to re-interview these residents tomorrow morning.” Mason tapped on the list.

Nodding, Olivia asked, “Who called it in?” as she watched two police being buzzed in.

“The killer wanted us to find Weser, left his apartment door wide open for all to see. One of his neighbors walked by saw him dangling from the stairs.”

“Perhaps it’s a resident then?” she suggested. “He was only nineteen. Did he have a roommate, maybe?”

“No roommate and it could just as easily be one of the maintenance workers, or someone just dressed like one,” Mason offered.

“Are there no other leads? Nothing to follow from the interviews from the residents? The neighbor who called it in?”

“Nothing,” he sighed.

The dream started as it always does, but just before the windshield shattered from the impact, a voice had called her name and the dream changed. She jerked around in the car seat, but saw no one in the car with them–it was just Olivia and her mother. “Olivia,” the voice urged again. “Olivia. Wake up,” it demanded.

Olivia shot up from the chair the instant her eyes snapped open. She didn’t have time to give a damn about the confused look on Mason’s face as she dashed to the bathroom to empty her stomach. This was the first time the dream of her mother had made her sick. Normally it resulted in a panic attack. It was the other dream–the one about her father that usually had her darting for a toilet.

Splashing cold water on her face, Olivia washed away the sheen of sweat that accompanied her pale reflection. “Stupid!” she scolded herself in the mirror. Olivia couldn’t understand how the hell had she had fallen asleep? She didn’t know where she was going to get the courage to face Mason after this. But she couldn’t stay in the bathroom all night, and she knew he was waiting for her. He was going to ask questions, that’s normal. That’s what normal people do after witnessing someone wake from a nightmare, run to the bathroom and be sick as a dog. They want to know what it was about, they want to know why. They always wanted to know, and she never wanted to talk about it.

Giving her pale reflection another exasperated look, she dried her face with some paper towels and took a deep breath before she opened the bathroom door.

Mason was waiting for her in the hall. “Are you sick?” he asked, alarmed, and she considered his question.

“I think so,” she lied and shuffled past him and into her office.

“I’ll take you home,” he said from behind her. “You should have said something. I didn’t realize you weren’t feeling well.”

“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

“You didn’t sound so fine a moment ago,” he countered.

She sighed and sat down. “I am fine,” she said again. She could feel his gaze on her face but ignored it. “Have you found anything while I was drooling on my desk?” Olivia asked as she clicked on her mouse to bring the screen back to life.

“We can continue with this tomorrow. I think I should take you home.” He had made his voice stern, but it didn’t bother her much.

“Have you talked with both family and friends? Did he have a girlfriend?”

“Olivia?” She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to look at him and give him an explanation of what had happened.

“I think we need to approach this differently,” she carried on, pretending not to have heard him.

He heaved a heavy sigh. “I’m open to anything.” Frustrated, but he eventually sat down.

“There is no connection between the two victims, neither involved in anything shady. The date itself doesn’t bring up anything. The interviews came up empty. There are no fingerprints or other DNA left at either scene.”

“About sums it up.”

“Did you check for sealed records, maybe something linked them from when they were younger?”

“I didn’t find any sealed records, and even if I did, it would take a hell of a lot more than an inkling to get them to give us those files. The connections we have are the type of murder, age, and school.”

“Same school?”

“Yeah, don’t look so excited, they weren’t friends, there was nothing there, Kat, and I made sure.”

“Did you check the local news archives for their names or the date, perhaps?”

“No. You think there is more to it than just the same killer with random victims?”

“Yes. I think there is a link between the victims.”

“Why?”

“Just a feeling,” Olivia said.

“OK.” He nodded. “We’ll check the news archives.”