"Rose...I only came in because you aren't returning my calls and you've blocked me on social media."

"And? What do you expect? Mom...you fell through again. I'm tired of it. And crashing a date isn't any way to make up for it. Do you have any idea how embarra.s.sing that was?"

"Well, I didn't come in here to grill your boyfriend, believe me. But he got high and mighty, so I retaliated."

"But Marcus is none of your business," Rose said. She was speaking loudly now, attracting the attention of some of the other patrons. "And you know what...for a detective, you can be pretty stupid, you know that? What do you think this little intervention is going to do? What do you think is going to happen after this? I'm going to call him and whine about my obsessive b.i.t.c.h of a mother and he's going to come over to comfort me. Want to guess how that'll end?"

"Rose, don't talk to me like that," Avery said. It stung...not just the imagery it brought up but the fact that her daughter would speak to her in such a way so easily.

"It's okay, Mom," she said. "We've already slept together."

"Rose-"

"I've been on the pill for about three months now. That's something you might know if you gave a d.a.m.n enough to actually hang out and talk to me."

"Rose, can't we just-"

"No!"

This time she did shout. The cafe went quiet as a flush of heat raced through Avery. All eyes were on them now and in that moment, she felt weaker than she had in a very long time.

"Don't call me anymore," Rose said, getting up from the table, her voice still loud and thunderous. "Just forget about me. You do it so well. That and ruining everything!"

With that, Rose took her leave, storming toward the door. Slowly, conversation returned to the other tables. Avery stood there, staring down at the tabletop, wondering just where in the h.e.l.l things had started to turn so wrong for her and Rose. For a moment there a few days ago, it seemed like things were getting better. So what had happened?

You chose work over her, stupid, she told herself.

A waitress approached from seemingly out of nowhere. She looked very uncomfortable to be next to her but did her duty anyway. "Can I get you anything, ma'am?"

"I don't guess you serve tequila, huh?" she asked.

The waitress frowned and walked off without another word.

Several moments later, Avery did the same. She stepped back out into the cool night and headed home, hoping to find some answers and solace there. She silenced her phone, sure that Connelly or Agent Duggan would call, and walked to her apartment, trying to remember a time when she had ever felt more alone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

It was ridiculous, Avery thought, that an eighteen-year-old could make her feel so defeated, alone, and embarra.s.sed. It was one of the least glamorous parts of being the mother of a teenager on the verge of going into the real world. Worse, though, was that she felt like she was totally failing at being a mother.

What truly bothered Avery was that when she got home from the cafe, she wanted to bury that sense of failure in her work. Her work, after all, was what had caused her relationship with Rose to suffer. Frustrated, she took the files out of her laptop bag and practically threw them on the coffee table.

She sighed as she went to the refrigerator. She took a moment to decide between wine and beer and ended up sitting down at the table with a very tall gla.s.s of moscato. She had just enough time to read the first few lines of the coroner's report from the first set of remains before the vibrating buzz of her cell phone interrupted her.

She'd silenced it for a reason, but when she saw that it was Ramirez, she picked it up. Before answering it, though, she felt a little uneasy. She had no idea what sort of direction a conversation with him might take right now, but she also knew that she had never been so totally aware of how alone she was until after coming home from the latest failed conversation with Rose.

"Hey," she said almost flippantly.

"Hey, Avery."

A long pause followed this-a pause that irritated her because it made her feel as if whatever chemistry they had between them had devolved into some sort of basic middle school fling. The sort of fling where everything was always awkward and there was never anything of substance to talk about. Ramirez must have sensed this, too; out of nowhere, he decided to get right to the point-which was very unlike him.

"So what's going on?" he asked. "Are we okay?"

"We're fine," she said.

"The other night didn't change things?"

"Of course it changed things," she said. "But that has nothing to do with the past two days. This case is dragging me down and there's all this tension and drama with Rose going on behind the scenes."

"I get it," he said. "Is there anything I can do? Do you need me to come over?"

She wasn't sure why this comment made her slightly angry, but it did. And before she was able to understand this, she was letting that anger shape her words as she spoke them.

"No, I don't," she said. "You should know by now that I'm not one of these women that needs a man to feel safe and secure. I'm with you most of the day at work, which means there's really nothing you can do about the case weighing on me. And no offense, but I'm not even about to bring you into things with Rose. So thanks, but no thanks."

He was quiet on the other end for a moment. When he spoke, his words were soft and deliberate. "I'm going to be honest here," he said. "Avery, I think the world of you and if I had my way, I'd be over there right now. And that's why I'm going to call it a day. I know you've got a lot on your plate right now but it's no need to be a b.i.t.c.h to me."

"A b.i.t.c.h?" Avery asked. "What have I done to be a b.i.t.c.h? Not let you come over and kiss me and stroke my hair and tell me everything is okay? How's that being a b.i.t.c.h?"

She barely heard his sigh from the other end but it was there. "Bye, Avery. I'll see you at work tomorrow."

Before she could say anything else, Ramirez killed the call. She rolled her eyes and slammed her phone down on top of the folder. Before she could let her anger rise up any further, she concentrated on the folder, focusing in once again on the coroner's report. She looked over the details of the scant remains of Keisha Lawrence, looking for something that might have been overlooked. She did the same for the still-growing file on Sarah Osborne and really did nothing more than commit it all to memory.

As she expected, though, there was nothing. The coroner and the guys at Forensics had looked at this thing from every angle. They had done exhaustive work and Avery knew she'd find nothing new.

Somehow, by the time she had looked through the reports, she had emptied her wine gla.s.s. She refilled it and attacked it right away. She knew that drinking was not the best form of therapy but at the moment it seemed to at least be making her care a little less about her problems with Rose and Ramirez.

She half-heartedly looked through the files as her second gla.s.s of wine got lower and lower. When that gla.s.s was empty, she refilled it, emptying the bottle. She then stood in the kitchen, staring at the fridge for a moment. She sipped slowly from the gla.s.s, feeling herself lean somewhere further away from tipsy and closer to drunk. She prided herself on knowing when to stop and had only gotten drunk on one occasion-and that had been while in college.

But maybe tonight would be the second time.

She stared at the fridge and her heart started to go cold. In the back of her head, a memory that she had pushed very far back started to bully its way forward.

Broken beer bottles from an opened fridge, a pool of amber liquid on the floor, mom screaming, Beth crying in the living room.

The memory was such a behemoth in her mind that she literally froze for a moment, unmoving and unblinking. She could even recall that the refrigerator door had been opened for so long that the interior light had shut itself off. She was pretty sure she had closed it and afterward, once her mother had stopped screaming and Beth had gone to bed, Avery had cleaned the spilled beer up.

Avery shuddered at the memory. Then, pushed more by the amount of wine she had drunk rather than by need or courage, she picked up her cell phone. She scrolled to "Beth" and pressed call.

She put the phone to her ear and listened to the ringing of her sister's phone for the first time in nineteen months.

It was answered on the third ring. "h.e.l.lo?"

Beth's voice nearly made her weep. G.o.d, I've missed her, Avery thought.

"Hey," she said. "It's Avery."

"Oh." It was a genuine sound of surprise and the silence that followed was completely different than the silence she'd experienced with Ramirez forty minutes ago. This silence carried a sorrowful weight between the two phones.

"Am I bothering you?" Avery asked.

"No, not really. I'm just shocked to hear from you."

The southern tw.a.n.g in Beth's voice made Avery smile. Beth had been born and raised in West Virginia before Avery's parents had adopted her at the age of seven. And although they had moved to Maine and then Ma.s.sachusetts through their childhood, that southern accent had never faded away.

"Well, my mind has been to some strange places today," Avery admitted. "I had this memory...this thought, I guess. It made me think about you. I sort of just wanted to check in. I know it seems like I've forgotten about you a lot of the time and..."

She didn't finish the statement. She purposefully stopped, hoping Beth would pick up the thread.

"Avery, that's okay," she said. "I could have called, too. But I chose not to. I figured you thought the same way. Mom and Dad died, you went off to college, I did my own thing. We separated. We moved on. It happens sometimes."

"But sisters," Avery said. "Sisters should be different."

"Do you still feel like my sister?" Beth asked.

"Of course I do. If I didn't, I sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't have called you." She almost followed Beth's question up with the same question. She decided not to, though. She was actually afraid of what the answer might be. Beth had said time and time again how as an adopted kid, she never felt connected to Avery. She'd said these things when she was p.i.s.sed or moody all through their teen years, though. As such, Avery had never thought much of it.

But now with years and physical distance between them, those old comments carried a sting with them.

"So what are you up to?" Beth asked. "Still with the Boston police?"

"Yes," Avery said, surprised by the attempt at conversation. "How about you? Are you still working for that...what was it? An ad firm?"

"It was, yeah. But I'm doing freelance design now."

"How's that going?" Avery asked.

"Pretty good." She paused, let out a sigh, and then added: "Look, Avery. Are we for real going to try to do this? Are we really going to pretend that it hasn't been a year and a half since we last spoke? Are we going to pretend that there isn't this...this ghost sitting between us every time we speak?"

"Beth, it's not a-"

"Let's be honest," Beth interrupted. "When we split apart, we went our separate ways. And we're not doing too bad for ourselves. Can't we just leave it at that? Maybe we're better when we're far apart-when we're just memories for each other."

"Is that what you'd prefer?" Avery asked.

"Yeah, it sort of is. Thinking about you and Mom and Dad and everything that happened...all it does is hurt. And I chose a while ago to not do that to myself."

"If that's what you want," Avery said.

"Thanks for calling, sis. But I'm going to go now."

Avery said nothing. Her apartment was so quiet that she heard the click when Beth ended the call.

She set her phone down softly on the kitchen table and slowly walked into the living room. She sat down on the couch and looked at the scattered files on the current case. She gave them only a cursory glance at first; her mind was elsewhere.

Let's do the math, she thought. That's a daughter, a maybe-boyfriend, and an estranged sister that I have managed to drive further away in less than four hours. That's got to be some kind of a record. What the actual f.u.c.k is wrong with me?

She was tempted to go to the fridge and start on the beer. But she knew that would only make things worse. It would make her more p.r.o.ne to overthinking her troubles and it would hinder her with a hangover in the morning.

Instead, she buried herself elsewhere...in the only other avenue she had ever really known to effectively absorb grief.

She turned back to her work, now more obsessed than ever with the case and finding a way to capture what was turning out to be a truly s.a.d.i.s.tic killer.

Quickly, her mind took a sharp and dark turn. There was somewhere else she had always turned when things had gotten hard. Had she not been three very tall gla.s.ses of wine into the night, she might have realized that this was something of a crutch for her. But she was pleasantly buzzed and her thoughts, while frantic, were also very easy to twist into shapes that made sense to her in that moment.

She found herself thinking of Howard Randall.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

With the same nervous sort of queasiness overcoming her that she always experienced when visiting Howard, Avery found herself being led through South Bay House of Corrections, nearing B-Level. The guards that led her were making it quite clear that they did not enjoy this detail, doing so without saying a single word.

With only their footfalls to break the silence, the guards led Avery to the same small conference room she'd visited a few times before. And just like on those previous visits, Howard Randall was seated at a rectangular table, sitting in a prim and proper manner. He smiled at her as she stepped into the room. The guards shut the doors behind her, leaving Avery alone with Howard.

"Avery, I can't even begin to explain how lovely it is to see you again."

Avery only nodded as she took her seat. Howard looked to be in pretty bad shape. He looked thinner than the last time she had seen him. Something about his face looked hollow and almost empty. Still, it pained her to admit that something about him made her feel almost at ease. He might be psychotic and selfish, but he was familiar.

And given the way she had handled her life as of late, she could use a little familiarity.

"Thanks for agreeing to meet with me," Avery said.

"Of course. I a.s.sume it's about this deplorable man that is burning his victims?"

"How did you-?"

She had nearly asked how did you know? but they had been through this same song and dance before. He had avenues to information within the prison walls. Avery wasn't sure where he got his information from but he had proven time and time again that he had very little problem keeping in the loop. This was especially true when it came to cases she was handling.

"It is," Avery admitted.

"You know, it almost hurts my feelings that you never visit just to see me or to chat," Howard teased, giving her a thin little smile.

"I'm sure you understand that I don't have much free time to just swing by and chat." What she thought but didn't say was: If I can't make quality time for my own daughter, I'm certainly not going to make it for you.