Particles of Obsession (A Shadow of Death Romantic Suspense Book 2) (7 page)

“I don’t want to hurt you.” It’s an unmistakably female voice.

“Who are you?” John demands. He reaches for her mask. She ducks her head away from him and grabs his wrist. She twists him around by jerking his wrist and pushes him away from her. She sprints away from us.

I pursue her. Like last time, she proves to be much faster than me, but adrenaline allows me to stay about five paces away from her. Once she reaches the school building and it’s getting hard for me to breathe, she jumps up to a fire escape. Her weight doesn’t pull the ladder down. As I reach out to grab her, she pulls herself up to the next rung on the ladder. She continues to pull herself up until her feet hit the bottom rung and she scrambles her way up to the top. I watch as she reaches the top of the fire escape. She gets on top of the railing, jumps up grasp the ledge above the window, pulls herself up, and uses it to get on top of the roof.

“What are you doing?” John asks, stopping beside me and gasping for breath. “Where did she go?”

“She’s fucking Spiderman,” I say, pointing to the roof of the building. “She’s up there. She can reach a shit ton of buildings by being on the roof. There’s no point in rushing. This—superwoman…she climbed up the first half of the fire escape ladder with just her arm strength. That has to slim down the suspect pool—what woman do you know who can lift her own body weight without breaking a sweat?”

“I’m sure I know some, but it’s generally not a question I ask in polite conversation,” he says, sighing. “So…now we know it’s a woman.”

“Yes, a woman who is strong as hell and can beat both our asses,” I say. “That’s great. First, we had a guy who could secretly poison people, and now there’s a ninja. What kind of people are you associating with?”

He turns around, heading back toward the greenhouse. “Come on. Let’s go back to my house and sleep. I don’t want to think about this for the next eight hours.”

I don’t want to leave, but I know staying any longer will only increase the likelihood that the police find me. I follow him, hoping he doesn’t lose faith in me as fast as I’m losing faith in finding this killer.

* * *

J
ohn left
to go to a meeting about the school lockdown and how it’s going to affect final exams, so I’m alone in his house. I wish I could check on my brother, but I’m certain the police will be keeping an eye on him in case I show up. My only other option is to check on someone else’s family and I have two options: Kiona’s or Alex’s.

I can’t be certain that Kiona isn’t another victim, so I’ll have to go with Alex. Shirokov isn’t the most common name around Tuskmirth. I find only one number in the phonebook with the same name. Gerard Shirokov.

The house is about three miles away, but I decide to walk there. I need as little human contact as possible in order to avoid the police. At this point, it almost seems more sensible to get arrested because then I could at least use the prison library to research everything.

It didn’t occur to me that the family would be having a wake today.

Their driveway and the front of the house is packed with cars. I’m surprised that a man who had been accused of committing multiple murders would have so many people here to mourn him, but I suppose the people are here more for his parents than him. Plus, the fraternity likely came.

No one will be around to have a ceremony for Andre. The mafia he had been accompanying would likely pay for a nice casket, but they wouldn’t make a big show of it. He wasn’t important enough for them to act like he was part of the family.

I’ll have to bring flowers to his gravesite every day to make up for it.

When I walk into the Shirokov’s house, the first thing I notice are his parents, evident by the fact that they’re the ones everyone is giving their sympathies to.

I’m wearing the same black pants and top I’ve had on for days, only removing them for sleep and the couple of times I’ve run them through John’s washer and drier. At least they’re the right color for mourning, although they’re too informal. Too bad. I don’t have time to be worried about my appearance. Instead, I take a closer look at Alex’s parents.

Alex’s mother reminds me of Marilyn Monroe if Marilyn Monroe had aged older than fifty and was shaped like a grandfather clock instead of an hourglass. His father looks like a dick—figuratively and literally.

His mother looks up at me. She stares at me with such intensity that I get a sinking feeling that she knows the police are looking for me. I was banking on the idea that the police wouldn’t have told Alex’s parents that they suspect someone who had been working with them had killed him, but I’ve been wrong before.

She looks away. If she knows something, she’s not going to confront me. Alex’s father glances at me, but he doesn’t recognize me from anything.

I came here to find out more about Alex—to see if his family knew more than his fraternity brothers, but now I feel like I’m a rat that has just taken the cheese off of the mouse trap.

“Hello, Dr. Zimmer’s friend.”

I turn around to see Dominic, Victoria’s boyfriend. Or at least, he was her boyfriend until Alex killed her.

“Dominic,” I say. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Why? Because Alex killed my girlfriend?” he asks. “Well…I suppose I should have known. He was acting weird for the last couple of months.”

I straighten up. “Really? Do you know why?”

“Perhaps because he’d begun his transformation into a homicidal maniac?” Dominic suggests.

“No, I mean…did something happen in his life? Did he happen to meet someone that triggered him to change?”

Dominic tilts his head. “Why are you so curious? He’s dead. It’s over.”

“I just need to know. Come on, Dominic. You have to want to know the whole story. Why would he kill all those people?”

Dominic rubs his bottom lip. “I can’t be certain. The way he was acting…I don’t know. He was always a fun guy, but I think he suffered from major depressive disorder. There was always a bit of sadness underneath his facade. But in the last couple of months, he seemed genuinely happy, and he’d take off and lie about where he was going. One of our brothers would ask where he went and he would tell us some bullshit story about his family or going to a bar. Why would he go to a bar alone? One time, he told us he was going to Blue Crystal bar, but Daniel was there that night and he said he never saw Alex. Something was going on, but it wasn’t our business to pry into it. Maybe he had joined a Satanic group or he had a boyfriend. We may never know.”

I glance back over at his parents. It never really occurred to me that it could be a guy who was dating Alex and obsessed with Dr. Zimmer.

“What do you know about Kiona?” I ask.

“She was Victoria’s roommate. She’s a good woman. She’s not a violent person. I don’t know why she ran off with a gun, but…it’s certainly strange,” he says, frowning. “There’s something else going on, isn’t there? I’m not going to give you any more info until you tell me. My girlfriend was killed and if there’s more going on, I think I should know.”

I shake my head. “I was just curious.”

“A man doesn’t kill a bunch of students and, in the same frame of time that he’s killed, a female student doesn’t disappear with a gun,” he says. “Do you think Kiona killed Alex?”

“It’s possible,” I admit. “Do you think she was attached enough to Victoria to want revenge?”

“No,” he says. “They were only close to each other in the way roommates are close…They had to like each other to survive sleeping a few feet away from each other. She was upset at her funeral, certainly, but it’s not like she’s going to be wearing black all year.”

Unless she’s dead and locked in a casket.

He opens his mouth to say something else, but several people’s cell phones begin vibrating or ringing. He pulls his phone out and checks it.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he mutters. “Not only is the campus on lockdown, now the whole downtown is.”

“What?” I ask.

He gestures to his phone before putting it back in his pocket. “Campus police just sent out a text to all students that we have to stay away from Costume Artillery,
some costume shop on Main Street.”

It feels like an anvil rammed into my chest. Costume Artillery is right beside my parent’s shop, Magician’s Suitcase. I leave the house so quickly that I can barely hear the echo of Dominic asking, “What the fuck is she doing?”

I
danced
around the main room of Alex’s apartment. The music wasn’t even upbeat and it had a slow tempo, but I felt too happy to not dance. I felt like I had never experienced true happiness until I had started planning these murders. I knew how psychotic that sounded, but I had purpose and I was actively trying to solve my problems for the first time in my life.

Every dream, every thought, every breath

It’s all about what I would do to get you by my side

Call me obsessed, call me naive, call me whatever you want

I’ll follow you to the grave, another Bonnie and Clyde.

I heard the apartment door open and close. I turned around to see Alex. I shouldn’t have expected anyone else, considering neither of us had told anybody about this place, but there was always that bit of anxiety ramming in my brain, telling me that a SWAT team could come bursting through the door at any second.

I lowered the volume on the radio and rushed over to him. I wrapped my arms so tight around him, I could feel his chest rise and fall with his breathing. He ran his hand down my hair.

“You act like you haven’t seen me in a decade,” he said.

“I’m just so happy,” I said.

He stared me, trying to read every detail of my face.

“She’s dead, right?” I asked. “I know you thought after Victoria and Everett, it would be harder to get it done, but since she’s at a different school, it was easy, right?”

He frowned. “I wouldn’t use the word easy. I had to break into her apartment, but I managed to leave the pen there. I saw ambulances racing to the school as I left…but anyway, yeah, it’s done.”

“How can you be sure she’s dead if you didn’t stick around?”

“You’ve seen the results of the poison,” he said. “It kills within a couple of minutes. I ensured it was right where her hand would grip it, so if another person picked up the pen, it wouldn’t hurt them as badly because the poison had all been absorbed. I promise you: she’s gone.”

I jumped onto the kitchen stool and drummed my hands against the counter. Joy was impossible to contain.

“We should go do something,” I said. “Dr. Zimmer is doing a reading in the student union in an hour. We should grab some dinner and go listen to him.”

“Really?” he asked. “I just drove back from the middle of godfucking nowhere and you want to go run and see your professor? I thought at the very least that we would spend some time together alone tonight. Do you ever think about that? The two of us, together? Or is your professor always involved somehow?”

I flushed, but I kept my head bowed so he couldn’t see my face. I looped my finger through his jeans pocket and pulled him closer to me. He leaned away.

“You know I love to spend time with you,” I said. “That’s what I figured we would do once we got back from the reading. But if you want to start right now, I’ve been working on my splits today, so I’m all limbered up.”

I moved my hand toward his groin. He grabbed my hand and shoved it away from him.

“No,” he said. “Don’t try to distract me with sex. I’m not as stupid as you like to pretend I am. I could look the other way from your obsession with Dr. Zimmer because I thought you saw him as a parental figure, considering the circumstances of your own family…but I’m beginning to doubt that’s what it really is. You’re in love with him and you just see me as a means to an end.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “You know I only care about him when it comes to my work. I look up to him, but I love you.”

“You’re so full of shit, I should have seen it from the moment I laid eyes on you,” he said. “Fucking gymnastics with that fake smile on your face.”

He was nearly shaking with anger. It was frightening, but I’d seen it before. He had been rough with me a few times, but it never got to the point that I thought I was being abused.

“Alex,” I said. “Come on. You know how I feel about you. I trusted you enough to tell you how I felt and what I wanted to happen with those other students. I’d never tell those kinds of things to Dr. Zimmer. He couldn’t ever understand me the way that you do. He’s not like us. We both have that bit of darkness in us and he doesn’t, so even if I was in love with him, we wouldn’t be compatible. He would reject me and I could never be happy with him. It’s always been you. You will always be more important to me than he is.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, turning away from me.

“Then, we’re not going to go see your professor,” he said. “I don’t want you see him again.”

“I have a class with him next semester,” I said.

“You need to drop out of that class,” he said. “In fact, with how unhappy classes are making you, I think it would make sense for you to drop out of college completely. You had mentioned that you were thinking about it. You’re not even sure how you’re going to pay for your books and shit next year.”

I nodded. When I had mentioned that to him, I had been at a low point—grades lower than I had expected, no recognition in any of my classes, and the one friend I had made here had dropped out after her father died, but it did make sense. I came here to get experience—a degree in English with a concentration in creative writing wasn’t going to exactly open up doors for me in the job market, so my intentions were purely to learn, absorb, and expand my mind with new concepts. But, honestly, I hadn’t learned anything. Everything in college had been busy work and I felt like I was keeping my nose to the grindstone for a useless piece of paper they would hand to me at graduation, where my parents wouldn’t even care enough to show up.

“I will absolutely do that if you think that’s what’s best for me,” I said. “All I care about is you. I just…you know how I felt about these other students. They’re trash, but they’re treated like treasures. It has nothing to do with my professor.”

He set his hand on my shoulder and slid it up to my neck. With his fingertips pressing against my skin, he pulled me closer to him, kissing me so hard that it felt like he was still angry and trying to leave a circle of bruises around my mouth.

He pulled down his jeans and boxers in one movement. He grabbed me around the waist and carried me over to the sofa. He dropped me onto it and quickly draped himself over me, his kissing more insistent than before. He yanked up my white dress—the hem of it draping itself over my throat—and pushed inside of me. I closed my eyes. He would never be able to see I had my eyes closed the whole time because his face is pressed against my chest, rubbing between my breasts with each thrust.

It would never be like this with John Zimmer. He would kiss me into tiny, joy-filled pieces and then put me back together. I just had to make him see that.