“You see him again?”
I shook my head.
Bohannan didn’t say anything.
Now I was clutching his hand. “Do you still think this is about me?”
“No, baby,” he said quietly.
He then took in a big breath.
And he held my eyes when he said, “I think it’s about me.”
Thirty-Seven
You Pay Attention
“Explain,” I demanded.
“You like me.”
“Yes.”
“A lot.”
I gave him a look.
He smiled, but he didn’t mean it. He was trying to inject levity.
I wasn’t feeling like being leavened.
“You’re not tight with your mom.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“But she’s your mom.”
“Yes, Cade, just tell me,” I snapped, impatient.
“She’s your mom, and you were eleven and you needed her, you probably felt something for her, if only because she was what you had. And this guy shouting at her was a threat to her.”
Now I was following.
And my skin started prickling.
Bohannan explained it anyway.
“You saw that guy out your window, heading to my home, you like me, you sensed a threat…to me. And you pay attention. You can read people. And we aren’t sure, but we think you were right.”
“Oh my God.”
“So, baby,” he scooted closer, and held my hand tight, “what I think is, this isn’t about Audrey or Alice or Malorie or Lana, or Bobby and Dale being cheating assholes who didn’t know how to talk to their wives about things they wanted in bed. It’s about me. He’s calling me out. He’s testing me. And that means…”
Oh God.
Oh dear God.
“There’s not going to be a pattern. There’s not a profile. Malorie being vaguely connected to Alice is a red herring. It’s to lead me off track when there isn’t a track. The next person could be anybody. Because this is him versus me.”
Thirty-Eight
Catastrophic
If you have an abundance of it, as a parent, you strategize the real estate of your house very carefully.
Even before Bohannan really kissed me, I understood why Grace and he put the boys in the basement, and Celeste’s room was all the way down the hall, to the front of the house, whereas Bohannan’s was at the opposite corner in the back.
Warren and I had not lasted long after Fenn was born.
Angelo and I were married for almost eleven years, and we had Camille right away, because I wanted my kids to be born close together and have every opportunity to build that brand of sibling camaraderie (fortunately, in this, I succeeded, though truthfully, they did it).
Me not having sex did not mean I wasn’t sexual. I gave myself orgasms regularly and had what I would estimate was an above-average, very healthy sex drive.
Angelo was a self-professed sex addict, and perhaps this was a thing (and I’d done research on it not only because of how it affected my life, but possibly using it in books, and I still thought it was a cop-out, but I say that with the caveat that I have a block to it, because it might exist as a bona fide psychological condition, but Angelo had used it in an attempt to keep me).
In other words, Angelo and I had sex all the time.
So we made very good use of baby monitors and our real estate.
This was on my mind as I was standing in my jammies, brushing my teeth in Bohannan’s bathroom.
It wasn’t the only thing on my mind, which was understandably cluttered.
After the bombshell Bohannan dropped in his office, as I fought hyperventilating, he explained that this was not outside the norm. In fact, it had been one of the factors that led to him searching for someplace out of the way and safe for him and his family.
He’d been fulfilled by his work with the FBI, and as such, wanted to keep his name out of the high-profile cases. But the media tipped it, and investigative journalists-cum-authors pushed it, and he was outed.
And when you get that kind of reputation, it can detrimentally affect your work.
An example of which, it could trigger disturbed people to play cat and mouse with you.
“When I quit the Bureau, and we moved here, I installed the fence and gate. And I don’t have cameras and sensors around the property just because I want privacy for my family,” he explained.
I had not put this two and two together, but Bohannan went on to share that law enforcement types did not herald where they lived. From something as minor as keeping their names off their mailboxes, to taking pains to minimize their digital footprint, to Bohannan’s fortress-type setup.
So, although this bombshell wasn’t great, he was not surprised by it.
And he assured, “Baby, just because you might not be able to build an accurate profile because your subject is actively working to make sure you don’t, doesn’t mean you can’t investigate murders. Criminals leave clues. He’s leaving clues. We just have to find them and follow them.”
He seemed so collected about this, so unaffected by and aloof from that particular mindfuck, I felt a modicum of comfort.