“Then she could have snapped and killed the nanny herself, perhaps?” my uncle mused.
Vehemently, I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand,” I snapped. “She was practically a zombie. And even if she had somehow found a way back to herself, there’s no way she would do something like this.” I looked around the tired pink room. “Ellis Earnshaw is the sweetest, most innocent person on this earth.” My stomach flipped when I thought of how, as a kid, she would dress up as Alice in Wonderland and pretend she was drinking tea. “She’s delicate.” My heart broke for the shell she’d become. “She was almost too fragile for the world. Easily manipulated. Too vulnerable.” My mouth, which had a formed a nostalgic smile, fell. Only one person came to mind. The prick who had taken her from me. Took away my best friend and molded her into his lap dog . . .
Heathan fucking James.
But he was dead. Or at least presumed dead. Disappeared when we were kids, leaving Ellis heartbroken. He was always selfish. I’d tried to see her once, months after he had left, when I found out from my mama that he’d left her all alone. But it was the start of Ellis’s spiral into darkness. Heathan fucking James left her and ruined her goddamn life.
That dick was better off dead and gone. There was always something weird about him. As if he lived with evil in his veins. And the minute he set his sights on Ellis, he did nothing but corrupt her, and devour her spirit and grace.
The ringing of my uncle’s cell cut through my smoldering anger. I blinked away the image of Heathan, with his strange clothes and eerie gray eyes. I focused instead on my uncle’s eyes, which had fallen on me.
“I’m on my way.” My uncle ended the call and tucked his cell back into his pocket.
“What is it?”
“Murder,” he replied. “Amarillo.”
My heart started racing. My uncle was pretty high up in the Texas Rangers. From being a kid, I had wanted to be him. I started training the minute I turned eighteen. At twenty-two, I was now truly learning my craft. Even when I was officially on leave, I didn’t take the day off. Instead I shadowed him, the best. Yeah, it was a blatant case of nepotism, but my uncle let me. He could see how much I wanted it. I had two weeks of vacation time. For me, it translated into two weeks’ worth of the most important cases to observe and understand.
“When are we leaving?” I followed him as he turned and raced from the room.
“Now.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered under my breath as I drank in the scene before me. We’d passed bodies on our route to an office in the secluded house we’d been called to. Guards. When the next shift of guards had started, they’d immediately called in the murders.
It was carnage.
I followed my uncle into the office. And I had barely taken one step inside when I stopped in my tracks. A man, stabbed to death, slumped in his office chair against the wall. I tore my eyes from the bloody sight of his corpse and up to the writing above. The scrawl was messy, almost childlike. I squinted to make out what it said. Just as it swam into focus, my uncle gave it voice: “Sick Fux.”
He stepped up to the writing and ran his finger over the edge of one of the letters. He brought the pink stuff it had been written in to his nose, then rubbed it between his fingers. “Lipstick?” Eyebrows pulled down, he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers.
On closer inspection of the writing, I saw he was right. “Lipstick?” I asked. “And what the hell is Sick Fux?”
My uncle put his hands in his pockets. “I’m gonna say the person, or persons, responsible.” He crouched down beside the body and gazed over the wounds. “They toyed with him.” He studied the tape around the man’s wrists. “Tied him down and played with him like he was a piece of meat.”
Without looking behind him to the deputies assigned to the case, he asked, “We have a name?”
A deputy flicked his notepad open. “A Mr. Lester Knowles.”
That name sounded familiar. I racked my brain trying to work out why. I moved to the desk and searched through some of the papers, his name playing over and over again in my head. Lester Knowles . . . why do I know your name?
My blood cooled when the answer hit me. I spun on my heels to look at my uncle. “Lester Knowles was one of Mr. Earnshaw’s colleagues. An associate in his business.”
My uncle came toward me. “Earnshaw? The missing girl?”
“Ellis,” I said and felt everything inside of me frost over in trepidation. “She called him her uncle. He wasn’t by blood. But that”—I pointed to the corpse—“was one of her father’s best friends. He practically helped raise Ellis.” My face blanched. “Do you think they’re connected?” I heard the fear lacing my voice. “Ellis’s kidnapping, Mrs. Jenkins’s and his deaths . . . Do you think they’re linked?”