Chapter 37

THIRTY-SEVEN

I was twenty and a college student, when I first met Dr. Karen Albright, a psychiatrist who also became my friend when I most needed her. During my sessions with her, I poured out my soul and she helped me process my hideous history and the ideas that I was doing good while doing bad things. She taped these sessions and when I was finished therapy, she gave me a box of cassette tapes of the sessions and a tape player. I remember crying during that conversation and that was the first time I'd allowed my emotions to show. Crying was a weakness that my mother never allowed. I had to be strong and emotionless like her. Sure she could turn the tears on and off like a faucet, but only when she was manipulating someone.

I remember that conversation with Karen like it was yesterday. Karen said, "You'll want these someday." To which I'd responded, "I can't see that happening." She'd smiled at me and said, "Trust me. You will. The day will come when listening to the tapes will make you stronger." I didn't feel strong. She had put her arms around me, and that was the first time I'd allowed someone to touch me in that way and I welcomed the comfort. I knew it wasn't goodbye forever. But it was my last therapy session; therapy that had spanned a year and a half. At that time I was graduating from the university with a degree in criminology and had enrolled in the police academy in suburban Seattle. But more importantly I was graduating from therapy. Karen thought I was ready. I wasn't so sure, but Karen was the only person I could trust completely in life.

She was right about me needing the tapes. I've listened to each tape many times, and each time I've found answers I didn't know I was looking for, some tidbits to help me solve a case, or just get through the day. Over the next several years I visited her sporadically when I felt like I was sliding back into the whirlpool of blackness.

The original tapes are still in a box in the bottom drawer of my desk at home, but I never felt comfortable with them being accessible to anyone else. For one thing, Hayden has a skill I didn't teach him. He picks locks. I've come home and found him in my kitchen making himself at home. If he found the tapes, they would tell him everything about our past, about our mother, about our real father, about what I'd done. I don't want Hayden to find out that way.

It took me several weeks, sitting at my desk, my iPhone recording what my cassette tape player was playing. But I don't need to listen to the recording to remember the conversation with Dr. Albright.

Karen: Take your time, Rylee. I'm here for you. Let's go through this together. You found your stepfather murdered? And your mother was gone. It was just you and your little brother. Why did you think your mother had been kidnapped?

Me: Hayden was on the floor kneeling in a pool of blood beside Rolland's body. On the wall behind Rolland a word was written in blood. Run .

Karen: Tell me what the word ‘run' meant to you back then.

Me: It was my mother's code word. It meant we'd been found.

Karen: Found by who?

Me: The man we'd been running from my entire life. The one that had taken her.

The message from my mother makes me think of another message left at a crime scene.

The note Rebecca was given at the resort was scrawled in barely legible letters. You promised Dinky . Promised what? To Vinnie or to someone else? Was it code? Did Victoria go back on a promise? A promise that would cost her freedom and maybe her life. Was she running from someone? I know so little about Victoria's past, only that she has a brother that doesn't have the approval of her husband and that entire side of the family has been erased from memory.

I press STOP. Victoria has been missing for two days. Victoria's daughters love her. Her husband is still questionable. The note must be related. I don't believe in coincidence. The Ohio case is another thing. Coincidence? I'll have to tell Ronnie and see if she can get the police file on that murder from Ohio and here. Lucas will be pissed off that we're messing in another of his cases. Screw him.

A clap of thunder rolls across the bay, coming from miles away, and rushes past my window like a freight train. The patter of raindrops turns into a full-blown storm. It will help me sleep. But what of Victoria?

"I'll find her," I say the words in a whisper. "We're coming for you, Victoria, and God help whoever took you."