“She’s due to leave within a few hours. Can you just drop things that quickly and go?”
“Yes, sir.”
Johnson considered this for a moment and then sighed. “The case does seem to fall right into your wheelhouse.” He then gave a defeated little shrug and said, “Okay. Speak with Rhodes and have her forward you all of the case details. You’re officially on the case, but I need you to be responsible. If you get out there and find that you aren’t ready for it just yet, I need you to be honest about it.”
“Of course. And thank you, sir.”
She wheeled back around, heading for Rhodes’s office before he could change his mind.
CHAPTER THREE
Danielle had been handling the aftermath of Millseed, Texas, about as well as she might have expected. Because Danielle had always preferred solitude and stewing in it to actually trying to be proactive, she had spent the five days since coming back home sitting in her apartment. The only thing she had done in terms of going out and trying to better herself was seeing the doctor in regards to her injuries. She had suffered a mild concussion and a slightly sprained ankle from the confrontation with her father and nothing more.
Still, she felt sore all over. She had read something somewhere about how the body keeps score—how even when there is no psychical trauma, your muscles and nerve endings recall the tension of a given time or place and can cause it to resurface.
Apparently, her body was doing exactly that.
She was also having to deal with the fact that she held no regrets. She was glad the bastard was dead—glad even that she had helped get him to such a state. When she looked back to the backbreaking work of digging the grave and then shoving him in, she was filled with relief and pride rather than any sort of sadness.
These were all things she would never tell Chloe. She was well aware that Chloe had always thought she was a little deranged. It was hard to read Chloe on the matter, though. Sometimes it was broached as an almost passive sort of comic relief, while other times she felt that Chloe almost looked down on her because of it.
Honestly, Danielle just wanted to get back to her life—back to work, back to pretending like her father didn’t exist. She still felt that it had been unfair of him to resurface after she had spent so much of her life pretending he didn’t exist in the first place.
Now, on day five after everything had taken place in Millseed, Danielle was sitting on her couch, trying to decide what to watch on Netflix. She knew she needed a shower, knew she needed to call into work to see when they would let her start picking up shifts again. But she knew once she did that, her life would begin again. And as cliché as it seemed, she knew that now that her father was dead, there would be a new chapter to her life beginning when she did decide to get her ass off the couch.
As if reading her thoughts about needing to get into action, her cell phone rang on her coffee table. She reached out for it and was surprised to see it was Chloe. They’d only spoken once since returning from Texas. It was unlike Chloe to distance herself after something so monumental, but Danielle assumed she had her reasons. The lies they had constructed were so intricate and numerous that she likely figured it was best not to talk very much for a while.
So then why is she calling now?
Curious, she answered the call. “Hey, sis.”
“Hey, Danielle. How are you feeling?”
“Rested up and mostly fine, I think. You?”
“Same. I haven’t been sleeping particularly well, though. I feel the need to just start life back up again, you know?”
“I do, actually,” Danielle said. “The sleep thing…you having nightmares?”
“No. It’s just anxiety, I think. Look, D…there’s something a little strange going on at work and I wanted to give you a heads-up. I was questioned again this morning about what happened. It wasn’t just my director this time, though. He brought in some other people from higher up—the sort of people that only get involved when there could be potential trouble brewing.”
“How’d you do?” Danielle asked. She knew just how careful her sister could be. She didn’t think Chloe would have cracked under the pressure, but she wasn’t absolutely positive. If either one of them cracked or slipped up and their stories all of a sudden didn’t line up, they were both going to be in some pretty deep shit.
“I did fine, but I’m worried they might call you in, too.”
“Don’t I need to be arrested for them to question me like that?”
“No. It’s almost considered a courtesy at this point. They’ve already questioned you, so they’d expect you to accommodate them again.”
“To hell with that. Why would I want to go through it again?”
“If they do contact you, you can’t have that sort of attitude.”
Danielle rolled her eyes. “So I just bend over and keep taking it as long as they want to give it to me?”
“For a while, yes. Just please…Danielle, please stick to the story. Don’t let your emotions or annoyance take over.”
“Is that really why you called?” Danielle asked.
“It is. Well, that and because I know how you tend to stew in your emotions when things get bad. How are you holding up?”
“I stink. And I’m out of things to binge on Netflix. Thinking of heading back in to work tomorrow.”
“That sounds good,” Chloe said. “Please don’t talk about what we did to the people you work with, okay?”
“My God, Chloe. I’m not an idiot.”
“I know, I just—”
“Chloe, let’s not do this. How about you go ahead and resume your life and I’ll do the same. Let’s give it a few weeks and see where we are. I know how this works. We’ve been through something pretty fucked up. And no matter how you like to paint it in your head, you and I have never been especially close. We don’t have that tight sisterhood bond, you know? So maybe we don’t need each other to get through this.”
She sensed she had said too much about halfway through, but it had been too late to stop by that point.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Chloe said. Her voice was deflated and thin. Danielle had clearly hurt her feelings—something she had never been fully aware of either as a child or as a grown woman.
“Chloe…”
“I think you should get back to work,” Chloe interrupted. “Pick up your life like it was before all of this. And if the bureau or the cops come calling, all I ask is that you play it cool. Don’t take it personally. They are, after all, only doing their jobs.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Love you, sis. Bye for now.”
Before Danielle could respond, Chloe ended the call. Danielle set her phone down slowly, not quite sure why she was so bothered by the nature of the conversation. She had always been the sister who had not been bothered by hostile discussions. But now, to feel that Chloe was so annoyed with her, she felt like she was letting her sister down.
It’s because she saved your ass from a stupid mistake, she thought.
Yes, it had occurred to her several times in the last few days that Chloe had likely saved her life. And that would change the direction of their relationship from here on out. Never having been comfortable with feeling as if she owed people anything, Danielle was simply not sure how to handle it.
She absently started scrolling through the Netflix home screen again. She looked back to her phone and considered calling work. Maybe she could even get on the schedule for tonight.
Chloe was right, after all; she had to pick things up at some point. She no longer