Kellaway shrugged. “Most of them. I get it, you know. They’re trying to put on a show, trying to seem tougher than they really are. I’m young and small-built. They’re going to rib me and give me a hard time.”
“Not too much of a hard time, I hope. Not a PR-reportable hard time.”
“Oh, no…nothing like that.”
“Most of the guys at the A1 are pussycats,” Avery said. “You just need to assert yourself. And so far, it doesn’t seem like that’s an issue for you.”
“It never has been,” Kellaway said. “I’m actually more concerned about what you think of me, if I’m being honest.”
“Don’t be.”
“Well…you got stuck with me on your first day back and I still don’t really even know the full details about why you left.”
Avery recognized this as a not-so-subtle way for Kellaway to ask about the last few months. Avery didn’t mind. Surprisingly, she welcomed it. It would be good to speak to someone other than a therapist about it—especially someone who knew very little about her personal life.
“I left because everything seemed like it came falling down all at once,” she said. “My ex-husband died, killed by a man I was trying to track down…all while my daughter was also being tormented. And then Ramirez died—and I don’t know how much you know about him but…”
“You guys were involved, right?” Kellaway asked.
“Yeah. It was more serious than I admitted to myself. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me until he was right there at the edge of death. He had a ring…was ready to get married.”
Kellaway nodded solemnly, perhaps feeling that she had opened a door she wasn’t ready to step through just yet. “Well,” she said quietly, “how is your daughter doing after all of it? At least you still have her.”
Avery tried to muster up a fake laugh but couldn’t manage it. “You’d think. But…no. Rose is more distant than ever. She blames me for her dad’s death. And she claims my career has always kept her in harm’s way. And the hell of it is that she might be right.”
It was strange to talk to Kellaway about Rose. After all, Kellaway might be five or six years older than Rose…it was far too close to speaking to Rose herself.
“So…if you don’t mind me asking, what made you come back?” Kellaway asked.
Avery knew the answer. It was an easy one but that made it somehow harder to answer. “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense to me,” she said. “I tried to tell myself that I didn’t miss it, but I did. It’s all I know. And really, I think Ramirez would be disappointed in me if I didn’t carry on.”
Somehow, the conversation had sped the strip along. Avery took the final turn as directed by Kellaway. It brought them to a nice apartment complex about twenty minutes away from the precinct. Kellaway paused a moment before opening the door. She looked back to Avery thoughtfully.
“You know…I know it’s not the same,” she told Avery, “but my folks divorced when I was twelve. Then my father died in a car accident when I was fifteen. I hated my mother. If I’m being honest, I still haven’t fully forgiven her. But I have reached out, especially now that she’s not well. I’ve talked to her and she’s not completely shut out anymore. So, the thing with your daughter…give it time. She’ll come around.”
“That’s the hope,” Avery said…without much hope at all.
Kellaway stepped out and closed the door. Avery watched her go, trying her best not to let the unexpected conversation pull her toward grief. She pulled away before it had a chance to sink its claws in, though her thoughts remained very close to Rose.
Give it time. She’ll come around.
It was a pleasant thought, a bit of encouragement wrapped up nice with a little bow on top. But Avery seriously doubted that it was true.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Avery spent a portion of that night in front of her laptop. She was trying to determine the types of places someone might order a funnel web spider. There were an alarming number of places, a few of which seemed highly illegal yet given a very professional fa?ade. She then allowed herself to slip down a bit of a rabbit hole in doing more digging on Stefon Scott—not because she believed him to be a suspect but because he seemed to have been something of a central character in the little online communities he had talked about.
She read a few of his posts from one of the arachnid-centric forums, getting his user information from an article that had been linked to a bio page on the Boston Science Museum’s website—a bio that she was sure had not yet been removed solely because someone had not thought to take it down. She also discovered on those forums that acquiring venomous spiders that were not considered “local” was often considered illegal and immoral.
As she looked back over Lawnbrook’s case files, something peculiar struck her for the first time. Whoever had brought those spiders to Lawnbrook’s apartment had not bothered trying to collect them up afterward. If the person had been a spider enthusiast, it seemed unlikely that they would just leave the spiders there. On top of that was the fact that Stefon claimed Lawnbrook wanted to get over his fear.
So maybe the spiders aren’t the central focus here, she thought. Maybe his fear is where the case needs to be explored from. Maybe his fear was the motive…
It seemed flimsy but certainly worth some thought.
Only, it was harder to think about than she cared to admit. Truthfully, ever since her conversation with Kellaway, Avery’s attention had mostly been turned toward Rose. It’s why she had such a hard time connecting with anything she read on the forums or in Lawnbrook’s case files.
She checked her phone and saw that it had somehow already gotten to be 9:20. She was pretty sure Rose was at work, getting some of those amazing tips she had boasted about. Still, Avery tried to give her a call. It rang once before going straight to voicemail. Avery toyed with the idea of sending a text but ultimately decided against it. She figured it would have to be Rose’s decision if there was to be any repair. Rose would have to make the next move.
But her personal life had never been too different from her career; Avery was not one to rely on patience to help resolve problems. She knew Rose was a master at the silent treatment and worried just how long she’d be able to hold up.
“Shit,” Avery said into the empty cabin.
She slid her phone away from her and shut her laptop down. For her first day back on the job, it had been an exhausting one. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to bed before eleven, but it was happening tonight. Alternatively, she could not remember the last time she had set her cell phone on her bedside table when going to bed—but that was happening for the first time in three months as well.
She was working again…on the clock again. And while there was a certain amount of pressure and weight to that fact, it also helped her to fall asleep faster than she had since Ramirez had died. Now, instead of focusing on what she had done wrong during the case that had resulted in his death, she was able to instead focus on the things she could do right on her current case.
***
There were spiders crawling up her arms. One had reached her shoulder and was scurrying its way to the curve of her neck. She opened her mouth to scream and another one—a spider the size of a quarter—came leaping off of her tongue.
It was this one coming out of her mouth that clued Avery’s subconscious brain into the fact that this was nothing more than a bad dream. A very bad dream.
The spiders were coming from everywhere—from webs on the ceiling, from under the bed, from within her hair, from under her clothes. She shot up in bed, realizing that she wasn’t in bed at all but on one of those metal slabs in the morgue. Alfred Lawnbrook was lying beside her. He was dead yet his head lolled back and forth. When he looked over in her direction, he smiled. Numerous tiny spiders came skittering out from between his teeth.