It looked as though the task force had reached a dead end.
However, Darren was relentless, he refused to give up. He spent days and nights going through the files from the Bloodhounds case. He feverishly noted down any point on the whiteboard. Tonight, he paused and stood back and stared at the board to review everything one by one, mumbling to himself.
“I just need one more piece to complete this puzzle,” he muttered, tapping his cheek with the marker. It was frustrating to keep watching him jump over the one piece that was glaringly obvious.
He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration and picked up his phone.
He frowned slightly. “Tamara hasn’t called me. Since that day we last spoke. Is she mad at me? But she said that she understood that I was trying to catch Julia’s and my mother’s killer.” He thought out loud in concern.
Then he paused and frowned thoughtfully. I shook my head hopelessly as I stared at him. He was never going to get it.
“But, I never mentioned anything about trying to find my mother’s killer.” He muttered softly under his breath.
My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe it, he was getting it.
His eyebrows furrowed. “How did she….” He trailed off.
The marker fell out of his hand as he gasped. “Oh no.’
He searched his pockets, where he normally placed the key to our house. It wasn’t there. It was back in the house he shared with Tamara.
He shook his head in disbelief. He picked the marker, rushed to the board, and wrote down her
name ‘Tamara‘ in the middle of the board.
He drew a line from her name to the word ‘Key‘.
He had thought he was saving her that day from the captivity of the Bloodhounds, but what if he wasn’t. What if she wasn’t a captive like he thought?
He drew another line from her name to the word ‘Bloodhounds‘.
His mind flashed back to the day she had come to see him because she claimed she wanted to keep him company. She was coming from the direction of where my body was kept, and shortly after, the remaining part of my body parts ‘magically‘ appeared.
He drew another line from her name to the word ‘missing body parts‘.
The bloody note that was found on his desk, under his briefcase. She must have placed it under the briefcase, the night he had spent with her. So when he came to work the next morning, it looked like it magically appeared in his office.
He drew another line from her name to the word ‘Bloody note‘.
His mother was actually recovering from her illness, but sometime after he ‘rescued‘ Tamara,
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she began getting worse and then she died.
His hand shook as he drew another line from her name to the word ‘My mother’s death‘.
She had been turning his mind against me, trying to make it look like I intentionally overdosed his mother, making him abandon me completely and giving her the confidence that she had to torture me for days in our house because she knew Darren wasn’t going to come for me.
His breathing increased as he drew another line from her name to my name ‘Julia‘.
He placed his hands on his head in despair. All these while, he had been blinded by hate and by ‘love‘.
He remembered how I had called him begging for help, and he just shunned me, thinking I was trying to get his attention. If only he had listened, he would have saved my life.
He turned red with rage and punched a hole through the wall as he growled. The anger he felt was so much that he shifted into his large brown wolf and ran out of the investigation room.
“No!” I cried out in despair, “Don’t go alone. That’s what she wants. She wants to kill you.
Darren!”
It was no use, he couldn’t hear me…
