Her Brother's Best Friend - Aching Hearts Series #2

Karma is a bitch,bitch

"When everything is over,when the worst has happened,there's still one thing left in Pandora's box: HOPE." - Harold Finch, Person of Interest

CHAPTER 46 - KARMA IS A BITCH, BITCH

When Riley arrived to the beach house, his heart, already on fire, received one horrific blow more.

There were police cars outside, cops swarming around, the way they would at a crime scene. Riley didn't think it twice, he bypassed every officer that tried to stop him and, out of breath, catapulted himself into the main bedroom, where he found four people, two talking between them, two others seemingly recollecting evidence. 

He anxiously scanned the room for any sign of a corpse, but found none, which would have had him heave a sigh of relief, hadn't he noticed the red stain on the wall, just beside him.

Riley turned paler than pale, dropping against the door as his legs gave out, while the four people observed him, muttering things his hazy mind could not possibly comprehend. He'd arrived too late.

"Excuse me? You can't be in here." A gruff voice pointed out in a hiss, but Riley didn't react. His forest green eyes were fixated on that red spot on the wall. Where was she? Where had that psycho taken his Honeybee? A horrific thought crossed his mind as he realized: they were at the beach. The ocean. Had Lydia thrown the corpse into the ocean?

Before the bald man with a worn out brown coat and thin mustache could approach him, Riley took off for the door, bumping into every officer on the way, stumbling out of the house in a frenzy. He didn't even think it through, didn't consider weather wasn't enough good for the water to be even only mildly warm, he didn't even take off his clothes, just ran off and dived in, desperate to find his Honeybee.

He'd spent crazy hours searching, searching and searching, then driving and driving, and he'd only gotten to an empty house with an immaculate bedroom that however sported a red stain on the wall. What else could he think? Ocean, blood on the wall, polices everywhere. What else was there to wonder?

Riley didn't even feel the cold water soaking him, he didn't even care that his eyes saw blurry due to water and contact lenses, he didn't care that his clothes weighed him down, actually, when he realized he was struggling too much, he just struggled once more, but only to take off jeans, sweater, shoes, even socks, which came afloat without him.

Swimming in the chilly water of that portion of the Atlantic Ocean called Quincy Bay, in search of a body, a sign, anything. If Lydia had shot Emily, she'd certainly thrown the corpse into the water. At the cost of having to swim across the whole freaking ocean, if she was there, he would find her.

Standing on the shore, eyes ahead of him, Detective Murtaugh dipped his hands into his pockets, chewing on one of the gums he'd been greedily using as replacement for cigarettes ever since his wife forced him to quit smoking. His dark brown eyes observed the ocean ahead of him, as if able to see the foolish man swimming underneath, in search of who knew what.

His office had received a call for an attempted murder barely an hour before, the coordinates had been given at the speed of light along with the audio of the 911 call. There was a girl inciting her enemy to shoot, one, two, three times, Murtaugh had been in the car, speeding off the streets, his partner cursing him for the reckless driving style for the umpteenth time, as the audio was played. As a matter of fact, he'd heard it all. Until the gunfire.

Murtaugh admired the girl for her guts, he had to be honest, but she'd been very reckless. Provoking a murderer like that, if the killer had brought her here, in the middle of nowhere, the plan had been studied to perfection: hardly would an assassin spoil all those efforts.