Page 101 of Riptide
He'd been watching. Planning. Waiting for his moment.
And he'd gotten the wrong woman.
Gabe photographed everything, then bagged the laptop and papers as evidence. Whatever story Thorne had to tell, it was all here. Years of fury and fear, condensed into surveillance notes and desperate scrawl.
Back at the truck, Thorne sat in the back seat, cuffed and quiet. Ellie was leaning against the hood, arms crossed.
"He say anything?"
"Not much. Asked if Blaire was dead." She paused. "Seemed disappointed when I said no."
Gabe climbed into the driver's seat. The ride back to the station was silent except for the hum of tires on asphalt and the occasional crackle of the radio.
At the station, they processed Thorne—fingerprints, photographs, the whole routine—and put him in the single holding cell Haven Cove PD had. He sat on the metal bench like a man who'd forgotten how to stand.
"I want to talk to him," Gabe told Ellie. "You can watch from observation if you want."
"Wouldn't miss it."
The interrogation room was barely bigger than a closet—a table, two chairs, a camera in the corner that was probably older than Ellie. Gabe sat across from Thorne and waited.
Sometimes silence was the best interrogation technique. Let them fill the void with whatever was eating them alive.
It took about two minutes.
"I built it for her." Thorne's voice was barely above a whisper. "Huntress. That's what she called it. A tracking system. Research aggregation, pattern recognition, social media scraping. I was proud of it, at first. Thought I was helping people find lost family members."
He laughed again, that same broken sound. "I was so stupid."
"What happened?"
"She found something. About me." Thorne's hands trembled on the table. "Something I did a long time ago. Before I got clean and turned my life around. She's been holding it over me ever since."
"And then?"
He swallowed hard. "I got a message. Anonymous. Said Blaire was in Haven Cove, that she was in trouble with law enforcement. That she might turn on me to save herself."
Gabe leaned forward. "Who sent the message?"
"I don't know. Burner email, couldn't trace it. But they knew things. Her schedule, her habits, where she'd be vulnerable." Thorne met his eyes for the first time.
"So you came to kill her."
"No! I just wanted to scare her into leaving me alone. I came to be free." Thorne's voice cracked. "When I got that message, I thought—maybe this is my chance."
"But you attacked the wrong woman."
Thorne’s head snapped back. "What? I followed her to that parking lot. Waited while she talked to that other….” He stopped, his face deathly pale. “You’re kidding me? That wasn’t––“ He buried his face in his hands. “No way,” he whispered. “No way.”
"You almost killed an innocent woman."
"I can’t believe it." The words came out strangled. "That guy ran up before I could tell Blaire…or whoever…it was me. I was kind of glad, actually. When I got my hands around her neck––” He exhaled, a deep, shuddering breath. “Anyway, I guess I was way madder than I figured. I just kept squeezing. I couldn’t stop.”
He stared down at his hands. “I've been sitting in that shack for two days trying to figure out how everything went so wrong. I'm not—I'm not a killer. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted to be free. To scare her into leaving me alone."
Gabe let the silence stretch, then leaned forward. "What about her brake lines? Someone cut them two days ago. Nearly killed her."
Thorne blinked. "Brake lines?"
