Page 18 of Best Served Cold
Chapter Fifteen
The painted purple and yellow hue of Morgan’s body lingered on Lee’s mind so prominently, it felt as if a mental tattoo of each individual bruise was being formed within her mind.
She had remembered each detail; the way the marks snaked around her stomach, just below her ribs. Her girlfriend had preconstructed a plan to hide the bruises for their first intimate moment since the incident that Lee Holmes still knew very little about—turning the lights out just as Lee was taking off her clothing. And yet, what Morgan Finch hadn’t prepared for was the sound that would leave her upon Lee touching the area she had been purposefully attempting to hide. Lee remembered that sound, too.
For reasons she couldn’t quite place, Lee’s mind focused heavily on herself situated in the backseat of the taxi, beside Sienna, and Kat, watching as her girlfriend’s silhouette became smaller, and then smaller still, until entirely out of view. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar to how she had felt about her relationship this past week, watching Morgan divert down a path she herself was unfamiliar with, the previous version ofher fading away with each new decision that was made without her. The one thing she knew for sure was that she loved Morgan Finch with every fiber of her being. It was terrifying to think of her disappearing out of her view forever. And yet, perhaps it was always destined for them to drive away in separate vehicles; for their paths to diverge completely.
She decided at that moment that if that was to be her destiny, then destiny could go fuck itself.
The only definitive thing was death, and yet ironically death had potentially caused a definitive wedge between herself and Morgan simultaneously. Prior to this week, Lee had been silently wishing for somethingmore, a way to spice up her relationship, and now, as the week came to a close, she had assisted Morgan in the worst crime imaginable if only to retain the life she already had with her. Only, had it truly been retained?
Waiting for her girlfriend to come home after causing damage to another human being hardly felt like their old life. Being questioned at a police station certainly didn’t. Lee Holmes was looking through the exact same kaleidoscope of their relationship, she realized, only the pictures she saw upon looking through it had now changed entirely.
Even now, when Lee had asked for the truth, Morgan had carefully crafted half-truths in their place, weaving a story that was almost palatable, and yet, she decided at that moment that she couldn’t stomach Morgan’s fabrications of the truth anymore. The truth she craved was likely inside this very apartment, taunting her from afar, or perhaps even closer than she had anticipated. All that she needed to do was find it.
Despite multiple protests from Lee, Morgan had put on her construction gear an hour prior and gone to work, her eyes squeezed shut as she had pulled her high-vis jacket over her shoulders, hissing through the pain. Lee had gently soothed the bruises with a warm cloth before she left and provided her withenough painkillers to tranquilize a horse for her day at the site, and yet, what she needed most was a day of rest. A day she was now unlikely to see until the following weekend.
What Lee needed, however, was answers she was equally as unlikely to get unless she sought them out for herself. She looked over at the bedside clock, as if seeking out reasoning for her next decision. It read 7:08am, giving her at least an hour before she would have to make the journey to work herself. She factored in her shower, and getting dressed, which gave her approximately twenty minutes of time to herself. Her mind had a way of rationalizing her actions with trivial logic—in this instance, twenty minutes of free time could be used to discover more about the woman that she slept next to whilst Morgan struggled away at the construction site.
Previously sitting upon the bed, she opted now to stand, her less-than-sound logic telling her that she had now taken the second step towards her plan, the first step being looking at the clock. Stepping now towards their dresser, she had reached the third and final step in her plan before it all came into motion. If she was going to do this, she would have to act fast. “Fuck it,” she said aloud, and allowed her logic to win.
Lee Holmes was not a jealous girlfriend. She prided herself on knowing that not once in the five years of their relationship had she scrolled through Morgan’s phone, desperate to find something that wasn’t there. At that moment in time, as she ransacked their apartment, searching drawer after drawer, the thought of finding anything at all made her feel sick.
Her guilt battled away at her sense of entitlement—both equally feasible winners. For Lee Holmes felt a wave of culpability for rooting through Morgan’s personal belongings without her awareness of it, whilst simultaneously feeling as if her girlfriend being a serial killer automatically gave her the right. She reasoned, at that moment, as she peeled back dozensof receipts at the bottom of a drawer inside the dresser that had no right to be there, that their relationship had new unspoken allowances. She was allowed to rifle through Morgan’s clothes and documents, and Morgan was allowed to murder people.
Upon finding an old photograph of the pair of them tucked away in one of the drawers, she felt the lump in her throat as she swallowed the guilt down. The photo in question was taken on their third date at a theme park she couldn’t quite remember the name of, but it had pleasant, and yet bittersweet connotations attached to it. Morgan had taken her there unaware of Lee’s prominent fear of rides, particularly rollercoasters, and as she took the photo in between her fingers, she put aside the guilt for just a moment and smiled, recollecting how she had attempted to put aside her own fear that day in favor of pleasing the woman she was very rapidly falling for.
Alas, Morgan Finch had read her emotions that day without any hesitation, sensing her fear, and in turn, presented the idea that they go out for a meal instead. Lee remembered shaking her head in a comical fashion, with more vigor than required. “No,” she had said, fighting back any additional fears of intimacy as she took Morgan’s hand in her own. “I want to do this with you.”
Morgan had offered a supportive squeeze against Lee’s hand in return, and a smile that made her knees weaker than any rollercoaster. “You’re sure?” she said. Lee nodded again in response, offering affirmation despite not being positive herself. “I’ll be beside you the whole time, and if it gets too much, just let me know, okay? We never have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
Lee laughed, now, finding the irony of the situation prominent in the front of her mind. She had been terrified throughout the past week, to the extent in which she truly believed that her fear could swallow her entirely, like a black hole destined to take her at any moment. She couldn’t imagine sitting beside anyone elsepresently, metaphorically speaking, and whilst Morgan had not been as forthcoming now as she would have liked, she was still the woman in the theme park, holding her hand, telling her that she could take a step back whenever she needed.
The only difference was that Lee Holmes would forever be scared if she didn’t fulfil this act to completion. She would always be the terrified person who had stepped onto that rollercoaster, dreading the inevitable drop, but she had done it then, she reminded herself, and she would do it now. Placing the photograph back where it belonged, she closed the drawer and continued her search.
Lee let out an exasperated sigh as she closed the final drawer at the bottom of the dresser, finding nothing at all of value. Expecting the relief to wash over her, she wiped the sweat from her forehead after getting herself worked up and sat upon the bed. And yet, the relief never came. Lee Holmes didn’t believe in signs, but the feeling, or lack thereof, was enough to make her stand once again and scan the room with her eyes, pivoting her body in place. “If I was something condemning, where would I be?” she said aloud, placing a single finger to her mouth as if attempting her best detective impression.
She tapped her foot against the floor, inviting another area of intrigue that she had yet to explore. Perhaps moving the bed was psychopathic in its own right, but it did not deter Lee from using all of her force to shift it slightly towards the window, revealing dust and empty candy wrappers underneath. Her disgust would have to take the next shift, because at present time, as she pulled back the carpet, all that she could focus on was the lighter-colored floorboard where Morgan’s side of the bed had once sat. The color drained from Lee’s face as the room somehow closed in on her, making her feel like the largest thing in it, or the smallest, she wasn’t sure.
What she was sure of, however, was that she would not leave this room until she lifted the lighter-colored floorboard, revealing what was underneath. In a matter of seconds, she did precisely that. She was undecided as to what she may find—a head somehow crammed into a space half its size, perhaps, or a finger, more likely, she deduced. And yet, she found neither.
Instead, what she found was simply one singular item amongst the cobwebs, a flimsy piece of plastic that she quickly identified to be a driver's license. A picture of an older gentleman occupied half the space; a wiry individual with a peppery beard and a rose tattooed upon his neck. More importantly, written on the front was a name: A Mr Arthur James Strickland.
Chapter Sixteen
Lee sipped her coffee as she pressed the power button on her monitor and watched it come to life with an energetic greeting sound that had somehow managed to jump-scare her for an entire year before she gradually got used to it.
More often than not, Lee Holmes would much prefer to sit amongst the confines of her living room, wearing her standard slippers and dinosaur pajamas. Today was an exception to the rule, finding herself grateful for the distraction that work occasionally brought. The distant ring from the telephones that surrounded her office cubicle, the sounds of technology whirring—she welcomed it. The sounds of technology were always preferable to the sounds of someone being murdered.
Through no coincidence, the woman in the cubicle beside hers just so happened to be Kat. The pair of them had met at a work Christmas party and instantly decided there and then that out of their standard array of workmates, Lee was the most tolerable to Kat, and Kat was the most tolerable to Lee. Kat moved office cubicles the next day to be closer to Lee, and that was that. Twoyears later, seasons had come and gone, but their affection for each other remained, blossoming into a friendship.
Kat leaned over the partition, which wasn’t unusual, grabbing a highlighter pen from Lee’s desk in order to claim it as her own. “You look like shit,” she said, as a way of greeting, donning her standard cheeky grin, expelling shiny white teeth as the highlighter pen shifted from view, presumably onto Kat’s desk.
Lee returned the smile, scrunching up an old piece of paper, namely a discarded journal article that had been sitting on her desk for three weeks too long, before throwing it at Kat. “Hey!” Lee exclaimed in mock offence. “At least I bring my own stationery to work!”
“Now, why would I bring my own when I could just steal yours? Way more fun,” she acknowledged, winking as she threw the piece of paper back onto Lee’s desk for it to likely sit and remain there for another three weeks. “Perry wants us to work together on an article today. It’s about some rando dude that went missing within the last couple of days. I don’t really know a whole lot yet because I don’t do anything within the first hour of my shift.”
Lee snickered. “You say that like you think I don’t know that you sit there half the day blowing bubbles with your chewing gum.” Now that her computer was on, she opened up her internet browser, typed in “New York” & “Missing”, and clicked on the “News” tab, in order to gauge a sense of what had already been published about the missing person in question. The last thing they needed was to write a reproduction of what had already been printed. When an older gentleman's face underneath the word “missing” appeared within the first article she clicked on, her pupils expanded. The face before her was not dissimilar to the face that she had literally seen less than two hours ago, branded on a driver's license.
