The Past



One more came in the weeks to follow. Peta Saunders in Providence. Parker became obsessed with the news coverage, watching it religiously every night – every night that she wasn’t with Jarod.

They’d begun a series of assignations, scattered all over Massachusetts and Delaware, and a few places in between. Seedy motel rooms and late night meetings, the secrecy that had been hot and illicit quickly lost its shine. Miss Parker started to feel like a kept mistress, the other woman to his investigation.

He wasn’t cheating on her with Maria or Sarah. But his mind was on them, on Lara and Peta, and sometimes she caught him staring at her with his head tilted to one side, as though he saw her but didn’t really *see* her. As though she were a reflection of somebody else. Maria, Sarah, Lara, Peta… Parker.

Are you walking in his shoes, Jarod?

For once, she went to him – his lair, rather than a neutral location. He was on her as soon as she walked in, pulling her inside and pressing her against the door as it closed. She laughed, and fought him off, trying to evade his fervent kisses and wriggle out of his grasp.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he growled, tracing an invisible line up her throat with moist kisses. She pushed at his chest.

“I’m fine, how are you?” she said sarcastically. Jarod chuckled, and the sound vibrated through his lips.

“Better, now you’re here.”

He finally succeeded in capturing her mouth and she found it too hard to resist, pushing her hands above her head and arching her spine as Jarod felt her up through her clothes like they were drunk teenagers. Oh, and his hands rubbed and squeezed in all the right ways, and he knew her intimately, as though he’d walked in her memories and selected her favourite parts. His hands; so big and warm and sure, taking her body and making it his. She could fall in love with the way he loved her. He busted open her blouse in a shower of shiny buttons, and was trying to lick her bone marrow through the curve of her breast when she saw the photos on the bed.

If they had of been pinned on the wall, she might have left then and there. But they were spread across the covers, crinkled but still glossy, as though he’d rolled on them in his sleep and tried to straighten them out again afterwards. Photographs of smiling women, pictures requisitioned from families, and crime scene shots of pale corpses on metal slabs. Victims.

“You forget to clean up, Jarod?” she asked.

He looked over his shoulder, to the photographs, some spilled on the floor, and back to her. A body block of awkwardness leeched the heat out of him and he let her go, stepped back, and rasped his hand over his face. You look at them, and when I arrive, you are hot for me. Like dirty pictures, like the Playboy channel. In your mind are they moving pictures, pretty girls with smiling faces? Is their hair silky and their teeth perfect, is their skin cold when you kiss it and are you surprised by my heartbeat?

“I fell asleep. Waiting for you,” he said. He began gathering up the pictures, shuffling them into a file.

Stop becoming him, Jarod.

They had sex after the photographs were away, cold, clinical sex where Jarod watched her in silence as she rose above him, where his orgasm was silent and taken from him against his will, because she wanted him to feel that she was alive, that she was here and she was real. She did not orgasm at all, and afterwards they lay side by side without touching, and Jarod was crying without sound.

He slept, finally, and Miss Parker put her clothes back on and sat in a chair and stared at him. She found his files and took them outside, and read through them one by one. Maria, Sarah, Lara, Peta. Peta had died of an air embolism when an air bubble was injected directly into her vein. Lara died when a syringe was pressed through the back of her skull and a bubble injected, which collapsed arteries and damaged tissue and brought on what would have been a blinding sear of pain as the mother of all strokes paralysed and then killed her. A brutal death.

Parker wondered about dying, dying in pain and fear and dying alone. And she hoped it never happened to her.



The Future



He shed Agent Jarod Garrison like it was dead skin, erased himself from all records and took most of the evidence with him. He drove to Delaware in the darkest hours of the night, pushing his foot a little too hard to the pedal just to see if he would crash. But he didn’t.

Someone had beaten him there. Jarod found dead sweepers littered around her house, slumped over their surveillance equipment. No needles and mercy killings for them; their throats had been slashed or their heads cracked open. A grudge with the Centre. You suffered the same vile atrocities I did, and look what you became. The lines between us are so very, very thin.

Inside, the memories threatened to crush him. Her scent was everywhere, her image flickering amongst doorways and behind windowpanes. He tripped up the stairs and into her bathroom, stared at his own wan reflection and superimposed a vision of a killer onto his skin. He and the reflection pulled faces and dreamt of murder, and in the cold room in his mind, he and the one responsible stepped closer together.

He smelled her shampoo and heard her calling him. In the bedroom, Jarod took off his clothes and lay in her bed, pushed his face into her pillow and inhaled her scent. You slept here. I made love to you here. Do you remember that, before the shadows consumed us? You and me and the sheets and the working models, the sunshine and my body inside of yours, and oh lord I should have told you I loved you. I should have told you a hundred times. I’m so sorry for being afraid.

I’m so sorry for letting you die. Me and him, we walked side by side for so long and I pretended not to know. Didn’t simulate him because he was already in me, and I was afraid to open that door. I should have saved you. I should have loved you better.

Jarod closed his eyes, and Miss Parker was there, soft and sweet and smiling for him. Black lace bra and black lace panties, three hundred count sheets and hot kisses. Jarod reached for his penis and found it hot and hard, and stroked himself to her image. Her kisses, her bare breasts and silken thighs, the exquisite beauty of sliding deep inside of her, pushing himself in again and again to her cries, the way her body shuddered in blue silk when the needle pierced her chest, her surprise, her fear and pain-

He came, a hot torrent spilling over his hand, and in horror Jarod scrambled out of the bed, falling down. He pressed his face into the carpet and choked bitterly on his sobs. How could I, how could I? What have I become? What has he made me I’m so sorry I’d do anything to take it back please I’m so sorry please forgive me I’m so sorry…

He showered, staying well away from her soaps and shampoos. He put his clothes back on and was ready to walk back down the road to where he’d hidden his car but stopped on the doorstep. There was a note, that hadn’t been there before.



You hurt her too.



Jarod knew to wait, and went to sit in the dark with his gun.

*