Ash's Darling | ✔

Chapter 22

~Ash~

"So, let's get straight to the point, why were you looking in the girl's window?" I asked Aldine as I walked into the interrogation room and closed the door behind me.

I had dropped Mae off at her house almost two hours before George called me, wanting me to come back in to interrogate Matthew. She had stayed the night after I cooked her some food and I wanted Mae to stay with me all of today so we could have a day to ourselves but her dad had called her and wanted her to come home since apparently she had been spending a lot of time with me recently. I didn't understand it but I took her home nonetheless, not wanting to make her dad angry with me.

I pulled myself out of my own thoughts and watched Aldine silently shrug in response. I pulled out the cushioned seat on the opposite side of the table from him.

"We both know that shit isn't going to work with me." Other interrogators would give up after a while of not getting an answer and Aldine seemed to know that. There's a reason George likes to use me as an interrogator; as much as I hate it, I don't give up until I get the answer I need. "I'm going to ask you again and I want an actual fucking answer this time, got it? Why the fuck were you looking in that girl's window?"

He shrugged again but finally gave me an answer even though it wasn't what I wanted. "For fun."

I sat back in the chair and crossed my arms, resting them on my stomach. "When I said I wanted an actual answer I didn't mean I wanted a damn lie." I knew he had some other motive but he was going to be a tough one to crack. "What was your goal with stalking her?" Before he had time to answer me, George opened the door and stepped in with papers in his hand.

"Dalloway, come with me for a minute." I stood up and followed him out of the room without as much as another glance at Aldine. As the door shut behind us, George led us to the room behind the double mirror so we could talk while making sure Aldine didn't pull any type of shit. "I had some of my detectives look into all the people he has stalked, all of them went missing for a week, or more, a few weeks after their first report for stalking was filed." He handed me the file to look through as he continued. "These are just the people who could identify him, there are many more reports from this area about teenage girls being stalked and then going missing, the only thing is they couldn't identify the person who did all of it."

I flipped through page after page all of the same things but different girls. All of the reports were about girls being stalked and then going missing only weeks later. "Can you call these girls in so I can ask them questions about it? I need to see if they have anything in common, I think that'll help to find his motive, if there is one"

"That's the thing, there's only four of them I can call in." Confused, I looked through the file in my hand again. There were a lot more than four girls in this file so why couldn't he call them all in?

"If all the girls were found, why can't you call them all in?"

"They all were found," He confirmed with a nod. "but not all of them were found alive. Actually seventy-five percent of the girls weren't found alive. By the time they were found they had died from mal-nutrition, dehydration, or the wounds inflicted upon them."

I immediately thought of what would've happened if Mae hadn't been found in time. I would've lost her before I even had her. She would've been one of the many girls in this file. "How the fuck is he not already behind bars if you've already got all of this shit on him?" I waved the file in the air to emphasize my point.

"We can't be sure that all those deaths are Aldine's doing. We know he stalked them but we don't know if he was the one to torture them and cause their deaths. All of the girls that didn't make it were found in the woods surrounding a warehouse outside of town." I immediately knew that must be the warehouse Esther was kept in. "There were no fingerprints nor any type of DNA on any of the bodies. If this was Aldine, he sure as hell knows what he's doing."