The Doll Collector's Son

Chapter 14: Jordan

Annalise and I stopped in front of a four story apartment building about half an hour away from the field office. We stepped off the car, taking a quick scan of the surrounding area. All seemed calm. The neighborhood was considered relatively safe, so it would be a little weird that the killer would live here. The building was in the middle of the street with houses filling out the rest of the street. This seemed like the kind of place where people knew the comings and goings of their neighbors. The lawns were perfectly manicured, the street nice and tidy. Every car sparkled under the sun, meaning most were newly washed.

A killer like the one we were tracking needed to move freely and at all hours of the night and day. Living in a place like this would make that difficult. We walked up to the gate, looking at the list of the tenants marked on the buzzer. IT had managed to trace the IP address down to the unit, Unit C. The name for Unit C was Chloe Rojas. Annalise pressed for Unit A, identifying us as FBI agents. The resident of Unit A buzzed us in, opening the door as we approached. It was an elderly woman with a friendly face.

Annalise took the lead, asking routine questions before diving into the heart of the matter. The woman was talkative, eager to give any information that Annalise asked for. Since she lived in the first unit, she often saw the other tenants leave or come home. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, everyone was friendly and most of the residents were in their apartments by midnight. She had a camera that looked out of her window towards the entrance.

A few months ago, there had been a break-in at one of the upper units, so she installed a camera as a precaution. She offered up the stored footage before we even had to ask. Annalise smiled and accepted waiting a few minutes while the woman gathered the laptop the camera fed into. I had taken the time to look around. No curtains moved, none of the other tenants had come out.

If the killer did live in Unit C, then they hadn't noticed our presence just yet. When the woman returned, Annalise produced a plastic bag from her back pocket and slipped the laptop inside. We thanked the woman for her time, stepped back and waited for her to shut the door. We passed by Unit B, approaching Unit C carefully.

The name Chloe Rojas had not come up in any of the evidence we had gathered. But jumping from Chloe to Chrissy wasn't a huge leap. Chloe could be her real name, and if it was, maybe she was working with someone else. I banged my knuckles against the door, stepping back a couple of feet. My hand instinctively drew back over my exposed holster.

We heard the shuffling of locks, then the door was pulled open. My muscles went slack and my stomach seized with shock. Annalise turned to me then back at Chloe. Was I imagining things? Impossible, Annalise had seen her, too.

"Can I help you?" Chloe asked.

Her voice was deeper than I expected, which brought me back to the moment.

"I'm Special Agent Valentine and this Special Agent Aleksandrov, we're with the FBI." Annalise said.

We flashed our badges, but I was too stunned to speak. She was... she was identical to Marina.

"Are you alright?" Chloe asked me.

Her voice was much deeper than Marina's, so it couldn't be her.

"Yes ma'am, it's just been a hot day." I managed to get out.

"Can I see your badges again?"

We obliged her request. She took a better look at them, then invited us into her apartment. Chloe had had the air conditioner running so it was a cool blast of air that welcomed us. I breathed out, starting to feel some relief. She brought us each glasses of cold water then asked us to sit down.

Annalise, being the amazing woman that she was, took the lead again. While Chloe was distracted, I let my eyes wander around the apartment. It was tidy, everything in its place. The carpet was a little dingy, but it was probably like that when she moved in. She had a lot of pictures on the walls and frames on almost all of her surfaces.