No Control (Chris Motionless)

Chapter 42 - Things Forgotten

My face scrunched up in confusion, but then it seemed to click together in my mind a second later. These had to be written by someone else, but whether or not Chris was aware of them was still an issue. He could still be a part of this dark twisted plot that tried to justify the violent murder of innocent women.

"Grab the gray lock box out of the closet over there," Kim instructs me as she eases my phone out of my grasp to continue to observe the notes.

I found the metal box at the bottom of the closet underneath some shoe boxes, instantly noticing that it had two locks sealing it shut. Kim held out a key to me as I brought the container over to her and as I undid the padlock, she added, "The combination for the other one is 17-33-10."

"Now, before you open that, it's only fair that I warn you that there are some things in it that you won't like." She says as she sits my phone down on the arm of her chair. "That box holds all of the things I wished to forget, but I knew that I couldn't get rid of."

I raised an eyebrow at her words, but her only reply was motioning for me to open it. Inside was a thick stack of papers, varying from newspaper clippings to legal documents. I lifted up the first thing in the stack, which was a news article detailing a man's suicide just outside of King's Cross station and how his body had been covered in strange scratch marks. The police then found his girlfriend's body a mile down the road, it appeared that she had been beaten to death. The truly unusual part was that the autopsy reported that his girlfriend had died after he did.

I sat the article on the floor after I finished reading it and reached for the next leaf of paper, a copy of a police report. I scanned over the words, it was a witness report given by Roy Simms over discovering the body. That name made me freeze for a moment and then launch back into action by reaching inside of the lock box, flicking through everything inside, until I found what I was looking for.

It was a wedding photo of Kim and Roy. The same man that led the Jack the Ripper Movement, was Kim's husband. My head snapped up to find Kim watching me with so much sadness and shame lingering in her eyes as she shook her head.

She gazed down at the picture in my hand as she explained, "We got a legal separation not too long after that young man died. Roy refused to go through an actual divorce, but I was going to take whatever I could get at that point. I had just wanted to get my children and myself away from the mess he was getting himself in."

I put the photograph to the side to spot another legal document, detailing her exact words of their separation. Underneath that, there was another picture that caught my eye. In it, Roy was beaming at the camera as he cradled an infant in one arm while the other was wrapped around a little girl I quickly recognized.

"Kamaria always was glued to her daddy's side and despite everything she came to know him to be, I don't think that's ever changed," Kim remarked in a melancholy tone.

It didn't take much effort to figure out that the baby in the blue cap was Darien. It prompted me to voice a question that had been bothering me for quite some time now. "If you truly believe that Roy's cult is dangerous and out to hurt you too, why don't you try to stop Darien from being a part of it?"

Her eyes seemed to glisten as she said, "I've lost count of how many times I have pleaded with him to just stay out of what's going on between his father and me. He has convinced himself that going along with Roy's twisted cause will keep me safer. It apparently started off as a major part of their agreement, he had to do whatever Roy told him and in return, they would keep away from me. As you can see, that loyalty hasn't done much good."

"What does Darien even do for him?"

"From what he's told me, he's responsible for finding people for the cause."