Chapter Text
In the greatest movie ever made, a dying man once said “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”
Grace goes back to that place in her dreams, time and time again. Every night, she slips into the cold black water of sleep and suddenly she is back there, standing outside the bathroom door.
The water is always dripping.
She knows it’s the bathtub, water drip dripping from the faucet into water black with blood. She knows her mother is lying in that water. She knows she is dead.
In her dreams, she has no direct control. She is merely a visitor to her own mind, stuck in a body that doesn’t yet understand what is happening.
She stands in the dark hallway outside of the bathroom, listening to the water drip. The light from inside shows through a crack in the door and she feels it on her face like the judgement of God.
Her arm raises and she pushes open the door with the tips of her fingers. It creaks and behind the creak, that incessant drip.
She didn’t understand what she saw at first. That pale, still face bobbing in a bathtub full of blood. The bloody footprints stark red against the white tile, leading from the door to the tub and back again, a smeared path. Bare feet.
She doesn’t contemplate the horror of it because she just can’t make herself believe it.
Until she has no choice.
She knows her mother is dead. There is too much blood. She’s too late and she can’t help her. So when she walks towards the bath, she does it slowly, with a tremble in her spine. She stands above her, her head turning to look down the length of the tub. She sees her mothers knees poking out of the water and she sees that she is naked.
The fall comes next. On her knees, one hand gripping the edge of the tub, clenching so hard she thinks her fingers might break.
“Mom.” She whispers it like she’s asleep.
Alyssa doesn’t respond and Grace closes her eyes, her mouth twisting as she tries to hold back a sob. She shakes her head and forces her eyes open, blinking through tears.
“Use your eyes, Grace.” Her mom would have said. “What do you see?”
Thumbprint in blood on the chrome water handle. Smeared, but with a little definition. Enough for a partial.
She blinks, logging the information and moves on.
Her mother is naked, ligature marks at the neck. Someone garroted her with a wire. They did it fast and efficiently if the smooth edges of the wounds are anything to judge by.
Grace looks around for a weapon, checking the floor, the sink, the trash. She finds nothing. But she does note a small spattering trail next to the bloody footprints. Whatever it was dripped blood in intervals. Very likely the murder weapon.
She follows the footprints into the hall. She flips on the light switch in the hall and see that they lead towards the living room.
It’s a short distance, and Grace is careful not to step in the blood.
She freezes in the doorway.
Someone has pulled back the furniture from the middle of the floor and rolled the rug out of the way. They’ve drawn a pentagram on the floor, burning candles left at each point. The carcass of a dismembered chicken sits at the center of the pentagram, its pieces arranged in an odd sort of caricature of life.
This is where the dream begins to distort, shifting from the reality of what she saw to something else. Something she can’t be certain was real or imagined.
The TV flickers on, jumping to static. It flickers for a moment, and then numbers flash on the screen, counting down from 10. A new image jumps onto the screen at the end of the countdown, low quality and grainy, but it’s a view into their kitchen from directly outside the window. Alyssa stands with her hip leaned against the counter. Grace sees herself, focused on a laptop, nodding at whatever her mother is saying.
The screen jumps and it’s her and her mom again. Whoever holds the camera leans out from behind a tree, capturing them as stealthy as they can as they walk around a sidewalk, unaware they’re being followed.
A floorboard creaks.
Grace turns slowly, the tv behind her still playing through scenes of her life, pieces no one else should have.
The hallway light has been turned off. And in the darkness, someone stands.
She can’t see much of them, a glint of eyes, the vague impression of a body that somehow doesn’t feel entirely intact. There is a void in them, one that turns the air cold. Grace exhales and she can see her breath, crystalizing in the moonlight.
“H-Hello?” She says. “Who are you?”
They blink and as they do, they move, one hand lifting, slipping from the shadows into the moonlight, reaching for Grace.
“Follow,” they say, and their voice feels like gravel and razor blades blended into a pipe bomb filling.
Grace doesn’t know why, but she reaches to accept the hand, fingers nearly touching…just as the dream begins to melt.
The moonlight disappears like a flipped switch and around Grace, she hears water, rushing down the walls. She feels herself pulled, drawn down sharply until she jolts, slamming awake in a body that doesn’t quite feel like hers.
She scrambles, tangled up in bed sheets, checking her hands for blood, clutching at the sweat on her face in confusion.
Her phone is ringing.
She fumbles it out from under her pillow, her hands shaking as she accepts the call and puts it on speaker.
“Grace,” Ada says, her usual brusque self, even at 1AM. “There’s a body. I’m texting you the address right now. Bring coffee.”
Ada hangs up, leaving Grace to stare at her phone.
By coffee, Ada doesn’t mean Starbucks. She means the coffee Grace makes and so that is what Grace pours into the insulated water bottle she keeps just for Ada. She mixes it with almond milk and a little cinnamon and grabs her keys, heading towards the door. She thinks better of it at the last second and veers into the bathroom, getting a good look at herself in the mirror.
She looks both sleep ruffled and sleep deprived. Her eyes look tired, and worse than that, they look hungry.
Ada calls them predator eyes. Overblown pupils that make people feel like there is something very, very wrong.
On her way out the door, she grabs her sunglasses. The round lenses cover her eyes completely, the dark tint obscuring most of her eye movement.
Better to look like a douche than a murderer. Especially in her line of business.
October nights are the worst for murders.
At least, that’s what Jill would tell you if you asked her.
She stands on the rain-slick street, just outside the caution tape cordoning off the house. She looks past the cops and the emergency lights, trying to see the house as it would have been. Quiet. A single story with a tiny yard, inherited, not rented. Porch light on, so that burglars know someone is home. Rain, like right now, a drizzle that feels like it goes on forever and soaks your bones in cold.
Inside, a lone woman. She’s 45, she’s blonde, and she does not own a gun. There is someone outside, watching her move through her windows. Watching and waiting.
She is jarred out of her thoughts by a soft murmur.
Jill glances over at the blonde tech showing her ID to a uniform. It’s the sunglasses that get her attention.
There are only two reasons to wear sunglasses at night: either you’re an idiot, or high as fuck. And neither of those belong on her crime scene.
The tech looks nervous, jittery. Anxiety or something else?
Jill decides to find out and strolls over, holding a hand out for the tech’s badge.
“Hi,” she says. “Can I see that?”
She can see the start of a frown behind the frames of the sunglasses, but the tech holds out her badge anyway.
“Grace Ashcroft,” Jill reads the name on the ID. “That you?”
“Y-Yes.”
She stammers when she says it and Jill suddenly feels a little guilty. Grace Ashcroft looks young and inexperienced and like a cop staring down at her ID with a flashlight and suspicious eyes is the last thing she needs.
But there is something about her…something that sets Jill on edge. Something…off.
“This your first crime scene?” Jill asks, still examining the ID.
Grace lets out a breath, a scoff. “No, it is not.”
Okay, great. Now she has offended her. Loses the nerves fast, though. Must have a temper.
“Hm. Haven’t seen you around.” Jill points at her own eyes, nodding her head to indicate Grace’s sunglasses. “What are those for?”
Grace frowns and opens her mouth to reply, likely with something scathing if her expression is anything to go by, but a voice cuts her off.
“Detective Valentine, are you hassling my assistant?”
Ada has a way of making an entrance everywhere she goes, and when she speaks, she speaks as if she assumes you were already listening to her.
Jill glances back at Grace with a thoughtful look.
“Just curious about the fashion choice,” she says.
Ada shrugs and her smile is clipped. “Well, young people and their notions. Was there a dead body? Or am I at the wrong crime scene?”
Jill leads the pair under the caution tape, up a slight incline of stone stairs and up onto a wooden porch. They put booties over their shoes before they step through the open front door.
Uniforms are searching, milling around as they check for anything of note, marking anything important with a yellow tag. Cameras flash and voices murmur and the floor is covered in blood.
They follow a dark trail of blood down a carpeted hallway to where it ends at a bathroom. It’s small and cramped, not much room for the dead body in the tub.
Grace pauses, suddenly struck by a hard sort of emptiness in her gut, like a stone sitting right below her ribs. It makes her feel cold, the kind of cold that gets so icy that it burns right before you turn numb.
In the right kind of lighting, with the right angle, the dead woman in the tub might resemble Alyssa Ashcroft. The positioning of the body is familiar, reminiscent of the one Grace visits every night in her dreams.
She can feel that rude detective staring at her again, weighing her, and it irks her. She shoots her a look that she hopes penetrates and gets a smirk for her efforts.
What an ass.
Ada’s hand settles on her shoulder. Steadying, offering that quiet comfort that is unique to her.
“Got my coffee, Ashcroft?” She asks.
Grace hands her the bottle and slips away. She reaches into her back pocket to pull out a pair of gloves. She slips them on and takes a breath, emptying her mind. Making it blank so that she can write down everything that she sees.
Blood. Lots of blood. Everywhere. Gouts of it. An especially worrisome patch on the edge of the sink. Looks like…tissue. A head wound.
Handprints around the sink. Grabbing the doorframe as if stumbling.
And then the tub. It’s a tiny thing, and the woman inside of it sticks out of it at odd angles. She’s been heavily battered. Likely by something heavy and blunt. She fought back, her hands ragged and swollen with defensive wounds.
Grace pulls a dulled scalpel from her bag along with a plastic bag and collection tube. She sets to work scraping under the victim’s fingernails, collecting anything foreign.
She scans the dead woman’s hands and face when she is done and catches sight of something sitting on the edge of a wound under her eye. She picks it up with a pair of tweezers and holds it up to the light. It looks like a thin sliver of metal, flaked off of whatever impacted the woman’s face.
Grace looks up as she feels a shift and finds Ada standing at her shoulder, sipping her coffee.
“What are we thinking?” Ada asks.
Grace holds up a finger, scrolling through a file on her phone, quickly orienting herself on the basic info pulled in by a background check.
“Okay, okay,” Grace says. “Robin Smith, 45. Single. Owns the home. No known romantic partners. Works in finance. Whatever that means. Has a couple of parking tickets, but other than that, she looks clean. Social media appears to be pretty stereotypical almond mom.”
“What’s an almond mom?” Jill interrupts from the doorway.
Grace stifles the urge to snicker.
“Google it, Detective.”
“Ooookay,” Ada says, glancing between the two. “So we know who she is. So what happened?”
“She died about 4 hours ago,” Jill says. “We can confirm this with the call placed by a concerned neighbor to 911. They heard screaming and called for help. Your autopsy will narrow down the exact time of death. Based on the preliminary search, our guy entered through a window left open in an upstairs bedroom. Made his way downstairs, caught the victim asleep on the couch.”
Grace is already looking at a picture of the blood spray on the sofa. “Yeah, hit her hard. Enough to have made her extremely dizzy. She would have been disoriented, but, based on the defensive marks on her hands, she did try to protect herself. But, well.” She nods towards the tub. “Didn’t do her much good. He beat her, stripped her. Made her walk in here on her own. You can see there was a struggle there, near the sink. Bashed her head into the edge of it before he finally strangled her. Bare handed judging by the marks on her neck. And then he dumped her here, in the water.”
“Sexual assault?” Jill asks.
Grace wrinkles her nose, but shakes her head no. “The autopsy will tell us for certain, but on a preliminary look, no. Highly unlikely.”
“You should take a look through cold cases,” Ada says. She is looking at Grace as she says it, her expression unreadable.
“This guy was messy,” Grace concludes, rising up from her crouch. She gestures around the bloody bathroom. “Blood everywhere. Disorganized. Frantic. Likely his first time. The killer himself won’t be connected to any cold cases, but the crime scene might be familiar.”
Jill’s arms cross. “So certain it’s a man?”
“Yes. But you already know it’s a man.”
Jill shrugs, keeping her opinions to herself with an enigmatic smile.
Grace’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She peels off a glove and digs it out. She hopes her face doesn’t show what she’s thinking as she reads the text.
‘I think we should see other people.’
She stares at the screen.
Did this woman seriously break up with her via text at 3am in the goddamn morning?
“Everything okay?” Ada asks. Grace’s face does in fact not hide what she is thinking.
Grace gives the text a thumbs up before promptly blocking the contact and shoving the phone back into her pocket. Her smile is tight as she peels off her other glove.
“I will let the team know they can pick up the body,” Grace says.
“I will wait here until they arrive,” Ada says. “I want to look around a little more.”
Grace nods, her gaze flickering to Jill. “Nice to meet you, Detective. But if you don’t mind?”
She nods pointedly, indicating her desire to get around Jill. Jill steps back, giving her space, but she watches her as she goes, rankled by her.
There is something strange about that one.
It’s nothing more than a gut feeling, but Jill always listens to her gut.
“I’ve never seen your assistant before,” Jill says, standing at Ada’s shoulder. “Is she new?”
Ada doesn’t know how to not look condescending when she smiles. So she doesn’t bother to try and she doesn’t care if it offends the detective. “New to you.”
Jill nods, pretending to be thoughtful. “What’s her specialty?”
“Forensic behavioral analysis. Do you mind giving me some space, Detective? You’re giving me a headache.”
Jill steps into the hallway, careful to mind the blood. She sees a familiar face as she does and Chris raises a hand in greeting as he walks up the hall. He sticks his head into the bathroom, giving Ada a respectful nod.
“Doctor,” he says. “What’s the word?”
Jill gives him a quick run down and Ada steps out of the tiny bathroom, giving Chris space to look around.
“Okay,” he says eventually, his face leaned close to the victim’s as he examines her wounds. “So we wait for the autopsy for more information. When can we visit, Doc?”
“Early afternoon,” Ada replies. “Bring lunch.”
Chris chuckles as he straightens, but he is frowning.
“This reminds me of something,” he says. “2018. What was the name? Ashcroft?”
Jill’s eyebrows raise. “Ashcroft?”
Chris snaps his fingers. “Alyssa Ashcroft. Thinking of it, she was a neighbor of yours, right, Doc? Daughter found the body. Trail went cold quick. No one saw anything, heard anything or knew anything. Ashcroft was a reporter. The general theory was that she dug a little too deep into something and someone got her. But this…the placement of the body. And her face. This woman is almost a dead ringer for Ashcroft.” He pauses. “No pun intended.”
“What was the daughter’s name?” Jill asks, her eyes on Ada.
Chris thinks. “Grace. Grace Ashcroft. Nice kid. Anxious. Kinda to be expected, though, all things considered.”
Ada meets Jill’s eyes and smiles.
Her expression very much says “And what are you going to do about it?”
Jill’s teeth grind.
No one pisses her off like Ada Wong.
As the Medical Examiner, Ada performs the autopsy.
Grace assists. She takes notes and marks down the location of wounds and passes tools when asked. Ada works efficiently, her dictation to the recording clear and concise.
When it’s done, Ada strips her gloves off and turns off the recording, turning to Grace. She places a small sample dish in front of Grace. Inside the dish is a grey bit of brain.
Ada lets out a breath, watching Grace’s face. “Okay, killer. Show me what you’ve got.”
Grace’s taste for brains set in after Alyssa’s death. Immediately after, in fact. Ada found Grace one night after Alyssa’s funeral, her mouth full of a dead cat she found in the bushes. Oddly, rather than having the girl institutionalized at the first opportunity, she invited her in for dinner.
She couldn’t eat normal food, but her stomach liked the lamb brain Ada dug out of her freezer just fine. Everything was fine for a couple of years. Ada took pity on a teenage Grace who had somehow managed to convince social services that she was being cared for by a visiting aunt to avoid being pushed into foster care. Ada became a mother overnight, stoically taking on all the mess that came along with someone like Grace - depression, anxiety; severe highs, steep lows, and the rage that filled in the gaps. Not to mention suddenly becoming her local halal market’s biggest animal brain buyer.
The oddest bit came in medical school, when Grace was left alone with a specimen that smelled a little too good. Her impulse got the better of her and she sliced off the thinnest layer of brain, so thin that it dissolved on her tongue on contact.
But with that dissolution came something else, something that didn’t belong to her.
It was a memory. She could see her hands, but they weren’t her hands. Arms, chest, her legs, a seatbelt across her torso. She was inside a car and water flooded in. She couldn’t move because her boyfriend gave her something, something in her food that paralyzed her, kept her body still even as her mind panicked.
He left her in the car on purpose. Rolled it into the lake and stood on the shore, watching it sink.
And so she died helplessly, slowly, unable to scream as the water overtook her.
The detective on the case had looked at Grace like she had two heads when she told him where he should be looking. Thanks to the memory she experienced, she knew what to look for and was able to back up her assertions with facts and a toxicology report.
The boyfriend got 20 years. 20 years in exchange for the entirety of someone’s life.
Rage is something Grace learned to live with. She sleeps with it, wakes with it, feels it always there, ready to some day finally turn her into the mindless creature she was always meant to be.
Ada insisted they experiment, of course, in case it was an isolated incident. She snuck Grace into the RPD morgue during the graveyard shift and set her loose, watching and waiting and noting anything Grace had to say.
Three brains later, it was safe to say they had a pattern. An irrefutable side effect, Grace reading the final memories of the dead like requiems.
Grace hesitates as she looks at the small bit of Robin Smith’s brain. Death is something she has experienced more times that she can count, but it never gets easier.
Brains don’t taste like anything to Grace. They’re all texture, soft and easy to break apart. They’re like overripe berries, leaking juice and bursting easily on the pressure of her tongue. It’s in the memories that taste lives.
Robin Smith was terrified when she died.
Grace feels the impact of the blows like a rock to her face and she struggles to think beyond it, to push through Robin’s animal fear and into her secrets. But she’s on her hands and knees and her mouth is numb and she can feel blood pouring out of her and she’s struggling to get her arm up. The attacker crushes it in a single blow and the sound of her forearm snapping makes her feel sick.
She can’t see the man through the blood in her eyes, but she can hear him, his quick, erratic breaths as he grabs her by her hair, hauling her to her feet. He uses his hands to tear at her clothes and the fear inside her is absolute, an all consuming terror that spurs her to fight harder. But he is stronger and suddenly he’s pushing her down the hallway, into the guest bathroom on the first floor.
She tries to fight him again in the small space but it’s useless and he overpowers her. His hands go around her neck and death comes for her quickly, insidiously, and the last thing she thinks about is the thumb drive hidden in the curtain rod above her bedroom window. The one that overlooks the neighbor’s garden. She always liked standing in that window and watching the small family plant in the spring. She loved their laughter and the simpleness of their joy and…
Coming out of a memory like that feels a bit like a car crash and Grace startles as she pulls out of the sticky liquid of the memory, every muscle in her body stiffening and hardening. Her body is fine but her mind is not and she has to fight to not be pulled into Robin Smith’s death loop. She draws air in huge gulps, the ghost of a murder’s fingers around her neck.
Ada is there, grabbing her hands, telling her to breathe, just breathe, one two, hold it, hold it, out, slow, back in, and do it again.
“Did you see him?” Ada asks when Grace’s breathing calms enough.
Grace shakes her head, still struggling to orient herself. “Too much blood. But she left something. A thumb drive. Her bedroom. We have to find out if the cops found it. And if not, I need to get it.”
“Great. Fantastic. Here.” Ada retrieves an unmarked squeeze packet she left in an empty body locker. “Eat this.”
Grace has spent the majority of the last 8 years surviving on pureed animal brains. She misses the simple things, like burgers.
She sucks the package dry and Ada checks her watch.
“Glasses?” Ada asks, hovering her hands over the frames tucked behind Grace’s ears, waiting for consent.
Grace nods and Ada plucks them off, folding them before she slips them into the pocket of Grace’s labcoat. “Okay. Valentine and Redfield will be here any minute. Stay out of Jill’s way, okay? She can tell there is something off about you and the last thing I need is for her to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Grace knows exactly where Detective Valentine can shove her nose, but she keeps it to herself, throwing away her lunch trash. She gives a quick glance into the mirror above the handsink and is relieved to find her eyes normal, if a bit tired.
Her sigh is rough and a little ragged.
Get it together, Grace, she tells herself. Focus.
She has to be calm. Get through the rest of the day. And tonight, if all goes to plan, she will return to Robin Smith’s house, specifically to a certain upstairs bedroom.
Chris’s idea of lunch is chicken tenders and a ketchup packet of unknown age from the console of his car. Jill knows someone with abs like Ada’s does not eat fried food. When she and Chris make their way to the morgue in the basement of the RPD, Jill clutches a bag of the healthiest shit she can find, and vows that if Ada has any negative commentary, she will dump the entire bag on the windshield of her car.
They find Ada and Grace in the examination room, both women looking up from their respective tasks as the door swings open.
“I left your lunch with your secretary,” Jill tells Ada.
She catches sight of Grace. A few hours have made a difference in the younger woman’s appearance. There is a bit of a flush to her pale face and she has lost the sunglasses. She looks infinitely less sinister without them and Jill idly notes that her eyes are pretty. In fact, Grace Ashcroft in her entirety is very pretty. Even when she frowns at Jill like maybe she’s thinking about calling her a name.
“I know you,” Chris says, looking at Grace. “Do you remember me?”
Grace may not have a smile for Jill, but she does for Chris.
“Of course I remember," Grace says, shyly shaking his hand when he offers it. “Detective Redfield now, right?”
“Chris,” he amends. He looks her over, shaking his head. “Wow. Your mom’s case was the first one I caught as a rookie. I still think about it. I’m sure you do, too.”
Something flickers in Grace’s eyes, a little of her light dimming. She licks her lips and recovers quickly, redirecting the conversation. “But you’re here for other reasons.”
“Right. Of course. Have you met my partner, Jill Valentine?”
Jill stops prowling the lab and meets Grace’s eyes. Something passes between them and Grace seems to take a moment to reassess Jill, sizing her up.
She nods finally, her eyes slipping away from Jill’s. “Nice to see you again, Detective.”
Ada claps her hands. “Okay. Lunch is waiting. Shall I give you the details?”
Jill and Chris move to stand on either side of the examination table holding Robin Smith’s carefully stitched body. Grace falls in next to Jill, offering her the postmortem diagram.
Ada runs through the autopsy quickly, recapping anything pertinent, but not offering much in the way of new information. The autopsy had confirmed their suspicions but had not shed light on any new clues.
Chris lets out a breath through his nose, staring down at Smith’s still face. “So now to figure out the motive. If not sexual, then targeted, maybe?”
“I don’t agree,” Ada says.
“Oh?”
“She may not have been sexually assaulted, but there is still an element of sexual dominance at play. Humiliation. Why else take off her clothes and leave her to be found like that? He could have just left her on the floor. But he put the effort into staging the scene.”
“Unless he wanted it to resemble something,” Jill says. She turns to Grace. “Do you like coffee?”
Grace blinks. “I like coffee.”
“Great. I need to talk to you. Tomorrow morning. There’s a cafe down the street. Do you know it?”
Grace nods. She doesn’t ask why Jill wants to talk to her. She suspects that despite her loose manners, Jill Valentine is too smart for her own good.
But that doesn’t mean she can’t outsmart her.
Watching her think, Jill can tell Grace Ashcroft is going to give her a headache.
She makes a mental note to buy Tylenol before she sees her. The fast acting, extra strength kind, reserved for a special type of pain in the ass.
The type that maybe could get you killed if you’re not careful.