Full Summary:
A rookie at the 15th has a deadly past. What happens when Chloe finds this secret out? Will she be able to help her friend? And how do the rest of the 15th react to hearing the news? Will a showdown between the rookie and her past end up with two people dead? Or will the rookie survive her past?
Deadly Secret Past:
Nobody really understood why I had become a cop. They seemed to think with the past that I had had that I would have gone into something criminal. They always thought that I would end up in jail. They never thought I would learn to live with my past let alone try and catch the killers that do what they do. I mean granted, I know I haven't been a cop long and at the beginning I wasn't even part of the 1th Division, but after a few months on the job trying to catch the killers that couldn't be caught, I had to have a change of venue.
You see my story doesn't start at my becoming a cop. It starts at my becoming a survivor of one of the most horrific crimes known to mankind. It starts when I am ten years old and living in Vancouver, Canada. We lived near the San Juan Islands and even though some of my siblings couldn't stand living out in the middle of nowhere, I loved it. It was one of my favorite places to live, other than my grandparent's house. My grandparent's lived a little way into the hubbub of the city of Vancouver. And that's where my story turns deadly.
We had just shown up for my grandma's 80th birthday. My siblings and I were going to be staying the week with our grandparent's as our parents had to work. We were in one word: excited. We hadn't stayed at our grandparent's place since the summer before and we had so much that we wanted to do while there that we had ended up writing down a list. My dad knocked on the door and then opened it. He was always polite in that retrospect. He always knocked once on his dad's door before walking through the door. The minute we were in the house we knew that something was wrong. The place was a mess and there was no one around. I thought it would be a good idea to go look for grandma and grandpa and my siblings agreed. Our mom and dad tried to stop us as we ran around the house yelling for our grandparent's.
I was the first to stop and scream. A man was standing over my grandpa holding a baseball bat. He turned around and before any of my family could do anything, more men surrounded them and pushed them to the basement. My sisters and brothers were looking at me with looks of horror on their faces. Our grandpa was dead and our grandma was nowhere to be found. Mom and dad were separated from us almost immediately and we were forced to watch as the men killed our father and then turned on our mother. They raped and then beat her to death. My brothers were next and though they fought as hard as they could, one of them men had grabbed a sledge hammer from the garage and within minutes my brothers were dead. The men had taken the sledgehammer and hit them in the head.
My sisters and I cowered in the corner. Before turning on us, they went and brought out our grandma who had been tied up in the basement bathroom. She had tears streaming down her face as she saw her children and grandchildren dead on the floor. When she saw her husband, she stiffened with her eyes going wide. She held her chest the best she could before she collapsed onto the ground and died in front of our faces. The men, obviously mad that they couldn't have fun with her turned on us instead. Three men separated the three of us and tied us up. We were triplets, the only set of twins in our family. We screamed the best that we could but it did is no good. They raped us that day and when they were done, shot the three of us and then got out of the house. They knew that the sound of gunshots would draw the attention of the neighbors and they wanted to be gone before any cops got to the house.
I passed out shortly after the men left. I could hear my sisters whimpering but knew that we wouldn't survive at all. But I was wrong. The cops got to the house sooner than the men would have thought and though they brought paramedics with them, they would arrive too late. I had started to come around, wake up at the sound of feet coming to a stop at the bottom of the basement stairs. I knew that they saw what was waiting for them in the basement and I knew that if I didn't make a noise, they would think that we were all dead. But I did something better. I was actually able to sit up. I looked around the room and though it was dark, I knew that the rest of my family was dead. Someone entered the room and picked me up, wrapping me in a blanket and taking me out of the house. I was now all alone in a world where nobody wanted me.
I was taken to the paramedics who looked me over and though I knew I had been shot, they told me that the bullet had just nicked my arm and that I would be fine. All I could do was shake my head as I looked towards the house. Tears obscured my vision then and I knew that in order for me to ever go home, my parents would have had to have some kind of Will. I cried the entire way to the hospital. When the doctor tried to examine me, I freaked out and wouldn't let him touch me. He left and came back with a female doctor who told me that she would take care of me from now on. I smiled and let her take a look at me.
She had been told by the police that the rest of my family was dead and it looked like the little girls had been violated which would explain why she wouldn't let her superior look at her. Dr. Stevens was a man and the little girl had just survived being raped and shot, she didn't need any more pain at the moment. When the exam was over, she introduced herself as Dr. Tabitha Andrews and I smiled a small smile at her. She proceeded to ask me what my name was and where I lived. When I told her that we lived near the San Juan Islands and that I didn't know the men, she asked if a cop could come in and talk to me, saying that she wasn't going anywhere. I nodded and a female officer walked in and smiled at me. She introduced herself as Officer Maritsa Cortez and she was going to ask me a few questions about the night. I nodded and she proceeded.
She asked if I had any family outside of the house that I had been rescued from and when I told her that I had an aunt that lived with us in San Juan she asked for the number. I gave her our home number and she wrote it down saying that she would call my aunt and let her know what was going on. After writing our number down, she proceeded to ask if I knew the men that had attacked me and my family. When I told her that I didn't and that we were only in the city to celebrate my grandma's 80th birthday I broke down crying again. I was so angry that this had happened to us and I just wanted my family back. Officer Cortez said she would come back later and left the way she had come.
Two hours later and my aunt Jessica was in my room. The second I saw her I started crying again. She came to me and held me as tight as she could without hurting my arm, which is where the bullet had grazed me. She let me cry into her and knew that what I had survived would stay with me forever. Upon further talk from both Dr. Andrews and Officer Cortez, Jessica learned that she could take me home in the morning but that she would have to keep an eye on me for any signs of depression. Jessica would also have to go to the city morgue to identify her family.
Of course Jessica was already trying to figure out her job schedule now that she had me to look after. We would stay in my family's home and though my parent's Will stated that the kids would get everything including the house (which we owned since the mortgage had been paid off last summer) in the unlikely event of their death, Jessica knew that I probably would want it. She wouldn't sell the house but she would sell her parent's house after we cleaned everything out. Though it was looking more like she would sell it back to the bank and let the bank deal with it. I mean, who would want to live in a house that was the site of a mass murder?
Two weeks later, with the funerals for our family over, Jessica and I ended up at the house in the city. She wouldn't let me into the basement, but with the help of some of her friends and coworkers, we were able to clean out the house of all the valuables and get it over to our home. The cops had gotten everything that they had wanted, evidence wise, from the house and though they told us that stuff had to be left in the basement; Jessica wasn't too keen on taking anything from the basement except the quilts that had been in the family for generations. The rest of the furniture had been from garage sales so there was no sentimental value to it at all.
When we got back to our house and had everything unpacked from the vehicles, we put the boxes on the covered sundeck and moved into the kitchen. At the age of ten, I wasn't a total orphan but Jessica had wanted to make sure that I was still treated like a kid. She would ask if I was alright and when I didn't want to go to school, she would take me to work with her. Jessica worked at a local bar as a waitress and the owner was always nice when I came to work with her. I would stay in the office with his wife and help out with whatever I could or I would just do homework.
For the first two months after the murders, instead of going to school, I would go to work with Jessica and she and I would sit in the employee lounge on her breaks or when it was time for lunch and either do a puzzle or she would help me with some of my homework. Jessica and I grew very close in the months following the murders and though she would never be my mother, she would always be the person I confided in when I needed to get things off of my mind. It was also in those months that we cleaned out the rooms of my parents and siblings but kept the essential things that I didn't want to throw away. Our house was two stories with our own private dock which my dad had kept a boat.
We Goodwilled most of the clothes, but I was able to keep some of them. We hung the clothes that I wanted to keep of my family in one of the closets in the house before unpacking the boxes we had packed up from my grandparent's house. The dishes went into the kitchen and what wouldn't fit stayed in boxes but we moved those to under the guest bed so that they weren't in the way. The furniture went into the now vacant rooms and we made one of the rooms into a study. Jessica didn't do much of anything in the study, but since the room was on the first floor, we put bookcases up and stacked all of the books from both houses in the cases as well as the movies that we had.
As I got older, we moved a writing desk into the room so that I could do my homework in the study. When I reached High School, I kept my past from my friends. But as fate would have it, most of the school had pretty much heard about the murders at some point in their lives and though they hadn't been told specifics about the victims they knew that it had occurred somewhere in Vancouver city. Most people chose to do projects on the city's worst murder ever and though people were surprised at first that I refused to do projects on it, my teachers were eventually told why by my aunt Jessica as she knew my feelings about the subject.
Though Jessica was sure it wouldn't get out I knew that I would have to eventually say something so I had the principal call an Assembly and get the whole school together to 'discuss' the event that everyone wanted to do their school projects on. Aunt Jessica stood by me as I stood in the middle of the gymnasium next to our principal waiting to tell the entire school that though I understood their interest in the subject, I wanted them to choose something else to work on because I didn't want to have to relive the pain again. The principal turned the mic over to me and I told them that they weren't allowed to work on the 'murders' project anymore. Kids were in an uproar yelling at me and telling me I wasn't allowed to tell them what they could be interested in or not. Some of them had their parents with them and the adults stood up and started yelling as well. Aunt Jessica took the mic from me and yelled at everyone to shut up, which quieted the entire gym.
Aunt Jessica gave me the mic and in front of everyone, I told my side of the story, telling them that I understood their interest in the subject but if they really cared for me like my Aunt and the authorities did, then they wouldn't push on with the projects that they were working on, that they would let me live my life as I was the only survivor of the murders that had happened nearly seven years ago. Kids and parents that had once yelled at me were stunned to find out that one of their peers had survived the 'murders' that had gone unsolved for nearly seven years. And everyone also understood something else. If they started asking questions, then the people that had murdered my family and tried to kill me would learn that I was alive and would come looking for me. In order to keep me alive and safe, they could no longer work on the projects. As the Assembly finished one of my friends asked for the mic and when it was handed to her, she said that she was sorry for what had happened and that if I ever needed anyone to talk to, that she always had an open ear.
It was that night that I learned that my friend had survived something similar to what I had when she and her family had lived in Oregon State. The people that had killed my family had killed hers and in order for her to live her grandparents had moved to Vancouver to live. She lived with her grandparents and it was some comfort to know that we lived only a few miles away from each other. Aunt Jessica made us dinner that night after inviting her grandparents over to eat. We became fast friends after that night and it was hard not to see us together. Whenever we didn't want to go to school, we stayed at my house in the study doing homework or reading a book or watching a movie.
After High School, we both had scholarships to go to Toronto for college and we took them. Aunt Jessica said that she would always be there for me but that I needed to branch out and find my own way. She was right in that retrospect. After college, I joined the police force in Toronto to help others like me and catch the killers that most cops can't catch. I had studied Behavioral Analysis in college and had gotten a job right out of college, well right out of the Police Academy. Instead of the normal three month probation riding around with a Training Officer, I was already going to crime scenes and helping out in any way that I could.
You see, I had a gift that most people who were cops didn't have. I had the ability to read these killers and see them for what they really were, the animals that they really were. And I really wanted to find the men that had killed not only my family but also my friend's family. My friend became a lawyer, advocating for the victims of violent crimes as well as children of abuse. We stayed close and when I decided that I wanted to be a normal cop for a while, she understood and so did my boss. I was transferred to the 15th Division a week later and was now in the uniform of a cop instead of civilian clothes like I had been used to.
Would they like me? Would I be welcome? And how would they react to hearing where I have been the last few months? Would they accept my degree in Behavioral Analysis?