Page 4 of Acceptance
Ashley
Slamming the Griffin’s Beach Herold down on the desk in front of Grayson Tate, Ashley glares at her husband as he looks up, startled. “Look at this.”
Her finger stabs at the headline almost painfully, but she wants to make sure her point comes across to the former police officer. The case still on the front page every couple of weeks has been on-going for far too long. The case that remains unsolved.
“The Un-Identifier Strikes Again,” Grayson reads. “The newest victim of the Un-Identifier has been found in a series of suitcases left between the gas pump at a Stop N Pump, the last gas station before reaching the city limits.
“The victim’s face has been disfigured, just like all of the other victims, along with shattered teeth, and her fingertips cut off. Another victim who will remain unidentified unless her DNA is on file, according to Travis Hall with the Griffin’s Beach Police Department.”
She stares at her handsome husband expectedly. His rugged appearance he’s adopted since becoming a private investigator turns her on even more than he did when he was a clean-shaven cop, but she refuses to let it distract her. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“It’s been eight months since the first victim was found, and they believe that wasn’t his first. This sicko has been out there killing and disfiguring women for God only knows how long. There are probably even more victims we don’t know about.”
“Ash, I get that this is scary, but no one has invited me to help. No one with a missing family member has reached out to have me look into whether or not they’re one of the victims. And we know Travis and Julian are going to trip over themselves to stop me from assisting.”
Moving around the desk, she sits on the corner next to him and crosses her legs as they rest along the arm of his chair. The skirt she chose to wear today has its desired effect as Grayson stares down at her legs. “But they’re failing because no one can do what you can do. Don’t these girls deserve justice?”
“Ash—”
“Look, where I come from, people go missing every day. The only people who notice or care are people just like them.”
His face softens as he stares into her eyes. Ashley Tate is a recovering drug addict. It started when she was seventeen after a rival club brutally murdered her mother, and she was the one to find her. Not only that, she was forced into the shoes Nancy Short left behind. Shoes Ashley never wanted to even try on.
Club life was never what Ashley wanted, but she was thrust into it when her mother died. Being a kept woman who bent to her man’s whim just wasn’t in her DNA, even though by all means, it should have been. It’s how she was raised.
Now that she’s older, she understands how she viewed the women of the club isn’t how it is now, but back then, it was exactly as she saw it. Submissive women who would bend over backwards and turn a blind eye to please a man who did whatever he wanted to please himself.
Forced to take over the responsibilities her mother held in the house pushed Ashley over the edge. Her father, an Original Ten of the Deranged Drifters motorcycle club, became a zombie while her brother, Ky, walked around lost. When she found her mother’s pills, she didn’t even hesitate to toss them back, and then she was hooked.
“Even if we brought the disappearances to the authorities, they never did anything about it. We were seen as unreliable junkies, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends just disappeared one day and never came back. And we never found out what happened to them.”
When Diesel found Ashley high on street drugs after her mother’s pills ran out, he threw her to the curb. She disappeared for almost twenty years, living on the streets and in an almost constant state of active addiction. Prison saved her life, and she probably wouldn’t be alive right now if she hadn’t been locked up for six months and forced to detox.
“Baby—”
“Most of my friends are likely dead, and no one saw them as worthwhile enough to miss them. Doesn’t everyone deserve to have someone miss them? Or even know they’re gone? To have a final resting place to let the world know they were here?”
“You know I would do something if I could, but I can’t force my way in without an invitation. If we had someone who claimedone of the victims could potentially be their daughter, I could work that angle. But Julian and Travis will shut me down if I start sniffing around simply because they don’t have traction.”
She runs her hand down the side of his face and cups his cheek. “They’re not doing enough. If you were still working on the force, you wouldn’t sleep until you found a way to identify these women.”
Grayson should be the one heading up this investigation. He was one of the only competent officers, but his love for her got him fired. After he took a bullet meant for Ashley, the Police Captain and Chief of Police decided it was too dangerous to keep him. He was a liability because of his affiliation to the club by proxy because he dated a Drifter daughter.
He picked himself up and became a Private Investigator, proving extremely useful to the club, and they’ve been married about a year now. With his background, and her family being in the club, they almost didn’t end up together. If they weren’t, he’d be solving these grizzly murders.
“I have to admit, though,” Grayson says as he leans his cheek into her palm, “I don’t hate how much Julian’s getting dragged for this. Incompetent, arrogant, and lackadaisical. It’s such an interesting choice of word play by this reporter, but I like it.”
“Someone out there has to be missing these girls. I refuse to believe they’re truly in that morgue with no one in the world,” Ashley says.
Turning his face towards her hand, he kisses her palm. “I love you.”
“Don’t distract me, Grayson. These women may not have had strong ties to people in the world, but they have family and friends out there. Somewhere. A mother or brother or cousin or friend deserves to know their loved one is gone. They deserve a headstone with their name on it rather than a toe tag listing them as Jane Doe. They deserve to have record they were here.”
“I’m not trying to distract you. It’s just amazing to me that you care about people you probably never met. And I know why this means so much to you. I know you identify with these women.”
Her eyes glance down to stare at his chest. “I could have been one of them, you know. Once upon a time.”
