Page 21 of Jar of Hearts
“You think this is Calvin James?” she asks.
“It could be coincidence, but you know how I feel about coincidences. Anyway, it’s after six. You should probably get going.” Kaiser eases out of bed and heads for the bathroom. He doesn’t have to walk far. His apartment is small. He likes it that way—less to clean. And besides, he’s rarely ever home for long. “I gotta take a shower.”
“Want some company?”
He pauses, then sighs. Really, it has to stop. This can’t continue. It’s wrong and it’s messy and the longer it goes, the more complicated it feels. They work together, for fuck’s sake. She’s his goddamned partner.
He doesn’t answer her, pretends he didn’t hear the question. He enters the bathroom.
But he leaves the door open.
7
A drop of water lands on Kaiser’s forehead, falling from a leaf or a branch somewhere above him. It drizzled earlier, and the scent of the soil and trees would have been refreshing if not for the circumstances. Kaiser hasn’t been in these woods in over five years. And yet the crime scene now looks eerily similar to the one from back then. Only this time around, there are two victims: a woman and a child.
The woman was found first. Or, to put it more accurately, the woman’sbody partswere found first. Her torso is in one large piece, buried two and a half feet deep in the ground between two trees. Scattered around it, in a series of shallow minigraves, are her feet, lower legs, upper legs, hands, forearms, upper arms, and head. Her eyes are missing. Two jagged holes remain where her eyeballs once were, now scraped out of their sockets. Crime-scene investigators are still looking for them, but they won’t be found. Whoever took her eyes did so for a reason.
It’s anyone’s guess what she looked like when she was alive. The face is cold and gray, the skin waxy, the lips pulled back from the teeth in the classic death grimace. There’s too much dirt and soil matted into the hair to determine whether it’s black or brown. Based on the tearing of the skin, she was taken apart with a tool that had teeth. Maybe a saw. Dismemberments are always horrific, but this one feels especially gruesome.
She’s buried in almost the exact same place as Angela Wong.
He turns his attention to the child, whose body, thankfully, has been left intact. Found less than five feet away from the woman, the grave is a foot and a half deep, three feet long, one foot wide. A tiny grave for a tiny body.
He looks to be about two years old, based on his size and the number of teeth he has. He’s dressed in Spider-Man pajama pants and a blue hoodie, no T-shirt, little legs tucked into shiny red rubber rain boots. While cause of death is always determined by the medical examiner, it’s clear the boy has been strangled. The dark-red marks around the throat and the self-inflicted bite marks on the boy’s tongue are both consistent with asphyxiation, along with the telltale pinpoint blood clots in the sclera, also known as petechial hemorrhaging. Other than a few faded bruises on his shins—consistent with being an active toddler—he looks normal. The cheeks are still chubby, the belly comfortably round. The top of his diaper is sticking out of his pajama pants.
Just a baby, really.
The hoodie is open to reveal markings on the boy’s small chest. At first glance, Kaiser thought it was blood. But it’s not, because dried blood smears in the rain, and this has not budged. The killer drew on him, using dark-red lipstick to draw a perfect heart. And in the center of the heart are two short words.
SEEME.
“I see you,” Kaiser says quietly to the dead child. “I see you.”
The crime-scene photographer bends over and takes several more pictures of the boy, the bright flash from the camera illuminating everything around her in brief sparks. “This is terrible, huh? Seen anything like this before, Kai?” she asks.
He resists the urge to zip up the boy’s hoodie. “Yes,” he says, his tone curt.
She waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. Correctly sensing that he’s not in a chatty mood, she steps back, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He nods to the paramedics, waiting patiently nearby with a stretcher, indicating that the bodies are ready for transport to themorgue. The crime-scene techs are handling the female victim’s remains, which all have to be photographed and catalogued individually.
Are they mother and son? Is this the work of Calvin James? The heart on the boy’s chest reminds Kaiser of the doodle on his notepad from the trial. Everything about this reeks of the Sweetbay Strangler.
Except for the gouged-out eyes. That’s new. As is killing a child. But monsters, like everyone else, can evolve.
The scene is secure, cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. The entrance to this section of the woods is located at the edge of a cul-de-sac, right between two houses on Briar Crescent. Kaiser leaves the woods and heads back to the street, unsurprised to find that a sizable crowd has gathered behind the road barricades. Curious neighbors, of course, along with a couple of news vans and a few reporters.
Less than two hundred yards away is the house with the blue door. Georgina’s old house. He hasn’t set foot inside it since he was sixteen, but he can still remember the smell of the Crock-Pot, always bubbling with something. Neither Georgina nor her busy doctor father were ever great cooks, but they could make a mean beef stew in the slow cooker.
How many times did Kaiser ring that doorbell to pick her up to go the movies, or the food court at the mall? How many times did he sit in her living room watchingMelrose Place, a show he pretended to hate but secretly enjoyed because it meant he could spend time with her? How many times did they sit on her floor in her bedroom, drinking Slurpees from the 7-Eleven and listening to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, on the nights her father worked late? Right here, on this street, nineteen years ago, when they were juniors at St. Martin’s high… and also best friends.
Back when Angela was still here. Back before she was declared a missing person, before her face was on posters all over the city, before her bones were found in these same woods years later. Before Calvin James was arrested. Before Georgina went to prison.
Before.
Before.
Before.
Kaiser wonders who lives there now, wonders if they know thebaggage that house comes with, the secrets it hides. It was photographed extensively after Angela’s remains were found. Reporters were titillated by the fact that her body was buried less than a football field’s length away from where the woman charged with her murder slept every night.
