Page 45 of Jar of Hearts
“Huge,” he says with a nod. “I never liked him. Calvin, not your dad.”
“I know. You were a really good friend to me back then, Kai. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you.”
“At least I know why now,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, I forgive you.”
“Thank you,” she says. It comes out a whisper. His forgiveness means more to her than she realized.
Now, if only she could forgive herself. She sighs inwardly. She knows she never will.
“Did your dad tell you what we found out there the other day?” Kaiser asks, gesturing to the kitchen window. It’s too dark to see anything other than their reflections in the glass, but she knows he’s referring to the woods beyond. His gaze is fixed on her, searching and intense.
“He didn’t have to. I saw it on the news. I had a TV in my cell.” She sips her coffee. “They said it was a woman and a minor.”
“The woman was dismembered,” he says. “And the minor was a child. Strangled. A two-year-old boy.”
Geo’s sharp, sudden intake of breath sounds like a hiss.
“I need you to look at something,” Kaiser says, pulling out his iPhone. It’s gigantic, like a small tablet, and it looks even bigger in person than it did in the television commercials. Geo hasn’t seen one in real life before. “A picture of the boy.”
“No.”
“Please,” he says, tapping on the phone. “It’s important. Just look.”
He slides his phone across the table toward her, and despite everything inside her that’s screamingdon’t look, she looks. He was, indeed, a child. Cheeks and hands still chubby, eyes closed, belly protruding. If not for the mild grayish cast to his skin, he might have been sleeping.
The heart drawn on his chest looks like blood. Two words are written inside in neat block letters.SEEME.
“Jesus Christ,” she says softly, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
“They were found right there,” Kaiser says, making no move to take back the phone. “Almost in the exact same spot Angela was buried.”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in those,” he says. “The woman was killed the same way Angela was, and dismembered the same way she was. With a saw. Head cut off, arms at the shoulders and elbows, legs at the hips and knees, hands, feet. She was buried in a series of shallow graves, her torso in one of them, the rest of her scattered around it. The boy was in a tiny grave about five feet away.”
He reaches forward, swipes at the phone, changing the picture. Geo closes her eyes.
“Look,” he says. “For god’s sake,look.”
She looks down again. It’s a photo of a woman on an autopsy table, same grayish cast to her skin as the boy, hair matted with dirt. Except this image is even more horrific. The woman’s arms and legs aren’t attached to her torso, and her head isn’t attached to her neck. There’s a small gap between each, because she’s in pieces.
“This is Calvin’s work,” Kaiser says. “You know it, and I know it.”
Geo’s stomach turns and she’s out of her chair in a flash. She makes it to the powder room just in time, dropping her knees onto the cold tile as the bile comes up her throat. She retches into the toilet until every last trace of her father’s beef stew is gone. When her stomach is empty, she stands up shakily and flushes, dizzy from the exertion.
She turns to the sink and splashes her face with cold water. As she rinses out her mouth, she tries not to think about the woman in thepicture, and how much it all reminds her of Angela. It’s becoming painfully clear that it doesn’t matter how long ago it was, it doesn’t matter how much guilt and remorse she feels, it doesn’t matter how much time and energy she’s spent trying to forget it, or how many years she’s served in prison. What happened to Angela that night will never leave her.
Something that changes you so profoundly never could. And not only because of how the world sees you, but because of the way you see yourself. It wasn’t just Angela who died that night. Part of Geo did, too, and she’s long suspected it was the best part of her.
She heads back to the kitchen and takes a seat once again. Kaiser knows exactly what happened in the bathroom, but he looks neither satisfied nor concerned.
“What do you want from me, Kai?” Geo looks at him through bleary eyes. The sour taste of vomit is still faintly in her mouth, and she takes a long sip of her coffee despite her still-queasy stomach. “I don’t know what I can say or what I can do. I haven’t had any contact with Calvin since that day in the courtroom. I hope I never do.”
Kaiser looks at his phone again, and Geo is scared he’s going to make her look at another photo. She’s relieved when he tucks it back into his pocket.
“Tell me what you know about Shipp Pharmaceuticals’s new cosmetic line,” he says.
She almost chokes on her coffee. That’s about the last thing she expected him to say. “What?”
