Page 77 of Jar of Hearts
As a cop, he can’t afford to love someone like that. But he does. And so be it.
He can still remember how her hair smelled that night at Chad Fenton’s party all those years ago, when she pressed against him inthe laundry room, the length of her body touching the length of his. There was no place else he wanted to be; for a moment, the whole world disappeared. He can remember the softness of her lips and the scent of vodka-infused fruit on her breath. He remembers his physical arousal, and the conflicting feelings of wanting her to know how he felt and not wanting to scare her. Nothing feels as powerful as longing for someone you can’t have when you’re sixteen. Georgina occupied all the places in his heart.
The same way Calvin James occupied all the places in hers.
“I got a call from the lab,” Kim says, and he looks up. She’s back from the break room, two cups of coffee in hand. She places one on his desk and pulls her chair over. “They confirmed there’s no foreign DNA on Emily Rudd and Sasha Robinson, same as the other two.”
Kaiser nods, wishing she’d roll back to her own desk, although this is how they typically work. “Thanks,” he says, taking a sip of the coffee.
“The thing that bothers me, and I’m sure you’ve thought of this,” Kim says, “is that a lot of this doesn’t fit with Calvin James’s old MO. I get that people can change, but serial killers tend not to. Their patterns are fixed. Most killers don’t deviate from their way of doing things.”
Kaiser has thought about it, of course. But in the absence of other leads, he hasn’t dwelled on it. Calvin James is still the best suspect they have.
“He dismembered Angela Wong, his first victim, but not the three he killed after that, years later.” Kim sips her coffee. “But these last two females, he dismembered again. And now he’s killing children. And not just any children—his own. And not the way most parents who murder their children do—in a rage, after a psychotic break of some kind—but deliberately. He’s tracking them down. Hunting them.”
“He’s escalating.”
“Is he, though?” Kim says. She’s not being argumentative, but he can see she’s trying to make a point. “If not for Georgina, and where the bodies were buried, and the lipstick used on the kids, would we even think it was Calvin? He never used condoms before. Hissemen was found on the three earlier victims. But in these new murders, condom lube and spermicide were found both times. Not a speck of DNA anywhere.”
“He’s getting smarter. He knows we have his DNA.”
She shrugs. “Why would he care? He’s leaving the bodies in places that lead back to Georgina Shaw. He’s using the lipstick that her old company now manufactures, which isn’t widely available. He’s drawing hearts on the children. He would know all of those things suggest it’s him, so if he wants us to know, why not skip the condom so that we’re certain? The last two victims got pregnant with his children, after all. Which suggests that when they were together, they didn’t always use birth control. And why track them down now? The kids were two and four years old. What’s the motivation for tracking down their mothers and killing them? And tracking down his biological children—both of whom were adopted into other families—and killing them, too? That takes work, planning, research, things he never did with Angela Wong or the three women he killed after her.”
Kaiser doesn’t answer. He’s considered all of these things, of course, but he’s never laid it out as methodically and linearly as Kim just has.
“I think we’re dealing with two different killers, Kai,” she says. “We still have to find Calvin, of course. But I feel strongly that we’re looking in the wrong direction for the other one.”
His instinct is to argue with her and point out all the ways that she’s wrong. But the problem is, she’s not wrong.
“Play along,” Kim coaxes, as if she’s reading his mind. “Let’s at least talk it out. Let’s try and discuss these last two double homicides as if they’re not related to Calvin James at all.”
“Okay,” Kaiser says with a resigned sigh. “The mother and child thingisdifferent. All by itself, usually the prime suspect would be the husband and father of the child, and we’d be looking at this as some kind of family annihilation. But we now have two mothers and two children, killed in the same way. What ties them together further is that the women weren’t raising their children. Both kids were given up for adoption.”
“Right. So what kind of killer is attracted to a mother and child?”
“Someone who wants to destroy that bond. Someone—” Kaiser frowns and shakes his head. He’s not enjoying this exercise. He’s not an FBI profiler, he doesn’t believe in digging too deeply into the psychosis of a crime. It’s not his job, and it’s risky because the chances he’s wrong in whatever he comes up with are extremely high. “Someone who wants to desecrate the mother. The rape tells us he wants to dominate her, cause her pain. Assuming shewasraped, which we can’t confirm. The dismemberment tells us he wants to humiliate her, to belittle her life and her very existence.”
“But the children were unharmed before they were killed. Why?”
“He doesn’t want to cause them pain. But neither does he want them to live.”
“And what doessee memean?”
Kaiser mulls it over, allowing the theories to swirl in his brain. “He wants the child to see… no. He wants to be seen by the child. No. He wants someone else to see him and the child is the messenger.” A cold feeling washes over Kaiser as something occurs to him, something that stabs at him. His head snaps up. “Jesus.”
Kim’s nodding. “Talk it out.”
“The child is the messenger,” he says, the words coming out slowly. “Heis someone’s child. That’s what the killer is trying to tell us.Heis someone’s child.”
“Technically, we’re all someone’s child,” Kim says, but there’s a small smile on her face. She understands where he’s going with this and is pushing him to get there quicker.
“That’s the missing piece,” Kaiser says, the chill washing over him. “Whoever’s child he is, wherever he came from, that’s the key to this whole thing.”
“Now let’s try and tie the rest of it in.” Kim leans forward. “The bodies were found in two significant locations. The first is the woods near Georgina’s house.”
“Not just near it. Right beside it.” Kaiser is mentally kicking himself. He’d been so focused on the locations and the parts that tied into Georgina that he hasn’t been properly thinking about the rest ofit. “Same place Angela Wong was buried. And the body was dismembered in the same way Angela’s was—head, upper arms, elbows, wrists, thighs, knees, ankles. Multiple shallow graves. The second site is the woods behind Georgina’s high school. Victim was also dismembered.”
“I know you don’t believe in coincidences, but I need to point out that the locations could have been a coincidence,” Kim says. “There are only so many wooded areas in Sweetbay. The killer might have chosen those locations simply because they worked.”
