Page 78 of Jar of Hearts
“And he dismembered the bodies the same way as Angela?” He shakes his head. “Even if I could accept the burial sites as coincidences, the dismemberments can’t be.”
“But why do you think Angela was dismembered in the first place? Think about that for a minute,” Kim says. “We know she was cut up because her bones were found in multiple places, consistent with dismemberment. But there might not have been a psychosis behind it. The woods are dense, filled with rocks and tree roots. You can only dig so big and so deep a hole. Her dismemberment might not have been done for any other reason than practical. And if a new killer wanted to bury an adult body in those same woods, he’d probably be forced to do the same thing.”
It seemed odd to use the wordpracticalto describe the reason for chopping up a body, but Kaiser understood her point. “Okay…”
“So the only real thing that ties Georgina to the new murders is the fact that the lipstick is from the company she worked for,” Kim says. “She was VP of lifestyle brands or something. I did a little googling, found a five-year-old article inPacific Northwestmagazine that profiled Shipp Pharmaceuticals and Georgina. She was quoted as saying that she was hoping to take the company in a new direction, and her plan was to build a cosmetics brand. She has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, and an MBA,andshe went to beauty school for a year. She had a valid cosmetology license, for Christ’s sake. Creating a cosmetics line one day was her dream. The killer had to know—had to—that using a Shipp lipstick on the children, out of all the thousands of lipsticks to choose from, would get her attention.”
“Well, we’ve known from the beginning that the new murders tie back to Georgina,” he points out.
“Georgina, yes, but they don’t necessarily tie back toCalvin,” Kim says, pounding her fist on his desk for emphasis, causing him to jolt. “We need proof—DNA, a witness,something—that Calvin James killed his own children. And we don’t have it yet.”
Kim’s right. Jesus Christ, she’s so fucking right. Despite his best efforts to stay objective, Kaiser fell down the rabbit hole that no detective worth his badge should ever fall into—he was looking to make the evidence fit his theory, instead of creating a theory based on the evidence. He assumed that because everything tied to Georgina, Calvinhadto be the killer.
A potentially grievous assumption.
“He’s someone’s child,” Kaiser says again softly, more to himself than to his partner. “But whose?”
Kim stands up, rolls her chair back to her own desk. “You should go talk to Georgina. You always said there were things she never told you. If there’s anything left to know, you’re probably the only person she’ll tell. You guys have history. She trusts you.”
She says it lightly, but he sees it then. The stiffness of her body language, her lack of eye contact, the downturn of her lips.
Married or not, the end of their affair is Kim’s loss, too.
28
Kaiser met Georgina in science class. They were freshmen, it was the first day of school, and the first thing he thought was that she smelled amazing. The second thing he thought was that she was beautiful. Not in an obvious way, like Angela, whose presence could never be ignored, even on her worst day. But in a subtle, underappreciated way; the kind of beauty that isn’t trendy or obvious, the kind of beauty that seems plain at first glance until you get to know her better, the kind of beauty that doesn’t blossom until well after high school.
You can’t tell girls like this they’re beautiful. They won’t believe you. But that’s part of what makes them beautiful. Because it doesn’t matter.
Georgina took a seat right in front of Kaiser, her long dark hair brushing the edge of his desk as she opened her binder to a fresh sheet of three-hole lined paper. The classroom was only half-full, and she had her choice of desks. She clicked a pen filled with purple ink and wrote the date on the paper. September 3rd.
She turned around. “I’m Geo,” she said.
“Geode?” he said, misunderstanding her. What kind of messed-up name was that? “Like a rock?”
“Geo,” she said, spelling it out. “Short for Georgina, but I hate that name, so please don’t call me that.”
“Why not? It’s pretty. You might like it someday.”
“Doubt it.”
“Her name is Geo and she dances on the sand…,” he sang. He couldn’t help it.
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” She rolled her eyes at his terrible rendition of the Duran Duran song “Rio.” “That song came out when I was, like, in kindergarten. You’re just like my dad. A big fan of eighties music.”
Well, that killed it. No teenage boy wants to be compared to a girl’s father. It shut him up, and she turned back around. For the rest of the class, all he could see was the back of her perfect head. Sometimes he’d kick her chair accidentally-on-purpose so she’d turn around to tell him to stop it. It was stupid, he knew. But he was smitten.
The friendship that followed was instant and easy, built on their shared struggle with science and desire to annoy the shit out of each other. He didn’t like Angela when Georgina first introduced them—her best friend bossed her around a lot, and would pull her away often to talk about “girl stuff,” which made him feel like the third wheel he was. But he and Angela grew on each other over time, and by homecoming freshman year, the three of them were inseparable. Oh, he had guy buddies, too, but his closest friends—hisbestfriends—were two girls. And they trusted him, told him things about teenage girlhood most boys would never be privileged to know. He was often the voice of reason when they couldn’t make a decision on what to wear or eat, the one who could tell them which boys they liked were douchebags and which were okay, the one who played referee when they squabbled with each other (which wasn’t often, but when it happened, it was World War III for all of them).
He never told Georgina he was in love with her. But Angela knew, and they talked about it a few times. One of Angela Wong’s best traits was that she was honest. Unfortunately, it was also one of her worst. She had no problem telling you if your outfit looked like shit, if your taste in music was abhorrent, if you had something stuck in your teeth.
“She doesn’t think of you like that,” Angela said to Kaiser oneAugust afternoon, the summer before junior year started. They were at the mall, and he was “helping” her shop for some new party outfits. Which basically meant heaping effusive praise on everything she tried on. Geo and her dad had gone to visit her grandmother in Toronto for the week, and he’d been forced to step in.
“Like what?”
“As more than a friend. You’ve been in the friend box for two years. Telling her how you really feel isn’t going to change that. All it will do is make her feel bad because then she’ll be forced to tell you she doesn’t feel the same way. Which, even though you knew it was coming, will feel like she lit a match and set you on fire. And then guess what?” Angela turned to him, looking pissed off, although none of this had even remotely happened yet. “At the end of the day, nothing will change. You’ll stay friends, but now it’s awkward. And by awkward, I mean awkward forme.”
“But I really think—”
