Page 15 of Jar of Hearts
Then again, a photograph of a pile of human bones and tattered clothing would traumatize anyone.
“Her purse was buried with her,” Kaiser said, speaking to Geo. “It contained her driver’s license and her high school ID card. Also her camera. There’s no doubt it’s her.”
Geo said nothing.
“Remember that camera?” Kaiser smiled. “Some fancy thing her dad won in a golf tournament? Small, but not digital. They didn’t really have a digital cameras for the consumer back then. It was a thirty-five millimeter. She was always buying film at the 7-Eleven. Always carrying it around, taking pictures of everything. Remember?”
Geo remembered.
“The film was preserved inside the camera from that night,” Kaiser said. “We got the pictures developed. Want to see? You and I are in a whole bunch of them. It’s a real blast from the past.”
Internally, Geo shook her head rapidly. Externally, she didn’t blink.
“Come again?” Fred Argent said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand any of this. You’re speaking to Miss Shaw like you have a previous relationship with her. Do you two know each other outside of this… situation?”
“Catch up, dude,” Kaiser said nonchalantly, and Geo almost laughed. It was something he used to say in high school. “Miss Shawand I go way back. We were—how do the kids put it now?—BFFsback in the day. Best friends, along with Angela Wong. Right, Geo?”
Again, Geo said nothing.
Kaiser reached into the folder again and pulled out a smaller envelope filled with photos. He removed them and placed them in a stack in front of Geo. “These are from Angela’s camera. Have a look. You’ll be tickled, I’m sure. We all look so young.”
She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t help it. The picture on top was of the three of them, taken a few days before the night Angela died. They were standing in the entryway of Angela’s house and Kaiser had snapped a picture of their reflection in the full-length hallway mirror. Geo plucked the photo from the stack and examined it closer. Kaiser was right; they looked very young. He was skinnier then, and not quite as tall as he was now. Geo appeared shy and self-conscious standing beside him. Angela was on his other side, posing with a hand on her hip and her hair tossed to the side, hamming it up for the camera. Geo looked pretty. Angela looked beautiful.
She started thumbing through the rest of the photos. Angela hadindeed taken pictures of everything in the days before she died—school, cheer practice, the football game, Chad Fenton’s party… and then Calvin. He was in the very last photo with Geo. They were sitting side by side on his bed, in his apartment, after the party. Geo was wearing a short blue dress, and it had hiked up almost to her underwear. Her head was resting on Calvin’s shoulder, and he had a hand on her thigh. He could never be near her and not touch her. He was always stroking her, playing with her hair, squeezing her hand. She shuddered. She hadn’t thought about that in a long time.
She hadn’tallowedherself to think about it in a long time.
She didn’t remember this picture being taken. But then, why would she? The picture didn’t show it, but she was so drunk that night she could barely stand.
“Who is that?” Fred Argent was leaning in toward Geo, frowning at the photo.
“That, sir, is the Sweetbay Strangler,” Kaiser said. “Back when he used to date Georgina.”
A sharp intake of breath. For once, not Geo’s. She glanced over at Shipp’s lawyer where beads of sweat were forming at his hairline. The man’s blood pressure was probably up twenty points, no doubt because his CEO’s fiancée was in major trouble here. And he was stuck with the task of protecting her, something he obviously wasn’t cut out to do.
“What’s so crazy is that discovering Angela’s remains after all these years allowed us to solve three other murders, just like that.” Kaiser snapped his fingers for emphasis. “We already had his DNA in the database for three other murders, but no ID. But then we developed the pictures in Angela’s camera. Imagine my shock—my utter fucking shock—when I realized Calvin James was with Angela the night she died. As were you.”
“But that doesn’t mean she—” Fred began, but Kaiser raised a hand.
“Now we had an ID on a possible suspect,” the detective continued. “We tracked Calvin down, arrested him at a diner in Blaine. You know where Blaine is, right? Right by the Canadian border? Fuckerwas about to cross into Canada. Had a passport and everything. Had he done that, we might never have caught him. Guess what he was eating when we caught him. Guess.”
Geo said nothing.
“A salad,” Kaiser said. “Isn’t that funny? Because you never think about what serial killers eat, do you? I mean, other than Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Fred Argent paled.
“Sorry, bad joke,” Kaiser said with a smirk, not sorry at all. “But it turns out psychopaths are just like you and me in some ways. They watch their waistlines; they care about their blood pressure. Did you know that something like five percent of all CEOs can be classified as psychopaths? I read that somewhere.”
It was 4 percent. Geo had read that book, too.
“And you were on the fast track to success at your company, weren’t you? How many people did you step on to get there? I’ve been keeping tabs on you. Does your rich heir-to-the-throne fiancéknow your secret?” Kaiser’s voice was polite, but there was no mistaking the edge that lay right beneath the surface. “Had you gone to the police the night you killed Angela, you might have saved three more lives from being taken. Calvin James was twenty-one; you were only sixteen. You could have struck a deal, and you might never have seen the inside of a jail cell. You could have spared her parents fourteen years of agony, of not knowing where their daughter was or what happened to her. You have would spared her friends the pain of all those unanswered questions. Because all this time, you knew, Georgina. You knew.You knew.”
The last two words weren’t shouted, but they might as well have been. Geo winced as if he’d slapped her.
“Want to know what he did to the other three women? The women he killed because you never said anything?” Kaiser was breathing fast now, his chest heaving. He pulls more photographs out of the file folder and shoves them across the table. The pictures are gory, the bodies discolored, bloated. Because death was ugly. “He raped them first, then he strangled them, and then he buried their bodies in thewoods. He probably figured he got away with it once and it turned him on, so why not do it again? And again. And again. You murdered your best friend, and then you went on with your lifelike it never fucking happened.”
The words stung. Geo felt herself sag into her chair. “I loved her,” she whispered again. “You know that.”
