Page 27 of Jar of Hearts
“She was terrified?”
“No, it wasn’t fear. Something else. Resentment, maybe. Like he was a reminder of the person she used to be, and she hated him for it.”
Calvin James might have been charged with the murders of four women, but it was Georgina Shaw’s arrest that kicked the case into the media spotlight. A Big Pharma executive involved in the cold-case murder of her teenage best friend? It was more entertaining than a Lifetime movie, more titillating than an episode of20/20.
Nothing is more satisfying to humans than watching anotherperson fail. Especially when it’s someone who has everything you don’t: beauty, brains, an education, a high-paying job, a rich fiancé.
There are three versions of Georgina Shaw that Kaiser knows. The first is the girl he knew in high school—the sweet cheerleader who had friends in every social circle, and who got straight As. The second was the girl she’d become after she’d met Calvin—distracted, consumed, unavailable, selfish. The third was the woman he’d arrested in the Shipp boardroom fourteen years later—successful, mature, exhausted… and remorseful.
Which version is she now?
Kim is on the phone, talking to someone who can only be her husband, judging by the gentle tone of her voice. Kaiser makes his way back to the Bowens, his mind sifting through all the questions he still needs answers to.
Is it possible that Georgina is still in love with Calvin, and that her avoidance of him during the trial five years ago was all just an act? He slipped her something that day in the courtroom, something that still eats at Kaiser whenever he thinks of it. She denied it was anything important, but he doesn’t believe her. Of course he doesn’t. Remorseful or not, nobody’s a better liar than Georgina Shaw.
He opens the door to the conference room. The Bowens are huddled together on the couch. The grief counselor is speaking softly. Three heads look up at Kaiser when he enters.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. There’s no point in asking them how they’re doing.
“We want to find out who did this,” Tyson Bowen says. He’s a bit calmer than he was earlier, but not much. His voice is shaking. Beside him, his wife nods.
“Absolutely.” Kaiser pulls out his phone, and taps it to pull up the picture of the dead woman with the censor bar. “I need you to look at this picture and tell me if you recognize the woman.”
Amelia Bowen leans forward, takes a good look at his phone, and gasps. “That’s Claire Toliver,” she says. “Oh my god.” She looks to her husband for confirmation, and though it takes him a few seconds longer, he confirms her statement with a brisk nod.
“Who’s Claire Toliver?” Kaiser asks them.
“Henry’s birth mother,” Amelia Bowen says. “Is she dead? What’s wrong with her eyes?”
Kaiser answers the first question, but not the second. They don’t need to know.
10
The report Kim requested from the warden at Hazelwood is in Kaiser’s email the following morning. Encompassing all five years of Georgina’s prison stay, it’s too large to download to his phone, so he sits at Kim’s desk with his coffee and logs into her computer. His partner won’t be in for another hour—she left his apartment early this morning to shower and change—and whenever she’s not in, he prefers to sit at her desk. She’s neater. The top of Kim’s desk is always clear, the pens arranged like a bouquet in their ceramic holder. In contrast, Kaiser’s desk looks like a junkie tossed it searching for drugs.
He scrolls through the report quickly. There’s less detail in it than the reports he receives from the corrections officer he pays every month, and of course there are no personal notes. But it is interesting to see the past five years of Georgina Shaw’s life summed up in one long spreadsheet. It gives Kaiser a different perspective on the information he’s had all along.
Her mail, for instance. Like any inmate of notoriety, Georgina gets fan mail, and in the span of five years she’s received over a thousand letters. But ten of those letters were sent from the same address. Somehow, this didn’t register when Kaiser received his monthly reports from his inside source, and he can only assume he missed it because those reports only listed sendernames, which are all different.
Whoever wrote to Georgina from an address in Spokane,Washington, used a different moniker each time. Tony Stark. Clark Kent. Bruce Banner. Charles Xavier. And so on. The “real-life” identities of fictional superheroes.
“Fuck,” Kaiser mutters. It’s a hell of an oversight, and he has nobody to blame but himself.
He runs the Spokane address through the Seattle PD database and comes up with a hit for Ursula Archer. In her mid-sixties, she’s a retired librarian whose husband passed away the year before. Kaiser picks up the phone and dials the number.
Thirty seconds later he’s speaking to the woman. It takes another fifteen seconds to explain who he is and why he’s calling, but she’s not suspicious. If anything, the woman sounds happy to have someone to talk to.
“You must be calling about Dominic,” Ursula Archer says. Her voice is both soft and sharp, every syllable pronounced crisply, although her tone isn’t harsh. She reminds Kaiser of a teacher he had in high school. “He stayed with us a few years ago. We were his foster parents for three years. He wrote letters to a woman, you said?”
Kaiser stifles his disappointment. Clearly the letters aren’t from Calvin James. “Yes, to an inmate at Hazelwood Correctional Institute named Georgina Shaw.”
The woman sighs, and he can almost picture her shaking her head on the other line. Her driver’s license photo, which he’s pulled up on his computer screen, depicts a woman with dark-blond hair in the early stages of gray, cut in a short bob that’s slightly longer at the front.
“The name doesn’t ring a bell,” she says. “But then, Dominic wrote to quite a few people in prison. It started as school project. He was doing some kind of research on life in prison after Scared Straight came to his school to do a talk. You’ve heard of that program?”
Kaiser was only vaguely familiar with it, but knew the gist—it involved former inmates convincing kids to stay in school and away from drugs and gangs. He glances toward the wall clock at the precinct, wondering how he can get her off the phone. “Yes, ma’am. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered—”
“Anyway, Dominic decided to do his social studies project on life behind bars, and he came across a website where you can write to inmates. Next thing we know, we’ve got mail coming from prisons all over the country. Graham, my late husband, was pretty upset. After all, these were convicted criminals who were sending letters to our home address. He didn’t want Dominic writing to them anymore, but I convinced him to let it go, that it didn’t seem to be doing any harm. We ended up getting him a post office box so he could have mail sent there instead. We told him to never give out personal information, and to never send anyone money.”
