Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

  Clearly everyone else seems to think so or they wouldn’t keep asking. Kim wasn’t his partner back when Angela’s remains were found, and Kaiser didn’t even work the first two Sweetbay Strangler murders; they were another detective’s cases. But yes, it’s hitting him hard. It all feels too familiar, too close to home, as if this is all happening specifically to remind him of the past.

  Again, it’s a narrow-minded line of thinking, and very dangerous. His job isn’t to find evidence to fit the theory. It’s to come up with a theory based on the evidence. He has to stay objective, but it’s getting harder.

  In the elevator, Kim touches his hand, speaking in a low, soft voice. “Dave’s working tonight, graveyard shift. I can come over after ten-thirty, stay all night. If you want.”

  “Maybe,” Kaiser says.

  But he already knows he wants her to, and he hates himself for it.

  9

  Henry Bowen’s parents react exactly as Kaiser knew they would. They scream, cry, blame the police, blame each other, and then eventually fall silent as they try to individually process the new reality they now face.

  Amelia Bowen’s eyes are slightly glazed. She sits silently on a small blue sofa in the police station’s conference room, subdued on the outside, raging fire on the inside. Tyson Bowen paces the room like a caged lion, eyes bright and intense, hands curled into claws, ready to destroy someone. Based on Henry’s age, Kaiser expected to meet younger parents, but the Bowens are older, mid-forties.

  “We adopted him.” Amelia Bowen’s voice is soft and distant. “Tyson and I met in college, but we were so busy, we thought we’d wait to have kids until we were at least thirty, and just enjoy our time together.”

  Tyson Bowen stops pacing. “Amelia, don’t—”

  Kaiser raises a hand. It’s better to let her speak; she’ll be more responsive and apt to remember something if she’s allowed to think things through in her own way. The first question he’ll ask, of course, is about Henry’s biological mother, now that he knows Amelia didn’t give birth to him. He has the phone in his hand, the censor-bar photo of the female victim just a tap away.

  But not yet.

  “All our friends seemed to be waiting to have kids, too,” Amelia continues, “and it was nice to go out for dinner and drinks, to be twenty-six, and then twenty-eight, and then twenty-nine, and not have to worry about sleepless nights and babysitters and the expense of having a child. Then we turned thirty, and it still wasn’t the right time, because we decided we wanted to be further along in our careers before slowing down to become parents. We worked hard, both got promoted, and then we realized we needed the right house, in the right neighborhood, in a good school district. And then suddenly we were thirty-five, and we started trying to get pregnant, only to find out we’d waited too long and now we couldn’t. Four rounds of IVF, two miscarriages. We put ourselves on the adoption list, waited two years to get picked. And when we got word that Henry’s biological mother selected us, it was the greatest day of our lives.”

  The disconnect in her voice fades. She pauses. The loose bun at the top of her head is askew, and she reaches up and plays with an errant lock of brown hair dangling down one side.

  “We were in the delivery room. The first time I held him, a minute after he was born, he instantly felt like mine. It didn’t matter that he had just come out of another woman’s body. He was mine, and I felt it, and I know Henry felt it, because he looked up at me and we both just knew. And I thought, why the hell did we wait so long? Why did we think everything had to be perfect? Because children are perfect, and everything falls into place when you hold your child in your arms. All the things you think you’re going to worry about don’t matter.” She meets her husband’s gaze. Tyson Bowen is standing in the corner, watching her with tears in his eyes. “And now he’s gone. I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  She leans forward, her chest racked with sobs. Her husband sits down beside her and holds her tightly.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes,” Kaiser says, but neither of them acknowledge him. Right now, it’s just them, wrapped around each other, their grief wrapped around them.

  He slips out of the room, indicating to the grief counselor that she can go on in. The Bowens’ child is dead, and while there is a sense of urgency to find out what happened to him, he can allow them ten minutes to cry. He heads to his desk down the hall and logs into his computer.

  “Report came back on the lipstick used to write on the kid’s chest,” Kim says. She’s seated at her desk, directly across from him. “I saw you were busy with the parents and didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  “I see that,” he says, clicking on the report. “Shit, that was fast.”

  “It’s because I had them narrow it down,” Kim says, and he looks up. “I asked them to check if it was a brand made by Shipp Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Why would—” he begins, and then stops as he makes the connection. “Oh. Right.”

  Shipp Pharmaceuticals, Georgina’s old company. And that, right there, is why he appreciates Kim. For every obvious detail she misses, there’s one she finds that nobody else would possibly have thought of.

  “My hunch was right. It is a Shipp-made product.” There’s a note of triumph in his partner’s voice. “They’re about to launch a new line of cosmetics, and this particular lipstick only comes in ten shades. The heart on the kid’s chest was drawn in one of them.”

  “About to launch?”

  “They’re not widely available yet. You can only buy the lipstick at Nordstrom, and only at the flagship store here in Seattle. It’s only been on sale for one week.”

  “One week? That’s it?”

  She smiles, pleased that he’s pleased. “That’s it.”

  “Call the store and—”

  “Done. They’ll send over the security footage shortly.”

  He sits back in his chair and gives her a smile. “Great work.”

  “It all ties back to Georgina Shaw, Kai.” Kim is bouncing in her chair, her ponytail bobbing behind her. “Clearly someone’s trying to get her attention. I called down to Hazelwood, requested copies of her visitor’s log, phone calls, mail. Maybe she’s been in contact with Calvin James.”

  Even if she has, the reports won’t show that, as Kaiser well knows. But he can’t tell Kim he’s been paying a prison guard for information on Georgina, so he simply says, “Good thinking.”

  “You could always talk to her, too. She gets out in a couple of days.”

  Kaiser turns away. He doesn’t want his partner to see his face. His feelings for Georgina are complicated, and they always have been.

  “I know you two were close once, but that was a long time ago,” Kim says. “Don’t let your bias get in the way of doing everything you can to solve these murders. The female victim was killed in the exact same way as Angela Wong. She was buried in the same woods, right by Georgina’s house. The lipstick is from a company she worked for. You know how many brands of lipstick there are in the United States, Kai? I looked it up. Thousands. Big names, small names, brands that are now discontinued but that you can still find on eBay. This wasn’t some old lipstick the killer had lying around. It was chosen deliberately.”

  Kim’s mind is in full analytic mode. He can tell by the way she’s speaking but not looking at him, her speech rapid but extra clear. “It has to be Calvin James. He’s still out there. Maybe he’s back. And maybe your old friend Georgina knows all about it.”

  “You didn’t see her at the trial five years ago, Kim,” he says. “She wouldn’t even look at him. She never made eye contact with him while she was testifying, not until the very end, and that’s only because he spoke to her.”

  “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 of 20/20.

  Nothing is more satisfying to humans than watching another person 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 sender names, 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.”

  Despite none of this being useful to his investigation, Kaiser finds himself curious. “What was he writing to them about?”

  “Initially he was fascinated with how they ended up there, but after a while he was only writing to the female inmates. Some of them sent love letters. I think he liked the attention.”

  Kaiser stifles a chuckle. “Well, I appreciate your time—”

  “I think about him often, you know. He had a rough start, was in foster care since he was very young.” Ursula sighs into his ear. “But he has exceptional survival skills. That, I believe.”

  “He did use superhero names on all his correspondence,” Kaiser says.

  “That’s something he’d do,” Ursula says with a laugh. “He always wished he was someone else.”

  It takes Kaiser another minute before he can wrangle himself off the phone politely, but he’s not too annoyed; the woman sounded lonely.

  “Seriously?” a voice behind Kaiser says, and he turns to find Kim standing there, coffee in hand. “You realize you have your own desk three feet away, right? I hate it when you sit at my desk. You make everything … messy.” She waves her free hand in a gesture of distaste.

  “I like your desk,” he says, but he picks himself up out of the chair and moves over. “It’s so clean. Even the air around it smells fresher. Thought you weren’t going to be in for another half hour.”

/>   “I decided to come in earlier after all,” she says, and very subtly, her body language changes in a way that would only be noticeable to someone who knows her intimately. And Kaiser knows her intimately. Her voice drops. “Dave was waiting for me when I got home. He didn’t ask me questions,” she adds quickly, seeing the look on Kaiser’s face, “but he did say he thinks we need to get away for the weekend and spend some time together. So we’re going to Scottsdale on Friday, back to the resort where we got married. He already booked it.” She holds Kaiser’s gaze for a full ten seconds before looking away.

  “Ah.” He keeps his tone light. “Sounds nice. I’m sure you’ll have a great time.”

  It’s all he can say. The heaviness in his heart surprises him, even though he knows the affair should have ended ages ago.

  Fuck that. It should have never started in the first place.

  He busies himself with tidying up his desk so they don’t have to talk. Their relationship plays out in his mind in a series of snapshots: Kim propped up in bed beside him as he catches up on some computer work, her bare breasts glowing from the light of the laptop screen, nipples like fresh mosquito bites. Kim snaking her hand into his boxer briefs as she makes a phone call to her husband to tell him that she’ll be working all night. Kim in the shower only that morning, the water sliding down her back as she bends forward so he can take her from behind. He swallows the memories down with a long sip of hot coffee, burning his throat in the process.

  His desk phone rings, and he’s grateful for the distraction. It’s Julia Chan, returning his call. She’s the roommate of Henry Bowen’s biological mother, and he tried calling her last night, after Claire’s parents met him at the morgue to confirm their daughter’s identity. It had been a long night, especially since Kim had come over afterward.

  “I just got your message. I’m heading into work, Detective,” the young woman says, sounding distracted and put out. “I have an early meeting and I’m already late. What’s this about?”