A Caress of Bones: a serial killer thriller (Wren Delacroix Book 9)

by V. J. Chambers

  “Wait,” said Maliah. “Are you okay? You said it was good.”

  “It is,” said Wren. “But it’s… it’s real. It’s a lot.”

  “Sorry it’s me with you while you’re finding this out.”

  “Oh, no,” said Wren, turning to her. “I’m glad it’s you.”

  “Are you?” said Maliah. “I mean, I know we’re good, you and me. But we haven’t always been good, and I know there was some weirdness, especially whenever you and Cai were getting together, and…”

  “Yeah, and you went out of your way to say you were fine with it,” said Wren.

  “Because I was,” said Maliah. “Am. Am fine with it.”

  “So, it’s not weird,” said Wren.

  “That’s what I was saying,” said Maliah.

  “Nothing like a conversation about how not weird something is to make everyone feel secure in the not-weirdness,” said Wren.

  Maliah snorted.

  Wren snickered.

  Maliah picked up the pregnancy test. “You know, I already have dibs on planning your bachelorette party. I called that a while back. But it’s not going to be as fun if you’re pregnant.”

  “We’re not getting married.” Wren snatched the test back. “We’re just, you know… this. We’re doing this.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Maliah.

  “I admit, I don’t like calling him my boyfriend,” said Wren, furrowing her brow. “It feels like he’s more than that.”

  “You’re totally getting married,” said Maliah. “And we should wait until after the baby is born for the bachelorette party. You think you’re going to breastfeed?”

  Wren made a horrified face. “Oh, God. I hadn’t even thought about that.”

  Maliah laughed again.

  “Shut up,” said Wren. “I was enjoying how we were bonding, and now you’re being awful.”

  “Yes, highlight of my morning,” said Maliah. “Hanging out with my ex-boyfriend’s current girlfriend while she finds out the results of her pregnancy test.”

  Wren turned to her. “Is there a thing with you and Trevon?”

  “A thing? No.” Maliah backed away, folding her arms over her chest. “What does that even mean, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.” Wren was defensive. “It’s just that you two are always together, and you seem… flirty.”

  “Who seems flirty?” said Maliah. “Me?”

  “Well, him too,” said Wren.

  “Can you think of a flirty example?”

  “Well…” Wren held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry I brought it up. Obviously, I’m way off base.”

  “He’s, like, a child,” said Maliah.

  “He’s not that much younger than me,” said Wren.

  “You should probably call Reilly and tell him that he’s going to be a father,” said Maliah. “I’m sure he’s interested in that information.”

  “Yeah,” said Wren. “I do need to tell him.”

  “Right,” said Maliah. “Well, I will leave you to it, then.”

  “I’m not going to call him in the bathroom.” Wren contemplated the test. Should she throw it away? It had urine on it. Was it the kind of thing one saved as a memento? Eew. She set it down on the sink and snapped a picture of it with her phone. “I’ll go outside and call him. I’ll be in the front of the station if you or Trevon needs me.”

  “Great,” said Maliah. “And, um, congratulations, if I didn’t say that.”

  “Thanks,” said Wren.

  Maliah pushed the door to the bathroom open.

  “Maliah?”

  She paused and turned back. “Yeah?”

  “You don’t think I’m being insane? Like, that I’m very ill-equipped to do this mom thing?”

  “Because you wear the same holey jeans every day, you mean? I’m sure you’ll dress your kid better.” She winked at Wren and then left her alone.

  Wren took three more pictures of the positive test before tossing it. Then she went out front and dialed Reilly.

  “Hello?” he greeted.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  He let out a huff of air.

  “I mean, hello,” she said. “I guess I should say that first. Hi. Um, I almost threw up on a body, so I went and got a pregnancy test. Well, three, a pack of three, in case. But I just took one, and it was positive, and so I’m calling you.”

  Nothing from Reilly.

  “I took a picture. Do you want me to text you the picture?”

  Silence.

  “Say something, Cai.”

  A long pause. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I wish I was there.”

  “I wish you were here, too.”

  “Text me the picture.”

  “Okay.” She did. Then she put the phone back to her ear.

  “Fuck,” he said in a low, wondering voice.

  “Why did you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m having this weird kind of reaction to this, like it’s just not feeling real somehow. Like it’s… fuck.”

  “Stop saying ‘fuck,’” she said. “That is not the right word to say.”

  “It’s a good ‘fuck,’” he said.

  She snickered. “Well, pick another word, okay? We’re going to have a foul-mouthed child out of the womb because of only hearing its father swearing constantly.”

  He laughed. “Shit, Wren, we are going to have a child.”

  “That word is not better.” She was smiling now, like she couldn’t stop smiling, the smile was too big, but she was shaking too. When had she started shaking? Maybe she needed to eat something. Oh, she needed to sit down. She spied a bench up against the building and she sat down on it.

  It was hot out here. She’d hoped to get a reprieve in upstate New York, but it was just as blazing hot here as in West Virginia.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ or ‘damn,’ which was probably my next exclamation, I think.” She could tell he was smiling too. She could hear it in his voice.

  “Yeah, watch your mouth,” she said.

  “Go back and tell me all of it again,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fuck, Wren, I’m missing it,” he said, sighing. “I know, I said I wasn’t going to use that word. It’s only that I wish I was there. Tell me all of it. Walk me through it. You woke up this morning, and how did the body come into it?”

  “Um, okay, well, I ran into Trevon and Maliah, because Maliah is here to try to help track down Poppy. Did you know that?”

  “I found out this morning,” he said.

  “Anyway, I went in with Trevon to the lab to look at the body of Leroy Graham, and I felt like I was going to throw up. So, I ran out of there, and then Maliah came after me into the bathroom, and she helped me go and find a test, and then she waited with me for the results—”

  “Wait, Maliah was there? Why didn’t you call me while you were waiting?”

  “I don’t know.” She cringed. “I should have. I’m sorry, Cai.”

  “No, no, I’m not… It doesn’t matter.” A pause. “So, that wasn’t weird with you guys?”

  “No, we talked about how not weird it was,” said Wren, laughing.

  “Damn,” he said. Then: “Fuck, I can’t stop swearing.” A pause. “Shit, I just did it again.” Then another laugh. “Uh, sorry.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you were being weird anyway. Maybe you just feel left out. You said to me that you wanted to be part of this, that you missed too much with Timmy, and you didn’t want to miss any of this. And now, I’m here, and you’re there, and it must suck. Swear all you want.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.”

  “If I was there, I would not be able to stop kissing you.”

  She smiled even wider, feeling shy. “I can’t wait to get back to you, then.”

  “Yeah, tell Trevon to crack the case wide open with some sort of lab wizar
dry, and then come home to me.”

  She looked up. “Speak of the devil.” Trevon was coming out of the front door of the station. He looked around until he laid eyes on her.

  “Delacroix!” he said. “You are never going to guess what I just found. It’s some real Silence-of-the-Lambs shit!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WREN squinted. “Um, that was in his throat?”

  “It’s a flower,” said Trevon. “Look, it’s been laminated.” He was holding it up with a set of surgical tweezers. It was a square piece of plastic that had been folded up. Inside, Wren could see that it was a white flower with a lot of long petals. “I think if it hadn’t been stuck in a dead guy’s mouth, it would be pretty.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Wren. “Regardless, it’s obviously purposeful.”

  “You think her other victims had this?”

  “I don’t know that anyone was looking in their throats,” said Wren.

  “Did they have autopsies?” said Trevon.

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean, the cause of death in a lot of them was pretty obvious, I think, so it would depend on state law, and I don’t know what the laws are here in New York.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I’m going to need all the bodies exhumed,” said Trevon, who looked pretty excited at the prospect. “That’s a thing I can do, right?”

  “If we’re taking this case, yeah,” said Wren. “But maybe they’re going to find her soon. And then they won’t need us.”

  “Right,” said Trevon, looking dejected. “Well, here’s hoping she stays out there.”

  “So that you can dissect exhumed bodies.”

  “Yeah,” he said brightly. Then he winced. “Oh, is that one of those things that’s weird? It is, isn’t it? I’m just so shitty at pretending to be normal, you know?”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “I like dead bodies too.”

  He turned to her, grinning. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding.

  “We should start a club,” he said. “The we-like-dead-bodies-but-we’re-not-killers club.”

  “Yeah,” said Wren, letting out an uneasy laugh. Except, she was technically a killer, because she’d had to kill people before.

  He lifted his hand. “Fist bump?”

  She fist-bumped him.

  “So, why were you and Maliah in the bathroom together for, like, forty-five minutes?”

  “It couldn’t have been that long,” said Wren. Of course, they’d had to go hunt down the test, so maybe it had taken a while.

  “Yeah, it was a while,” he said. “Is everything okay? Because if you have some virus or something that’s contagious, I’m kind of annoyed that you fist-bumped me.”

  She laughed. “No, I…” She shrugged. “I’m, um, pregnant. I was taking a pregnancy test.”

  “Oh!” His eyebrows shot up. “Wow.”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Oh, right, I’m reacting wrong again.” He shook himself. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, Trevon.”

  The door to the lab opened. It was Maliah. “You’re telling people?” she said. “Lots of people wait until the second trimester to tell.”

  “Oh, they do?” said Wren. “Why?”

  “That’s when the risk of miscarriage lowers,” said Maliah. She flinched. “Mmm. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

  Wren put her hand on her belly. She hadn’t even considered that.

  “You’re young and healthy and you’re going to be fine,” said Maliah.

  “Right,” said Wren. She looked down at her feet. “Well, I guess I won’t tell anyone else.”

  “Ooh, I’m good at secrets,” said Trevon. “I won’t tell anyone. I won’t even talk about it with you. It’ll be like you never told me at all.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Wren, who was finding Trevon rather amusing, and kind of wondering if he wouldn’t be good for Maliah in a way, if she wouldn’t be balanced by his straightforwardness.

  “So, what’s going on?” said Trevon. “Please tell me that you haven’t found her so that I can exhume bodies.”

  “We haven’t found her,” said Maliah. “We found the car, though. Abandoned. She wasn’t in it.”

  “Where did she abandon it?” said Wren.

  “Middle of nowhere,” said Maliah. “But there’s a set of train tracks nearby and maybe she hopped a boxcar.”

  “So, we’ve got people on that train?” said Wren.

  “They need your authorization,” said Maliah, “because that’s going to cross state lines. So, if we’re doing that, this has to officially become your case.”

  “Yes, please,” said Trevon. He turned to Wren. “I mean, right?”

  “Right,” said Wren.

  BUT Poppy was nowhere to be found.

  Whether it was because she hadn’t actually hopped on that train or whether it had been too late by the time they’d brought in the local police in Pennsylvania, Wren couldn’t be sure.

  What she was sure of was that within the next few days, it was obvious that they weren’t going to find Poppy anywhere in upstate New York.

  So, they shipped Leroy Graham’s body back to West Virginia, and they all went back home.

  Trevon got all the bodies of Poppy’s victims exhumed and sent to him as well. All of them had been subjected to autopsies and no laminated flowers had been found, but this did not deter him from wanting to look at the bodies again. The laminated flower in Leroy Graham’s throat was apparently a spider lily, which was pretty appropriate, given her status as a black widow killer. Very nice little joke, Wren thought.

  Wren began to work through the file that Harry Lovelorn had put together on Poppy, and Reilly helped.

  When they weren’t working, they were working on buying a house. They’d found one that they liked, and they’d put in an offer on it. It was accepted, and now they were just waiting for all of the loan paperwork to go through.

  They went to a birthday party for the Freeman twins, Natalie and Jessica, who had been raised by their crazy, cannibalistic parents in the woods outside the FCL compound. The girls were settling in nicely with their adoptive family, and they were happy. Wren had a special bond with them. She’d pulled them out of that woods. She’d saved them from Hawk. Now, she looked after them and she stayed close to them.

  She didn’t like to think about the idea that they’d be called upon to testify against Hawk, but it was something that might likely happen, though she couldn’t say when that might be.

  Everything with Hawk right now was in horrible flux. She knew that the hearing to determine whether he’d be set free before his new trial was coming up soon, and she distracted herself from thinking about that by staying busy.

  She had appointments with the doctor about the pregnancy.

  At the second one, she and Reilly heard the heartbeat for the first time, and he clutched her hand, a big grin on his face. His expression made her heart lurch. She was so happy to be with this man, this man that she loved, and that there was a little person growing inside of her, made of bits and pieces of both of them.

  It seemed undeniably huge, too big of a thing to fathom.

  And yet, the baby was so small, the heartbeat so fast, and her stomach still so flat. Even the side effects she felt, the morning sickness, the tenderness in her flesh, it all seemed so slight. But because of this small, slight thing, their entire lives were in upheaval.

  Their loan came through, and they went to closing. They shook hands with the former owner of the house, and then they were homeowners.

  Wren walked through the rooms of the place with Reilly, feeling overwhelmed by all of this. She had never really allowed herself to hope for a normal life, for anything like this, but here she was, buying a house with a man she loved, pregnant with his baby. She felt domestic and feminine and good, and it made her want to cry—but everything made her want to cry.

  The nausea was bad, but it was better if she go
t enough to eat. She couldn’t abide the taste of coffee—even decaf. She still loved the way it smelled, but drinking it was out of the question, and it didn’t bother her not to drink it, even though she would have sworn that drinking coffee was a part of her identity or something.

  Reilly had claimed that he’d quit drinking caffeinated coffee with her, but she had released him from this promise when she realized that she didn’t actually feel deprived not having it. He’d tried valiantly to only drink decaf for a grand total of three days before giving up.

  She was exhausted all the time. She had never understood exhaustion before this.

  She felt asleep over the files for Poppy Morgan on more than one evening.

  Due to her pregnancy and Reilly’s recovery from a gunshot wound, they oversaw their move into their house more than they actually moved anything. They would have helped, but Reilly couldn’t lift things and she knew that she couldn’t tire herself out if she wanted to make it through the entire day.

  Being pregnant was all about limitations and trying to live within them, and she kind of resented it, but she was also too tired to resent it.

  Anyway, they hired good movers, and they payed them extra money to help them unpack their boxes and set up their furniture, and soon it was home.

  Soon, she was sprawled out over the kitchen table in their new house with the files, yawning as Reilly puttered around making himself coffee, which she sniffed appreciatively.

  Soon, he was rubbing her neck and kissing the top of her head as she floated her theories to him about why Poppy left Louisiana and went to New York in the first place, and he was throwing his own ideas back at her.

  Soon, a month had passed, and everything was different.

  WREN sat in the courthouse, feeling sick to her stomach even though she’d eaten eggs and cheese and sausage that morning—a veritable smorgasbord of protein. (She had learned that her morning sickness could often be assuaged if she was certain to eat protein-packed foods first thing in the morning. Oftentimes, of course, she was choking them down because they didn’t seem the slightest bit appetizing, but once she was full, she usually felt better.) Her heart was beating too fast, and there were beads of sweat forming on the back of her neck. That could have been because it was too hot in here. She felt like someone could have turned up the air conditioning. It was a sweltering August day, and the room was crowded.