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

by V. J. Chambers

  “So, she just never came home?” said Reilly.

  “We went to a party together,” said Miranda. “It was out at the TKE house. I don’t really like frat parties, but I figured it would be okay if we stuck together. Anyway, she started talking to this guy, and they obviously didn’t want me around, so I went off on my own, and I found a ride back to the dorm. I texted her that, and she said it was cool. She had her car there.”

  “This guy,” said Reilly. “The one she was talking to. Can you describe him?”

  “He was, um… tall?” Miranda bit down on her lower lip. “It was dark. I don’t know if I got a good look at him.”

  “Let’s start with race, then,” said Reilly.

  “White,” said Miranda.

  “Did he have any facial hair?” said Wren.

  “No,” said Miranda. “Maybe. I was a little drunk.”

  Great, thought Wren. Perfect. She dug out her phone and found a picture of Hawk. “Was it this man?”

  “No way,” said Miranda. “He was a lot younger than that.”

  “Oh,” said Wren. “Well, good. That’s good.” Definitely not Hawk, hmm? Well, that didn’t mean that Hawk wasn’t involved, however.

  “He, um, he was a little bit older, though. You know, he seemed older than the frat boys. And I don’t think he goes to school here, because I’ve never seen him before.”

  Well, she couldn’t really be sure of that, though, could she, Wren thought, since she hadn’t seen him well enough to know if he had a beard or not.

  “She’s really… dead?” said Miranda. “Like, are you sure it’s her?”

  “We’re sure,” said Reilly softly. “Hey, how about you give us your information, and we’ll be back in touch with you. We may have more questions. I think that’s enough for now. I’m sure you’re reeling from this.”

  “Yeah,” said Miranda. “I am. I really am.”

  WITH the victim identified, they were busy for a time, and it wasn’t the good kind of busy. They had to inform the family, of course. Wren always hated that part the most, because her high empathy made the experience practically unbearable. She ached for the parents of the girl, who were so devastated that they couldn’t even seem to react.

  They were like shuffling zombies, slack-jawed, destroyed.

  Wren cried, though.

  Stupid pregnancy hormones.

  She came home and curled up on the couch in her new house and sobbed the afternoon away.

  That was a bad day.

  There was paperwork, and there were interviews, and they put together a timeline. Asha Forrester had gone to the party with her roommate and met a guy. She’d spent the evening talking to him, which matched up with the story that they’d gotten from Everly Green, who had also been met at a party by a man. She’d fought him off and gotten away.

  Wren put together a series of pictures of guys from the FCL, anyone she could think of who was vaguely within the age group, although she erred young and old, thinking that any of these men could be under Hawk’s influence.

  It wasn’t as if there wasn’t a history of people in the FCL killing at the behest of others, anyway. This might be the same thing.

  But neither Everly nor Miranda identified any of the men in the pictures.

  So, the flurry of activity gradually died down, and then they were nowhere.

  This was the way of cases much of the time. Wren and Reilly chased down as many leads as they could, and then there was nothing to chase down, so they did nothing, and time passed.

  August wore on.

  Eventually, Trevon brought them all in to talk about the spider lilies.

  He’d found one on each of the bodies that he’d exhumed, though none of them had been in the throats of the victims. Instead, she’d tended to make small incisions in the groin area and to tuck the lilies in there.

  Even if the incisions were found during the coroners’ examinations of the bodies, no one had gone poking around in them with tweezers. Trevon, of course, had.

  The thought was that Poppy had shoved this one down the throat of her last victim because she’d been in a rush.

  Wren still couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t run. That part didn’t make sense. Nor did she know why Poppy had gone back to New York at all.

  Trevon had carefully removed each of the preserved lilies from their protective lamination and had done tests on the flowers.

  He informed them that due to the traces of soil and other such factors, he could say with reasonable certainty that these spider lilies had been plucked from the Louisiana bayou.

  With the case in Cardinal Falls cooling, Wren found herself drawn back to the black widow case. Instead of trying to figure out how she was going to get Hawk back in jail and stop him from murdering girls, she began looking into cases in Louisiana in which a husband had died right after his wedding.

  She hunted and hunted, and she didn’t find anything, so she began to think that the case in New York may have been the first case.

  But she didn’t know who Poppy really was. Looking for birth records on that name had come up empty, and she had been able to trace (with Maliah’s help) the way that Poppy had stolen a social security number from a deceased person and created a false identity.

  Even that identity was no good, because Poppy wasn’t using it anymore.

  Just when she was about to give up on all of it, she discovered a case in which a man had been stabbed by his wife, who had skipped out immediately afterwards. It hadn’t happened on their wedding night, but she had obviously been intending to kill him and simply hadn’t managed it.

  She found herself drawn to the case because of the man’s talking about how crazy his wife was, and how she’d been screwed up in the head by PLL.

  Wren didn’t know what PLL was, so she looked into it and discovered it was the abbreviation for a cult called Project Love and Light. It wasn’t a religious cult, but was instead focused on health and meditation. It was ultra-rigid regarding food intake, exercise, and various other aspects of its members lives.

  Even so, it might not have even been accurately termed a cult if it hadn’t been for Keith Hughes, the leader of the group, who had just recently, in the past three years, in fact, been indicted for sexual abuse against children. Girls, in fact. Young, prepubescent girls.

  The stab victim said that his wife had escaped PLL, and he’d promised to help her and protect her. And then she’d turned around and done this to him. He wasn’t pleased, to say the least.

  It might not be Poppy.

  There was no reason for Poppy to have been brought up in a cult where little girls were sexualized.

  That’s my history, she thought to herself.

  And yet… somehow… she couldn’t let it go.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “NICE to meet you both,” said Agent Thomas Hook, shaking Wren’s hand and then Reilly’s. He was going to talk to them about PLL, and he’d driven out to their facility from D.C. to speak to them. “I know you two were working with Clive Krieger on his last case.”

  “Oh, of course you knew Clive,” said Wren. “We’re so sorry.” They were meeting in a conference room and they all settled down in chairs around a small, round table.

  “Terrible thing,” said Hook. “He was so young and eager.”

  Wren flashed on Krieger’s body in the back of the van, next to Reilly, who had been bleeding and barely unconscious, and she felt ill. Krieger had been a horrible casualty in the last case they’d worked.

  “Very terrible,” said Reilly. “And a couple inches either way, I would have been killed by the same man, so it’s sobering.”

  Truthfully, Doug had been such a terrible shot it was amazing he’d managed to successfully kill Krieger. But Wren definitely wasn’t going to say that out loud.

  “I can only imagine,” said Hook. “I mean, I suppose I could end up in a situation like that someday myself, but I’m a bit chained to a desk most of the time, so I just have to say that I really value w
hat you guys do, going out into the field like that. And Krieger was a great guy who didn’t deserve the end he got.”

  “He definitely didn’t,” said Wren.

  “So, you guys want to talk about Project Love and Light, am I correct?” said Hook.

  “Well, we don’t know if it’s going to be important in the case we’re working,” said Wren, “but we wanted to be thorough.”

  “It’s basically defunct at this point,” said Hook. “There was, at one point, two different active groups. One was in New York state, and the other was in Louisiana.”

  Oh. There was the New York connection.

  Hook continued. “The Louisiana group is where it started. It actually has roots in a hippie commune that was established in the early 1970s. It was pretty benign, and they didn’t call themselves that. So, when Keith Hughes started taking over down there, that’s when things started to get weird.”

  “So, is it defunct because he was arrested?” said Wren.

  “Yeah,” said Hook. “The abuse was a well-kept secret. He would groom the families of the girls he was going to abuse, and they were all sort of his followers, so they would do whatever he said, and he made it seem like it was, I don’t know, a spiritual experience or something.”

  “They always do,” said Wren dryly.

  Hook inclined his head. “Anyway, the families sometimes… I interviewed mothers who said that they didn’t know what was going on, and I think that they maybe didn’t want to know, and so they ignored the signs. Because this had grown out of this commune, there was several generations there, and if you left, you were cut off from your entire family and support system. And accusing the leader of sexual abuse, that was obviously going to get you kicked out. So, even if they did know, they stayed quiet.”

  That seemed typical to Wren as well.

  Hook continued. “When he was arrested, a lot of the community thought it was a lie, and they banded behind him, but after the trial and the testimonies of the victims, it all basically fell apart. There are a few tiny little hold-outs, but they aren’t organized, and it’s essentially, like I said, defunct.”

  “Well,” said Reilly, “we’re not necessarily thinking that it’s part of our active investigation, but it may be related to the past of a perpetrator we’re looking for.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Hook.

  “If it was a secret,” said Wren, “then Hughes was hiding it somewhat. He hadn’t convinced everyone it was okay. So, how many victims would you say that he had?”

  “Oh, difficult to say. We put three women on the stand. One was a woman named Pagan Moore, and she was the one who came to us in the first place with the case. We worked with her to find the other two women who were willing to testify. But that would have just been the tip of the iceberg.”

  “So, our perp could have been abused by him,” said Wren. “Maybe that’s why she wanted to escape.”

  “You got a name for me?”

  “Well, maybe,” said Wren. “The name of the woman who we definitely know was involved in PLL is Indigo Evans. The name of the woman who’s murdering her husbands is Poppy Morgan, but we know that’s an assumed identity. So, we don’t know if they’re the same person.”

  “I know the last name Evans,” said Hook. “There were a whole mess of Evans involved in PLL. In fact, Keith had, um, I wouldn’t call her a wife exactly. He was anti-monogamy—”

  “Of course,” said Wren.

  “Yeah,” Hook chuckled. “Uh, but he had a woman who was sort of his main squeeze, and she was an Evans. Marlena Evans.”

  “Well, if it is her, it might explain some of her pathology,” said Wren.

  “What do you need to identify her?” said Hook.

  “A photograph really,” said Wren. “There’s an open case in Cottonstown, Louisiana, but no one was ever arrested, and so there’s nothing to look at. All we’ve got is a name.”

  “We did look at social media,” said Reilly.

  “Right, always hit up Facebook first,” said Hook. “Being chained to a desk, I know this well.”

  “But nothing there,” said Reilly.

  “Well, I have some contacts from PLL, most notably Pagan Moore,” said Hook. “So, I’ll put a bug in her ear and see if she knows Indigo Evans, and then she might have a photo or could find one.”

  “That would be great,” said Wren. “We would appreciate that.”

  “Sure thing,” said Hook. “Happy to help any way I can.”

  A day later, they got a text from Hook with a picture of a very, very young Poppy Morgan. This was the only photo of the girl that Pagan Moore had been able to find, and it had been taken when she must have been thirteen or fourteen.

  Even so, it was her.

  Wren was elated.

  The case with Hawk might be going nowhere, but this was progress, actual progress.

  “We should go to Louisiana,” she said to Reilly.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You’re not going to fight me on it?” she said.

  “Why would I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “We’re meant to be finding her, and she won’t be there.”

  “But we need to understand her,” said Reilly. “We need to find out more about what motivates her. And something about Louisiana is important to her, or she wouldn’t use the spider lilies.”

  “Yeah,” said Wren.

  “So, that’s why we’re going to go,” he said.

  “What about the other case?” she said.

  “Trail’s cold,” said Reilly. “This other case is officially ours, and she’s on the run. We should do something.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We should.”

  “OOH, can I come to Louisiana?” said Trevon, who was perched on a table in the lab, swinging his legs.

  Maliah glanced at him. She was leaning against the table. Wren and Reilly had come in to talk to them about the fact that they were leaving for their investigation, and she and Trevon were getting ready to grab lunch. “They don’t need you in Louisiana,” she said to him.

  “You just don’t want to be left alone,” he said to her.

  “We’re not expecting to find any evidence there that would require our lab guy,” said Reilly. “But if we do find something, we’ll call you, Trevon, and you can come on down.”

  “Cool,” said Trevon, jumping down from the table.

  “And, um, I’m officially in the second trimester,” said Wren. “So, the pregnancy isn’t a secret anymore if you guys want to talk about it.”

  “Oh, also cool,” said Trevon. “But I’ve done very well with the secret so far. I mean, I think I even forgot that you were pregnant at all. Are you sure you are, actually, because you don’t look pregnant.”

  “Stop talking, Trevon,” said Maliah, shaking her head slowly.

  He glanced at her. “What? Is it bad to tell a woman she doesn’t look pregnant? I know it’s bad the other way, but I thought it was cool to say that.”

  “I’m not offended,” said Wren. “I’m used to you, Trevon.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Trevon. “So, you’re just making allowances for me because I’m weird.”

  “We’re all weird here,” said Reilly.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Maliah. “I am incredibly normal and well-adjusted, thank you very much.”

  “Wait,” said Trevon, holding up a finger. “What if Hawk kills someone else while you’re gone?”

  “We’ll come back,” said Wren with a steely look in her eye.

  “I would get the body, wouldn’t I?” said Trevon. “You’ll tell the Cardinal Falls people to send it to my lab?”

  “Yes, they are going to do that,” said Wren.

  Trevon let out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.”

  Maliah put a hand on his shoulder. “You really are weird, you know that?”

  “I do,” said Trevon, grinning at her.

  “Anyway, let’s hope there aren’t any more bodies,” said Wren.

&nb
sp; “Yeah, objectively, it’s good if people don’t die,” said Trevon, nodding furiously. “I want to make that clear, in case it’s not.”

  “Well,” said Maliah, “if that’s all, Trevon and I are getting ready to take lunch. You guys can come with us if you want?”

  “Nah, we’re busy packing,” said Wren.

  “You guys have fun,” said Reilly. Then he furrowed his brow. “You guys eat lunch together a lot, don’t you?”

  “Cai,” said Wren.

  He turned to her.

  She shook her head at him. “Let’s go.”

  “What?” said Reilly. “I was just saying that—”

  Wren grabbed him and tugged on him.

  They walked out.

  Trevon shoved his hands into his pockets, staring after them. “So, everyone thinks we’re, like, involved, huh? That was what that was just about? Why’d they get weird?”

  “It’s my fault,” said Maliah. “Delacroix asked me some questions way back in July, and I reacted too strongly to it.”

  “How come?” He turned to her. “Were you, like, appalled at the idea of it, because I’m so strange and socially idiotic?”

  “No,” she said, dismissing this. “It’s just that sometimes you’re flirty, you know, and I don’t think you mean it. You’re kind of oblivious to everything.”

  “I’m flirty?” He spread his hands. “I’m just playing off you.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said, smirking. “So, we’re flirty. But it’s a game. We’re friends. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “You’re right. Where do you want to do lunch?”

  “I don’t know, maybe tacos again?”

  “I could do tacos.” He shrugged out of his lab coat. “Maybe we should just hook up, since everyone thinks we are.”

  Maliah’s lips parted.

  He glanced at her. “Uh… sorry.”

  “You really don’t think before you talk,” she said. “Ever.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I should, though. I regret it. Like, a lot.” He tossed his lab coat over one of the tables and started for the door. “So, for the record, though, is it because you’re not attracted to me at all that you don’t want to?”