“So you think he’s pointing to us again?” Had asked.
Rather than answer, Joshua started back up the ravine, Bella yipping in excitement. As the neared the top of the ravine, the puppy scurried off in the wrong direction, leaving Joshua suddenly alone, as he’d outdistanced the rest of the team.
“Bella! Wait!” The dog stopped, looked at him with her head cocked off to the side, then ran off again. There was no way he was getting her back fast. Joshua waved to the cops and pointed at the spot on the bridge. “Go on ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”
He turned back to Bella, who was now sitting just a slight way off, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Moving toward her, Joshua tried to get around behind the puppy, but she thought it was part of the game and started barking.
“Bella. Come here!”
His puppy was smart; Joshua knew that. She had to know how frustrating this was for him, but rather than accede to his wishes, the damn girl kept taunting him, messing with his head.
Wait.
That’s what Humpty was doing.
He was baiting them. Screwing around with them. Making them dance like marionettes on strings of his own designing. And they had been obliging him every step of the way.
That’s what was different about each of these crime scenes. Not just the external fact of their differences from before, but the shift in the very design of them. Everything in these sites had been done both for maximum exposure and maximum disruption. The serene garden in Ann Arbor. The hand in the sandbox in Charleston. The leg in Richmond. The torso here.
He had been baiting them. Joshua knew that. And it was escalating. He knew that, too. But that meant that the stakes would be raised as well.
Shit.
He ran toward the bridge, screaming and waving his hands for the cops to get away. As he rushed along, heedless of the scratches and scrapes from the flora and fauna around him, Joshua saw one of the policemen lift his head up, turning toward the noise, even as his companion bent down to look at something on the ground.
Something right in line with the gaze of the dismembered corpse below.
And then the world blew up.
The shock from the explosion threw Joshua back against a tree, his head striking the trunk with a thud that sent fireworks of pain and light dancing through his skull. Everything went dark for a moment as his vision tunneled inward.
He woke to Bella licking his face, whining and dancing around him. As he sat up, his head throbbing a dangerous tattoo, Joshua surveyed the damage.
A quarter of the bridge was gone. The cops were nowhere to be seen. Had and Coop were running up the hill toward him, Had sporting a bleeding gash on the side of his face, and Coop looked to be limping.
“Are you all right?” Agent Cooper yelled up at him. He heard everything through a slight ringing in his ears, making the entire scenario feel somehow disjointed and unreal. But a glance to the side, where one of the policemen had been thrown disabused him of that thought. The body was partially visible underneath rubble from the destroyed section of the bridge, but the neck was at an angle that made it clear the man was dead.
“Did any of them…?” Joshua fired back, ignoring her concern for him for the moment. He knew even before she shook her head what the answer would be. He had seen the group, clustered around the blast point. With the amount of damage that had been done to the bridge, none of the four could have escaped.
The Humpty Dumpty Killer had claimed four more victims, even as they were gathered around to try to piece together one who was already dead. And Joshua could have stopped it if he had realized in time.
Had and Coop were rushing about, seeking out the bodies amidst the rubble, doing what they could. Joshua knew better. There was nothing they could do. Sorting through the aftermath of the tragedy might feel like it gave them purpose, but it was short lived. They would discover that all too soon.
Their movements were like a backdrop of random noise that invaded his skull. An emotional tinnitus that kept him from being able to focus. At the same moment, it came with a bizarre sense of déjà vu, the sounds of concern and the actions of kindness unable to blot away the horror of the action. Voices all around him, calm and soothing, telling him that it would all be okay, it would be okay, it would be okay…
But he had known that it would never again be okay, even before the DNA evidence had come back. It was not an event that he could recover from. Not in this lifetime. There were some occurrences that the passage of years could not even begin to touch. And that one had started with an ill-advised fight with his wife, and had ended in a wood chipper.
This was a flashback to a darker period of his life, a moment in time when his existence had shattered into a million shards of black obsidian, raining down sharp destruction on anyone foolish enough to get inside the blast radius. This was only an echo of that crystalline epoch of glittering dreams obliterated, but Joshua felt the impact in his soul with the same intensity with which he had felt the physical blast from the bomb a mere matter of moments ago. He had been marked. Cursed. The pairing of the hurts, one emotional, one physical, were ganging up to tell him something. The message was clear.
Humpty was beating him. And there was nothing he could do about it.
CHAPTER 14
Had knew there were all kinds of reasons why he should still be with Joshua and Agent Cooper right now. They’d just finished almost getting blown up, for one. Joshua was due for a complete derailment, for two. And more time could be spent back at the nature center observing, taking pictures, categorizing information on the crime-scene-turned-blast-sight.
But he couldn’t be there any longer. The paramedics had bandaged up the cut on his face, as well as checking out Coop’s leg and Joshua’s possible concussion. They were all fine.
The local cops, however, were not.
It wasn’t like Had was inexperienced when it came to death. Growing up with a mortician as a father had given him a strong stomach for things that made other people squirm. There were only so many dead bodies you could be around before you realized that they were just meat.
But those weren’t usually people Had was talking to just moments before. And the aftermath, by the time it got to the mortuary, wasn’t as bloody as what had awaited them in the rubble after the explosion.
He wasn’t running away. He definitely was not running away. There were just things that needed to be done in connection with local law enforcement that it would be best to handle in person. Phone calls were so impersonal. There was no other reason for Had to be headed out to the police station in Walcott.
No other reason at all.
The station made Had homesick. The police department in Ann Arbor was bigger than this one, but up to this point, the other departments he’d liaised with had been larger and more organized than what he was used to. Here, he could feel himself relax. The building was nothing more than a glorified box with a roof that had been plopped down across the street from the fire station. No effort had gone into making it look pretty. Function over form all the way, baby.
As he walked through the entrance to the precinct building, a young brunette looked up from where she had her head bent over a file. Her eyes were a brilliant green that almost seemed like they were shedding their own light, they were so bright. She smiled a welcome.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I’m Officer Hadderly, with—”
“Oh, Had, right?” Her smile broadened.
“Um. Yes. How did you—?”
“Small office. Everyone talks.” She shrugged her shoulders, an almost-apology. “I’m Reggie. I work here part-time.”
“Reggie. Nice to meet you,” Had answered, shaking her outstretched hand. “What do you do here?”
“Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I dabble in forensics, but there’s not much call for that here. More of a hobby. Mostly I’m the I.T. girl.” She wrinkled up her nose. “To be honest, there’s not much call for that, either.”
Had chuckled. “I know what that’s like.”
“Oh, come on,” Reggie swatted at his arm. “You’re working with the FBI on a big murder case. You can’t know what it’s like to be stuck in a Podunk place like this.”
“You kidding? Up ‘til last week, I’d just barely been out of Michigan. I work in Ann Arbor. It’s bigger than Walcott, but it’s not huge by a long shot.”
“Come on,” she snorted. “We have a population of under two thousand. I’m pretty sure Ann Arbor’s a metropolis compared to us. I can’t even find indie music here, except for on Amazon.”
“You like indie music?” Had asked, enthused. “What groups?”
“Of Monsters and Men. Neon Trees. The Shins.”
Okay. It was possible that he was falling in love here. Reggie was stunning, her hair almost midnight black against skin that was the color of cream. She was buttoned down, but had an edge to her that was intriguing.
His phone rang. Psycho.
Seriously. Did his mama have some kind of bizarre radar? How she managed to know when he was talking to a woman was beyond him, but she had a knack for it that he would swear bordered on black magic.
“Sorry. It’s my mama. Gotta take this.” He waved an apology to Reggie.
“Don’t worry about it. Your mom calls, you take it.”
One more mark in the plus column, as far as Had was concerned. He pushed the “talk” button, and his mother’s voice flowed through the speaker.
“Honey, I’m startin’ to get worried about you. It’s been almost a week, and you haven’t been over to the house.”
Had sighed. “Mama. I’m working. And don’t tell me you didn’t call my boss and ask about this.”
“Well of course I did. What kind of mother would I be if I just sat here on my fanny?” She blew out a raspberry at him.
There was no response to that question that wouldn’t get Had in trouble, so he just gave a noncommittal grunt. He needn’t have worried. She motored through without waiting for a response.
“But I don’t believe a word that comes out of that man’s mouth. You know he was having an affair with Mrs. Johnson from the congregation?”
“Mama, that’s just—”
“Look, I don’t care. It’s none of my business,” she said, her tone pious. Then she turned on a dime. “Now, sweetie, you say you’re out huntin’ a killer? Fine. As long as you keep looking for someone that can give me grandbabies while you’re doin’ it. They have women out where you are, right?”
Had snuck a glance at Reggie. “Yes, Mama, they do. But—”
“But nothing. You know what the pastor said. Single men over 25 are a menace to society.”
“That wasn’t him; it was a quote. From some Mormon church leader from a long time ago. I looked it up.”
“What?” she gasped, her tone horrified. “But we’re Southern Baptists.”
Oh, great. This was getting better by the moment. Mama on religion was even worse than Mama talking about women. It was time to beat a hasty retreat.
“Okay. Gotta go.” Had hung up before his mother had a chance to talk about the pastor some more, or make him put any woman in the general vicinity on the phone with her. She’d do it, there was no doubt in Had’s mind. Mostly because she’d pulled that on him more than once already.
And right now, he didn’t want his Mama messing with his mojo.
Turning back to Reggie, he saw her wipe a smile off of her face. Yeah, it was pretty funny, now that he thought about how his side of the conversation must’ve sounded to her.
“That just ruined any chance I might’ve had with you, didn’t it?” he asked with a wry grin.
“Oh, I dunno,” Reggie answered, her eyes crinkling up at the corners. “A man that loves his mom is pretty damn cute.”
“Is that right?” Had leaned on the counter. “And what are your feelings on Latin dance?”
“Er. What?”
This didn’t bode well. “Latin dance? You know. Salsa. Merengue.” Nothing. He groped for another, more popularized example. “The Lambada.”
“Oh, I don’t dance any of those.”
“Really? Not even the Lambada?” Had could feel the chemistry seeping away.
“Never heard of that one, actually.”
“You’ve never…” he choked a bit on the statement. This was bad. Okay. Let’s try that one again. “You’ve never heard of the Lambada? The forbidden dance?”
“Sorry.”
A sigh slipped out of him before he could stop it. Reggie arched an eyebrow at that. This was going downhill fast, at least as far as any kind of potential relationship was concerned. Ah well. Perhaps it was not meant to be.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just this thing of mine.” He moved to change the subject. “I was actually coming in to see if we could set up an interrogation room with some of your guys. I just got word from Officer Chance over at the truck stop that he’s managed to find a couple of the suspects we’re trying to track down.”
“Right,” Reggie replied, her brow creasing. “We were talking about that earlier. Were you wanting to set up here, or over at the Iowa 80?”
That was excellent. Exactly what Joshua had been looking for earlier. “Well, if there’s a place there that would work, that’d be perfect.”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah. They have this area back behind the trucker’s lounge that would be perfect.”
“Oh, hey,” Had said. “I’ve got an idea.” He pulled out his phone and opened the Facebook messenger app. He’d added Preston, and they’d chatted back and forth a few times, mostly about curling. The guy had some wacky ideas about the Spirit of Curling. Must be the whole Detroit thing.
“I just texted someone at the truck stop. He should be able to help us coordinate the whole thing.”
“Perfect,” she answered. “Oh, there’s no observation room, but we could set up a video feed without any trouble.”
“Would that be you?” Had asked. He had a brief moment of imagining himself teaching Reggie how to dance the merengue during their down time. It was not going well, even in his mind’s eye.
What a freaking shame.
“Yeah. I usually help with any of the tech stuff that way. Audio visual’s totally included in I.T., didn’t you know?” She winked at him.
Well, at least the afternoon wasn’t a complete waste. They were getting an interrogation room right where they were doing their searching for suspects, he’d made a new friend, and he’d managed to stay away from the aftermath of the explosion. Not too shabby a list of accomplishments, even if he wasn’t all that proud of the last one.
The romance angle would just have to wait.
* * *
Sariah felt edgy.
Her ears still sounded with a high-pitched whine from the explosion that morning, and her ankle throbbed where the alcohol monitor had cut into the flesh of her calf. Getting tossed into the ground with that amount of force had not been the most pleasant experience of her life. It had also given her one more reason to be pissed off about still wearing the monitor.
And then she thought of the dead bodies that had surrounded them at the site, the corpses of the policemen that had been helping them track down a killer, and her complaints about her ankle seemed not just pathetic, but downright offensive. The stakes were getting higher by the moment, and Sariah could feel the weight of her inexperience.
Her train of thought was interrupted by the puppy nipping at the monitor on her ankle. She growled and barked at it, then looked up at Sariah with her head cocked to one side and her tongue lolling out. Cute.
She looked over at Joshua, who should have been minding the little devil of a mutt, but he was chatting with the young part-time policewoman who was setting up their audiovisual for the interrogation room. It was the first time Sariah could remember Joshua engaging with anyone on purpose. How she felt about it wasn’t as clear, especially with Bella doing what she could to tear the device off of Sariah’s leg.
> At least they now had some suspects in custody. Officer Chance from the Walcott office had nabbed a third while they were setting up the space. Had was off with the officer, keeping tabs on the three individuals, two of whom had made the trip up to Cedar Ridge.
One of the other cops from the station, Officer Reggie Black, had come over to help convert one of the back rooms of the truck stop into a functional sweatbox. She looked up at Sariah from the installation she was performing.
“Could you step into the observation room and see if the feed’s working?”
Joshua stepped forward. “I’ll do it.”
“Hey, thanks, Joshua.” Reggie smiled at him, a dazzling display of white teeth that was made all the more beautiful by the fact that it seemed to be genuine and unselfconscious. Bella trotted over to her, and Reggie reached down and scratched her behind the ears, while the puppy’s tail did what it could to wag itself off of Bella’s butt.
Sariah watched as Joshua darted into the other room. She was pretty sure she’d never seen him dart anywhere.
Strange.
He’d been crabby all day, and it had only gotten worse since the explosion. Now he seemed attentive, almost respectful. And it had started the second Reggie walked in.
Not a complete shocker, Sariah guessed. The girl was stunning. Flawless skin, radiant eyes, hair with a sheen that made it look like she had just stepped out of a commercial for deep conditioner.
But this was Joshua. Not only was almost twice her age, he was still beating himself up for the loss of his family. Not exactly the type that she’d expect to get twitterpated over a girl.
“So, what’s the deal here?” Reggie’s voice intruded on Sariah’s thoughts.
“Sorry. What?” She shook her head to clear her thoughts out. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you guys are tracking a serial killer, right?” Reggie waited for Sariah’s head nod as confirmation before she continued. “But Joshua’s not an agent, and neither is Had.”
“No. Had’s a cop and Joshua… well, he’s a special consultant.”
“Exactly. So… are you like hard as nails or something?” Reggie’s question was direct, but her manner was almost shy. Like she felt that she was treading on thin ice.
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