Wren Delacroix Series Box Set

by V. J. Chambers

  But they were usually cheerful about it. Some of them viewed it almost like a vacation, away from the stress of their typical routine.

  Reilly assigned a guy named Abelson to come with her, but Wren had a perverse streak and ended up facilitating a switch with a woman named Dorothy Lane. Abelson had to get home to his wife and kids that night. She could tell he was pretty shaken up from the scene they’d found that morning. He had a daughter only a few years younger.

  Anyway, Wren was pretty sure that Reilly had assigned Abelson to do it because he was a big, burly guy, able to intimidate anyone who might bother them on the mean streets. But she and Lane could handle themselves. It would be fine.

  Still, she was going to enjoy the look on Reilly’s face when he found out that Abelson hadn’t gone with her after all.

  Lane insisted on driving. She said that she’d been to Baltimore lots of times, and she knew her way around. Wren was fine with that. She got into the passenger’s seat and Lane got into the driver’s seat, and they set off.

  Lane didn’t want to talk about the case. “Too spooky,” she said. “No offense. I know you were brought up in that religion or whatever, but it freaks me out.”

  “No, you’re not wrong,” Wren said. “It is a little spooky.”

  Lane wanted to gossip about Reilly instead. “He was married, you know that? Just got divorced.”

  “Yeah, I think I knew that,” said Wren.

  “Marriage broke up because he and Maliah Wright were banging.”

  “Still are,” said Wren.

  “Really? I never even see them talking to each other in the office.”

  “Well, I saw her at Reilly’s house in the morning once,” said Wren.

  “No shit!” Lane turned wide eyes on Wren. “I heard he ended it to try to save his marriage.”

  Watch the road, thought Wren.

  Lane turned back to the road. “Well, you know, she’s married too.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Wren.

  “Yeah, but her husband is clueless,” said Lane. “And it’s awful, because everyone knows. I mean, you and I, we both know. I bet everyone who steps foot inside that task force headquarters knows. It’s going to get back to her husband. She’s going to be screwed.”

  “Yeah,” said Wren quietly. She felt uncomfortable thinking about Reilly like this, but also vaguely comforted. She’d slept with Hawk, which was clearly a stupid move, but at least Reilly wasn’t immune from making his own really stupid mistakes. An affair with a married woman? Bad call. Anyone would agree.

  “You ever cheat on anyone?” said Lane.

  “Me?” said Wren. “I, uh, I’ve never been married.”

  “Neither have I,” said Lane. “But I cheated on my boyfriend once. It was just this bad night. I got crazy drunk. I didn’t care what I did. I really regretted it in the morning. I told him about it, and he was devastated. He left me.” She sighed.

  “I’m, um, I’m sorry,” said Wren.

  “So, I take it you’ve never done it?”

  “Well…” Wren considered how to answer. “I don’t really tend to have boyfriends. Not long term, anyway. If it feels like it’s starting to get serious, that’s typically my cue to bail.”

  Lane laughed. “Yeah, should have realized that by looking at you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Girl, you wear the same ripped jeans to work every day, along with that leather jacket, and you’ve always got that get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way expression on your face, holding your coffee cup up like a weapon. Ain’t nobody going to mess with you.”

  Wren licked her lips, unsure of how to respond.

  But Lane was laughing, so Wren laughed too.

  “Oh, come on, you’re a badass and you know it,” said Lane.

  Did Wren know that?

  “Let’s go to fucking Baltimore,” said Lane.

  “Hell, yeah,” said Wren.

  “Just so you know, someone comes at us, I’m hiding behind you.”

  * * *

  When they got to Roger Green’s apartment, the door was cracked open again. This time, Wren didn’t try to be cautious about it. She banged on the door. “Roger? Hey, it’s Wren Delacroix. I’m coming in.”

  No answer from within.

  Wren tried one more time. “Roger?” She pushed open the door and was stunned to see that the place was completely empty. Last time she’d been here, the kitchen had been cluttered with dirty dishes, but now, it was cleared out. The place hadn’t been cleaned yet. There were stains in the sink, marks on the counter, dirt on the floor. But everything was gone.

  “Roger?” Wren called again, in a quieter voice.

  “What’s going on?” said Lane.

  Wren looked around. The rooms were all completely bare. “I don’t know. It’s like this guy moved out or something. I can’t imagine him having the energy to clean up all his trash, though. He acted as though he barely had it in him to drag himself to the bathroom.”

  “Who is this guy again?”

  “He was in the Children,” said Wren. “He’s sort of a suspect in the murders. If he left, though, well, that probably moves him higher up on the list.”

  “Excuse me?” called a distant voice. “Is someone in here?”

  Wren and Lane made their way back to the entrance.

  A man was standing there. “This is private propert—” He took in Lane’s uniform. “Sorry, Officer. What can I do for you?”

  “The man who lives here, Roger Green?” said Wren. “Where is he?”

  “Hell if I know,” said the man. “His lease was up, and I thought I was going to have a fight on my hands to get him out of here, but he told me he’d be happy to leave. Said he figured his security deposit was a lost cause. He was right.”

  “He left behind a lot of trash,” said Wren.

  “Not just that,” said the landlord. “He drew all over the floor and the walls and the ceiling in that bedroom back there. I’m going to have to paint. The walls aren’t that big a deal, but the floor and ceiling…” He shook his head. “That little bastard.”

  “Drew?” said Lane. “Like pictures?”

  “You want to see?” said the landlord. “Come with me.” He led them down the hallway to the far bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Drawn in the corner of the room was a hasty sketch of a man with antlers. His eyes and mouth were big, black scribbled holes, like doorways to madness. All around the man, scrawled with a shaky hand were the words, The Crimson Ram wants in. It was written in tall letters, short letters, slanting letters, thick letters, thin letters.

  TheCrimsonRamwantsintheCrimsonRamwantsintheCrimsonRamwantsintheCrimsonRamwantsintheCrimsonRamwantsintheCrimsonRam—

  Wren backed away, because she felt as though something dark and unseen was somehow getting inside her, seeping in through the soft open spots on her face—her mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears—tunneling into her, pounding with her pulsing blood just under her skin.

  Wren backed up, going faster, nearly tripping over her feet.

  Seconds later, she was out of the apartment, panting, and Lane was there too, also out of breath, her expression stunned and disturbed.

  The landlord came out too. He shut the door behind them. “I could swear I keep locking this damned door,” he muttered.

  “I, uh, I guess you don’t have a forwarding address?” said Wren.

  “No,” said the landlord. “I don’t.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Reilly tapped his foot against the ground outside of the fence that surrounded Kyler Morris’s house and glared at the speaker above the buzzer. He was in the middle of another fruitless conversation with Kyler’s wife, and he was beginning to wish he’d gone to Baltimore. “Listen, ma’am, if you can tell me with certainty that your husband was home all of last night, that’s going to make me feel a lot better about everything. All I’m trying to do is see if I can’t eliminate him from an investigation.”

  “Investigation into wh
at?” said the woman. “Something bad?”

  “The worst. Serial murder. Of children.”

  “What?” She was aghast. “He never did anything like that.”

  “Let me in, I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s not here right now. He went into town.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” said Reilly. “Why don’t you let me in, and let me look around a little bit?”

  “I don’t know. Kyler wouldn’t like that.”

  “Look, you’re saying he would never kill children. If that’s true, I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long for you to convince me of it. Why don’t you let me in, and we’ll chat.”

  “That’s all? Just chat?”

  “Just chat,” he said.

  “You’re not going to arrest him?’

  “I can’t arrest him. I don’t have a warrant. I don’t have evidence tying him to any crime.” He was here to look for it, of course, but he didn’t need to say that to her.

  “Really? Is that true? You have to have a warrant?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A long pause.

  “Unlock this fence, and let me in, please,” said Reilly.

  “Well, all right,” she agreed. “But only for a little while. You have to be gone before Kyler gets back, or he’ll be furious.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” said Reilly, although he couldn’t promise anything. If he did find incriminating evidence in the house, he wasn’t going anywhere. Again, that wasn’t something that that he wanted to share with her, however, so he chose his words carefully.

  The fence opened and Reilly stepped inside.

  Now, he could see the house, a sturdy looking Cape Cod with dormer windows. A woman was standing at the entrance, holding the door open. She looked diminutive, dwarfed by the size of the house, which seemed poised to swallow her up. The house was clean and functional, but there were no niceties—no flower gardens in front or decorative welcome signs. It was bland. Institutional.

  He climbed the steps onto the porch. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Morris.”

  “You can call me Camilla,” said the woman. “So, what do you want to do exactly? Just talk?”

  “I’d like to look around a little too,” he said. “Would that be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, let’s start here. Was your husband home last night?”

  “Uh, well, he got in late, but that happens a lot.”

  “How late?”

  “I don’t know. I was asleep. When I know he’s going to come home late, I sleep in the guest room. Otherwise, he wakes me up when he comes in and I never get back to sleep.”

  “Are we talking late, like after-midnight late, or late, like four-in-the-morning late?”

  “I really don’t know,” she said.

  He nodded. Okay, so no alibi for last night. “And you say he stays out like that often?”

  “Well, not every night or anything.”

  “Three times a week? Four times?”

  “About that,” she said.

  Reilly didn’t react, but internally, he was starting to get excited. This house was well guarded and isolated. It wasn’t particularly close to the sites where the bodies had been left, or where the girls had been kidnapped, but it was close enough that it was feasible as a place to take them to kill them. “Is there a place in the house that your husband doesn’t like you to enter? Does he have a workshop or a man cave or something like that?”

  “Well, yeah, he tells me to stay out of the basement,” she said. “He even put a padlock on it, but I found the key and made a copy. He’s not as clever as he thinks he is about hiding it.”

  Reilly’s heart did flip-flops. “He put a padlock on it?” he repeated, struggling to keep his voice even. This is it! It’s him! I got him!

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Camilla, I’m going to need you to let me into that basement.”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know. If he found out, he’d be so angry.”

  “Camilla, let me ask you a question. If it turned out that your husband had been living a double life, and he’d been hiding the fact that he liked to strangle little girls for fun, would you want to help him keep that hidden?”

  “He’s not doing that! He wouldn’t.”

  “He seems a little controlling, your husband.” Okay, Caius, come on, don’t push her too hard. You might make her fold up and kick you the hell out. Be nice.

  But Camilla just looked down at her hands. “He wasn’t like this in the beginning, I swear. If you’d told me that I was going to end up locked up in this house, not allowed to go anywhere—”

  “He doesn’t let you leave?”

  Camilla bit down on her bottom lip. “I’ll let you into the basement.”

  “Thank you, Camilla.” He gave her his widest smile, the smile that used to melt Janessa before she hated him.

  She nodded, but she looked nervous.

  He went with her when she went to get a key, which she had taped underneath the crockpot in the kitchen, explaining it was the last thing that Kyler would ever bother to touch. She gave it to him.

  He unlocked the padlock into the basement.

  The door opened onto a dark pit, bare wooden stairs descending into nothingness.

  Reilly took a deep breath. He wanted to catch this guy, all right, but he might be going into a killer’s lair now. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the place where five little girls had been drugged and killed. He shoved that key into his pocket without thinking about it.

  “There’s a light.” Camillia was whispering.

  He flipped on the light switch. Too-yellow light bathed the steps, a buzzing noise overhead. He could make out a rug and an easy chair in the basement, a big TV mounted to the wall. There was a big freezer too.

  “He told me he sold that freezer,” said Camilla.

  Reilly got a funny jolt in his stomach. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to follow that thought through to its conclusion. But now, he was moving down the steps, almost against his volition, as if he was connected to a string that was tugging him down into the basement. He couldn’t seem to resist. He went down one step, and then another, and then the next.

  Eventually, he was at the bottom of the steps.

  The basement was mostly bare. There were concrete block walls and a poured-concrete floor, and there were too-cloudy windows high up near the ceiling, one on each side of the room.

  There was a pegboard on one side of the room, tools hanging on it, neatly in rows.

  But Reilly went straight for the freezer. That same irresistible force was leading him there. He went to the freezer and he opened the lid, and it made a scratchy noise as it swung open.

  He was hit with a blast of cold air.

  The freezer was full of ice packs and bags of frozen chicken. But peering out between the bags was something that looked like a human finger.

  Reilly let out a little noise, something guttural, something strangled.

  “What?” said Camilla. She was behind him.

  Reilly knew he needed to reach forward and move the bags out of the way, so that he could see what that was in the freezer, if it was attached to a hand or not, if it was really a finger. But he couldn’t seem to move. He gaped into the freezer, its chill pouring a frozen fog into the basement, and he didn’t move at all.

  “What is it?” said Camilla.

  And then the door at the top of the steps slammed closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Wren and Lane got back to headquarters right around quitting time. Maliah was already packed up and on her way out. As she walked past them in the hall, she gave them a look, as if she knew that they’d been talking about her behind her back.

  Wren felt guilty, so she struck up a conversation about the only thing she could think of to talk about with Maliah. Reilly. “Uh, you seen Reilly? He back yet?”

  “No, haven’t seen him,” said Maliah, narrowing her eyes at Wren. “Why don�
��t you call him if you want to talk to him?”

  “I could do that,” said Wren. “Excellent idea. I will definitely take your advice.”

  Maliah gave her a weird look and stalked off.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Lane burst out laughing. “Oh, my God, you could not be more awkward! What the hell was that?”

  Wren shook herself. “I don’t know. I’m better with suspects than real people, I guess.”

  “I sure hope so,” said Lane, still laughing.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” said Wren. “I mean, maybe it was awkward that we met while she was climbing out of Reilly’s bed, but I don’t hold it against her.”

  “Oh, come on. You judge her,” said Lane. “I judge her.” She shook her head. “Her poor husband.”

  “Maybe her husband’s a dick,” said Wren, shrugging. “Maybe he deserves it.”

  “Then dump his ass, don’t fool around behind his back.”

  “Point,” said Wren. She got out her phone. “Okay, I’m calling Reilly. Let’s stop talking about this.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” said Lane. “I’m picking up something out of the refrigerator in the break room, and then I’m heading home.”

  “Okay, great,” Wren said. “Thanks for your help today.”

  “Sure thing.” Lane breezed past her down the hall.

  Wren ducked into her office and dialed Reilly. She clutched the phone while it rang.

  And rang.

  And went to voicemail.

  She hung up without leaving a message. Instead, she shot him a text. Back from Baltimore. Where are you? What should we be doing right now?

  She’d been up since the dawn, and she was exhausted, but she was seized by the certainty that they were running out of time. This killer was speeding up. They couldn’t be sure when he’d strike again. Every moment they wasted could be a moment that might save a life.

  She dropped her phone on the desk and went out into the bullpen, which was what Reilly called it. It was a wreck right now. Even though Reilly said they could organize things, make a board for their suspects, it was basically just covered in boxes of files and empty coffee cups.