The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2)

by Dot Hutchison

  Sterling takes the bagged bouquet to their car and puts it in a lockbox in the trunk. Then she pulls out a stepladder and a pair of toolboxes.

  I look at Archer.

  He smiles again and tucks his small notebook into his coat pocket. “Finney said your mother’s company approved the cameras; we’ll get them set up while we’re here.”

  “Boxes are in there,” I tell him, pointing at the coat closet. “They’re a brand your Agent Finnegan recommended.”

  “Front and back, any other doors?”

  “No.”

  I walk Sterling through the house to the back door. Mum and I honestly kind of forgot there was a back door until Finnegan asked to check if any flowers were there. There weren’t, and the fence makes that yard a little difficult to get to discreetly, but it makes more sense to have a camera there than not.

  Just in case.

  From her toolbox, Sterling pulls a rolled-up kit that hooks neatly over the door like a wreath hanger. It has all sorts of pockets on it, so all her tools are in easy reach when she’s up on the stepladder. It’s kind of genius, really.

  Archer, however, does not have one, so I shrug into my coat and join him on the front step, and when he points to a thing, I hand it to him. Our kitchen stepstool is sturdy enough for me and Mum, but it creaks under the agent whenever he shifts his weight.

  “I studied your sister’s case at the academy,” he says after a while, the wires for the camera tangled through his fingers.

  I should probably respond, at least make some kind of polite acknowledgment.

  I don’t.

  He doesn’t seem put off by that. “They have us go through some open unsolveds, so we know before we get to the field that we can’t settle every case. Hand me those pliers, please? The needle-nose?”

  I do.

  “You must really miss your sister.”

  “It’s not something I like to discuss.”

  His hands still. “I guess not,” he mutters. For a while he works in silence. One of the neighbors across the street waves as she hauls her twin toddlers to her van. I wave back, even though she isn’t looking anymore, because one of the boys is. Archer clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “For?”

  “It was inappropriate of me to get personal. I was just trying to make conversation.”

  “Conversation is the weather, Agent Archer, or traffic. Spring training. I don’t really need to know that you’ve probably seen naked photos of my dead sister.” I watch the van pull out of the drive. The other twin presses his face against the window in an unsuccessful raspberry; I give him a little wave all his own. “I’m aware the academy uses the case as a teaching tool; Agent Hanoverian warned us a few years ago.”

  “But you gave permission, or your mother did.”

  “We didn’t. We weren’t asked. The FBI is allowed to use its own cases to train new agents; they don’t have to have permission from victims or families. Let me guess: you found the case fascinating and you’re grateful for the chance to work on it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Don’t be grateful. That means being glad terrible things are happening.”

  “Hanoverian lectures at the academy from time to time. He’s pretty big on gratitude.” He points at an Allen wrench, so I hand it to him.

  “Do you listen to what he’s grateful for?”

  “Finney didn’t tell us you were feisty.”

  I eye the stepstool, then decide there’s no way to kick it out from under him without risking injury to myself. Vic would be disappointed if I broke an agent; Eddison would be pissed if I broke myself. “I’m going to check on Sterling.”

  When I carefully open the back door, Sterling glances at me and shakes her head. “I told him not to bring it up.”

  “So you studied it too?”

  “When I was in middle school, my best friend and I walked home one day to find her father getting arrested for a series of murders. What he did to those women . . . the day we studied him, I went home and spent the rest of the night throwing up, because I used to spend the night at his house once or twice a week. I’ve never told her.”

  “Why not?” Would it make a difference, coming from a friend?

  “It shaped her life enough; why should I add to it?” Dusting her hands, she unhooks her kit and steps down the ladder. “I’d guess you already live your sister’s case every day. Do you need me to talk to him?”

  “Not this time. We’ll see if it happens again.”

  I appreciate it, though, that she’s willing. She looks young, probably not long out of the academy, and taking a senior partner to task can’t be easy.

  “Let’s make sure your computer can communicate with the cameras, and then we’ll be out of your hair.” With a small, sideways kind of smile, she hands me a business card. “That has my cell and email, if you need something and Finney’s busy.”

  “We’re going to get along just fine, Agent Sterling.”

  Archer’s the one who actually gets everything linked up, but Sterling shows me how to scan through and isolate time stamps, and how to grab a screenshot from the stream and attach it directly to email without having to save it first. Once I show her I’m comfortable with it, they gear up to go.

  “You know,” Archer says abruptly, as Sterling gets the tools back in the SUV, “if you’re going to hide your head in the sand about the other cases, you should be grateful other people have studied them. The Bureau’s not up in arms just because someone sent you flowers. They have meaning.”

  “No one’s sending me flowers,” I tell him, aware of Sterling’s watchful eye. “They’re delivering them to my door. If I didn’t think that meant something, I would never have mentioned them.”

  They pull out of the drive a little after noon. Eddison isn’t going to be here until six or so, depending on traffic out of Denver, which gives me a lot of time and not enough schoolwork or focus to fill it.

  Here’s the thing about purple-throated calla lilies: the second known victim, Zoraida Bourret, had them framing her head like the arch in a Mucha print. Her crossed hands kept a single lily clasped to her sternum.

  Every victim has a flower, and it has a meaning, something that ties it to the girl in the killer’s mind. Two days before she died, Chavi wore a crown of silk chrysanthemums, and when I found her, there were real ones through her hair. Easter morning, when Zoraida helped corral her younger brothers and sisters for a family photo, she wore a single calla lily as a corsage on her white Easter dress.

  I don’t know what the flowers mean to the bastard, but I do know that Eddison wouldn’t be so scared if any other families got deliveries like this. Whether this is a fan or the killer, it’s meant for me.

  That’s something Archer in his I-studied-the-case-so-I-must-be-an-expert arrogance probably doesn’t get.

  Eddison does; I can’t help but wonder if he’ll mention it.

  I heat up a can of soup for lunch and pour it into a travel mug. A lady in Starbucks last week was telling her phone really loudly about the new stained-glass windows her church just put in and how beautiful they are. At the time, I didn’t particularly appreciate having to listen to the conversation; I might be a little good with it now. Investigating the windows sounds like a perfect way to fill these hours.

  Jonquils followed by calla lilies. It’s hard to call something a sequence with only two entries on the list, but so far it follows the order of the murders, and it follows the order of the deliveries in San Diego. No one starts a pattern with the intent of abandoning it partway through; if something’s going to happen to me, it won’t be until the flowers run out. I’m safe enough for now, even in churches.

  With my camera bag over one shoulder, I pull up the address on my phone and start walking, sipping every so often at the soup. I finish lunch before I reach the church, a yellow-faced monstrosity that cannot possibly be the right place. It’s one of those churches that sacrificed character for size, large and looming and
more than a bit soulless. I’m not Christian—I’m not really anything—but growing up beside the little grey stone church in Boston gave me certain opinions of what the buildings ought to feel like.

  There are windows in the building, tall and narrow and completely colorless. What the hell was that lady talking about then?

  I stand for a bit in the parking lot, the temperature fairly comfortable in the midtwenties, and shit, what is wrong with me that I now find that comfortable?

  “You lost, honey?” calls a woman leaning against a side door, pale smoke curling upward from the cigarette in one hand.

  “Maybe,” I answer, walking up to her. “I heard someone talking about new windows, and—”

  “Oh, that’s over in the chapel.” She waves her hand, accidentally trailing the smoke into my face. “Here, I’ll show you. One of the church founders got pissy when they put up the new building, so he bequeathed money that could only go into making a traditional chapel. He didn’t like the way the church was modernizing.”

  The woman leads me through what can only be called a complex of buildings, all faced in that ugly yellow stone, but over the curve of the parking lot, and after a grassy stretch, there’s a little red-brick building tucked up against the woods, and holy hell, there’s probably as much glass as brick, if not more.

  The woman smiles at me, or at my awestruck expression, and flaps her hand toward the door. “It’s unlocked, honey. Take as much time as you need.”

  Setting the empty mug down on the front step, I pull out my camera and pace around the outside of the chapel. Most of the windows are bigger than I am, intricate and graceful without being cluttered. I’m used to churches where the pictures are either biblical scenes and figures or complete abstracts, but these are mostly nature based. One has mountains and clouds, stretching out into the distance. Another has swirls of white through a dozen shades of blue and green, the rush of water giving way to tall trees in the next window, and great bunches of flowers in the one after that.

  Between the large windows, small rosettes maybe twice the size of my head are stacked vertically in threes, a little more traditional in the kaleidoscopes of color, the leading beautifully detailed. Even when I switch over to black and white, the richness of the colors still manages to shade in.

  I’m not sure how many times I circle the building before collecting my mug and heading inside. There, where the sunlight spills colors across the floor, it’s a little more chaotic, the colors from the north and west windows all layering over each other and canceling each other in fragments of clean light. There are no chairs, no pews, just a quartet of velvet-cushioned kneelers made of dark wood.

  Chavi would have both loved and hated this tiny chapel with its mess of color and light.

  I find the strange angles, the ones where the dust glitters and dances and makes the light look tangible, the places where the colors pool on the stone in a way that forms new images recognizable only because we’re human and so very strange.

  Eventually, I sit down on one of the kneeler-cushions, tilting my head back against the wood, and soak in that feeling that reminds me so much of Chavi’s quest to capture the light and color on paper. As much as it frustrated her, she would never have given up pursuing her own version of the Grail, because sometimes it’s the quest that holds the meaning, not the reward.

  When I lean forward to nestle my camera back into its case, my pocket crinkles.

  Oh, right, Inara’s letter. From a week ago. Somehow I completely forgot about it in all the fuss.

  I should probably apologize for that.

  Dear Priya,

  Thanks for writing back; I have to admit, I feel a bit less like an idiot now. And less of an imposition.

  Still flailing, though.

  As much as the general public knows about the Garden, there’s so much more that they don’t. I have a feeling most of it’s going to come out in trial, and I already know some pieces are going to get very problematic reactions. The Gardener’s lawyers are trying to insist that I be brought up on charges. Being a runaway isn’t a crime, but using a false ID to work is, and if they could prove I stole cash from my grandmother’s house after she died, I’m sure they’d be on that, too.

  I’m honestly surprised they haven’t tried to claim I murdered my Gran, as if a woman who did nothing but smoke and drink in front of the television couldn’t possibly drop dead without help.

  And I get it, I really do. I’m a powerful witness. I’m articulate and not overtly emotional, and I can go a long way in speaking for the girls who aren’t here to do so themselves. Anything the defense can do to discredit me would help cast shadows on all of us.

  Do you ever feel like pop culture has lied to you?

  When I read articles or watch segments on the Garden and the investigation, Inara always comes off as calm and completely in control of herself. She doesn’t make abrupt turns in conversation, never gives interviewers a chance to be confused by what she’s saying.

  I wonder if this is her being unguarded, giving up some of that control. Or maybe just setting it aside, letting herself rest until she needs it again.

  I know what that feels like.

  We have all these movies and shows obsessed with the justice system. They give this impression that everything happens immediately, the trial and the investigation happening at the same time, cops desperately getting some new piece of significant evidence to the prosecutor just in time for the big reveal and dramatic closing statements. They make it look like a conviction is something the victims have in hand to help them start the grieving process.

  It’s bullshit, of course, but until now, I didn’t realize just how far it is from the truth.

  Thirty years of crimes causes a lot of delays, especially if the asshole is rich and has a really good legal team. The destruction of the Garden—it never occurred to me that could make things harder. It was our way out. It also destroyed the code-locked doors that kept us prisoner, so the defense is trying to claim that we were free to come and go and we chose to stay. The prosecution is trying to put a name (and proof) to every victim, but some of the bodies were destroyed in the explosion and some weren’t even in the Garden, but out on the property. You’d think the rest of the bodies on display would be sufficient.

  Vic is trying so hard not to let any of us get discouraged, but he told us recently to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we could see the anniversary of our escape before the actual trial starts.

  Even if they only sought justice for those of us who’ve survived, they have so much proof, and it might not even matter. Eddison says the defense has a whole roster of doctors and shrinks ready to delay things further.

  Eddison actually scolded me once for wishing the Gardener had died in the explosion. He said a trial was the way for us all to get justice.

  Is that what any of this is? Justice? Girls afraid to leave their homes for all the attention they’re getting, harassed at school and work and therapy? A boy who swears being in love absolves him of all sin? A man who might escape sentencing to live in an expensive nursing facility the rest of his life?

  People keep telling me to be patient, to wait for justice.

  Even if he gets convicted, even if he gets sentenced to life without parole or even death, how is it justice? We have to keep opening our wounds for everyone, bleeding again and again and again, knowing full well what he did to us; how is a verdict of guilty going to change any of that?

  What kind of justice puts a twelve-year-old girl on the stand before court and cameras and makes her talk about being raped?

  If they found the man who killed Chavi, do you think it would help you? Is this just me being cynical?

  I really am trying to believe in this justice thing, but I can’t help but think how much easier this would be if all three MacIntosh men had died that night.

  If there’s not enough left of Chavi for her to care about justice, why should the rest of us need it so badly? What can we even do wi
th it?

  I don’t have an answer for Inara; I don’t even have an answer for me.

  But I wonder, sometimes, if it had been me that died that night, if it had been Chavi left behind to mourn and change: given how much she loved the idea of grace, would that be enough to preserve her belief in justice?

  Eddison pulls into the parking lot, looks up at the stone chapel, and shudders. To his dying day, he will never understand why Priya doesn’t hate churches after how she found her sister’s body. He knows the no-longer-a-church back in Boston held dear memories for both of them, knows that she looks at the windows and thinks of sunny afternoons with Chavi, but he can’t quite wrap his brain around her continued love for little churches with great windows.

  Priya walks out in her long winter coat, the one she bought purely because it sweeps dramatically down the stairs like a Disney villain and makes her mother laugh. Those two have a relationship far outside his ability to explain. She ducks into the passenger side, tucking her camera bag and a stainless-steel mug around the base of the seat before she sits. “Welcome to Colorado, population: frozen.”

  “What makes it worse than D.C.?”

  “Mountains.”

  He watches as she leans her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. “You okay?”

  “Tired. Nightmares.” She cracks her neck, settles almost sideways against the window so she can see him. “Getting kind of pissed.”

  He nods. “Oreos?”

  “I’ve been okay, actually.” But she’s frowning, twisting her gloved hands in her lap. “Tempted, yes, but so far, I’m okay.”

  “Scared?”

  “Yes.”

  He appreciates that she doesn’t feel the need to mask it.

  The Sravastis’ rental is a blandly nice house on a street of blandly nice houses, none of them particularly distinct. Where some of the neighbors have tried to add personality with flags or statues, the Sravastis’ house has a bleakly impersonal façade. He can’t say he’s surprised by it.

  Before following her into the house, he stops at the front step, looking up at the overhang. He can see the camera, the lens aimed where it can take in the widest view possible. There’s no light to show whether or not it’s on, which he likes. Helps it to be a bit more discreet.