The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2)

by Dot Hutchison

  He scowls at the Starbucks logo. He has something against fancy coffee, so any place that charges him more than a dollar for a big-ass cup of black coffee has his eternal enmity. When we lived in D.C., Mercedes’s favorite form of entertainment was Eddison and Mum getting coffee together.

  While he’s trying to set the sign on fire with his glare, I see Joshua get up from his table, a peacoat draped over his arm. He seems to like fisherman sweaters; at the least, he seems to have an endless supply of them. This one is a sort of faded heather that works well with his greying auburn hair. He sees me and smiles, lifting his cup of tea in a kind of salute, but doesn’t stop to chat on his way out the door.

  Drinks in hand, Eddison and I walk back to the house in comfortable silence. We both stop and look at the empty doorstep.

  “I’m not sure if I wanted flowers to be there or not,” he says after a minute.

  “I know that feeling.”

  Once I’m safely inside, the door locked behind me, he takes off back to Denver, to check in with Finney and then fly back east. I’m not ignorant of how far he’s stretched allowable limits for my sake, and maybe for his own. I was only ever supposed to be part of a case, not a part of his life, but here I am, five years later, closer family than blood in many ways, and I don’t regret it.

  I don’t think he does either, even when it forces him into some difficult decisions.

  I give a few hours over to getting ahead on schoolwork, because it seems like the responsible thing to do, quibble with Mum via text over what to do for dinner (she wins, but only because we haven’t actually had curry since Birmingham), and then pull out Inara’s letter.

  I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned it to Eddison. He knows her, even if he doesn’t know whether or not he likes her (he gives away a lot more than he realizes). It’s nice, though, keeping it to myself. Keeping it for myself, maybe.

  Setting the letter on top of my current journal, I grab the first of the Washington, D.C. journals from the stack on my floor. All the rest are still downstairs, but San Diego is where things changed and D.C. is where I realized how much things changed, and I can’t help but read back through them looking for clues.

  Two years ago, I made a friend in San Diego. Her name was Aimée Browder, and she was in love with all things French. Despite my intention to keep myself to myself, she was there; just all the time there, without being pushy or nosy. I let her talk me into French Club and movies and hanging out, and some afternoons I’d sit by the door in the ballet studio where she took classes and do my homework to the sounds of classical music, murmured instructions, and the thumps of successfully landed jumps.

  In spite of everything, she was my friend, so when Mum and I were about to move to D.C., I asked Aimée if we could keep in touch. And we did, actually, for about a week and a half. I wasn’t worried for the first few days of silence; we were both busy. She’d respond when she got the chance.

  Then I got a call from her mother, who was sobbing so hard she had to hand the phone to her husband so he could tell me Aimée was dead. Their daughter, my friend, had been murdered, and as soon as he said church and flowers, I knew it was connected to Chavi in some way. It didn’t seem possible that it could be coincidence.

  That night wasn’t the first time I ate myself sick. Far from, really; it had been almost three years by that point. I think it was the worst, though. I stuffed myself so overfull I couldn’t even cry it hurt so badly, gasping for breath and feeling like I was about to split down my sides. Mum was two seconds from hauling me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped, but somehow that was the thing that tipped me into full-blown hysterics.

  I didn’t want Eddison to know it was that bad. Didn’t want Vic and Mercedes to know at all.

  They called from San Diego with questions about Aimée, things they had to ask for the investigation even if they really didn’t want to. I could hear how worried they were, and though I was still sick as shit, I craved more, just because it hurt so badly.

  It took days before I could eat again. Even then, Mum had to make me. I couldn’t look at food without my stomach cramping painfully.

  To distract myself, I started researching the other murders, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that my ignorance had gotten Aimée killed. Mum pretended she wasn’t clinging as she looked over my shoulder. She was the one to notice that the flowers surrounding the murdered girls matched the bouquets that had shown up on our doorstep in San Diego.

  Yellow and white jonquils for Darla Jean Carmichael, dead as long as I’d been alive.

  Purple-throated calla lilies for Zoraida Bourret, found in her family’s Methodist church on Easter Sunday.

  Clumps of baby’s breath for Leigh Clark, a preacher’s daughter in Eugene, Oregon.

  A crown of honeysuckle for Sasha Wolfson, whose cousin told stories of a girl who plucked blossoms out of her hair to touch their sweetness to her tongue.

  Colorful sprays of freesia for Mandy Perkins, who built fairy villages in nursing home gardens around Jacksonville, Florida.

  White carnations for Libba Laughran, veined and tipped and red so they looked like they were bleeding. She was only fourteen when she was raped and killed outside of Phoenix.

  No flowers came to D.C., though, nor to Atlanta after we moved that November. There were none in Omaha or Birmingham, aside from the ones sent by the idiot coworker in Nebraska. No mystery flowers, then, so it never seemed worth telling my agents.

  If we hadn’t left San Diego when we did, it would have been columbines at our door next, for Emily Adams, seventeen years old, from St. Paul, Minnesota, and no relation to later victim Meaghan Adams. She was a musician, according to the articles and tribute pages we read. She sang like an angel, especially with folk songs, and played every instrument she could get her hands on. A few days before she was murdered, she organized a rally in response to a school shooting in Connecticut; she clipped a couple blue columbines to the end of her guitar, to honor decades of victims as she played.

  When the bastard killed Emily, he draped a ribbon of flowers over her throat, to hide the gaping wound. It was mentioned in a couple of articles about the killing, but there were pictures, too, on true crime websites that somehow managed to get crime scene photos from most of the murders.

  Impressive, considering the FBI wasn’t brought in until the tenth victim, Kiersten Knowles.

  Even with all the research Mum and I did, we don’t have half the information the FBI does, but I’d guess we’re no further from the answer. All these facts to be found but nothing that leads anywhere. If I get a name someday, the identity of the man who murdered Chavi and the others, will that bring peace? If he goes to trial and is found guilty, is that justice?

  I look at the folded pages of Inara’s letter, then reach for a pen and loose paper.

  Dear Inara,

  My mum has said on occasion that it’s a shame people can only die once; one of her dearest wishes is to find our nightmare and kill him again and again and again, once for each person he killed and once again just for us.

  I don’t know that it’s any more or less just than imprisonment or formal execution.

  I used to think it would mean something. I’d dream about being in a courtroom when a jury foreman read out guilty, and the unknown man with the blurred-out face behind the defense table would start weeping. Noisily, messily, the kind of crying that leaves you mortified because there are just globs of snot dripping everywhere. He’d be broken, and Mum and I would laugh, giddy and bright, and fall into each other’s arms.

  We’d be happy.

  We wouldn’t hurt anymore.

  At some point, I realized that it wouldn’t bring Chavi back. Nothing would.

  Suddenly I couldn’t stand the thought of any resolution that left the asshole alive, weeping or not.

  I have no answers.

  I have no wisdom.

  What I have is a healthy sense of spite and a determination that someday I’m going to learn how
to do this thing called living. Maybe that’s as far as justice can stretch.

  There’s no actual reason to switch his destination from D.C. to New York, but Eddison does it anyway, thumb rubbing against the dark screen of his phone where the message from Vic sleeps. At the moment, still a little raw from worry and frustration, he doesn’t want to look into his motivations all that deeply. Not when there’s something itching at him about how the Sravastis took the news about the stalker, and he can’t put his finger on what it is or why it’s bothering him.

  So he makes the switch, knowing he can take the train between cities and get a few hours of paperwork in, and maybe he’ll even call it virtuous. The train is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the plane, anyway.

  He hates the subway, isn’t particularly fond of the metro back home, but it still seems a better option than dropping fifty bucks on a taxi just to get into the city. He stands against one of the poles, a safe distance from heaped shopping bags, luggage, and sprawled limbs, counting stops and listening to the familiar mix of phone calls, conversations in a dozen languages, and the fuzzy music that seeps too loud out of headphones and earbuds.

  A little girl perched on her grandfather’s lap catches his eye and giggles, her hands fisted in a hand-knit scarf almost the same obnoxiously bright green as his. He smiles slightly, and she giggles again before burying her face in her grandfather’s shoulder. She’s still laughing, though; he can see the two puffs of ponytail high on her head shake.

  He knows, in a purely theoretical sort of way, that Inara lives in a shit neighborhood. She was straightforward about that much the first time they questioned her. When she was released from the hospital, she moved right back in. The agents in the New York office prefer to visit the restaurant if they need to see her or Bliss for something.

  Knowing it is very different from seeing it.

  Standing outside the stairs to the subway, he takes a deep breath and promptly gags on an unexpected lungful of garbage and urine from the alley. He adjusts to the smell after a minute or two—he’s breathed worse, in his line of work—and carefully buttons his suit coat and trench to cover the gun at his hip. He’d feel better if he could access it quickly, but that’s not the kind of attention he wants to bring to himself, especially not when he’s technically on his own time.

  He finds the building, a faded brick monstrosity with the remains of a wrought-iron gate hanging around the front steps. There’s an intercom to the left of the door so guests can be buzzed in, but that seems more like wishful thinking. He’s not sure if the sledgehammer hit it before or after the bullets but either way, it’s not working. In the tiny lobby, half the mailboxes are cracked open, envelopes and circulars strewn over the floor. He can see official letterhead on some of the stomped-on envelopes.

  The girls’ mailbox is just fine, though, freshly painted in dull silver that almost matches the tarnished metal beneath, and covered in flower stickers. Above it, a note on cheerful pink paper is pinned to the wall. He recognizes Bliss’s handwriting, large and round, almost bubbly, really only missing the cute shapes above the lowercase i’s. If you take our mail, I take your balls. Or lady-balls, I’m not particular.

  Jesus.

  It’s signed with a fucking smiley face.

  Both paper and ink are a little faded, and their mailbox is intact, so clearly it struck the right tone for the building. Adjusting the weight of his bags on his back, he heads into the stairwell. There’s an elevator shaft, but it seems to be lacking the rather necessary elevator.

  And doors. Doors would be important.

  He’s a little winded by the time he reaches their floor, second from the top, and is contemplating adding stadiums to his exercise regimen. He can run for miles across level surface, but stairs are surprisingly problematic.

  Fortunately—or not—he doesn’t even have to remember the apartment number. All he has to do is look for the drunk passed out on the floor. The man’s been sleeping outside their door for years, apparently, and none of the girls have the heart to chase him off or tell the cops, so they just go up to the roof and down the fire escape to come in through their very large window.

  Eddison isn’t that kind.

  He kicks the drunk’s feet, just hard enough to jolt him without risking energy. “Find someplace else, buddy.”

  “’Sa free country,” the man slurs, curling tighter around his bottle.

  Leaning over, Eddison grabs the man’s ankle and starts walking backward, hauling the swearing and wailing drunk along with him until he can plant him halfway between doors.

  Inara’s door opens and a head pops out, red-gold hair fluffing out around it in an enormous halo. “Hey, are you harassing our drunk?”

  “Just moving him,” Eddison replies. He drops the man’s ankle. The drunk promptly sprawls along the floor, messily gulping from his bottle. “Are you Whitney?”

  “And you are?”

  He’s unaccountably relieved by her blatant suspicion. “Special Agent Brandon Eddison, here to see Inara if she’s in.”

  The woman’s face lights up in recognition. She’s probably in her mid or late twenties, one eye discolored and the pupil blown in a way that looks permanent. “Hang on. I’ll get her.”

  After a short wait, a sleepy-eyed Inara walks out into the hall, still shrugging into a hoodie. Her hair is mussed around her, her feet shoved in Eeyore slippers. “Eddison?”

  “If we go to the roof, will you be warm enough?”

  She nods and fumbles with the hoodie’s zipper. She has to stop halfway up to wrestle her hair out of the way before she can close it the rest of the way. Her hands, curled into the sleeves, rub at her eyes as she leads the way up to the roof. The roof is strewn with furniture, from basic lawn chairs to a plastic-wrapped couch under a makeshift awning that may have started life as a pair of hammocks.

  She walks all the way across the roof until they can sit in a cluster of canvas camp chairs against the front ledge. If he leans over just a little, he can see their landing of the fire escape, two of Inara’s roommates smoking and laughing.

  “You realize it’s three in the afternoon?” he asks eventually.

  She scowls sleepily, and it’s a little bit adorable in a way she generally isn’t, soft and growling and a bit like a grumpy kitten. “Kegs had a party after closing,” she mumbles around a yawn. “We didn’t get back till eight this morning. And then we were helping Noémie practice her presentation for her eleven-o’clock class.”

  “And you go to work . . .”

  “We have to leave around four-thirty.” She pulls her feet up onto the chair. “What’s up?”

  “Judge Merrill granted the no-contact order,” he tells her without preamble. “Any further attempts to contact you, and Desmond can be charged.”

  Well, that wakes her up. She stares at him for a moment, her pale, almost amber eyes wide and fixed on him. Then she blinks, thinking her way through it, and finally nods. “That was fast.”

  “There wasn’t really a way for the defense to argue against it. While it wasn’t illegal for Desmond to write you, it was inappropriate, and the judge wasn’t happy with the content of the letters.”

  “The cont—shit. Of course you had to read them.”

  He clears his throat. “Vic read them. And the judge and lawyers, but Vic. Vic read them.”

  She rests her chin on her knees, and he has the uncomfortable feeling she’s stripping the words far past what he wanted them to mean. Christ, his mental health and well-being are suddenly very dependent on her never meeting the Sravastis. Priya and Deshani understand him far too well as it is; he does not need them teaching Inara anything. A man needs to preserve some capacity for self-delusion, after all. All she says, though, is “I guess you wouldn’t find the letters of a lovesick twat very interesting.”

  He snorts and leans back in the chair. “From what I understand, that part of it wasn’t the problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “From what Vic tells
me, somewhere in the midst of begging your forgiveness, Desmond slipped in a few pleas for you not to testify against him or his father. To, ah . . . understand.”

  She blinks at him.

  “Asking forgiveness is one thing, even if he still doesn’t seem to have a full grasp of his part in things. Asking you not to testify, putting that kind of pressure on you with the weight of your history . . . that’s attempting to influence a witness, and that crosses into bad territory.”

  “Still claims to love me?”

  “Yes. Do you believe him?”

  “No?”

  He looks out over the roof, noting scorch marks where there used to be a flourishing crop of marijuana, from her stories. There are baskets of toys here and there, and it looks like someone tried to make a swing set out of piping at one point or another. He wouldn’t ever trust a child on it, but it probably makes parties a little more interesting.

  She sighs, and it takes more than he expected not to look back at her. Some truths are easier when no one’s watching. “I know he believes he loves me,” she says slowly. “Whether or not I believe he actually does . . . I don’t know. Maybe he’s like his father, it’s love as he knows it, but I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to believe that love can be that out of touch with reality.”

  “Maybe he needs to believe it’s love,” he offers. From the corner of his eye, he can see her nod.

  “I’ll buy that. If it’s real, maybe it absolves him in some way. Everyone’s fascinated by the things people do for love.”

  “But you think it’s a little more than that.”

  “If it wasn’t love, what was it?”

  “Rape,” he says bluntly.

  “Exactly. Boy like Desmond, he doesn’t want to think of himself as a rapist.”

  “Why didn’t you read the letters?”

  She’s silent for long enough that this time he does look back at her. She’s staring down at her slippers, fingers stroking the tufts of black along the Eeyore heads. The slippers are ridiculous and not something he’d expect her to love or even really to wear, but that’s probably exactly why someone gave them to her.