One blonde eyebrow arched. “Seems to me you’re splitting hairs.”
“It only seems that way to you?”
She made a face and lifted a stiff middle finger. “You made your point, Agent Buzzkill.”
“He deflects often. Uses ‘you’ to pin the blame on Abigail and Brooke, deflecting culpability. ‘I think you both know why you’re here.’ Men have a lot of pride. They want credit for their work. A man’s more likely to say ‘you’re here because I made it happen.”
He rewound the tape and played back the words.
“That doesn’t sound like something a man would say when he’s the one who kidnapped them at random. How the hell should they know why they’re there, when he blitzed them in a parking lot?”
Lisette gestured at her office door, behind which the rest of the Boy’s Club homicide men milled around. “Those idiots out there are constantly blaming each other for drinking the last of the coffee or using the last of the filters. Men deflect just as much as women.”
“All right. Another thing. On average, women take longer pronouncing vowels. Eleven percent longer, one study said. This man lingers on vowels. Pauses between words, wants to make sure they sink in. Men don’t worry about things like that, making sure their messages are clear. They just assume they are. They’re not as talkative. Don’t care much for details. All they want is the bottom line.” He tapped the screen. “For a man, he doesn’t speak much like one.”
Her lips squished into a skeptical frown. “I don’t think I’m buying him being a her. Women don’t get off on stuff like this. I mean, yeah, some are complete psychopaths, but murder is a means to an end for them. It’s a goal, not a thrill. They use poisons or guns, not blowtorches. They don’t achieve sexual release from torture or pain. And they don’t take trophies or leave signatures.”
“You’re not wrong. Usually that’s the case. Whoever this is, they’re trying very hard to sound manly, but it’s not fooling me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the back of her chair. “A female computer whiz is an unnatural thing. At least in LA.”
John smiled, thinking of Stacy and the horrified expression she’d be wearing if she’d heard that. “It doesn’t take a computer genius to run a blog. I’m not saying it’s a female beyond all doubt, but it’s a viable possibility. Whoever dyed Brooke’s hair was thorough. I’m sure it’s not a difficult thing to get right, but I’d expect a man to be more careless, since typically they have little to no experience hair-dyeing.”
“I guess a woman would explain the lack of sexual elements.” She still looked unconvinced. “Apart from Stan the Man’s molestation. I don’t know. Still seems like a stretch. Not many would buy that a woman could get off on doing things like this.”
“She probably wasn’t always this way. And we don’t know if she’s getting off on it. If it’s some sort of ritual, she might not be able to help it. It’s a desire that won’t go away.” John paused the video and panned closer to the ski-masked perpetrator in bulky black clothing. “This is a very specific scenario. Despite the differences between all the women, they’re still in this same room, with another girl, locked up for weeks in the dark. Only one woman is harmed. The others are so consumed with guilt or horror, they commit suicide. What do you think happened, from looking at all these puzzle pieces?”
Lisette looked into the Day-Glo yellow glare radiating from morning sun out the windows of her office. “Victims turning into abusers are common, but in my experience it applies to children who’ve been molested or abused. Their love map is fucked up; they attribute violence to love and carry that with them as they grow.”
“You’ve had a lot of experience with children of abuse?”
She twisted the silver chain around her neck that her gold sergeant’s badge hung from. “I had a stint in Sex Crimes after I got my shield. I’ve seen my share of kids.” She rubbed her eyelid with the slender curve of her wrist and sighed, before she stood and headed for the door. “I’ll have a few desk jockeys tear through old case files. See if there’s something similar to this shit.”
FORTY-NINE
I’m picking over the cereal when the landline rings.
We stare at each other for a second before Jack snaps the phone up. He passes it over just as I’ve shoved a spoonful of Cap’n Crunch into my mouth. “It’s Sergeant Jennings.”
The cereal’s hard corners rip across the roof of my mouth when I swallow. The tang of rust on my tongue startles me.
So much blood, I can taste the metal. Splashed on my thighs, freckled on my forearms, crusting in a perfect handprint on my ankle. What an idiot I was, believing he’d let me go after she was dead.
But then I decide I’m only getting what I deserve.
I press the handset to my ear.
“Hey,” Lisette says. “I need you to listen to something. I don’t want you to freak out, though. Promise me you won’t freak.”
“Why would I?”
She sighs static. “Just listen. Okay?”
I nod. Then I remember she can’t see me. “Yeah. Sure.” I accept the glass Jack slides into my hand and take a big gulp to make him happy.
“Do I sound familiar?”
I spit out the mouthful. It spreads into a wobbly white puddle across the island. Jack snatches the glass I’m about to drop, and dumps it in the sink.
“So what happens now, Brooke? Where can we go from here?”
I have no idea why he’s laughing, but then shell-shocked waitresses and dead bodies probably amuse him.
What doesn’t amuse me is when he blasts Time of My Life through the P.A. The movie theater within my mind explodes behind my eyelids. Patrick Swayze swinging a green-and-black skinned Abby around by her slack arms.
“What the hell is going on?” I say, once I’ve found words. That wasn’t Lisette, it was the voice of my monster.
“I’m sorry, did it scare you?” Something rustles on her end. “I should have come over for this experiment, but I didn’t want you to know what I was doing.”
“Who was that?”
“Me. Using voice modifying technology. Is that the voice you heard?”
I wipe my lips with the napkin Jack presses into my hand. “Yes.”
“All right.” It sounds like she’s covering the phone with her palm to speak to someone beside her before she continues talking to me. “You probably have heard the voice before. Companies are trying to make those fucking GPS robots sound more human. This is one of the newish voices. They have a female one and a lady who speaks in a goddamned British accent, too. Even Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves. I’d never be able to keep a straight face if it was Keanu Reeves telling me to take the next left.”
Elena’s GPS. It all makes sense.
My eyes flick to the microwave clock. It’s nine a.m., and I already want to hide back in bed with the covers up to
my ears. “So, everything I’ve told you is useless. The only helpful thing I said was his voice is familiar. And now it’s not even his voice.”
“For God’s sake, you’ve been plenty helpful. You’ve probably heard this voice on someone’s GPS. You didn’t have a face to attach to the voice, so you couldn’t make a connection. Either way you’ve been a very good witness.” I hear her name called in the background. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll call later, okay?”
We say our goodbyes and disconnect. I slap the handheld into Jack’s outstretched hand and answer his silent question. “She found out why I recognized the voice. It’s not his. He’s using some voice changing thing.”
He walks around the island and slides onto the barstool beside mine. We sit there for a while, staring at our bare white cupboards across the kitchen, before Jack shatters the silence.
“They’re making progress. This is a good thing. She’s going to find this asshole.”
So what if she finds him? It won’t bring Abby or the string of dead girls before her back to life. He’ll sit in jail with cable television
, waiting for a trial that will make him famous. He’ll perfect his creepy smile to flash at the courtroom cameras, practice his manifesto, and when it’s over, his is the only face the media will remember. It’ll be like Abby never happened.
“This is a death penalty state, baby.” Jack slips his arm around my waist and kisses my shoulder. “He’s going to get a lethal injection. And you can watch. We’ll get front row seats. Something I’d love to see.”
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
I stab floating pieces of Cap’n Crunch with my spoon. “Lethal injection. Does it hurt?”
“I doubt it. The needle is probably the only part that pinches, though the catheter can’t be much fun. But that’s not the point.”
I push the bowl away, milk sloshing over the side. “Okay, well enlighten me. What’s the fucking point?”
He picks the bowl up and circles back to the sink. “The fucking point,” he says over the stream of the tap, “is that he’ll be dead. Never coming back. Goodbye, psycho. It’s the ultimate payment, isn’t it?”
No. The ultimate payment would be sentencing him to a slow death by torture. The same courtesy he paid Abby.
But the bleeding heart liberals would never allow that sort of thing to happen.
FIFTY
“Messenger sent these over.” Lisette tossed a thick manila file into John’s lap. “Final coroner’s findings. And P.S, Brooke ID’d the voice modifier. I scared the shit out of her, but I figured a visceral reaction would be more telling than if I’d brought her down here and set up the equipment in front of her.”
He sat back in the desk chair she’d allowed him to commandeer for the past hour. “Good. Make sure you have people looking into local shops that sell the product.”
“Yep. But don’t hold your breath.”
He wouldn’t.
Lisette swung out the door, so he busied himself with removing the paperclips holding photos of each dead girl to her autopsy report. He placed them side by side on the desk in the order they’d been killed.
Beth Grant and Rebecca Adams. Brianna Weaver and Vienna Lockhart. Emily Takahashi and Paula Bennet. Death had done horrible things to their complexions.
John bit into the tip of his thumb as his eyes scanned from Beth to Paula and back again.
He found the answer at the same time that voice did.
Well, that’s not a coincidence. But you don’t believe in those anyway.
The murdered girls looked similar. Strip away color and skin and hair, and their bone structure was oddly alike. Not twins, but cousins.
Broad foreheads, a little longer than was normal. Left eyes a different shape than the right. Crooked smiles, faces more circular than oval, with thick, fleshy earlobes.
That’s all fine and dandy, but who are they surrogates for?
John looked up as Lisette flounced past with a fresh cup of coffee and tried to roust him from her swivel chair. “Visitor’s seat is across the desk, sir. I’ve let you post up here long enough. The other chair hurts my ass.”
“Look at this, and tell me what you see.” He plucked up the three photos of the murdered women and slapped them into a pile.
She squinted as John flipped through the images. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Do you see anything similar about their faces?”
Her eyebrows collided over the thin slope of her nose. “The only thing they have in common is they’re all fucking dead.”
“Apart from that. They have asymmetrical faces.”
One brow arched into a get real look. “So? Lots of people do. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He placed the photos on the desk. “But not everyone has similar asymmetry. It’s only the murdered girls who share commonalities.” He dug a pen out of his breast pocket. “Look.” He dragged the point of the pen in a vertical blue line through each girl’s forehead. “You see how they all have foreheads on the longer side?” He underlined the left eye sockets. “All their left eyes are different from the right—wider, set lower, or slightly cockeyed.” He drew a curved path along the undersides of each chin. “Their faces are rounded. Almost too round, like a child’s face. They don’t have sharp or angular features, the way you do.” He capped the pen and ran it up the length of Lisette’s jaw to her earlobe. “They all have earlobes on the thicker side, too.”
Her nose wrinkled, and she batted the pen away. “Couldn’t it be coincidence? The kidnapper couldn’t have put a lot of time into examining their faces. They were blitzed from behind.”
He tossed the pen on the desk. “I’m not saying snatching women with the same asymmetry was plotted. I’m saying it’s something the abductor may have noticed before the snatch and grabs, or once the girls were already hostage. This asymmetry is something the kidnapper recognizes. Killing the same face over and over can’t be an accident.”
She blew out a sigh and chewed the corner of her mouth. “Who are they supposed to represent? It could be anybody. She’s not stalking her targets, she’s stumbling on them randomly. It isn’t like she flipped through Facebook to find the right girl. It’s all wrong place, right time when she takes them. There was zero overlap when we went through the girls’ lives. No common names, no telephone number they all called, and it’s unlikely their paths ever crossed until they found themselves in that dungeon. Different dry cleaners, mailmen and fucking baristas.”
The thing about turning up answers was they always opened the door for more questions.
They both pressed their hands into the glass divider above the desk, under which much-abused pieces of paper with scrawled notes and marked calendars lay.
“I guess you’ve been good for something,” she said. “I’ll have to forgive Foster for running to the Feds.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard from you.”
She snorted, but didn’t answer.
He knew what she was thinking from the angle she held her head and her slitted eyes staring at her reflection. “Your features are symmetrical.”
“You think?” She frowned. “My lips always look a little swollen.”
They did. The same way a teenage girl’s lips looked when movie theater lights blinked back on. Mussed hair, bra straps poking out of an unbuttoned shirt, lips puffy and red when they pulled back into a secret smile.
Rode hard and put to bed wet, the voice chimed in. A teenager can’t perfect that look so easily.
“Ah, but they’re swollen on both sides, and therein lies the symmetry.”
She rolled her eyes.
“We’re drawn to celebrity faces a lot of the time because there’s a perfect balance to their beauty,” John explained, rocking on his heels. “It’s one of the things that make them so pleasing to the eye. The Perceptual Bias view says symmetrical faces are attractive because the human visual system can process symmetric stimuli better than asymmetric stimuli. But the Evolutionary Advantage hypothesizes symmetrical faces are attractive because symmetry indicates how healthy an individual is. Our genes are designed to develop proportionally, but disease and infections during development cause asymmetries. So, the thought is, only people who withstand infections, like those with strong immune systems, develop symmetrical traits. Studies of human and animal health note a relationship between symmetry and health, with the healthier individuals being more symmetric. Peacocks with symmetrical tail feathers are particularly healthy, thus more in-demand as potential mates.”
She stared at him for a couple seconds before shaking her head and collecting the photos. “Are you calling me beautiful, or a peacock?”
He fell back on flat feet, wondering if he’d unwittingly shoved his foot in his mouth. “Neither. I was just waxing on about useless information. I have so much of it I can’t help spreading it around. You’re attractive until you start talking, and scare people half to death. You’d make an Army Sergeant blush.”
She slapped the file against her desk and flipped him off with her free han
d. “How come know-it-all’s don’t know how fucking annoying they are? You need an intervention. If I hear one more speech, I’m going to punch you.”
“We know we’re annoying. But we don’t care, because we’re still right.”
FIFTY-ONE
The sounds of LA make my ears bleed. I prefer night, when all is quieter. When you can’t hear a thousand clashing car alarms and people screaming into their smartphones. I never thought I’d miss Michigan, but Los Angeles isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Nothing like in television and movies. Beverly Hills is a long way from the rest of the place—dirty streets, liquor stores, air reeking of bus exhaust and diesel fuel.
I wish I were alone. Completely alone—post apocalypse or freak plague. There wouldn’t be anyone to act normal for. Peace and quiet sounds nice.
The silence that falls after the music bleeds out is suffocating, unearthly, too big for this white room to contain. The shaky stillness that follows an explosion of a bomb, when the survivors are stupefied and haven’t found their voices yet. But since I’m the only survivor, I can’t speak to anyone if I even found mine.
Maybe quiet is overrated.
The blinds ruffle behind my chair. I blink a billion times until the mental image fades. When I turn, Stripes slinks around the open patio door. He hurls himself into my lap, purring in oblivious ecstasy.
I’m giving his head a few absentminded strokes when I hear my name called from below. Jack hears it all the way from the kitchen and is on the patio in a heartbeat, wet hands dripping all over the turf.
Stripes snuggles into the crook of my neck when I stand to peer over the balcony railing. The sun dipping beneath mountains in the distance bounces off a shiny scarlet head as the woman it belongs to windmills her arms.
“It’s Elena,” I tell Jack.
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