Twin Offerings

by Ruth Parker

  Twin Offerings

  Ruth Parker

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About the Author

  © Ruth Parker 2017. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations for critical reviews and certain noncommercial uses permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, locations, and events portrayed in this work are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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  Prologue

  It had been five days, and the girls still hadn’t been found. Police had knocked on hundreds of doors, dogs had run through miles of woods, volunteers had passed out thousands of fliers—but the girls were still gone.

  The man had brought them to his house; they were his honored guests.

  He took one of the little white pills and placed it on the cutting board. With the back of a spoon, he carefully crushed the pill into a smooth powder. He got a second pill and crushed it the same way. He got a third, a fourth, a fifth. The girls were innocent. He didn’t want them to suffer.

  When he’d first seen the girls, the pain in his heart had almost caused him to drop the heavy box he’d been carrying. He was at work, trying to set up his equipment, when he saw them outside on the sidewalk, like two ghosts.

  They were twins. They were the right age. They were wearing matching light blue snow jackets and jeans. They each had a huge mass of curly dark hair that did not fall to their shoulders, but rather seemed to hover about their heads, like dark, ethereal halos.

  They were ghosts.

  He had to set down his heavy box and wait for his hands to stop shaking. His mind was spinning, but what he felt in his heart was strong and true.

  He would have them.

  He needed to plan. He had tried once before—without enough planning—and had failed.

  Later, he had waited outside their school, frantically scanning the crowds of students as they poured out of the building. He had almost given up, but then he saw them, those two bobbing heads with bouncing curls and bright blue puffy jackets. He tailed the girls home and watched with real sadness as they disappeared into their house.

  He went home and planned. The next morning, they were his.

  For the last five days, he had his beautiful twin girls. The three of them played games and watched movies and had tea parties. He loved tea parties; they were about ceremony and structure. When he was a boy, his mom only had one rule in the house: leave mom alone. His sisters had a tea set and if he was good—if he didn’t tease them too much and if he waited for them after school and walked home with them—they would invite him for tea. Tea time had lots of rules. Clean hands and face. No elbows on the table. Napkin on the lap. Say please and thank you and excuse me.

  The last five days had been good… but they hadn’t been right.

  He swept the fine white powder into a neat pile on his cutting board. He used a postcard to scoop up the powder and put it into the teapot. That was for later. First he had to see the girls, had to make sure they were okay. Off the kitchen was a door with a deadbolt and a latch fastened with a padlock. He’d lived in this dark and horrible house his entire life and this one door had been the only improvement he’d ever made. It opened up to a flight of stairs that led to a small, furnished basement.

  The keys were on a hook on the wall. He unlocked the door, but paused and knocked first. Girls didn’t like it when you barged in. It was rude. He opened the door just a crack. “Can I come in?” he asked. There was no answer.

  “Yes,” a weak voice finally answered. He took the stairs carefully and saw that the girls were lying in bed, their arms wrapped around each other. They spent a lot of time sleeping. He didn’t approve of that. He gave them a nice room with toys and clothes and they didn’t want to do anything but lie in bed. He held out a shopping bag. When they didn’t make a move to take it, he set it down and reached into it. He pulled two identical dresses, navy blue. They had cost him a lot of money and he’d driven around the city spending the entire day finding the right type of dress. Buttons down the back, a rounded peter pan collar, slight A-line flare. He laid them out for the girls to admire.

  “Don’t you like them?” he asked.

  “Sure,” one of the girls said. “They’re nice. Does it mean you’re going to let us go home?” That was another thing that wasn’t right about the girls. They kept asking when he would let them go home. They didn’t realize that this was their home. He had created this bedroom for them, painstakingly furnishing it with anything and everything two twin sisters could ever want.

  “It means,” he said, rooting around in the bag, “that we’re going to have a tea party tonight. It’ll be special, so get ready.” He set out matching white gloves and ribbons for their hands and hair. He left the clothes on the table. “And make sure you get ready. Clean hands and face. No chipped nail polish. Put on a little dab of perfume too. Tonight is going to be special.” Their lunch tray was on the floor and he took it, frowning as he saw that they’d barely touched their meal. He’d made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with banana slices and a glass of milk. That was their favorite, wasn’t it? He took the tray and left the room, locking it behind him.

  He put the scraps of the mostly uneaten sandwiches in the trash and poured the warm milk down the sink, though it pained him to do so. He’d spent most of his childhood hungry, eating things like ketchup toast for dinner.

  He washed the dishes and then put the teakettle on the stove. He opened a box of cookies and fanned out a nice arc on the tray. He used tiny metal tongs to place sugar cubes into the sugar dish. He poured real cream into the cream pitcher. Inside the teapot, he put four teabags—one for each guest and one extra teabag for the pot. That was how his sisters said real tea was made.

  As the water in the kettle warmed, he examined the teapot in the dim kitchen light. He loved this teapot, the smooth white ceramic surface like the girls’ smooth skin, like the white ribbons in their hair. The dusky orange roses circled the rim like their fingernail polish. His happiest times had been spent gathered around a little plastic table, so small his knees knocked against it, sipping tap water out of the tiny teacups. Well, not this exact teapot. The original had been lost some time ago. Broken, he corrected. But he didn’t want to think about that.

  He dipped his fingertip into the powder and touched his tongue to it, lightly, just enough to get a few granules. It tasted faintly of soap. Earl Grey then—the strong bergamot oil in the tea would mask the flavor. The girls wouldn’t be able to taste it.

  During his boyhood tea parties with his sisters, they filled up the teapot and cream pitcher with tap water from the sink in the bathroom. The sugar dish remained empty, and they used imaginary tongs to
tweeze imaginary cubes into their cups. One rare occasion, they’d filled up the teapot with warm, stale cola, what was left in the bottle after their mom had mixed up enough whiskey and colas to send her soundly to sleep.

  The kettle started to whistle. He removed it from the heat and poured the hot water into the teapot, making sure to drench the teabags. He put on the lid and let it steep.

  Five days ago, when he’d seen the twins, so perfect, two dark angels on a cold winter morning, he’d wanted them so bad. He’d been so excited. He’d planned how he would get them. He’d fixed up the room. He’d bought clothes and food and tea.

  It hadn’t crossed his mind that the girls wouldn’t be right.

  The first twins—those beautiful girls from fifteen years ago—they had been right. He knew it. But he hadn’t planned. He’d been younger, impulsive. He let that need to possess them overwhelm his senses—and everything went wrong. He still thought about those girls from fifteen years ago. They were so beautiful. It still plagued him how that had all turned out—because of his own stupidity.

  But he didn’t want to think about that either.

  He stirred the tea, making sure that everything was dissolved. He added a knock of brandy. He took out the teabags one at a time, wrapping each around the spoon and squeezing to extract the last bit of flavor from the leaves. The tray was artfully arranged. Teapot, teacups, saucers, spoons, napkins, sugar cubes, cream, cookies. He carefully made his way to their room, balancing the tray carefully while he unlocked the door and walked down the stairs.

  The girls were beautiful. Pale skin, huge mass of dark curly hair, those perfect navy blue dresses with little white gloves and hair ribbons.

  They’d be perfect forever.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “It’s tea time.”

  One

  Fletcher Reed looked at the clock on the dashboard; he had about an hour and a half before the media vultures got to the scene. It would be a side-show, that much was for sure. Photographers and cameramen, microphones shoved haphazardly into any face within arm’s reach. He was still twenty minutes out—even driving like a maniac. That would give him an hour ten at the scene. Not nearly long enough.

  He knew it was going to be bad. His dad had called, practically begged him to come. Fletcher’s father was the former Sheriff of Washington County, a large county by Oregon standards, but quiet. Homicides were rare.

  The sheriffs definitely weren’t equipped to handle the two bodies that were found this morning.

  This was what Fletcher did. His official title was Criminal Behavioral Analysis Consultant. He traveled around the country, helping out when small law enforcement agencies found themselves overwhelmed by a gruesome crime. Fletcher had been in the FBI, one of the top profilers in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, until two years ago when he’d resigned.

  Resigned in disgrace was how the media vultures had described it.

  Not knowing what to do with himself, he’d started his own consulting business. He made a lot more money hiring out his services (he still couldn’t bring himself to call it his expertise) than he ever made in the Bureau. He wrote up many of the cases for textbooks and articles that were used in colleges and law enforcement training courses throughout the country. He’d been to every state in the country except Hawaii and North Dakota. A body would surface, the cops would scratch their heads—then he would get a call.

  He’d spent his entire adult life in the abyss, delving deep into the most twisted and violent minds in order to catch them. He lived in Virginia, but hardly spent more than a week at a time in his small condo. It was better to keep traveling, keep working, keep moving—keep trying to outrace his own thoughts.

  Driving to the airport, on his way to the Florida panhandle, Fletcher had gotten a call from his dad. The former sheriff had explained the crime scene in vivid detail. “It’s bad,” he’d told his son. “Get here quick.” There was a numbness in his voice Fletcher had never heard before. When Fletcher got to the airport, he’d switched his flight to Portland. He called the sheriff in Florida, offered his apologies, and talked to the man for an hour, trying his best to help.

  After his flight landed, he’d driven straight through to the scene. The GPS told him to turn off Route 26 down a small road, through a thicket of trees. The trees were dense; morning fog still blanketed the ground. The road had been paved at some point, but now was rocky and pitted. He drove slowly at first, but when the road curved to the left and he saw the other cars, the officers and technicians, the spotlights and yellow tape, he sped up, jouncing uncomfortably in the seat.

  He turned the car off and parked on the dirt. A couple uniformed officers had roped off the perimeter far back from the actual scene. He showed his ID and signed into the log. They gave him a pair of polyester booties and a handful of latex gloves. It seemed like everyone in the north half of the state had turned out for this. He walked quickly, feeling the sick anticipation turn his stomach sour.

  He’d seen hundreds of dead bodies, but it never got easier.

  The crowd parted for a moment and between the trees he could see it, but his brain could not process what he was seeing. It didn’t make sense, like how dreams were sometimes so weird that you couldn’t remember them.

  There were two little girls having a tea party. Why would there be two girls having a tea party in the middle of a horrible crime scene?

  But of course—the girls were the horrible crime scene.

  There was a tree stump, not a big one, maybe a foot in diameter, with a handkerchief covering it like a tablecloth. Crowded on the stump was a small teapot and two tiny teacups resting on tiny saucers. A children’s tea set. The girls were dressed up. Navy blue dresses with round collars and buttons down the back. White gloves on their slender hands and matching white ribbons in their curly dark hair. The sort of outfit a girl would wear to an Easter brunch or piano recital.

  Or a funeral.

  He walked closer to the scene on numb legs. The girls were sitting, slumped against trees. Same hair, same dress, same ribbons. It was like they were twins.

  Why did it have to be a couple of kids? Fletcher reached into his pocket and felt for his Zippo. He’d gotten it—stolen it—on his last day as an active Special Agent for the FBI. It was a reminder not to lose his cool.

  The other officers were taking pictures or sweeping the area. No one had approached the girls yet. He saw one tech in khaki pants and blue windbreaker standing off to the side, spitting into the dirt.

  “Can you believe this?” A man’s voice, close to his right. He turned and saw an older man, maybe fifty-five or sixty years old. His face was not wrinkled but it looked tough, like if you pressed a finger into his face it wouldn’t give at all. “You’re old Sheriff Reed’s son, I can tell. There’s definitely a family resemblance. I worked for him before he retired.”

  “You’re the new sheriff?”

  “Richard Stella,” he said and offered his hand. They were both wearing latex gloves and Fletcher could not feel the heat of the other man’s hand.

  “What happened here?”

  “Shit, I thought that’s why you were here,” Stella said. He ran his hands through his dark hair. He had plenty of silver strands threaded through, and this case was going to give him a lot more before it was over. “I don’t even know where to start,” he admitted.

  “Have you guys ever handled anything like this?” The county crime scene techs had come over in two well-equipped vans from the coroner’s office, but even they seemed lost, milling around, hunched over and looking at the ground. The county was the second largest in the state, but was still small, with just under half a million residents. Fletcher had grown up here and the town hadn’t changed that much in the last twenty years he’d been gone.

  “Worst I ever saw was a husband stabbed his wife twenty-nine times. That was a fucking mess, but it was…” he trailed off. “Natural.”

  “A husband stabbing his wife is natural?” Fletcher said, arching an eyebro
w. “Remind me to have a talk with your wife.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “I can understand being so damned mad that you just snap.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate. “This… this is sick. It’s unholy.”

  “What have you guys done so far?” he asked.

  “Photographs. We’ve got about a pound of memory cards full already. We’re combing the area for tracks or anything, but the girls weren’t killed here, that much is clear.”

  “First things first,” Fletcher said. He’d been stalling. Fucking kids. Had to be fucking kids. This was why he traveled so much, worked so much. If he slowed down, his mind would replay visions of the countless crime scenes he’d seen—the bodies of the ones he couldn’t save. The world was a sick place. How could you bring children into a world where something like this could happen to them? It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t natural, but it was reality. “Let’s examine the bodies.”

  The macabre place setting had been taped off, and Stella ducked underneath the tape. Fletcher followed. One of the girls stared straight forward. The other girl’s head was leaning back against the tree. A wet leaf had landed on her face, sticking to her eyes and nose. Her mouth gaped open, and Fletcher saw a fly was sitting on her tongue, wringing its grimy little hands.

  “We think he cut the tree down himself,” Stella said. He gestured to the ground. There was fresh white sawdust sprinkled over leaves that were tamped down flat, pressed into the soft earth as if they’d been stepped on. “But we haven’t found the tree yet.”

  “I’m sure he just dragged it off to the woods. Seems weird he’d take the tree home with him,” Fletcher said.

  “Seems weird he’d kill two little girls.”

  Fletcher crouched by the girl who was staring straight ahead. She wasn’t a little girl, not really. She was tall and had strong-looking legs. Her skin was blotchy, a sickly gray mottled with purple, except on the bottoms of her legs, where the blood was starting to pool. She had the beginnings of small breasts, so that put her at maybe twelve years old. “Who found them?” Fletcher asked.