If only the creep that had killed Francine had taken Edie instead. Then Edie was certain that her parents would still be together, her father wouldn’t be anesthetizing his pain with drugs and alcohol and everyone would be happy.
A deep shudder worked through her as she mentally acknowledged what she’d always known…the wrong daughter had died.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Teddy asked and then burped the first few bars of Heartbreak Hotel. They had just eaten barbecue, which always made Teddy verbose in his belching.
“If she is, her body must be buried somewhere,” Jake replied. The subject of their conversation was Maggie Black. The case had gone beyond cold and the most difficult thing of all was having no answers for Maggie’s distraught mother. “At some point in time a dog will dig her up or some kids will stumble on her.” Jake sighed in frustration.
“How did the book signing go? Lisa and I planned to be there but around noon Snap started throwing up and by one we had all three girls ralphing into a variety of containers.”
“Are they okay?” Jake asked as he pulled away from the barbecue restaurant.
Teddy nodded. “Must have been some sort of vicious twenty-four hour bug. They seemed to be doing better by morning.”
“After the signing we had dinner with Frank and Colette Burgess. He said that for the three years that Colette was kidnapped, he never lost hope because her body hadn’t been found. As long as there was no body there was a possibility she might still be alive.”
Jake shook his head as he turned the corner back to the police station. “When we don’t find the bodies of murder victims, do the families just exist in a state of limbo between hope and despair? I mean sometimes it takes years to stumble on a body. Sometimes we never find the victim.”
“It’s a sad part of the business we’re in,” Teddy replied. “There’s never a happy ending when murder occurs.”
Jake immediately thought of Edie, whose father had died when Edie had started college and whose mother had run away from her grief and built a brand new family, effectively erasing her painful past.
They’d had closure; they’d known what had happened to Francine. They’d buried her in a funeral that had drawn crowds of people and still they’d all been destroyed.
How much worse was it for those who never got that kind of closure, who never knew the fate of their missing loved ones? What was it like to go through day after day, not having the answer you needed more than any other? He dismissed these thoughts from his mind as he pulled into the station.
The crime scene they’d begun the morning with had been easy. Wife dead on the floor from a single gunshot wound, husband standing over her body sobbing with a gun in his hand. Before Jake and Teddy could say a word the man had dropped the gun and confessed to anyone and everyone in the area.
They’d fought, he’d said, things had spiraled out of control. He’d drawn the gun just wanting to scare her and bang – he’d killed the woman he loved.
It had been an open and shut case, something that rarely occurred. The only things that would have made the day better would be if they could give Danielle Black a definitive answer on what happened to her daughter and if he were going home tonight to Edie’s instead of the apartment he no longer felt was home.
Home was sitting across from Edie at the breakfast table with Rufus begging at his feet. Home was Edie spooned against him in her king-sized bed.
That’s where he wanted to be and for the first time he felt an edge of irritation with the situation…with her. The problem was he didn’t know what to do with his irritation. He definitely didn’t know what to do with her.
Anthony had found work beyond irritating all day. He’d almost taken a sick day, but he was in the middle of a big project and really couldn’t afford a day off.
Still, the allure of Edie’s garbage had haunted him all night and throughout the day. He’d come home the night before and had meticulously placed everything he’d dumped into his truck in two garbage bags. Then he’d carried them into his paper room where soon she would be his guest.
He’d wanted to start sorting through it then, but he knew he’d get lost in it, in her and would never manage to make it to work this morning.
The project at work was finished and he’d put in for a personal day off tomorrow. When he got home this evening he could lose himself in all things Edie.
He looked at the clock on his computer. Thirty more minutes and he would be out of here and surrounded by pieces of Edie. He closed his eyes, momentarily caught in a euphoric state that had him on the verge of exploding.
Twenty-nine more minutes and he could get out of this place and be where he most wanted to be, surrounded by his things and by her things.
“Anthony?”
Susan’s voice snapped him from his rapture. For a moment he wanted to smash her face in, claw her throat out. Instead he pasted on a pleasant smile. “Susan, I was just thinking about you,” he said.
Her cheeks pinkened in color. “I was thinking about you, too. I was wondering if maybe you’d like to come to my place Wednesday night for dinner instead of going out someplace. I thought it might be fun to throw a couple of steaks on the grill.”
He couldn’t think of anything he’d like to do less, but he reminded himself that this pseudo-relationship with Susan was necessary. “That sounds wonderful. What time and what can I bring?”
“Why don’t we say around six and you don’t have to bring anything but yourself.”
“How about I bring a nice bottle of red wine?” he countered.
“Sounds perfect.” She positively glowed. “And now I’ll get out of here so you can finish up and go home. See you tomorrow morning.”
He breathed a sigh of relief as she left the doorway. He hadn’t even bothered to tell her he wouldn’t be in tomorrow. Another glance at the clock on his computer let him know that in the time he powered down his computer and gathered his things together, it would be time to go home…home to his new treasures of Edie.
By the time he pulled up in his driveway he trembled with such excitement he nearly tripped getting out of the car. As he opened the front door he automatically twisted to ease past the tower of baskets on top of several boxes, stepped up on a three-foot high stack of carpet samples and through a narrow opening between towers of hard-backed books.
That brought him into his kitchen and beyond that was his paper room where the contents of Edie’s trash can awaited him. He didn’t bother to make himself a cup of coffee and he didn’t take time to change out of the suit he wore. He went directly to the two garbage bags, dumped them out and then sat nearby and drew in a deep breath.
The things he surrounded himself was him…these things were her. He picked up a coffee-stained receipt and studied the items she’d bought. A lot of salad stuff, a bottle of wine, chicken breasts and a box of Vanilla Wafers. The receipt was from a grocery store not far from her house. So, now he knew where she shopped. It was time stamped three-thirty in the afternoon.
It was amazing the things you could learn about people by picking through their garbage. She liked Chinese take-out. She’d gone through one roll of toilet paper and shredded her credit card receipts. He found several crumpled pages of what appeared to be the book she was working on. On one of them she’d doodled the name Jake Warner. He set that page aside, intending to Google Jake and find out who he was and what his relationship was to Edie.
Not that it mattered. Edie was already marked as Anthony’s. Nothing and nobody would stand in his way. His need for her was life-threatening. There was no question in his mind that she would be the one to finally bring some peace to his life, to fill the hollow hole inside him.
He spied a half of a sandwich, the bread hard and the slice of cheese bright yellow and stiff. He picked it up and felt as if it almost vibrated with her psychic energy.
She’d eaten part of it. There was a place in the center where teeth marks were visible, hardened and preserved by the petrifying
bread. He raised the sandwich to his mouth and carefully placed his teeth around the place where hers had been.
He bit into the bread and chewed with his eyes closed. It was like he was eating her…taking her into his body, swallowing her whole…destroying her bite by bite until nothing remained. He was momentarily at peace.
Chapter 14
Jake sat in a small conference room with a stack of missing persons' files on the desk before him. He and Teddy had hit a brick wall in the Maggie Black case and the Kelly Paulson disappearance before her. They were currently between assignments and Jake had okayed it with Chief Decker to do a little digging into the missing case files from the Kansas City area and the surrounding small communities.
There were hundreds of missing persons reports called in each year to the station. Most of them resolved on their own within a couple of hours. A run-away wife comes home, a missing husband sobers up, and others just show up in a different town, with a different relative.
However, there were plenty of cases that just never got solved. Either the person wanted to disappear permanently and has gone underground or a crime had taken place and the body had yet to be found.
Teddy walked into the room with a stack of reports that had been faxed to them from nearby communities. He slapped them on the table with a frown. “I feel like Chief Decker is punishing me by making me do this with you,” he grumbled as he sat in the chair opposite Jake.
“If you are being punished it’s because Decker heard you burp Hail To The Chief behind his back earlier this morning.”
Teddy grinned proudly. “It was an unusually clear rendition, wasn’t it?”
Jake remained silent, refusing to sink to the depths of actually making this a viable conversation. “Why don’t we start with the files from just the past year?”
“What are we looking for?”
“Let’s separate what we have between blonds and brunettes around Maggie and Kelly’s ages,” Jake said.
Teddy stared at him. “I thought you told me the other day not to go there.”
“I still don’t want to go there,” Jake replied. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Haven’t you heard that curiosity killed the cat?” Teddy asked, his eyes heavy-lidded with speculation.
“It bothers me a little bit that the two women who disappeared off the face of the earth within the past seven weeks looked a lot alike. I’m not expecting this to go anywhere so just indulge me, okay?”
“Consider yourself indulged.” Teddy began to separate the reports. “What do you want to do with the redheads?”
“Put them in with the blonds,” Jake replied.
Once again silence reigned in the small room, broken only occasionally by a rumble of Teddy’s stomach. At least the rumble was remaining contained rather than coming up his throat or blowing out his ass.
It had been last night as Jake had laid awake in his bed alone that photo images of Maggie and Paula had flashed over and over again in his head. They both shared long dark hair, bright blue eyes and slender, delicate features. They both had disappeared from public places. Maggie from a McDonald’s parking lot and Paula from the parking lot of a busy dental office.
Despite the fact that he and Teddy had been working the two cases, last night the similarities had bothered him more than usual. Maybe it was because he’d been alone in the bed, without Edie to talk to, without the presence of her warmth snuggled up against him.
The darkness of the night had seemed more profound and his mind had drifted to sinister places. What if they were missing something? What if the two women who looked so much alike were tied by a single force that had removed them both from sight? What if the same man was responsible for both women’s disappearances?
It had been seven weeks since Kelly Paulson had disappeared. Three weeks since Maggie had vanished. Was that some sort of time line? Three weeks between events? There just wasn’t enough information to leap to any sort of conclusions.
His sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the two women crying out his name, begging him to find them, to bring them back to the light. The worst part had been when Maggie’s face had morphed into Edie’s face. Then Kelly’s had done the same thing, filling him with a terror he’d never known before.
The dream had stopped abruptly and he’d come to full consciousness, bathed in sweat and with his heart pounding a thousand miles a minute.
A glance at his clock had let him know it was just after three. What he wanted to do more than anything was grab his phone and call Edie, make sure that she was okay. He knew he was being ridiculous, spooked by nightmares and dark images he couldn’t control.
He’d called Edie at seven when he’d been on his way into the station. She was fine and sitting at her computer already at work, but it had been the nightmare that had prompted him to dig into the missing persons’ reports to see if there was any kind of a pattern they might have missed.
By the time he and Teddy were finished with their sorting, they had five women who fit the general profile of long dark hair, blue eyes and dainty features. Maggie and Kelly had been taken from Kansas City. The other three came from Liberty, Riverside and Smithville, all small towns that were minutes from the Kansas City limits.
“This one…” Teddy plunked his fat finger on top of one of the reports, “doesn’t quite fit with the others. Both Maggie and Kelly were taken from public areas.” He pulled out two of the other reports. “This one, Regina Smith, disappeared from a pizza place. Linda Burns vanished from a convenience store. All of their cars were found in the parking lots where the women disappeared.”
His finger once again pointed to the earlier report. “But she disappeared from her house. Her car was found in the garage and her husband was a number one suspect. No evidence was found to directly tie him to her disappearance. She’s an anomaly out of the group.”
Jake frowned as he looked at the reports of the four other women. “Is there enough of a pattern with the cars left at the last places they were seen and the physical resemblance of the victims for us to go there.”
Teddy leaned back in his chair and released a deep sigh. He knew what Jake was asking. Was there a serial kidnapper working in the area? Taking women who physically rang his bell? And if there was, then where were the women?
Were they still alive? Or was he killing them and burying them someplace where they’d never be found, replacing one with another as the need struck him?
“Is it possible that you’re more sensitive about all this because these women kind of look like Edie?” He raised one of his eyebrows and held Jake’s gaze.
Jake hesitated a long moment and then gave a curt nod. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“I’m just wondering if we go through the stack of blonds the same way we just did the brunettes, would we find the same kind of patterns?”
The last thing that Jake wanted to do was sound a false alarm, based on his nightmares, on his irrational fear of losing Edie. Maybe he was the one who had gotten too close to Colette Merriweather’s story. Maybe listening to Edie talk about everything that Colette had suffered was affecting him a little too closely.
He eyed the separate stack of blonds and redheads. “Let’s go through them and see what kind of patterns we can find, see if any of the facts of their disappearances matches what we’ve found with the four brunettes.”
Teddy burped the first refrain of Get A Job by the Silhouettes and then both men fell silent as they once again got to work.
Edie was deeply immersed in all things Colette. She was in the zone, the words tumbling over themselves to get from her brain to her fingers to the computer screen.
She scarcely had to look at her notes next to her as she wrote about the night Colette awakened in her apartment with a man standing next to her bed.
It was amazing the thoughts that went through a person’s mind in the brief moments between recognizing danger and danger unleashed.
For the mere seconds before the man
had attacked her, Colette had noted that her clock read two-thirteen, that a sliver of moonlight danced in the window and that she’d worn an old nightgown to bed. If her body was found the next morning she’d be embarrassed by the wear and tear of the gown.
Such a crazy feminine thought at a time of imminent danger. These are the kinds of things that fascinated not only Edie, but also her readers. The human touches made the victims all the more real.
That was Edie’s job, to make the victims real and vital and to minimize the monster to a pathetic stealer of dreams, of hopes, of life itself.
She finally took a break and leaned back in her chair. The air-conditioner hummed a pleasant white noise that was conducive to her writing and also her own comfort. The weather was nasty hot outside and she’d finally decided it was time to close and lock the windows and give into the need for the pleasures of the forced cool air.
She dreaded her electric bill. Trying to make a living as a writer was difficult enough, especially since she had the added burden of being financially responsible for her father.
Absently she moved her arm down to give Rufus a pat on the back. He’d been snoozing next to her office chair since she’d started work that morning.
Knowing she needed to stop and take a break and stretch a little bit, she got out of her chair. Rufus instantly rose and looked at her expectantly. He knew the routine.
He followed her to the back door, where she opened it and allowed him out before her. He stretched on the deck next to the stairs and then nimbly ran out into the yard.
Edie stood in the center of the deck and raised her arms overhead, feeling kinks in her back and neck slowly unkinking with the movement. It was hot, but the heat felt good as she bent over and touched her toes and then twisted her body back and forth to finish loosening up.
Rufus did his business against a bush he was slowly killing with each visit outside and then suddenly shot toward the back of the fence where a thick stand of trees stood just behind the chain link enclosure.
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