The Broken

by Shelley Coriell

  “We’re getting it typed,” Chief Greenfield said. “Seeing if we can get a match on any of the broadcaster victims. If that’s the case, we have our link.”

  Hayden studied the freezer for a good five minutes. She didn’t know how he could stand the cold. The icy air pouring out of the freezer made her knees quake.

  When he at last raised his head, he brought out a brick-red chunk of ice. “He didn’t have a broadcaster in here.” Two threads poked out from the ice. Pink.

  She reached for Hayden’s arm to steady herself. “You think he stored Kendra’s body in this freezer?”

  For a moment, Hayden didn’t say anything. Then he nodded.

  The cold intensified. “Why?” Kate asked.

  “He wanted to keep her close.” He turned to her. “Just like he wanted to keep you close.”

  * * *

  The picture was getting clearer.

  Hayden saw that Jason had been a boy torn in two. He was a little boy trying to please his overbearing, mentally ill mother, who was deathly jealous of Kate, a jealousy brought on by Kate’s father’s attention. Jason was also the little boy who adored his daring, pretty older sister, and he was sensitive enough to know the injustice being done to Kate. Had that rift as a child sent Erickson into a bout with dissociative identity disorder? Hayden had wondered from the beginning if he was chasing one person with a split personality because there were such disparities at each crime scene. However, people who genuinely suffered from the disorder were barely able to function, to dress themselves and get through the day and its normal challenges, let alone plan and execute six successful murders.

  He jammed a fist in his pocket. The tesserae in the mosaic that was Jason Erickson were numerous, and they were starting to come together, but there were still a number of missing pieces. He had one more room to check before he could get Kate away from the hell house of her childhood.

  When he started up the steps to the attic, Kate grabbed his hand, her fingers cold and hard. “We don’t need to go there,” she said with a sudden sharpness.

  ”What’s up there?”

  “Nothing.” Two fast blinks.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I can’t stop you, can I?”

  “Should you?” He kept his words soft.

  “No.” Her shoulders curved in as if she were trying to disappear into herself. “You probably need to see it.”

  A band of something clamped around his chest, containing his growing anger at Kate’s mother and a society that allowed horrible wrongs against children. The staircase was narrow, the ceiling low. “Do you want to go in first, or do you want me to?”

  A growl rolled over her lips and collided with her strangled laugh. “This is another one of your psychobabble things, isn’t it? Giving me some control in a place where as a child I had no control?”

  He admired her astuteness and that laugh. “And if it is?”

  “It’s still bugging the hell out of me.” With another little growl, she rushed passed him and shoved open the door. “Welcome to my world.”

  The minuscule room with high-pitched ceilings held a twin bed with a plain blue blanket and a three-drawer dresser. On the floor in front of the bed stretched a blue and brown circular rag rug. Nothing else. No pictures on the walls, no knickknacks or books, but there were bars on the window.

  She circled the room, touching nothing. “You know, she never physically abused me.” Kate stopped at the window, and the silhouette of her against those bars made him flinch. The surest way to kill a spirit like Kate’s was to cage it. “But she never let me truly live. I couldn’t have friends, join school clubs, read popular books or magazines, or wear pretty clothes. She was miserable in life, and she wanted the same for me.”

  Her voice trailed off, and she squatted, pulling back the rag rug. On the faded maple floor spilled a brown stain. “Remember that scar on Jason’s arm, the one I gave him?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “It happened right here. It was the night of my junior prom, and I was determined to go. Kendra refused to buy me a dress or shoes and wouldn’t let a boy on the property, but for once I wanted to be a normal high school girl in a pretty dress going to a fancy party. So I put together an elaborate scheme. I sewed an outfit from old cocktail dresses I’d found at Goodwill and told my date I’d meet him at school.

  “Long story short, Kendra found me getting ready and went ballistic. She was particularly upset I wore a pair of small gold earrings my father had bought me before he left.” Kate massaged the jagged welt on her lobe. “The earrings set her off. She yanked one out, and while I stood in shock holding my bleeding ear, she picked up a pair of scissors and headed toward my dress laid out on the bed.

  “That’s when I lost it. I ran toward her and tried to get the scissors out of her hand. We struggled, and Jason, who never could stand us arguing, jumped in. I know, Hayden, I’m sure as the sky is blue, that he was trying to get the scissors out of her hands so neither Kendra nor I would get hurt. When I eventually yanked the scissors from Kendra, my momentum sent me flying, and I jammed them into Jason’s arm. He jumped back, and the scissors sliced down his arm and across his wrist, a horrible, jagged gash.”

  Her gaze dropped to the bloodstain. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but I didn’t bother to stick around and see if he was okay. I took off and never looked back.” With a shrug meant to be indifferent but was instead heartbreakingly sad, she slid the rug back in place. “Let’s go.”

  He didn’t need to be a profiler to see how hard this was for her, but he had to be thorough. He reached for the door to what looked like a closet. Behind him, Kate sucked in a gasp. His fingers hovered over the knob.

  He’d seen torture chambers outfitted with chains, ice picks, battery acid, and branding irons. He’d touched the final words and prayers scratched into walls by victims who knew the place where they were being held against their will would be the place they would die. And he’d heard the echo of terror that would live forever in rooms where vile bits of humanity perpetuated evil. Damn the Kendra Ericksons of this world.

  His gut twisting, he pushed open the door and pulled on the cord hanging from the ceiling. Light chased away shadows, and it was his turn to suck in a breath. “It’s beautiful.”

  She left the window and joined him in the closet doorway. “I called it Happily Ever After.” Her voice was light and melodic, like sweet music. “I had forgotten all about it.”

  “You drew it. All of it?” He motioned to the space and asked, “Do you mind?”

  “Do I mind if you look into my past? My dreams? My soul?” she asked with a sarcastic laugh. “Sure, Hayden, go right ahead.”

  Hayden studied her face, making sure her intent matched her words. Catching the genuine smile, he stepped into a fairy tale. Magic Markers and crayons. Hardly the tools of an artist, but the murals on the walls moved him. His gaze traveled from the magical pool to the fairy village to the pasture that housed the unicorns. A smile curved his mouth as his finger traced the green-eyed princess flying through the sky on a winged horse with a little boy with equally green eyes. He raised both eyebrows at her.

  “Jason and I had a few good times,” she said with an obvious fondness for the child who had been her brother. Kate had a huge capacity for feeling, for caring. Hayden had seen it in her “Justice for All” reports and in her interaction with Smokey. And she wore those feelings for all the world to see. If Maeve were here, she’d say he could learn a lesson or two from Kate.

  His hand stilled when it reached the pink dragon, which lay on the ground, a silver knife arrowed in its breast.

  “The dragon never got past the gate,” he said softly.

  “Not in Happily Ever After.”

  Which is where this visit should end. Hayden switched out the light and shut the door on a little piece of Kate’s heart.

  As they made their way down the steps, he marveled not only at her ability to express what was in her heart but at her artistic
talent. He knew from his investigation into her past that she had no formal art training, but having lived years with Marissa, a trained artist, he knew good art. He also knew how that mural made him feel. He’d bought into the magic in her whimsical fairies and unicorns and celebrated the victory over the pink dragon. Kate’s fairyland went deeper; it was something that moved one’s soul.

  You don’t have a soul. Marissa’s words.

  Sometimes he felt soulless, detached from mind and heart and something deeper. But he had to in his line of work. He was the team’s head guy. Hatch called him the Professor, and Parker and the rest of the team turned to him when they needed unbiased and analytical observation. He could get into the head of a criminal because he had the ability to turn off his own mind, and in order to deal with those horrors he needed some level of detachment.

  With Kate more at peace than she’d been all morning, they left the house and made their way to the car when a screech sounded from under the porch.

  “Look, Hayden. It’s Jason’s cat.” Two yellow eyes shifted in the shadows. Kate held out her hand and made a soft titching sound. The cat took a furtive step toward her. “She looks horrible. I wonder when she last ate.” The mangy cat, a mottled mix of orange, brown, and yellow, continued to inch forward.

  A uniformed officer walked by. “Hey, there’s Ellie.” The officer made soft clicking noises toward the porch skirt. “We’ve been trying to get her for days. Here kitty, kitty.”

  Jason’s cat ran into the shadows.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday, June 13, 11:30 a.m.

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Shayna Thomas’s eighty-three-year-old grandmother held out her blue-veined hand, raining dirt on her granddaughter’s casket. That old hand shook, as did her stooped shoulders as she tried to hold back tears in eyes full of heart-shredding sadness. This was one fucked-up world when a grandma had to throw clods of dirt on one of her grandbabies’ graves.

  Lottie shifted in her seat in the back row of chairs next to gravesite 154-B. Eleven more of CSPD’s finest, dressed in their Sunday best, were planted at and near the Forest Lawn Cemetery, the final resting place of Shayna Thomas. Her boys had also been at the Alleluia Lutheran Church looking for Shayna Thomas’s killer.

  Five days had passed since they’d found Thomas’s bloody body and Lottie had sworn to find the SOB who was fucking with her town.

  Right now they didn’t have much. The fingerprints on the window were run through IAFIS, the FBI’s mother of a database. No matches. She was still waiting on the DNA from the ejaculate. Contrary to all those cop shows her twelve-year-old grandson liked to watch, it took weeks, sometimes months, to get DNA results. They had that size nine shoeprint of the ugly orange- and yellow-striped shoes. And they had the woman’s orthotic shoeprint.

  All that added up to a whole lot of nothing.

  The mourners at the gravesite stood and sang a song about walking in the shadow of death and fearing no evil. Lottie didn’t fear the evil that had invaded her town. She despised it. She wanted to grab it by the balls and twist. Hard.

  When the music died away, the mourners filed out, and Lottie met with Detective Traynor at one of the parking lot exits.

  “You see anything, Hayseed?” Lottie asked.

  Traynor shook his head. “We’re taking down plates, though.”

  Lottie took the two-way out of her purse and radioed her other men. Nothing at the other exit. Zilch at the park across the street and the office building on the corner. Her radio squawked.

  “Got a man at the gravesite,” one of her men said with a catch in his voice. “Jogger.”

  A jogger in a cemetery? Pretty damned creepy. “You close enough for an ID?” Lottie asked.

  There was a pause. “Yellow and orange shoes. Zebra-striped.”

  Lottie hiked up her dress and sprinted past the pond with its two white swans, past the veterans’ section with its proud flags, and past a gazebo with swirly benches. A hundred yards into her sprint, the heel of her right black satin three-inch pump snapped off. She kicked off her left shoe, sending it through the air like a sleek black missile.

  The center of her chest ached, and her lungs throbbed. Her fat old ass wasn’t up to this, but her heart was. She outran the pain, including the stab from a rock that sliced her instep. She reached the gravesite, where one of her officers had a man on the ground, his face pressed against the dry grass. She dropped to her knees. Grabbing him by the hair, she spun him toward her, ready to go face-to-face with evil.

  But she got a shock. Evil didn’t stare at her, fear did.

  * * *

  Saturday, June 13, 6:30 p.m.

  Dorado Bay, Nevada

  Why weren’t people staring at her?

  Kate had spent all day with Hayden, meeting and interviewing people who knew Jason. She steeled herself for pointed stares and whispered talk, but today no one blinked twice at her scars. Was it because she wore the makeup and scarf? Or was it because all of Dorado Bay was focused on another monster?

  “I can’t believe Jason is the Broadcaster Butcher,” Jason’s postal carrier had said. “He was always so kind, even helped me get my truck out of the snow one day.”

  Likewise, Jason’s neighbors, pastor, and coworkers didn’t give her a second look, but they had plenty to say about Jason—everything from he enjoyed taking long hikes by himself to he didn’t hang out at bars or clubs. What they didn’t say was where Jason may be hiding.

  “He never strayed far from home,” Ike Iverson, Jason’s pastor, had said. “He was dedicated to his mother and his work at Hope Academy.”

  Hayden, for all the dead ends, kept going with an efficient doggedness Kate had come to expect from him. She also found comfort in it. Hayden would not stop until his mission was accomplished. If she ever needed to move heaven and earth, she knew who to call.

  “You’re smiling,” Hayden said.

  She sat in the passenger seat of the rental car as he slipped the key into the ignition, ready to pull out of the parking lot of Pastor Iverson’s Living Waters Church. “Does my smile bother you?”

  Hayden was such a serious sort, all work and no play. Even when she’d been focused on her broadcasting career, she took time off to play. She indulged her creative side with her jewelry and her adventurous side with scenic motorcycle rides. She squinted, trying to picture Hayden on her motorcycle. No. It would mess up his hair and wrinkle his suit.

  “It’s an anomaly,” he explained, referring to her smile.

  “And you notice anomalies?”

  “I notice everything about you, Kate.”

  Her heart did a stutter-step as the space between them seemed to shrink. She heard the beat of his heart, breathed in spicy cinnamon, and felt a sudden heat. Surely he felt it, too. And then she remembered who this man was. He dealt in facts, not feelings, and any sensory overload was clearly one-sided, as he hadn’t budged. Hell, he hadn’t even blinked, so intent was his gaze. The comment wasn’t a come-on, just Hayden being Hayden, the FBI profiler who sees everything.

  She clicked her seatbelt in place. “One more stop today, right?”

  At last Hayden blinked and cranked the ignition. “Are you sure you’re up to it? I could drop you off with Evie and Hatch and do this one on my own.”

  Something soft and warm wrapped about her heart. Agent Perceptive really could be sweet, like now.

  “No, let’s get it over with.” Kate was not looking forward to talking to her grandparents. The few times Kendra took Kate and Jason to her parents’ lakeside mansion, the visits were uncomfortable affairs with Kendra screaming that they abandoned her and with Oliver Conlan’s icy return that Kendra made her own bed and needed to lie in it.

  A large man with tufts of white hair over his ears and a sharp nose opened the door. Kate stood in the shadow of a column but shifted to get a better look at the grandfather who had ignored her all of her life.

  “I need to talk to you about Jason.” Hayden show
ed the old man his badge.

  “We’ve already talked to the police,” said a thin woman with a platinum halo of hair and overly tight skin. And this would be the cold-shouldered grandmother. Kate wrapped her arms about her waist, surprised at the chill.

  “I appreciate that, Mrs. Conlan, and I assure you my questions tonight will be brief.”

  Good. Less exposure to this ice couple meant less chance of frostbite.

  Her grandparents shared a long look and nodded.

  “When was the last time you saw Jason?” Hayden asked.

  “Three weeks ago,” Oliver Conlan said. “He stopped by to tell us goodbye.”

  The skin on Kate’s arms pebbled, but Hayden didn’t flinch. “Was he going on a trip?”

  Her grandmother’s shoulders sagged. “He didn’t say. He just said he wanted to see us one last time.”

  “One last time? Did he say he was going away for good?”

  “He didn’t say, but he was visibly upset.”

  Was it that split personality concept Hayden had been toying with? Did the good, productive Jason want to say goodbye to those he loved because the evil, killing monster was taking over? But Hayden said people who suffered from this disorder could barely function.

  Hayden slipped a knotted fist in his pocket. “Do you know where Jason could be right now?”

  Oliver Conlan’s bushy eyebrows jerked up. “That hovel of a hunting cabin is my first guess. Jason was connected to it because it belonged to his lowlife father’s family.”

  “Did he ever talk about traveling or wanting to visit certain places?”

  “Never,” Ava Conlan said. “Jason seemed very content here.”

  “Did he have any friends, girlfriends?”

  “None,” Oliver Conlan said. “There wasn’t a good deal to like about him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m done.” He turned, and the mansion swallowed him.

  Hayden thanked Ava Conlan, and they’d turned to leave when the old woman said, “Good night, Katrina.” There was a softness, an almost wistfulness to her voice.