by Stella Hart
I nodded, said my goodbyes, and left her office. My legs were shaky and my knees weak as my mind replayed our session. I knew that I’d had the dream about the hallway and the doors many times before, but I’d never paid any attention to it in the past, even when I woke up with funny feelings in my stomach. I figured it was just one of those silly, pointless recurring dreams people got sometimes; something my subconscious picked up from an old movie I saw as a kid. I never thought it might have a deeper meaning, and I never considered that it might be a cover for some past trauma.
I let out a puff of frigid air and wrapped my woolen scarf around my neck, still mulling it over as I headed to the nearest bus stop.
What on earth was beyond those doors?
Did I even want to know?
4
Alex
I lurked behind a polished stone column in the hallway, listening to the scuffing sound of Celeste’s faded old boots on the tiles as she walked away from Dr. Fitzgibbons’ office and toward the mental health clinic’s main exit. She’d just finished a therapy appointment. She had one at nine-thirty every Thursday morning nowadays. I knew from the little schedule she’d typed up on her laptop, which I’d had remote access to for a long time now.
Silly, innocent little girl had no clue.
When she was out of sight, I stepped into the wide hall. Now that there was no chance of her seeing me, I didn’t need to hide. I was like a ghost in this place; could easily come and go as I pleased without a second glance. Aside from the odd woman, that is. They noticed me, but they were never rude or questioned my presence. Instead, they were admiring and friendly.
A square jawline and piercing blue eyes tended to have that effect on the ladies, as I’d learned at a very early age. Young or old, they practically melted if I flashed them a smile. I didn’t care about that, though—I only smiled to be polite so that I wouldn’t receive any unwanted negative attention. There was only one girl I wanted to melt for me. Melt until she was on her knees, begging and pleading.
Celeste.
I quietly stepped up to Dr. Fitzgibbons’ door and put my left ear up against it. From here, I could listen to the therapist record her main session notes. It was too difficult to try and get into a computer in this part of the hospital (either here or remotely; the mental health center had some serious firewalls on their new network. Even doctors who worked in other sections of the hospital couldn’t get in) and too risky to outright steal the recordings or spy outside the door when Celeste was directly in the room. This was the unfortunate third best option. I couldn’t hear every single word, but I could always hear enough to make out the general gist, and it only took a few minutes.
If anyone happened to walk by in this secluded hallway and ask what I was doing, I had an excuse readied. Oh, I was just dropping by to see Dr. Fitzgibbons, but I thought I heard something weird going on in there, so I was just quickly listening to make sure nothing bad was happening. I guess she’s just on the phone, though. Followed by a self-deprecating laugh. People always believed everything I said, as long as I smiled. They never suspected what was behind the smile. Or rather, what wasn’t.
I’d done this every other week since Celeste began therapy, and so far, she hadn’t said anything during the sessions that made me believe she remembered a thing about that day so long ago.
But this week… this was different.
“Celeste Riley… believe she is beginning to recall an occasion… she described standing in a hall outside a ballroom door entrance. She was able to tell me about… and I am concerned that she is starting to… distress….” The therapist’s voice was faint today, quieter than usual, and I could only make out every few words. What I heard was still enough to set my pulse racing.
I strained, trying to catch the rest of what Dr. Fitzgibbons was saying. When she was done, I quickly drew my ear away from the door and stalked toward the exit.
Fuck.
Celeste was getting close. Far too close. Her fragile mind was beginning to put everything together, re-forming all those old memories, and it would only be a matter of time before she remembered what was behind that door. That meant only one thing.
It was time to take her.
This time, she sure as hell wouldn’t forget me.
5
Celeste
“Six black coffees, four white, two of those decaf, and three teas. One white and two black. Bring them to the eastern conference room, and do it fast.” Leonard Foley, the Pittsburgh FBI field office’s Special Agent in Charge, barked the order at me, his dark eyes narrowed.
“Yes, sir,” I murmured, nodding briefly.
He was mad at me, because I was late to the office today. I was never late, but I slept through my alarm, which also never happened. Then it started to bucket with rain, which meant everyone somehow forgot how to drive, and the resulting traffic jams made me even later. Rough start to the day.
I was an intern, so if I wasn’t around to fetch coffees for higher-ups, they would all be grumpy with me, especially Foley. He didn’t approve of the whole internship program for criminology majors, but it was implemented by those in the Bureau who were above him, so he had no choice but to grudgingly accept my presence, along with the other intern, a quiet guy named Bryce.
Even though I was doing a lot of tedious scut work, I was still gaining invaluable experience. I had received a relatively high security clearance (a must for anyone who stepped foot in the field office for work, even lowly interns) so the agents allowed me to shadow them when I wasn’t photocopying, returning documents to the file room, or getting coffee. They let me look over case files, and sometimes I was even allowed to sit in on meetings with criminal profilers.
Foley seemed to favor Bryce over me, though, because I’d never been allowed to read the Heartbreaker case files or sit in on relevant meetings, which had ramped up ever since Paul Halston went missing several weeks ago. The general mood in the office was fraught with tension as a result.
Three profilers had even been sent from the BAU in DC yesterday to aid the local agents with the case, because in Foley’s words (and apparently his superiors in DC, too), it was ‘nothing short of an embarrassment’ to our city that we’d had a serial killer operating on and off for fifteen years with no leads. Before this year, the total tally of victims was seven. An eighth one had been found four months ago, on Washington’s Landing, and if Halston was also a victim, then that brought the killer’s current count up to nine.
Bryce was a nice guy, and he’d secretly filled me in on the Heartbreaker meeting he attended a few weeks ago. I was surprised at just how little the FBI had on the case after this long. Apparently, all they knew for certain about the killer was that he was a man.
But I already knew that.
Still, I was disappointed. I’d hoped they would have more on the Heartbreaker, because I’d been desperate to know his identity for years now. Beyond desperate...
“About time,” Foley snapped as I hurried into the conference room, carefully clutching the tray with all the drinks. His icy-sharp glare practically sliced through me like a laser.
“Oh, leave her alone,” muttered Dwyer. He was one of the Assistant Special Agents in Charge, and he was much easier to deal with than Foley. He was a balding, paunchy man in his fifties with a warm, familiar air—the kind of man you felt like you’d known forever even if you only just met half an hour ago.
Foley, on the other hand, was a different story. Sharp, acid-tongued, impatient. A real piece of work. Whenever he was around, I was on edge, praying I didn’t do anything wrong in case it affected some sort of performance review of mine. Of course, I was also all thumbs around him, clumsy as a drunken bear, because he made me so damn nervous.
I quietly handed ASAC Dwyer his drink, giving him a grateful smile. Then I gave the rest out to the other agents and the three criminal profilers who’d just arrived from DC. My heart skipped a beat as I realized what their presence implied. This was a meeting about the He
artbreaker case.
“Will you be sitting in on this, Celeste?” Dwyer asked, his forehead puckering in a curious expression.
“Of course not,” Foley snapped. “She’s not allowed anywhere near this case. You’re aware of that, Dwyer.”
“Look, I know,” he replied, holding his palms up. “But Bryce is out sick, and I actually think it would be okay. Perhaps even… useful. Anyone else agree?”
Several of the agents nodded and murmured, including Agent Jason West. I remembered him from a guest lecture he presented at college last year. He was a nice man with messy dark hair and friendly blue eyes, and he was actually the first person to mention the internship to me.
“Unfortunately, I’m the one in charge,” said Foley, aiming a nasty smile at Dwyer. “And we need to follow the rules. Celeste needs to leave.”
My heart sank. I guess it made sense that I wasn’t allowed to listen in, but still….
One of the newly-arrived DC profilers held up a hand. “Actually, I’d like it if she stayed.”
There was a long, painful silence as the profiler stared down the SAC. Finally, Foley relented. His face was a bright, angry red.
“Fine.” He turned and shot me a filthy look. “You can stay, Celeste.” He practically spat out the sentence, and he said my name like it was a dirty word.
The meeting began. The profiler who stood up for me and asked for me to stay—Cara Hess—cleared her throat and began to walk everyone through the revised profile for the Heartbreaker.
“We already know for sure that it’s a man we’re looking for.” She paused and glanced down the table at me, a curious expression flickering in her hazel eyes. Then she looked away and continued. “But now, based on statistical data from other similar cases, we can also be reasonably certain that he is Caucasian and somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and forty. He lives alone, most likely somewhere within fifty miles of the city.”
She stood and tapped something on a small laptop computer. A slide appeared on the whiteboard which hung on the wall closest to the far end of the table. It featured photos of every known Heartbreaker victim so far, along with their names, ages and occupations. I swallowed hard and looked away, my guts churning.
“Eight victims so far, nine if we count the missing man, Paul Halston. Halston fits with the victimology profile our past team members developed for the killer years ago, so we don’t predict any of that changing anytime soon. But I’ll go over it again as a refresher.” She glanced at me again, and I knew she was going over the profile for my benefit. Everyone else already knew every detail.
I perked up, listening intently. There were plenty of theories on the internet about how and why the Heartbreaker chose his victims. I was curious to see if any matched the FBI’s profile development.
“We believe he has a criminal past, and that is why he targets these individuals. He was most likely imprisoned for a stretch of time, and he believes he was unfairly treated by the justice system. Now he’s getting his idea of revenge. We think this is why he keeps his victims captive for weeks before their murder. He is punishing those he feels are responsible for his incarceration, making them feel what he felt when he was locked up for all that time. This is a highly narcissistic individual with anti-social personality disorder.”
My shoulders slumped. Nothing new there. The theory that the Heartbreaker was an ex-con was an old one, and also the most popular on the internet sleuth forums. It made sense, after all. The victim list included two lawyers, three high-ranking senior detectives, a police chief, a prison warden and a judge. Paul Halston—if he was actually a victim too—brought the number of lawyers to three.
From that, it seemed clear the Heartbreaker had an issue with the law, and was punishing those he held responsible for whatever happened to him. However, a select few people on the internet seemed to believe that the ex-con theory was too simple. Too obvious. They believed the police and FBI were missing some key aspect of the case that would blow that theory out of the water once and for all. No one had ever discovered any evidence to prove that, though.
Despite that, I agreed with them. The ex-con theory was far too obvious for my liking. Then again, what did I know? I wasn’t an FBI profiler. Not even close.
“The acknowledged problem we have with this profile,” Hess continued. “Is that in all the work that has been carried out for fifteen years now, no one has managed to find any criminal case that connects each and every one of the victims. We’ve combed through arrest records and databases from all over the country, and we haven’t found a single individual who was arrested or charged by all of the police force victims, represented or prosecuted by all of the lawyers, sentenced by that particular judge, or housed in the penitentiary that the prison warden headed up.”
“What if they were just victimized because of the general nature of their jobs?” Agent West asked, eyebrows knitted. “Does it have to be that they’re all connected by virtue of personally arresting the killer or personally prosecuting him in court, et cetera? Guy could just have it in for law enforcement, right?”
“We’ve considered that angle too, of course, but the way he keeps them captive for so many weeks, and the way he tortures them and carves their hearts out while they’re alive… it seems specifically designed for those he wants serious revenge on. Not just anyone who happens to have a police badge or a law degree. We think he’s definitely targeting specific people. We’ve just failed to find the connection that links all of them.”
“Some arrest records from pre-digital times still haven’t been uploaded to online databases yet,” ASAC Dwyer cut in. “We’ve been hoping to find someone who connects to all of the victims in those. But that’s from well before the early nineties… that would make the killer quite a lot older than the current profile suggests.”
Hess nodded, her forehead creasing with thought. “The victims were all over forty-five, some over sixty. So perhaps there’s some merit to that, though it goes against the age range we decided fits the most,” she mused. “We’ll certainly look into it while we’re here. How close are you to having all the old paper records digitalized?”
“Not far. It’s been a long, slow process, but we’re getting there.”
“What if….” I blurted the words out without thinking. My face immediately turned hot, and I knew I must be beet red.
Foley shot me a look so cold it could’ve stopped the polar ice caps from melting. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled.
“No, please. Tell us all about your ideas, Celeste. I’m sure you, with your three years of college so far, know better than all of us.” His words cut through me like hot knives.
“I wasn’t—” I began to speak, but I faltered again under the special agent’s piercing gaze.
“Foley, for Christ’s sake,” Dwyer said, giving his superior a contemptuous look. “Stop being so cruel to the interns. Celeste, did you have something to say?”
“I just thought… what if the whole ‘ex-jailbird’ theory is off-base?” I asked in a small voice.
Foley rolled his eyes. “Okay, that’s all we need to hear. Back to being seen and not heard, Celeste.”
Dwyer, West and the profilers looked at me with interest, then whispered amongst themselves. I managed to catch a few words.
“He’s not wrong. She’s what… twenty? What the hell would she know?”
“Yes, but it’s her,” I heard Hess murmur. “Why do you think I wanted her in here?”
“Hm. True.”
They stopped whispering and turned to me.
“What makes you say that, Celeste?” Hess asked.
My hands trembled. “I’m sorry, I know it’s probably stupid, and I don’t mean to undermine fifteen years of theorizing from great minds, but I’ve always been interested in the details of this case, and I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. After… well….” I trailed off and paused to take a breath. I didn’t miss the looks everyone else exchanged. I
knew what they were thinking. “I’ve always wondered if perhaps the victims are all connected, but not via the law enforcement angle.”
ASAC Dwyer frowned. “Go on.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what the connection could be. It’s just an idea that would explain why you can’t find any links on the law side of things.”
Hess stared at me, narrowing her eyes. “Is there something you aren’t telling us, Celeste?” Everyone exchanged looks again. I ignored it. “Perhaps something about your—”
I cut her off, knowing exactly what she was going to say and not wanting to hear it. “No. That was it,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster.
Foley openly rolled his eyes. “Great, thank you, Celeste.” He clapped his hands. “Pack it up, everyone. After fifteen years, a college kid with no real world experience has solved it. Oh wait… no, she hasn’t. She’s just mentioned a theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up, let alone any idea of what this arcane connection between the victims could be. A theory, I might add, that was already considered years ago, yet no evidence was ever found to support it.”
Most of the agents laughed. My cheeks burned with shame. Only West, Dwyer and Hess looked unamused, but they didn’t say anything to defend me. They were right not to. I was stupid for having spoken up; should’ve kept my mouth shut.
Of course the experienced FBI agents and profilers knew more than me. Of course they’d already considered my idea before. I was coming across like an immature child who thought she knew better than everyone. It wasn’t my intention, but that was probably how they all viewed it.
“How about you go and grab us some more coffee while the adults get back on the case, little girl?” Foley said.
Gladly. Anything to escape this room. The same room I’d been so desperate to get into just moments ago.