“You might as well be useful? Asshole.” Bella grunted, already feeling guilty about insulting the man who’d saved her in so many ways. After all, he was still her father, and he was a damn good one. But couldn’t he at least throw her a bone? Let her in even a little bit?
She slid the file off the desk and turned it so that she could read the name on the tag.
Williams/Fraud and Conspiratory Murder/June 28, 2018.
“Shit,” Bella hissed.
Chapter Eight
She’d overdone it on the treadmill again. Her legs were lifeless, and her shoulders complained as she pushed open the door of the gym. Bella’s body had given her plenty of warning throughout the day. After only an hour of reading the torturously dull Williams file, her head had begun to swim. Every time she looked up from the endless lists of phone calls and pointless minutia, it was as if her brain had to catch up with the movement of her eyes. She promised herself she’d get a proper rest as soon as her working day was done. She also promised herself that it was her decision to do so. It was easier to do the right thing if she convinced herself it was her idea in the first place. She was impressed with her resolve. She’d go home, eat something, have a much-needed shower, and then collapse, just as she should. But she didn’t.
She’d found herself at the gym instead—pushing her exhausted body to another 10K time record. Because if she could pull it off when she was this exhausted, what could she pull off when she wasn’t? If there was ever a time to stay sharp, to push herself, it was now.
The smell that came off her when the fresh air hit her was as legendary as her so-called resolve. It was a pungent mix—sweat from the night before and the stink of exertion, coupled with the fact that she’d put on some unwashed workout clothes from her locker. She was glad for the cool, outside air.
Steadying her legs, she walked out from under the awning into the rain. It practically steamed off her cheeks where it fell. Now that she’d completely depleted herself, she could collapse right onto the slick pavement, curl up in a ball, and sleep happily. She scanned the empty street for a cab.
“Bella?”
She started, turning around so fast her sweaty hair licked the side of her face. Kyle Gray was stepping out of the gym. For a moment she was stunned. Seeing her partner in a place that had become more private to her than her own home unsettled her for a moment.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He shrugged his broad shoulders, his large overcoat seeming to move of its own accord. “I knew I’d find you here.”
“Kyle, we’ve been partners for almost a year, if you didn’t know where I was most of the time, I’d question your detective skills.” Her attempt at a joke failed, judging by the look on his face. Somewhere between her leaving for the day and now, something had knocked all the levity from Kyle’s expression. His mouth was a hard line. His eyes searched hers in the dim. For what? Something was wrong.
“What is it?” she asked before thinking. “Is it Salem? Did you get a positive ID?”
Kyle had been holding something in the pocket of his jacket since stepping out into the rain beside her. He hesitated before pulling whatever it was from the inside. He shook his head, loosening a strand of Lassie-blond hair. It fell over his eyes, still locked on hers. “You know I shouldn’t be here, right? I’m totally going over the captain’s head. My job is on the line right now.”
Bella’s heart, already struggling to find something like a regular beat in her chest, was revived. It leapt back to form, thudding in her still-sweaty temples. “I know, I get it. It’s forbidden,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”
Kyle sighed. He shook his head again and turned his phone screen to her.
“There’s been another one. The media doesn’t know about it yet. We want to keep them as far away from any of this as possible so we can avoid any copycats. This picture…” He paused. “Poor son of a bitch. It was sent directly to me, but it’s not directed at me.”
Bella took the phone from his hand and looked closer. It was lurid. For a moment, her brain struggled to comprehend the mass of gore and flesh she was staring at. The flash lighting illuminated all the indecent angles of the body, the splatters and panic-curled fingers brought into stark relief. The shadows were so dark it was difficult to distinguish what was blood and what was mud. The message, however… that was easy enough to interpret.
“Christ, Kyle. He—”
“Looks just like me, I know.” Kyle brushed her observation aside, as if that wasn’t the worst thing about the picture.
The victim could’ve been Kyle’s twin. Whoever had done this had positioned his face so that he stared, his dead eyes as lifeless as a doll, straight into the flash. He was naked except for the final embarrassment of a pair of stained underwear. But it was what remained of his chest that was the photographer’s focus. The letters were strangely Nordic-looking, carefully carved but without curves. Blood dripped from the wounds, creeping down his stomach and turning the wide band of his underwear a fiendish pink.
Bella put two trembling fingers on the screen. In a single motion, she zoomed in to read the man’s deep, fatal inscription.
LET’S PLAY
Chapter Nine
The first time she heard Mamá singing, it came from the corner of the cellar where the shadows seemed the darkest. At first Bella had thought it might have been the televisions upstairs. When the man she knew now as Mr. Ross first took her by the hand and led her through the house, she’d caught a glimpse of them in passing. She’d only ever seen that many screens in shop windows and department stores. Every television was on a different channel, streaming convulsing blue light through the dark room that was already packed with a nonsense of voices, jingles, and applause. She’d looked up and saw him staring down at her then. When their eyes met, something altered in his. It was like someone deep inside had slammed shutters closed on windows too dark—too private—for children.
He’d been looking at her with his adult eyes.
Grown-ups kept those eyes locked tight. She’d seen them before when Mamá had argued with Papa or opened one of the envelopes the government wouldn’t stop sending. When she collapsed onto the floor of the Stop N’ Save a million years ago and a million miles away, she’d used them then, too.
But Mamá wasn’t dead. Not really.
Somehow, she’d made her way to the farmhouse. Huddled in the corner of the cellar, Bella strained to hear her mother’s voice from the shadows. She forced her eyes to focus, willing them to cut through the cobwebs and inky black that pooled across from her like a flooded swamp.
“Los pollitos dicen
Pío pío pío
Cuando tienen hambre
Y cuando tienen frio.”
It wasn’t the televisions. With nothing else to occupy her mind, she’d mapped out the floor plan of the house onto the ceiling. The cavernous living room was to her left, where a jungle of rusting pipes snaked their ways to the boiler. The noise from all those screens was ceaseless, and after a few days it’d receded into Bella’s mind until she barely heard it at all. She knew the creak of feet on the stairs leading to the second floor, the rattling tap of dog claws above her head where the kitchen was, the slam of the front and back door. She knew their voices now, too. Mr. Ross was always the calm one. She’d heard him once or twice at the door that led down to the cellar. Sometimes, late at night, the handle would burst into life and fling up and down as one of those horrible men tried to force their way in. Mr. Ross was never far behind. His voice was stern even then—louder than the televisions upstairs and so frightening that the entire house seemed to shrink into itself.
He wouldn’t let them hurt her. That’s what Mr. Ross told her every day when he brought her food. She was safe. He was always sure to tell her that. He’d never let anyone hurt her. She was his after all. His little duckling.
In the beginning, she’d believed him. After all, it was his brothers that’d kil
led her mamá and thrown Bella in the back of the car. As disgusting as he was to her physically, Mr. Ross was looking after her. He brought her cake every day on a chipped china plate. He made sure her water was always filled and that her bucket was emptied. She still trembled when he approached, unable to look past the chicklet-white teeth that glowed in the dark and the stooped, thorny thinness of him. But he’d never touched her. Never yelled like he did when he made the world stop around him.
The day he looked at her with his adult eyes again was the day she’d heard her mother sing the first time. He was later with her plate of treats than usual. She’d heard the key rattling in the lock, and when he made his way down the staircase, she’d seen him stumble. Walking across the uneven floor, his body had seemed looser somehow, like a broken Barbie doll. When he placed the plate on her air mattress, he’d smelled like her papa used to. When he looked down at her, the shutters in his eyes were wide open. There was no light behind them. They were as black as the oily, stale dark that surrounded her.
“You won’t like this,” he’d said that day. He pulled a hair brush from the back pocket of his jeans. Plastic and coated in glittering paint, it shimmered in the light of the bulb that hung overhead. “But we should try to get some of those knots out.” He slumped onto the mattress, sending Bella’s thin body upward on a wave of displaced air.
Bella considered running, but to where? The blackness in the corners was so deep that she’d often wondered if she could just disappear in it, the house folding her into its water-warped wood and prickly pink insulation like a protective blanket.
She could hear Mr. Ross’s breathing become as ungainly as his movements. He was looking at her, stroking the brush through her matted hair. If she looked in his eyes, she knew exactly what she would see. Her papa had looked at her like that. Her uncle had. She’d seen her best friend’s father stare at her like that once, too. Did all men have those eyes?
“Does that feel good?” he asked.
Bella stiffened. He was smoothing her hair to her scalp with his other hand, tangling his fingers through her strands as he drew the brush down her back. Did he expect an answer? Did he expect her to nod and thank him? She willed herself to do something but found her body couldn’t respond.
Mr. Ross didn’t seem to notice. He continued his awkward rhythm, his acrid, yeasty breath fanning her cheeks. “So pretty. Such a pretty little duckling, aren’t you?” His hands were on her face then. His fingertips scaled with tiny cuts caught on the softness of her flesh as he stroked her.
Staring forward, Bella saw the shadow in the corner pulsate. His hands were on her neck then, tracing along thin muscles of her throat and collarbone. The mattress bulged upward again as he shuffled closer. The shadow swelled.
“La gallina busca
El maiz y el trigo
Les da la cominda
Y les presta abrigo.”
Mamá. Had she followed in a car of her own? Had she slipped into the trunk? She imagined her mamá, a superhero back from the dead like she’d seen in so many movies, hiding in the shadows until she was needed and then springing out to save the day with gritted teeth and blows.
“My little duckling.” He leaked the words down her body like poison dripping from a needle. He was mumbling, ranting incoherent words under his breath as his fingers hooked under the collar of her blouse. “Let’s play.”
“Bajos sus dos alas
Acurrucaditos
Duermen los pollitos
Hasta el otro día.”
Nothing came from the darkness but song.
Chapter Ten
It was busy for 2:00 a.m. on a weekday. She’d chosen the location of her loft apartment for that reason. She liked the noise and rush of life around her—the laughter of drunkards on weekends, the honk of traffic during the day, the faint bass of the music from the café downstairs. It was silence she couldn’t stand. These days, her natural aversion to it wasn’t getting any better.
Bella took a deep breath and pulled her coat around her tighter. It was unseasonably cold, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way. The moist air was cleansing, almost icy, and she imagined it sweeping out all the dusty corners of her body as she walked, cleansing her mind from the thoughts that’d been harder and harder to quell as the forbidden case picked up momentum.
Not that she should be thinking of that. God, no. According to the good captain, it was all Williams for her, all the time. She shook her head to herself, picking up her pace. She walked past the late-night falafel place that marked where her neighborhood officially ended. The owner was scrubbing down the plastic tables inside, and he nodded at Bella as she passed. She nodded back, but it didn’t show—her head was buried in her hood, her hands stuffed in her pockets and her eyes unfocused.
Goddamn Williams case. She could take an entire bottle of Adderall and still be unable to concentrate on it. It’d been a week since she’d been assigned to it, and even though she dutifully sat at her desk every day and opened the file, she might as well have been reading Cantonese. If Brooks ever summoned her to his office to ask her about it, she’d be screwed. She couldn’t tell the first thing about the man or whatever triviality had earned him a police file in the first place.
The two new murders though? She could tell a few things about those.
Her quick pace had already taken her a few blocks from her apartment. She’d left any stragglers making their way home from late-night shifts or searching for an after-hours slice of vegan pizza behind her. She was in the ghost town that was the city’s oldest industrial area. The gentrification of her own little piece of Portland hadn’t reached here yet, its stylish tentacles still too weak to squeeze the cool out of the old buildings and alleyways that surrounded her.
It was colder. She gazed up at the brick walls and sagging gates that seemed to tower over her. Muscle memory forced her hand under her jacket to where her gun was pressed against her flank. Usually just touching the grip was enough to calm her, but now, she felt nothing.
Looks like you took a wrong turn there, my little duckling.
Salem’s voice was so loud in her head it made her jump. She pushed her heavy hood off her head in a rush and looked behind her. Her eyes darted to all the places she’d been trained to look.
Nothing.
She sucked in another deep breath and exhaled. Her breath steamed into the air, released from the tight confines of her lungs. Of course he wasn’t there.
Ever since Kyle had shown her the photo of his doppelgänger victim, she’d been hearing Ross’s voice in her head more often. It was as if the soft, innocent voice in her head that’d been hers had receded somewhere, replaced by the raspy tones of a man she hadn’t spoken to in years. First it was a whisper, sneaking into her ear one morning while she was brushing her hair. Then it woke her in the middle of the night, louder this time, as if he were lying under her bed like a giant, filthy insect burrowed into the bottom of her mattress.
If Salem had killed those people, he’d obviously chosen the first girl because of her age. The second victim, the lovely and helpless frat boy, had been chosen because of his resemblance to her partner. Salem was watching her. He was getting his information from somewhere, and unlike Brooks or Kyle, she wasn’t giving it away on national television. If Salem really was to blame, he was getting his information himself from somewhere other than news clips and internet searches. He was getting it the only way he could: directly from her.
There was a sudden clatter from a junk lot across the street. Bella’s body turned to iron, adrenaline stiffening every muscle. She squinted into the darkness of the lot, scanning the twisted metal and piles of tires for a familiar form.
If he was following her, this was the worst possible place for her to be.
She turned on her heel and walked back the way she came. It was late anyway. She should get back to bed, clear her head, and maybe actually apply herself to her job tomorrow. There was no way Ross could’ve gotten her address or any other
detail of her personal life. There wasn’t a single chink in the armor she’d created around herself these last twenty-five years. She’d made sure of that.
So, how did I know about your himbo partner, then? Figure that one out, clever girl.
She was speeding up. She didn’t remember walking this far out of the way, and she calculated at least five more empty blocks before she was near anything resembling the living part of the city. Although her instincts were yelling at her to turn around, she refused. Her breath was pluming, huffing out before her as she walked the line between a rush and a jog.
Another metallic clunk sounded behind her.
Bella stopped and turned around. Someone was there. She saw his noiseless shadow blend into the darkness of an alleyway, as effortless as a snake sliding under a rock. She went to unholster her gun but found it was already in her hand. When had she done that?
Before she knew it, she was stalking toward the alleyway. There was no way, if Salem really was following her, he was going to force her back behind locked doors again.
She stopped at the alleyway and raised her gun, willing her hands to be steady. She searched the darkness for him, for his lean frame pressed up against the walls or even emerging upward from one of the filthy puddles like she’d conjured him.
“Police,” she heard herself announce. “Into the light and identify yourself.”
There was a rustle then and a curse spoken in a shaky and frightened voice. A short, middle-aged man exploded from behind one of the dumpsters like a frightened bird. Away from the shadows, Bella could see the blank panic in his face as he fumbled with the fly of his trousers. Before she could say anything, he turned in the other direction and ran.
Kill Game: An Unforgettable Serial Killer Thriller Page 5