Repressed Page 2

  “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.” Petrosky gestured to the three stacks of file folders on his desk. The police department was perpetually overworked and understaffed, though probably more so in recent years. No surprise. Ash Park itself shared the police department’s undercurrent of agitation—a quiet, but desperate despondence that seemed to permeate the air, the water, the citizens who would leave—if they had the means. But understaffed or no, it didn’t look like Petrosky had filed a single report since Morrison left.

  “Your paperwork skills are atrocious,” Morrison said.

  “You’re the English Lit major—thought your guys loved that paperwork bullshit as much as your fancy-ass words.” He snorted and shook his head, muttering: “Atrocious.”

  “Figured if I confused you, you’d forget about making me write the reports.” Morrison pulled up a chair from his own adjacent desk and gestured to the shortest stack of file folders. “So what’ve we got?”

  Petrosky grunted and pulled the manila stack closer. “The usual. One missing persons, thirteen-year-old girl, turned homicide. Davis thinks sex trafficking which is why we ended up with it.”

  Morrison squinted at Petrosky, watching for signs of distress. Petrosky’s daughter, Julie, had been raped and murdered before her fifteenth birthday, and his marriage had dissolved soon after.

  Petrosky’s eyes betrayed nothing. “We’ve also got two domestic violence cases, one with a stabbing, the other with sexual assault history, both almost wrapped except for the paperwork. Valentine’s got one guy in holding now, picked him up on a routine traffic stop. Though you might already know that.”

  Petrosky peered at the side tabs, slid a folder from the center of the pile, and laid it in front of Morrison. “Then we have this one.”

  Morrison opened the folder to the crime scene photos. A dark-haired man, burly, face down in a storm drain. Messy tribal tattoos covered his shoulders, though the stains might just as easily have been grease—or maybe they were grease. No pants. Blood pooled under his groin.

  “Rape?”

  “Nope. Someone took his dick as a souvenir.”

  Morrison winced, trying not to imagine the searing pain of amputation. He crossed his legs.

  “Keep it in check, California,” Petrosky said, but his voice had lost the hard edge of condescension.

  Morrison passed the folder back. “Any promising leads?”

  “Ex-girlfriend. Melanie Shiffer, got a place over on Wildshire. She’s probably home now.”

  Morrison’s mouth dropped open. “You know who she is? Why haven’t you gotten her yet?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Morrison stared until Petrosky sighed.

  “Fine. I picked the victim up several years back for molesting Shiffer’s two-year-old daughter. He took a deal for seventy months, only served four years. Got out last week.” He stood. “Maybe we can convince the prosecutor’s office to plead her down on the murder the way they did on his charges.”

  “Not sure the prosecution will go for it unless this guy went after mother or daughter,” Morrison said. “She intentionally severed his junk.” And I probably would have done the same.

  “Maybe she didn’t mean to kill him.” But the look on Petrosky’s face told Morrison he didn’t believe that either. “They can plea molestation down, might as well see if they’ll plea vengeance.”

  Morrison nodded, but he didn’t believe it’d happen, even though Roger McFadden—lead prosecutor and Shannon’s dick of an ex-husband—did have a rather impressive history of dreaming up plea deals. In the past, Roger had taken cash for it, too—or so Morrison believed. He’d never had enough evidence to do anything about it, and an internal investigation the year before hadn’t turned up a thing.

  “What time do you have to be home to pick out nannies?”

  “Around noon.” Morrison raised the coffee mug, but stopped it halfway to his lips. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Fucking detective, remember? Like you used to be.” Petrosky grabbed the folder and stood. “Let’s get Shiffer squared away so you can get back to your own manhood—Shannon keeps it on the kitchen counter, right?”

  “In the bathroom next to the mouthwash.”

  Petrosky half grinned. “Good to have you back, Surfer Boy.”

  Melanie Shiffer lived in a whitewashed townhouse with a tattered broom leaning in a corner on the front porch and a doormat that read “Beware of Attack Cat.” No one answered the first knock, but the front curtain flipped—a finger, nothing more—and went still. Petrosky put his hand on his gun.

  Morrison’s mind flashed to the man in the storm drain and he squared his shoulders, hand on his own gun, as an edgy heat rose into his chest. He’d nearly forgotten that feeling—dirty diapers were slightly less stressful than approaching the home of a killer. “She got weapons registered?”

  “Nope.” Petrosky tried the handle. It turned. “Ma’am?” No answer from inside, just a subtle shuffling to the left of the foyer, like a rat scuttling through tissue paper. Petrosky disappeared into the hazy dimness of the house and Morrison followed, alert for the source of the sound. He saw her as they emerged into the next room.

  Shiffer sat on a green rocking chair in the front room, her hair disheveled, staring down at a photo album in her lap. She did not look up as they entered, just flipped a page, then another. A family vacation somewhere, a little girl playing in the water, another picture of the girl on Shiffer’s shoulders.

  Morrison’s gaze darted around the room, looking for any other person, the little girl, signs of disturbance … or a weapon. But everything was orderly, almost inexplicably so. There were fresh vacuum tracks on the beige carpet.

  Petrosky stepped closer to the chair. “Ms. Shiffer?”

  She looked up slowly, as if awakening from a dream or perhaps a nightmare, her glassy eyes punctuated by starbursts of broken blood vessels. “I remember you,” she said to Petrosky. Her voice was barely a whisper, as if she was trying not to wake a sleeping child. Morrison might as well have been invisible.

  Petrosky said nothing.

  “She still cries at night, you know,” she said. A single tear trailed down her cheek.

  Morrison approached her and laid a hand on her shoulder, half for comfort, half to prevent her from reaching for a weapon, though nothing in her manner suggested aggression. Just bone-crushing sadness. His own heart ached for the little girl, abused, still fearful of the man who had hurt her, and for a moment his ears filled with Evie’s cries. Something hot and vile bloomed in his gut. He pictured the heat draining from his chest, and his body cooled accordingly. “Is she home now, ma’am?”

  She shook her head. “At school.” She looked at Morrison, set the album aside, and stood. “I’ll never regret it. Not for one second.” Her eyes were dull.

  Neither of them reached for their cuffs. She came willingly to the car, the crisp, blue sky overhead heavy and oppressive, as if they were all bearing the weight of injustice on their backs.

  3

  Morrison left the precinct in a haze of discontent. Reading the details in the reports had drained him. Sex crimes had been bad enough before he’d become a father, but now it was like every kid was Evie—with every story of an injured, raped, murdered child, he could almost see her face staring at him from the files.

  As he crossed the lot to his car, Morrison turned to the courthouse steps to see someone watching him. Karen … something. Her red hair seemed darker than it used to be, and her belt was cinched tight around a barely-there waist. Karen waved, one quick, nervous jerk of the wrist, then averted her eyes and bounded up the courthouse steps, probably late for a case.

  She worked at the local rehab center and had been the girlfriend of Frank Griffen, an old college buddy of Shannon’s. Morrison’s fist clenched involuntarily. Last year, Griffen had suddenly gone off the deep end and bludgeoned two people to death. He’d killed Shannon’s niece’s kitten, too, then framed an innocent woman along with Morrison
himself for the murders. Then he’d attacked Shannon, murdered his own ex-girlfriend, and headed to the courthouse to blow more people away. Petrosky had put a bullet in Griffen’s very fucked-up brain, maybe right through the tumor that had caused the hallucinations and aggression, though Morrison hadn’t asked. Petrosky and Shannon never spoke of The Incident. But afterwards, Karen seemed to be around all the more.

  Poor girl. Had to be hard watching someone you love unravel.

  Morrison waved back but she was already gone, leaving him with an uneasy feeling in his belly. Griffen’s journal entries were full of references to voices, and the way those voices had plagued the man was all too familiar. Morrison had his own mysterious voices, some memories, some surely imagined, and even for him, the line between imagination and reality was hazy at best. Was it the far reaches of his past still whispering as he awoke, or a simple trick of the mind, mere remnants of a dream? And what happened if the voices became like Griffen’s—sinister and murderous and barbaric? Not that a mere voice could get you to act, but …

  Morrison got into his car and headed out, mindful of the steering wheel, the pressure of his foot on the gas, the leather against his back as he sped home, each green light surely the universe’s way of telling him he should be with his family instead of at work. He turned into his neighborhood. On either side, two-story brick houses passed along with the occasional stone ranch, some with pools, though he’d be damned if Evie played at any of those houses before she knew how to swim. He’d gotten called on a child drowning case last year. Though the child had been injured and unconscious before being thrown into the water, every whiff of chlorine recalled the memory of that baby’s purple face.

  He pushed the thoughts aside, forced a smile, and waved to his neighbor, Mr. Hensen, an eighty-two-year-old chatterbox who still wore his purple heart on Veteran’s Day.

  Shannon met Morrison at the door. “Hey! Welcome home!” Her smile faltered when she saw his face. “Bad first day?”

  He put his hand against the small of her back and leaned over to kiss her on the mouth. She tasted like Cheetos and coffee—probably skipped lunch caring for Evie. He’d make her something to eat before he left.

  “Not a bad day, really. Just the usual.” He followed her into the kitchen. The usual was brutal and distressing but Petrosky would have slapped the shit out of him if he’d said those thoughts out loud. You can’t let it get to you. Go in and do your job and fuck everything else. Morrison hoped he would never see the day where he wasn’t affected by someone abusing children. Killing children. That ache in his gut was the least he could do for a tiny life so violently snuffed out.

  “You can call me if you need to, you know,” she said.

  “I know.” But they’d never been that couple, the kind who chit-chatted about nothing over the phone. Shannon had always stared at a ringing phone like it was a boil on the ass of humanity, and after the baby, their phone communication all but ceased. She’d said she was busy. He’d worried she was lonely.

  He kissed the top of her head, happy that her hair smelled like lemon shampoo and that Dr. McCallum had given her the shrinky go-ahead to go back to work after she returned from visiting her brother-in-law and niece in Atlanta. He knew the loss of her brother, Jerry, to cancer last year still weighed on her, but the look on her face when she talked about the trip—excited and resolute—showed him that his take-no-prisoners wife was back. Though he still wasn't sure how he’d sleep without the constant hum of the baby monitor at night. Even now, the silence of the house wrapped around them like a fog, muffling everything but Shannon’s breath. Was Evie asleep? Must be.

  “So …” Shannon drew close to him. “We had one scheduling conflict, Alyson Kennedy had to come earlier.”

  “What? But I wanted to meet—”

  “Shh. We’ve got twenty minutes before anyone else gets here … wanna get me out of these pants?”

  He pulled back from her and ran a finger over her cheek, down the front of her throat. Her mouth was warm, her tongue fervent against his own. She pressed herself against him, her soft skin a stark contrast to the determined grasp of her fingertips against his belt.

  He lifted her onto the counter and she leaned back so he could undo the button on her jeans, every movement a frenzied dance of need. He pulled her face to his with one hand, the other at the waistband of her panties. Then his thumb was on her clit, his fingers inside her and she was already wet, ready for him, and she moaned into his mouth—

  Evie’s wail sliced through the sound of their heavy breathing.

  Every time. He released his wife, pulling his fingers from her, and she arched against him, then let him go.

  “Fuck.” She jumped from the counter, buttoning her pants. “Maybe tonight,” she called over her shoulder as she padded through the kitchen and toward Evie’s bedroom. He stared after her, betting she’d be too exhausted later on. With the way his morning was going, maybe they’d both be ready to fall asleep come nightfall.

  From the driveway came the whisper of tires on cement. Their first nanny candidate was early. Sometimes Evie got it right. Not usually but … sometimes.

  Morrison washed his hands and thought about baseball. Paperwork. Then he pictured the guy in the sewer drain, blood pouring from his crotch, and Morrison’s body wilted like a flower in frost.

  Nanny Number One, Patricia Weeks, was old as time and stocky as a bull. She had cold eyes that reminded him of a thousand mug shots. Her square jaw and bulbous nose didn’t help either, though he knew it was superficial to think that way—what wasn’t superficial was the white hair and the musty smell that clung to her. How old is she? This woman could die while watching Evie, and neither he nor Shannon would know until after they got off work. And she was so stern. He tickled Evie’s chin, watching for the slightest glimmer of warmth in Weeks’s eyes, something that would hint at grandmotherly affection, but the woman just answered curtly as Shannon rattled off the questions they’d written up and only smiled halfheartedly when Evie let out a fart that sounded like it might rip straight through her onesie.

  “You’re doing it again,” Shannon told Morrison after Weeks had disappeared down the drive.

  “What?”

  “That stare.”

  “She didn’t seem bothered.” Morrison said, harsher than he’d intended. He took a breath and tried to lighten his tone. “Not that she’d be bothered by much other than the grim reaper and kids playing on her damn lawn.”

  “She’s not that old—”

  “She’s got at least twenty years on Alice from The Brady Bunch.”

  “She’s younger than Petrosky. And he can still chase bad guys.”

  “If they’re running slowly.”

  She cocked an eyebrow.

  “I mean …” He exhaled the tension from his body. “Really, she just didn’t seem that interested.”

  “She might have been bored—I asked her the same questions on the phone last week. And she came highly recommended. I’ve called every reference on her list.”

  “Like she’d give references for people who’d say she has all the personality of a dead fish.”

  Shannon pressed her lips to his, then stepped back. “Morrison, you’re pouting.”

  Between them, Evie farted again.

  4

  He looked like a boy. But he was no boy. And someday he’d show them all.

  His heart hammered as she pulled up in front of the house, the sun heating the still-damp walk under his feet and turning the metal of his bicycle into a scalding implement of torture against his bare leg. But he did not shift his calf away from the bar—he could withstand far worse.

  Happy, happy, happy.

  The red streaks in her hair blew in the breeze like every finger of wind desired her, wanted to touch her, the air itself crackling with the tense energy of unrequited possession. She knew it too, knew she was desirable, powerful, just like every bitch he’d ever met. They all thought they were better. Too good for the likes o
f him, no matter how many times he did their homework, carried their bags, told them jokes. Just once he’d wanted to show them the man he was on the inside. He’d wanted to parade one of those girls on his arm. Show the jocks, those self-proclaimed masters of the universe, that he was one of them. To prove he was better. Just once.

  But they’d never given him a chance. He knew he deserved more from them, and yet, as the woman raised her eyes to him and nodded, his mouth went dry. That old familiar itch began on the side of his face, on the back of his neck, and he pulled the visor of his ball cap down. The stance he’d taken to hold the bike upright faltered and he almost crashed to the pavement.

  The girl looked up and down the road. Opened her car door to retrieve something—a purse.

  He watched. That was what he was supposed to do, though here he was too vulnerable; too exposed. Then again, Frank Griffen had been hiding in plain sight, buddying up to Petrosky, talking to Shannon, all the while planning to kill her. But Griffen had failed. Weak.

  He was more of a man than Griffen ever was. He was definitely stronger than his so-called buddy from this morning who’d wept like a little cunt just because that stupid kid was dead. He had hoped he could learn from the fucker, but things hadn’t quite turned out that way. But he would learn nonetheless.

  He was the bigger man. The better man. And someday everyone would know it.

  The red-haired bitch finally reached the front door, and as she rang the doorbell, he lowered his gaze to the sidewalk, pushed off from the road, and pedaled up the street, an unassuming streak of metal and gangly limbs.

  But his boot left a bloody smear on the pavement, delicious and dark and unquestionably masculine.

  5

  The doorbell rang. Morrison tried to beat Shannon to it, but she sidestepped around him, shoved him back, laughing, and opened the front door to reveal a tiny woman who might’ve been there selling Girl Scout cookies if it weren’t for the fine lines around her eyes. She was right around thirty, maybe—sparkling brown eyes and platinum blond hair with red streaks underneath that were too light to be punk. A smiling mouth full of bright, white teeth, too exuberant to be genuine. Across the street, a lanky high school boy on a bicycle had stopped, probably watching her from under his ball cap, though when Morrison approached the door the boy lowered his gaze to the sidewalk and hit the bricks. Move it along, son.