Repressed Page 24

But he couldn’t stop himself. He was being pulled by something deep and wild—the house called to him. And while Shannon might not be here, he’d get The Juggler—Michael Hayes—to tell him where she was. Unless … Hayes was with Shannon in another location. A storage facility. A warehouse. He’d never find them then.

  And yet … someone had cut the grass, recently—if it had been a lawn service they would have completed the edging too. Someone lived here. With another glance down the road, Morrison exited the car and crossed the street. The air was still heavy and wet with yesterday’s storms. Had that been only yesterday? It seemed like an eternity had passed.

  He hooked around the garage and pressed his body flush against the wall, creeping slowly past two garbage cans to the back of the property. The stink of rotting trash singed his nostrils. When was trash pickup? He wished he could see inside the garage, to know whether the car registered to Hayes was here. He’d find out soon enough.

  Behind the cans, he scaled a chain-link fence and crossed a cement patio to the first window. No noises came from inside—no scuffle of a shoe, and though he held his breath, he heard no cry that might have been Evie. Stomach twisting, he scanned the bottom of the building, seeking glass block windows, a vent, anything to indicate a basement. Nothing but a slab foundation. His family wasn’t being held below.

  Slowly, Morrison leaned his forehead against the glass and peered inside. He was looking into a laundry room, dim with drawn blinds. Plenty of grime on the window, but from what he could see through a gap near the sill, the room was empty. He strained his ears, squinted up at the second story. There’d be a couple of bedrooms up there, maybe a bath. But when he stepped back, he saw that the windows were open, just like those in front, curtains swaying softly in the warm breeze that was rotting the garbage. They’re not here. It would be too easy to overhear the wails of a starving baby, the muffled screams of a woman having her mouth sewn—he retched, swallowed. No one would use this place as a dungeon.

  He crept across the cement, thankful for his stealthy Toms. On the other side of the patio he could see into the kitchen, lit by the sun, see the bowl on the countertop, fruit flies and fat houseflies buzzing around something on a cutting board. Something … wet. Dark. Please let it be animal meat. Bile rose in his throat, and Morrison visualized the cold coming back in before the panic pulled him from what he needed to do.

  He ducked under the window and around to the last section of the house, where the home protruded farther over the cement. A glass door opened onto the patio, blue light flickering from a television inside. There were no other lights on inside that he could see. He peered around the corner, hearing only silence, and crept closer to the glass door. With one final inhale, he peeked into the living room and—

  The phone in his pocket buzzed suddenly, and he snapped his head back so quickly he was certain that the sound of his temple cracking against the brick would rouse the man from the couch.

  A mere six feet away. Michael Hayes. He looked exactly like Jenny the tattoo artist had drawn him.

  Plan. You need a plan.

  Making as little noise as possible, Morrison flew back along the patio on his tiptoes, then leapt the fence and ran around the garage to his car. They had cameras on this place. They knew he was there. Hayes’s friends were killing his family now, were calling to tell him his family was dead.

  The cell buzzed a third time.

  But no, it was Decantor’s phone, the caller ID blinking with a New York number. The phone Morrison had taken so anyone watching his cell would not know he’d contacted Karen Palmer’s mother. He slammed the car into drive, trying desperately not to squeal the tires or call any attention to himself before he had a chance to think. He’d found the bastard. He’d go back to Hayes’s while the man still lay on the couch. If he could do it without anyone knowing he was there, he wouldn't risk his family’s life. He’d search to make sure the other suspects weren’t there with Hayes, then look through cupboards, drawers, closets for clues to his family’s whereabouts.

  But if he found nothing, he’d need a bargaining chip. Could Roger help? It was the only card he had left to play, the only other thing she’d asked him for.

  The phone. “Detective Morrison.” He turned down another side street and headed toward the main drag where he could blend in with the other motorists.

  “Yes, my name is Hilary Palmer, and I received a message from you earlier. Something about an identity theft case?”

  “Thank you for calling back, Mrs. Palmer.” Don’t sugar coat it. No time. “I’m sure this seems a bit out of the blue but I’m working on a homicide that seems to be linked to your daughter’s identity.”

  Silence.

  “Mrs. Palmer?”

  “My Karen?”

  “The woman I’m looking for is using your daughter’s name. Has been for a few years. I believe she stole your daughter’s identity after she died.”

  The silence stretched, amplifying the sounds around him. A car backfired somewhere up ahead, behind the shrill squawk of a bird. Had she hung up?

  “I know who took her identity.”

  Morrison’s hand cramped around the receiver. “Who?”

  “Do you know why I got involved with Moms Against Bullying?” Her voice was cold, harder than before—and there was the longing, the grief that he heard every day in Petrosky’s hello, in the way his partner asked about lunch. Palmer wasn't hiding it now, not like she was on her voicemail recording.

  Tell me who! He stopped at a red light and put on his blinker, looking for a parking lot where he could pull over inconspicuously. “No, ma’am, I don’t know why you got involved with them.” And it occurred to him that he should have known. He should have dug deeper. Which meant he’d missed something critical. You see me but you don’t. The light changed and Morrison put his foot on the gas, resisting the urge to tell her to hurry up. To hurry, because something terrible could be happening to his child right now.

  “Karen was such a happy child,” she said. “She played in the band, worked after school, had friends. Her best friend, though … she was something else. Got her involved in little petty trouble. I got a call one day that they’d been shoplifting. Shoplifting. Karen said Janey wanted to see if they could get away with it.”

  Janey. The name pinged a little memory somewhere in Morrison’s subconscious, but he couldn't place it. His brain was scrambled. Think, or you might as well let them die.

  “Janey what?”

  “Krantz.”

  His heart hammered against his ribs. Danny’s last name. But Danny didn’t have a sister, and she was too old to have come around after the fact. A niece? Cousin?

  Palmer coughed, and it was a phlegmy sound, as if she was swallowing tears, but when she spoke again her voice was harder—angry. “I tried to keep them apart, but they gravitated toward one another. And then they started college. My husband and I were moving to New York, so Karen decided to come, go to college there. Janey stayed back in California. I thought that’d be the end of it.”

  The cell buzzed in his pants pocket and it took him a moment to register that he had Decantor’s phone in his hand already. His own cell phone was ringing. No … not a call. A text. Shit.

  Palmer blew her nose. “Karen had a hard time; depression, anxiety, you name it. Then Janey cut her wrists, ended up in the hospital. And it seemed like”—her voice hitched—“like Karen blamed herself. After Karen died, I found messages from Janey to Karen. Awful things. A few little knocks here and there, but later the texts were blatantly aggressive, encouraging her to hurt herself. And she listened. Karen took sleeping pills but she never made it to the hospital like Janey did.”

  The phone buzzed again—oh fuck—and he tried to grab it out, but the blare of a car horn made him swerve back into his lane. He fumbled his cell to the floor. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What if it was Shannon? Or the kidnapper? But this woman was telling him about the kidnapper. Palmer might hold the clue he needed to find her, to find his family.


  “I tried to file charges against Janey,” Palmer was saying, “but bullying isn’t really a crime.” She sniffed. “Janey should have to pay for what she did.”

  So what was he dealing with? Psychopaths didn’t usually try to kill themselves—they didn’t feel enough pain to merit escape. Narcissists didn’t often commit suicide either; if a narcissist made a threat or slashed their wrists, it was probably to manipulate someone else, not because they truly wanted to die. But Karen—Janey—wanted him to suffer because Morrison had hurt someone she’d cared about. Narcissists might pretend to care, but they typically lacked the empathy for any meaningful bond to form. But this Janey woman—she felt. She felt everything too deeply.

  Janey had manipulated people in the past, driven them to the edge and pushed them off. And if she had emotionally tortured Karen from the opposite side of the continent, what was she doing to Shannon, right now? She knew how long it took to weaken people. How long it would take her to weaken Shannon.

  Ahead, a driveway approached, a dry cleaner’s. He put on his blinker, resisting the urge to blare the horn at the driver in front of him. Shannon didn’t deserve this pain. Evie didn’t deserve to lose her mother. Evie didn’t deserve to die.

  But then again, neither had Danny. And Janey wanted to avenge his death. For years, the madness must have grown, festering like his dreams until she’d embraced the ferocity inside her, birthing cruelty and aggression until there was nothing left but revenge. She’d found Morrison, stalked him, taken her time planning her attack. She’d convinced Griffen to channel his rage into Shannon, into Morrison, to destroy their lives. And when Griffen failed to do it …

  Now Janey had sought out men who really were capable of murder. Men who hurt others for the fun of it. And she’d turned these maniacs loose on his wife. She’d had them take his baby. His hand, wet with sweat, slipped and he gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles ached. If he burst into Hayes’s house, gun drawn, and hauled the man out—Janey would surely have a contingency plan. She’d take it out on his girls. He needed to find where they were before he—

  “Detective?” Palmer’s voice was tight, worried, but he couldn’t find a way to respond. He screeched into a parking lot, slammed the car into park, and scrambled for the phone.

  Text message:

  “Roger’s gone, or she’s gone. You want them back, you do it tonight.”

  And below it a photo.

  Oh, god, no.

  Evie’s onesie. Torn in half. Streaks of red covering the arm, the side, the neckline. Blood? They were going to kill his baby. Maybe she was already halfway there, the life ebbing from her drop by drop.

  He felt it then, a swelling in his belly, the blistering fire that he’d hidden, the one he’d tried to keep dulled with drugs, the one he’d stomped out again and again and again since the day they’d found his father dead, shot by some asshole who just wanted the store register. The beast was waking up. But he had to keep going. Pretending. Pretending to be normal. Pretending he wasn’t carrying a monster within him.

  He needed more time. He needed to go see Roger.

  “Detective?”

  He hung up the phone.

  Arrest him … or kill him. Janey didn’t care. And as Shannon’s bloodied mouth flashed in his mind’s eye, as Evie’s wails of pain lit up his eardrums, neither did he. Work your cases. She wanted to put him in an impossible position. Needing to fix it and being unable to do a fucking thing. He’d felt that same sense of helplessness too, so many years ago, staring down at Danny’s lifeless, broken body. And so had she.

  But she would feel helpless again when he watched her bleed.

  He would kill Karen, Janey, whatever the fuck her name was. And so help him, if they’d hurt his family, not a one of them would get out alive.

  “I became insane with

  long intervals of horrible sanity.”

  ~Edgar Allan Poe to George W. Eveleth, January 4, 1848

  34

  Janey downed the rest of her wine and sank into the bathwater, listening to the footfalls in the next room, the telltale clack of the boots Adam always wore. The water suddenly felt too warm, as if she were heating it with her fury.

  The rage never went away, not anymore. She inhaled the scent of soap, trying to ground herself in the moment, but her back stayed rigid. Fuck. Danny had been perfect—the only one who’d ever understood her. He might as well have been her brother, the way he patted her hand when something inside her snapped out of nowhere and all the feelings burbled angrily to the surface like froth, seeking escape. And the depression that would follow those episodes, the ugly hole that would open inside her—every time, she saw it coming, knew it was coming, yet still couldn’t avoid falling into the darkness. And he would just sit. Hold her hand. He was the only thing in her life worth clinging to.

  And Curt had taken Danny from her.

  Danny had said they were family, and his shining eyes had made her believe it. But the others—those who had loved Danny too—grieved him and ignored her, ostracized her, even. Everywhere she turned were such hateful people, trying to hurt her in one way or another. They said she was crazy. That she was broken. They left Danny’s photos lying around just to taunt her, to make her cry.

  And worse, they blamed her—for not acting sooner, for not calling an ambulance instead of lying down beside his cooling body and falling asleep. It wouldn’t have mattered. They hadn’t seen his face. His blue lips. His body, broken on the floor of his bedroom, a few stray ants from the shattered tank still struggling in his blood. They hadn’t seen the congealing gore clinging to the corner of the end table.

  She had tried to become someone else so many times, altering every little snippet of her personality, every little quirk, convinced each was the cause of her misery—and every time, Danny held her hand when she realized she’d been wrong. Again. If Danny had lived, she’d have found peace by now, surely. She’d have been a better person. The day her last husband left her, she had decided: Curt had destroyed what she could have become by taking away her lifeline. Now he would pay.

  She had moved to Ash Park. Gotten a job. And watched. Waited. Once, while following him, she’d come face to face with him in the grocery store and there had not been even a flicker of recognition. He’d forgotten her, discarded her as completely as if she were a piece of trash. He’d destroyed her life and didn’t even remember her. How it had stung.

  But now he’d never forget—not as he had before when she was just Janey, useless to him, not even worth remembering. Now she had something of his that was just as dear to him as Danny had been to her. And now she had help, help more reliable than the insufferable Frank Griffen.

  Somewhere in the other room, something shattered, and her heart rate climbed. Adam hadn’t once tried to hurt her, but she’d seen signs of his rage simmering below the surface, seen the way he became silent and still when she tried to tell him how to do something, the way he froze and averted his eyes when she said anything, anything he didn’t agree with.

  She tried to make it up to him on those black sheets, but he closed his eyes there too—couldn’t even get hard. The day he’d sewn Shannon’s lips shut was the first time he’d actually responded to her sexual advances, stayed with her, looked at her when he came. Better than what Roger had done—he’d whispered Shannon’s name once while they were fucking. Even if Curt had ended up marrying someone else, she would have killed Shannon anyway.

  She rolled onto her side and submerged her face in the water, feeling the pressure of the liquid as her ears filled, the water muting the sounds in the house. Bubbles escaped from her mouth and crawled along her skin toward the water’s surface like fingers tracing a path from her lips to her ear where the bubble burst above water.

  Her lips. Blessedly untouched by a needle. But she had other scars, and her lover liked them. His eyes had lit up the day her sleeve had hiked a touch too high and he’d seen the butterfly bandage on her wrist, though he hadn’t said a thing.
He’d been too timid.

  He’d gotten over that, it seemed. She’d wanted help hurting Curtis Morrison, but he might no longer be there for the sole purpose of meeting her needs. He might be there for the blood. And if that was true, she would never be able to control him. And she didn’t want to bear the brunt when the last of his anxiety melted and the hostility in his eyes was stoked into an inferno.

  He’d told her he had an errand Monday morning, that he was going to the store to get coffee. When she came home that evening, his boots had been in the bathtub, covered in mud. And there’d been no coffee. Just the newspaper the next day, the boy at the playground, found dead. But it didn’t make any sense. The kid had nothing to do with her or with their goals, and the paper said they were looking for two killers—she didn't know anything about another guy. Was Adam working with someone else too? Or did he...like boys? Was his lack of sexual interest in her because he was a pedophile?

  She couldn't even consider it. That wasn’t in the plan.

  Then there was the girl he’d told her about, whispered it like a confession while he picked at her lower back with his fingernails. Said he did it for her, but she didn’t know the woman, only that he’d followed her home from Curt’s. He’d insisted they needed the phone to punish Curt more, mess with him. And Adam had looked so … concerned, practically begging for approval with those big puppy dog eyes. But she knew his motives were deeper than wanting to help her. The night after he’d killed that girl, she’d heard him moaning while he dreamed.

  Had Adam fucked her? Rage simmered in her belly. She’d kill him if he had.

  The mask stared at her from its stand on the sink, and her heart quickened. He’d told her it was a symbol of status, an updated replica of a doctor’s mask that had been used during the black plague. But when he wore it, it was as if he became someone else. Without it, he chewed his fingernails. He couldn’t meet her eyes. As soon as it was strapped onto his face, he stood straighter, as if the mask made him feel different, made him feel worthy.