Repressed Page 4

  Petrosky pulled the kid toward him, just a little onto his side. Along his rib cage, a few hash marks scored the skin to the left of one long, angry slice—like a crooked number one.

  Morrison clenched his fist and released it before Petrosky saw. “You think the killer is saying this is the first?” It had been a few years since a serial killer had terrorized Ash Park, but Morrison could still practically smell the blood from the crime scenes, see the dripping poems that sadistic asshole had left for the cops. They’d never found him. But this wasn’t that killer’s MO.

  “There’s no way this is his first,” Petrosky said. “No one starts with this level of brutality.” He gestured to the school, well within sight of the trees if one were to stand just a foot beyond the body. “Or this level of exposure.”

  “We’ll look for others.” Morrison stared at the school, tried to picture Acosta running, leaping at a football. He turned back to Petrosky to erase the image. “But how’d the killer get the”—Dylan Acosta—“victim to come back here?” It would have been hard to haul a kid away while he was playing with his friends unless the attacker was someone he knew.

  Of course, those closest to a person were often the one responsible for hurting them—Morrison knew that from experience, and not just his days with the Ash Park PD. Even years after the fact, a female voice from his past whispered in his ear late at night: My turn! No, me next. He could not recall who had said it or who was even there, only that he’d been alone when he’d awoken, blood covering his knuckles like he’d been in a brawl. And near the bed, his best friend, Danny, head gashed open, blood pooling on the floor, ants crawling over his face. Crawling. He scratched at his arm, the tickle of imaginary insects as real as the hint of blood in the air around him.

  Morrison still didn’t know if he’d killed Danny—he couldn’t remember much of anything from that night—but he’d stopped using drugs after that day, tried to make his life right again. Still, the wrongness of that evening lurked in his memory like a malevolent fog. Sometimes he lay awake at night trying to force his vision to clear, to let him see just once. During the day, he felt hunted, as if the memory had teeth that could eat him alive. Maybe better if he didn’t let those images creep into his consciousness.

  Behind Morrison, the clank of a gurney brought with it the sounds around him: the medical examiner giving orders, Petrosky’s shoes, squelching as he backed up out of the way. And the boy was there—face down. Here, then gone. Just like Danny.

  In the back of his brain, electricity crackled, bright and hot. Me first. No me. Blood poured down the walls. Come back, you can shoot it once, no one will ever know. He forced himself to listen to the rustle of the body bag, the rattle of the metal gurney, the sharp hiss of the zipper, the keening squall of an obstinate bird overhead, and the gory walls disappeared along with the whispers. The boy in the bag receded across the playground. Morrison tensed his toes, trying to focus on the self-inflicted cramp in his foot, but he could still feel the incessant vibration of insanity, ready to drag him to hell.

  8

  The next morning started eerily white, the sun burning hot but unseen behind clouds like swollen mushroom caps. Morrison settled into the extra chair at Petrosky’s desk.

  The precinct hadn’t missed him, and the feeling was mutual. By the time he had finished another stack of paperwork the night before, Shannon had been asleep. This morning she had slept through his alarm. But he hadn’t missed the “Nannies” folder on her bedside table. On a Post-it note stuck to the top of the folder, she’d scribbled “Things to Do Before Alex’s,” and a list which included errands like grabbing her niece, Abby, a birthday present. Maybe he’d surprise her and take care of that at lunch.

  Petrosky’s mood had been as cloudy as the sky all morning as he pecked angrily at his keyboard—not that he was generally a ray of sunshine, but today felt especially bleak. Dylan Acosta’s mother’d had to be sedated yesterday and would be in to see them this afternoon, but there was little else to go on until the medical examiner or the crime scene techs came back with some DNA or … something. They needed any little bit of evidence they could find.

  Acosta was last seen playing on the swings. No one at the school had noticed him with anyone or seen him go into the woods. Had he been singled out purposefully? Had someone he’d known waved him over, or had Acosta gone back to the trees to play and become the victim of an opportunistic killer? Judging by the cigarettes and empty bottles the techs had found back there, the tree line was a popular place to get hammered, and two men fighting one another at the scene didn’t scream premeditation. But there’d been no database matches on the fingerprints from the bottles, save a couple high schoolers previously arrested for burglary. And though the size of their suspects suggested they could be high school kids, both those boys had been in school at the time of the Acosta killing.

  Morrison tilted his chair back and listened to Petrosky’s agitated typing. At least they’d determined the brand of shoes and boots, though it hadn’t helped much: middle price range, both readily available at several local shoe stores. The spikes on the boots—too far apart to be aeration shoes or cleats—had probably been added by the wearer. But Petrosky was looking into any place that might be in the business of altering footwear: shoe repair services and the like.

  They’d already confirmed that the cause of death was punctured lungs. Morrison had really wanted to be wrong about that. The punctures were so clean, so resolute—the killer had stomped on the boy, then stood back and watched him choke. Enjoying the child’s suffering. What kind of a sick fuck drowns a kid in their own blood?

  He jumped at a cough near his ear. “What the fuck, Surfer Boy?” Petrosky’s jowly face glowered down at him. “You got a bug in your ass? Probably from those cricket bars you eat.”

  Morrison forced a smile. “They’re full of protein. You’d like them if you tried them, Boss.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about protein unless it’s bacon, and if you try to feed me a bug bar, I swear to god I’ll shove it up your nose.”

  “Up my … nose?”

  “Better than saying ‘up your ass.’ I’m cleaning shit up. You’re a dad now.” Petrosky flipped open a file and slapped it on the desk, and this time, Morrison managed to avoid startling. “I’ve found three other cases in the last two years that fit the pattern,” Petrosky said. “Rapes in schools or the surrounding, victims left under trees or bushes, a couple with signs of strangulation. No stomping, though. No deaths, either. Trying to get the kids to review their statements, but apparently teenage boys are reluctant to face their childhood attackers.”

  I can imagine. “Maybe at least one will come down, if only to see justice served.”

  “They don’t give a fuck about justice. They just don’t want to relive it.”

  Morrison closed the folder and slid it next to his final stack of paperwork. “We’ll figure it out. Truth always comes out. Has to.” But even as he said it, he hoped that wasn’t true. Some secrets were best hidden lest they destroy you.

  Petrosky stood. “Maybe you can do some of that fancy computer bullshit, see if there are any more vics. I’ll go follow up with the ones I’ve got already.”

  “Want me to come with?”

  “Nah, you see if you can find more.” Petrosky hauled his coat over one fleshy shoulder. “I’ll be back by noon.”

  The bustle of the precinct drowned out the images of Acosta’s bloody back, and by lunchtime Morrison had two more potential connections on the middle school rape-homicide, both cold cases fitting the same pattern: clothing around the neck to subdue, attacks occurring in or around the woods. Though in these cases the perp—or perps—had stopped short of the stomping and subsequent murder. The cases he’d found had children who were strangled to unconsciousness and had awoken traumatized—but they did wake up.

  At lunch Morrison hit up the toy store to grab a board game for Abby as well as a stuffed teddy for Evie—just because. The whir of the tires on
his way to the park near the precinct was significantly brighter and calmer than it had been before he’d had a stuffed animal riding shotgun. But his peace wavered when he got out of the car. One dead tree stump in the middle of the park. A barren metal skeleton of a swing set to his right, not a single chain left to hint that it had once held swings. But such was the nature of socioeconomic decay—children, and those things that brought them happiness, always deteriorated first. Their voices were smaller which made them more expendable to the powers that be.

  It also made them more vulnerable.

  He sat on the broken park bench—two boards missing, but still enough to hold his ass—with a sub sandwich and a folder full of horrible. Maybe Petrosky was already back at the precinct reading through the copy of the file Morrison had left on his desk. That’d save him from having to describe the brutality out loud.

  Zachary Reynolds had been taken from his school five years ago, and, like Acosta, had been discovered in the woods that bordered the grounds. His mother had even been volunteering at the school that day. She’d been by the window, someone asked her a question, and poof little Zach was gone. Later he was found unconscious with a T-shirt still tied around his neck. Two years later, a seven-year-old girl, Kylie Miller, was taken during a field trip to the firehouse. The girl had been found in the wooded area behind the lot, brutalized and trembling. Not the same as the playground, and nothing around the neck, but she’d said someone had used her shirt to cover her face. Close enough.

  Morrison had been in this job long enough to know that pedophiles weren’t always choosy. Some male pedophiles even had normal relationships with women: marriage, kids, the works. Some exclusively targeted children. For others, gender was irrelevant and the attraction was the innocence, or the inability of a child to hurt them, common after sexual trauma in the perpetrator’s childhood. He and Petrosky would talk to the department shrink, Dr. McCallum, to work up a suspect profile later this week. Or maybe tomorrow, since their perp in the firehouse abduction case was out already, probably roaming the streets for his next victim.

  Fucking figured. If they waited long enough, maybe they’d find that guy in a sewer drain with his balls in his mouth.

  Petrosky didn’t look up from the file as Morrison sat across from him. “How was your break, Cali?”

  Morrison raised an eyebrow. “Cali?”

  “Less letters, less effort.”

  Morrison eyed Petrosky’s empty coffee cup. “You get comfortable with that lingo and you’ll be quoting rap lyrics before you know it.”

  Petrosky flipped a page. “I do that and you need to take me to the hospital.”

  “To hide you away before someone younger and hipper slaps you?”

  “No, because I’ve obviously had a fucking stroke, Surfer Boy.” Petrosky shoved the open file across the desk, brows furrowed, a half-eaten granola bar in his other hand. “I checked out the cases you referenced,” Petrosky said. “Got us an appointment with Dr. McCallum on Thursday, once we have little more for him.”

  Good. They were on the same page with the shrink.

  “Also, the guy convicted on the Miller case … Nick Nolte–looking motherfucker, isn't he?”

  “You say that about everyone.”

  “Give ’em enough crank and everyone looks like Nolte. Best anti-drug campaign there is.”

  Morrison peered at the mug shot. Pale, with flyaway blond hair and eyes so light they were almost purple. “Okay so he’s a little Nick Nolte. That should help us if anyone saw him around. I figured maybe we could haul him in for questioning. He doesn’t have any housing registered, a definite no-no with his sex offender conviction.”

  Petrosky said nothing, just flipped a few more pages and grunted, his shoulders tight. Something had happened. Morrison opened his mouth to ask, but Petrosky cut him off.

  “It was a good find, California. But this twat isn’t our guy. Neither are the potentials I pulled this morning.”

  Morrison’s cheeks heated and he envisioned ice on his face, pushing the flush from his head. His skin cooled. “Twat? So much for cleaning up your language, Boss.”

  “Sometimes you need the appropriate verbiage,” Petrosky said.

  Morrison cocked an eyebrow and Petrosky shrugged.

  “You’re not the only one who knows words.” He handed Morrison a sheet. “I spent lunch in the lab. Got Echols to rush the DNA.”

  Of course he had. Heather Echols had just started three weeks ago and couldn’t seem to say no to Petrosky—or so Petrosky said. She was probably still scared of the old man, but that wouldn't last long.

  “And?” Morrison prompted him.

  “She told me this was the last time she was rushing shit for me, so it’d better be worth it.”

  That had taken less time than he’d thought.

  “Found blood from one male suspect and semen from another man at the crime scene, but neither sample belongs to that Nolte-looking fuck from the Kylie Miller case. And there’s no doubt that the scuffle happened after the murder and not beforehand: they found Acosta’s blood and slivers of bone in the boot tracks. The killer stomped him hard enough to crack ribs.” Petrosky grimaced. “Far as I can tell, the boot-wearing guy watched while his buddy raped the kid, then stomped Acosta to death. When the killer stepped back, the rapist went at him—or our killer tried to hurt the rapist too. And while they were scuffling, Acosta was gagging on his own blood.”

  “Jesus.” Hearing it like that …

  “That water-to-wine motherfucker abandoned us a long time ago, Surfer Boy. But you were right about Zachary Reynolds.” He turned back to the paperwork. “DNA from the Reynolds case is a match to the guy who raped Dylan Acosta yesterday. If only they’d fucking caught him five years ago.”

  The sub sandwich rose in Morrison’s esophagus.

  Petrosky flipped the folder closed. “We’ll head over to the Reynolds place after school. He’d be … what? Fifteen, now?”

  Morrison nodded, mute. He must have looked as ill as he felt because Petrosky squinted at him. “You think you can handle the trip, or you want research duty until you can pull your shit together?”

  “I’m together, Boss.”

  Petrosky leaned toward him, his blue eyes softer now with just a hint of irritation—the closest he got to genuine concern. “See that you stay that way, California. And for fuck’s sake, figure out this nanny bullshit before you worry yourself into a goddamn heart attack.”

  “Not sure I’m the one in danger of a heart attack, Boss.” The pile of crumbs near the granola bar wrapper on Petrosky’s desk looked suspiciously like powdered sugar.

  Petrosky grunted. “Not everyone wants to live to be a hundred, California. Some of us are happy just to make it through the day.”

  Wasn’t that the truth.

  Petrosky made the phone calls about the case while Morrison pounded keys and called nanny references. Half the references on his list weren’t home, though the background checks were coming up clean. Progress. He even checked the ones who weren’t on Shannon’s short list. Ms. Ackerman, whom he’d not met, was a former nanny for three families and a current psychology student, but Shannon had an x by her name with a note—funny bone broken—which made him smile. He did a check anyway, set her folder aside, and finally looked at one he’d met: Ms. Weeks, the grocery clerk who turned nanny after her children grew up and left home. Background check fine, lots of experience, but she was so … grouchy. And old. And he didn’t like her. But she apparently had more clout with Shannon, who had not crossed her name off the list despite her humorless scowl.

  Natalie Bell also checked out. No complaints. No weird social media activity, no one bitching on her Facebook wall about holding a grudge. No suggestion of an abusive boyfriend who’d show up at his house to grab her in front of his kid. Her life appeared perfectly normal—boring, even. He liked that in a nanny.

  That left one more candidate, the nurse Shannon had tried to sell him on. Alyson Kennedy’s boss at the hospi
tal said all the right things, noting that Alyson had been a perfectly-perfect employee, but his voice grated on Morrison’s ear as if the words themselves were made of sandpaper. He didn’t like it. He also didn’t like that he couldn’t locate Natalie Bell’s last employer, though there was something endearing about her. He’d rather have someone he’d met. Morrison didn’t realize he was tapping his foot until Petrosky glared at him. He stilled.

  Shannon was obviously having an easier time keeping her head straight about all this. He called her cell. “If you had to pick one—”

  “Bell.”

  He smiled into the phone. “Fine.”

  “I’ll call her. Love you.”

  It was much like the conversation they’d had about their wedding. Best friends for nearly four years, living together for almost one, and she’d just had his baby—he’d still been terrified when he proposed in the hospital with a onesie that said “Will you marry my daddy?”

  A month later, Shannon had chosen a dress and a spot on the beach for the ceremony.

  “When should we do it?” he’d asked.

  “Tomorrow,” she’d said. “Call Petrosky.”

  And he’d responded with, “Love you,” his heart as full as it had ever been, unaware of the demons she was fighting when he went off to work that first month. She was his lifeline. For the last four years she’d been his everything. But if she could have it to do over, after the PPD had passed … would she still have married him? Would she do it again now? Unease twisted in his belly, deep but insistent as a writhing serpent. Yet another thing he really didn’t want to know.

  Dylan Acosta’s mother, Tara Lancaster, didn’t look up when they entered the interrogation room. Her brown hair was still wet, damp strands plastered to her cheek under bloodshot brown eyes. Water speckled her gray blouse. The sight of those errant drops tightened Morrison’s chest as if each one had purposefully escaped from her head, running from the heartbreak, the pain. She kept her blank gaze fixed on the double-sided mirror as if waiting for someone to leap through it and tell her they’d made a mistake, that it was some other woman’s child they’d found dead in the woods.