Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

  He grinned, his teeth shining in the dim light of her bedroom. “Remember how I always told you we would wait until the right time?” he said, unzipping his jeans. His erection was obvious through his briefs, and he massaged himself through the thin material, never taking his eyes off her. “This is the right time, Georgina. I won’t see you again after tonight. I want to be the first man that’s ever been inside you.”

  “No,” Geo said. “I don’t want to, okay? Please—”

  He was on top of her before she could continue, and the weight of him felt heavier and more forceful now. One hand pinned her arms down over her head, the other spread her legs open wider, pulling down her panties. She was wet from his earlier touch, but she didn’t want to be touched anymore. She didn’t want this to go any further. She wanted this to stop.

  She wrangled an arm free and thumped him on the back. “Calvin, please, I don’t want to—”

  “I’m going to be your first, Georgina. So you don’t ever forget me.”

  His penis entered her, suddenly and forcefully. The pain was searing and intense. She cried out, and he put a hand over her mouth, continuing to thrust inside her, going deeper, and it hurt more than she ever imagined it would. She clawed at his back, her short fingernails ineffectual as she tried to scratch him. This was not the Calvin she thought she knew, who’d always been gentle with her sexually, who took pride in pleasing her. This wasn’t sex at all, was it? This was something else entirely.

  This was dominance. This was taking something he wanted that she didn’t want to give. This was rape.

  “Stop,” she whimpered, when the hand covering her mouth slipped a little. “Please. Stop.”

  He heard her, of course he did, but Calvin was in own world, where the only thing that mattered to him was what he wanted, what he needed. Nothing else existed. Eventually, Geo went limp, letting her arms rest on the mattress. There seemed to be no point in fighting. Fighting made it hurt more. Fighting made it worse.

  Karma had come for her, and it was terrible.

  He left the same way he came in, through the window. Geo never saw him again after that night. Not until years later, not until the trial.

  Kaiser had asked her the other day if she ever worried about Calvin coming back for her. She’d told him that she wasn’t concerned, which was true. Calvin had already taken the best part of her the night she’d watched him rape and murder her best friend. What was left, he took the night he raped her in her own bedroom, with her father sleeping right down the hall.

  Geo stares at the empty Mason jar on the nightstand now, the one that used to contain all her innocence, all her goodness. She’d kept it all this time. A therapist might have a field day trying to analyze why she had never thrown it away and, more important, why she’d kept it in a spot in her bedroom where she could clearly see it.

  The answer was simple. It was punishment for what she’d done to Angela. And a reminder of her own trauma, her own pain, which she’d brought on herself for being so young and so stupid.

  Her phone pings. Geo checks the text message, her heart lifting a little when she sees it’s from Kaiser. A small smile crosses her lips. Maybe it can work out between them … as long as she never tells him the whole story.

  No one, not even Kaiser, could love her if they knew the whole story.

  Her face falls when she sees what he’s sent her.

  Two more bodies found in the woods behind St. Martin’s. Adult female and a child, killed same way as the first two.

  A second message follows a few seconds later.

  Calvin spotted in town. Stay inside. Lock the doors.

  PART FOUR

  DEPRESSION

  “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

  ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

  25

  Mo has long blond hair, warm brown eyes, an easy grin, and a drooling problem. That’s because Mo is a dog. And not just any dog, but a cadaver dog. The golden retriever’s tail thumps on the grass as Kaiser approaches the tree he’s resting under, about twenty feet from where he found the bodies, in the woods behind St. Martin’s High School. He and Kaiser have met a few times before.

  Mo’s owner looks up and smiles. In her early sixties, Jane Bowman is dressed in hiking gear—waterproof shell jacket from The North Face, Dri-FIT pants, Merrell boots. No makeup, but Kaiser’s never known her to wear any, and her long gray hair is pulled back from her face with a black scrunchy.

  “Thought you two were retired,” he says to Jane with a smile, and they embrace warmly.

  “Thought we were, too,” she says, and Mo stands up. He nudges Kaiser, who kneels and gives the dog a full minute of pats before straightening up again.

  “So walk me through what happened.”

  “Well, you know Mo’s an old guy now, like me,” Jane says, looking down at the furry yellow face with fondness. The dog is resting on the grass once again, gnawing on a chew toy, unbothered by the activity of the police officers and crime-scene technicians not far away. “Bones are getting creaky, hips are starting to go, and so it was time for us both to retire last year. But working dogs, just like working people, tend to get bored in their retirement. So you can imagine how happy he was to be walking through the woods this morning and suddenly pick up a scent. We were on the east side of the woods, on the trail, when he got all excited, put his nose to the ground, and started running. At first I didn’t know whether to restrain him or let him go, but I hadn’t seen that zest in him in a long time. So I let him run and followed him, bad hips be damned. He finally zeroes in on the spot and stands there and barks and barks. I caught up to him and saw that the earth had been disturbed. I didn’t realize we had made it all the way through the woods to the high school.”

  “If you were on the path on the east end, you two had to have to come almost a quarter of a mile,” Kaiser says, marveling at the old dog. Mo looks up and grins.

  “Around that, yeah. Anyway, I know the drill. Called an old friend at Seattle PD to ask if you guys wanted to come see if there’s something in the ground. Took a few hours for you guys to show up, but you did.” Jane smiles. “And wouldn’t you know, there is.”

  Kaiser reaches down, gives the dog another pat. “Hope he got a cookie.”

  “Gave him two. He earned it.” She pauses, her smile fading. “I caught a glimpse of what they dug up. Pretty bad what happened to the woman. And a child, wow. Hope you catch the bastard, Kai.”

  They say their good-byes and Kaiser heads back to the crime scene. Two bodies, like the time before. The woman looks to be a few years older than Claire Toliver, the last victim. The child—a girl, this time—is a bit older as well, maybe three or four. Her Elsa doll from the movie Frozen was found a few feet away. Other than that, the scene is identical. The woman was dismembered, the child strangled, and on the little girl’s chest was the same heart drawn with the same lipstick. Inside the heart were the same words.

  SEE ME.

  Like Claire Toliver, the woman’s eyes are gouged out. Empty sockets where they once were, the edges rough. And like Claire Toliver, Kaiser doesn’t feel optimistic they’ll find them.

  He wonders if the killer keeps them in a jar somewhere, like Ed Gein. Or if he eats them, like Jeffrey Dahmer. Or if he simply throws them away, the act of scraping them out satisfying enough on its own. What’s the significance? See me. What does the killer want them to see?

  Or is it some kind of punishment to the woman—all women? one specific woman?—for not seeing?

  Kim stands beside him. He can hear the scratching of his partner’s pencil against her notepad, and the sound is intrusive and irritating. The act of writing things down gives them significance in her mind, helps her remember things later. Kaiser doesn’t work this way, never has. He takes mental pictures, allowing his thoughts to meander unrestricted where they will. He also prefers to do this quietly, and her scratchy note taking is ruining his silence.

  They haven’t spoken on a personal level in
a couple of days, and he notices she’s wearing her wedding band. She normally doesn’t while she’s on the job or when she’s alone with him, so he’s not sure what makes today special. Perhaps she and Dave had a good weekend away, celebrating their anniversary, rekindling the fire in their marriage. He’s curious, but he’ll never ask her; it isn’t his business and honestly never was. The only thing deader than their affair were the two bodies in the ground, one of them in pieces.

  Kim tucks her notebook away. “You think she’s Calvin James’s daughter, too?”

  “I don’t think anything right now,” he replies. His tone is a bit more hostile than he intended, and he adds, “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I don’t get it.” She shakes her head, blond ponytail swinging, her face twisted into a grimace. Kaiser understands. It’s hard seeing victims this way, especially children. And that’s fine; it should never be easy; it should never not be horrifying. “Why kill your own child? And, if this is similar to the other case, why kill her mother? Why take her eyes? This is so confusing, I can’t even begin to make sense of it.”

  “Lesson number one when dealing with serial murder is that it never makes sense,” Kaiser says. “Calvin James isn’t like you or me. He might have been once, but he’s morphed into something else. His sociopathy was clear when I was arrested him five years ago. They don’t operate in logic. The whys of it are unimportant; he can save that for his prison shrink. All I care about is catching the motherfucker.”

  “Got the ID on the little girl, Detective,” an officer says, coming up behind him and waving a cell phone. “Parents filed a missing-person report this morning. I have it here. I can forward it to you.”

  A moment later it’s on Kaiser’s phone. He opens up the document, scrolls through it.

  “Who is it?” Kim asks.

  He hands her the phone, lets her read it for herself. The child’s name is Emily Rudd. Her birthday was two days ago; she just turned four. She went missing from her home in Issaquah, a city about thirty minutes east of Seattle. Same story as with Henry. Parents woke up to find her gone. Didn’t panic immediately, as Emily was a sleepwalker and they’d found her in various places inside the house before this. Issaquah police had no reason to suspect foul play.

  But it was foul play, of the very foulest kind.

  “Jesus,” Kim says, handing the phone back. “Those poor parents.”

  “Have that officer look into whether she was adopted. I put a rush on the DNA, but if we can confirm that the child is adopted, that will tell us enough to get started. Keep working on the woman’s ID in the meantime.”

  “Will do. But I think we need to talk with Georgina Shaw. She’s the only person we know of who had any kind of intimate relationship with Calvin James and is still alive. Have you been in contact with her?”

  “A little.” He feels his jaw clench, tries to stop it, but she catches it and knows instantly what the facial tic means.

  “Kai,” Kim says, shocked, and he can hear from her tone in that one syllable that she knows what he’s been up to. But he doesn’t want to hear about it, not from her. They’re both guilty of bad judgment, and she’s in no place to lecture him. She does, anyway. “You can’t be serious. She’s a person of interest in this case.”

  “She has nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s completely inappropriate.”

  He turns to her. “Pretty sure I don’t need a lecture from you about which relationships are inappropriate,” he says softly.

  Kim’s face reddens. “Okay, I deserved that,” she says, admonished. She looks over her shoulder to make sure nobody nearby can hear them. “But still, if you’re involved with her because you’re upset with me, I really think—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Kaiser says with a small smile. “Seriously. I’m happy you and Dave are back on track. We fucked for a while, it’s over now, and it’s cool. But it means my personal life is no longer your concern. Got it?”

  Kim looks as if she’s been slapped. Her cheeks flush deep crimson and her eyes fill with tears. She turns away, wiping her face quickly, pulling herself together.

  He knows they’ll never speak of it again, and he won’t be surprised if she puts in for a transfer once this case is closed. That’s the thing with affairs. They are, by definition, a temporary relationship. They always end, one way or another, and they almost always end badly.

  “Detective?” A different officer is standing behind Kaiser, cell phone in his hand. He touches Kaiser’s shoulder. “The parents just arrived at the precinct.”

  “That was fast.”

  “They both work here in Seattle,” the officer says. He indicates the phone in his hand, the call from the precinct still connected. “What should I tell them?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Grief manifests differently in different people, and Kaiser learned a long time ago to stop judging. You can’t tell people how they’re supposed to feel, when they’re supposed to feel it, or how they’re supposed to show it. Daniel Rudd and Lara Friedman, Emily Rudd’s parents, nearly collapse at the news of their young daughter’s death at first, crying and shaking and wanting details Kaiser doesn’t have yet. He assures them her death was quick, and that there were no outward signs of abuse.

  They demand to see her, but the bodies are being examined in the morgue. Kaiser shows them a picture instead—the kindest one he has, where it appears the little girl might be sleeping—and they confirm it’s their daughter. Less than an hour later, they’re calm and polite, almost professional in their demeanor. Their eyes are bloodshot, but dry. They sit close to each other, breathing and speaking normally, but not touching. Daniel Rudd is a cardiothoracic surgeon at Harborview Medical Center, and Lara Friedman is a pediatric surgeon at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Kaiser can only assume that their professions are the reason they’re able to compartmentalize this way.

  They have two other children, twin boys conceived via in vitro fertilization. Shawn and Shane are six years old, and Lara Friedman shows Kaiser a picture of her sons sitting on a park bench, with their little sister in between them. Emily bears no physical resemblance to her brothers—they’re blond and blue-eyed while she had dark hair and dark eyes—but the bond among the three of them is unmistakable. Their parents confirm Emily was adopted.

  “Even after the twins, it didn’t quite feel like our family was complete,” Lara says, hands in her lap. The coffee Kaiser brought her from the precinct’s break room is cooling in its paper cup, untouched. “I couldn’t go through IVF again, so we started the adoption process through a Christian agency that specializes in placing babies born to unwed teenage mothers.”

  “What can you tell me about Emily’s biological parents?” Kaiser asks.

  “Why is that important?” Daniel Rudd frowns beside his wife. “They’re not in the picture. Sasha wouldn’t even tell us the father’s name. He’s not aware she even had a child.”

  “Sasha’s the biological mother?”

  “Yes.” The man stares at him. “Again, why does it matter? She never had a relationship with Emily after she gave birth.”

  “It’s relevant to the case,” Kaiser says gently. “That’s all I can say for now. But I would appreciate any details you can give me.”

  “Her name is Sasha Robinson,” Lara says, giving her husband a look that shuts him up. “She was actually a sweet girl. We met about halfway through her pregnancy. We invited her to our house to spend time with us and the boys. She was eighteen then, living with her grandmother in a trailer park. High school dropout, recovering drug addict. She grew up poor, and it was clear that it was extremely important to her to have her baby go to a family with money. She emphasized that she wanted her child to have access to the best education, and she thought it was great we already had twin boys, because the baby would always have big brothers to protect her.…” She stops then, her voice choking.

  “We saw her twice during the pregnancy, a
nd then once right after she gave birth,” Daniel says, sounding defeated. “Then we didn’t see or speak to her again for over two years. It was her choice. She was doing drugs again, she was in no shape to see Emily. We told her if she got clean, we’d be okay with limited contact, but she said she didn’t want to meet Emily even if she was clean. Deep down, it was a relief. That kind of thing can get complicated.”

  “But you had contact with Sasha when Emily was two?” Kaiser asks.

  “We called her,” Lara says. “We were experiencing serious behavioral problems with Emily. Hyperactivity that was well beyond what was normal for a child that age. She was quick to anger, and very aggressive, even violent. Hitting, biting, clawing, shoving—she even tried to choke Shane once when he wouldn’t let her play with a toy she wanted. There were actually times when the boys were scared of her.”

  “The obvious decision was to medicate,” Daniel says. “But we opted not to. Those meds for ADHD can turn a kid into a zombie. We put her in therapy instead, changed her diet, hired an extra nanny part-time to take some of the burden off Maria.”

  “Maria is…?”

  “The full-time nanny,” Lara says. “She lives with us.”

  “Did the extra support help?”

  “Not even a little bit. She was a really difficult child. It was hard.” She bites her lip, looks away, the guilt of having said something negative about her dead daughter etched all over her face.

  “And what about the father?” Kaiser asks. “Did you ever learn anything about him?”

  “All Sasha would say is that their relationship was very brief,” Daniel says. “Sounded like a fling, maybe even a one-time thing. She wouldn’t tell us his name.”

  “Or maybe she never knew it.” Lara sighs. “Of course, if you ask her, maybe she’ll be more forthcoming. She no longer speaks to us.”

  And she never will again. “Why’s that?” Kaiser asks.

  “When we talked to her about Emily a couple of years ago, we told her we needed to take a complete genetic history,” Daniel says. “We told Sasha that while we understood she didn’t want to tell us anything about Emily’s biological father, it was necessary to know more about him in order to help our daughter. We explained about the violence, the aggression, that we were concerned she might hurt her brothers. The conversation upset her. She hung up on us and never returned our calls again.”