Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

  “Had you seen him before?” Kaiser asks, his mind churning. It couldn’t be Calvin, the woman would have said so. Plus, she just said he was younger. “What did he want to know specifically?”

  “He asked a little about her drug use, and I said she was clean. Mainly he wanted to know about the baby. He wanted to know where it ended up, whether it was a boy or girl, said that the records didn’t show those things. I asked him why any of it mattered if Sasha was no longer the parent. After all, she’d been claiming welfare as a single person, not as a single mother. It surprised him; he didn’t know Sasha had given the baby up for adoption. He asked for the name of the agency, and I gave it to him, hoping he’d leave. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have. Sasha had no legal claim to her child, so the adoption wouldn’t be any of his business.”

  “Did he leave a card?”

  Mrs. Robinson shakes her head. “No, and I forgot to ask for one. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it. He was strange, and I didn’t like him, and it made me defensive.”

  The whole thing sounds weird to Kaiser. The woman was right to be suspicious.

  While it was common practice for the state to check up on a woman who’d had a baby applying for welfare, Sasha had given her child up. And according to her grandmother, she hadn’t lied about that on her application.

  “Did he tell you his name at least?”

  She shakes her head again. “I’m sure he did at the beginning when he introduced himself, but I couldn’t remember it by the end of the visit. You think this is related to Sasha’s and Emily’s deaths somehow?”

  “I’m considering every angle.” It’s all Kaiser can tell her. He opens the screen door and takes a step out into the cool afternoon air.

  “By the way, Detective,” Mrs. Robinson says, her voice soft. “How are Emily’s parents doing?”

  “They’re coping,” he says.

  “I imagine in their line of work, being surgeons and all, they deal with death every day. But not like this. Not so close to home.” She sighs. “When can I see Sasha?”

  “Ma’am, I—”

  “Oh. Right.” Caroline Robinson’s whole body sags. “Oh, lord, I forgot. She’s … she’s not…” Her knees buckle, and Kaiser catches her before she can fall.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, gasping. “On some level I braced myself for this day. Losing my daughter, losing my father, I thought I was prepared. But not for this. She was really trying to put her life back together.…” A sob escapes her lips, and she quashes it before it can grow. “I guess I have something to talk about in grief group this week.”

  “Grief group?”

  She straightens herself, shaking Kaiser off gently, and takes several deep breaths. Her glasses dangle on her heaving bosom. After a moment, she attempts a smile. It isn’t for him; the smile is for herself, self-reassurance that she’s got this, that she’ll be fine. He’s seen it before on other mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who’ve just been told the worst possible news.

  “I’ve been going for twenty years,” she says. “I lead the weekly meeting at St. Andrews, the church three blocks away. It’s how I push through all this, Detective. It’s been one grief after another.”

  “How do you do it?” It’s none of Kaiser’s business, but he honestly wants to know. He could kill Calvin James for a lot of reasons, and causing this admirable woman more heartache after everything she’s already been through is one of them. “How do you handle it?”

  “I just do,” Caroline Robinson says. “Someone has to be alive to remember them. If they’re not remembered, then it’s like they never existed in the first place. And so, if not me, then who?”

  She looks away for a moment, and then back at him. “Who?”

  27

  Kaiser was present in the courtroom the day the judge sentenced Calvin James to four consecutive life sentences, one for each of the murders he committed, including Angela Wong. Georgina was not there. She was already in prison, so she missed the big show.

  After hearing several statements from bereaved family members of the victims, the sentence was read. The families cried. Justice was served, but in criminal cases it doesn’t feel like other victories. There’s no reward. At most, there’s a sense of relief, the closing of a chapter that never should have been written in the first place. But it doesn’t fix the wounds of the injured. And it doesn’t bring back the dead.

  Kaiser comforted Angela’s parents that day in the courtroom. Candace Wong Platten hugged him tightly, whispered her thanks, and kissed his cheek, leaving a lipstick smear that would be rude to wipe away until after she left. Victor Wong had gripped Kaiser’s hand with two hands, pumping his arms.

  “Our girl can rest in peace,” he said, tears in his eyes.

  Kaiser could only nod. He believed that the dead were already at peace. It was the living who suffered.

  Calvin James, clad in a suit and tie, looked over at Kaiser as the bailiff handcuffed him. In a few minutes he’d be back in an orange jumpsuit. His attorney was packing up his briefcase. Calvin opened his mouth and appeared to say something, but Kaiser couldn’t hear him above the din. He walked over.

  “Are you trying to say something to me?” he said.

  The two men weighed about the same and had similar builds, but Kaiser was an inch or two taller. Funny to think that when he was sixteen and Calvin was twenty-one, Georgina’s boyfriend had seemed so much bigger, so much stronger, so much more intimidating. Now he was just a man. A murderer, yes, but a man growing older like the rest of them, with no special skills or training, just a lust for hurting women in the worst way possible.

  In a fair fight, Kaiser was 98 percent sure he could rip Calvin’s throat out.

  “I said I was surprised they didn’t give me the death penalty,” Calvin said.

  “That’s a conversation for your lawyer.” Kaiser glanced over at the defense attorney, who was already talking on his cell phone, then back at Calvin. “Would you have preferred that? I know I would have.”

  The bailiff had Calvin by the arm and was beginning to move him toward the side door that led to the holding cells below. From there, he would be transported to Walla Walla, Washington, where he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

  “People like me shouldn’t exist,” the Sweetbay Strangler said, looking over his shoulder. “You hear me, Kaiser? People like me should not exist.”

  * * *

  Kaiser’s phone pings, bringing him back to the present. There’s an email about the DNA results on Emily Rudd. Confirmed: She’s Calvin’s biological daughter. It’s the least surprised he’s felt since this all began. And it also confirms another important fact: Despite the few dubious sightings of the Sweetbay Strangler across the globe over the years, Calvin James has been in the Seattle area at least twice since his escape from prison, long enough to have fathered two children.

  That’s two times the serial killer has been close enough to catch, and two times that Kaiser didn’t catch him. He heaves a long sigh and rubs his temples, feeling the onset of a headache.

  Kim is at her desk across from his in the precinct, working on something unrelated to the murders. TV shows make it look like cops work one case at a time until it’s solved and the bad guy—or girl—is arrested, tried, and convicted. In real life, it doesn’t work like that. Kaiser juggles multiple cases. So does Kim. Sometimes they work cases together. Sometimes they don’t. She senses his eyes on her and looks up. He looks away. When he glances back again, she’s up from her desk and heading toward the break room, presumably to get away from him.

  He’s not angry she’s back with her husband, especially considering she and Dave were never really apart. He’s not even upset that she didn’t talk to him about it first. Kim doesn’t owe him anything; Kaiser knew the drill when they first hooked up, when things morphed from work to friendship to sex.

  But still, the sense of loss is there. He understands now how you can feel loss at the absence of something you ne
ver even really wanted in the first place. Kaiser was never fully invested in his personal relationship with Kim, and therein lies the problem. That space—that in-the-middle place somewhere in between being fully invested and not caring—simply isn’t worth it. When you’re in a relationship like that, it’s rarely fulfilling, and all you can see is everything wrong with it. But when it’s over, it stings, and you still somehow feel like you’ve lost.

  His relationship with Georgina, however, is the exact opposite. There’s no in-between with her, no gray area. There’s no way to be with her just a little bit—he’s either all in, or all out. And after yesterday, he knows he’s all in. He has no choice, really. Georgina is the woman he’s loved since he was fourteen, and nothing—no amount of years, distance, or criminal activity—can make that disappear. And it’s fitting, really. Kaiser has a history of picking the wrong women. Georgina fucks with his head and his heart, she diminishes his capacity for good judgment, she brings out all his protective instincts. The fact that she’s an ex-convict is the least of his issues with her.

  As a cop, he can’t afford to love someone like that. But he does. And so be it.

  He can still remember how her hair smelled that night at Chad Fenton’s party all those years ago, when she pressed against him in the laundry room, the length of her body touching the length of his. There was no place else he wanted to be; for a moment, the whole world disappeared. He can remember the softness of her lips and the scent of vodka-infused fruit on her breath. He remembers his physical arousal, and the conflicting feelings of wanting her to know how he felt and not wanting to scare her. Nothing feels as powerful as longing for someone you can’t have when you’re sixteen. Georgina occupied all the places in his heart.

  The same way Calvin James occupied all the places in hers.

  “I got a call from the lab,” Kim says, and he looks up. She’s back from the break room, two cups of coffee in hand. She places one on his desk and pulls her chair over. “They confirmed there’s no foreign DNA on Emily Rudd and Sasha Robinson, same as the other two.”

  Kaiser nods, wishing she’d roll back to her own desk, although this is how they typically work. “Thanks,” he says, taking a sip of the coffee.

  “The thing that bothers me, and I’m sure you’ve thought of this,” Kim says, “is that a lot of this doesn’t fit with Calvin James’s old MO. I get that people can change, but serial killers tend not to. Their patterns are fixed. Most killers don’t deviate from their way of doing things.”

  Kaiser has thought about it, of course. But in the absence of other leads, he hasn’t dwelled on it. Calvin James is still the best suspect they have.

  “He dismembered Angela Wong, his first victim, but not the three he killed after that, years later.” Kim sips her coffee. “But these last two females, he dismembered again. And now he’s killing children. And not just any children—his own. And not the way most parents who murder their children do—in a rage, after a psychotic break of some kind—but deliberately. He’s tracking them down. Hunting them.”

  “He’s escalating.”

  “Is he, though?” Kim says. She’s not being argumentative, but he can see she’s trying to make a point. “If not for Georgina, and where the bodies were buried, and the lipstick used on the kids, would we even think it was Calvin? He never used condoms before. His semen was found on the three earlier victims. But in these new murders, condom lube and spermicide were found both times. Not a speck of DNA anywhere.”

  “He’s getting smarter. He knows we have his DNA.”

  She shrugs. “Why would he care? He’s leaving the bodies in places that lead back to Georgina Shaw. He’s using the lipstick that her old company now manufactures, which isn’t widely available. He’s drawing hearts on the children. He would know all of those things suggest it’s him, so if he wants us to know, why not skip the condom so that we’re certain? The last two victims got pregnant with his children, after all. Which suggests that when they were together, they didn’t always use birth control. And why track them down now? The kids were two and four years old. What’s the motivation for tracking down their mothers and killing them? And tracking down his biological children—both of whom were adopted into other families—and killing them, too? That takes work, planning, research, things he never did with Angela Wong or the three women he killed after her.”

  Kaiser doesn’t answer. He’s considered all of these things, of course, but he’s never laid it out as methodically and linearly as Kim just has.

  “I think we’re dealing with two different killers, Kai,” she says. “We still have to find Calvin, of course. But I feel strongly that we’re looking in the wrong direction for the other one.”

  His instinct is to argue with her and point out all the ways that she’s wrong. But the problem is, she’s not wrong.

  “Play along,” Kim coaxes, as if she’s reading his mind. “Let’s at least talk it out. Let’s try and discuss these last two double homicides as if they’re not related to Calvin James at all.”

  “Okay,” Kaiser says with a resigned sigh. “The mother and child thing is different. All by itself, usually the prime suspect would be the husband and father of the child, and we’d be looking at this as some kind of family annihilation. But we now have two mothers and two children, killed in the same way. What ties them together further is that the women weren’t raising their children. Both kids were given up for adoption.”

  “Right. So what kind of killer is attracted to a mother and child?”

  “Someone who wants to destroy that bond. Someone—” Kaiser frowns and shakes his head. He’s not enjoying this exercise. He’s not an FBI profiler, he doesn’t believe in digging too deeply into the psychosis of a crime. It’s not his job, and it’s risky because the chances he’s wrong in whatever he comes up with are extremely high. “Someone who wants to desecrate the mother. The rape tells us he wants to dominate her, cause her pain. Assuming she was raped, which we can’t confirm. The dismemberment tells us he wants to humiliate her, to belittle her life and her very existence.”

  “But the children were unharmed before they were killed. Why?”

  “He doesn’t want to cause them pain. But neither does he want them to live.”

  “And what does see me mean?”

  Kaiser mulls it over, allowing the theories to swirl in his brain. “He wants the child to see … no. He wants to be seen by the child. No. He wants someone else to see him and the child is the messenger.” A cold feeling washes over Kaiser as something occurs to him, something that stabs at him. His head snaps up. “Jesus.”

  Kim’s nodding. “Talk it out.”

  “The child is the messenger,” he says, the words coming out slowly. “He is someone’s child. That’s what the killer is trying to tell us. He is someone’s child.”

  “Technically, we’re all someone’s child,” Kim says, but there’s a small smile on her face. She understands where he’s going with this and is pushing him to get there quicker.

  “That’s the missing piece,” Kaiser says, the chill washing over him. “Whoever’s child he is, wherever he came from, that’s the key to this whole thing.”

  “Now let’s try and tie the rest of it in.” Kim leans forward. “The bodies were found in two significant locations. The first is the woods near Georgina’s house.”

  “Not just near it. Right beside it.” Kaiser is mentally kicking himself. He’d been so focused on the locations and the parts that tied into Georgina that he hasn’t been properly thinking about the rest of it. “Same place Angela Wong was buried. And the body was dismembered in the same way Angela’s was—head, upper arms, elbows, wrists, thighs, knees, ankles. Multiple shallow graves. The second site is the woods behind Georgina’s high school. Victim was also dismembered.”

  “I know you don’t believe in coincidences, but I need to point out that the locations could have been a coincidence,” Kim says. “There are only so many wooded areas in Sweetbay. The killer might have ch
osen those locations simply because they worked.”

  “And he dismembered the bodies the same way as Angela?” He shakes his head. “Even if I could accept the burial sites as coincidences, the dismemberments can’t be.”

  “But why do you think Angela was dismembered in the first place? Think about that for a minute,” Kim says. “We know she was cut up because her bones were found in multiple places, consistent with dismemberment. But there might not have been a psychosis behind it. The woods are dense, filled with rocks and tree roots. You can only dig so big and so deep a hole. Her dismemberment might not have been done for any other reason than practical. And if a new killer wanted to bury an adult body in those same woods, he’d probably be forced to do the same thing.”

  It seemed odd to use the word practical to describe the reason for chopping up a body, but Kaiser understood her point. “Okay…”

  “So the only real thing that ties Georgina to the new murders is the fact that the lipstick is from the company she worked for,” Kim says. “She was VP of lifestyle brands or something. I did a little googling, found a five-year-old article in Pacific Northwest magazine that profiled Shipp Pharmaceuticals and Georgina. She was quoted as saying that she was hoping to take the company in a new direction, and her plan was to build a cosmetics brand. She has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, and an MBA, and she went to beauty school for a year. She had a valid cosmetology license, for Christ’s sake. Creating a cosmetics line one day was her dream. The killer had to know—had to—that using a Shipp lipstick on the children, out of all the thousands of lipsticks to choose from, would get her attention.”