Pretty Broken Things

by Melissa Marr

  “You are human.”

  I wave his words away. “I don’t know how to find him, but maybe I can find Teresa Morris. That’s the best bet we have. She’s the most likely clue . . .”

  It’s not exactly a new plan. A lot of people would like to find Teresa. She’s the only person I can think of who might help me find the killer, find the missing bodies of the girls who disappeared . . . unless she’s dead, too.

  I hear myself getting louder, my voice too sharp. “I need to do something. I have to.”

  He drops his voice to that soothing tone and reaches out to touch my hand cautiously. “Jules . . . you could just leave it alone. Take care of yourself, but stay out of the investigation. Let them do their job, and you just . . . stay safe. Maybe tell them you won’t be able to deal with any more of his victims.”

  Andrew moves closer to me and tries to hug me.

  I pull away. I know he means well. I know he cares about me, but his words make me feel weak. I am not weak. I will never be weak. “Fuck that.”

  Andrew doesn't flinch. The man has the patience of a saint. He has to in order to be with me.

  “No one would think less of you. A killer sent a letter to you, and you’re letting your emotions—”

  “I’m not.” I glare at him. This bubble of rising rage isn’t what I’m to feel, not when I’m with Andrew. He’s meant to be calm and steady. He’s in my life because he can level me when I become emotional. Right now, it’s not working. I am livid. "I am not being emotional. I'm not letting this asshole manipulate me either."

  “Be smart, Jules. Talk to Revill, but don’t get involved.” Andrew doesn’t reach out again. He looks like he wants to, but he holds back. “Think about it, Jules. Please? He’s dangerous, but maybe if you let it go—”

  “No.” I take several steadying breaths until I know my voice will be level. When I’m sure I sound calm, I say, “He wants my attention. It can’t be just because of my job. There are other morticians, others who work for the coroner’s office, but he wants my attention. There’s a reason. I'm going to figure it out.”

  Andrew shakes his head. “And if the reason is simply that he wants you?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen, Andrew. I’m not stupid, or being stupid. I know he’s out there. I knew better than most women. I see the bodies. I . . .” I swallow hard before I can continue. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to tuck tail. I need him to stop.”

  I wonder if any man can understand the fear that women know intuitively. The victims of the Creeper have had those fears all realized. My sister was overpowered by a man who claimed to love her. I can't decide if that's worse than a stranger. Either way, it's the stuff of every woman's nightmares at some point. Andrew has rarely sounded so insensitive.

  “He can’t stop killing. If he could, don’t you think he would’ve?”

  I shudder. In some ways, killers like the Creeper are not so different from any other addict. The difference, of course, is that this sort of addiction destroys a lot more lives.

  It’s not going to destroy mine.

  “He’ll stop because we’ll catch him.” I open the next folder. “Read it or don’t. I’m going to find something.”

  10

  A Girl with No Past

  “Did your roommate quit?” Edward asked after only an hour at my temporary job.

  “No.” I filled him in on Elle’s temporary absence and my job woes.

  “You’ll take care of me. Won’t you, Tessa?” He nodded, his tone making it apparent that this wasn’t truly a question.

  I nodded—not that it mattered. The manager wouldn’t allow me to tell him no. That was the rule at the Red Light: Edward was never wrong.

  “So, you’re only here until Elle gets back?”

  “That’s the plan.” I felt odd just standing and talking to him, but Kari had been explicit that I should do so as long as he wanted.

  “Just to wait tables,” he clarified.

  “Definitely! Can you picture me up there?” I gestured toward the stage. I was a little in awe of how girls like Elle and the others could dance so confidently. I wasn’t unfit or unattractive. If I had been, I couldn’t even wait tables at the Red Light. That didn’t mean I felt bold enough to spin around a pool or gyrate on the ground wearing only a G-string and garter.

  I’d taken the job in a sort of desperation, and maybe a secret fantasy of my mother discovering that I’d rather let men ogle me than take her money. Maybe it was petty. Maybe I wasn’t being a survivor as much as a fool.

  “I can picture a lot of things,” he said.

  I forced a smile. He wasn’t unattractive, but he made me nervous.

  In truth, he was handsome. Muscular without being bulky, no visible tattoos or scars. Blue eyes. Luscious mouth. Everything else about him was so carefully cultivated. His suits were off the rack, but tailored. His haircuts were salon quality, but not attention drawing. The look of his mouth, though, when he smiled was the stuff of fantasies. It was like he had a decadent side that explained away the cold in his eyes.

  He worked at one of the myriad companies over in RTP. If I had to guess, I’d think he was in charge. I didn’t ask. A lot of suits came into the strip club. Men like them liked to pretend they were civilized, but they still visited the place where they could treat women like objects.

  Edward slid two bills across the table, drawing my attention away from my thoughts. “I need a whiskey.”

  “You don’t pay. Kari said—"

  “It’s not for the drink, Tessa. It’s yours.”

  I blinked stupidly at him for a minute. He’d just tipped me more than I made in an entire shift at the bookstore.

  I brought his drink back and smiled as I accepted the tip waiting on the table.

  “Tell me about you,” Edward ordered.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “No secrets, Tessa. Tell me about you. What state? What’s your family like?” His breath curled over my skin.

  “Massachusetts. Awful but . . . wealthy.” I swallowed.

  “But you’re here,” he said. “Letting men look at you.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you like it?”

  There were a lot of things I could say. I could tell him that I liked the money. I could say that I liked knowing that the men who looked at me wouldn’t ever be ones I would let touch me. I could even tell him that I thought about how shocked-horrified-jealous my old friends would be. Something about Edward’s words scared me, though, so I said nothing.

  “Little rich girl playing at being bad . . .”

  I shrugged. “I’ll inherit enough not to need to work, but . . . I hate my mother. I hate her husbands. I hate the stupid lies and—”

  “But you want to be taken care of, don’t you?”

  I shook my head instinctively. “I can take care of myself.”

  It wasn’t a challenge, but I know now that he heard it as one.

  11

  Juliana

  Since I learned about the letter from the Creeper, I can’t stop thinking about them, the flower bud girls. Courtney Hennessey. Maria Adams. Christine Megroz. Yolanda Waters. It bothers me that he thinks of them as his because no woman belongs to anyone but herself. I suppose the same is true of men. We are our own keepers. We define ourselves, possess ourselves, and what he did to these women cannot change that.

  Murder is not ownership.

  His possessiveness is part of what the police need to understand to find him, though, and I’m sure Henry is thinking about it. The Carolina Creeper not only holds them captive, but he also marks them. He tattoos them. So many killers—and I have researched far more of them than I ever planned as I try to understand this one—keep tokens, like talismans from their crimes. In some perverse way, it’s akin to the holiday mementos regular people tote home from every excursion. The police don’t know if he keeps anything, but they—we—know that the Creeper sends his vict
ims out with a memento. A tattoo, a specific one: Flower buds.

  Of course, journalists have speculated. Why that one? Is he a florist? Is it symbolic? Is it about the language of flowers? There are a lot of questions, and not very many answers.

  The only truth I know for sure is that he's out there. Right now, he has another victim with him or has another victim he's still watching. He has a pattern, a type, a timeline, and he's good at it.

  He kills in the South. Regional. No DNA. No forensic evidence that leads to him. He’s white and in his thirties in all likelihood, based on profiling. I have read every snippet I could get—not that I am technically allowed to do so, but Henry has bent more than a few rules so I can sleep at night.

  We don't know how to find him, though. I don't know if we'd even find the victims if he wasn't so eager to share.

  The Carolina Creeper is good at what he does, and I am afraid. I'm not good at being afraid, so I'm going to find him. I have to. It's the only option—and it's all I can do to avoid total obsession with it.

  Andrew and I spend another date reading horrible things in case files. I'm fairly sure he's using vacation time to do so. I look up at him and smile. He is oblivious, reading glasses slipping down and forehead furrowed.

  "Thank you," I say, as he looks up questioningly.

  "If you're going to do this, I'm here to help, too. Well, as much as I can." He gestures at the pages in front of me. "Read. I have an hour left today to do this."

  The biggest anomaly in the cases is the missing heiress: Teresa Morris.

  There are only two realistic choices: The Carolina Creeper has either killed her or he still has her. I can’t decide which would be a worse fate. She was one of the last girls to go missing in North Carolina, but she gets a lot of attention because of her family—especially in the last year: Her mother died about fourteen months ago, and her entire estate was left to her missing daughter.

  I find Sterling Morris’ final act of faith unsettling. She died believing her daughter was alive. I never want to have another woman with a flower bud tattoo under my gloved hands, but I cannot imagine wishing for anyone to survive what he does to the women.

  Years of being trapped there would be more than I’d wish on an enemy. What sort of woman would wish that fate on her daughter? Or did she just foolishly think that her daughter was elsewhere? Safe and not his victim?

  I’ve made use of my connections through the police department to get files from around the state, and I’ve looked for the missing girls. Andrew has used his ties to the paper to help me as often as I’ve wanted. Henry has left files out where he knew I'd see them. It still isn’t enough. Amateur sleuthing doesn't work like it does on TV. I haven't found some magical clue that would lead to the killer's apprehension.

  Instead, the Creeper is watching me. I know it. His letter proves the fears I’ve tried to ignore the last year.

  The man whose victims I’ve prepared for their graves, the man whose actions make me far too often unable to sleep, knows my name. He knows where I am. He knows who I am. The sheer weight of that realization makes me shudder. Too often we imagine that killers are people we'd notice, but in reality, they often aren't. Richard Ramirez, Paul John Knowles, Charles Schmid, Paul Bernardo . . . a lot of serial killers are charming and attractive.

  "Jules?" Andrew slides a paper from one of my files toward me. A missing person's file. A thin, dark-haired woman. “What about this one?”

  The woman in the picture is a light skinned Latina girl of the right age.

  “She’s a likely candidate.” I read her name: “Ana Mendoza.”

  “A lot of women are likely candidates,” Andrew points out. This is what he does. He switches to devil’s advocate.

  “He usually picks paler girls,” I admit.

  “As far as we know. There could’ve been others, ones we didn’t realize were his . . .”

  That’s the part that’s maddening sometimes—one of the parts. For all we know there are dozens more who weren’t included in the list because they weren’t perfect matches. Until I can examine their bodies, or the police catch the Carolina Creeper, we can’t say for sure. Even then, we might not be able to find them all. That’s more common for killers than the myriad crime shows or thrillers admit: There are bodies that will never be found.

  “Ana vanished from Wilmington,” Andrew reads.

  I stare at her face. Heart-shaped, pretty, wide-eyed. I want her to speak to me, to let me know if she’s one of the women I’m looking for. The dead don’t truly talk, but their bones do. Their paper trails do. A lot of forensic information gives voice to the women who no longer can ask for help.

  “She’s a strong maybe." I take Ana Mendoza’s picture and add it to the maybe file. There are so many dead girls, so many men preying on lost women. I’d tried to tell myself it was a coincidence that he left their bodies where I’d be their caretaker, but it hadn’t only been journalists drawing the unpleasant conclusion that it wasn’t an accident. They were fascinated because of my brother-in-law’s crimes, as if some people draw murderers to them. It doesn’t work that way, although most articles about Darren mentioned that I introduced him to my sister and I work with the dead. A part of me wonders if the Creeper’s interest in me is the fault of those journalists. It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that a killer is watching me—and not from behind bars like my brother-in-law.

  “Next file.” I drop my gaze to the stack of photocopies of pictures of missing women. Some are no longer missing. Their files include autopsies. Most don’t. So many of the women in these files will never be found. So many not in these files won’t even be reported as missing.

  Andrew reaches out and squeezes my hand. “It’ll be okay.”

  All I can think about are the rest of the girls whose bodies we haven’t found. I think about Ana, and Maria, and Courtney, and Christine, and Yolanda, and the others whose names I don’t know yet. I want someone to stop the Creeper because of them. I want the list to stop where it is, no names added, no new bodies with ink etched on their wrists.

  I want to stop seeing them on my table.

  I slide a stack of missing person and Jane Doe coroners’ files out of the folders. “No, it isn’t, but it will be fine once he’s stopped.”

  He wanted my attention, and now that he has it, I'm going to find a way to help the police stop him. There is no other option.

  12

  Tess

  “Why don’t you stay at my place?” Michael’s hands stroke my skin, tracing tattoos as if he can read the stories by touch. If we reach a point where I need to share everything with him, we’ll start here: in bed, naked, where I’m not the only vulnerable one. I don’t want to discuss my skeletons, though; I want to be a blank slate. I want to be someone other than the woman with these memories.

  I want to not expect pain to accompany caresses.

  “I only sleep at my own house,” I explain for what might be the sixth time. If he were anyone else, I’d be done speaking. But I’m enjoying Michael and I’m on the verge of trying to be someone Michael wants to keep in his life. Maybe I miss a life with comforts, or maybe I want to be loved. I can’t say for sure. What I know is that I want to stay in Michael’s arms, and it’s been a very long time since I wanted that.

  I still have limits. I have to have them, my rules, my pills, my forgetting. If not, I’m not sure what I’ll become.

  “I don’t see why we can’t stay in the same place.”

  “Yes.” I don’t admit more, but I see his eagerness. He looked for the woman I used to be, and I want him to see me. So, I roll over and set to distracting him. It’s not unpleasurable. He has a good body, trim and firm, and he has the sort of penis that justifies some of his arrogance. Nice girls tell you that size doesn’t matter. It’s a polite lie that we use when necessary, but it is a lie.

  Afterwards, I leave. This, too, is a rule. I don’t stay. I don’t feign affection. The sex is as satisfying as anything is these day
s. I’ll return, not because of the sex, but because I like the way he craves me.

  Two weeks later, Michael starts pressuring me to travel with him. Like everything, he’s expecting me to capitulate. He wants compliance, even though he tries to pretend he isn’t bored when he gets it. “I don’t leave the city,” I point out bluntly and firmly once my laughter and distractions fail to get him to drop the subject.

  The problem with Michael is that as much as I dedicate myself to finding ways to keep him happy, the truth is that I do it all for my own happiness. Michael pleases me. His presence in my days, at my table and in my bed, sometimes makes me feel almost as if I could forego my pills—not that he knows about my reliance on the pills. Like the stories that explain my tattoos, the pills are as much of a secret as I can manage.

  “We could turn it into a holiday,” Michael argues.

  He’s done so well at not trying my boundaries that I am unprepared for the onslaught of arguments. On this, he’s not bending. I don’t know how to refuse both his request to travel and his pleas for my history. There is no way to give him an explanation and maintain my silence.

  One of my rules the last three years is that I don’t leave New Orleans overnight. I haven’t left the area even once since I arrived. Sometimes, I might go over to Slidell or maybe as far as Baton Rouge for a day if I’m having a good spell, but New Orleans is where I feel safe. It’s where I sleep.

  My doctors are both here. My jobs . . . the dozen or so that I’ve had . . . have all been in the city, mostly in the Quarter. There’s so much turnover that one more fucked up chick with a lot of short-term jobs isn’t shocking. I’m a hard worker when I keep my meds all straight.

  But as the days pass, Michael keeps pressuring me. He offers me every temptation I would’ve wanted in my life before Reid.

  “We could go to a show. Wouldn’t you like to see Broadway, Tess? Or the Met. There are just a few meetings I need to go to, and then you can come to dinner. Meet my agent.”