Patrick Flannery had a view of me I loved (I think): he thought I was awesome yet vulnerable, yet awesome. We’d been going out for a few months and he took turns bragging to people about me and worrying about me.
“I’ll make you coconut custard,” he wheedled as I methodically dug out my ID and found my gun (Adrienne had used it last to express her displeasure over the new paint job in my living room). “With homemade whipped cream.”
“Back off, Baker Boy, I’ve got work to do. Come on, if I was a guy friend of yours, would you really want to tag along to a murder?”
“Sure.”
“Gross. I mean, ’bye.”
Patrick was stupidly handsome whether he was kissing or pouting or busily whipping up crepes with flour on his hands and nose. At least he didn’t know it. He was also my best friend’s brother. And the only man I’d ever met who wanted to date Adrienne, Shiro, and me. My therapist was endlessly interested in the whole weird thing. Possibly more than I was.
Sometimes I was thrilled to have such an understanding guy in my life. Someone I could come home to now and again, someone I could tell about my odd, odd days. I knew, even if I didn’t quite understand, that mine was an unusual life. That most people do not and cannot live like this. Patrick was my shot at normality. So, yes, absolutely, sometimes I was beyond thrilled he was in my life.
And sometimes I was jealous, and didn’t want to share him. Even with Shiro and Adrienne. Maybe especially with them.
As if a murder scene on the glorious Fourth wasn’t bad enough … wow. I’m complaining a little too much. I mean, sure, my Fourth had been derailed, but then, so had the victim’s. I should be counting my blessings.
Still, I couldn’t shake that first impression. Murder was dreadful in all its facets; I would never argue otherwise. But there was something particularly awful about knowing that every single Fourth of July holiday, from now until they died, would be ruined for every single member of this kid’s family.
Poor kid didn’t look more than twelve, which I knew wasn’t right. We later confirmed he was fourteen. They were all fourteen. They’d all been killed with the same signature weapon.
And we had no idea who or why or when.
And the file just kept getting thicker and thicker.
I remembered I could smell BBQs all over the neighborhood; could still smell them, even inside the house. It was a smell I would forever after associate with the JBJ killer.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen brutality before; I’d witnessed worse before I was five, for jeeper’s sake. But something about the boys, their childhood only a couple of years behind them but adulthood still a couple of years ahead … the sunny gorgeous days when they were found … the ones who weren’t found on or near July 4th were still found on gorgeous sunny days. Murder was dreadful in February and October and March and July, but there was always something about a gorgeous, cloudless sunny day. You expected bad things to happen in the middle of a blizzard. You expected bad things to happen when it was cloudy and had been raining for three days.
Their extreme youth was no fun, either … it made me feel worse to see them like that. It made the loss of their potential all the more sad and senseless and In Your Face. Give me a wife-beating mouth breather whose body was found in the middle of a hailstorm at midnight.
Anyway, it would have been a memorable unpleasant day anyway, and I had to meet up with the FBI guys who’d been told (told, mind you, not asked) they would now have to play nice with BOFFO. Past experience had taught me this would be trouble. Divisions tended to be territorial.
Which is why Special Agent Greer greeted me with, “Are you kidding me with this shit, or what?”
“It’s nice to meet you, too.” I was busily pulling on booties and gloves. “I’m Cadence Jones.”
“And I’m pretty damned annoyed they’re calling you weirdos in.”
I just looked at him. I hated confrontations. Why couldn’t everybody just be nice all the time? I sort of hoped Shiro would come out and smack him around. Okay, not really. Wait. Yes, really.
“Why are you staring at me?”
“Uh … sorry.” Stupid Shiro, who wouldn’t show up on command. “Listen, you get that it’s not my fault, right?” I heard my tone: anxious. Trying to soothe. Pathetic. Shiro! Come out already! This guy can probably smell my wanting-to-please, like a dog smells fear, or Snausages. “I mean, it wasn’t my decision or anything? You get that?”
“BOFFO? Friggin’ false flag ops? They’re handing this unbelievably tragic mess over to the nuthouse inmates?”
Was he asking me or telling me? “Um. Yes?” That seemed safe enough.
Shiro? Hellooooo? Anybody home?
Darnitall! Therapy was starting to work a little too well. We had been focused, of course, on fewer blackouts, and fewer kidnappings of my body by my sisters. But according to my doctors and, more important, Michaela (who had no investment in stroking me), I made Shiro and Adrienne to help me in stressful situations. I made them when I was little, when I watched my father run over a Canada goose with a riding lawn mower and then get murdered by my mother. So where the gosh-heck-fiddly-darn were they?
“This really hurts.” Greer was still bitching. I reminded myself that I could be in a worse situation: I could be standing over that poor boy’s body. I could be that boy. Count your blessings, count your blessings. So I just stood there. “First off, you guys are more like some sick urban legend than an actual department, okay? Most of the Bureau thinks you don’t exist. You’re the Area 51 of the FBI.”
Good.
“But to find out you do exist … and to find out you’re all…”
“Heavily medicated?” I suggested. “Emotionally disturbed?”
“No. I’m heavily medicated and emotionally disturbed; I’m in the middle of my third divorce. You guys are all certified crazies.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “We are.” And we had the charts to back it up.
But Greer wasn’t interested in a conversation; he wanted a rant. So he groaned and moaned and made yanking motions in his hair—which would explain his monk’s fringe—and shook his head and rolled his eyes. I expected him to burst into flames at any moment, and/or collapse into a seizure.
And his suit was dreadful. Shiny at the elbows. Frayed at the cuffs. His paunch was emphasized by the coffee stain between his third and fourth buttons. I might be crazy, but I’d been able to drink without spilling since I was four.
“It’s unbelievable! Crazy people wearing sidearms?” He scraped at his shirt with a fingernail. “It’s like a bad joke.”
“Or a genius idea,” I suggested. “Set a thief to catch a thief, and all that.”
“No, it’s a joke. Did Congress approve this? Where’s your budget coming from? Are you telling me somebody looked at the proposal for BOFFO and said, ‘Yup, sounds like a plan, here’s a check and don’t worry, we’ll keep ’em coming year after year, let’s be careful out there’? I don’t believe it!”
I blinked. He didn’t? That was strange. How was this a puzzle? “It’s the government.”
A short pause. “Okay, well. That actually makes sense.” A fellow government employee, and thus tortured by the same payroll/health benefits/administration personnel, he had to admit the truth, even if he didn’t like it. “But, come on. You’ve got kleptomaniacs pilfering at crime scenes—”
“He eventually bags anything he can’t help grabbing.”
“—agents who are convinced their reflections are out to get them—”
“How do you know they aren’t?”
“—agoraphobes who live in their offices—”
“Yeah, but think of all the money’s she’s saving on commuting costs. And rent.”
“—claustrophobes in tents on the roof of your office building—”
“It’s cheap 24/7 security.”
“—a phallically obsessed department head—”
I didn’t really have an argument for that one.
“Who have Multiple Personality Disorder, now more commonly known as Dissociative Personality Disorder,” I supplied helpfully. “Sybil Syndrome. Please don’t ever call it that.”
“Yeah, that. And don’t even get me started on Pinkman.”
“Nobody wants you to get started on anyone.” Especially Pinkman. I paused. “Since you know about us anyway, I figure there’s no harm in explaining.”
“Oh, goody.”
“What civilians and the occasional fed don’t understand is, I’m effective because of my psychological quirks. Though ‘quirks’ may not be the strongest word, to be fair.
“A sociopath thinks nothing of bending a few rules to get his man. And a kleptomaniac knows how to take things away from a bad guy right under his nose. A histrionic can turn in an Oscar-worthy performance in any undercover situation. Like that.”
“Mmmm, sure. Just like that. Uh-huh.”
“So, are we at all helpful?”
“You’re being rhetorical, I guess.”
I answered myself. “Sure we are. Are we a pain in the tuchus? Yes. Worth the hassle to get the job done? Well. We have an eight-figure budget that sails through congressional budget justification every single year. What does that tell you?”
“That I should have voted for the other guy.”
I giggled. “Do you have anything else to get off your chest?”
He gave me an odd look. “What are you, my therapist?”
“No. Just someone who wants to catch this guy. Like you.”
“Catch him.” He nodded slowly. “Yeah, well, I don’t want to catch him. I want to hang him by his testicles until they fall off.”
“It’s good you’ve got goals.” In this instance, he had my sister’s goals.
He smiled, and it completely changed his face. He instantly looked younger and much less testy. He almost looked friendly and everything. It was like a magic trick! A really good one with lots of mirrors and a pretty girl in an indecently short sequined costume. I wondered why he didn’t smile more.
“Do you feel better now?”
He thought about it. “Yeah. I kinda do. Sorry. Thanks. Uh, I know you’re just following orders.”
“That’s true,” I teased. “I am.”
“I hate today. I’m supposed to be at my daughter’s baseball game right now.”
I nodded. “Fourth of July stuff.”
“Yeah! I’m the Number One Guy on the Grill.” That’s just how he said it, too. You could hear all the capital letters. “I got all this hamburger meat at a huge discount—my cousin works for Lorentz Meats.”
“Oh, yum,” I replied, impressed.
He nodded. “I know! And about fifty kinds of brats, and now my wife’s gonna cook and she’d burn water. You should have heard all the bitching when my pager went off. And not just from me. My wife was pretty mad, too. Instead I gotta—”
“I’m sorry you had to leave your family on a family holiday.”
“You, too.”
I didn’t volunteer anything, and when I didn’t say anything he sighed, then opened the front door for me. “Come on. Kid’s in the basement.”
Thus making the basement the place I didn’t want to go. But I had work to do. We all did, thanks to JBJ.
chapter seventeen
Too soon, I was looking at another dead body. Caucasian teenage male. COD: severe head trauma. Dressed in a striped shirt and jeans, clothing that wasn’t his.
For whatever reason, the killer snatched them in June, beat them to death, then dressed them in clothes he or she or they brought with them. Clothes we hadn’t been able to trace, other than the fact that you could buy them at any Target or Walmart. Cheap, and cheaply made. Forgettable.
Like any puzzle, the entire thing seemed mysterious and unsolvable. And like any puzzle, once we solved it things we didn’t catch would seem obvious and even, sometimes, logical.
This boy was the seventh. Which, if anyone asked me (but no one did), was seven too many. The FBI was called in when an ambitious data tech put together the pattern. And so here we were.
chapter eighteen
Did she just call me an ambitious data tech? For heaven’s sake. I, Shiro Jones, was a field agent, as Cadence was. There was no need to throw around inaccurate job titles simply because I enjoyed crunching data in what little spare time I had.
No one was more surprised than I to see a pattern where before, we had only seen what Michaela liked to call “the random.”
Once, when we were much younger, not even seven, Cadence and I took turns working on a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was all black except for a tangerine in the center. It took us over a year.
When I was running the body I would work on it, and when Cadence was in the driver’s seat she did. I will not go into what Adrienne would do to it, but needless to say we had to start over many times. Neither of us would quit. Neither of us would let Adrienne’s temper tantrums stop us from finishing.
Even now, I have no idea what triggered that stubbornness. It was one of the rare times Cadence and I were in complete accord. One of the rare times we did not feel like we were fighting each other for the same body.
It pains me to admit this, but if Adrienne had not kept forcing me to examine and re-examine the puzzle, if I had not had to start and stop and start again over and over, I am not sure I would have seen the JBJ pattern.
And then, one day, just as I deduced where everything fit around the tangerine years ago, I saw a pattern in what I had assumed was the random.
I disliked assumptions, but occasionally indulged. And the reason I had assumed it was part of the random is because, though it is an ugly truth, teenagers are murdered every month in this country. In every country, actually, with the exception of Antarctica. This is what a toxic species we are … wherever we settle, we hurt and kill each other.
Sometimes there is no way to make sense of all the numbers. And sometimes, after you look at it long enough, after you start and stop and start again, there is a way.
I took the data straight to Michaela, as was department policy. Different states (thus, we had federal jurisdiction), different days in June, every June for every victim.
What the data did not show was what we badly needed to find out: how JBJ was choosing them. What seemed like chance to us was, of course, anything but chance to him/her/them.
Other than the fact that they were dead by the same person/persons, the boys had nothing in common. Different backgrounds, religion, upbringing. Different hair color, build, eye color. Some were one of many siblings, some were only children. Some were raised by loving parents, but two had been in the foster care system. Some came from poverty, some had eight-figure trust funds.
And now I knew something I had not known two hours ago: Dr. Gallo’s nephew had been the seventh, and last, victim. It made the timeline just about perfect—enough time had passed to give notice to an employer, pack away belongings, apartment-hunt, and move across the country.
But knowing that did not bring us any closer to a true suspect. The whole thing was baffling. And maddening. To think a random wretch was out there killing children like a farmer picking chickens out of his personal coop. Oh, I had so many questions for JBJ. And I expected to get the opportunity to ask them.
I would solve it.
chapter nineteen
“Hey! Space case! Time to go to work.”
I blinked. I had been thinking—no, Shiro had been thinking about the yummy Dr. Gallo. It spoke well of his devotion to family to have picked up his life and moved everything to come at his sister’s call. “George, I’m right here. No need to scream.”
“You’ve been staring at that file for the last ten minutes. With that really dumb look on your face that you know I hate.”
“Which one?” George would just have to be more specific. He didn’t like all sorts of things about me. Which was okay, because the feeling was more than mu
tual. “The dumb look when I’m hungry, or the dumb look when I’m concentrating, or the dumb look when I’m trying to think how to tell you that you complain about my dumb looks too much, or—?”
“Aw, shit, never mind. Are we going? Let’s go. Yeah? Cadence?” George shook his keys at me. “Want to go for a ride, girl? Huh? Wanna go in the car? Huh?”
“Wow,” Emma Jan said, staring at George. Or at his tie, which was chicken feet with a purple background. “You’re really unpleasant.”
“Thanks,” he said, pleased. “You’re probably a bitch or something, too. I don’t know you that well, but I’m sure you’ve got qualities I’ll hate. Really! You just have to give it time. Or me time.”
“Thank … you?”
“Don’t try to make sense of it,” I advised her. “You never will and sometimes it’ll even give you a headache.”
“No, it just gives you a headache, Cadence,” he snapped, and I could see he was still mega-ticked about yesterday’s ER/handcuff/gurney adventures. Normally he didn’t hold grudges so long. It was one of the few reasons our partnership worked. “Then goddamned Adrienne pops out and smacks the shit out of me, and then I get a headache.”
“Riiiight.” Emma Jan nodded. “I heard about you.” She looked at me with bright dark eyes, like a sparrow. A sparrow with a .45 single-action riding on her left hip. “Uh, is there anything I should try to avoid doing or saying so I don’t have to deal with the crazy one?”
I just looked at her. This weirdo wanted to know how to avoid my craziness?
Meanwhile, George was happily in mid-rant. “Are you fucking kidding? Like there’s a list? You think if we knew that we’d provoke her, ever?”
“You used to like Adrienne,” I pointed out mildly. In fact, I always thought it was odd (and proof of his craziness) that he loved playing Halo with her. And she occasionally cooked him omelets. Some were even glass-free.
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