by James Carol
Broken Dolls
A Jefferson Winter Thriller
JAMES CAROL
For Karen, Niamh and Finn.
Love you guys.
Prologue
The last time I saw my father alive he was strapped to a padded prison gurney, arms outstretched like he was about to be crucified. All the appeals had been filed, and denied. There would be no last-minute stay of execution. He had a catheter in each arm, the IVs already attached. Only one line was needed to get the job done. The second was there purely as a back-up. A monitor counted off the final beats of his heart, the rate a steady, relaxed seventy-five a minute despite the circumstances.
There was a crowd of a couple of dozen witnesses in the viewing gallery. Parents of the victims, prison officials, a man in a crisp no-nonsense suit representing the Governor of California. Everyone was rustling and shifting, getting comfortable for the main feature, but I was only partially aware of this.
My father looked through the thick Plexiglas and the intensity of his gaze cut right into me. At that moment it was just the two of us. I stared back, curious to know what he was thinking. I had met and studied enough psychopaths to know he wasn’t sorry for what he had done, that he was incapable of showing remorse for his crimes.
Over a twelve-year period my father murdered fifteen young women. He abducted them and took them to the wide rolling forests of Oregon, where he set them free and hunted them down with a high-powered rifle. He couldn’t care less about those fifteen girls. To him they were playthings.
I kept my father’s gaze. Held it. His eyes were bright green with a golden yellow halo around the iris. They were exactly like mine, just one of the many genetic traits we share. Looking at him was like looking down a long dark tunnel that led into my future. We’re both five foot nine, slim and overcaffeinated, and we both have bright snow-white hair, the result of a rogue gene somewhere in our ancestry. My hair had turned when I was in my early twenties, my father had been even younger.
There were three main reasons he managed to keep killing for so many years. First off, he had the intelligence to stay one step ahead of the people hunting him. Secondly, he had one of those faces that was instantly forgettable, a face that merged into the crowd. The third reason was hair dye. It didn’t matter how forgettable your face was if you had instantly recognisable hair.
The brief smile that flickered across my father’s lips was there and gone in a fraction of a second. It was a cruel smile. A bully’s smile. He mouthed three words and my lungs and heart froze in my chest. Those three words spoke directly to a secret part of me, a part I’d kept well hidden, even from myself. He must have seen something change in my expression because he fired another of those brief cutting smiles, and then he shut his eyes for the final time.
The prison governor asked if there were any last words, but my father just blanked him. He asked again, gave my father almost a whole minute to respond and then, when he didn’t, signalled for the execution to begin.
Pentobarbital was pumped through the catheter first, the anaesthetic working quickly, rendering him unconscious within seconds. Next, he received a dose of pancuronium bromide, which paralysed his respiratory muscles. Finally, he was injected with potassium chloride to stop his heart. Six minutes and twenty-three seconds later my father was pronounced dead.
Behind me, the mother of one of the victims was sobbing openly and being comforted by her husband. The woman had the glassy-eyed stare of the self-medicated. She wasn’t alone in her chemical lethargy. A glance around the gallery confirmed that. The legacy left behind by my father was long and hard and filled with a misery that would echo far into the future. The father of another victim whispered under his breath that he’d gotten off too easily, a sentiment shared by most of the people in the viewing gallery. I’d seen the crime-scene photographs and read the autopsy reports, so I wasn’t about to disagree. Each one of those fifteen girls had suffered a slow, terrifying death, a death that was the polar opposite of my father’s.
I filed out with everyone else and made my way to the parking lot. For a time I just sat in my rental car, the key dangling from the ignition, and tried to shake the fog filling my brain. Those three words my father mouthed were playing on an endless loop inside my head. I knew he was wrong, knew that he was just screwing with my head, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a shred of truth in there. And if that was the case, what did that make me? We build the foundations of our lives on faultlines and shifting sand, and in his last moments my father had managed to send a Richter-nine quake rattling through mine, destroying everything I’d held as right and true.
I turned the key, put the car into gear and headed for the airport. My flight to Washington, DC, left at six thirty the next morning, but I never made it. Instead, I drove past the turning to the airport and just kept going, all the way back to Virginia. There was no real hurry. I wasn’t expected back at Quantico until the next week, but that didn’t stop me wanting to get the hell out of California as fast as possible, to keep moving.
The static soul-sucking limbo of an airport departure lounge was something I could definitely live without. Minutes crawling into hours, hours crawling into days, days crawling into years. That’s what I told myself as the speedometer needle crept higher, and it was the truth, albeit a small part of a much larger truth. The real truth was that I was trying to outrun those three words. The problem was that it didn’t matter how far I drove, or how fast, I couldn’t escape them.
Even now, almost eighteen months on, those three words still haunt me, jumping into my head when least expected. Time and memory have warped those mouthed shapes into my father’s lazy Californian drawl, the same easy voice he used to charm his victims. I can hear him now as clearly as if he was sat right next to me.
We’re the same.
1
The woman in the hospital bed could have been dead. She should have been dead. The only reason I knew she was alive was because of the soft, insistent beep of the heart monitor and the gentle rise and fall of her blankets. Her face was slack. Emotionless. This wasn’t the deep relaxation that came with sleep, it was more like the relaxation that came with death, like all the muscles in her face had been permanently switched off. I could have been looking at a corpse on a mortuary slab, or a body dumped in a lonely woodland, but I wasn’t. A part of me wished I was.
Detective Inspector Mark Hatcher looked down at the sleeping woman and muttered a heartfelt ‘Jesus Christ’ under his breath. He stared at her like he was hypnotised. An occasional shake of the head, a sigh, small gestures that spoke volumes. I’d first met Hatcher on a profiling course I’d run at Quantico for overseas police forces. He’d stood out from the crowd because he had been on the front row for every single lecture, and he wouldn’t shut up with the questions. I liked Hatcher then, I liked him now. He was one of Scotland Yard’s finest. Anyone who could stare into Nietzsche’s abyss for thirty years and still feel something was all right in my book.
But those years hadn’t been kind. They’d sucked all the colour from him, all the joy. His hair was grey, as was his skin, his outlook. He possessed a particular brand of cynicism you only found in cops who’d been on the job too long. His sad hound-dog eyes told the whole sorry story. They’d witnessed more than anyone should ever have to.
‘Patricia Maynard is the fourth victim, right?’ A rhetorical question, but one that needed asking to pull Hatcher back into the room.
‘That’s right.’ Hatcher let out a long, weary sigh and shook his head, then turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Sixteen months I’ve been chasing this bastard, and do you want to know the truth? The truth is t
hat I don’t think we’re any closer to catching him than we were back at the start. It’s like Snakes and Ladders, except someone’s stolen all the bloody ladders and every other square has a snake’s head on it.’ Another sigh, another shake of the head. ‘I thought I’d seen everything, Winter, but this is something else.’
That was an understatement. There was no limit to the horrors serial criminals dreamt up, but even I had to admit this was new, and I have seen everything. There were some things worse than death, and Patricia Maynard was living proof of that.
I looked at her lying there in that claustrophobic private room, wired up to all those machines, an IV plugged into the catheter in the back of her hand, and it crossed my mind again that she would be better off dead. I knew exactly how I’d do it, too. Unplug the IV tube and use a syringe to pump air into the catheter.
The embolism would hit the right side of the heart first and from there it would travel to the lungs. The blood vessels in the lungs would constrict, raising the pressure in the right side of the heart until it was high enough to push the embolism to the left side. From there it had access to the rest of the body through the circulatory system. If it got lodged in the coronary artery it would cause a heart attack. If it reached the brain, it would cause a stroke.
A neat, simple solution. Unless someone looked really hard, the risk of doing prison time was minimal. And nobody would look too hard. Experience has taught me that people tend to see what they want to see. Over the last three and a half months Patricia Maynard had been held captive and put through hell. And if she died now? Well, we’d all want to believe her body had finally given up, and that would be that. Case closed.
‘DNA?’ I asked.
‘Enough to tie her to the other three women, but nothing that gave a hit on our database.’
‘Anything new on the unsub?’
‘The unknown subject,’ said Hatcher. ‘You know, I think the last time I heard that one used was on TV.’ He shook his head. ‘Nope, nothing new on the unsub.’
‘So basically we have four victims who aren’t talking, and absolutely no idea who the bad guy is.’
‘That about sums it up.’ Hatcher sighed. ‘We need to find him before he gets his hands on someone else.’
‘Not going to happen. After the first victim was dumped two months passed before the second abduction took place. Only seventy-two hours passed between the dumping of victim number three and Patricia Maynard’s abduction. Usually there’s a cooling-off period, a time where the unsub’s fantasies are strong enough to hold him in check. With this guy the fantasies no longer work. They’re a poor substitute for the real thing, and he’s got far too used to the real thing. This unsub is escalating. Patricia Maynard was found two nights ago, so my guess is that he’ll kidnap the next one tonight.’
‘Just what I need. More bad news.’ Hatcher sighed again and rubbed at his tired face. ‘So what’s the good news, Winter? Because you’d better have some. After all, that’s what I brought you in for.’
‘The good news is that the more he devolves, the more likely it is that he’ll make a mistake. The more mistakes he makes, the easier it’ll be to catch him.’
‘That’s fine in theory. The problem is there’s a woman out there who’s about to come face to face with her worst nightmare and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop that. My job is to protect these people.’
There was no response to that. I’d been in Hatcher’s shoes plenty of times and knew exactly what he was feeling right now. The helplessness, the need to do something when you didn’t have a clue what that something was. The anger was the hardest thing to deal with, though. Anger at yourself for not solving the puzzle, anger at a world where those puzzles even existed.
For a while we stood in a respectful silence and watched Patricia sleep. The heart monitor beeped, the bedcovers rose and fell, and the clock on the wall counted off the seconds.
Patricia was twenty-eight, brown-eyed, brunette. The second detail wasn’t apparent because her eyes were swollen shut, and the last detail wasn’t apparent because the unsub had shaved her head. The skin around her eyes was bruised, and her scalp was a shiny smooth pink dome under the bright hospital lights. There wasn’t even a hint of stubble, which meant this had been done recently, probably in the hours before she was dumped. There was no way this was the first time the unsub had done this to her. This guy got off on humiliation, pain and torture.
I’d interviewed dozens of murderers in an attempt to get an insight into the impulses that drove them. I had made it my business to try to understand why one human being would hurt another for pleasure. But I was having a tough time getting my head around the fact that Patricia Maynard had been lobotomised.
Cardiopulmonary functions are controlled by the medulla oblongata, a part of the brain that hadn’t been affected when Patricia was lobotomised. For as long as she lived, her medulla oblongata would keep her lungs pumping and her heart beating. Patricia wasn’t even thirty yet. She could easily live for another forty or fifty years. Half a century trapped in a twilight prison, completely reliant on others for help in every aspect of her life, unable to feed herself or go to the bathroom, unable to string a thought or a sentence together. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘And there’s no scarring on the skull?’ Another rhetorical question, this one necessary because I needed to find my way back into the room.
‘That’s because access to the brain was gained through the eye sockets.’ Hatcher was still staring at Patricia Maynard. ‘You seen enough, Winter?’
‘More than enough.’ I was staring, too. I couldn’t help it. ‘Okay, our next stop’s St Albans. I need to talk to Graham Johnson.’
‘Is that necessary? My people have already interviewed him.’
I tore my eyes away from Patricia Maynard and looked at Hatcher. ‘And I’m sure your people did a wonderful job. But it was Johnson who found Patricia, which means there are only two degrees of separation between him and the unsub. And since our victims aren’t saying much, that’s the closest I’m going to get to him right now. So yeah, I want to talk to him.’
‘Okay. Let me make a call. I’ll find someone to drive you.’
‘And how much time will that waste? It would be better if you drove.’
‘No can do. I’m expected back at the office.’
‘You’re the boss. You can do whatever the hell you want.’ I grinned. ‘Come on, Hatcher, it’ll be fun.’
‘Fun! You know, Winter, you’ve got a pretty warped idea of what constitutes fun. Fun is a twenty-year-old blonde. Fun is partying all night on a billionaire’s yacht. What we do is not fun.’
‘You know your problem, Hatcher? You’ve got too used to pushing a desk. When was the last time you did any real police work?’ I grinned. ‘Come to think about it, when was the last time you did a twenty-year-old blonde?’
Hatcher let out another long, tired sigh. ‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘And I’ve just flown across the Atlantic to help save your ass. And did I mention it’s thirty-six hours since I last saw a bed?’
‘And that’s emotional blackmail.’
‘Your point?’
Hatcher sighed again. ‘Okay. I’ll drive.’
2
Hatcher drove fast and careful, the needle flickering around ninety and rarely dipping below eighty. We were headed north up the M1, an urban corridor on the outskirts of London. The motorway was flanked by dismal grey buildings that were made even more depressing by the dull December light.
Christmas was less than a week away but even the coloured fairy lights twinkling behind the windows we passed failed to brighten up the day. It was mid-afternoon, an hour before sundown, and the slate-grey sky was filled with dark storm clouds. According to the news reports, snow was on the way and people were already betting on whether or not it was going to be a white Christmas. I could understand the appeal of gambling but I didn’t understand the appeal of snow. It was cold, wet and depr
essing. At heart I would always be a Californian. I crave sunshine the way an addict craves crack.
‘I really appreciate you agreeing to take the case,’ said Hatcher. ‘I know how busy you are.’
‘Glad to be here,’ I said. No you don’t, I thought. And that was the truth. Right now I could be in Singapore or Sydney or Miami. Hot, sunny places. Instead I was in London on an icy December day, fighting off frostbite and hypothermia and wondering when the blizzard was going to hit.
I only had myself to blame. The main benefit of being your own boss was that you got to call the shots. I’d chosen to be in London for the simple reason that this case was unusual, and unusual made it interesting, and interesting was one of the few things that could trump sunshine.
Since quitting the FBI I’d travelled the world hunting serial criminals. Every day brought a new request for help, sometimes two or three requests. Choosing which cases to work was tough since declining a case could mean a death sentence for someone, often more than one someone since serial killers tend to keep going until they’re stopped. This dilemma gave me plenty of sleepless nights during my FBI days. I slept better now, but that was the combination of sleeping pills, whisky and jet lag.
Unfortunately there was never going to be a shortage of monsters to hunt down. That was the way it had been since for ever, all the way back to when Cain murdered Abel. Serial criminals were like weeds. When you caught one another dozen sprang up to take their place. Some people believed there were as many as a hundred serial killers operating in the US alone. And that was just the killers. This figure didn’t account for the arsonists or the rapists or any of those other monsters whose only goal in life was to bring pain and suffering into the lives of others.
I’d been your archetypal G-Man when I was with the FBI. A sharp suit, shoes spit-shined until they shone like mirrors, hair cut into a neat short back and sides. My hair was black back then, dyed so I wouldn’t stand out. Put me in a line-up with a thousand other agents and I would have blended right in.
