by Lynn Bulock
Kyra mulled that over while she poured tea and brought the mugs to the table. “Maybe it would. I hadn’t looked at it that way.” She sat down next to Josh, reaching for the sugar bowl and stirring a small spoonful into her tea. “You know, when we put our heads together we make a decent team.”
She offered the sugar to Josh, who held out his hand to refuse. “I was thinking that, too. It surprises me because I haven’t worked this well with a partner in years.” He took a sip of tea and set the mug back down. “Except you, now that I think of it. Things have always gone smoother on investigations where I brought you in for some odd forensic puzzle.”
His words warmed her face as much as the steam from her mug of tea. Kyra tried to look anywhere but at Josh’s face. She was afraid that if she did he’d see what she felt, how much his words meant to her. “Maybe so. I know I enjoyed working with you. It probably influenced my decision to come over to crime work full-time as much as anything else.”
“So without me you would have stayed in the academic world, lecturing and writing obscure papers on the life cycle of some kind of insects?”
Josh was one of the few people she’d ever known who could bring her from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other so quickly. She laughed. “You make it sound so awful.”
“That’s because to me it would be. Even in the lab you’ve probably noticed that I have to get up and walk around every half hour or so. I have to be on the move.” He took another sip of tea and looked down into the mug. “This is good. I didn’t even ask what kind you were making, in case it was something full of twigs and leaves or something.”
She stifled another giggle. “It is, kind of. Blackberry sage, not much caffeine and a flavor I thought would go nicely with wood smoke.”
“And you were right. But I’ve probably taken up enough of your time. I’ve gotten at least one concern answered, and the cat is back to ignoring me now that he’s been fed, so I ought to start that drive home.”
He rose from the table and she stood with him. “It’s still early,” she said, not sure why she was arguing. She wanted to take a hot bath and slip into ratty flannel pj pants and an ancient T-shirt, something she wouldn’t dream of doing with anybody else around.
“It is, but we’ve been together a long time today, Kyra, and I know we’re going to be together a lot all week at work.”
“So you’re tired of me?” She tried to keep her tone light and not show any hurt.
“Just the opposite. If I’m going to keep things on a professional level for the rest of the week, I think it’s time to go home.” The intensity of his gaze almost made her lose her balance for a moment. She felt like pressing a palm to her chest like the shocked heroine in a cheesy movie.
“Okay, then. Maybe you’re right.” Now it was difficult for her to look at him without stirring feelings she’d rather keep dormant.
“I know I’m right, at least from my perspective. It’s heartening to me that you might agree with me. Can I leave you with one thought to pull yourself back to business? I’m concerned that if Garcia is our killer, he’s getting ready to get active again. That’s why I’m inclined to take what Ashley said seriously.”
Kyra swallowed hard, her heart beating faster now for an entirely different reason. “And Ashley, Marta and Jasmine are uncomfortably close to his earlier victim profile.”
“Exactly. Tomorrow let’s talk about what we can do to see that nothing happens to them.” She followed him to the front door, where Josh paused for a moment.
“After that I can hardly say I hope you sleep well. Still, maybe you can get some rest and come in tomorrow with new ideas.”
Kyra nodded and watched him head for his car. Now she was the one concerned, wondering if she would spend the night with visions of one of “her” girls as the victim of a killer.
And if your right eye offends you, pluck it out. That was the way the Bible verse went, wasn’t it? The Watcher stood silently in one of the few places he could relax and tried not to think about the little girls. What if it wasn’t your own eye that offended you, but somebody else’s, like those girls were doing to him all the time now? They wouldn’t stop staring at him, following him and asking for it. They were already evil. That was why they were where they were. He’d just be thinning the herd.
It would be harder now to carry it off, he knew. He was older and more experienced, but that wasn’t going to work totally in his favor. He could probably escape detection easier, but the girls would be more suspicious of him than before. Still, he had some advantages. With what he did all day he was almost invisible to them. They never noticed him as a real person; they just looked at him with contempt the way they would some kind of bug on a windshield.
Where would he take them this time? His garden was out of the question. The yellow caution tape was still there, one side of the rectangle drooping a little but not enough to risk a visit. There was still the Other Place, but that might be dangerous. He’d taken her there and she might remember being there. True, it was a pretty ordinary place, but there was only one person who knew what it meant to him and was still alive.
Did she even remember? Perhaps he could gamble on her having too much to think about when they were there for the scene to really register. Maybe he should go back home and get on the computer and see if anything else had made it into the newspaper.
What had already been in there was bad enough. That bone doctor and her investigator hadn’t just destroyed his garden. They’d made it impossible for him to even go back there and reminisce without fear of being caught. And now they’d identified the girls.
He imagined taking that doctor someplace and slowly tightening his hands around her slender neck. His fingers tingled with anticipation of doing it. She didn’t look all that much bigger than Serita, anyway. He thought that was the name of the one who had put up the most struggle. She’d hurt him, but in the end it had worked out okay.
The rain began to fall harder, making the Watcher shiver a little. It was time to go home and figure out what to do. All he knew was that it was time to do something. Between the little girls daring him and his own inner voices urging them on, he had to do it soon.
“So, did you sleep any?” Kyra greeted Josh as he walked into the office balancing two large cups of coffee.
“Not a lot,” he admitted. “But then I hadn’t expected to.” No sense telling her that it wasn’t worry about their killer that had kept him up, but the look on her face last night when he’d told her how much trouble he was having keeping things professional between them.
He’d expected her to laugh, maybe, or be offended. Instead her deep green eyes had widened and she’d worn just the hint of a smile, a look that showed a bit of surprise and even more understanding and agreement. He’d kept replaying that look last night, wondering if he was reading a lot more into it than he should. It’s not like she was declaring undying love for him or anything. She just seemed to agree that it might be getting hard to keep a professional distance between them.
So now he set the two cups down on his desk and turned on his laptop. While it came to life, he handed her one of the coffees. “Plain black, dark roast, no foo-foo. I got myself a latte and virtuously passed on the pastries for both of us.”
“And I thank you for that. Can I pay you back for the coffee?”
“Nope. You’ll buy sometime this week, I’m sure. Besides, yours was a lot cheaper than mine, anyway.”
“Okay.” She didn’t waste any time on argument, going straight to the issues at hand. “I thought a lot about what you said last night. I’m not as convinced as you are that Garcia is the guy, but I’ll agree that nobody else we’ve identified looks any better. And the thought that any of these kids that I know could be in danger makes my blood run cold.”
She was pale just saying the words. Josh felt like patting her shoulder and assuring her that it would all be all right, but he couldn’t do that. “As much as I want to go for it, I’ll admit that I
don’t see a judge giving anybody a warrant for Garcia’s home or his space at work. And I’m not sure what we’d find, anyway. Kids have disappeared in this area out of foster care in the past five years, but we don’t have any bodies and there’s nothing about the disappearances that makes them stand out.”
Kyra’s sigh was deep. “Why is it so easy? Every child ought to have somebody that cares about them so much that it would be impossible for them to go missing without an alarm sounding.”
“Too bad it doesn’t always work that way. You don’t have to be in foster care to be ignored, either.”
Kyra was silent for a while. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked softly.
“Not really. I was just thinking about how long my grandparents would have waited to report it if I’d gone missing at sixteen. Probably quite a while. At eighteen it would have taken at least six weeks for them to figure out I was gone because we only communicated about once a month.”
“You went back for holidays, though, right?”
Josh shrugged, trying to sound more nonchalant than he felt. “For Christmas break. And the summer after freshman year, but after that I stayed at school and worked jobs there. How about you? You haven’t ever said much about your family.”
“Not much to tell. I’m an only child and my parents are both living. I was never denied anything money could buy.” The narrowing of her eyes and the flattening of her expression told Josh that she wasn’t saying any more, either. On the surface it sounded all right, but Josh knew that there was usually a lot more than that in most family situations.
Before he could decide whether or not to dig any deeper today with Kyra, her assistant Allie came into the office. “You’ve got a phone call on line two. It’s Fairfield School. Do you want to take it here or somewhere else?” The young woman looked pointedly in Josh’s direction.
“If you’d like, I can step out for a minute.” Judging from Allie’s crossed arms and brisk tone she thought that would be a good idea.
“No, you don’t have to,” Kyra said. “Fairfield is where Jasmine goes to school. It’s a continuation high school, and unless I’m way off base this call means that she’s in trouble again.”
Kyra thanked Allie for the warning and picked up the phone on her desk. Josh tried not to listen to the conversation, although he could hear Kyra’s tone get more and more agitated. When she put down the phone she sighed and reached into her desk drawer for her purse. “Want to come with me on a scouting mission? Jasmine isn’t at school, and isn’t at her group home. The social worker at the school wanted to talk to me to make sure Jasmine wasn’t with me, because she knows I’m important to her. If Jasmine doesn’t show up at school or at the group home in the next four hours they’ll have to report her.”
“That doesn’t sound good. What happens to her at that point?”
“She’d probably go to a stricter, more institutional setting. Knowing Jasmine, that would mean she’d bolt at the first possible opportunity. The thought of that makes my blood run cold. She may act tough but she’s not, and she has no resources to live on her own.”
“So you’re going to see if you can find her?”
Kyra nodded. “I can try. She took the bus to school today, so I have a couple of ideas about where she might be. She has a couple of favorite places.”
“Do you think she’ll be upset if I go along? I don’t want to mess things up even more.”
Kyra looked down at her desk, as if weighing the options. “I would like you with me. I really want to make sure Jasmine realizes how serious this is if I find her. Especially if you’re right about our killer still being out there. She’d be too attractive a target. Having her go missing would haunt me forever. So please, come with me.”
It took about twenty minutes to drive to the area where the school was located. “Continuation schools never get the pretty buildings,” Kyra grumbled, passing the worn brick structure. “If I ever come into a lot of money, I’m going to fund the prettiest alternative high school you ever saw.”
Her voice sounded wistful and Josh wondered what drove her comment. Somehow he felt it was more than just caring for the girls that she mentored through the church. He didn’t have time to pursue the subject further, though, because soon they pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall and Kyra stopped the truck. “I think she’ll be in here, either in the used bookstore, the Chinese carryout place or the thrift store. Let’s go through them in that order and find out.”
There were only two people in the bookstore; the elderly owner and a young man browsing through the science fiction section. Josh was glad they didn’t spend much time there because a huge orange tabby cat was stretched out on the front desk, making his nose prickle immediately.
In the farthest booth of the Chinese carryout place, Jasmine sat with a box of fried rice in front of her, engrossed in reading a hardback without a dust jacket. She didn’t look up and see them, making it easy for Kyra to sit down at the end of the bench where she sat, blocking her exit. Josh sat down across from the two of them.
“You want to tell me about it?” Kyra said softly.
“Not really.” Jasmine glared at her, expression sour. “I really needed a day off from everywhere and everything so I just took it.”
“Next time you feel that way, call me. I’ll find a way to get you a break without getting you in trouble.”
Jasmine’s expression didn’t change. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I don’t want you to die!” Josh jumped along with Jasmine at the intensity of Kyra’s statement. “We think there might be somebody out there singling out girls from the system and killing them. Even without that, what you’re doing is stupid, and if it goes any further you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
“You don’t know anything about what I’m doing. And you’re just trying to scare me with that stuff about a killer. I bet you just don’t want a blot on your perfect church-lady record if I run away.”
Josh found anger rising in him at Jasmine’s hurtful remarks. They’d obviously found their mark with Kyra, because her eyes filled with tears. “I know more than you think about what you’re doing,” she said softly. Then she did something Josh didn’t understand; she pushed up the right sleeve of her soft cotton sweater to show something to Jasmine. It looked like a small tattoo. Josh couldn’t tell what it said around a tiny heart. Whatever it was, it made Jasmine’s dark eyes go wide as she slumped back against the bench.
“Okay, maybe you do know something. Are you for real about the killer part, too?”
“We’re for real,” Josh said as Kyra nodded. “Should I leave you two alone to talk for a while?”
“No, stick around. I’m only going to tell this story once and you might as well hear it.” Kyra’s tone was flat and she stared through him as she folded her hands on the scarred orange laminate surface of the table.
ELEVEN
Kyra hadn’t planned to do this with Josh present. What was he going to think of what she had to say? Too late to worry about that now. He seemed to sense her discomfort. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked softly.
She shook her head, then angled her body slightly toward Jasmine. “No, but I know my throat’s going to get dry. Could you get me something to drink? Diet soda is fine.”
He slid out of the booth and went up to the counter. Jasmine looked down at Kyra’s arm again and reached out to trace the small pink heart tattoo. She let her, not even flinching when she felt Jasmine’s soft finger on her skin. “How old were you?”
She didn’t have to ask anything more. Kyra couldn’t deny what Jasmine had understood immediately. “I was two months short of my seventeenth birthday when my daughter was born. She lived three days.”
“I’m sorry. Was she sick?” Kyra noticed that Jasmine’s hand went unconsciously to her midsection, protectively curving around the top of her rounded belly.
“She was premature, and there were some other problems, too.” In her mind’
s eye, Kyra could see the tiny incubator in the neonatal intensive-care unit, hear the beeping and whooshing all around her from those days in the NICU. The lights had always been on there, day and night. You couldn’t tell what time it was or what day it was.
Jasmine still looked at Kyra’s arm, her eyes filling with tears now. “Lissa Rose was her name? Is that for anybody in your family?”
“The Rose was for my gran who raised me.” Just saying her name put another picture in Kyra’s mind, of the compact, sweet woman with soft hands and brown hair streaked with silver. “She had the same blue eyes that Lissa did when she was born.”
On the table a plastic cup of soda with a red straw poking through the lid had appeared by her elbow. Kyra took a sip, letting the cold liquid sting a little on the back of her throat. Jasmine’s eyes searched her face. “Your gran, was she there when you had the baby?”
“No. She died two years before that, a sudden stroke nobody expected. When that happened I thought maybe my parents would take me back and I’d live with them, but a week after the funeral they shipped me off to a girls’ school. I lasted a month there before I left.” The pictures in her mind now weren’t comforting. Kyra knew she didn’t have to spell things out for Jasmine, because the teen had been on the streets herself. It wasn’t a welcoming place for a girl of fourteen and they both knew that.
Kyra leaned back against the hard surface of the rigid booth seat and took another drink of cold soda. Josh sat across from them, quiet and pale. His voice was the next one to break the silence. “How long did it take them to find you?”
Kyra shrugged. “They didn’t look real hard. I found out later they filed reports with the police, but they didn’t hire a private detective or anything. After eight months or so I got picked up for shoplifting and spent some time in the juvenile justice system.”
Jasmine was still wide-eyed. “I am not believing this. You’re smart, Miss Kyra. Why did you do something so…?”
