by Pandora Pine
“It’s just a feeling that something’s different, right?” Ten knew that feeling well. He’d been dealing with it himself since he and Ronan bought the house.
“Right. It’s unsettling, not being able to put my finger on it.” She pulled her hands away from Tennyson’s to wrap her arms around herself. “As much as I hate to say it, I think the issue is with Mark. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just quieter than usual. More withdrawn. He’s spending a lot of time alone in his room with his computer. Like you said last night, so many of those things are what a typical teenager does, but Mark is our attention seeker. This behavior isn’t typical for him.”
Tennyson had been thinking the same thing about Mark. The boy was the close-talker out of the group of friends, the one who craved attention. That wasn’t the teenager Tennyson observed last night. “Is there anything else going on that’s worried you?”
Carlie frowned and hugged herself tighter. “It’s just silly stuff really. I’ve heard footsteps upstairs a couple of times when no one was up there. Things around the house have moved. Like my keys not being in the front hall where I always leave them. Then there was the night Mark wandered into the living room and seemed to be talking to himself. Tony and I chalked it up to him just sleepwalking, you know, after everything he’s been through, but…”
“But now you’re not so sure?” Tennyson knew Carlie was questioning her original assessment of what was going on within her own home.
She nodded.
“Carlie, there’s something I need to tell you. Ronan and I meant to talk to you and Tony about it last night but time just got away from us.”
She reached out a hand to Tennyson’s arm, seeming to search his face for any signs of what he might possibly have to say. “What is it?”
Ten took a deep breath. He wasn’t good at delivering bad news. “There was a body found in Mattapan yesterday.”
Carlie visibly sagged. “I heard about that on the news. I mean, I’m sorry for the boy and his mother, but you really had me scared there for a minute.”
“The boy was murdered in the same manner and style Rod Jacobson used to kill his victims. He had the number fifteen written on his chest.”
She frowned. “So, were dealing with a copycat?”
“We think so.” Tennyson was leery to elaborate on what he was really thinking at this point. He didn’t have any facts to support his theory.
“You think so? What else could it be?” Carlie was oozing anxiety.
“I had my first vision the morning that the body was discovered. I was transported to the crime scene and it reminded me of the Jacobson crime scenes. I said out loud that it couldn’t be him and the body of the teenager sat up and said that it was him.”
Carlie paled and took a step back. “Tennyson, what does that mean?”
“We thought it meant someone was impersonating Jacobson, but now I’m wondering if Jacobson’s spirit is influencing this new killer.” There were four teenagers in this house that had been seriously affected by Rod Jacobson and his crimes, Tennyson had to give Carlie a heads-up about this situation.
“Do you think the killer is being haunted?” she asked directly.
“I don’t know.” At this point Tennyson could only guess. “It’s just something we wanted you and Tony to be aware of. The BPD crime lab is going through a state audit so the DNA and other evidence hasn’t come back yet.”
“Okay. I’ll tell him about it tonight when I tell him about your visit today.” She took a deep breath. “Do you sense anything bad here?”
They were still standing in the entryway of the house. Ten’s eyes were stuck on the freshly glued cross that had been snapped in half as if it were a twig. “Do you mind if I walk around a bit?”
Carlie shook her head. “No, not at all.”
Ten shut his eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath. Just like last night, he didn’t feel any malevolent spirits in the house. Right now, not even Tony’s mother or Carlie’s Nonna were present. He wandered through the dining room and then the kitchen. The house was calm and peaceful, with the exception of the anxiety he could feel rolling off of Carlie, who was trailing behind him at a distance.
The family room was equally free of spirits. “Do you mind if I head upstairs? I won’t go into any of the rooms without your permission.”
Carlie nodded. “The house is yours to explore, Tennyson.”
He started up the stairs. So far it seemed there were no spirits up here. There was nothing at all for Carlie to be worried about. Ten was about to tell her that very thing when he reached the last bedroom at the end of the hall. He stopped in front of the closed door, tensing a bit. The door had a sign on it reading: “Mark’s room. Enter at your own risk.” He knew it was just a sign that teenagers bought to set a boundary between themselves and their nosy parents, but Tennyson got a funny feeling that in this case, it meant a little bit more.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Carlie’s voice had a bit of an edge to it.
Tennyson didn’t know what exactly was wrong, but there was something. “The vibration is off.” It was the best description of what he was feeling. He held his hand up to the door and the feeling increased. There was something in Mark's room.
Carlie joined him and did the same thing with her hand. “I don’t feel any vibrations, but the room does feel off. It’s cooler here.”
Ten nodded. It was August and hot as hell upstairs, but it was a few degrees cooler at this end of the hallway. “Can I go in?”
“Yeah, let’s not touch anything though. I don’t want Mark to feel like we violated his privacy.” Carlie turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The room wasn’t what Tennyson was expecting at all. He’d been thinking the space would be draped in black and the walls covered with rap posters. Instead, the bed was neatly made with a navy-blue checkered quilt. The walls were bare, but for a Pretty Woman movie poster. “Carlie, this is a nice room.”
“We gave Mark the biggest of the bedrooms, figuring he deserved it.” She shrugged. “Each of the boys got a certain budget to decorate their rooms with and he was the only kid who came in under that total.”
Tennyson walked over to the desk. There was a Dell laptop sitting closed in the center. School books were stacked neatly to the left of it, while notebooks were in a pile to the right. Next to the desk was a wastepaper basket. All around it were tiny balled up gum wrappers. Ten saw packs of unopened gum sitting on the desk. There was nothing strange about any of this stuff. He frowned.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He turned to look at her. “There’s nothing wrong at all.”
“You felt something outside the door,” Carlie reminded him.
Ten nodded absently and moved closer to the bed. On the side closest to him, there was a nightstand that matched the bed with a light sitting on it. He wasn’t getting any kind of weird vibration from that either. He looked across the bed to the far corner. There was a matching nightstand there. “If I were a teenage boy, that’s where I’d hide something I didn’t want my parents to find.” Ten pointed across the room.
Carlie nibbled on her bottom lip and nodded.
Ten moved across the room, past the Pretty Woman poster and past a matching dresser. The second he stepped into the alley between the bed and the wall, he felt it. “Jackpot,” Ten whispered. His stomach felt a bit queasy and he took a step back.
“Tennyson, are you okay. You went green all of a sudden.” Carlie looked at him with concern.
“I feel a bit green too. It’s here. Whatever it is, it’s here.” He took a shallow breath through his mouth, willing his breakfast to stay put.
“Under the bed?” Carlie sounded scared.
Ten wasn’t sure but he thought so. “Do you want me to look? Or, do you want to walk out of the room now? Like you said, I don’t want to invade Mark’s privacy.”
“We’ve come this far, we might as well look and then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.�
� She crossed herself. “I mean, we’re talking about something metaphysical right? You’re not going to find a dime bag of pot under the bed.”
“Right. Whatever it is I’m picking up, has to do with a spirit or something similar.” Ten knelt down and lifted up the quilt. He peered under the bed and found a shoebox. There was nothing else under the bed, not even a dust bunny. “Shoebox.” He pulled it out and set it on top of the blue quilt. “Do you want to open it or do you want me to do it?”
“You can do it.” Carlie’s voice was quiet. “Hail Mary, full of Grace...”
Ten didn’t have time to recite the prayer along with her, even though he was familiar with the words, thanks to Ronan. He lifted the lid off the box and peered inside. “Newspaper clippings.” His voice sounded hollow in his own ears.
“What?” Carlie came over to look over his shoulder. “That can’t be all? Why on earth would newspaper clippings make you nauseous?”
That was a good question. “Looks like news stories from the Jacobson case.” Ten remembered Keegan saying that Mark had a crush on the newspaperman turned serial killer.
“He would always ask for the papers once we were finished reading The Globe and The Herald. I had no idea he was cutting them up.”
Ten nodded and kept going through the pile of clippings. There was nothing in the box that should be making Tennyson feel like he was going to throw up any second now. Lifting the last clippings up, he found it. “Sweet Jesus,” he whispered, not knowing if it was a prayer or if he was taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“What? What is it?” Carlie’s voice sounded close to panic.
“It’s a short lock of hair tied with a pink ribbon.” Tennyson knew better than to touch it. Just being this close to the object was enough for him.
“Why does he have a lock of someone’s hair?” Carlie sounded confused.
“Lots of people save hair. Don’t you have one from your boys’ first haircuts?”
Carlie shrugged. “Whose hair is it?” Carlie asked, her voice shook with what sounded like terror.
Tennyson dry-heaved and set the clippings back into the box. “I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, my money would be on Rod Jacobson.”
18
Ronan
Ronan’s chirping cell phone woke him out of a dead sleep. He rolled over to grab it and noticed that the red LED readout on his alarm clock displayed 4:12am. “O’Mara.”
“Sorry to wake you, Ronan, but you need to get to Chelsea, now. Bring Ten,” Fitzgibbon’s voice was all business.
“Number sixteen?” Ronan asked.
“What is it?” Ten asked from beside him.
Ronan hit the button to put the call on speakerphone. “Ten, it’s Kevin. We’ve got another body. Teenager. Same telltale throat slashing as before. Homicide called me in due to the special circumstances of this case and I want you both down here. I’ll text you the address.”
“We’re on our way.” Ronan punched the red button to end the call. “Jesus Christ, not another one.”
Tennyson pressed a kiss to his forehead and went to pull away.
Ronan grabbed his arm to stop him. “What, no cheery spin on this? No, ‘It will be okay?’”
Ten shook his head. His body was lit only by the eerie red lights of their alarm clocks. “It’s not going to be okay, Ronan. We both know that. Another kid is dead. BPD is twelve thousand men and women strong and none of us were there to stop this from happening.” Ten pulled away.
Ronan let him go this time. He’d been in a strange mood since his solo visit to the Abruzzi house yesterday. According to the story he’d told, Ten had gone straight to Madam Aurora for her to cleanse him of whatever it was he’d touched in Mark’s bedroom, but he’d still been in a sullen mood for the rest of the night.
Ronan snapped on the light in his closet and dressed quickly. When he walked into their bathroom, Ten was brushing his teeth. “Do you think these killings and what you found in Mark’s bedroom are at all related?”
Tennyson looked up to meet Ronan’s eyes in the mirror. He looked like he was thinking it over. “No, of course not. Mark’s a seventeen-year-old boy, not a deranged copycat serial killer.”
“At this point, a second body would only make him a spree killer, but that’s beside the point. Authorities and psychiatrists who studied him believe that Jeffrey Dahmer started killing when he was in his teens.”
Ten rolled his eyes in the mirror. “We’re about to head out to a murder scene. The last thing I want to talk about is Dahmer.” Ten spat into the sink and washed the toothpaste from his lips.
Ronan didn’t want to talk about the sadistic serial killing cannibal either, but needs must. “You didn’t get any vibe at all that Mark is the one doing this?”
“Jesus Christ, Ronan, no!” Ten turned around to look at him. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you still pissed that Carlie called me? That she asked me to come alone? I thought you trusted me?”
Okay, it did rankle a bit that Carlie had asked Tennyson to come over alone. It rankled a bit more that Ten hadn’t told him about their meeting until after he’d been back in Salem. “I do trust you, babe.”
“I sense a but coming on.” Ten moved to rush past him, but Ronan caught his arm and spun his fiancé around to face him.
“I do trust you, period. There is no but. I just wish I’d known about your little field trip ahead of time.” Ronan was acting like a pill and he knew it. He worried about Ten when they were apart. Who would have protected him if something had gone wrong that afternoon? The Holy Spirit? Carlie’s Blessed Mother statue?
“Ronan, for God’s sake, if I had gotten any kind of vibe that Mark was picking up where Jacobson left off, I would have called you instantly. I would have had Carlie call Tony and we all would have talked about it together.” There was an earnest look in Tennyson’s dark eyes. “I would never keep anything like this from you. The Abruzzis have three other kids in that house, I wouldn’t put those other boys at risk to protect Mark.”
Ronan knew damn well that Ten would never keep anything like that from him. Feeling guilty, he looked away from his fiancé. “I’m sorry, Ten. Maybe whatever weird vibration you felt in that house is affecting me too.” It was the only way to explain why he was acting like such a tool, especially while they were in the midst of getting ready to go out to a crime scene in the middle of the night.
“It doesn’t work like that, but I forgive you anyway, you big lug.” Ten hugged him. “Finish getting ready and I’ll take Dixie out and feed her.”
Ronan nodded. He reminded himself again just how lucky he was to have a man like Tennyson Grimm in his life.
The ride into Chelsea was uneventful until the GPS sent them in the wrong direction. After a few tense moments of Ronan insisting they should have stayed on 95 South and Tennyson saying they should just listen to Siri, Ronan finally banged a U-turn and drove to the crime scene the way he knew. He somehow managed to refrain from reminding Tennyson that his Boston geography sucked in spades. He deserved a cookie for his restraint after this morose duty was behind them.
The crime scene was lit up like it was the middle of the day. A huge spotlight was illuminating where Ronan assumed the body of the latest teenage victim was lying. A path of flashing blue and white lights led them to Fitzgibbon and Captain Davidson, Ronan’s old boss in Homicide.
“Glad to see the two of you could spare some time to get here.” Fitzgibbon’s tight voice dripped with sarcasm.
Ronan slapped a hand on Fitzgibbon’s meaty shoulder. “GPS issues, Cap. Good to see you, Captain Davidson. You remember my partner, Tennyson Grimm.”
“Nice to see you again, Tennyson.” Davidson held out his hand to shake.
Ten took his hand. “It’s good to see you too, captain. It’s a shame we keep meeting under these kinds of circumstances.”
The last time Ronan and Tennyson had seen Captain Davidson was the night Rod Jacobson had shot Fitzgibbon.
Davidson nodded. �
��The minute I was updated about this crime scene, I was on the phone with Fitz. I knew you and Ronan should be in on this one even though this isn’t a cold case. No one knows the Jacobson case better than the two of you. I’m thinking any information you have about him will be able to help us catch this copycat son-of-a-bitch.”
“Well, no one told me we were getting the band back together!” Vann Hoffman chirped from behind Ronan.
“I’m glad you’re here, Vann.” There was no better medical examiner in all of Boston than Vann Hoffman. Unfortunately, Vann knew it too.
“Rumor has it, the two of you request me personally for all of your cases.” Vann winked at Ronan before stepping around him to take a look at the body. He set his bag down next to the corpse and pulled a black light out of it. “Sixteen!” he called out, without explanation. At this point, one wasn’t really necessary.
“Shit,” Ronan muttered under his breath.
Fitzgibbon set a hand on his shoulder. “We had a pretty strong feeling that was going to be the case.”
Ronan nodded. Thinking a thing and having it confirmed were two different things.
Tennyson walked past them and up to Vann’s bag. “You got gloves in here?”
“You know where they are,” Vann answered absently.
Ronan watched with curiosity as Tennyson snapped on a pair and approached the victim. The last time he’d done this with the body of Dylan Charles, he’d been unsure of himself and nervous. Now Tennyson radiated confidence. He held his hand over the boy’s chest briefly before reaching for his hand. Ten’s head dropped down and his eyes slipped shut. The crime scene was silent as the grave. All eyes were on Tennyson.
“His name is Zach Ryan. He just got his early acceptance letter to Brown yesterday for the winter semester. Microbiology major. He was graduating half a year early from Phillips Exeter Academy.” Tennyson stood up and swiped at his wet eyes with his wrists.
“Well, this is a new twist.” Fitzgibbon shook his head. “Jacobson’s victims were all street kids, while both of these new victims were going places.”
“Are you getting any other information, Ten?” Ronan wanted to go to him and hug him. He wanted to be the one to whisper that everything was going to be all right, but like Tennyson had said earlier, clearly, it wasn’t.
