THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  “I want this to be over,” I said. “I want to find Green and put him away this time, do whatever it takes to move past this. And I need to make Amelia safe. I have to find her and do right by her.”

  “You and Amelia, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Me and Amelia.”

  “You deserve to be happy, Tuck,” Harriet said. “Everyone does. But I just don’t know how realistic it is for you to go after someone like Green now, especially without the resources and manpower you had behind you before.”

  “You read the note, just like I did,” I said. “If I don’t play the game the way he wants me to, Amelia will die.”

  “This is starting all over again. Don’t you get it? Of course he wants you to play the game. Sure, he wants to finish what he started, but then he’s going to remember just how much he liked the game in the first place.” Harriet’s chest heaved — she was angry. “And he’s going to jerk you around all he wants until he breaks you with Amelia. You know how this ends, Tuck. You fucking know.”

  “Maybe I do,” I allowed, and quiet resignation was such a welcome comfort over the blind panic I’d been experiencing ever since Amelia had vanished. It reminded me of the resignation I had down in the grave with Amelia, and I realized we were both back in that grave, in that same place that had ruined both of our lives. Maybe I wouldn’t succeed. Maybe Amelia would die, or I would die trying to save her. But trying was the thing I had to do. It was the only thing I could do.

  “Then why do it?” Harriet demanded. “Why engage him like that?”

  “I love her,” I said, shrugging. “I guess it’s that simple. I love her enough to do it again. To play his game.”

  “You’re going to get hurt.” She wasn’t paying attention, and so I took the note back before she could decide to keep it. I needed it. I needed it to do what had to be done.

  “It’s a possibility. But he’ll kill her if I don’t try.”

  “I’ll put a team together,” Harriet vowed, looking up suddenly, apparently coming to some sort of inward decision. “We’ll have a task force to back you up.”

  “You read the note,” I reminded her. “I can’t have police backing. It was a risk even coming here. I just needed to see the files again.’

  “Do you think he’s watching you?”

  “There’s no way of knowing, I’m afraid.” Maybe it had been stupid to come back here. I should’ve followed the directions on the note. Maybe there would be terrible repercussions for Amelia because of this. All I could do was what I thought was best.

  “How can I possibly help you if you can’t use the police?” Harriet asked.

  “Just the records. I need to see the case files. That’s all.”

  She didn’t like it. I could tell in her demeanor, her posture, the string of questions she kept unspooling at me. I knew I wasn’t a cop anymore, but I needed to at least consult these resources. If I were an enterprising man and had all the time in the world, I could’ve filed an information request as a private citizen and waited for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to churn and produce possibly something, but more likely nothing — it was considered an open investigation even if no one was openly investigating it. But I didn’t have the time to do something like that. I needed this, and fast. Green had explicitly — well, as explicit as he ever got in his little notes — told me where I needed to go, and I hadn’t gone there first. I’d come here.

  “Fine,” Harriet said finally. “I can get you ten minutes, but that’s it. And you can’t take anything.”

  I didn’t know whether ten minutes would be enough, but I had to take it.

  “Let’s go,” I said, knowing that time was running out for Amelia.

  Harriet hovered perhaps unconsciously as I retrieved note after note, carefully filed away in plastic bags. I’d logged much of this evidence, and it was an unwelcome stroll down memory lane.

  “Could I have some time to myself?” I asked her, knowing that I was pushing my luck, but with the understanding that I couldn’t focus with her flitting around, opening files herself, touching the bags I was examining.

  “Fine,” she sighed, “but you know the rules. Don’t take a single thing. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I knew she probably crouched on the other side of the door to the evidence room, watching the seconds tick by on her watch so she could get me the hell out of here once my ten minutes were up, but I was more engrossed in the case files. I’d been right — the tone and handwriting of the note were dead matches for the one that had been left at the house — but then again, I’d always been certain of just who it was who took Amelia and wrote that note for me to find.

  I opened a folder expecting more notes and documentations for them and stopped. Dozens of photos of various crime scenes scattered across the table, and I tried to force my hands to gather them back up. I didn’t want to see this. I couldn’t see this.

  But those images had already been seared into my brain. They were photos of people and places I’d seen before — black bruises and blood spatter, ropes and handcuffs, water droplets and a pale face with wet hair. That was the thing that had vexed the department about Oscar Green. Green eluded the definition of a serial killer for so long because he never killed in the same way. For a long time, we just thought we were dealing with a spate of violent killings of women. That early misunderstanding seemed to enrage Green, and the homicides we turned up started including sick little twists. It was difficult for people to stomach, and harder still because we couldn’t close cases. One or two people floated the idea that a single person or ring of criminals was responsible, but that was shot down. The only similarities among all the open murder cases were that the victims were women and not a suspect was to be found.

  All the more eager for recognition, Green started leaving notes.

  The earliest ones were generalized nuggets of malevolence, and none of us could really understand what their purpose was. It was fascinating, if somebody had the stomach to call what Green did anything other than evil, to see his evolution through the notes.

  I forced myself to turn away from the photos and re-examine the notes.

  “You all are so stupid.” That was the first one, as simple as that. By the time of the first note, there were already five unsolved murders of women in the area. Dallas was a big city, and there was a ton of crime a person could focus on, but the media picked up on these particular murders just because the details were so heinous. A woman was stabbed so many times the walls looked like a particular famous abstract artist was going through a red phase of creativity. Another woman was strangled, her body left on a park bench. Another was drowned in a bathtub of a vacant house, and it wasn’t until a realtor took a couple on a tour there that the body was found.

  The headlines were tough to take. All of them read like different versions of the same theme — Dallas has a woman-killer on the loose, and the police can’t seem to do anything about it.

  Oscar Green really, really liked that.

  The second note was more of the same with some choice newspaper clippings for extra taunting.

  “You don’t even know what you’re looking for,” it read, the concerned editorials of the area’s newspapers handled and highlighted. We’d found the note at the site of a murder in which the woman showed signs of being tortured. He’d been right. At that point, we didn’t. We still didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, didn’t have motives or suspects in mind, didn’t even know that all of the killings were connected. We were all working on various profiles, but nobody was confident they understood why this was happening.

  The third note made us all sit up and take notice.

  “All of these are mine, and you will never stop me,” it stated, including copies of clippings and headlines from the various murders we’d been investigating.

  It was as good a lead as any, and it made us stop whatever profiles we were pursuing and refocus. What if this really was being done by one guy? Peo
ple resisted that explanation, at first. Cops saw weird shit like that all the time, people claiming crimes there was no way they could’ve completed, convinced they were the killers in cases that had been solved and closed for decades. Some people on the force thought there was just some psycho out there who found the crime scene and left the note and clippings as some kind of twisted game. Others thought it was a deranged individual who did commit the murder but sought to inflate some sense of self-importance by relating it to the unsolved cases that were getting such play in the media.

  We were only right about one thing: This was a game.

  He started signing his name as Oscar Green, and that’s what we started classifying all the open cases and eventual additions to his repertoire. Units were formed to address this specific threat, and I got assigned to one of them. We tried to limit media coverage, but it was difficult. I was assigned to act as a media outreach figure for the Oscar Green unit for the simple reason that no one else wanted to do it, and when my name started appearing in the articles, Green started addressing me in the notes.

  It was a very uncomfortable spotlight, even if we did keep the notes out of the media.

  We combed the crime scenes while the notes taunted us and lambasted me, but we never got a shred of evidence that we could use to figure out just who Oscar Green really was. There were never any prints, any DNA evidence, never any common thread among the victims besides the fact that he was apparently behind all of their deaths. The damn notes were the only thing connecting all of the cases, and we still couldn’t be sure of what we were looking for.

  Oscar Green stepped up his game of terror with notes he sent directly to the department. They were all forwarded to me — every single one of them.

  “You seem to know so much, Detective Corbin,” one of them read. “But you still have no idea what you’re looking for. Maybe look past your ego and stop talking to the press all the time.”

  It was certainly disconcerting to be getting fan mail from an apparent serial killer, and when we realized what we were looking at, all of the letters in their telltale manila envelopes were carefully examined, bagged, and tagged.

  We tried everything we could think of to identify the man calling himself Oscar Green, but all the tests we ran and theories we tested never amounted to much. The paper he used was generic, as were the pen and envelope. He licked the envelope — or had someone do it for him, but the DNA sample didn’t match anything we had in the system. Oscar Green was an anomaly, a man with a taste for murder who had apparently never run afoul of the law. Usually there was some early indication, like animal deaths or suspicious behavior or stalking or something of that nature called in.

  On Oscar Green, though, there was nothing.

  His favorite game, though, as he evolved in his trajectory and fine-tuned the art of whatever he was doing, was to leave twisted little clues for us that didn’t make sense until after the murder had already been discovered. It was hell on my psyche, and on the morale of every single person in the unit, to not be able to unravel the kinds of things Green was leaving for us. We’d get a mailing and then be on high alert for days afterward until homicide called us to the next crime scene. He’d tell us exactly what he was aiming to do, and then he’d do it. He’d give us the murder weapon, perfectly preserved, and we still couldn’t anticipate his next move.

  This time, though, things were different.

  Things were different because they had to be different. As personal as it had been back then, it was even more personal now. Green had frightened Amelia into tracking me down, then watched her for God knew how long. Then, to fuck with her or me or both of us, he’d taken her and tempted me back into the game.

  I could see how Harriet could be so convinced that this was an exercise in futility.

  Things were also different this time, though, because for once, I knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do.

  I wasn’t going to let Amelia become another one of those crime scene photographs. She’d escaped being a victim before. She was going to do it now, too, and I was going to help her.

  Chapter 8

  I expected the same kind of panic that had enveloped me in Dallas to surround me again when I was out in the wilderness, slowly tramping toward the same copse of trees that had been haunting my dreams for years on end. The only difference right now was that I had never seen them in daylight, and the sun and birds masked the horror they usually presented to me. This was an ordinary tangle of underbrush and wild land, not fit for anyone to tame quite yet. I’d noticed the sign that said the parcel was for sale, but I understood intimately why it hadn’t been snapped up by a developer — or anyone else who’d been reasonably informed about current events. No one wanted to be associated with the spot where a serial killer had been thwarted.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected when I stood there, right where I’d almost died. None of my old wounds pained me anymore. There was no twinge of recognition from my arm or belly. It was hot. That was the only thing my body was reacting to. I wiped sweat from my forehead and examined the area.

  Someone had seen fit to fill in the grave, at least. Maybe I would’ve felt differently if that hole still gaped in the ground. Maybe it would have no more effect on me than the hot sun beating down overhead. Even the dirt seemed different now. I kicked at it with the toe of my boot, examining the way it came away powdery. Of course, nearly the entire state was suffering from a major drought now. There had been more moisture back then. Stickier earth.

  That’s when I saw it — an envelope fluttering in the tepid breeze. I’d been preoccupied with how I felt, meeting the past and all the nightmares it contained head-on, too preoccupied to notice what I’d come there for.

  It was the next note. Oscar Green’s very favorite game.

  I seized it before it could fly away and really make an asshole of me — though it had been tied with a scrap of fabric to some tall weeds — and opened it.

  “You follow directions well if you’re reading this,” it read, that same stilted handwriting spread across the paper. It was his. I’d known it before, in the house, and I knew it especially now, after reviewing the case files. This was what he really lived for, the thrill of the hunt. He wanted to be the smartest. He wanted to stump people, taunting them along the way, and I should’ve been frightened that he had singled me out for this. Back at the height of his terror campaign, at least his focus was spread to the Dallas police force as a whole.

  But I wasn’t scared. I knew it was probably foolish, but I’d been through all this before. It was pointless to be scared. Being scared would probably get Amelia killed, and that was the only thing I was striving for — to save her. I would do anything.

  "We are obviously not here," the note continued. "I don't do the same thing twice — ever. I have something new planned for you and Amelia. Well, if you get here in time. Or else it will only be Amelia. I'd hurry, if I were you. Remember: cops are a big no-no. You wouldn't like what will happen if you bring them along. And leave your gun in the truck."

  And then he'd listed an address.

  That was definitely something new. Back in his heyday, Green would love to give us clues that wouldn't do a damn thing to help us find the victim or give us any sort of chance of staving off a murder. The clues only served to amuse him, taunting me for my stupidity for not being able to figure it out.

  The only thing I could make of it was that Green really did want me there.

  That was something that would work to both my advantage and Amelia’s. I knew where I needed to go even if I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, yet. But being there increased the chances that I would be able to alter Green’s game and save Amelia. Maybe this was him making a mistake for the first time since the night I’d kept him from burying Amelia alive. Maybe he’d never be the perfect killer again.

  I shoved the note into the pocket of my jeans and ran back to the truck at a dead sprint, trying not to stumble and twist my ankle on the dubious footing
in the brush. Green said I would have to hurry, and I had no idea what that might mean. Was whatever he was using to try to hurt Amelia on some kind of timer? Was he functioning on a specific schedule? I’d only be able to find out once I got there and assessed the situation, figured out what I could do to stop him.

  Then again, what if this was just another dead-end clue? What if Green had no intention of giving me a chance to save her? What if it was just a malignant way to really fuck with me?

  I entered the address into my GPS and pointed the truck in that direction, not even daring to hope, my heart filling up with an increasing dread the closer I got. The site of the previous note had been remote, but this address was a little more worrisome. I pulled into an old, abandoned industrial park and tried to get my bearings. This was way off the beaten path, and there wasn’t another soul in sight. My GPS gave a triumphant ding as I stopped in front of a warehouse, even if I didn’t see another vehicle parked.

  If I had still been a cop, this would’ve been the moment I called for backup. I would’ve tried to secure the perimeter, scouting out possible places for ambush, completely detached from the life that might be hanging in the balance inside the structure.

  But I wasn’t a cop anymore, and backup wasn’t coming. This entire situation was deeply personal, and I was terrified that I would make a mistake that would cost Amelia her life.

  I weighed my pistol in my hand for a few long moments, wondering if I could try to conceal it on my person. If he tried to frisk me, if there was a risk of it being discovered and Amelia suffering the consequences, I could simply try to quickly wound or kill Green before anything else could happen. I liked my chances on that. I was a good shot, and I always had been.

  Then, I opened my glove compartment and slipped the gun inside, staring at the trigger, the dull gleam of the barrel, before closing the glove compartment again. I couldn’t compromise Amelia’s tenuous safety. If bringing the gun in there was the thing that got her killed, then I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I half wondered whether Green’s game consisted of me making the decision to break his rules. He would probably have a twisted caveat for that breach.