“Jesus, what is this?” Heather cried.
The man looked through Heather as if she weren’t there. “I’ll dress you.”
Heather screamed and her voice echoed through the lonely belly of the church, a haunted cry to no one, as the man carefully arranged the dark wig over her blond hair. He took his time and teased out a few long strands so they cascaded down to the tops of her breasts.
“Better. But still not right. Put the dress on.”
“Will you let me go if I do?”
The man continued to look through Heather and slid his tongue over his lips.
Heather grabbed the dress from his hands. She’d play along. He had to be a freak is all. If she just did what she was told, maybe he’d let her go. If he was going to kill her, he would’ve done it by now, Heather convinced herself. She looked at the piece of clothing she was supposed to wear. It was a bright blue dress, which was sleeveless, with a scooped neck, a fitted high waist, and an A-line skirt.
“Take off your shorts and shirt. It needs to be perfect,” the man said. He turned around as if to give Heather privacy so he wouldn’t see her in her underwear.
“Don’t look,” Heather said. She undressed and then pulled the garment over her head. “Okay. It’s on.”
The man cocked his head to the side as he took in his creation. He rearranged a few locks of the long, dark wig so they framed Heather’s face, and, seemingly pleased with himself, smiled.
“Size two. It fits you perfectly, just like I knew it would.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
“I’ve seen you running. You fit the dress, just like I thought.”
Heather shivered and tried to move backward and away from the man, but fumbled and tripped on a step that led up to the altar.
“She would’ve never done that,” the man said. “Don’t ruin it.”
“Who are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
The man grabbed Heather by the waist and drew her against his chest. Unable to hold it together anymore, Heather sobbed as her attacker began to sway with her in his arms.
“ ‘Hold me close and hold me fast . . . The magic spell you cast . . .’”
The man sang softly and tenderly in her ear. His voice hung on the last word, triggering a memory for Heather, something long ago and familiar. She worked it through her head, and caught an image of her eight-year-old self rummaging through the contents of her family’s garage and discovering her mother’s old jazz albums.
The name of the song and singer was on the tip of her memory when her attacker spun her around and then slit her throat in a single fast, deep cut.
Heather’s hand shot up to her neck in surprise. She tried to stop the bleeding, but there was so much of it and the laser-sharp pain was such that she had never felt before.
A strange wheeze came from her throat, like a child blowing a whistle, and she collapsed in front of the altar. She stared up at the splintered image of Jesus in the stained glass and was no longer able to fight off the truth.
She was dying.
Something warm and wet trickled from Heather’s mouth. She pictured Carly from a long-ago memory when her daughter was just two, her Carly laughing as her plump little legs poked out of a striped onesie, her little girl racing down the hallway of their house, with Heather trying to keep up from behind.
She tried to hang on to the image and block out the horror around her, but was still vaguely aware of her killer, huddled on the floor over a piece of paper, drawing while he hummed.
The man stood above her now, smiling and holding up the picture he had drawn, strange and intricate symbols in turquoise and red.
“Do you like it?” he asked, and beamed like he was showing her his masterpiece.
He then lifted up Heather’s left hand, slipped something inside it, and folded her fingers closed against her palm.
Heather struggled to take her last breaths as the man brushed his lips against her ear.
“We are one and the same, my Julia,” he whispered. “For now, write everything for me. Every single little detail.”
CHAPTER 2
Julia Gooden eased up on the killer pace from her ten-mile dawn run when she reached her place of reprieve. The graveyard.
Julia pushed her way through the wrought-iron gates of the Sunset Hills Cemetery, the five-mile mark to her Rochester Hills home, and kept pounding forward. Her breath came hard and fast as she ran past the somber, neat rows of gravestones. The sun pierced through a nettle of trees in the distance and her sneakers left behind a tattooed dent in the dewy grass until she reached her destination in the back of the cemetery lot, away from the road and close to the peaceful solitude of the woods.
It was still there.
Julia smiled as she picked up the baseball she had left behind during her last visit. While most people brought the traditional bouquet of flowers or wreaths to remember their loved ones who had been laid to rest, Julia had carefully selected a ball with a New York Yankees insignia for her older brother, Ben.
Julia had been the only thing Ben had loved more than the Yankees during his nine short years spent on this earth. And he had tried to protect her until the very end.
Julia looked up to the gray sky and felt the familiar ache of loss and pain as a vivid image of Ben flashed through her memory like a bittersweet postcard from the little boy who promised he’d never leave her, not in a million years.
Three decades had passed, but sometimes when Julia was alone, she felt like her brother was still right beside her, with his jet-black hair, crooked smile, and red shirt, grabbing her hand as the two ran down the boardwalk to snatch a rare moment of happiness in their desperate young lives.
Julia bit the side of her mouth to keep herself from crying. She knew crying never did anyone any good or gave back what was taken.
Benjamin Gooden Jr.
Julia ran her finger over Ben’s name on his gravestone and shivered as she thought about the one truth that had stayed with her: Nine-year-old boys should always find their way home.
Julia had finally turned off her front porch light three months earlier when Ben’s case had been solved. The lifelong ritual started when Julia was seven, the night Ben was taken from the room they shared. When she had returned from the police station, she hoped the light would help her brother find his way back home.
A tiny beacon in a tempest, like the hope that had somehow remained inside her. Even the cruel answer of what happened to her brother couldn’t snuff that out.
Ben would’ve wanted it that way.
Julia ran her fingers over the baseball’s red stitching and took hollow comfort in the fact that at least she now had the answers that she had chased for the majority of her life. She knew from her experience as a crime reporter that many families never found out what happened to their kidnapped child. Some nights, after she put her children to sleep, Julia felt selfish when she wondered which outcome was less agonizing for those who were left behind.
A dozen dry, scattered leaves blew across Ben’s marker as a gust of a cool October wind kicked up. Julia swept the fall leaves away and then set the baseball back in its rightful place.
She did a quick look at her phone to check the time. Julia didn’t want to leave just yet, but she knew she’d need to hustle back home for a call with her New York book editor and her return to the newsroom following a three-month sabbatical to write a book about Ben’s abduction and how she was able to find his killer after thirty years.
Julia gripped Ben’s gravestone with a gloved hand and sprinted out of the cemetery to the road that would take her home. She ran past her oldest son Logan’s elementary school and wondered if anyone ever really got closure, especially when the hard-won answers were stuff of monsters and howling nightmares that no little child should ever have to endure.
The warmth and familiar smells of her home wrapped around Julia when she went inside. She knew she had to get moving, but still paused in front of her little boys’
bedroom, taking in the peaceful sight of her sleeping sons. Her three-year-old, Will, had migrated to Logan’s bed since she had first checked on them before her run. Logan, who had just celebrated his ninth birthday, lay cocooned in a ball, with his shiny black hair standing out against his Pokémon pillowcase. Her towheaded Will wore his favorite Captain America pajamas and was sprawled out at the foot of Logan’s bed.
Julia beat a quick path to her home office where she pulled up her manuscript in preparation for her seven AM call with her book editor. She then clicked on her newspaper’s website to see if there were any updates on the story that she couldn’t let go.
Julia snapped the tip of her pink-and-gold Make It Happen pen against her desk in an inpatient rhythm as she tried to sift out the missing details on the dead woman. Julia dropped the pen and put her head closer to her computer screen, as if the proximity to the newspaper story about the single mother, April Young, age thirty-four, who was last seen jogging along the Detroit RiverWalk, would help her figure out what the cops didn’t tell the reporter who was playing babysitter on her beat.
Julia’s eyes ticked off the story’s bare-bones facts. April was a first-grade teacher and a mother of a six-year-old boy. Her body was discovered by a homeless man in an abandoned Catholic church in one of Detroit’s still-struggling neighborhoods. The coroner estimated the missing woman had been dead for several days before her remains were found.
It was a twelve-inch “just the facts, ma’am” kind of follow-up story, with no new details about the murder, no mention of possible suspects, or, at the very least, any color elements about April Young. Based on the scant facts, which were really nothing more than a rehashing of the first article that went live the day before, Julia figured the general assignment reporter didn’t have good sources to work in the cop shop. Either that, or the guy was too lazy to call the school where April worked or to track down any relatives to get quotes about April to include in the article. That was a no-brainer on a day-two story, even if the new reporter with the unfamiliar byline was fresh out of journalism school.
Julia could admit that she was as proprietary as a jealous lover about her beat of twelve years. But she had to concede on one point, that the article had a hell of a land mine that the reporter, and subsequent editors, buried at the bottom when it should have been the lead: Police would not give specific details about the cause of April’s death, but they did confirm the crime appeared to be “ritualistic in nature.”
Julia studied the picture of the abandoned church that had run along with the photo of a smiling April from her elementary school’s yearbook. From her years on the beat, Julia knew what was on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape that the police wouldn’t comment on could speak volumes about the killer. If he was ritualistic, as the cops indicated, the person who murdered April would be an organized planner who likely left his signature behind as a perverse clue, or a braggart’s calling card.
Julia envisioned a mental rolodex of the killers she had covered who fit easily into that category, including the Holly Hobby murderer, who had slaughtered six nurses during a three-month spree across the city one summer after the victims got off their swing shift. The police came up with the Holly Hobby nickname, since the killer wrote the initials HH on the dead nurses’ stomachs after he raped and then strangled them.
Julia clicked out of the story about the murdered runner and vowed she’d get answers from the police and would doggedly investigate what happened. April Young and her family deserved at least that.
Julia’s home phone rang on her desk, and she felt a flip-flop of nerves in her stomach when she saw the call was from a New York City 212 area code.
“Okay. It’s all good,” Julia said, trying to convince herself, and answered the call from her book editor.
“Hey, Julia. It’s Tom Shea,” her editor said in a rapid-fire, time-is-of-the-essence, New York City sprint. “Look, I had a chance to read through your manuscript.”
“What did you think?” Julia interrupted. “You can be honest.”
“I will. Here’s the thing. It’s a heart-wrenching story. That’s why we wanted you to write it. There’s no one better to tell the story about what happened to your brother. But after reading the manuscript over the weekend, it kept coming up short. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then I realized what was missing.”
The nerves in Julia’s stomach over her first book critique and the one story that mattered to her the most were replaced by a plummeting free fall.
“I know I didn’t leave out a single detail. The story is beyond thorough . . . ,” Julia started, but backed down when she heard the defensiveness in her voice. Julia was never afraid of a fight when it came to disagreeing with her editors at the paper, and she figured she had a pretty thick skin. But this story was personal. It was hers.
“Don’t get me wrong. You did a great job on the reporting. But you got into everyone’s head, but your own. You need to take the readers on an emotional ride with you. You lost the one good thing in your life when Ben was abducted. Your dad was in and out of jail, and your mother was an alcoholic. And then your parents took off and abandoned you after Ben went missing. You didn’t say once how that made you feel.”
“I don’t need people to feel sorry for me. How I feel doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. Readers want to know. How did Ben’s abduction change you? Did it affect how you raise your own kids? Is it the reason you became a reporter, to help give people answers you couldn’t find for yourself? You see where I’m going with this?”
“I do. But in all due respect, I think you’re wrong. I’m not the story here.”
“You’re part of it. But more important, you’re the narrator, the little sister left behind to deal with the aftermath and your relentless pursuit to solve the case. Right now, you’ve written a flat account of the facts. Anyone could’ve done that.”
“That was grade-A reporting I did. I even spoke to my brother’s killer in a jailhouse interview. I don’t know anyone else who would’ve had the balls to do that.”
“Point taken. But let me ask you something. Why did you want to write this book in the first place?”
“Because I wanted to tell Ben’s story. I didn’t want him to be forgotten. He was everything to me growing up.”
“That’s the soul of the story. And that’s what you need to write. Like I said, it’s a good start, but send me a revise with more of you in it. Take your time. And feel free to run anything by me. Just shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions. Don’t get me wrong. What you wrote is really good. But I know you can make it great.”
Julia hung up and stared at her Make It Happen pen, now wanting to chuck the thing with the inspirational quote across the room.
The aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafted down the hallway from the kitchen, meaning Julia’s live-in housekeeper and self-appointed den mother, Helen Jankowski, was already up.
Julia headed to the shower and put the water to the coldest temperature, wondering if she’d be able to deliver on her editor’s demands. Pushing herself was nothing new. Digging into her true feelings about what happened to Ben was treading on sacred ground.
A blast of ice-cold water pelted against Julia’s skin. She stayed under the spray until she couldn’t take it anymore and exited the shower, shivering. She dried her long, dark hair and pulled on a blue-and-white–striped dress over her lean size-two runner’s frame. Julia always figured blue was a good choice for her, since it matched her eyes, the same piercing bright azure hue she had inherited from her con man father, Duke Gooden, who was currently on the lam, God knows where, from the FBI.
Julia grabbed her briefcase and old-school reporter’s notebook, where she jotted down a reminder to call her Realtor to check on the status of the closing of their house, which had recently gone into escrow, since Julia was ready to make an offer on a home she had her eye on in the Palmer Park neighborhood of Detroit.
Julia slipp
ed her heels on with one hand and gave one more glance to her still-sleeping boys. She then went down the hallway to the kitchen, where Helen, a whisper-thin older woman with a thick Polish accent and a killer pierogi recipe, was busy making lunch for Logan.
“Thanks, Helen. I was going to do that.”
“I figured after your phone call this morning, you could use the extra help.”
“How do you know about my phone call?”
“I heard a snippet of it when I was heading to the bathroom. Your story was excellent. Don’t let the bastards get you down. You give me the word, and I’ll set him straight. Saying your story wasn’t good enough . . .”
“So you overheard my phone conversation in the hallway when the office door was closed?” Julia asked, and gestured to the other house landline next to the coffee machine.
“You are a very suspicious woman,” Helen said, and put a mug of coffee down in front of Julia. “It seems that you are in the right line of work.”
“Thanks for the support, but my editor was right. I should’ve known better. I didn’t follow my own rules.”
Julia patted Helen’s hand and jotted down a note for Logan and slipped it in his lunch box, letting him know she loved him, and although everything seemed really hard right now, the move to the new house was going to work out just fine.
“Tell the boys I love them,” Julia said. “And remind Logan he’s got basketball practice on his new team tonight.”
“I don’t think the boy wants to do that.”
“I know. But it will give him a chance to meet some kids ahead of time from his new school before he starts. I just want him to be okay. He’s had to deal with a lot of changes already. Both boys have, with the loss of their dad.”
Julia took a look out the window of the kitchen to the rear yard and had a sudden image of her former, estranged husband, David Tanner, building Logan’s tree house. Their marriage was already on irreparably damaged ground when he was killed. There were too many ghosts of bad memories of the man she spent nearly ten years with in this house, and it was time for Julia, her boys, and Helen to make a fresh start.
You Fit the Pattern Page 2
