by Hayton, Lee
Disaffected youths holding paper-bagged bottles had crowded out the children. Parents found less dangerous places to let their children safely run barefoot. Play areas where the only burns they’d suffer would be from hot asphalt. Not discarded cigarettes, carelessly tossed aside, still lit.
And the third was Shelly.
Except maybe the order should change so she was first. Shelly’s park was the terrifying overlay Victoria had to peer through to see the others. A Polaroid picture, taken last. One that had leaked its chemicals over every other photo in the box. Discoloring them all with its sad and mournful tones while its own image became faded and empty. Hard to look at. Hard to see. Yet still taking pride of place at the top.
The park was close by, but Victoria hadn’t visited in years. Once, a few years back, she’d tried to walk through as though she was a tourist. Trying to dissipate the nightmares that were staining her sleep and leeching her waking hours. There was an empty spot in her memory, then she was safely home, afterward. Her mind as blank and smooth as though she’d drunk her brain function away.
Curiosity warred with fear inside her. Would she remember this night in future? Or would her mind wipe its blackboard clean of this, too?
Opening her eyes, Victoria withdrew a step and let her head fall back as she gazed up to the top of the fort. She kept looking as she inched around, letting her feet fall anywhere they wanted. No longer caring if the bark hid dangerous secrets—infected needles ready to pounce with terrifying silver teeth.
Victoria was now opposite the slide. In front of her, a ladder stretched high up into the empty sky. Her hand caressed the wood of the fourth rung up. Now it was smooth. Years before, during its peak use, there wasn’t a day went by without a child getting a splinter embedded. Wooden shards piercing so deep the day ended with a run home to mom and tweezers.
Another step, another. Victoria was at the corner. The last corner before she’d see.
One more step.
Shelly was hanging from the handrail, a rope eating into her neck until her blackening tongue forced her teeth and lips apart. But a stranger wouldn’t see her. They wouldn’t see the flowery dress with a sheer layer that billowed out at the bottom atop a clinging sheath that cradled the enticing curve of her body.
A stranger wouldn’t see the hands dangling on either side—blood pooling in the fingertips where the pathologist noted their lividity as purplish-black. Only Victoria saw the friendship bracelet with taupe feathers. Each one slick and patterned at the tip diffusing into a spray of fluff at the base. Each one cleverly entwined in the knotted elastic.
A breeze caught under Victoria’s fringe and blew her hair gently upwards. It cooled her forehead where the embers of her memory burned. It caught at something on the side of the fort, hanging. Caught and twisted it around, before gusting past to play elsewhere.
Victoria reached her fingers out, tentative. She felt the gentle brush of soft feathers, so light it felt like touching warm air. A terrified sob caught in her throat as she raised her hand and hooked her finger under the object. She pulled it down from the exposed nail. A dangerous hook that once upon a time the park’s committee would safely have hammered flat by the end of the day.
The feather bracelet was more finely fashioned than the one placed in Nicole’s locker. Even in the dim light from the park lamps, Victoria could see that time had been spent here. Each quill was tucked out of sight, the shafts twisting in with the braids of cotton-covered elastic so they wouldn’t poke out. Fashioned so they wouldn’t be unsightly, or cause discomfort to the wearer.
The feathers were layered, with softer plumage underneath and vibrant patterns retained for the outermost layer. Each one angled in the same direction. A never-ending circle where Victoria could see no join, no start or finish line.
A sob caught in her throat as Victoria took a step back, a step away. She looked back up at the fort and saw her sister’s body superimposed over the structure. The nail was placed where the loop around Shelly’s neck had pulled tight. The same height as the choking noose that killed her.
Victoria didn’t notice herself falling. She just registered that she was now on her knees, the wooden structure looming high above her. The realization struck home, digging in with horrifying force. Anxiety and terror set every nerve in her body alight. Flaming torches in the gathering darkness.
Malcolm Carter hadn’t pulled this handiwork together. He was just a boring sap lying, almost dead, in a sterile hospital bed. Gregory Mancini was long dead and buried. This bracelet was fresh. This trinket of death had been carefully placed by an evil deviant for her to find.
She’d failed.
Victoria’s mind spun into darkness as she realized that she’d never killed the Birdman. That was just her ridiculous indulgence. He was out there, still framing pathetic Malcolm Carter. Still slaughtering pregnant teenage girls and discarding their bodies like empty wrappers from which he’d eaten his fill.
After all her hunting, all her plotting, after watching the light fade from Star’s terrified eyes, this was the evidence he’d sent to torture her. No matter what Gregory Mancini had or hadn’t been once, he was now dead. Only the killer could have known the truth, could have pulled all these pieces together to taunt her.
This couldn’t be the work of a copycat. No matter what she’d told a class of girls to frighten them, no criminal could have tied these random threads together. The only person capable of doing that was the serial killer who’d murdered her sister.
The Birdman was still out there.
The Birdman was still killing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Victoria was sitting on her bed, in the same position she’d stayed all day, when she heard Arnaud call out, “Victoria.”
She ignored him. He tapped on her door and even though she didn’t answer he opened it anyway. “There’s someone here to see you.”
“I’m not feeling well. I can’t cope with visitors.”
Arnaud paused. “Is there something I can get you?”
Victoria shook her head. The thing she needed was to reverse the last fifteen years of her life. Further, even. Go back to deciding upon a career and choosing to be a firefighter rather than a cop. A teacher. An office worker. Something that gave her the opportunity to form her own life and family. A job that was just something to pay the bills and enable her to pursue the things she valued. Not the constant drain on her time, energy, and sanity that her dream career turned out to be.
She pressed the palms of her hands against her face, blocking out the world. If enough pressure was applied, Victoria could even make a rainbow of sparks appear. Harder still, a shining donut of light.
There was a rap at the window, and she jumped and pulled her hands away. Edwards stood there, cupping one hand to his face to block out glare, the other holding a six pack of beer aloft. He shook it and even through the pane of glass she could hear the bottles clink against each other.
Sighing, she stood. Fine. If the world wanted to intrude on her private hell who was she to stop it? She pointed at the front door, and he nodded and walked away.
Arnaud smiled as Victoria walked past him to open the door. “So you are home, then?”
She poked out her tongue and let Edwards in, wriggling as he enveloped her in a hug, the cold bottles pressing into her lower back.
“What’s that for?”
“I missed you. Hey Arnaud, is there a fridge handy?” He loosened two bottles from the carrier and handed it across to Arnaud’s outstretched hand. “Help yourself to one.”
Victoria frowned. “How did you know my roommate’s name?”
“We met. At the door. Introduced ourselves. Arnaud told me you’d sat in your room all day and needed the company.”
Did he?
“Hey, Grace. Do you want to come out the back and help out your dear, old Dad? I thought we might fire up the barbecue.”
Grace shifted on the sofa and shook her head. Arnaud gave a not-so-subtle head tilt t
oward Victoria, and Grace sighed loudly as she got to her feet. “I live here too,” she complained audibly as they walked outside. Arnaud’s response had a sharper tone but was quiet enough to be indecipherable.
“What are you doing here?” Victoria asked. “I thought you’d be back at the station joining in the celebrations.”
Edwards didn’t speak for a moment, taking a long pull at his beer. Victoria opened hers with the gadget he’d left on the table and sipped. She didn’t usually drink alcohol, one of the things she’d learned to avoid between her work and insomnia. The cold refreshment of it had her tongue dancing. Saliva filled her mouth after she swallowed, and she took another sip. Another.
“There were some things about the case that puzzled me, and I can’t talk to the guys at the unit about it.”
“Sure you can. That’s one of the advantages of working inside a big team. Always someone to bounce ideas and theories off.”
Edwards sighed and took another pull. His bottle was now down to halfway full. Or halfway empty, given Victoria’s state of mind. “I tried to talk to Arbeck, and he shut me down. I’m scared to talk to Haggerty. Stanton just held up his hand when I sat down because Arbeck shares everything with him, especially because I asked him not to.”
Victoria stifled a burp against the back of her hand and drank some more. With her stomach empty since lunchtime the day before, her head was already beginning to buzz. “Go on then.” She leaned back against the sofa and put her feet on the coffee table. “What questions did you have?”
He pulled a notebook out of his pocket, along with a folded clutch of documents that he laboriously smoothed out before handing across to her. “Have a look at that. It’s the full transcript they pulled from Malcolm Carter’s computer.”
Victoria skimmed through it, confirming her suspicion that Shelly’s name wasn’t among the victims listed. Then she read through it again, more slowly. “What of it?” She asked as she handed it back. Better to keep her views to herself until Edwards shared his.
“So, it doesn’t mention Shelly. I’m assuming you didn’t invent her.”
“No, I didn’t invent her.”
“So why isn’t she mentioned? If that were his first kill, you’d think he’d give her more airtime.”
“And . . . ?”
Edwards finished his beer with another long swallow and walked into the kitchen to grab another. “And there aren’t any details in there that you couldn’t find in the paper,” he finished off, walking back.
Victoria crossed her ankles on the table. The edge started to bite into the back of her lower leg immediately. “But all the details did end up in the paper. The whole case was an open book by the end.”
“I called in a favor with the FBI.” Edwards was picking the edge of the label off his bottle. The condensation helped him get a fingernail under the corner.
“You called in the FBI? Did they tell you they’d already assisted—” Victoria made air-quotes with her hands— “with the investigation.”
Edwards shrugged. “They didn’t need to, I already heard about that from half the station.”
When the death toll started to mount, the old Captain had called in the FBI. It wasn’t across state lines, so they didn’t automatically have jurisdiction, but they were meant to offer help and perspective. Two years down the track, they’d stopped even sending men in when a new body was discovered. Their “help” had simply reaffirmed the department had done everything they could to advance the case.
“So, who owed you a favor?”
“Guy I was in college with. He works at their forensic tracking department. I don’t know much about it, but they install computer software into the computers of sex offenders. It enables them to take snapshots of whatever the perps are looking at, whenever they like. Up to one a second.”
Victoria cocked an eyebrow. “They can do that?”
“Yeah.” Edwards laughed. “They even make the offenders pay to download and install the software. Part of their parole conditions.”
She pulled her legs back and sat up. “What’d your friend find?”
“They’d paid more attention to the programs since Miranda was found. Malcolm was still noted as a suspect, so they paid especial notice to his. Joe says they’ve got a file almost 8GB large just with his information over the past couple of weeks.”
He stopped and drank again. When the pause went on too long, Victoria slapped him on the arm. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Out with it.”
“It doesn’t make sense.” Edwards put another empty bottle on the table and clasped his hands together. “Joe said there’s no way he typed out those diary entries. Not since Miranda’s body was found, anyway. And Malcolm couldn’t have done it before because it had details of both Miranda and Coby.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Edwards said. He stood up and began to pace the room, rapidly back and forth. “Joe said there weren’t any keystrokes that matched—if there were, they would have hauled him in when it happened. He hasn’t received any emails with files, hasn’t downloaded anything. He said . . .”
Edwards stopped still and looked down at his shoes, a frown adding a decade’s worth of wrinkles to his forehead. “Look, the software scans all the files every time the computer is turned on, right. Then it tracks everything that’s done on it.”
“Okay.”
“Even if they weren’t tracking his screen at exactly the moment he typed it, the software would send out an alert. Joe said there were target words, girls, meeting, park, playground, that sort of thing. A whole list. If those words had been typed in, the software would’ve triggered an alert on their end.”
“So, it malfunctioned.”
“They got Chuck in the lab to test it. When he typed in those phrases the alert sounded and the system at their end started to auto-record. It was working fine.”
Victoria held up her hands. “So. What does he think happened?”
Edwards snorted a laugh out his nose. He didn’t think what he was about to say was the least bit funny, but it was utterly ridiculous. “He said that as far as they could tell the computer had produced the memory of the message entirely by itself.”
Victoria shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I,” Edwards said, taking a seat beside her again. “And neither did Joe.”
#
An hour later and Victoria was drawing up the information on a whiteboard in her room. “So, point one. No mention of Shelly. If Malcolm is the killer, he should have known about her. If he wasn't, then he wouldn’t.”
“Or the person who put that file on his computer didn’t know,” Edwards clarified. “Presuming Malcolm didn’t type it himself.”
“Point two. Malcolm didn’t type the letter himself.”
Edwards tugged at his fringe, then slicked his hair back with his hand. “If he didn’t then the most obvious suspects to have planted it, are down at the forensic lab.”
Victoria frowned and shook her head. “I’ve known Chuck for years, and I doubt it’d be him. He sent me a summary he wasn’t meant to, to ensure I knew about this before he even told Haggerty.”
“Who else is down there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, but they don’t have a team just on one computer. They each work with a piece of evidence and only turn it over if they strike something above their level of expertise.”
“So, if Chuck can tell us who he passed the computer to—”
“—or who passed it to him, more like,” Victoria finished. “I still don’t understand, though. If this was organized by the Birdman, then why would he leave my sister off the list? Especially when he’s gone to lengths to reaffirm his involvement in her death.”
She’d told Edwards about the bracelet she’d found, shaking all the while. It’d taken her three beers to work up the courage. Victoria thought if she left it longer, the beer would fog her brain too much to tell him at all. She didn�
�t need another private wound, festering.
“We’re assuming he was involved in this. Could be, someone just thought Malcolm Carter was the culprit and wanted to fit him up, good and tight.”
Victoria considered it for a moment, then shook her head. Not because she didn’t believe that someone she worked with wouldn’t be up to it, but because it didn’t matter. “Malcolm Carter is lying in a hospital bed. His doctors are saying even if he wakes up he’ll have brain damage. And the waking up is a big if. Who’d risk their job to frame him when he’s going nowhere?”
“Someone who thought he might still recover?”
Victoria snorted. “No one who’d read the hospital records, then.”
“Who else wants Malcolm put away for the crime?”
They stared at each other, but couldn’t come up with another solution. “I’ll park it. But that’s the piece I don’t get. Missing Shelly off the list makes it more likely that Malcolm faked that confession, not less.”
“I don’t understand why he’d do that.”
“People like attention. He’s already got kids hassling him, day in, day out. Neighbors that don’t care or contribute to his isolation. His job means he never encounters anyone who isn’t a client or a trader. Maybe he missed prison.”
It was Edwards shook his head, this time. “Nah. That doesn’t fit. Look up his records, they had him in the protective unit the entire time he was inside. They’d do it again, too. Locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day with no contact outside of meals shoved through on a tray.” He tossed the spare markers up in the air and caught them. “If he wanted the company, that’s no way to do it.”
Victoria cocked her head to one side. “If we’re right about the evidence so far. What made the Birdman pick Malcolm as a scapegoat, to begin with?”
Edwards stood and joined her by the whiteboard. Two points in, and they were already flummoxed. “Did you search for that when you were chasing Mancini?”
“Hell, yes. Mancini had a reason. Malcolm Carter used to make these antique teddy bears. Fixed them up for rich folks who were overly attached to their childhood toys too. He’d also ferry drugs back and forth in them.”
