The Broken (The Apostles) (12 page)

“Do you think it’s a different killer?”

The hands. It came back to the hands. This woman’s hands were clasped, thumbs interlocked, and centered on her chest. “Same killer or someone with intimate knowledge of the killings.”

“I wonder who she is.”

A shadow moved across the door, blocking the sun. “I know.”

Hayden’s jaw clenched. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on the hill with Evie.”

Despite the smell, Kate didn’t gag, nor did she gaze in horror at the flesh-dotted bones. Her face was oddly composed. “Hatch needed Evie to look at something they found in the cabin.”

Hayden reached for her elbow and tried to turn her around. “You need to get out of here. This is no place for—”

“Agent Reed, didn’t you hear her?” the tech asked. “She said she can identify the body.”

The sunglasses on Kate’s nose slipped as she nodded once. “It’s Kendra Erickson.”

For the first time that morning, the hairs on the back of Hayden’s neck stood on end.

“Who?” the tech asked.

“My mother,” Kate said with a hollow but steady voice. “I recognize those pink shoes.”

*  *  *

Friday, June 12, 11 a.m.
Colorado Springs, Colorado

“That is one butt-ugly pair of shoes.” Lottie jabbed Detective Traynor in the ribs and pointed to a pair of lace-ups the color and texture of chunky peanut butter.

“Ugly to the eyes, but heaven to the feet,” a deep voice said behind her.

Lottie spun and came face-to-face with a man with a rusty mop of hair on his head and an equally unruly red mustache. This must be Rusty Coswell, the manager of the orthotic shoe store. “I’m sure that’s a wonderful shoe,” she said.

“But you’ll be dead before you’ll be caught in a pair of these, right Sergeant King?” He tipped his gaze to her shoes, a pair of denim stilettos with tiny swinging cherries.

She’d taught her grandkids to stand up for and speak their truths. Ain’t healthy for a soul to back off on her truths. “I’m afraid so.” She offered him her hand. “Thanks for meeting with us on such short notice, Mr. Coswell. We have the casts.”

The smile beneath his bushy mustache fell away, and the shoe salesman ushered them to his office. “I still can’t believe something like that happened here.”

Colorado Springs, a town of a half million people, wasn’t a stranger to violent crime, but it had never seen a murder like this. Thomas’s celebrity status combined with the carnage and Butcher’s notoriety had her town on edge. She was hoping orthotic shoe man here could help take off a bit of that edge. She took out the cast of the odd shoeprint found in Shayna Thomas’s terraced garden and handed it to the man, who put on a set of bifocals and studied the print.

“Custom orthotic,” the shoe salesman finally said. “Ladies size eight and a half wide. Manufactured by Ortho King out of Michigan, which distributes nationwide.” He reached into the file drawer of his desk, took out a catalog, and pointed to a big, black chunky shoe.

“This shoe could have been fitted and sold anywhere in the United States?” Lottie asked.

“Yes.”

“Who would wear this type of shoe?”

“Diabetics often wear orthotic devices, as do patients suffering from arthritis, those with some type of foot deformity, or individuals with general foot fatigue or discomfort caused by everything from obesity to stress from rigorous sports.”

“It could be anyone?”

“Probably a woman.”

Traynor made notes on his notebook. “We have a woman with a size eight and a half wide foot. That narrows our search.”

“Numbers, how many are we looking at?” Lottie asked.

“Of this size and brand, probably a couple thousand over the past ten years,” the shoe store manager said. “That’ll be a lot of prescriptions to check.”

“Prescriptions?”

“Patients need a prescription for these types of shoes.”

“And prescriptions are attached to names.” The cherries on Lottie’s shoes jiggled.

*  *  *

Friday, June 12, 11:05 a.m.
Danaville, Nevada

Hayden placed his hands on either side of Kate so she couldn’t escape his words. “Do not move.”

She nodded and sat on the hood of the sheriff’s cruiser parked in front of the cabin. She’d refused to get inside the car, despite the fact that a body she believed to be her mother’s lay in the final stages of decomposition not fifty feet from her.

He put a finger under her chin and lifted her gaze to his. “Give me a minute to talk with Evie, and then we’ll go.”

Again, she nodded, but he wasn’t sure if she was listening. A part of her had checked out, shut down, but given that Erickson was still on the loose, he preferred shut down to on the run.

He motioned to Hatch to come over to the patrol car. “Don’t let her out of your sight. Cuff her if you need to.”

He walked to the hunting cabin and wondered if that body really could belong to Kendra Erickson. He’d wanted to interview Kendra five months ago when he first went to Dorado Bay, but Jason said his mother was out of town, and Hayden believed him. The young man displayed no signs of dissembling. He’d said his mother had been at…A quick rush of air shot over Hayden’s lips. Jason said his mother was at the family’s hunting cabin, which was obviously the truth. Had Erickson killed his mother as early as January and brought her here? Did he come here on a regular basis and drape her body with fresh roses? Hayden needed to spend some time with those thoughts, move the pictures around in his head, but first he needed to talk with Evie.

Inside the cabin, Hayden found Evie Jimenez in the kitchen, poking into the drawer next to the sink and swearing. Evie was the SCIU’s bomb and weapons specialist. She had a notoriously short fuse and could swear in two languages.

Hayden looked in the drawer and pressed his lips together. “A match?”

Evie nodded. “An eight-inch double-edger, same as the asshole used on all the victims.”

Hayden studied the razor-sharp length of metal. He’d dreamed about this knife, about the Butcher’s hand holding it, but he needed more than a knife. “Get it bagged and printed.” If this knife belonged to the Butcher, it would most likely be clean. The man he hunted wouldn’t leave prints behind, but Hayden had to be thorough. Obscenely thorough. “And get someone to take the drains apart. I want them sampled.”

If they found Shayna Thomas’s blood in that drainpipe, they had their link, although, honestly, he didn’t hold out much hope for trace blood. The Butcher, being the meticulous sort, didn’t leave blood trails. Hayden needed something more, proof that they were on the right track.

“Did you find anything else?” Hayden asked Evie. “Any souvenirs?”

“Nada. No jewelry, hair, or clothing, nothing we can tie to Thomas or any of the other broadcasters. Place is spotless.”

Which fit the profile. They were looking for a neat freak, someone who thrives on order and routine and…

“The mirrors,” Hayden said.

“What?” Evie asked.

“Did anyone check the mirrors?” Hayden didn’t wait for an answer. He ran to the small bathroom and stared at dull grayish-yellow paint and a faint outline of an oval where a mirror had once hung above the bathroom sink. He yanked open the drawers, checked the small dresser near the cot in the corner. Not a single mirror.

The knife, the absence of mirrors, they both pointed to the Butcher.

*  *  *

Friday, June 12, 1 p.m.
Danaville, Nevada

“Are you okay?” Hayden asked.

“I’m fine.” Kate felt no horror, no disgust, no loss, and no sadness at the knowledge that her mother’s rotting corpse had just been packed into the back of a coroner’s van. She didn’t even feel a lick of anger. Or triumph, which, on second thought, made her anything but fine. “I’m a monster, aren’t I?” Kate ground the heel of her boot into the dried grass near the sheriff’s cruiser where she’d been sitting, waiting for Hayden to finish in her father’s old hunting cabin.

“Kate—”

“I mean, I can’t be human, right? Because right now I should feel something.” A sliver of panic pricked her midsection. “A normal person would feel something after seeing that, wouldn’t she?”

“You are you, and you feel what you feel,” Hayden said with an infuriating calm. “Don’t fight it. Accept it, along with the fact that your feelings may change when the shock wears off.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but he placed a firm finger under her chin and tapped her mouth closed. Her skin tingled at his touch, and she allowed that warm quiver to rush along every inch of her skin. No, she wasn’t an unfeeling monster. That wash of heat from Hayden’s touch was proof of that.

“It’s okay,” he said.

It’s okay.
She breathed in the low, deep calmness of his voice, his soft cinnamon scent. Hayden. Hayden was here. For two days he’d been at her side and in her head, and right now she was grateful. She scrubbed her hands down her face. “You think I’m a nutcase, don’t you?”

“I think you’re too hard on yourself.”

“Just picking up where my mother left off.” Despite the midday sun beating down on them, a biting cold crept from the sun-baked earth to her feet.

“Are you ready to talk about her?” Hayden asked.

She kicked at the dried grass. “Will you believe me?”

“I’ll believe the truth.”

“And do you think I’ll tell you the truth?” The words fell sharp and bitter from her tongue. A fight brewed. There was something comforting in the fight, perhaps because she spent the first half of her life fighting the monster in her own living room.

“I know you,” Hayden said with his unflappable calm. “You have no reason to lie.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think. Maybe I lied about the scar on my attacker’s wrist. Maybe you’re wrong for trusting me. Maybe you’re a piss-poor profiler, a sorry excuse for an FBI agent.” Once, just once, she wanted to see him one shade less than perfect, because right now, in the shade of the shed where her mother had been rotting, she felt anything but perfect.

He took both of her hands in his and pulled her away from the hood of the cruiser. Nudging her with his arm, they walked away from the cabin. “Talk to me, Kate.”

Here she was doing her best to drive Hayden away, but he was patiently standing by her side. Smokey was right when he said this world was one crazy place. She rolled her head along her shoulders and squinted at the bright sun flooding the sky. “Where were you three years ago, when I needed someone to believe me?”

“I’m here now.”

Yes, Mr. Fix-It had arrived on her doorstep. “Headline or in-depth version.” She didn’t want to go where he was asking her to go, but it was vital to the case. And right now, it was vital to her well-being. The cold was growing, an arctic glacier crushing her chest.

“Your choice,” he said.

“You’re pulling some psychobabble stuff on me, aren’t you? Letting me control where this goes, how it unfolds.”

“And if I am?”

“It’s working, because, yes, I want to tell you about Kendra. I think in knowing her, you’ll better understand Jason.”
And me.
No, Hayden, didn’t need to understand her. He just needed to catch a killer.

“Technically all my mother wanted was happily ever after,” Kate said. “Kind of strange, isn’t it, starting a story with happily ever after?” She pulled in a long breath.

“My mother lived her entire life in Dorado Bay. She grew up in a fancy house on the lake with two parents who doted on her. She was pretty and popular. After high school, she was supposed to go to some prestigious all-girls college on the East Coast, but her senior year she met my father and things changed. Her parents didn’t like him, called him a transient bum who was beneath her. My father worked as a blackjack dealer, and my grandfather got him banned from all the casinos and run out of town. Deeply in love with him, Kendra took off after my father and soon got pregnant with me. She was ecstatic. My father, who was a self-professed free spirit and dreamer, reluctantly settled down with her in Dorado Bay, but he hated being tied down, hated living in a town that looked down on him. They fought all the time. Kendra would scream and rant, and my dad would take off. As the years went on, she grew more angry and depressed. He grew to hate her, and my mother, shunned by her parents and the whole town, began to hate everyone.”

Hayden’s arm brushed hers, the expensive cloth of his suit coat soft and smooth. “Doesn’t sound like a healthy place for a young girl.”

Hayden didn’t know the half of it. “When I was five, Jason was born, and two years later Kendra, in a fit of rage, attacked my father with a kitchen knife. That night my father came to me and said he was leaving and that he’d come back for me when he found a better place where we wouldn’t have to deal with dragons like her. But he never came back, and she blamed me. Maybe because I looked so much like him or because we were so close. Or maybe because I was a free spirit, wild like him.” Was. Right now she was anything but free.

“As for Jason,” she went on, “Kendra adored him. As sick as it sounds, I think she turned all of her love and attention that should have been for my father onto Jason. She doted on him, but in a twisted way. He had no friends, no interests of his own. They were inseparable. What she liked, he liked. What she didn’t, he didn’t.” Something hard and prickly clawed up her throat.

“Including you.”

Her fingers traced the scar along her earlobe, another one Hayden didn’t know about, the one that a butcher hadn’t carved into her. “Yes, just like my mother, my brother hated me.”

*  *  *

Friday, June 12, 7 p.m.
Dorado Bay, Nevada

Agent Hatcher took a blue silk handkerchief out of his pocket and unfurled it with a flick of his wrist. The motion stirred the air in the too hot, too still break room of the Dorado Bay Police Department.

“You don’t have to entertain me.” Kate watched the blond-haired FBI agent, the latest of Hayden’s dutiful babysitters, tuck the blue silk into a tiny hole atop his fist.

“But it’s my pleasure.” A slow smile slid across Agent Hatcher’s mouth, conjuring two deep dimples. With the blue silk completely hidden, he waved his hand in the air before her in slow, sweeping arcs. Then finger by finger he opened his fist and showed her his empty palm. His blue eyes widened. He slipped his hand into the folds of hair near her left ear and pulled out a white silk scarf with a print of a single red rose. He handed it to her and bowed.