Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Page 20

“You still think it’s me.”

  She backed the car out of the parking lot. “I never thought it was you.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. You always thought it was me. This whole time you did. And now, even though Major confessed to all of it, you still want to blame me for some reason. You know, if you want me to steer clear of you, all you gotta do is say the word.”

  She didn’t say anything at all. She pulled the car out of the parking lot of the hospital and got on the road back to the compound, back home. They drove in silence for about ten minutes before she exploded.

  “What the fuck?” she finally said.

  “What?” he said.

  She gripped the steering wheel. “Say the word? Didn’t I say it over and over again? You just kept pushing. You wouldn’t let me reject you.”

  He turned to her, lips slowly parting. “Let you…” He shook his head. “So, is that what you want?”

  “Look, you’re so confident about everything. Maybe you know how you feel about it all, but I just… it’s confusing to me is all I’m saying.”

  “Confusing,” he echoed.

  “You’re just… you’re putting all this pressure on me.”

  “You know, you’re the one who came to my door in the middle of the night and threw yourself into my arms,” he said. “That’s the last time I touched you, so, okay, I guess that’s not letting you reject me. I get it now. How could I have not seen it before?”

  She was quiet for a long time. When she did speak, her voice came out strained. “I didn’t plan that.”

  “So, what? That makes it better?” He waited. When she didn’t answer, he took a smashed cigarette pack out of the pocket of his flannel shirt.

  She eyed him. “Don’t smoke in my car.”

  He fished out a lighter. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and lit it.

  She glared at the road ahead of her. “You covered up for a serial killer, Hawk. Hell, you tried to help him escape. And now I’m supposed to be your girlfriend or something?”

  “Just forget it,” he said, sliding down in his seat. He smoked and ashed out the window and didn’t look at her.

  They drove the rest of the way without talking. She pulled up to his cabin and he got out and slammed the door.

  She got out too and followed him up to the door.

  “What are you doing?” he growled at her.

  She seized his lapel and pulled him close. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I can’t be your girlfriend.”

  “No one asked you to be my girlfriend.” He was whispering too.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s not make things so… formal. Let’s just… be. Sometimes. If we need it. If either of us needs it.”

  He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “Can that be okay?”

  He kissed her.

  She shut her eyes. She clung to him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  For the next few days, Wren had a few things she had to do at headquarters, but the case on their end was winding down. They were still working to gather evidence, but they had found a place in the woods near the bone piles where the girls’ clothes had all been stashed.

  They weren’t sure exactly how Major had gotten them out there, but they theorized he would have picked them up, luring them into his car somehow. From the contents of the girls’ stomachs, they knew that he had hidden the drugs in ice cream, knocked them out before he took them to the woods. There he’d stripped off their clothes, dressed them in the black clothing of an initiate and laid them out on the stone circle in the woods to suffocate them. They’d even found plastic bags which he’d used, bundled up with the clothes. There were traces of several of the victims’ DNA on the bags too.

  So, the case was coming together. There was no real doubt that Major was guilty, especially since they had a confession from him.

  Major was fuzzy on the details of all of it. He couldn’t remember getting the girls into his car or drugging them. He didn’t like to talk about suffocating them. When he did, he would typically break down into tears and start in on how he didn’t understand why he’d done it. It was hard to watch that happen, but it was also frustrating, because all the answers were in Major’s head, but he couldn’t get them out to help them.

  Currently, Major only had access to a public defender, who probably wasn’t doing everything that could be done for him. With a proper psychological evaluation, maybe more of the details of the crimes could be discovered.

  In the end, Wren felt sorry for him, but she felt sorrier for the families of those five little girls. Whatever you could say about Major, it all had to come down to the fact that he’d deprived five girls of their lives because he believed that some mythical horned god wanted him to. It was tragic.

  Wren wasn’t sure what was next for her.

  She had wanted to solve this case, and she had. Now, whatever had drawn her back to the compound was concluded. She was free of it all.

  And yet, she didn’t feel as if there was anything else out there in the world calling to her. She wasn’t likely to get a second chance at the FBI Academy. Even if she wanted to pick up her life where she left off, she couldn’t.

  With the new murders, the tour business was booming. Kimora had hinted that if Wren wanted to take people on tours, she’d be more than welcome back at her old job. Wren had declined thus far, but eventually, she was going to have to make a decision.

  That morning, she got up and went out on the porch in the chill of the morning air to look out at the trees. A few of them had leaves that were just starting to change color. Summer was over, autumn was coming. The sun was struggling into the sky, spilling reds and purples out onto the streaky clouds.

  And a car pulled into her driveway.

  She squinted at the headlights before she recognized it.

  Detective Reilly parked the car and got out.

  “Detective,” she said, “you should really start calling before you come over.”

  “Maybe I like seeing you in your pajamas,” he said, grinning at her. “Get dressed. There’s coffee in the car. I had Angela make you something she says you’ve never ordered before.”

  “Oooh, really?” She grinned. “I thought I’d run out of new combinations. Exciting. But where are we going?”

  “Oh, we caught a case across the border in Maryland,” he said.

  “What? Another case?”

  “There’s a YouTube video,” he said. “You can watch it in the car. It’s disturbing.”

  She drew her eyebrows together. She’d wanted to solve this case. This was the case that had haunted her, with the echoes of her youth and the Horned Lord and David Song. And now that it was over, she was free. So, she should tell Reilly no, and she should get on with her life. She should call her dad and tell him that she was coming home.

  “Go on, get dressed,” said Reilly. “Your coffee’s going to get cold.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Give me a minute.” She ducked back into the house and pulled on a clean t-shirt and the jeans she’d worn yesterday. She put her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck and splashed water on her face. And then she climbed into Reilly’s car.

  Another case.

  She could stick around for another case.

  THE QUIET BONES

  The Quiet Bones

  Wren Delacroix, Book Two

  by V. J. Chambers

  THE QUIET BONES

  © copyright 2019 by V. J. Chambers

  http://vjchambers.com

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  CHAPTER ONE

  “Whoa,” said Wren Delacroix, taking the cardboard cup away from her mouth and looking at it. “What is this?”

  “Sea salt coffee,” said Detective Caius Reilly, turning the steering wheel of his car. “Angela said she’s been wanting to make it for someone, and she thought you’d
like it, since you’re adventurous about your coffee.”

  “It’s amazing,” said Wren. The coffee had a salty cream mixed with a barely sweetened bitter dark roast. The salt made the rest of the flavors bright and explosive on her tongue. “I could drink this again.”

  “Whoa, a repeat?” Reilly grinned at her. “I didn’t think you ever had the same coffee drink twice.”

  “Oh, shut up, Mr. Ginger Latte. You’re in a rut.” Wren settled back into the passenger seat of Reilly’s car, looking out the window at the early morning light.

  “I’m not in a rut. I know what I like,” said Reilly. “There’s a difference.”

  “Sure.” Wren didn’t sound convinced.

  “Hey, if you keep hating on my coffee choices, I might stop buying you coffee,” said Reilly. “Think how that would feel. I’d roll up to your house and be drinking my coffee and have nothing for you.”

  “And then I’d force you to stop someplace and let me buy coffee. Morning without coffee is like apples without… something that goes really well with apples.” She grimaced. “It’s too early in the morning for off-the-cuff analogies.”

  “Peanut butter?” said Reilly. “Caramel?”

  “You said there was a YouTube video,” said Wren.

  “Oh, right,” said Reilly.

  He got his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. “It should be right up on the app. You might have to pull it up—”

  “Got it,” said Wren, turning his phone to landscape. She took another sip of her coffee and then hit play on the YouTube video.

  Immediately, the screen was filled with a guy in a gray hoodie. He was lit from behind, so his face was entirely in shadow. Behind him, there was a brick wall that had been tagged with a lot of graffiti.

  The man began to speak, his voice distorted and deep. “Hello. I am the heir to the killers of the tri-state area. I am the son of Lucas John Jackson, Oscar Robinson, and even David Song. I fulfill their legacy and kill when they cannot. You will find my first victim behind the practice football field at Lingandale High. She is only the first of many. I will kill them all and no one will be able to stop me, not even the authorities that seek to. Try and find me, police, FBI, CIA. I will not be found.”

  The screen went black.

  A letter K appeared in the middle of the screen.

  That was the end of the video.

  Wren raised her eyebrows at Reilly. “Well, then.”

  “Yeah, it’s short and to the point,” said Reilly. “It probably wouldn’t matter to anyone if they hadn’t just found a body out behind the practice field at Lingandale High. That’s where we’re heading right now. They’re at the scene waiting for us to look around. The minute the video went up, someone called me. They want the task force on this from the get-go.”

  “Well, that’s good. We both came in late on the last case,” said Wren. “Being there from the beginning will make our job easier.”

  “Definitely,” said Reilly. “I guess they heard about us closing the case out here, and they want our help. It’s a good sign. Sometimes the local department is hostile to us coming in.”

  “Oh, like here in Cardinal Falls?” said Wren.

  Reilly grimaced. “Hey, the local boys aren’t all bad.”

  “With you,” said Wren. “They hate me.”

  “They just need to get to know you,” said Reilly. “They wouldn’t hate you then.”

  “I don’t know, it’s been a long time,” said Wren, who’d grown up in the area. She decided to change the subject. “The video’s a little hyperbolic. He’s cocky, thinking he can outsmart everyone. And it’s funny that he thinks the CIA would be after him.”

  “That mean anything?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t really know what the CIA does,” she said. “He could be stupid. Or young.”

  “What do you think about the K?”

  “I have no idea. I guess it’s a signature of sorts,” she said. “What do we know about the victim?”

  “Her name’s Bristol Cannon,” said Reilly. “She was a student at the high school. She apparently got up early every morning and went out to run the cross-country track at the school. They found her body around 5:00 AM, and she hadn’t been dead for long. It looks as though the killer surprised her there, dragged her off into the woods between the track and the practice field and raped and killed her. That’s just preliminary observation from what I’m hearing.”

  “And when did the YouTube video go up?”

  “Not sure,” said Reilly.

  She clicked around on the phone and was able to find the answer. “It’s been up for about an hour. Which means that the killer had a pretty tight window of time to make this video, edit it, and then put it up on YouTube.”

  “Unless he made it ahead of time.”

  “Could be,” said Wren. “Except…”

  “What?”

  “I need to see the scene first,” she said. “I’m not sure, but something feels a little weird about that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Um, I don’t want to say yet,” she said.

  “Weird meaning what?”

  “Look, Reilly, I assume you want me to try to put together a profile on this killer? I’m trying to do that, and I’m pulling together bits of information here and there, and I want to get it right.”

  “Okay,” said Reilly. “Drink your sea salt coffee and keep your own counsel, then. I’ll just drive.”

  She sighed, rolling her eyes. She did drink some more coffee.

  * * *

  The scene was a horror show, and Reilly wasn’t prepared for it. He thought he would have been ready for anything after their last case, which involved finding the bodies of five girls, not a single one older than twelve. Those little bodies had haunted Reilly’s nightmares, but this was worse in some ways.

  For one thing, Bristol was still quite young. She was only seventeen. She was practically a child as well. For another, it was a messy, bloody scene.

  Say what you wanted about Major Hill, he had been very tidy with his killing. No blood. No fluids. The bodies dressed and posed. Almost… artful.

  This was something else.

  Bristol lay face down in the grass, totally naked. She’d been shot in the back of the head and there was blood matted in her hair and smeared over her back. Her legs were spread and there were dirty streaks on her thighs and buttocks. In the morning light, she looked so small and pale and ugly lying like that. She’d just been left there, like roadkill.

  Reilly felt ill. Not stomach-churning ill, like he’d toss his coffee, but just generally disgusted with the state of the universe that this kind of shit even happened.

  Wren, on the other hand, was crouched down, taking in everything with an almost eager expression on her face. She looked everything over, moving her head this way and that like a curious bird.

  That was a little weird, sure, but then Reilly was weird too. He crouched down next to her. “So? You got that profile yet?”

  She turned on him. “No.”

  “Detective Reilly?” said a voice.

  Reilly straightened. “Yes? Detective Gamsey, right?”

  Gamsey nodded. He was a little pudgy, hair going thin on top of his head. “That’s right. I don’t mean to rush you at all, but we’re wondering about how much longer you’ll need with the body.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” said Reilly. “My associate, Wren Delacroix, she takes as much time as she needs, so—”

  “I’m good.” Wren stood up, facing Gamsey. “You guys have taken pictures, right?”

  “Yes, we’re ready to remove the body to the morgue,” said Gamsey. “But, as I said, I’m not trying to rush you or anything. It’s just if we could get a ballpark—”

  “No, take her,” said Wren. “There’s got to be evidence on her body. You see the finger smears?” She pointed. “Killer like this will have left a lot behind. We can probably have this tied up with a little lab testing.”

  Gamsey raised hi
s eyebrows. “Oh, you think so?”

  “I do,” said Wren.

  * * *

  “Nothing?” said Wren to Jennifer Starnes, who worked in the morgue at the local police station. The task force had to rely on the resources of the police departments it worked with. They didn’t have labs of their own or anything like that.

  “Nothing,” said Jennifer. “There’s nothing left behind. I mean, we’ve swabbed for DNA, so we can search for that, but it looks as though the killer was wearing gloves, and I would say that the penetration of the vagina and the anus were done with an object, probably some kind of shovel handle, judging from the wood splinters left behind.”

  Wren shuddered in spite of herself. “But you’re saying that the evidence suggests that was done post mortem.”

  Jennifer nodded. “Yes. Likely the time line is that he came up behind her, forced her to move off the track, shot her in the back of the head, and then stripped her and assaulted her.”

  Wren bit down on her bottom lip. “And then he left her there. He did it and ran. But he wore gloves.”

  “It looks that way. The smears of dirt on her legs have traces of powder from the gloves,” said Jennifer.

  Wren shook her head. “It’s all very odd.”

  “There’s also some evidence of cleanup in a few places,” said Jennifer. “A few discarded bleach wipes used to wipe her in a few places. He was trying to destroy DNA.”

  “Really?” Wren furrowed her brow. “This is crazy.”

  “Well, it’s what I found,” said Jennifer.

  “Not you,” said Wren. “Thanks, really. I appreciate what you’ve done.”

  “Of course,” said Jennifer. “If you need anything else, if you have any other questions for me, get in touch.”

  “Absolutely,” said Reilly.

  Jennifer disappeared back into the morgue.

  Wren started walking down the hallway.

  Reilly came after her. “Okay, what? What’s crazy?”

  Wren turned to him. “So, the first day of FBI Academy, you learn that there are two kinds of serial killers—organized and disorganized.”