The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  But late one night, she leaves her house and rides her bike to the community pool, climbing over the fence despite the lock on the gate. She drops her bag and towel on a chair, but follows it with her swimsuit, until she’s diving gracefully into the water naked as the day she was born.

  The clip is still in her hair, bright and bold even in the distant glow of the streetlights.

  Then you hear the fence rattle again, and a boy drops down to the deck. He drops his towel and trunks next to her things, but he doesn’t jump in. Instead, he sits down on the side, his legs in the water, and watches her swim laps. She’s swift in the water, her strokes strong and clean, and you know she swims competitively for school.

  Would they still want her on the team if they knew about this?

  She laughs when she notices the boy, and swims over to brace her elbows over his spread knees.

  It’s tempting to get it over with that night, but you don’t have any flowers. You know where you can find them—you’ve been watching her, after all, you’ve known it would have to be her—but it takes another day to drive a few hours out. It’s more effort than you’d normally go to, but the town’s having a Hibiscus Festival. It feels appropriate.

  And it feels appropriate to place a bloom over each nipple, where her tops should cover, a cluster of them over her too-often revealed crotch, and one more, the brightest bloom you could find, right in her whore mouth.

  After seeing Agents Sterling and Archer off with the Tuesday delivery of marigolds, I head to chess, needing an escape from the house and the boxes and journals. Mum loves marigolds. Dad was allergic to them, or said he was. Really he just hated them, and said he was allergic so Mum wouldn’t bring them into the house or plant them outside. It meant that she planted a border of marigolds along an entire wall of the old church, and he always had to go around to the other door in order to maintain the fiction.

  But just as we’re coming up on the anniversary of Chavi’s death, we’re also coming up on the anniversary of his, so marigolds are a little more painful today, the wound a little more jagged.

  It’s warm enough for jeans and a fleece, with a scarf draped around my neck just in case. The fleece is bright red and used to be Chavi’s, and it’s so much louder than anything I usually like to wear. There’s something comforting about it, though. It’s as red as my lipstick, and the scarf is a deep, cool emerald like Mum favors, and it’s like wearing pieces of them.

  Only not in a creepy Ed Gein sort of way, because no.

  I’m aware of the looks the vets are giving each other long before they finally designate someone to ask about it. It’s Pierce who clears his throat, looking steadily down at the board between us. “You all right, Blue Girl?”

  “Coming up on a couple of painful dates,” I answer, because it’s true and that’s about as far as I want to get into it right now. Gunny knows I have a murdered sister. They all know I’ve mentioned a mother, but never a father. We wear our scars, and sometimes the pain is as much fact as memory.

  “Landon hasn’t been back.”

  I drop my hands to my lap. “Is this something I should be apologizing for?”

  “No!” he squawks, and Jorge and Steven both shake their heads at him. “No,” he says again, more calmly. “We just wanted to check if he was bothering you elsewhere.”

  “I haven’t seen him.” But that makes me remember Finney’s concern. “Have any of you?”

  They all shake their heads.

  Tapping my queen across a three-square diagonal to where she can be easily captured, I put my hands back in my lap. Pierce gives me a flat look, but accepts the sacrifice. It’s as good a way to change the subject as any.

  “How much longer you with us, Blue Girl?” asks Corgi.

  “Not quite six weeks. We’re neck deep in the Sorting of Things, getting rid of a lot of things we’ve been hauling move to move for no apparent reason.”

  “Women are so sentimental,” Happy sighs.

  Yelp elbows him.

  “More lazy than sentimental,” I tell him with a small smile. “We just move so often it never seemed worth unpacking everything, and if we weren’t unpacking, why go through the boxes?”

  “But if you’re not using it, why keep it?”

  “Because the important things were mixed in with the other stuff; we couldn’t just throw out the whole box.”

  “Don’t argue with a woman, Hap,” urges Corgi. “Not even a younger one. Their logic ain’t like ours.”

  Gunny wakes to a pavilion full of laughter, and smiles at me even as he blinks sleep from his eyes. “You’re good for these weary old souls, Miss Priya.”

  “You’re all good for me,” I murmur, and it’s true. With the exception of Landon, this is a safe place, full of people who make me feel not just accepted but welcome, scars and scary smiles and all.

  After losing spectacularly to Pierce—and isn’t he disgruntled about that—I play a quiet game with Gunny, then wander around with my camera in hand. The FBI has the pictures they can use; I want more for me, for when I’m gone.

  My camera’s still up around my neck when I walk up to Kroger. I can see Joshua walking out, in yet another fisherman sweater and no coat. I take a couple of pictures, because he’s been kind without being pushy. When he notices me, he smiles, but doesn’t stop. There’s no sign of Landon, so I get my drink and head home. I still pay attention as I walk, but I don’t feel the lingering discomfort of anyone’s eyes on me.

  I shoot Finney and Sterling texts to let them know that the vets haven’t seen Landon, then scroll down to Eddison’s contact and press “call.” I read about the attack on Keely, saw the picture of Inara; I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to write her about it or let her take the lead on whether or not to mention it. Given that Eddison spent half the weekend texting me rants about the Nationals’ spring training roster, he’s still too pissed to be finished processing.

  “I’m not sure if that’s good news or not,” he says when I tell him about Landon. “I’m glad he’s not bothering you, but this makes it a hell of a lot harder to find him.”

  “Why are you so sure it’s him?”

  “Why are you so sure it’s not?” he counters.

  “Did he strike you as being smart enough?”

  “Socially incompetent doesn’t mean unintelligent.”

  “It does mean he’d be noticed. If you were a teenage girl, would you be inclined to meet him at night?”

  “If I were a teenage girl,” he echoes. “I think I’ve had nightmares that started out that way.”

  “Well, here’s another nightmare for you,” I mutter, coming up to the doorstep. “There’s been another delivery in the past couple of hours.”

  He swears softly, a solid string of sharp syllables, sounding stressed and stretched too thin. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” There are three flowers on the list with h names, and honeysuckle is the only one I can keep straight. “Something tropical? Looks like it belongs on a sunscreen bottle.” The individual blossoms are big, with a handful of large, frilled petals overlapping slightly on the edges and a long, long stamen sticking out like a pollen-beaded erection. The petals are dark purple at the heart, brightening quickly into a bold, orange-tinted scarlet, then to a cheerful yellow on the edges. From above, they look like they belong on Fantasia. I switch him to speakerphone so I can snap pictures and text them.

  “Hibiscus,” he says after a minute, husky with resignation. “Do you feel safe, Priya?”

  “Nothing’s gone inside the house so far.”

  “Priya.”

  “Vic’s rubbing off on you.”

  “Do. You. Feel. Safe.”

  “Safe enough,” I tell him. “I promise. I’ll lock the door, I’ll stay away from the windows, I’ll keep one of the good knives in hand.”

  “Do you even know where your good knives are?”

  “Sure, Mum found them yesterday. They’re sitting on the counter until we get enough stuf
f for a full box.”

  There’s a soft slap of flesh audible through the phone; I suspect he just smacked himself in the forehead. “All right. Finney will stay with you until your mother is home. Or Sterling and Archer, whoever comes out. Don’t argue on this. They will stay.”

  “Wasn’t going to argue.” With the way all three agents drive, it takes less an hour from the Denver office. Mum won’t be home for three. At some point, it feels like they should be able to hand things off to the local police, get the lab reports from them, but I don’t know the rules for that.

  “I’m going to call Finney. You call me back if you need to, okay? Let me know you’re still doing okay?”

  “I’ll check the feed, get the delivery cued up for them.”

  “Good.”

  I settle into the couch with one knife on the padded arm and another on the coffee table, my computer open on my lap. I was only gone two, maybe two and a half hours, so the delivery footage should be easy to isolate.

  Should be.

  The only person I see on the camera after the departure of the agents is me, leaving and coming back. The delivery doesn’t seem to exist. I scan back through, more slowly, and find ten minutes where the feed is frozen. Just stuck on a single frame. The cameras are hooked to our Wi-Fi, which is supposed to be a secured network. It shouldn’t be hackable.

  I check the time stamps around the freeze. Oh God. The flowers were left right before I got home.

  I don’t remember reaching for one of the knives but there it is, my fingers white-knuckled around the handle. I didn’t pass any pedestrians or cyclists, so whoever left these had to be in one of the cars that went by me.

  Don’t ask me why this is more frightening than being home alone when they get delivered. Maybe because when I’m out walking, I’m more vulnerable. In here I have weapons—knives, blunt objects, Chavi’s bat from softball—but out there I only have pepper spray.

  I should be safe until the flowers finish.

  If I keep repeating it, maybe I’ll believe it again.

  APRIL

  Geoffrey MacIntosh lives in the infirmary of his prison, his health still too tenuous to remove him to a cell. He’s on constant oxygen, his lungs permanently seared by the explosion of the greenhouse complex, the plastic tubing for the cannula actually locked behind his head so he can’t loosen it enough to harm himself with it. Or, Eddison would suspect, for anyone else to harm him with it. The attack on Keely has made national news.

  He used to be a handsome man, the Gardener. There are pictures in the file, and all over the Internet. A charming, charismatic fifty-something with sea-green eyes and dark blond hair, always impeccably dressed. Filthy rich, both inherited and earned, and willing to spend small fortunes on charities and other philanthropic endeavors.

  And his greenhouse, of course. His Garden.

  But the man in the hospital bed has bubbling scars running down the right side of his body, the flesh twisted and stretched. His fingers are thick and stiff with rippling tissue. His throat is pocked and sagging, the scars climbing up to tear at his face. His mouth is pulled down on one side nearly to his chin, teeth and bone showing in places, and his eye is simply gone, too damaged to leave in place. The healed burns wrap back around his scalp. His left side is better, but not unscathed. Pain has gouged deep lines around his mouth and eye. Some of the burns are still resistant to healing, seeping infection around fresh grafts.

  He looks nothing like the man who spent thirty years kidnapping, killing, and keeping teenage girls as human Butterflies.

  Perhaps perversely, Eddison really wishes he could take a picture to show the survivors. To reassure them.

  And because Bliss is Bliss, to really enjoy the sense of vindictive glee that will surely arise.

  MacIntosh’s lawyer—or one of them, anyway; he’s hired an entire team to defend him—sits to his client’s left, where he can be seen by the remaining eye. He’s a tall, thin man in an expensive suit that isn’t tailored quite right, like he was too impatient to get it done. It leaves him looking a little swallowed by it, and his clear discomfort with the infirmary doesn’t help.

  “Is there a reason you needed to see my client in person, Agents?” the lawyer—Redling? Reed?—asks sharply.

  Vic leans against the foot of the bed, hands curled around the sturdy plastic rail. His expression is hard to read, even for Eddison. It’s almost like he doesn’t trust himself to show anything, for fear of what might show.

  Eddison can understand that.

  “Call it a kindness,” Vic says too mildly. “Mr. MacIntosh. An hour and a half ago, your son Desmond was discovered dead in his cell. He shredded his pants to braid together a noose, and tried to hang himself from the end of his bunk. He was unsuccessful in breaking his neck, but he did cut off his air supply. He was pronounced dead at five forty-two.”

  Despite the suddenly shrieking heart monitor, MacIntosh looks frozen, unable to react. His eye darts around, landing on the agents, on his lawyer, at the space near the foot of the bed where the nurse says Desmond sat on occasion.

  “Suicide?” says the lawyer, fingers twitching toward his phone. “Are they sure?”

  “Biometrics on the cell; no one went through the door after he was accounted for last night. Not until they saw him this morning. He left a note.”

  “May we see it?”

  It’s already in an evidence bag, Vic’s initials the third in the chain, but he holds it out so it can be seen. There’s not much to see, really—just a single line in black ink, the letters slanting forward with the speed of the writing: Tell Maya I’m sorry.

  The lawyer glances at his client, but MacIntosh displays no awareness of the note.

  One of the nurses bustles over to hush the monitor, her hand on the inmate’s good shoulder. “Sir, you need to breathe.”

  “His son just died,” murmurs the lawyer.

  “Well, unless he wants to join him, he needs to breathe,” the nurse answers pragmatically.

  Vic watches in silence, finally turning to the lawyer. “We don’t need anything from him. We have no questions.”

  “This is your kindness?”

  “He heard it in person, from someone who isn’t gloating. He heard it from another father. That’s the kindness.”

  Eddison gives the man in the bed one last look before following Vic out. He didn’t say anything. He never intended to. He’s there for Vic, and maybe for the survivors.

  For Inara, who understood the fraught relationship between father and son perhaps better than the MacIntoshes themselves. Inara, who’ll know this was Desmond giving up as surely as him finally calling the police was. Not bravery, not what’s right. Just giving up.

  Vic is silent through the process of leaving the prison, getting their guns back, retrieving the car. He lets his partner do the talking, but Eddison knows how to talk to guards. It’s nothing like the discomfort of talking to victims. They hit the road back to Quantico, Vic still absorbed in thought.

  Eddison pulls out his phone, double-checks a few things before firing off some texts. They’re almost to the garage before he gets the response he’s waiting for. He dials, letting the car’s Bluetooth pick up the call. At the sound of the ringtone, Vic gives him a sideways look.

  “You’re a bastard for calling before noon,” comes Inara’s sleepy mumble over the line.

  Another day, he might tease her. Not today. “I wanted to make sure we were the ones to tell you.” He glances over at Vic, who nods. “Everyone else still asleep?”

  “It’s barely after eight; of course they’re asleep.”

  “There’s a box just outside your door; take it and your phone and head up to the roof.”

  “Is that supposed to make sense?”

  “Please, Inara.” There’s something to Vic’s voice, a weight, a grief, that makes Eddison shift in his seat. From the rustle of fabric, he can tell it works on Inara as well.

  “Bliss, let go,” she mutters. “Have to get up.” />
  “’S’early,” they can hear Bliss groan. “Why?”

  “You can sleep.”

  “Oh, it’s . . . shit. That means it’s important. Where are we going?”

  “Roof.”

  The agents in the car listen to the rustles and thumps of the girls getting out of bed, and Eddison wonders which of them had the bad night, that they were sharing. The girls did that in the Garden, curled around each other like puppies whenever they needed the comfort. There are snores in the background, one set soft and whuffling, another putting a chainsaw to shame, and a tinkling bit of piano music. A door closes, and the next thing they hear is another heartfelt groan from Bliss.

  “Jesus fuck, this box is fucking heavy, Eddison, what the fuck?”

  “Your morning eloquence is astounding,” he says dryly.

  “Fuck you.”

  Eddison grins. Vic just shakes his head.

  “Take the phone; I’ll take the box,” Inara says, and there’s a sharp thump before the line disconnects.

  Eddison hits the “call” button again.

  “Shut up,” Bliss answers. “No one’s fucking coordinated in the fucking morning.”

  There’s something solid and reassuring about Bliss’s habitual profanity. It’s like counting on the tide.

  “All right, we’re up on the roof and it’s fucking freezing,” she announces at a normal volume. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re on speaker?”

  “Duh.”

  “Inara?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” she says, the words garbled by a yawn.

  “We’ve got some news for you.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Just news, I think. I’ll leave it to you to decide.” He takes a breath, wonders why he’s the one doing this instead of Vic. “Desmond was discovered dead in his cell this morning.”

  A long silence crackles over the line. He can hear the whistling of the wind, and even the faint blast of car horns.