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

  “He killed himself,” Inara says eventually.

  Bliss snorts directly into the phone. “Someone could have shanked the fucker.”

  “No, he did it himself. Didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Eddison confirms, and Bliss mutters soft curses. “The box is for if you need to break shit. I had a friend drop it off.”

  “If we need to . . . Eddison.” But he can hear the almost-laugh in Inara’s voice, and he knows she’s opened it.

  And he knows, because it’s his cousin’s specialty, that the box is full of the most god-awful ugly mugs in existence, cheap things so badly painted you wonder that anyone would pay even a quarter for them. She buys them up by the gross, using them in therapy at the women’s shelter she runs, because there’s just something about smashing the damn things that feels so good.

  “If you need more, let me know. I can hook you up.”

  Vic flinches at the sound of shattering ceramic.

  “That one was Bliss,” Inara informs them wryly. “How did he do it?”

  And that’s the thing about conversations with Inara; they circle. Even when she doesn’t mean to, even when she’s not doing it to purposefully confuse people, she has a way of sidling around a thing until she comes back at a more comfortable angle. You just have to wait for it.

  “He tried to hang himself,” Vic replies. “He ended up strangling himself.”

  “Fucker couldn’t even do that right,” snarls Bliss.

  “Inara . . .”

  “It’s okay, Vic,” Inara says softly. Weirdly enough, Eddison believes her. “The Gardener can try and brazen through a trial, trusting the faults in the system and his own sense of superiority. That kind of confidence was never going to be Desmond’s.”

  One of Vic’s hands leaves the wheel, touches the pocket with Desmond’s last note. Eddison shakes his head.

  “The Gardener? Was he told?”

  “We just came from the infirmary.”

  “You told him in person?”

  “Vic’s a father.”

  That earns him a sharp look from his partner, but a soft sound of understanding from the speakers. “The prosecutor’s office called about the contents of the letters,” she says. “They said he seemed to get more unstable after Amiko died.”

  “You said he bonded with her over music.”

  “Finding out I turned the letters over without reading them, the no-contact order . . . well, it’s not really a surprise, is it?”

  “That doesn’t mean it makes less of an impact,” Vic tells her.

  “True. But this . . . this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

  “Finding out he’s dead?”

  “I thought you were calling to tell me another of the girls was dead.”

  Shit. Eddison definitely hadn’t thought of that.

  From the slightly sick look on Vic’s face, neither had he.

  Well, it’s been a hell of a morning.

  They can hear another mug shatter.

  “Yeah, so we’ll need that hookup to get more of these.”

  “Inara? It’s okay to grieve for him, if you want.”

  “I don’t know what I want to do, Vic,” she replies, then laughs bitterly. “I guess I don’t want him to be worth any more of my time and attention. But that’s hardly fair, is it?”

  “What is?” Eddison asks before he can think better of it.

  She gives a soft huff of amusement, an unconscious echo of a hospital hallway and a pacing father and a terrified, traumatized little girl. “We’ll get some of the others to take our shifts tonight. Maybe go back out to that beach.”

  “Did it help?”

  “We can run forever and there’s no glass wall to stop us.”

  So yes, it helped.

  “Try not to tell anyone else just yet. They want to control how it hits the news.”

  “Thank you for telling us. And for the fucktastic mugs.”

  They can hear another one shatter.

  Eddison gives up and laughs into his hand. “I’ll give you my contact’s name; she can tell you where she gets them.”

  “No, Bliss, not off the roof!” The call ends abruptly.

  But Vic is smiling a little, that terrible grimness fading. “They’ll be okay, won’t they?”

  “I think Inara will have some bad days, but for the most part, yes. I think this takes some of the burden away from her.”

  A cell phone goes off, making them both flinch. Eddison can feel the vibrations against his belt. He pulls it up, his stomach sinking as he sees Priya’s name on the display. “Priya? Are you okay?”

  “There are petunias on the doorstep,” she says, her voice sharp and fragile. “Mum forgot something and came back before she even got out of town, and they were there. The camera didn’t see a goddamn thing.”

  Friday’s camera footage shows a half hour of static instead of a delivery of petunias. It isn’t frozen in place like before—the time stamp is continuous—but it’s just snow. Just half an hour, though; it comes back on after that. Between that and all the clocks in the front half of the house being reset, Archer’s theory is a short-range EMP. They’re not that hard to find, he says; it’s even easy to make them at home.

  Oh, the joys of technology.

  Archer does . . . something . . . to the cameras, as Sterling argues urgently into her phone, trying to get permission from the section chief to take Landon’s picture and go out canvassing in the neighborhoods Eddison thought were most likely. The conversation does not go well, and is immediately followed by a call to Finney. He can’t countermand his boss’s restrictions, though, and his garbled voice sounds as frustrated as Sterling does.

  Archer does not look optimistic about the camera. “Hopefully the shielding will protect it through another pulse,” he says, screwing in the cover.

  “Hopefully?” Mum asks dangerously, still in her work clothes.

  “It’s a basic home-security camera; it’s not really meant to be indestructible.”

  Mum glowers at the camera, swearing under her breath in Hindi.

  On Sunday we drive up to Denver, ostensibly for shopping. Really it’s just to get me out of Huntington for a while. She points out the building where she works in LoDo; she doesn’t suggest going in. Even if I were in any mood to meet colleagues putting in extra time, Mum hasn’t personalized her offices since Boston.

  The first two years of moving around, her company was sending her to clean up HR departments in struggling branches. She was there to get things back to where they should be. Right after we got to San Diego, they offered her Director of Human Resources in their Paris branch; the current director was looking to retire within the next few years, but the woman he’d been grooming for his position had just been poached by a German industrial firm. They wanted Mum to keep putting out fires in different offices here in the States, but also start learning all the international aspects of the business, the French and EU laws that required different compliance.

  I think that may have been what let me bond with Aimée, actually, when I’d spent the other moves avoiding friendships. She was so damn excited when she found out I’d eventually be living in Paris; that was her dream. So, while everyone else in the class learned enough to meet graduation and scholarship requirements, Aimée and I drove the teacher crazy needing more.

  We eat someplace a bit nicer than usual because why not, and the whole time we’re there, I can feel the anger curling and crawling and clawing up my gut, hungry for far more than what’s on my plate, because I can’t get the petunias out of my head.

  Everyone who knew Kiersten Knowles talked about her laugh. She was always laughing, and had one of those laughs that could fill a room, make you join in before you’d even finished turning around to see what was funny. Kiersten Knowles was a creature of joy. That is, until her aunt—her best friend in the world—was killed by a drunk driver.

  Kiersten stopped laughing.

  She was murdered after her aunt’s funera
l. She stayed in the church while everyone else headed to the reception; she told her father she needed a little time alone to say goodbye. When he got worried and came back to check on her, he found her dead on the floor, parallel to her aunt’s coffin, her body dotted with little nosegays of petunias.

  It makes a hell of a picture. I’ve seen it online, along with one that was never meant to be included in the case file much less leaked to the world at large: her father, finally allowed near her, caught as he was falling to his knees, one hand braced against his sister’s casket, the other hovering over the petunias in his daughter’s hair.

  There’s a picture of Aimée’s mother, weeping as she tears all the amaranth out of the garden on the roof of their porch. They’re powerful, emotional photographs, the kind of expressive, one-in-a-million shots any photographer is lucky to get, like the one of me reaching back for my sister as the paramedic carried me away.

  Those pictures get plastered everywhere because we’re a culture fascinated with crime, because we think the families’ private pain is for public consumption.

  Kiersten’s was the first case the FBI worked. One of the officers was friends with Mandy Perkins’s brother and mentioned the similarities to his captain, according to the articles I read. Mandy Perkins was victim number five—five years and five murders before Kiersten—the one who liked to make fairy villages in gardens. Mercedes was still in her last year of college, not even to the academy yet when Kiersten was murdered, but there’s a picture of Eddison and Vic standing outside the church, talking to a uniformed policewoman. Vic looks calm, competent, completely in control of everyone around him.

  Eddison looks pissed.

  When we get home, there’s a wreath of clover over the doorknob, stiff wire holding the shape, and wires dangling from the overhang where the camera should be.

  Mum and I just stand there for a few minutes, looking between the two points.

  Clover is for Rachel Ortiz, who was killed at the Renaissance Faire where she was in the cast. Clover was her character name, a silly shepherdess who danced everywhere and carried a basket of pink and white clover blossoms to give to children. On her bodice, she wore a pewter pin that said gaolbait so people would know she was a minor and therefore not to be harassed.

  She was raped, the bodice with its pin beside her when she was found in the tiny wooden chapel the Faire used for weddings.

  Mum offers to call Finney and Eddison, so I stomp up the stairs to change back into pajamas. Archer will be over in a few minutes, she calls up, because he’s local; Sterling and Finney will drive down from Denver and bring a new camera with them. We saw Archer on his drive-by this morning, before we left for Denver. Patrolling might make Finney and Vic feel better, but it’s sure as shit not doing anything for my peace of mind.

  I don’t come downstairs. There’s nothing I can give them. Finney calls up the staircase when he gets here, but I don’t answer, and a moment later I hear Mum’s soft murmur. I know he’s hoping to see me, to check on me so he can tell the Quantico Three he saw for himself that I’m doing okay.

  Instead, I go into my closet, find the shoe box on the top that used to hold my photography ribbons back when I entered contests, and pull it down. I switched the ribbons to another box a few moves back, in theory consolidating. To be honest, I’d kept the ribbons in this one so long that it just became the ribbon box, so Mum never thinks to check for an Oreo stash there.

  My hands are shaking, making the cellophane rattle. I drop the first Oreo twice before I can actually get a hold of it, dark crumbs flaking off on my thumb and index finger from the strength of my grip.

  It tastes like ash.

  But I swallow it, and shove the next in my mouth, chewing only as much as I have to before I can swallow that one too.

  I should never have researched the other cases. I told myself I needed to, that I owed it to Aimée to hold their names in my heart, but I should never have done it, because I can see them so clearly, because I know what friends and family have said about them, because I feel like I know them.

  Because now it’s not just Chavi I see when I close my eyes, butter-yellow chrysanthemums spread around her, the tips of the petal fringe dipping into blood. It’s Aimée, her hands folded to clutch a spray of amaranth to her ballerina-flat chest, her entire body surrounded by the flowers. It’s Darla Jean Carmichael, the first girl, her throat destroyed amidst a fall of white and yellow jonquils. It’s Leigh Clark, raped so viciously the medical examiner had doubts she would have survived even if her throat hadn’t been slashed. It’s Natalie Root, her head pillowed on thick stalks of hyacinth, all shades of pink and purple and white like a patchwork quilt.

  The Oreos sit heavy on top of an already larger-than-usual dinner, but I can’t stop, because I can see the numb look on Dad’s face when he met us at the hospital, the shock that never entirely left his eyes. I can still hear Frank’s weeping as he tries to pull me away from Chavi, still feel the blood, cold and tacky on my hands, my cheek, my chest, my clothing soaked through in a way Chavi’s wasn’t, safely set aside, because my sister was naked on the floor of the church.

  I can see that picture of Inara, the fierce and protective rage on her face as she tried to shield a child from yet another senseless attack.

  My stomach is rolling, protesting, but when I finish the first package, I open a second, forcing the damn cookies past the cramping nausea. This is a pain that makes sense, this is a pain that will stop as soon as I stop, and I can’t stop, because none of this makes sense.

  None of this makes any fucking sense at all, and I can’t think how they choose this, my Quantico Three, and Agent Finnegan, too, and Sterling and Archer, I don’t understand how they can face this day in and day out. It doesn’t matter that it happens to strangers.

  Kiersten Knowles, Julie McCarthy, Mandy Perkins, they were all strangers to me.

  But I can see them, petunias and dahlias and freesia, bloody skin and church floors and it doesn’t—

  “Priya! No, sweetheart, no.”

  My hands close around the package of Oreos before Mum can yank them away. She grabs the ribbon box, sees two more packages there, and ducks out the door to throw the whole damn thing down the stairs. She kneels down in front of me, hands spread over mine, thumbs covering the ragged opening in the plastic so I can’t pull any out.

  “Priya, no.”

  She’s crying.

  Mum’s crying.

  But she’s the strong one, the one who’s always okay even when she isn’t (especially when she isn’t) and how can she be crying? It shocks me enough that I let go, and she throws the package back, heedless of the crumbs that spill over the grey carpet. Her arms wrap around me like a vise.

  The back of my throat is burning, and now that I’m not shoving more Oreos in my mouth, I can feel the nausea rising.

  “Come on, sweetheart. Up you get.”

  She hauls me up with her, always stronger than she looks, and together we stumble across the hall to her bathroom, because I still can’t look at my bathroom without expecting to see all Chavi’s things strewn about. But Mum’s is neat and tidy, everything stacked or in little containers or cups or tucked away behind the side mirror. As she rummages through the cabinet, I drop down onto the soft, thick rug between the toilet and tub. It’s soft, a pale, glittering kind of gold like candlelight.

  Sweat beads and drips along my hairline, down the sides of my face, and I can feel the tremors move up from my hands to the rest of my body.

  “Two glasses,” says Mum, folding down next to me. She holds out the first cup of salt water. It’s disgusting and hard to drink, and I’m gagging more often than I can swallow, but when I’ve choked it down, she hands me the second one. Vomiting is always painful and nasty, purposefully triggering it even more so, but if I can do it now before it has a chance to build up, it won’t be quite as bad.

  Still really bad, though.

  Mum pulls my hair back and knots it into a messy bun, one of her
terry-cloth headbands keeping the stray bits from my clammy forehead. Her manicure bowl sits at her knee, a washcloth folded into the cool water.

  It’s been months since I’ve done this—I swear to God I was getting better—but it’s still a routine.

  With one spectacularly vicious cramp, I start puking into the toilet. Between rounds of heaving, Mum flushes the bowl, wringing out the cloth to wipe sweat and sick from my face. Even when the puking is (probably) done, that nasty feeling remains, the will-it-won’t-it hesitation that makes me reluctant to leave the bathroom.

  The vomiting hurts, strong and acidic and tearing at my throat, and I start crying, which only makes it worse. My chest aches with the force of the heaves, with the effort it takes just to try to breathe.

  Mum curls around me, stroking my hair, the sides of my throat, her fingers cool and moist from changing out the cloth. “It all adds up,” she whispers against my ear. “We’re going to get through this.”

  “I just want it to stop,” I croak, “but then . . .”

  “What?”

  “We told him where to find us. We told him where we were going next and we dared him to come.”

  “Dared? No. Begged,” Mum says firmly. “But if you are having even the slightest doubt, we stop now.”

  It seemed simple when Mum proposed the idea back in Birmingham. If the killer really is watching us, if him being in San Diego, killing Aimée, wasn’t a coincidence, he’d almost certainly notice the profile in the Economist. Tell him where we’ll be, she said, and he’ll be there. It’ll be the best chance for him to be caught.

  Which might be fine, except we still can’t fucking find him.

  There was no way to anticipate the Denver FBI office having the section chief from hell. We should have anticipated he’d get around the cameras; he hasn’t been getting away with this for so long by being careless. It just seemed like such a brilliant plan when Mum told me about it, even if we had very different reasons for liking it. She wants to find him and kill him.

  I want to hand his ass over to our agents.

  Wanted.

  Now I want . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to think through the cramping pain in my belly and the feeling of being marooned. I’m far from abandoned, I know that, but logic doesn’t help much against the fear at realizing the FBI is hamstringing its own agents, that we’ll suffer for that.