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

  “What do you think I should do?”

  Mum’s silent for a long time. Then she gets off the couch, pulls me up after her, and hugs me so hard we’re rocking in place just to keep breathing. “I am never going to make that decision for you. You are my daughter, and I will always be your sounding board and give you advice, but I can’t just tell you what to do. Not like that. You are your own person, and you have to make the choice you can live with.”

  “I think we need to know exactly what this is before we decide. There’s too many other things the flowers could be.”

  “Then we’ll wait.” She kisses my cheek, almost by my ear. “We’ll gather all the information we can, and make a decision then.”

  There are all kinds of stalkers; the fact that I’m sort of hoping this is a murderous one disturbs me in ways I can’t even name.

  He can feel Vic’s eyes on him, heavy and concerned and thoughtful and just a little bit amused. No matter how grave the situation, Vic always seems to be entertained by Eddison’s pacing.

  But then, Vic’s never seen himself go completely still when an important piece of information shifts into place, or almost does. Vic goes still, Eddison paces.

  Ramirez taps her pen against the table in a frantic tattoo that starts pounding directly into his goddamn brain.

  He pivots a little too hard when he reaches the wall, sees Ramirez cringe and carefully set her pen down beside her legal pad. Later, he’ll feel bad about whatever expression he must be wearing. He might even apologize. For now, he’s just grateful that the sound has stopped.

  They’re all up in the conference room, waiting to hear back from the Denver office. Eddison is still in the sweat-stained tee and track pants, his windbreaker thrown over the back of a chair. Vic is in jeans, more casual than usual, but traded out his paint-spattered flannel for a clean polo within minutes of arriving at the office. Ramirez . . .

  Hell, he’ll really feel bad for her later, because she was very clearly on a date, even if it was the middle of the afternoon when Vic called her. She must have curled her hair, because he can see the natural wave fighting against the neat spirals, and she’s wearing a dress and the spiky kind of heels she doesn’t ever wear to the office even if it’s just supposed to be a paperwork-and-phone kind of day. She hasn’t complained, though, hasn’t made a single mention of having to ditch her date in the middle for what may be Eddison overreacting.

  Please let him be overreacting.

  The phone console in the middle of the table rings shrilly, and Vic leans over to stab at the speaker button. “Hanoverian.”

  “Vic, it’s Finney. They’re okay. Little shaken, maybe a little pissed if I was reading it right, but okay.”

  All three let out a breath. Of course they’re okay. It isn’t a threat yet, just the possibility of one.

  And it is not at all surprising that, having had time to think on it, one or both of the Sravasti women might be pissed.

  “What’s it looking like?” Vic asks a moment later. He’s the one who actually knows Finney, who is, in fact, his former partner. Eddison hadn’t realized it, but as soon as the Sravastis knew they were relocating to Huntington, Vic had briefed Takashi Finnegan on the case, just so there’d be someone close enough to help if it came down to it.

  Clearly, neither of them expected it to come down to it.

  “The card is clean for prints. Same with the outside of the tissue paper,” the other agent reports. “Now that it’s to the lab, they’ll unwrap it and check more. The flowers could have come from anywhere, unfortunately: florist, grocery store, private greenhouse, different city, who knows. Check your email for a picture of her journals.”

  Ramirez reaches out to spin her laptop around toward Vic so he can sign in. Eddison stalks around the table to lean over. “Holy shit, she wasn’t kidding,” he mutters once the picture loads.

  He’s pretty sure he’s never seen so many composition books in one place in his life.

  “Those are just hers,” Finney says, and even Vic chokes a little on that one. “They’ve got the sister’s stacked off to the side.”

  “So you don’t have the list of other flowers she received,” Vic surmises.

  “No, but she’s getting the journals in order. Not even sure how. Every notebook looks different, and no labels I saw. No dates, either, except for the beginning of each year.”

  “Not each notebook?”

  “Each year.”

  “Can we set up a camera for their front door?” Ramirez asks. Her fingers touch the pen, but then she looks at Eddison and puts her hand in her lap.

  “Ms. Sravasti is going to put in a request. Her company owns the house and makes it available as a short-term residence, so she has to get permission to make changes. In the meantime, there is a basic windows-and-door alarm system in place, and they’ll start using that.”

  “Start?” Vic echoes with a frown.

  “It’s a low-crime area; most folks feel safe enough with just locks. One of my agents commutes from Huntington; I’ll have him introduce himself to the Sravastis and check in on them. If they get approval for the camera, he can help them install it.”

  Vic coughs into his hand. “Be very careful how you phrase that offer with Deshani.”

  “Already offered,” chuckles Finney. “Archer worked as Geek Squad all through college; he can get things installed and set up before most people can finish reading the instructions. You told me yourself the Sravastis have been through hell and are still standing. I’m not going to assume they’re anything less than capable.” Over the line, the Quantico agents can hear the click of tapping on a keyboard, the ding of a computer registering new emails. “Next time she’s at chess, Priya’s going to try to get a picture of the guy who’s been creeping on her. We’ll run it as soon as she gets it to us. Hopefully we can get a last name and some background on him.”

  “See if he’s been anywhere near San Diego?” Vic asks dryly, and Finney wheezes a laugh.

  “Exactly. Your ladies have cool heads; I’m impressed.”

  Vic smiles and shakes his head. “They won’t start the fire, but they’ll dance around it if it will keep them warm.”

  “Deshani would start the fire,” Eddison and Ramirez correct in unison.

  Their partner’s indignation is drowned out by another wheezy laugh from the speaker. “You know, I got that impression. Terrifying woman, and she knows it.”

  Scrubbing his hands over his face, Eddison finally sinks down into a chair. His skin itches, sweat from his run long dried into salty, irritating streaks.

  “There is something else you need to be aware of,” Finney says more seriously.

  Vic groans. “Nothing good has ever followed that sentence.”

  “Of course not; that’s why I use it as a warning.” The speaker crackles with the sound of shuffling papers.

  “Out with it, Finney.”

  “I was able to get the ball rolling today because it’s a Sunday and I didn’t ask for permission, but I’m going to catch hell for it, and we’re going to hit some blocks moving forward.”

  “Why?”

  “Did I happen to mention we got a new section chief a few months back?”

  “What does—”

  “It’s Martha Ward.”

  “Shit.”

  Eddison and Ramirez both stare at their senior partner. It’s very rare to hear Vic swear, even at work; he mostly stopped when his daughters got old enough to innocently repeat interesting words.

  “All right,” Vic sighs. “I’ll talk to our chief, see if there’s any push we can give on this.”

  “You think it’ll accomplish anything?”

  Vic hesitates.

  “I’ll keep you updated,” Finney says. “Good luck.”

  The call ends, and all three sit for a time in the strange silence that follows. Finally, Ramirez picks up her pen and does something complicated that somehow ends with her hair twirled and pinned mostly neatly on the back of her head, the p
en cap sticking out like an ornament. “Martha Ward?” she asks delicately.

  Vic nods.

  “So . . . why is she an obstacle? I mean, her reputation says she’s pretty much a badass.”

  “Hard-ass,” Vic corrects. “Martha Ward is a hard-ass, who regards profiling as a religion and refuses to accept any deviations. The pattern is paramount.”

  Eddison’s the one to connect the dots, muttering curses under his breath until Ramirez launches a dry-erase marker at him. “Our killer has never sent flowers to a girl before he kills her; Priya getting a delivery is a deviation from the pattern. Ward’s not going to be easily convinced that it’s our killer.”

  Vic nods again, his expression grim. “Fourteen years ago, Finney and I were pursuing some missing kids in Minnesota. Different ages, boys and girls, but they all had brown hair and brown eyes and light-colored skin. Only three had been found.”

  “Dead?”

  “Wrapped in heavy-duty plastic, then in blankets, and partially buried. They were curled on their sides, like they were sleeping, and small stuffed animals were tucked in with them.”

  “Remorse?” asks Ramirez.

  “That’s what we figured. Our initial theory, because all the kids looked alike and were apparently being kept for some time, was that our kidnapper was trying to create a family. That kind of profile leans slightly more female, but not enough to make assumptions.”

  “Ward insisted on gendering the profile?”

  “Not exactly; she was on a completely different case in roughly the same area. Light-skinned brunettes in their thirties were going missing, one at a time, and showing up dead, dumped in or near construction sites.”

  “They were connected, right? They have to be connected.”

  Ramirez, for all she’s been through in her life, is still an optimist. Eddison is not. “Ward wouldn’t investigate the possibility,” he guesses, fairly confident he’s right. “You had to go over her head?”

  “We didn’t have a choice.” Settling back into the padded chair, Vic frowns at the memory. “She insisted the cases had nothing to do with each other. Our subject was obviously female where hers was male; kids versus adult women; entirely different causes of death and postmortem rituals.”

  “The kids who died were accidents, but he was auditioning the women, wasn’t he? Trying to find the perfect mother for his perfect family.” Ramirez sighs at Vic’s nod. “So the best way to find him is to investigate the overlap.”

  “While we argued with Ward, another woman turned up dead, and another went missing. Two kids were taken, and a different one was found. Finney and I went up the chain of command, got approval to take her case, and solved it. What we didn’t take into account was that our boss’s boss was good friends with Ward. When she got put on desk duty pending a case audit, he promoted her. Finney was transferred to Denver, and three days later, Eddison came out of the academy with a chip on his shoulder and my name on his papers.”

  Eddison refuses to give Vic the satisfaction of seeing him blush. “So you’re saying I was punishment?”

  “Not at all; you were already assigned to us. Finney getting transferred was the punishment. Ward’s politically savvy with great connections, so she keeps advancing, but if she can make our lives hell, she will. Finney getting her as section chief is very bad luck.”

  “So she’ll punish Priya just to make things difficult for you.”

  “Truth be told, she won’t give a shit about Priya; Ward has all the empathy of a dead fish.”

  Ramirez tilts her head to one side. “Ward versus Deshani: who wins?”

  Vic blinks, thinks about it, then shudders.

  Anything that can make Victor Hanoverian cringe is something Eddison never wants to see.

  The stack of multicolored folders is on the table near Ramirez’s laptop, ready for fresh notations. Next to it, an empty folder sits and waits. Pretty soon there’ll be a name on the label, probably Vic’s writing because Ramirez’s is a little too pretty for labels and Eddison’s requires a minute to decipher.

  PRIYA SRAVASTI.

  He wonders if it’s an accident that the folder is blue.

  None of them are red, but Chavi’s is a bright yellow, and that makes him think of the Taser and whether or not Priya’s screwing with him on the color and the heels of his hands dig into his eyes as if the pressure could just drag all his thoughts to a stop. Just for a breath, even, because he stopped running hours ago but still feels like he’s panting.

  When he pulls his hands away and looks up, Vic’s watching him. “We’ll make sure your schedule is flexible.”

  “How do I tell her that the people responsible for protecting her are getting blocked by politics?”

  “Just like that, at a guess.”

  “She’s going to be pissed.”

  “Good. If she and Deshani get angry enough, maybe they can push the case to Ward’s boss.”

  He can still remember the first time he met Priya, how relieved he was at her fury, that it meant she was that much less likely to cry, because he stopped being good with weeping girls the first time he was faced with one who wasn’t Faith. But it’s been five years since they met, and while pissed-off Priya is a decidedly entertaining thing to watch, he doesn’t want that fury to focus. Not when he knows what it takes for her to flare from irritation (default) to rage (exhausting). Not when he knows how badly she comes down from that kind of anger, how fragile it can make her and how long it can last.

  He promised her he’d never lie, not even to make her feel better, and she said she didn’t want to know anything about any of the other girls, but somewhere along the way, honoring that request started to feel like a lie. Two years ago, it started to feel like lying, but he kept his silence, because she didn’t want to know and he didn’t want to scare her, not when some of that anger had finally started seeping away.

  Vic’s battered loafers nudge his ankle. “She’ll be okay. She always is.”

  But he knows better than Vic what Priya struggles with when she tries to make sense out of all of this, when she tries to frame her sister’s murder into a bigger picture. Because Vic already had so much to worry about, and Eddison not enough, so he’s kept that secret for Priya and Deshani, and has never mentioned the food binges that leave the girl sweating and vomiting on the bathroom floor because her sister is gone—just gone—and there will never be a way to make sense of that.

  When Faith got taken, he started smoking, not in spite of the surgeon general’s warning but because of it, because he knew it was slowly killing him and that made more sense. He didn’t try to stop until a couple of years after Vic took him under his wing, didn’t actually stop until Priya wrinkled her nose and told him he smelled worse than the boys’ locker room at her school.

  Somewhere in asking her how she knew what the boys’ room smelled like, he’d forgotten to finish reaching for the cigarette. It’s still there sometimes, the gesture, the need, sometimes even the cigarette, but it isn’t the same as it was. Maybe because of Priya. More likely, because once he saw the impulse manifested in someone else, it didn’t bring the same comfort. So still because of Priya.

  This time it’s Ramirez who kicks him—gently, because the pointed toe of her monstrous heels hurts like a bitch when she puts a swing behind it—and nods. The pen shifts, but doesn’t let go of her hair. “No matter how many times they break, they always put each other back together. Deshani’s there to catch the pieces if she falls apart.”

  What was it Vic told him, back in November? Some people stay broken, others put themselves back together with all the sharp bits showing?

  He’d meant Inara, but it served just as well.

  Taking a deep breath, he pulls his phone out of his windbreaker pocket and opens her message thread. No Oreos, okay? Try?

  Less than a minute later, he gets back We smashed all of them up to make truffles. Better/worse? And I’ll try.

  It shouldn’t even surprise him that his phone buzzes agai
n a minute later, this time from Deshani’s number. I’ll keep an ear out; her room is snack-free, so I’ll hear her on the stairs if she gets itchy.

  And she will, because she’ll probably be sitting on the floor of her bedroom, back against the door, and listening through the night to hear the creak of stairs or shuffle of carpet. Deshani is probably what God had in mind when he made mothers so fiercely protective.

  “In Colorado, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of eighteen to have or use a stun gun,” he says finally, and both partners give him the slightly jaundiced look that comes of really not trusting where this is going. “She’s already got pepper spray, so what’s the next best thing we can give her?”

  “Baseball bat?” suggests Ramirez.

  Vic pinches the bridge of his nose and slowly shakes his head.

  Her name is Libba Laughran, and the first time you see her, her multi-layered prom dress is hiked up enough to show the shoulders of the boy with his face between her thighs. She’s sitting on the hood of a car, one hand holding up her skirts, the other in his hair, throaty cries filling the night as if they’re not right out in the open, as if no one could possibly hear and come investigate.

  Her dress is so bright a pink it nearly glows in the night, but on the wrist of the hand in his hair, you can see a corsage with a white carnation, the edges of the petals deep red like they’ve been dipped in blood.

  You see her holding his hand at church, their bodies an appropriate distance from each other but their hands always reaching out to the other whenever one steps away. You see them at the movies, walking to and from school.

  Fucking each other in the hammock in her backyard and laughing each time they nearly fall out of it.

  They love each other, you think, at least as much as they can understand it when they’re so young. They whisper to each other, end every phone call and conversation with it. Neither of them even seems to notice anyone else.

  There’s something to that, maybe, but it’s not going to save her. This isn’t a thing that good girls do, no matter how in love they might be. It isn’t respectful, it isn’t right. She’s young, so it’s understandable, but you can’t let it go unremarked. You can’t let her friends think this is forgivable, acceptable.