Minka
MINKA
“ C hief Mayet?” Aubree stops in front of my desk, pressing her hands to the top and leaning to stare into my eyes. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Hmm?” I blink once. Twice. Three times, and look past her to find my office crowded with white coats. Doctors Kirk and Torres, Flynn, and Catlin. Tox lab techs Campbell and Raquel stare at me from the windows, and the too-polite, too-quiet Callen watches me in stunned disbelief, her phone poised and ready to take notes, or write emails, or do whatever it is she needs to do. But then I look at Aubree and blink. “What?”
“We’re rounding up for the day.” She straightens out, taking up as much space as she can, as though to shield me from my audience. “We’re about done. Should we dismiss everyone?”
I missed the whole fucking meeting. I blanked it because my mind was somewhere else. Everywhere else. Or most specifically, in Bronxville, New York. “Um…” I clear my throat. “Yeah. Yep.” I stand and gesture toward the door. “Good work, everyone. We can revisit this in the morning.” I pinch the bridge of my nose as techs file out. Not even the obnoxiously loud and tormenting Doctor Raquel sticks ar ound to poke at me. She hugs the folders in her arms and follows Doctor Campbell to the elevator.
I free Callen and send her on her way, then I slump back into my chair and groan. “I screwed that up.”
“It wasn’t so bad.” Aubree leans at an awkward angle, folding her body to keep Callen in her sights all the way until the woman disappears around the corner. Then she settles back into my visitor chair. “Torres has a couple of frozen homeless males. Kirk is going to trial for the DV case. Catlin’s schnauzer has a vet appointment this afternoon because she has a tummy ache, and Raquel proudly declares her sex life is still, quote-unquote, fanfuckingtastic . She’s got a date tonight and can’t wait to fall asleep post-orgasm.”
“She said all that?” I drop my hand and exhale. My email pings with incoming correspondence, and my phone battery threatens to give out because I’ve spent more time on it today than I have… possibly ever. “She mentioned the sex and orgasms during that meeting? In front of Doctor Kirk?”
“She mentioned her upcoming date during the meeting. She regaled me on the orgasm stuff while we were waiting for the other techs to join us. You’re uh…” Frowning now, she folds one leg over the other and rests her elbow on her upturned knee. “You’re really struggling today.”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
“I know.” She sets her chin in her hand, hunching over herself. “New York. You’re not talking about it, but you’re not not thinking about it. It’s affecting your work, Chief, so you probably should get through this and come back to us pretty soon.”
“There’s nothing to get through.” And yet, I snatch up my phone and check my text inbox. Not for Archer’s name—that is almost always at the very top. But for Detective Gilbert’s.
I tap on his picture and open his last message, then I type out a response to his most recent question. ‘Cotton fibers and lined paper. Samples stored, no definitive matches made.’ I hit send and spy the rock Archer dropped into my inbox, so I open his, too, copy and paste, and then I tap send a second time. Finally, I lock the screen and set the device on my desk, face down. “They’re no closer to solving this case than they were twenty years ago, Aubs. Janiesa’s been taken, but she hasn’t been dumped. It’s the dumped bodies we collect evidence from. So until that point…”
“They can revisit the seventeen before her.” I shouldn’t be surprised she already knows the pertinent details of this case. I’ve never told her of how Diane Philips’ abduction and murder imprinted on my soul, and until recently, I had no clue she was aware of my extracurricular activities. Yet, she knows what hurts me. “Seventeen little girls, taken and returned, is a story told, Chief. It’s a timeline given, and it’s a sign that January eleventh matters to someone.”
“Yeah, but?—”
“They’re not taking just anyone. They’re replacing the same girl, time and time again. Her looks, her size, her age. They’re not abducting kids for fun. They’re shopping for the exact right one.”
“But for what reason?!” I want to scream. I want to fight. God, I want to tear the skin clean off the face of whoever keeps hurting those babies. “He takes them, keeps them, starves them, beats them, and then gives them back? Why?”
“I don’t know.” She swallows and searches my eyes. “I have no way of knowing until the detectives run the case.”
“What if I took you to New York?” My heart stutters with the first shred of excitement I’ve felt in over twenty-four hours. “I could take you to the park Diane was stolen from. Or I could introduce you to her mother. I could?—”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Sighing, she lowers her hand and rests both arms on her knee. “I’m not a circus freak you get to keep in a cage and wheel around the country.”
“No, I—That’s not what I meant!”
“It’s not a party trick I pull out on a whim, worming my way into every thought or memory or action a person has ever had. I can’t go to a city the size of New York and expect to dial in on one memory from so long ago.”
“I just thought we could try.” I hate that my eyes itch. That my brain works too slowly today, so my words are not as carefully thought out as they could be. “I just thought it could be a new resource the cops haven’t had before. And that doing so would hurt nothing. It would only?—”
“Hurt me,” she counters gently, her lips firming into what I suppose is meant to be a small, reassuring smile. Though I see the pain in her eyes. The disappointment. “Doing that would hurt me . Because you’re asking me to open myself up to a city of more than eight million people, to weed through their pain, and sidestep the evil. To pick through the trauma and set those aside, since clearly, they don’t qualify for our help this week. You’re asking me to walk into a city where thousands have died in a single day, on more than one occasion, and ignore those begging for help. But to close in on one, very specific, horrifying experience of a five-year-old girl who was raped and tortured and ultimately, murdered and abandoned in a park, naked, starved, and alone.”
“Aubree…” I want to say I’m sorry. To make her understand. I don’t mean to use her or to make her feel usable. I want her to know my heart, since clearly my words are lacking. But my phone buzzes with an incoming call, and try as I might, I can’t ignore it. So, hastily, I pick up the device and turn it over to see Paxton’s name on the screen. Swiping to answer, I bring the phone to my ear. “Chief Mayet.”
“Hey.” His voice is like a time machine, tossing me back four years to a whole other city and a completely different life. His gruff tone, a promise of sleepless nights and long days since he caught this case. His slow drawl, proof he’s nearing the end of his tether for today. “Sorry to call you again. I know you’re busy.”
“It’s okay.” I set my elbow on my desk and my face in my hand, if only so I can close my eyes and pretend Aubree’s beady stare doesn’t warm my forehead. “What’s up?”
“I’m running through the M.E. reports for the first seventeen. But some of this language is fuckin’ other for me.”
“One of those reports has my name on it. She was mine.”
“Yeah, Alana. Which means I don’t have to feel guilty for discussing the case with an outsider since you’re technically part of the original team. The samples you took from her belly?”
“I replied to your text already.” My mental exhaustion makes me more irritable than usual, and my complete inability to add flowers and rainbows to my words offends most.
But not Archer. Never him.
And oddly, not Pax .
“I pulled cotton fibers and what I believe was lined paper. The New York office will have the samples in storage.”
“But what do you mean by lined paper ? Specifically.”
“Like, in notebooks. School books. That sort of stuff. She, and every other victim before and after her, starved while in captivity. By their time of death, they weighed, on average, eighteen pounds. They would have been so hungry, I’m not surprised Alana ate her clothes.”
“Can we trace the clothes back to the source?”
“Not so far.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and swallow the groan I want so badly to release. “We could compare and connect it to the original article if it ever surfaced. But tracing it back to a particular shirt or sheet manufacturer isn’t happening.”
“And the paper?”
“If you get the rest of the book, we could match it up. But short of that, it would be next to impossible. The way I see it, the girls were kept for so long, it’s not really a stretch to think they were, in some twisted way, given things to keep them entertained. This person essentially parented a new five-year-old for a year, every year, for seventeen in a row. Even five-year-olds fighting for their lives are gonna get bored after a while. It’s sick, but after a few months had passed, they’d probably stopped asking for their mom and adapted to their new normal. He gave them paper and crayons to keep them busy. Books, maybe. Dolls, even.”
“So, she’s eating her clothes and swallowing wads of paper,” he growls. “Literally handing us evidence from the environment she was kept in, but we can’t identify it?”
I roll my eyes, even behind my closed eyelids. “Everything is identifiable, Pax. It’s just that no one thought to try that until you came along. But now you’re here, so strong, so smart, I bet we’ll have this tied up before dinnertime.”
He scoffs, too exhausted to do much more. “Snappy. Seems absolutely nothing has changed since we last hung out.”
“Mmhm. I didn’t see all seventeen autopsy reports. Just Alana, Diane, and Misha so far. They all presented the same way: starved, tortured, and, in the end, naked. Sexual assault was evident in all three. Can the same be said for the rest? ”
“Yeah.” He blows out a heavy sigh and scratches his stubbled jaw. “They’d all been sexually penetrated at some point, though not all were entirely recent in conjunction with their death.”
“So he was…” I drag my head up and blink my eyes open. “So he controlled himself for some of them? Assaulted them, but it wasn’t constant, and not all were immediately, or even soon, before death?”
“That’s how it appears. None, except Alana, had conceived a child, and as we know, she was one of the later cases. All of them carried his DNA, and each M.E. cross-tested it over the years.”
“Yeah, I remember.” I draw a deep breath into my lungs until the action broadens my chest and puts an ache in my throat. Then I exhale again and squeeze my eyes shut. “All seventeen connect via his DNA, but his DNA isn’t popping in the databases. Has that changed?”
Though, of course, the answer is no. Because if it wasn’t, he’d already be behind bars.
“No. The last girl who went missing?—”
“Elouise.” I know every name. Every face. Every birthday and mother’s name and sibling, if they had any. I know where they went to school and if they had pets. What their favorite television shows were, and when they typically went to bed. I made damn sure I knew it all. Because what I didn’t, I dedicated my time to finding out while we waited for the next to go missing. “Elouise Phelps was the last to go before he stopped.”
“Yeah. Well, she carried his DNA, too. Semen, at a minimum. Skin samples under her nails, which means she scratched and fought all the way to the end. Just like with the others, the labs worked with what they were given, they matched them with the sixteen before, but have yet to connect them to a person. Whoever he is, he’s not in the system.”
“What about now, though?” I sit back and tilt my head to stare up at the ceiling, hopeful that gravity will keep the itchiness in the backs of my eyes, in the back . “He stopped for years. I assumed he’d died. But since he didn’t, that kind of implies he might’ve been locked up for something else. If he was, then no matter the reason, he’ll have a file in the system. He’ll pop now if they re-run the results, no?”
“Tried it,” he mumbles. “Came up with a big fat zilch.”
“So where the hell did he go, Pax? Dammit!” I straighten out and snarl. “These people don’t just stop. They die, or they’re incarcerated. He didn’t die, and you’re telling me he wasn’t in prison? So, what? Where? And why the hell did he take a break?”
“I don’t know.” His frustration is just as palpable as mine. But as always, he has control over it in ways I don’t. “You’re not asking anything I haven’t already, Min. You’re spot on: they don’t stop. But I’ve run these cases through every database this country has access to. Whoever he is, he’s yet to leave DNA on a crime scene he was pinched for.”
“He’s not even careful,” I groan. “He leaves his semen in them, Pax. He put a baby in Alana! He returns to the scene of the crime, every friggin’ year, sneaking in under everyone’s nose. He doesn’t clean them off, doesn’t wipe hair or skin particles from their bodies. He doesn’t even try! All we need is for him to spit in the street one single time and let a cop see it, and this is all over. But somehow, he remains free.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Min. He’s slick.”
“I’ve helped put away much smarter killers! I’ve turned the key on men who left nothing behind. I’ve solved puzzles that had a million missing pieces. But this puzzle is missing only one. Yet, we still can’t figure it out.”
“We just need him to spit in the street,” he agrees softly. Comforting, the way so few can be. “We’re gonna get him this time, okay?”
“You don’t know that.” Stubborn, I lock my jaw and stare across at a watchful Aubree. “We’ve wanted him behind bars since the beginning, and so far, he’s been ahead of us every step of the way.”
“He came back when he could have stayed gone,” he counters. “We thought he was dead, which means he could have gotten away with seventeen murders and lived out the rest of his days as a free man. But he came back. That was his mistake.”
“It’s no mistake if he doesn’t return the girl, and he won’t return her till she’s dead. You’re telling me that for this case to be solved, another child needs to die?”
“I’m saying that he’s just a man. He’s human. And humans aren’t infallible. We’re gonna reread every report, we’re gonna close our net and find our suspects, and then we’re gonna paw through their trash until we find something to send off to the lab. The second we have a match, it’s done.”
“Find the connection,” Aubree murmurs, shyly playing with her fingers and avoiding my gaze. “There is one person on this planet who has touched on each of those girls’ lives. One crossover. Find that, and you’ll be closer.”
“We did that.” Ignoring Pax, I stare at my friend instead. “They’ve investigated schoolteachers, bus drivers, delivery kids, supermarket clerks, and so much more. Nothing overlaps except the parks, and the parks are owned by the city. None had facilities on site where someone might be employed, and even the cleaners worked for the city and rotated out regularly. There is no connection that spans all seventeen cases.”
“There is.” Slowly, she brings her eyes up. “There must . You just haven’t found it yet.”
“Who is that?” Paxton’s temper alights, anger spilling into his harsh tone. “Min? I didn’t realize this conversation came with an audience.”
“She’s an autopsy tech and particularly intuitive in these types of cases.” Which is way better than saying she’s my best friend who just so happens to have an otherworldly gift no one would believe even if I tried to explain it. “This conversation is still private. She has clearance and won’t leak the details of your case.”
“Well, you can tell her we’ve run everyone. Everyone ,” he snaps. “There’s no crossover.”
“Maybe it’s not the same role in each girl’s life.” I slump in my chair and roll my bottom lip between my finger and thumb. “Could be different for each.”
“How do you mean?” I hear the scratch of pen on paper. “You’re speaking in riddles.”
“I mean, you’re looking for each girl to have the same teacher, or the same bus driver, or the same whatever. But maybe this person is a schoolteacher to one of them, and grocery clerk to another, and bus driver to a third.”
“Not everyone is a machine who works on no sleep and too much coffee,” he grumbles. “The average joe can’t have that many jobs.”
“So maybe it’s not his job! Maybe he shops at the same store as some of them, but goes to the same movie theater as others, and buys stationery where some of the others do. You’re looking for one connection to stretch eighteen ways when it could very well be eighteen connections, all pointing to one. Every child came from a single mother; so what do single mothers do that is slightly more specific to them?”
“Like…” He groans and, I just know in the back of my head, taps his temple as though it helps him think. “These kids aren’t sent to different schools—some for married parents, and some for the singles.”
“No. But kids from single-parent homes are possibly more likely to spend time with the school counselor.” I think of sweet baby Mia and know she’ll have a solid relationship with hers by the end of this year. “Kids of single-parent homes, which means single-income homes, are more likely to visit places that are free: the park, obviously. But what else is free?”
“The museum,” Aubree inserts. “Not always, but they sometimes do weekend passes or whatever.”
“Right. Or the aquarium.” I think back to my childhood, knowing that although I had both parents in the home, my medical needs gobbled up every spare cent they earned.
“Movie theater, too,” Aubree adds. “These places aren’t typically free, but I’d bet a dollar they ran promos a couple of times a year. A savvy single mom will know when to snag those tickets and treat her baby to something out of the ordinary.”
“So maybe he worked the concession stand at the movies,” I ponder. “Or the ticket booth at Rockefeller.”
“Or at a recruiting agency!” Aubree tosses in enthusiastically. “Single moms probably have a decent relationship with those places. That’s a wide brush to generalize with, I know, but unless they were already set up with a career before their child came along and the father split, chances are, they worked in low or no-skill areas. These types of places have seasonal peaks, and those peaks are often delegated to agencies for management instead of keeping it in-house.”
“They were all taken in January.” New theories weave through my mind. New ideas. “Right after the Holiday rush. Summer is when lots of casual jobs come up in theme parks and excursion-type places, but the holidays will peak with hotel stays and cleaners needed. ”
“Not all the victim’s mothers worked these jobs,” Pax counters. “We already have a list of employers from these women, and every single one of them has been cleared on our end.”
“You cannot have cleared all of them! Jesus. The hotel manager’s boss’ wife’s cousin probably hangs around the hotel since it’s cold outside and the ornate flooring makes them feel fancy. Add in that they have connections in high places, and folks swarm to wherever they feel powerful. Maybe they get a free cocktail at the bar because they act important, and the employees don’t want to risk their jobs. There is no way you could say one of those girls’ moms wasn’t working casually in a situation like this, brings her daughter to work, the cousin or whoever the hell he is sees her, and that’s when he finds his newest target.”
“Min—”
“Now do that seventeen more times! He didn’t pluck them out of thin air, Pax. He’d done, at the very least, cursory research on each one. He picked a specific type , which means somewhere, he connected with the moms. Call them. Ask them. Then call me back and tell me what you found out.”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he grumbles. But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t say it with a hint of humor in his tone. “Stubborn as a mule and unbending in every case. You think the world is black and white, and there must be an answer.”
“I know the world is gray. But I also know I’m not quitting on Janiesa until we figure this out. Call the boss’ cousin and clear them out.”
He grunts unhappily. “Fine. I’ll follow it up and get back to you.”
“Good. Great.” I pull the phone from my ear and kill the call, setting my dying phone down as the battery bar flashes a warning red. “Do you have a charger?” I poke my eyelids again, somehow the pain I feel from that, soothing the fraying edges of my temper. “Archer will be pissed if I walk home with a dead phone and he can’t contact me.”
“Who is that?” She gets up, at least. The scrape of her chair and the scuff of her shoes on the tiles, all the proof I need. “Paxton Gilbert.”
“Detective. NYPD. You already know that.”
“Sure.” She passes through my door, rifles through her desk drawer, and returns in mere seconds. “I know that. But who is he, Min ?” She drops the cord on my desk and stands over me until I lower my hands and glance up. “You call him Pax. He calls you Min. Soph mentioned you have a history. So…”
I snag the cord and plug one end into my computer with jerky, shaking hands, then the other into my phone. “Don’t play dumb, Doctor Emeri. It’s not a good look.”
“A sexual history, then?”
“I had an entire life in a whole other city before I met you. Did you think I was born on the plane that brought me here?”
She firms her lips and lowers to sit on the edge of her seat. “How long were you and Pax dating?”
“We weren’t dating! We were just…”
“Casual fuck buddies? Wow,” she whistles low on her breath, “that’s so much more comforting.”
“Oh, get over it, Aubree! What are you? My wife? I had a life before I came here. I wasn’t a virgin when I moved here. I had run-ins with cops in New York, which makes it entirely probable that I might’ve spent time with them in private.”
“And Archer?”
“He wasn’t a virgin when we met, either.”
“No, dummy.” She firms her lips into straight, flat lines. “Does he know about Detective Pax and this sordid history you share?”
“No.” Scowling, I look down at my phone beeping with texts. Some from Archer himself. Some from Paxton. Some, even, from the original Detective Lowe. “I didn’t ask him to write a list of all the women he screwed before me. Nor did he ask me to write a list for him.”
“Right. But those people are faceless, nameless, and left squarely in the past. Pax is very much here, in your inbox, calling you three times in a single day while you’re supposed to be working. And,” she adds with a testing glare, “he calls you Min .”
“My name is !” I snatch my beeping phone and silence it before the dings send me certifiably insane, but then I navigate to Archer’s text chat and read his last question: did you eat? Are you nearly done for today?
Typing quickly, I lie. Only on the first part, at least. Yes, I ate. And we’ve finished rounds. I’m heading home soon. Just waiting for my phone to charge enough to not crap out on me on the walk home. I’ll order something while I’m walking. Early dinner and hopefully early to bed. I’m beat. Hitting send, I turn my phone over without reading Paxton’s questions, then I meet Aubree’s smug stare and counter it with one of my own. “Another little girl has been abducted, but you’re more interested in turning this into a lover’s quarrel. Your drama is not welcome here.”
“I’m not making drama. I’m only highlighting a double standard. If circumstances were flipped and Archer was chatting with his ex, and she was calling him Archy-Poo, and he wasn’t completely up-front with you about it, you’d have already lit his mattress on fire.”
“Not true.” I push up to stand and leave my phone behind, milking as much battery life as I can in the two minutes it’ll take me to slide into my coat. “This is work. It’s about finding a killer before he dumps that baby in a plastic bag and takes his next. Plus, I’ve dealt with his exes before. In fact, I saved the life of one, even though I wanted to rearrange her face with the hood of my car.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She stands, too, crossing my office and snagging her outside coat from the rack. She takes off the white coat and stabs her arms into the sleeves of the other, shrugging the thick puffer material on and tugging the belt to keep it closed. “I’m saying you need to take care of your marriage on this one, Chief. Stay focused, and don’t be surprised if it turns out Archer isn’t pleased with this little back and forth you have going on with your ex-lover.”
“If Archer attempted to stop me from talking to anyone, male or female, ex-lover or not, then I would consider that abusive and controlling behavior. Fortunately for us both, he is neither. My marriage is solid, so why don’t you focus on yours instead?”
She makes a face, part screw you and at least twenty-five percent don’t bring Tim into this or I’ll kick your ass . But she pulls her coat belt tight and fixes the collar so it sits tall against her neck. Then she lopes through the office door to switch her computer screen off and grab her things.
“My marriage is solid,” I grumble to myself, turning back to my desk and snatching up my phone. And as though to prove my point, I smile and read Archer’s reply. I’m heading out soon, too. Fletch being benched means I’m home for dinner every night. Pick whatever you want to eat, dealer’s choice. I caught a huge break on a cold case today, so I’ll tell you about it when I get home. And I’ve also been thinking about the New York case. I think I have some theories I wanna run by you.
Then another text. I worried about you today. You were quiet, and Fifi isn’t there to piss you off and get your blood flowing anymore. I’m happy you finally texted back. See you soon. Be safe walking home. I love you.
“See?” God, I’m speaking to myself, since Aubree is still on the other side of the glass. And yet, I continue. “We’re fine.”