In the Blood

18 FOREVER SILENCED

Seattle, WA

March 22/23

ANNIE FINALLY SLEPT, CURLED up on her left side, just like she always had since she was little. Bending over her sister, Heather pushed a lock of blue hair away from Annie’s face. The memory of an old promise—still as vivid as the night she’d made it—played through her mind.

Annie-Bunny, in her Tinker Bell jammies and clutching a plushie bunny, stands in Heather’s doorway. She rubs her eyes with her fist. Tangled strawberry-blonde curls frame her plump toddler face. Mommy and Daddy are screaming at each other again, their voices scraped raw with rage.

“C’mere,” Heather whispers, lifting the blankets.

Annie climbs into Heather’s bed and snuggles against her. “Scared,” she says.

Heather drapes the blankets over them both. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” she promises Annie, even though she’s scared too. But Annie-Bunny’s her baby sister, just like Kevin’s her little brother, and she’ll always take care of them, no matter what.

Annie-Bunny snuggles closer, her plushie bunny a soft squashed lump between them. Her eyes close.

“Sleep tight,” Heather whispered. Despite her promise, she’d been helpless to prevent all the bad things that had happened to her sister over the years.

It seemed like when Mom had died, she’d left a part of herself behind, rooted deep inside Annie, dark and bitter and self-destructive, a part that resisted all attempts to uproot it.

Maybe if Annie’d stay on her meds.

Heather walked from the room, leaving the door partially open behind her. She went into the kitchen and set coffee to brew. As it trickled into the carafe, she leaned against the counter and rubbed her face with both hands. She was exhausted—the visit to her mother’s death site, the meeting with Rodriguez and Rutgers, her father, then Dante and Annie—and the day wasn’t over, not quite.

And Dante…what else had that bastard Wells done to him?

Give me that name again. I can’t read it.

Wells still needed to answer for his crimes, past and present. The victims of all those who’d died at the hands of the killers he and Johanna Moore had created and set loose upon society, needed a voice, someone to speak on their behalf.

Dante had tried to speak for his mother, Genevieve Baptiste, the only way he knew how—through violence—but who had ever spoken for him?

And Dante’s victims? Chloe and the Prejeans?

Heather’s thoughts spun back to the tavern murders in New Orleans. Two dead NOPD detectives, three dead tavern patrons, bodies and building torched. She was afraid that Dante, heartbroken and fevered and lost to darkness after Jay’s death, had spoken for him with blood and gasoline-fueled flames, his programming triggered.

She dropped her hands from her face. Cold fingers squeezed her heart. Programming that could be triggered again and again. But if she killed Wells…

She sucked in a sharp breath. She steered her thoughts away from that dark path.

Murder is murder is murder, no matter how much the person deserves to die.

And the murders at the Flying Crow Tavern?

Dante never tells or forgives a lie. When the time was right, she’d just ask him. Deal with it then.

One thing at a time. Just one thing at a time.

Heather poured coffee into her kitty-face mug; the aroma, rich French roast and fresh, normally tantalized her nostrils. But now, she wasn’t sure she could even drink the coffee; her stomach felt like it was full of cold stones.

A little more work. Then sleep.

At the table, she set her mug down, the coffee untasted. She picked up a pile of the papers and reports that Dante had gathered. A photo slid out and fell onto the table. Placing the stack aside, she picked up the photo. The first known victim of Higgins, a young woman with a hard-drinking and easy-loving reputation, and a wistful smile. Heather carefully tucked the photo back in with the reports.

Higgins had forever silenced twenty-four women, including Heather’s mother. Each one had been lonely and hurting, seeking warmth in a bottle of booze or a stranger’s embrace or on a barstool surrounded by cigarette haze and drunken laughter. Most had been running from bad marriages, from uncaring parents, from themselves. Each woman had so desperately wanted to belong somewhere or to someone.

Just like Annie.

Annie’s photo would never end up in a crime scene report, the victim of an anonymous killer. Heather wouldn’t allow it. She rubbed the back of her neck and flexed her shoulders until some of the tension eased from her muscles.

Heather fetched her laptop from her bedroom and eased it onto the table. Once the laptop was up and running, she mulled over which search to begin first.

Search A: Who was SAC Alex Lyons and why had he been assigned to guide her on her magical murder tour?

Search B: What had been SAC Alberto Rodriguez’s previous assignments? Why had he been chosen to head Seattle temporarily? And why had he been pushing so hard on the medical issue and Bad Seed?

Search C: Where oh where was the retired Dr. Robert Wells?

Heather typed in DR. ROBERT WELLS and initiated search C.