Skeleton King Read online

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you on this one—need you to take the lead.”

  And to keep it together, Kendra finished for him in her mind.

  The line went dead. Like Kendra, Director Ames was curt and to the point, having more important things to do than waste words.

  Fuck.

  She turned to the officer who had initially ignored her request to search the garbage.

  “You,” she spat, “go outside and look for milk containers.”

  The man looked at her as if she had three heads.

  “Get the fuck outside and start looking!”

  CHAPTER 4

  The shitty motel room that Kendra was staying at only had two redeeming factors: one, it had a minibar; two, the minibar was full.

  Flipping off her flats and abandoning them at the foot of the bed, she went straight to the small black fridge tucked beside a worn wooden desk. Her slender hand closed on the handle and she pulled it open. For a moment, Kendra was content in simply basking in the cool air that wafted out at her, and she closed her eyes, imagining that she wasn’t in Butt-fuck-nowhere, USA. Butt-fuck-nowhere that was as hot as Satan’s armpit.

  Milk… where did the milk come from?

  Kendra’s eyes snapped open and immediately focused on the mini bottle of Jim Beam. She grabbed it, hesitated, then reached back in for the mini of Crown and the mini of Jack. Pulling all three out, she slammed the fridge door closed and collapsed onto the rust-colored duvet adorned with some tacky Navajo design on it.

  With one twist, the cap to one of the bottles—she didn’t even take note of which one—came off, accompanied by the all-too-comforting sound of the small metal tabs breaking. She brought it to her lips, taking a healthy swig.

  It was Jack, she realized, recognizing the slight banana flavor to it. As she reached for the TV remote on the bedside table, she tilted the bottle and finished it in three swallows.

  It burned, but only a little.

  Kendra pressed the red button on the upper right hand corner and the TV immediately roared to life, the sound turned up so loud that it was nearly deafening. Kendra swore, and then scrambled to find the volume button in the dim lighting. As she searched, the TV audio continued to blast, the speakers crackling with a mixture of moaning and wet slapping sounds.

  Her eyes flicked to the screen, and she saw three nude, writhing bodies followed by close-ups of tongues licking, lips kissing.

  Someone’s idea of a fucking joke—leave the TV on a porn channel, the volume maxed out.

  Kendra finally found the volume button and immediately lowered it.

  The static-filled moans hushed, but Kendra was too tired and too lazy to search for the channel button. Besides, she had found out long ago that porn wasn’t the worst distraction during times like these.

  Turns out this time was no exception; allowing her mind to drift, her thoughts quickly turned to Brett, and she began to wonder what he would be doing with his tongue and his lips at this moment. What he would do if she allowed him to take her again.

  Kendra cracked open the Crown next, but this time she swallowed in one go, as if thinking of the way Brett had fucked her—rough and hard, squeezing and pinching—had manifested itself in the way she drank.

  A tingling sensation began in her inner thighs and quickly spread outward, until her entire core had become tense. Closing her eyes, she sighed, her breathing quickening with the realization that her panties had started to moisten.

  Her cell phone buzzed, drawing Kendra out of the fantasy. Her eyes snapped open, and she quickly found the remote and flicked off the TV. Clearing her throat, she grabbed her phone and answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Kendra? It’s me, Brett. Just wanted to let you know that I’ll be arriving tonight. Coming in late, gonna get a hotel room. You good for breakfast at eight?”

  For the briefest moment, Kendra considered telling him to forget getting his own room and instead to come to her room and stay the night. And part of her wanted that—the part that tingled between her legs and made her nipples hard beneath her white blouse.

  But that wasn’t the way it worked between them—that wasn’t the way she worked.

  “Sounds fine,” she answered.

  There was a pause, an expectant pause, and for a moment, Kendra thought that maybe Brett had picked up on something in her voice. But that was impossible, even for someone as observant and astute as Agent Brett Cherry. If nothing else, Kendra was an expert at keeping her emotions wrapped up tight.

  “Anything else?” she asked, suddenly anxious to hang up.

  “Yeah… just a question: was it really the little girl’s birthday? Four years old?”

  Kendra’s mind flicked to the girl’s pale hand, the fingers stretched out, spotted with blood, reaching out from beneath the two bodies that were crushing her.

  Four years old. When I was four, my father abandoned me at the church.

  But at least he didn’t murder me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck.”

  There was another pause.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Brett,” Kendra said, then hung up.

  For a moment, she just sat there in silence with the TV off, the only sound the phantom noise of children laughing; party sounds. But before these could coalesce into a solid daydream, Kendra forced them away and chugged the bottle of Jack.

  Then she got up and headed for the shower.

  She felt dirty.

  * **

  The cold water felt good on Kendra’s skin, like tiny ice pellets bouncing off her body.

  That was okay; her chest and stomach were nearly numb from the scars.

  After washing with the horribly fragrant bar of soap that the motel provided, she washed her long, straight black hair with motel shampoo. She had her own stuff in her bag, but she had forgotten to get it and the water just felt too good to get out. She would regret this, she knew, as her hair would dry into a completely unwieldy mess, but at the moment this was one of the furthest things from her mind.

  The day had been hot enough to tickle triple digits, and it felt damn good to have an ice-cold shower, even if this was her norm regardless of the weather.

  Kendra waited a few more minutes, allowing the water to cascade over the top of her head, collecting her hair into a long, dark, and sudsy point that nearly reached the center of her chest, bent over the way she was.

  Eventually, long after the water had run clear, she turned off the tap and stepped onto the grungy bathmat, not bothering to wrap a towel around herself.

  The other advantage to a cold shower was that she didn’t have to wait for the fog to clear from the mirror before getting a good look at herself.

  As always, her eyes were drawn to the thick pink scars that wrapped their away around her torso, crisscrossing in places, and then to the other scars, the shorter ones that resembled tiny pink maggots.

  All told, she counted fifty-four scars on her body, all of them on her torso, filling the space between the tight ‘v’ of her stomach muscles right above her mound, to just beneath the undersides of her breasts.

  The cold water had turned Kendra’s pale skin white, as her blood had drawn inward to protect and feed her vital organs.

  It also made her scars stand out more.

  One in particular, a nearly complete circle above her right hip, looked almost like a balloon.

  A balloon…

  With one of her nails, she drew a four in the center, the red mark staying for a second before fading to white.

  She wondered what was worse, being murdered by your father or not knowing who your father really was.

  Or your mother.

  Or where you came from.

  Her red fingernail traced the outline of the scar, digging deeper with each pass. The thought was childish and downright insulting.

  Still, not knowing who she was or where she came from often left her feeling less than alive inside.

  And the hor
rors that she experienced on the job didn’t help, either.

  She pressed her finger into the scar and scratched upward. Her finger slipped off the raised flesh and dug into a small area of pristine white skin.

  A dot of blood, the color of which was nearly a perfect match for her nail polish, leaked onto her finger.

  Kendra didn’t flinch; instead, she just stared, images of Roger Black’s throat, blood gushing out, hot and sticky, coating the bodies of his dying and dead family beneath him, flooding her mind.

  Pulsating, his life eking out of him one heartbeat at a time.

  She brought her finger to her lips and sucked the blood away. Almost fully dry now save her wet hair, Kendra left the bathroom and collapsed on the bed, not bothering to put on a nightie or even pull back the covers.

  The latter was probably for the best, she decided; if the bathmat was any indication, she was better off on top of the sheets than within them.

  Kendra fell asleep in less than five minutes, another tiny bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in her hand.

  CHAPTER 5

  “You have to try this—it’s incredible.”

  Kendra tried not to let the disgusted feeling in her stomach make its way to her face.

  Brett was staring at her, smirking. The man had steel-blue eyes, a round face, and shortly cropped brown hair that, while not quite thinning, was on the verge of it. Not handsome, not quite—his lopsided ears kept him from gaining that trophy on Kendra’s shelf—but he was cute.

  And he had a charisma that most women, Kendra included, found attractive.

  She was out of his league, of course—at least, when she was fully clothed—but that didn’t matter much to her. She liked him, and he served a purpose.

  And he wasn’t a bad agent, either. But like his looks, he fell just short of being a great one.

  “C’mon, Kendra, just one bite.”

  Brett scooped up half of a runny egg with his fork and dangled the sloppy mess at eye level. It quivered in mid-air for a moment, its gelatinous surface shaking, before slowly sliding off and falling back onto his plate. A small dot of yolk splashed up and landed on his gray striped tie.

  “Shit,” he swore, putting his fork back down and dipping his napkin in the glass of murky water before dabbing at his tie.

  Now it was Kendra’s turn to smirk.

  “Serves you right,” she said, leaning forward and taking a sip of her coffee. “That shit’ll kill you, anyway.”

  Brett, to prove a point, abandoned tending to his now stained tie and attacked the eggs, shoveling a forkful into his mouth.

  He smiled at Kendra, flashing his teeth covered in yolk.

  Kendra grimaced.

  But despite her expression, the injection of childish humor was just what she needed. It had been a fitful sleep for her, a sweaty nocturnal rollercoaster, filled with nightmares of the like she rarely remembered.

  Screams—I remember screams echoing down a damp hallway. A fire glowing brighter and brighter…

  “You’re a child, you know that, right?” she said, forcing the dreams away. The truth was, she envied Brett, what with him being able to laugh and joke after what they had seen. Either he was insane or he had some amazing cognitive dissonance skills—or maybe he was a compartmentalizing genius… a dexterity she had never been able to master.

  “Director Ames said you had more info,” she said, and the smile fell off Brett’s face as well. He licked some egg from the corner of his mouth, then casually picked up a piece of heavily buttered toast and took a bite as he looked around.

  Kendra followed his gaze.

  They were two of five patrons in the greasy spoon, which was odd for a Saturday morning, even if it wasn’t quite eight yet.

  Kendra assumed that the small town of Torrance, West Virginia, population forty-five hundred, had heard about the crime overnight. And if they hadn’t, she knew that they probably just felt that something was wrong.

  Small towns like Torrance were not benign, innate objects, she knew. They were organic; information traveled through the air, the trees, the kite that a child had lost and floated up to the hot sun like an Icarus incarnation.

  Even if word hadn’t spread, the feeling had, keeping parents in bed longer, keeping children playing among themselves, weary to wake their tired folks.

  They just knew something was wrong.

  Brett, satisfied that they were unlikely to be overheard, pulled out a manila envelope and put it on the empty table before Kendra.

  She opened it and began reading.

  The first file, heavily marked with the ominous red letters “CLASSIFIED”, referred to a four-year-old girl from another small town, out east this time, who had gone missing on her birthday: Meghan Miller.

  Kendra skimmed the file, an uncomfortable feeling of dread settling in as she realized that she was familiar with the details even before her eyes skipped across the hand scrawled notes.

  Young girl, missing, parents teary, no leads, no suspects, no nothing.

  An all-too-common narrative that had become almost clichéd over the last twelve years.

  Missing… and that was seven days ago.

  Her experience told her that if they found the girl at all, an unlikely proposition, she would be dead.

  She flipped to the next file, and it was the same story.

  Four-year-old girl, Taylor Harper, missing the week after her birthday; again, no leads.

  The third file drew a little more of her attention.

  ‘Lacy McGuire, lived alone with her father, her mother institutionalized with schizophrenia. Peter McGuire, the father, was sleeping at the time of the alleged kidnapping. The man appears normal, distraught—a grieving and concerned parent.’

  Kendra felt her face twisting into a sneer.

  ‘Not a suspect; churchgoing pillar of the community, perhaps vying for mayorship.’

  But despite her incredulity of the claim, this case was different, if only because the girl’s mother hadn’t been home at the time of the kidnapping—only the father. A tip-off if there ever was any; it was almost always the father in these cases… and even if he wasn’t directly involved, he was tangentially or incidentally implicated.

  And yet the interviewing agent had been so quick to jot the note: not a suspect.

  Kendra searched for who had signed off on the field notes: Agent Paul Grover.

  The man’s face flashed in her mind; he was one of the few agents that she knew well, aside from Brett, of course. And while Brett was cute, Paul was handsome—almost too handsome, which was one of the reasons why she had turned him down as a potential partner when Director Ames had offered him up.

  In addition to the fact that he was too young, too green.

  She recalled the officer outside the Black home, the one trying to hold down his breakfast, which was probably of the same nature as the slop that Brett continued to shovel into his mouth.

  She wasn’t here to babysit; she was here to solve crimes.

  Not a suspect.

  Kendra closed the file and looked up, surprised to see that Brett was staring intently at her, a strange expression on his face.

  Her mind worked quickly, trying to figure out how the crime at the Black house related to these cases, as both the director and Brett had alluded. Notes furiously began to mentally collate in her mind:

  1. Young girl as the victim, on or around their fourth birthday.

  2. Mostly good parents, except for the schizoid mother in case three.

  3. No suspects.

  Outside the first point, there didn’t seem to be much to connect the Black case to the others.

  Missing children, kidnapped or other, was a far cry from murdered by one’s own family.

  As if reading her mind, Brett spoke in a hushed tone.

  “The milk, Kendra. It’s the milk.”

  Her eyes whipped up, her mind turning back to her conversation with the director and his preoccupation with the milk… the still cold glass of milk o
n the counter, and the lack of a container in the fridge or in the garbage.

  She made a mental note to follow up with Detective Tennison about the search for such a carton around the house.

  The milk.

  Kendra looked down at the files again, this time searching for something specific.

  A moment later, she found the link.

  “All three cases—”

  Kendra cut her partner off.

  “But what does it mean? We have an apparent murder/suicide and three missing girls… what do they have in common? A glass of fucking milk?” She chewed her lip. “Fucking osteoporosis? What?”

  Brett shrugged, and then took another bite of his toast.

  “Dunno,” he said with his mouth full. “But the director thought that there was enough of a link to pull Agent Grover off of it and give it to us. It was no accident that we were sent here, Kendra.”

  Kendra furrowed her brow as she recalled the surprise in the director’s voice when she had mentioned the milk.

  Did Brett know about that already?

  It wouldn’t be the first time that her partner had feigned surprise when he had given her a report. There was a time, back in her early years as an agent and with a different partner, that she had thought this a technique the director was using to test her. Knowing him as she did now, however, made her feel silly for this assumption. It wasn’t about her, she realized. Instead, the director used this tactic for the simple reason that he believed an agent was better served unbiased, that getting to the facts and truths about a crime on their own was far more valuable and insightful.

  Unbiased.

  The scars that covered her torso suddenly started to itch.

  No, unbiased was not a state of mind that she would ever be privy to. But Kendra wasn’t discouraged by this fact. After all, everyone was biased by something… in the very least, they were beholden to their genetics and their environment.

  Nature and nurture, as it were.

  In her case, however, her tainted memories left her leaning heavily on the former.