Humpty Dumpty: The killer wants us to put him back together again (Book 1 of the Nursery Rhyme Murders Series) (21 page)

No, he didn’t
, Joshua thought. That was part of the problem. The body had been found by a couple that was down there getting freaky, where there was the danger of getting caught to add to the thrill. But they would’ve found the torso even if they had kept to the path. The head and torso were visible from the bridge above.

“This isn’t the first crime scene we’ve processed so far,” Agent Cooper confessed. “But it’s far from the norm.”

One of the other cops snorted. “Yeah. I’m not sure we can even
see
normal from where we’re standing.”

“Gives me the creeps,” confessed Ingram. “Like he’s looking right up at me.”

“Wait,” Joshua said. “Say that again.”

“It gives me the creeps,” the cop obliged.

“No, not that part. The other.”

“Um. He’s looking at me?”

Joshua walked around the partially buried body part, following the corpse’s line of sight with his fingers. It led him straight up above to a point on the bridge.

“Coop? Had?” he called.

The two moved closer, their eyes intent. Had walked over to the body, peering down on it with an interest that would have seemed creepy from anyone else.

“What’d you find, Joshua?” Agent Cooper asked.

“Check out the victim’s eye line,” he answered.

Had turned around, looking up at the bridge, then back down at the body. He went back and forth for a minute. “Looks like he was staring at the bridge.”

“
He
wasn’t looking anywhere,” Joshua stated. “He was placed this way by the killer. The killer is telling us where
we
should be looking.”

“So you think he’s pointing to us again?” Had asked.

Rather than answer, Joshua started back up the ravine, Bella yipping in excitement. As the neared the top of the ravine, the puppy scurried off in the wrong direction, leaving Joshua suddenly alone, as he’d outdistanced the rest of the team.

“Bella! Wait!” The dog stopped, looked at him with her head cocked off to the side, then ran off again. There was no way he was getting her back fast. Joshua waved to the cops and pointed at the spot on the bridge. “Go on ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

He turned back to Bella, who was now sitting just a slight ways off, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Moving toward her, Joshua tried to get around behind the puppy, but she thought it was part of the game and started barking.

“Bella. Come here!”

His puppy was smart; Joshua knew that. She had to know how frustrating this was for him, but rather than accede to his wishes, the damn girl kept taunting him, messing with his head.

Wait.

That’s what Humpty was doing.

He was baiting them. Screwing around with them. Making them dance like marionettes on strings of his own designing. And they had been obliging him every step of the way.

That’s what was different about each of these crime scenes. Not just the external fact of their differences from before, but the shift in the very design of them. Everything in these sites had been done both for maximum exposure and maximum disruption. The serene garden in Ann Arbor. The hand in the sandbox in Charleston. The leg in Richmond. The torso here.

He had been baiting them. Joshua knew that. And it was escalating. He knew that, too. But that meant that the stakes would be raised as well.

Shit.

He ran toward the bridge, screaming and waving his hands for the cops to get away. As he rushed along, heedless of the scratches and scrapes from the flora and fauna around him, Joshua saw one of the policemen lift his head up, turning toward the noise, even as his companion bent down to look at something on the ground.

Something right in line with the gaze of the dismembered corpse below.

And then the world blew up.

The shock from the explosion threw Joshua back against a tree, his head striking the trunk with a thud that sent fireworks of pain and light dancing through his skull. Everything went dark for a moment as his vision tunneled inward.

He woke to Bella licking his face, whining and dancing around him. As he sat up, his head throbbing a dangerous tattoo, Joshua surveyed the damage.

A quarter of the bridge was gone. The cops were nowhere to be seen. Had and Coop were running up the hill toward him, Had sporting a bleeding gash on the side of his face, and Coop looked to be limping.

“Are you all right?” Agent Cooper yelled up at him. He heard everything through a slight ringing in his ears, making the entire scenario feel somehow disjointed and unreal. But a glance to the side, where one of the policemen had been thrown disabused him of that thought. The body was partially visible underneath rubble from the destroyed section of the bridge, but the neck was at an angle that made it clear the man was dead.

“Did any of them…?” Joshua fired back, ignoring her concern for him for the moment. He knew even before she shook her head what the answer would be. He had seen the group, clustered around the blast point. With the amount of damage that had been done to the bridge, none of the four could have escaped.

The Humpty Dumpty Killer had claimed four more victims, even as they were gathered around to try to piece together one who was already dead. And Joshua could have stopped it if he had realized in time.

Had and Coop were rushing about, seeking out the bodies amidst the rubble, doing what they could. Joshua knew better. There was nothing they could do. Sorting through the aftermath of the tragedy might feel like it gave them purpose, but it was short lived. They would discover that all too soon.

Their movements were like a backdrop of random noise that invaded his skull. An emotional tinnitus that kept him from being able to focus. At the same moment, it came with a bizarre sense of
déjà vu
, the sounds of concern and the actions of kindness unable to blot away the horror of the action. Voices all around him, calm and soothing, telling him that it would
all be okay, it would be okay, it would be okay
…

But he had known that it would never again be okay, even before the DNA evidence had come back. It was not an event that he could recover from. Not in this lifetime. There were some occurrences that the passage of years could not even begin to touch. And that one had started with an ill-advised fight with his wife, and had ended in a wood chipper.

This was a flashback to a darker period of his life, a moment in time when his existence had shattered into a million shards of black obsidian, raining down sharp destruction on anyone foolish enough to get inside the blast radius. This was only an echo of that crystalline epoch of glittering dreams obliterated, but Joshua felt the impact in his soul with the same intensity with which he had felt the physical blast from the bomb a mere matter of moments ago. He had been marked. Cursed. The pairing of the hurts, one emotional, one physical, were ganging up to tell him something. The message was clear.

Humpty was beating him. And there was nothing he could do about it.

CHAPTER 14

Had knew there were all kinds of reasons why he should still be with Joshua and Agent Cooper right now. They’d just finished almost getting blown up, for one. Joshua was due for a complete derailment, for two. And more time could be spent back at the nature center observing, taking pictures, categorizing information on the crime-scene-turned-blast-sight.

But he couldn’t be there any longer. The paramedics had bandaged up the cut on his face, as well as checking out Coop’s leg and Joshua’s possible concussion. They were all fine.

The local cops, however, were not.

It wasn’t like Had was inexperienced when it came to death. Growing up with a mortician as a father had given him a strong stomach for things that made other people squirm. There were only so many dead bodies you could be around before you realized that they were just meat.

But those weren’t usually people Had was talking to just moments before. And the aftermath, by the time it got to the mortuary, wasn’t as bloody as what had awaited them in the rubble after the explosion.

He wasn’t running away. He definitely was not running away. There were just things that needed to be done in connection with local law enforcement that it would be best to handle in person. Phone calls were so impersonal. There was no other reason for Had to be headed out to the police station in Walcott.

No other reason at all.

The station made Had homesick. The police department in Ann Arbor was bigger than this one, but up to this point, the other departments he’d liaised with had been larger and more organized than what he was used to. Here, he could feel himself relax. The building was nothing more than a glorified box with a roof that had been plopped down across the street from the fire station. No effort had gone into making it look pretty. Function over form all the way, baby.

As he walked through the entrance to the precinct building, a young brunette looked up from where she had her head bent over a file. Her eyes were a brilliant green that almost seemed like they were shedding their own light, they were so bright. She smiled a welcome.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah. I’m Officer Hadderly, with—”

“Oh, Had, right?” Her smile broadened.

“Um. Yes. How did you—?”

“Small office. Everyone talks.” She shrugged her shoulders, an almost-apology. “I’m Reggie. I work here part-time.”

“Reggie. Nice to meet you,” Had answered, shaking her outstretched hand. “What do you do here?”

“Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I dabble in forensics, but there’s not much call for that here. More of a hobby. Mostly I’m the I.T. girl.” She wrinkled up her nose. “To be honest, there’s not much call for that, either.”

Had chuckled. “I know what that’s like.”

“Oh, come on,” Reggie swatted at his arm. “You’re working with the FBI on a big murder case. You can’t know what it’s like to be stuck in a Podunk place like this.”

“You kidding? Up ‘til last week, I’d just barely been out of Michigan. I work in Ann Arbor. It’s bigger than Walcott, but it’s not huge by a long shot.”

“Come on,” she snorted. “We have a population of under two thousand. I’m pretty sure Ann Arbor’s a metropolis compared to us. I can’t even find indie music here, except for on Amazon.”

“You like indie music?” Had asked, enthused. “What groups?”

“Of Monsters and Men. Neon Trees. The Shins.”

Okay. It was possible that he was falling in love here. Reggie was stunning, her hair almost midnight black against skin that was the color of cream. She was buttoned down, but had an edge to her that was intriguing.

His phone rang.
Psycho
.

Seriously. Did his mama have some kind of bizarre radar? How she managed to know when he was talking to a woman was beyond him, but she had a knack for it that he would swear bordered on black magic.

“Sorry. It’s my mama. Gotta take this.” He waved an apology to Reggie.

“Don’t worry about it. Your mom calls, you take it.”

One more mark in the plus column, as far as Had was concerned. He pushed the “talk” button, and his mother’s voice flowed through the speaker.

“Honey, I’m startin’ to get worried about you. It’s been almost a week, and you haven’t been over to the house.”

Had sighed. “Mama. I’m working. And don’t tell me you didn’t call my boss and ask about this.”

“Well of course I did. What kind of mother would I be if I just sat here on my fanny?” She blew out a raspberry at him.

There was no response to that question that wouldn’t get Had in trouble, so he just gave a noncommittal grunt. He needn’t have worried. She motored through without waiting for a response.

“But I don’t believe a word that comes out of that man’s mouth. You know he was having an affair with Mrs. Johnson from the congregation?”

“Mama, that’s just—”

“Look, I don’t care. It’s none of my business,” she said, her tone pious. Then she turned on a dime. “Now, sweetie, you say you’re out huntin’ a killer? Fine. As long as you keep looking for someone that can give me grandbabies while you’re doin’ it. They have women out where you are, right?”

Had snuck a glance at Reggie. “Yes, Mama, they do. But—”

“But nothing. You know what the pastor said. Single men over 25 are a menace to society.”

“That wasn’t him; it was a quote. From some Mormon church leader from a long time ago. I looked it up.”

“What?” she gasped, her tone horrified. “But we’re Southern Baptists.”

Oh, great. This was getting better by the moment. Mama on religion was even worse than Mama talking about women. It was time to beat a hasty retreat.

“Okay. Gotta go.” Had hung up before his mother had a chance to talk about the pastor some more, or make him put any woman in the general vicinity on the phone with her. She’d do it, there was no doubt in Had’s mind. Mostly because she’d pulled that on him more than once already.

And right now, he didn’t want his Mama messing with his mojo.

Turning back to Reggie, he saw her wipe a smile off of her face. Yeah, it was pretty funny, now that he thought about how his side of the conversation must’ve sounded to her.

“That just ruined any chance I might’ve had with you, didn’t it?” he asked with a wry grin.

“Oh, I dunno,” Reggie answered, her eyes crinkling up at the corners. “A man that loves his mom is pretty damn cute.”

“Is that right?” Had leaned on the counter. “And what are your feelings on Latin dance?”

“Er. What?”

This didn’t bode well. “Latin dance? You know. Salsa. Merengue.” Nothing. He groped for another, more popularized example. “The Lambada.”

“Oh, I don’t dance any of those.”

“Really? Not even the Lambada?” Had could feel the chemistry seeping away.

“Never heard of that one, actually.”

“You’ve never…” he choked a bit on the statement. This was bad. Okay. Let’s try that one again. “You’ve never heard of the Lambada? The forbidden dance?”

“Sorry.”

A sigh slipped out of him before he could stop it. Reggie arched an eyebrow at that. This was going downhill fast, at least as far as any kind of potential relationship was concerned. Ah well. Perhaps it was not meant to be.