Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller)

Broken Dolls

A Jefferson Winter Thriller

JAMES CAROL

For Karen, Niamh and Finn.
Love you guys.

Prologue

The last time I saw my father alive he was strapped to a padded prison gurney, arms outstretched like he was about to be crucified. All the appeals had been filed, and denied. There would be no last-minute stay of execution. He had a catheter in each arm, the IVs already attached. Only one line was needed to get the job done. The second was there purely as a back-up. A monitor counted off the final beats of his heart, the rate a steady, relaxed seventy-five a minute despite the circumstances.

There was a crowd of a couple of dozen witnesses in the viewing gallery. Parents of the victims, prison officials, a man in a crisp no-nonsense suit representing the Governor of California. Everyone was rustling and shifting, getting comfortable for the main feature, but I was only partially aware of this.

My father looked through the thick Plexiglas and the intensity of his gaze cut right into me. At that moment it was just the two of us. I stared back, curious to know what he was thinking. I had met and studied enough psychopaths to know he wasn’t sorry for what he had done, that he was incapable of showing remorse for his crimes.

Over a twelve-year period my father murdered fifteen young women. He abducted them and took them to the wide rolling forests of Oregon, where he set them free and hunted them down with a high-powered rifle. He couldn’t care less about those fifteen girls. To him they were playthings.

I kept my father’s gaze. Held it. His eyes were bright green with a golden yellow halo around the iris. They were exactly like mine, just one of the many genetic traits we share. Looking at him was like looking down a long dark tunnel that led into my future. We’re both five foot nine, slim and overcaffeinated, and we both have bright snow-white hair, the result of a rogue gene somewhere in our ancestry. My hair had turned when I was in my early twenties, my father had been even younger.

There were three main reasons he managed to keep killing for so many years. First off, he had the intelligence to stay one step ahead of the people hunting him. Secondly, he had one of those faces that was instantly forgettable, a face that merged into the crowd. The third reason was hair dye. It didn’t matter how forgettable your face was if you had instantly recognisable hair.

The brief smile that flickered across my father’s lips was there and gone in a fraction of a second. It was a cruel smile. A bully’s smile. He mouthed three words and my lungs and heart froze in my chest. Those three words spoke directly to a secret part of me, a part I’d kept well hidden, even from myself. He must have seen something change in my expression because he fired another of those brief cutting smiles, and then he shut his eyes for the final time.

The prison governor asked if there were any last words, but my father just blanked him. He asked again, gave my father almost a whole minute to respond and then, when he didn’t, signalled for the execution to begin.

Pentobarbital was pumped through the catheter first, the anaesthetic working quickly, rendering him unconscious within seconds. Next, he received a dose of pancuronium bromide, which paralysed his respiratory muscles. Finally, he was injected with potassium chloride to stop his heart. Six minutes and twenty-three seconds later my father was pronounced dead.

Behind me, the mother of one of the victims was sobbing openly and being comforted by her husband. The woman had the glassy-eyed stare of the self-medicated. She wasn’t alone in her chemical lethargy. A glance around the gallery confirmed that. The legacy left behind by my father was long and hard and filled with a misery that would echo far into the future. The father of another victim whispered under his breath that he’d gotten off too easily, a sentiment shared by most of the people in the viewing gallery. I’d seen the crime-scene photographs and read the autopsy reports, so I wasn’t about to disagree. Each one of those fifteen girls had suffered a slow, terrifying death, a death that was the polar opposite of my father’s.

I filed out with everyone else and made my way to the parking lot. For a time I just sat in my rental car, the key dangling from the ignition, and tried to shake the fog filling my brain. Those three words my father mouthed were playing on an endless loop inside my head. I knew he was wrong, knew that he was just screwing with my head, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a shred of truth in there. And if that was the case, what did that make me? We build the foundations of our lives on faultlines and shifting sand, and in his last moments my father had managed to send a Richter-nine quake rattling through mine, destroying everything I’d held as right and true.

I turned the key, put the car into gear and headed for the airport. My flight to Washington, DC, left at six thirty the next morning, but I never made it. Instead, I drove past the turning to the airport and just kept going, all the way back to Virginia. There was no real hurry. I wasn’t expected back at Quantico until the next week, but that didn’t stop me wanting to get the hell out of California as fast as possible, to keep moving.

The static soul-sucking limbo of an airport departure lounge was something I could definitely live without. Minutes crawling into hours, hours crawling into days, days crawling into years. That’s what I told myself as the speedometer needle crept higher, and it was the truth, albeit a small part of a much larger truth. The real truth was that I was trying to outrun those three words. The problem was that it didn’t matter how far I drove, or how fast, I couldn’t escape them.

Even now, almost eighteen months on, those three words still haunt me, jumping into my head when least expected. Time and memory have warped those mouthed shapes into my father’s lazy Californian drawl, the same easy voice he used to charm his victims. I can hear him now as clearly as if he was sat right next to me.

We’re the same.

1

The woman in the hospital bed could have been dead. She should have been dead. The only reason I knew she was alive was because of the soft, insistent beep of the heart monitor and the gentle rise and fall of her blankets. Her face was slack. Emotionless. This wasn’t the deep relaxation that came with sleep, it was more like the relaxation that came with death, like all the muscles in her face had been permanently switched off. I could have been looking at a corpse on a mortuary slab, or a body dumped in a lonely woodland, but I wasn’t. A part of me wished I was.

Detective Inspector Mark Hatcher looked down at the sleeping woman and muttered a heartfelt ‘Jesus Christ’ under his breath. He stared at her like he was hypnotised. An occasional shake of the head, a sigh, small gestures that spoke volumes. I’d first met Hatcher on a profiling course I’d run at Quantico for overseas police forces. He’d stood out from the crowd because he had been on the front row for every single lecture, and he wouldn’t shut up with the questions. I liked Hatcher then, I liked him now. He was one of Scotland Yard’s finest. Anyone who could stare into Nietzsche’s abyss for thirty years and still feel something was all right in my book.

But those years hadn’t been kind. They’d sucked all the colour from him, all the joy. His hair was grey, as was his skin, his outlook. He possessed a particular brand of cynicism you only found in cops who’d been on the job too long. His sad hound-dog eyes told the whole sorry story. They’d witnessed more than anyone should ever have to.

‘Patricia Maynard is the fourth victim, right?’ A rhetorical question, but one that needed asking to pull Hatcher back into the room.

‘That’s right.’ Hatcher let out a long, weary sigh and shook his head, then turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Sixteen months I’ve been chasing this bastard, and do you want to know the truth? The truth is that I don’t think we’re any closer to catching him than we were back at the start. It’s like Snakes and Ladders, except someone’s stolen all the bloody ladders and every other square has a snake’s head on it.’ Another sigh, another shake of the head. ‘I thought I’d seen everything, Winter, but this is something else.’

That was an understatement. There was no limit to the horrors serial criminals dreamt up, but even I had to admit this was new, and I have seen everything. There were some things worse than death, and Patricia Maynard was living proof of that.

I looked at her lying there in that claustrophobic private room, wired up to all those machines, an IV plugged into the catheter in the back of her hand, and it crossed my mind again that she would be better off dead. I knew exactly how I’d do it, too. Unplug the IV tube and use a syringe to pump air into the catheter.

The embolism would hit the right side of the heart first and from there it would travel to the lungs. The blood vessels in the lungs would constrict, raising the pressure in the right side of the heart until it was high enough to push the embolism to the left side. From there it had access to the rest of the body through the circulatory system. If it got lodged in the coronary artery it would cause a heart attack. If it reached the brain, it would cause a stroke.

A neat, simple solution. Unless someone looked really hard, the risk of doing prison time was minimal. And nobody would look too hard. Experience has taught me that people tend to see what they want to see. Over the last three and a half months Patricia Maynard had been held captive and put through hell. And if she died now? Well, we’d all want to believe her body had finally given up, and that would be that. Case closed.

‘DNA?’ I asked.

‘Enough to tie her to the other three women, but nothing that gave a hit on our database.’

‘Anything new on the unsub?’

‘The unknown subject,’ said Hatcher. ‘You know, I think the last time I heard that one used was on TV.’ He shook his head. ‘Nope, nothing new on the unsub.’

‘So basically we have four victims who aren’t talking, and absolutely no idea who the bad guy is.’

‘That about sums it up.’ Hatcher sighed. ‘We need to find him before he gets his hands on someone else.’

‘Not going to happen. After the first victim was dumped two months passed before the second abduction took place. Only seventy-two hours passed between the dumping of victim number three and Patricia Maynard’s abduction. Usually there’s a cooling-off period, a time where the unsub’s fantasies are strong enough to hold him in check. With this guy the fantasies no longer work. They’re a poor substitute for the real thing, and he’s got far too used to the real thing. This unsub is escalating. Patricia Maynard was found two nights ago, so my guess is that he’ll kidnap the next one tonight.’

‘Just what I need. More bad news.’ Hatcher sighed again and rubbed at his tired face. ‘So what’s the good news, Winter? Because you’d better have some. After all, that’s what I brought you in for.’

‘The good news is that the more he devolves, the more likely it is that he’ll make a mistake. The more mistakes he makes, the easier it’ll be to catch him.’