“But you thought it had to be somewhere.”
“Yes. Anyway, the uniforms weren’t happy to be detailed like that, but the patrol sergeant gave me the end-of-shift hour for that sector’s patrol cars. They found it sitting right on top of a pile of other bricks. It was under the overhang of a house three doors down. Foundation repair going on there, apparently. Three frigging houses down. How do you miss that shit?”
Mel only shrugged. It happened. During a canvas, the officers could get so focused on what they thought they would find that they missed what was there.
“Yeah, well, it’s covered in blood and there were some good prints in the blood, so the lab has it. We’re hoping for DNA too.”
“You didn’t get any from her nails?” Mel asked, surprised.
“No,” he said, looking disgusted. “The hospital was informed, but they screwed up and cleaned her up for surgery before they took the scrapings.”
“Damn,” she murmured. It was so rare to get a good fat sample of DNA directly from a victim that it hurt to have the opportunity missed. “Is that why she was so angry the other day?”
“Yep. Thanks with that, by the way.” He gave a grim smile, then lowered his voice to a more conspiratorial level. “I hope she doesn’t find him before we do. You know what she said?”
“No clue, but I’ll take a guess that it was violent.”
He leaned forward against his desk, motioning her closer so no one else would hear him. “She said she wanted to eat him.” At Mel’s shocked and slightly confused expression, he nodded. “Yep, eat him. She said that if he thought a two second spurt of useless biological trash was worth her entire life, then she wanted to pay him back. She said she wanted to cook him and eat him, piece by piece, while he watched her do it.”
“Christ,” Mel said, appalled at the graphic image that flitted through her mind.
“Oh, and she wanted to feed some of it to her cat too.”
“Fucking hell!” Mel whispered. Bad language in the squadroom was a normal thing, but they tried to keep in down because children came through. “You better find him before she does.”
Paul picked up his pen then put it down again. He was obviously thinking something he wasn’t sure he should share.
“What?” she prodded.
With a shrug that almost looked a little ashamed, he answered her. “I’m not sure it would be such a bad thing for her to find him first.”
Mel snorted and said, “Don’t let the Captain hear you say that. Also, that’s a lot of calories and fat. She’ll have to exercise for months to get him off her butt.”
That made him laugh and when his phone rang a moment later, he seemed far more cheerful when he answered. Mel went back to thinking of soy-based creamer and deleting emails.
Serena and the Crescent Moon
“So, Baby, do you feel like talking more today?” Mel asked, sliding a paper plate with neatly cut apple segments toward the girl across the picnic table. They were at the park again. Baby seemed to like it here, so as long as the weather held out, Mel would keep bringing her here. Her hand was aching. She should have bought oranges instead. At least she wouldn’t have had to cut those. Using a knife and holding the apple was an exercise in painful awkwardness.
Baby made a noise of pleasure as she bit into an apple segment, then waved the remaining piece in the air. Her movement was languid, very upper class.
“Of course. There’s a lot to tell. A lot of years still to cover.”
“You were telling me about Raymond,” she prompted, cutting her own apple.
Baby arched her brow and said, “Oh, yes. Raymond was a very bad man.”
Mel’s knife stopped in mid-slice. Was Baby doing that on purpose? It was in the way she said it rather than the words themselves. The movement of her hand and the perfect tilt of her head reminded Mel of a silver screen Bette Davis giving one of her icy brush-offs to some man in a tux. It was perfectly done.
Shaking off the idea, Mel said, “You said he became very rich when we stopped last time. Is that because of you?”
“Not only me, but I was the first.” She paused and bit sharply at an apple slice, then smiled. “I was also his last.”
Mel said nothing to that. Saying provocative things was one method victims used to try and take control of the conversation. It was a way to feel like they had power over a situation in which they felt powerless. It was best not to rise to the bait.
“Anyway,” Baby went on when Mel said nothing. “That was later. I’ll start from the beginning. You asked if I stopped growing again. That was very perceptive of you.”
“So, you did stop growing?”
“Yes, then, well…I went backward a little, but only a little.”
“Backward? You mean you got younger?” Mel asked, wanting clarity.
This tale of hers was so outrageous that the clues inside it would probably be subtle and easily missed. When her reports finally found a professional to evaluate them, she wanted every nuance covered.
“Only a little. At first, the men visited me and no one noticed. Not even I noticed. Children grow fast, but not that fast. It was a fight between Serena and Raymond that brought it to my attention.”
“Who is Serena?” Mel asked, a little excitement surging through her. First names might be almost useless in such a large world, but first names of associates can quickly narrow the field.
“A sad thing. I told you before that most of the women
