Kill Game: An Unforgettable Serial Killer Thriller Read online

  Bella glowered at her.

  “I’ve got work to do,” she said, pulling her arm out of Sandy’s grasp. Sandy was quick. Bella was freed from Sandy’s acrylic clutches only to have them clamp down on her again.

  “Do you have any footage of the killer?” Her cameraman had joined her and was blinding Bella with his lighting kit.

  “Not at this time.” The light was hot against her cheeks. Of course she would be caught on camera. She’d probably see her face, haggard with sweat and insomnia all over the morning news. The entire city of Portland would get a firsthand look of what happened to her hair in the rain. Perfect. “Look, Sandy. They need me in there.”

  But Sandy was relentless, her face hovering next to the greedy square of the camera lens.

  “Detective Cruz, how are you feeling, considering what happened?”

  Bella stopped pulling away for a second. She squinted past the light to where Shrewd Sandy’s glossy lips formed a wry smile. Bella knew what she meant, and she knew damn well what Sandy was going to say next.

  This time it was a sudden flood of anger that seemed to knock her knees out from under her. Her hand balled into a fist again beside her. She felt the muscles in her lean arms clench. She’d like to smack that fish mouth right off her face—watch the silicone spill out when her fist crushed those ridiculous lips against her teeth.

  “Considering what, exactly?”

  “Considering your history, Detective,” the woman continued without a pause. “Considering they’re saying the girl is not much older than you were when you were—”

  “Detective Cruz,” Kyle’s voice called above the crowd.

  The camera light still blinding her, Bella turned to where she could make out the shape of her partner’s body ducking under the police tape. He pushed through the other reporters until he was beside her, catching her arm and pulling her away from the spotlight.

  “Is this your partner, Detective? Will you be taking the case, or is there too much personal connection? How long has the child been dead?” Now that Kyle was dragging her away, Sandy lost control of her façade, and the questions spilled out of her. “Is there any sign the girl had been raped or abused in any way?”

  Bella stopped, the anger that had made her arms tense filling her entire body. She planted her feet and turned back to face the jackal behind her.

  “Look, you parasitic bitch. Whatever sensational bullshit you’re looking for, you’re not going to get it from me. You’ll wait for us to throw you whatever scraps we see fit, got it?”

  She heard Kyle mumble under his breath. There was a yank on her arm, and the light was gone from her eyes again. Sandy’s voice continued from behind her as she was maneuvered through the crowd. She blinked into the darkness as faded red and yellow dots from the camera’s light danced across the faces of officers and citizens.

  “Good work, Bella. Don’t think they’re not going to use all that as a sound bite. You want to explain to the captain why you’re swearing all over the news today, or should I?”

  Kyle had stopped dragging her and was holding up the yellow tape so she could step under it. He looked at her disparagingly as she passed, gawking at the hair she’d not had time to straighten and the oversized black hoodie that swallowed her as she walked. Bella felt him watching her and glared as she passed.

  “Now I’ll have an answer when they ask me,” Kyle said, joining his partner as they walked toward the front of the building.

  “An answer to what?”

  “When the guys ask me what you look like in your off hours.”

  She glared at him again, her large brown eyes narrowing.

  “What’s that? Go on. This should be good.”

  “A baby crow. You know, all black and fuzzy and miserable.”

  Bella ignored that comment, fighting off the irresistible temptation to grin, but the scene before her stole any chance of a giggle for tonight. They reached a private area where a pile of officers had formed a kind of living fence around the crime scene. They parted as soon as they noticed her, stepping aside with their eyes dropped.

  Do they know? Bella thought. Of course they know. Everyone does. My life was all over the news until I was way past puberty. And keeping it quiet within the police force? Forget it.

  Bella tilted her head toward the cameras at the entranceway, where they’d been disabled. Glass littered the ground under one, twinkling like frost around where the outline of a small body had been made. The other was intact but inactive, as suggested by the blank led bulb. She took everything in at once, her mind snapping a continual roll of mental images—of awful memories that hadn’t left her head in years.

  Kyle was at her elbow.

  “They’re placing the time the killer dumped the body at around an hour ago. The consensus is she was killed off-site, but probably not long before the drop. We’re still waiting on the autopsy to help us get a better idea of the time of death.”

  Bella studied the outline. The killer had tossed her into a supine position, judging by the outline, with her arms and legs spread wide. Vulnerable. Bella’s stomach leapt.

  “Any idea who she was?”

  Kyle shook his head. “No ID, no purse. We got nothing on her. We’re running her prints through the missing… children database nationwide.”

  Bella couldn’t help but notice the pause that came with the word “children.” Kyle was clearly struggling with this—still green enough to have cases like this shake him up, but by the look in his eyes it was more sympathy for her than anything else. Her stomach ached again. Hadn’t she done enough to prove to all these boys that she was tough enough to handle anything, regardless of her past? Bella looked up at him, fixing him with her unblinking gaze. She was good at those.

  “How old was she, approximately?”

  Kyle coughed and adjusted his tie. Even after the early-morning call, he’d still managed to put on a tie. She could never decide if he was a sweetheart or just a kiss-ass.

  “Maybe twelve to fourteen. That’s what they’re thinking.”

  “Cause of death?” Every officer there was avoiding her eyes. They skulked around her like she had disciplined them all before arriving.

  “Strangulation. And she’d been…”

  When Bella spoke, her voice was flat. “She’d been what, Kyle?”

  “Interfered with. Before or after death, we’re not sure yet.”

  Her stomach convulsed again, this time harder than the last. Although she hadn’t eaten and couldn’t exactly remember the last time she’d done so, she felt a wave of nausea tighten her throat. She closed her eyes, despite the feeling of her partner’s gaze on her like one of those big-eyed paintings from the sixties.

  You’ve got this. You’re a survivor and you’ve got this.

  “Are you…?” Kyle’s voice was soft. He was still at her side, practically cuddled up against her, compelled by what Bella knew was his protective nature. She interrupted him before he could continue. Her voice sounded more tired than she realized.

  “Yeah, I’m fine—just fine,” she said, as if to convince herself. “I’m great. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Kyle’s face always struck Bella as belonging to some kind of fifties matinee idol. Even pale with concern, it was still built with the kind of proportions that might have made him a lot of money had he been a different man. His blue eyes looked black in the dim light of the streetlamps.

  “Look, I probably shouldn’t have called you.” He sighed and surveyed the scene. With the paramedics gone and all the photos taken, the number of officers was beginning to dwindle. “Captain Brooks is still in New York, and if you ask me, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I’ll brief him when he lands in a few hours, and I’ll take it from there. Go home, get some rest, and I can fill you in in the morning. You don’t…” He paused again, looking down at his overly polished shoes. “Well, you don’t look that great, Bella.”

  Bella rested her face in her hands and groaned. The offer of sleep was t
empting. She pictured her bed, unfriendly place that it had been lately, and wondered if she could actually do it. For something she worked so hard to control, her body was in a constant rebellion when it came to sleep these days. It was the darkness that was the worst. Not the real darkness—that she could handle—but it was the darkness behind her eyes that was the hardest to take. It lit up nightly with home videos she’d rather not watch. Home videos carefully curated by that little voice inside her head that only pushing herself to impossible treadmill feats could silence.

  She jumped when she felt Kyle’s hand on her shoulder. It was warm, not grasping or pulling but tender in an awkward kind of way.

  Bella took her face from her hands. She managed a weak smile.

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I like that.” She turned to face her partner. “You’ve got this covered, then?”

  The smile he gave her was a thing of beauty. “Of course.”

  Bella returned the smile, hoping it came out as genuine. She then dug into her pocket and pulled out her keys. She pointed them at Kyle’s chest for emphasis as she spoke. “Just a few hours. Just for a nap, not a whole sleep. I’ll be back at work before eight to give you a hand figuring this shit out.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll have the entire thing solved in an hour.” Kyle continued to grin, his megawatt-white row of teeth almost as blinding as Sandy’s camera light. “Just wind me up and watch me go.”

  Bella smirked back at his enthusiasm. She couldn’t remember ever being as enthusiastic about life as this guy was. It was endearing and youthful, and although they were only a few years apart, sometimes it made her feel like his grandmother in comparison. When had she gotten so bitter? So brittle? “Yeah, well, you better find your pace first so you don’t hurt yourself.”

  Chapter Three

  If Bella had been less preoccupied, she might have noticed that her normal five-minute bedtime routine had taken almost half an hour. She’d stood in silence by the front door, key in hand, long enough to hear the freight elevator behind her travel up and down the building at least twice. She’d stood even longer by her kitchen sink, gazing out at the dawn skyline with a forgotten glass of juice in her hand. Her time in the shower had been the lengthiest—the water sculpting her dark hair onto her face and shoulders as it rolled down her unmoving body into the drain. It was as if the storm that raged in her mind had caused some kind of power outage. She had nothing left.

  Sandy McDonald. Shrewd Sandy of the Portland Morning Edition. Even now that she’d showered, scrubbed, and crawled into her bed, she could still feel the woman’s nails grabbing at her as she passed. Was she even old enough to know what had happened to Bella all those years ago? Had she actually done the research on her? Not that there wasn’t a shortage of archived articles online. Her case had been quite a sensation back in the day. For a while there wasn’t a paper in town that didn’t have the captain and her on the front page.

  “Detective Cruz, how are you feeling, considering what happened?”

  “Considering what, exactly?”

  “Considering your history, Detective.”

  Bella rolled over, seeking comfort on her other side and burying her face in the pillow. The city outside her window had fallen into its deepest sleep before the dawn. Without the honking and rush of downtown traffic, her sighing and the rustling of the duvet she was trying to burrow into was too loud to ignore.

  Bella brought the comforter up around her chin, her knees curling up to her chest in the tight fetal position she spent most nights in. She closed her eyes against the sudden constriction in her chest. This was dangerous territory. Although there were twenty-five years between eight-year-old Bella and the exhausted, overworked detective she was today, there were still moments. Bad moments. Awful, haunting moments that froze her in place.

  Her loft apartment, as bare as an institution, yawned away from her on all sides. The dull, gray light of the morning somehow made it seem even emptier, the walls higher than she remembered and the floors colder and dustier.

  Just go to sleep. That was all she had to do. A few hours and she’d wake up ready to give whatever animal responsible for tonight’s drama the attention he was no doubt craving. But not now. Lights exploded behind her eyelids like silent fireworks, and she forced herself to slow her breathing. Just two hours, she told herself. Two hours and you can get right back into it.

  Her phone burst into life on the table beside her. It rotated with vibration, its cheerful trill a scream in the quiet room. Adrenaline searing through her body, she had it in her hand and to her ear before it could ring again.

  “Cruz here,” she said, her tongue barely responding. Had she actually been asleep?

  “It’s Kyle.” Adrenaline was replaced with annoyance. She looked at the clock on the nightstand. She’d slept for two hours in what had seemed like a second. She tried to get her bearings, her mind and mouth still thick with interrupted sleep.

  “What’s going on? I was asleep. It’s five already?” She pushed her sweat-matted hair out of her eyes to look out the large warehouse window in her bedroom. It was definitely lighter outside than it had been, but being Portland in the fall, not by much.

  “Bella, I don’t want you to think I’m not handling this, because I am. But…”

  The fog in her brain cleared as soon as she heard his hesitant tone. He was being careful with his word choices, and she didn’t like it one bit. “But what?” she asked, already getting ready and scanning the floor to find her clothes. “What’s going on?”

  Kyle’s breathing sighed through the phone. Why was this so hard for him?

  Bella pulled on a pair of black jeans she’d yanked from the pile of laundry lazing in the corner like a collapsed drunk. She fed her legs through them, the phone clutched between her ear and shoulder, making no sound until Kyle finally spoke up.

  “We got a set of fingerprints off the body. We’re not sure yet, as I’m making them test again, but it just… It doesn’t make sense, is all.”

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Bella found a tank top, and after a quick sniff, she slipped it on. Another pause. “Jesus, Kyle. By the time you spit it out, I’ll already be down at the bureau.” The laugh she attempted sounded too dry and betrayed her impatience.

  But her humour was short-lived, as when Kyle said those next few words, they repeated on her like a drink she couldn’t hold down. It left a sour taste in her mouth, knotting her insides and making her retch.

  “Bella,” he said. “The prints belong to Salem Ross.”

  Chapter Four

  In all her eight years of life, nobody had ever told Bella to shut up before. Nor had they used that other word. Of her mother’s list of very bad, terrible things that little girls should never say, the men in the front seat of the car were using that one the most. There were other words, too, that the little girl hadn’t even heard before—hateful-sounding words that were more like a slap than a sound. Maybe those ones were so bad that even her mother didn’t know them. Maybe her papa had used them, and that’s why her mother had decided to leave. Maybe her papa was just like the men in the front seat. Could it be that he had a secret face that looked just as theirs did—mouths full of rotten, snapping teeth, and eyes rolling around in too-wide, too-red sockets?

  When they looked over their shoulders to yell at her, to tell her to “shut up,” they reminded her of starving donkeys she’d seen once. She’d been not much older than five, and someone, her papa perhaps, had been pushing her toward the animals’ pen. They’d reached their narrow, bony muzzles through the wood, their lips searching for the apple the little girl had been instructed to feed them. Even their teeth seemed to strain forward, their sightless eyes bulging with desperation. She’d cried then, sickened by their ugliness. She shouldn’t have, she knew that now. She knew now that there were things you should save your tears for. Terrible things, like what happened today.

  When they shot her mother, her body had crumpled onto the floor o
f the convenience store so fast that Bella had frozen. She’d been clinging to her one moment, her thin arms wrapped around her waist and her head buried in her mother’s side, and the next she was all alone in this world. She could hear her mother’s voice echoing in her body, higher than she’d ever heard it before and wavering with an unfamiliar panic.

  Even when Papa was at his worst—even when her mother pushed her into the closet and told her to be quiet—her voice had been as confident and smooth as someone on television. The pitch of her mother’s tone before the men shot her had made Bella feel like she was either going to be sick or have an accident.

  Then there was a sound. It was so loud her eyes had slammed shut without her consent, and her ears felt like they’d filled with warm water. Her mother’s body was folding onto the dirty floor, twisting and spilling over itself like a marionette that’d had its strings cut all at once.

  But that was back then. Before they took her.

  “Salem’s going to be pissed—you know how he gets.” One of the donkey boys turned back in the car to glare at her. When he turned the way he did, his neck craning back to see past the headrest, she could see what looked like yellow clouds in the whites of his eyes. It was almost the same color as his hair—a sickly straw shade that faded into his complexion. “Especially if she don’t stop crying. Shut up! What the hell, man? How much can a kid cry?”

  The one driving was just as pale. He was bald—either naturally or by choice, Bella couldn’t tell and didn’t care—and all she could see of him was the mess of ginger freckles that covered every inch of his white, moist head. She saw his eyes once in a while, too, but only through the rearview mirror. He stared at her now, his starving-animal glare restless.