“And he lived for quite a while,” she said, marveling.
“Well, I treated him really well,” he said. “I had to, you know? Because I really, really loved him.”
“I know you did,” she said, her voice softening. “He was special for you.”
“He was.” And the tears choked his throat again. “And I thought maybe she’d be special too. But it’s broken.”
“Why do you keep sayingit?” she asked.
“Becauseitis anit,” he said. “Not asheanymore. Not aheanymore. It’s dead. It’s just anit. It’s now a piece of garbage that I have to get rid of. A broken toy,” he said sadly. “And what do I do with broken toys?”
“You have to get rid of them,” she said, with that old weariness in her voice again. “And then you replace it.”
“Exactly,” he cried out. “See? You’re the only one who understands me.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I understand anything,” she said sadly.
“You do,” he assured her. “You know you can ask me anything. I’m happy to tell you.”
“I know,” she said, “except for that one question I keep asking that you refuse to answer.”
“Well, stop asking that one then,” he said crossly.
“No, you said you’d tell me anything. So, tell me why you’re doing this.”
“And I keep telling you,” he said, “it’s because I’m lonely.”
“That’s a reason. It’s not a motive,” she said.
He frowned. “They are the same thing,” he said, getting angry at her for splitting hairs over a simple word.
“No, that is a reason that you give to others, but it’s not the motivation inside you that’s telling you to do this,” she said, her voice getting hard and angry too.
Every time they talked about it, they ended up back at the same point.
“You can listen to what you want to listen to,” he said, “and I’ll listen to what I want to listen to. The bottom line is that this is the way it is. I’m not changing.”
“Yes,” she said, “that we can agree on.”
And, with that, she hung up.
Chapter 6
Tuesday Morning
The next morningKate was sipping her coffee and running through the files. It was 10:15 a.m. already. She set the computers for multiple searches, and then she went case by case by case, looking for any elements that linked to the theory she was working on. On one of the images, she caught an ever-so-tiny nick on the inside of the left wrist. She stared at it, magnifying it many times over. She went back to her other seven cases, all eight similar to Jason’s, and found something at the same place but too grainy to clearly see it.
Was it possible?Excitement gripped her. She flicked through Jason’s digital folder but didn’t have a good picture of Jason’s left wrist. She picked up the phone and called the coroner’s office.
“Jason’s wrist,” she said, “left hand, above the wrist bone,” she said. “Is a tiny mark there?”
“I can check,” Dr. Smidge said. “The photos are in the file. Can’t you see the mark on the images?”
“Something’s there, more of a shadow on the photo,” she said.
“You seem to be pretty excited about it,” he said in a dry tone.
“Anything that we can find is a help,” she said. “No, I don’t know in what way, but, if a mark is there, this might connect a bunch of other cases.”