Killing Ways. Alex Barclay

going to keep you on the line with me, get some more details from you. Are you in a position to stay with her while we send help?’

      ‘Yes, yes, I can,’ said Amanda. ‘Please hurry, though. Please hurry. She’s very distressed.’

      ‘Thank you, ma’am. Can you tell me the name of the woman please?’

      Amanda turned to the woman, whose eyes appeared to be growing larger in her skeletal face. Her lips were dried out, cracked, ringed with deep lines. She pressed them together.

      ‘What’s your name?’ said Amanda. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

      The woman’s lips parted. She began rocking back and forth. But instead of speaking, she quietly croaked a tuneless song, her voice flat, broken, her eyes now scrunched closed: ‘Needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part, needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part, needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part.’

      Her arm shot out, and she slapped the phone out of Amanda Petrie’s hand.

      Kurt Vine was busy shunting memories of bad men and bad game plays out of his mind when he saw two women standing by the roadside. He looked around, for a moment thinking he was driving through a movie set. Or a game. There was a cute girl and an old lady who looked like she had been dug up from a grave. This was some kind of a two-woman zombie apocalypse situation.

      Weird shit just keeps on happening to me, he thought. He watched as the old woman suddenly slapped the girl’s hand. He pulled over, parked the pickup, and climbed down.

      ‘Ladies!’ he said, moving as quickly as he could toward them, wiping the sweat that always flowed so readily. ‘How can I be of assistance?’ It was a line from Hufuki, but he figured it was appropriate.

      Douglas County Undersheriff Cole Rodeal stood in the ambulance bay of the Sky Ridge Medical Center, tuning out his wife, Edie, the EMS Coordinator. As soon as she had used the expression ‘me time’, he was gone. Maybe that was because he didn’t love Edie any more, and hated himself for it. Really, it was because he was depressed and hadn’t realized it. He wanted to be home, in his den, with a box set from a time when women had never heard the expression ‘me time’. He was jolted from his thoughts by the screech of tires and a small scream from the wife he really did love. He turned to where she was looking.

       Oh, fuck.

      Kurt Vine liked being part of this emergency that he knew, in his heart, wasn’t a true emergency. He was driving like he had a siren, but he knew this crazy lady in the nightgown was going to be all right. She was starved and beaten and she smelled like shit, but she wasn’t dying, as far as he could tell.

      He was finally easing off the gas as they approached the ambulance bay at Sky Ridge.

      ‘What is that smell?’ he said. He looked into the back seat. ‘Holy shit! She’s on fire! She’s on fucking fire!’

      Amanda Petrie turned around at the same time and screamed. Small flames were rising from the terrified woman’s chest and shoulders. Her nightgown was melting into her skin, her hair shriveling.

      ‘Holy fucking shit!’ said Kurt, slamming his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, sending the pickup shooting toward a group of EMTs, until he yanked the steering wheel hard and plowed instead into the side wall of the hospital.

      On impact, the old lady said: ‘I did something real bad. Something terrible brought me here.’

       1

      ‘That lady died.’ Special Agent Ren Bryce turned to Everett King, one of her newest colleagues, an ex-trader, financial and IT expert, and quick, firm friend. ‘The one from the crash at Sky Ridge Medical Center. No one came forward to claim her, no match with any missing persons …’ She shook her head. ‘Rodeal reckons she was held captive somewhere for months at the very least: she had rope burns on her wrists, bruises on her ankles as if she’d been shackled, she was starved, beaten. But they found nothing in the neighborhood canvas. They ran her details through the system – nothing. Imagine that’s your life … tortured and neglected to death.’

      ‘Like your liver,’ said Everett.

      Ren was shaking a bottle of Fiji to help dissolve the two Alka-Seltzer she had broken into it.

      ‘My liver is well tended to,’ said Ren.

      ‘Like a captor tends to his captee.’

      ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’ She took a drink. She had already drunk a bottle of freshly squeezed pineapple juice. Hangover Cure Supreme. The Alka-Seltzer was a rarely required second step. The previous night was a blur of bright lights, colorful drinks, and dancing on chairs and half-empty dance floors with two girls she had met at her bipolar support group two weeks earlier. They had presumed that, like them, she was unlucky enough to be a bipolar-loved-one wrangler, not the wranglee. That was often the case. Ren didn’t want to lie, but she didn’t want to correct them. She just wanted to party. The women were at the support group to learn how not to enable their loved one. Instead, they were fine-tuning the art of enabling a stranger. But there was no law against it. Ren smiled to herself: there should, in fact, be laws to fully support it.

      Ren had been off her meds for three months.

      ‘Did you see the video of the crash?’ she said.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Rodeal was quite the hero – dived for his wife, totally saved her life, broke his arm in the fall. Sexism in Emergencies: it’s not all bad when a man thinks women need to be saved.’

      ‘It was his wife …’

      ‘I’ve dealt with him, work-wise,’ said Ren. ‘I walk away with a twitch in my eye. Sometimes I think he expects me to be the one serving the refreshments.’

      ‘Oh, baby girl, you always servin’ up the refreshment!’

      ‘And you keep topping up those glasses, handsome man.’

      ‘God help this guy,’ said Everett, nodding toward the glass panel of the interview room where murder suspect Jonathan Briar was perfectly framed. Briar’s fiancée, twenty-three-year-old Hope Coulson, had now been missing from their Denver apartment for twenty-eight days. Briar had ignited public suspicion with the first dopey words out of his mouth when asked about her on live television: ‘Aww … I’m sure she’ll be back,’ he said, smiling like an idiot, next to Hope Coulson’s weeping parents.

      ‘He doesn’t yet know that he meets a lot of the criteria for the Ren Bryce Book of Wrong,’ said Everett. ‘Stoner – check! Skinny dreads – check! Mouth too small – check! And my second favorite: rat-colored hair – check! I mean, rats are gray. His hair is mousey.’

      ‘Rats are creepier.’

      ‘And my all-time-favorite,’ said Everett. ‘Eyes overly almond: check!’

      ‘Because I like almond-shaped eyes,’ said Ren. ‘Too almond, though – that’s a problem.’ She looked at Everett. ‘I’m a nightmare. I know. Judgey McJudgicles.’

      ‘On the upside of his issues,’ said Everett, ‘every time he appears on screen or in print, the line of volunteer searchers grows.’

      Hope Coulson had captured the public’s hearts. She was a sweet, blonde, kind-hearted kindergarten teacher, a volunteer for everything from painting the ladies’ nails at her local retirement home to delivering Meals on Wheels to the housebound, to being stationed at First-Aid tents at community events. At one time, Jonathan Briar looked like nothing more harmful than a guy who was batting above his weight. Now, he was looking like a killer.

      Ren drank the rest of the Alka-Seltzer, then held a hand to her stomach.