The Broken (The Apostles)

Digital Galley Edition

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THE BROKEN

SHELLEY CORIELL

New York  Boston

Contents

1. Disclaimer
   
2. Title Page
   
3. Copyright
   
4. Dedication
   
5. Acknowledgments
   
6. Chapter One
   
7. Chapter Two
   
8. Chapter Three
   
9. Chapter Four
   
10. Chapter Five
    
11. Chapter Six
    
12. Chapter Seven
    
13. Chapter Eight
    
14. Chapter Nine
    
15. Chapter Ten
    
16. Chapter Eleven
    
17. Chapter Twelve
    
18. Chapter Thirteen
    
19. Chapter Fourteen
    
20. Chapter Fifteen
    
21. Chapter Sixteen
    
22. Chapter Seventeen
    
23. Chapter Eighteen
    
24. Chapter Nineteen
    
25. Chapter Twenty
    
26. Chapter Twenty-One
    
27. Chapter Twenty-Two
    
28. Chapter Twenty-Three
    
29. Chapter Twenty-Four
    
30. Chapter Twenty-Five
    
31. Chapter Twenty-Six
    
32. Chapter Twenty-Seven
    
33. Chapter Twenty-Eight
    
34. Epilogue
    

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Shelley Coriell
Excerpt from
The Buried
© 2014 Shelley Coriell
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First Edition: April 2014
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To Mom

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to the staff and guest lecturers of the Tempe Citizens Police Academy and to FBI Special Agent Jeff Thurman (Ret.) for opening the door to the criminal justice world and teaching me that law enforcement officers’ greatest weapons are their hearts.

Humble gratitude to Lauren Plude and the team at Grand Central Publishing/Forever for your expertise and enthusiasm, and to Jessica Faust, the agent who refused to give up on Smokey Joe and the Apostles.

Hugs to writerly friends and mentors who had a hand in getting this, my first romance, out the door: Jennifer Ashley, Susan Colebank, Connie Flynn, Anastasia Foxe, Susan Lanier-Graham, Varina Martindale, Sarah Parkin, Erin Quinn, Laurie Schnebly-Campbell, and Pat Warren.

As always, my heart to Lee and The Girls for loving me despite my habit of looking at blank walls and discussing plot holes with the dog.

Finally, a heart full of love and gratitude to Diana Davidson, a woman of strength, courage, and wisdom. Early on she recognized that not every little girl was meant to be a cheerleader or ballerina. Thanks, Mom, for taking me out of gymnastics and enrolling me in that book club. You, more than anyone, taught me the power and promise of a good story.

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, June 9, 1:48 a.m.
Mancos, Colorado

T
he cry was low and tortured, pulled from the gut of a man who’d been to hell and back.

Kate Johnson threw off her covers and grabbed the box of paper clips she kept on her nightstand. “I’m coming, Smokey Joe,” she called even though the old man couldn’t hear her. He was too far away, trapped in a time and place known only to his tormented mind. She tore down the steps of the cabin and into Smokey’s bedroom.

“Safety pins! Where the hell are my safety pins?” Smokey’s hands clawed at the covers she’d tucked around him four hours ago. “Dammit to hell! I need those pins.”

Kate took one of his hands in hers and dropped a handful of paper clips onto his palm. “Here you go.”

His knobby fingers clamped around the bits of metal, and he dipped them in a frantic but practiced rhythm. Eventually his cries died off and gave way to moans. Then came the sobs. They were the worst.

As she had done dozens of times over the past six months, she sank to her knees beside his bed and gathered him in her arms. Papery skin over old bones. The sour-sweet smell of cold sweat. Her cheek rubbed against the sprigs of gray hair on his head. As the sobs tapered off and his trembling ceased, she looked at her arms and shook her head. How could a hug, nothing more than two arms,
her arms
, stop a war?

When the old man’s breathing returned to normal, he opened his sightless eyes. “That you, Katy-lady?”

She squeezed his bony knee. “Yes.”

Relief smoothed the lines of terror twisting his face.

She left his bedside and opened the top drawer of the bureau. “Who was it?”

He inched himself to an upright position. “Never got a name on this one. He wasn’t talking by the time ground grunts got him in the chopper. Mortar round blew off half his neck.”

“What do you remember about him?” This was another thing she didn’t understand, Smokey’s need to relive the pains of the past. Yesterday’s horrors should be bundled up and tucked away. They had no place in this world. She reached into the drawer for a clean nightshirt.

“He had red hair, color of a firecracker, and he held a picture of his momma in his hand. We lost him before we got to Da Nang, but I made sure the hospital crew got the picture and told them to tell that boy’s momma she’d been right there with her son when he needed her, offering comfort only a momma can.”

Mommas don’t offer comfort.
The thought snuck up on her, a jarring uppercut to the chin.

“Katy-lady, you okay?”

The bureau drawer slammed shut. “I’m fine.”

She handed Smokey Joe the clean nightshirt and sat on the foot of the bed. That’s when she noticed the soft voices coming from the radio on the nightstand. A late-night talk show host was talking to William from Michigan about a school shooting in New Jersey that left two eleven-year-olds dead. “This!” She jabbed a hand at the radio. “What is
this
?”

“Don’t know.” Smokey raised his gaze to the ceiling. “Can’t see.”

She snapped off the radio, silencing the voices. “You were listening to the news before bed again, weren’t you?”

“You going to start nagging me? I don’t pay you to ride my ass.”

“No, you pay me to take care of you, and if you don’t want to take out any new help wanted ads, listen to me. Your doctor said no news before bedtime. Those stories from the Mideast bring back too many war memories.” And trigger nightmares of a time when he desperately tried to save bloody and broken bodies with only a handful of safety pins and a heart full of hope.

His gnarled fingers fumbled with the buttons of his sweat-soaked nightshirt. She reached over to help.

“I wasn’t listening to no war news. There was another one of them Barbie murders. This one right here in Colorado. All the stations are yammering about it.”

Barbie murders? What an insane world, filled with criminals without conscience, a public fascinated by the gory and gruesome, and media ready to unite the two for the sake of ratings. She didn’t miss the crazy world of broadcast news and had no regrets that she hadn’t seen a newscast in almost three years, not since she’d
been
the news.

She unfastened Smokey’s next two buttons. “So a
Barbie
was killed?”

“Yep. Course the coppers don’t call ’em Barbies. That’s just my name, but I think that makes six now, all TV gals, all stabbed to death in their homes.”

She grew still. “Broadcast journalists? Stabbed?”

“Yeah, not too pretty, either. Each gal had more than fifty knife wounds. Now why the hell does someone need to stab a body fifty times?”

Her hand sought the scar between her right eye and temple.
Because twenty-five isn’t enough to kill?

“I’ll tell you why.” Smokey jabbed a crooked index finger at his temple. “He ain’t right in the head.”

Kate slipped the shirt off Smokey’s bony shoulders, her own shoulders relaxing. As an investigative reporter she’d seen up close the machinations of the criminal mind. She knew the mean and twisted and evil that perpetuated crimes against humanity. There were plenty of bad people in this world, plenty of knife-wielding crazies, and the twenty-five scars that crisscrossed her body had nothing to do with Smokey’s
Barbies
. “Haven’t we both determined the world in general isn’t right in the head?”

“But this guy’s sick, scary sick. He does that creepy thing with the mirrors.”

The curtains on Smokey’s window shifted with the night breeze, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “Mirrors?”

“After he kills them Barbies, the screwball goes around breaking every mirror in the house. Shatters every single one. You ever heard of such a crazy thing?”

Sounds ricocheted through her head. The swoosh of a hammer. The crack of glass. The obscenely happy tinkle of falling mirror fragments.

Smokey’s shirt, soaked in sweat and terror, fell from her hand.

*  *  *

Tuesday, June 9, 2:20 a.m.
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Hayden Reed stared at the shards of mirror that once covered an entire wall in Shayna Thomas’s entryway. The largest piece was no bigger than two inches square.

Insanity was one hell of a wrecking ball.

He squatted to study the destruction, looking for trace—blood, footprints, hairs, fibers, anything that would lead him to the killer he’d been tracking for five months. All he saw in the broken mirror were distorted bits of his face, a macabre reflection of a man who’d been slammed by a wrecking ball of his own.

Parker Lord’s voice echoed through his head. “Hold off on the Colorado slaying,” his boss had said. “Hatch can cover for you and bring you up to speed when you get things wrapped up in Tucson with your family.”

Hayden stood. His family was fine.

Time to hunt for the Butcher. But first he needed to track down Sergeant Lottie King.

A uniform directed Hayden through the living room and down a hallway where he came face-to-face with a short, round African American woman. Her crinkly gray hair hugged her head in a tight knot, and she wore a simple navy suit and a Glock 22 holstered under her left arm. On her feet were the highest, reddest heels he’d ever seen outside a whorehouse.

“Chief warned me some FBI hotshot was coming in, and you got hotshot written all over you.” The sergeant crossed her arms over her chest. “My boys said you’re one of Parker Lord’s men, a fucking Apostle. That true?”