Page 14 of The Broken Places

“Well,” she said. “There’s the obvious bondage angle. S and M? Fifty shades of fucked up?”

He huffed out a small chuckle. “A singular belt is a pretty skimpy prop collection for a domination scenario.”

“Red rooms of pain are expensive. Our victims weren’t exactly rolling in dough.” She frowned as she ran her tongue over her teeth. “Butyeah, one belt doesn’t tell us a lot. It might be a role-play, and it might just have fallen out of one of their bags.”

“Or one of them could have removed it to use as a weapon.”

“Maybe, but there was no blood or tissue found on it.”

He looked away out the passenger-side window as he pictured the photographs he’d seen of the two people who’d died bloody deaths in the abandoned building, thinking about what exactly might have happened there. Lennon had proposed that the belt might have been a prop because she’d made a guess that the toys at the other scene were used that way. But ... “We have no direct evidence the teddy bear was part of a role-play, so this line of thinking might be moot.”

“No, I know. I’m just thinking aloud.” She turned toward him. “It helps me sort through things. Does it bother you?” There was no sarcasm in her voice. She seemed to be posing an honest question, and so he took a moment to think about it.

He usually worked alone, so it’d never been an issue. But for Inspector Lennon Gray? It wouldn’t be a sacrifice. “It’s not my usual style, but I can adjust.”

She let out a small breathy laugh, and in the bright daylight of the car, he could see the faded freckles scattered across her nose. The glow caught the golden hazel of her eyes and brought out the pale ring of green. Her eyes were like the clearing he’d once stood in in the redwood forest, gazing up at those impossibly massive trees as sunlight seeped between the gaps in their feathery branches. He’d closed his eyes and felt connected to some greater whole even while he’d never been more aware of his own smallness. There had been something ... wonderful about that feeling. A letting-go. An acceptance. An understanding that was beyond him and yet was more real than anything he’d ever experienced before that moment. And for whatever reason, he felt some small remnant of that feeling now, though he couldn’t begin to explain it, couldn’t imagine how that moment and this one were remotely similar. “I appreciate that, Mars,” she said. “There might be hope for this partnership yet.”

He smiled. He couldn’t even remember what she was responding to, his mind had drifted so far away. But regardless of why, he liked what she’d said. And despite his deep uneasiness about this case, he hoped that was true, because he enjoyed being around this woman who was a confusing mix of traits that he hadn’t yet managed to make sense of. Typically, that bothered him. He liked categorizing things, identifying and naming them. He found comfort and satisfaction in both the process and the result. But in Lennon’s case, he didn’t mind being in somewhat uncharted territory.Interesting. What is it about you that makes me comfortable with a lack of boundaries?

Lennon turned over the ignition and looked in the rearview mirror as she began backing out. “I have a meeting with the lieutenant in an hour, and then I need to look through the other footage from nearby businesses. Unfortunately, several in that area closed in the last few years, so we’re limited. But an alert just came in that some more was delivered. I’ll call the Gilbert House this afternoon and make sure they’re open tomorrow, and we’ll meet up in the morning?”

“Yeah, sure. That sounds good,” he said. “I need to bring myself up to date on the details of the other scenes. Hopefully in the morning we can get at least one ID.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

It’d been several months since Lennon had reason to be in the Tenderloin neighborhood. It seemed that even in that short time, the stark squalor and human misery on Hyde Street, onto which she and Ambrose had just turned, had increased significantly.

It was Thanksgiving Day, and apparently none of these people had anywhere to go. Or maybe it was early enough that they hadn’t made their way over to one of the churches serving meals.

She had called the Gilbert House the day before and wasn’t surprised when she was told they’d be staffed this morning. Places like that didn’t get a day off. The homeless problem didn’t go away on holidays. Neither did crime.

She’d been forced to park several blocks away, and as they began walking toward the Leavenworth address, she saw Ambrose glancing around, the expression on his face slightly stunned. “When was the last time you were in the city?” she asked.

He glanced over at her. “It’s been years.”

She stepped around some trash. “Compared to the suburbs, this must look like a dystopian hellscape.”

He gave a gravelly laugh. “You could say that. Things are bad here.”

Yes, things were bad here, even if, geographically speaking, the TL was prime real estate, smack-dab in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world.San Francisco’s purgatory.Lennon was alocal, but even she didn’t know all the historical reasons why gentrification had failed here. But it most certainly had.

“What’d you do in Pleasant Hill anyway?” she asked. She knew it was unwise to become distracted on a street such as this one, but a small sliver of distraction, frankly, was also necessary.

He turned his head toward her, and despite the hollow look in his eyes, his pace didn’t slow. His body language told her he was more surprised by the state of this place than scared by the inhabitants, and that made her feel more at ease with him. She might be able to count on him not to run and hide if they faced a physical threat. For now, however, the only threat was being waged on their olfactory lobes.

“We did a lot of everything. My interest area was missing persons, but there aren’t a lot of cases there, so when we learned they couldn’t spare any agents here in San Francisco and were contacting local field offices regarding this case, I volunteered for the chance to get some experience related to violent crime.”

He’d said it smoothly, but Lennon had this odd feeling that he’d rehearsed his answer. Was there something more to this case that the FBI knew but weren’t sharing with them? “Why exactly was the FBI called in on this case, though? I mean, I get that the idea of a serial killer always alerts the feds, but we aren’t even certain that’s the case yet. It seems ... early for you—or any agent—to be here working this case.”

Ambrose stepped around a pile of vomit on the sidewalk. “I think they might be concerned about a new street drug taking hold. A few years ago, a drug that’s a mix of fentanyl and a horse tranquilizer called xylazine started becoming more widely used. It began as a small problem, but it’s since blown up. I don’t think the government wants to be caught on the wrong side of something like that again.”

“Is that the zombie drug?”

“Tranq. You’ve heard of it?”

“Yeah.” She’d personally seen the effects, too, namely the rotting wounds that often led to amputation. And she’d heard of a case in Oakland where a man literally ate part of his friend’s face while underthe influence. And it didn’t respond to Narcan, which was a whole other problem. “So it’s not so much the serial killer possibility but the worry that the homemade drug found at the scene is a mix of hallucinogens that causes people to become homicidal?”

“Possibly. Either way, it’s best to get ahead of the situation. These things can easily become political. They affect the state of health care and a hundred other bureaucracies. At the moment, it’s not known if the drug was cooked up in someone’s basement, an illegal lab, or if it came across the border.”

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