Incarnate Read online

  “You’re out of the scary spaceship now, isn’t that right?”

  She nodded. “It was so cold . . .”

  Kim made her voice as steady and soothing as possible, hoping she’d get more information today than she had during the last conversation with this alter—otherwise, this second chance Zack was giving her wasn’t going to do any good. “Henry, I’m going to ask you some questions about the day you got put in the spaceship. And after that, you will be all done and you can go rest. Does that sound like a good idea?”

  “So sleepy,” Scarlett said.

  “I know, sweetheart, and you’re almost finished here. There’s just one thing left to do. Whoever put you in the spaceship was very, very bad. You know that, right?”

  Tears puddled in Scarlett’s eyes and spilled over, coursing down her cheeks. What was remarkable to Kim was that even though it was Scarlett’s body in the chair across from her, Henry’s alter took over her so completely—his expressions, the childlike way his mouth wobbled—that it was easy to forget that he was inhabiting the body of a nineteen-year-old girl. There were moments when she was completely convinced that a child sat across from her.

  “Very bad,” Scarlett agreed, snuffling.

  “And I know this is hard to talk about, and it makes us all sad, but that bad person needs to be punished. We need to make sure that what happened to you doesn’t happen to another little child. Doesn’t that sound important?”

  “Yes,” Scarlett mumbled. “I hate him. He is very bad.”

  Him. He. Kim’s pulse quickened—progress, at last. Henry wasn’t shying away from the subject, at least. Now they just needed some description, something they could pursue as a lead. She glanced at Zack, who gave her the smallest nod of encouragement.

  “What can you tell me about the bad man?” she asked, willing herself to take things slow, not to let her urgency frighten Henry.

  “Old,” Scarlett said. “Mean. Smells bad. Put me in a car . . . a big car.”

  Zack made a note on his legal pad and turned his gaze back to Scarlett.

  “Did you ride in the car, Henry?” Maybe there was some detail here that could identify the killer, some distinctive feature of the vehicle that Zack could trace in a police database.

  “Yes,” he said. “It bumped a lot.”

  Kim bit back her frustration. “Do you remember anything else about the car? Like what color it was?”

  Scarlett frowned and shook her head.

  “Okay.” Time to take a different tack. “Do you know where the bad man lived?”

  “No. Just the car. And the spaceship. And the game.” More tears welled and spilled down Scarlett’s cheeks. “He made me play a very bad game. It hurt.”

  Kim’s heart broke for the little boy, for the things he’d been made to endure. The terror and pain he’d felt. “Can you tell me anything else about what he looked like? Take your time, Henry. There’s no rush. Just think, and let us know if there’s anything else you remember.”

  Scarlett was quiet for a few minutes. Then she poked a finger at her top lip, pushing it up. “His teeth. They were big and ugly. And one went this way.” She twisted her finger halfway around.”

  Zack broke in. “What color was his hair?”

  Scarlett wouldn’t look at Zack. Instead, she whispered to Kim, “Is he mean?”

  “Detective Trainor? No—no, he’s a good guy,” she said reassuringly, glaring at Zack to be quiet. “He’s here to help. It’s okay to talk to him.”

  But Scarlett turned and buried her face in the chair’s upholstery. Her shoulders shook as she cried.

  “Henry. Henry, it’s all right. Henry . . .” Kim got out of her chair and went around the table, and crouched down next to Scarlett, touching her shoulder. “Honey, it’s going to be okay.”

  “I didn’t like the stomping,” she whispered.

  “The stomping? What stomping?”

  “When he walked. His foot went stomp.”

  Kim thought for a moment. “Do you mean he had a limp?”

  “It was too loud. It went stomp!” Scarlett made a fist and hit her other arm with it, then dragged her fist along her forearm. Henry was too young to know the word limp, perhaps, but he could be describing a leg dragging along the floor.

  Kim exchanged a glance with Zack, who frowned and made another note.

  She patted Scarlett’s shoulder again. “Okay, honey, you’ve done really well today. Is there anything else you remember?”

  But Scarlett just continued to sob, her shoulders shaking more and more. Kim realized this was about as far as she was going to get, at least for this session.

  “It’s okay, Henry. You’ve done a great job here. And now it’s our turn. It’s Zack’s job to find the bad guy and make sure he never hurts anyone else ever again, and Zack and his friends are going to work very hard to take care of that, so you don’t have to worry about the bad man anymore. Do you understand?”

  After a long moment, Scarlett nodded. Then, as if as an afterthought, she turned to Zack. “Does your police car have red and blue lights?”

  Zack nodded. “Yes, it does. And a siren.” When Scarlett smiled meekly, he smiled back. He caught himself, realizing that he believed . . . for a split second.

  Kim saw it, too. She turned back to Scarlett. “So you and I are going to say good-bye now, and you’re going to leave this—this place where you’ve been staying, and go home.” Kim was completely out of her element, talking about an afterlife of which she had no firm concept. All she knew was that the soul of a dead child had taken up occupancy in a living young woman, and for both their sakes, it was time to move on. “Do you . . . do you know where home is, Henry?”

  “Yes,” Scarlett said, and wiped her tears away with a fist, sitting up straighter. “The silver place. It’s nice.”

  Kim kept her tone even. “Okay, that’s good. Very good. Are you ready to go to the silver place?”

  Scarlett nodded, a tiny smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  “You’ve done so well, Henry.” Kim took her hands and squeezed them gently before releasing them. “Good-bye.”

  Scarlett’s eyes closed and she slumped back in the chair. After a second, her face went slack, and she was instantly recognizable as herself again. She stirred and rubbed her eyes, slowly sitting up, blinking and looking around the room. Her gaze fell on Kim crouching next to her.

  “How was it?” she asked anxiously. “Did you learn anything? Did I do okay?”

  “Better than okay,” Zack said, letting out a low whistle. “I’m pretty sure Henry just identified his killer. The limp? And the tooth? I think I know who he’s talking about.”

  “That’s— Who?” Kim breathed.

  But Zack was already out of his chair, his hand on the doorknob. “Sorry, active investigation—can’t tell you more yet. But thanks, Scarlett. And, Kim. This has been a big help. I’ll, uh, buy you a beer sometime.”

  Then he was gone. Kim and Scarlett looked at each other, and Scarlett burst into unexpected laughter. “A beer? He wants to buy you a beer?”

  “And all I had to do to earn it was for you to be falsely arrested, hassled, and possessed by restless spirits,” Kim said, feeling a small laugh of her own bubble up inside her. It felt good to release the tension—it had been so long since she’d had anything to laugh about. “Listen, I know that had to be tough on you. What do you say to getting out of here? Can I take you to dinner?”

  Scarlett’s smile faded. “Thanks, Kim, but I’m really tired. If you could take me home, I just want to see my dad. And my sister. And then I want to crawl into bed.”

  “Of course,” Kim said. As they left the stark, cold interview room, her heart ached for Scarlett for the thousandth time. Until all the alters found what they were looking for and moved on, Scarlett’s life would never be her own.

  * * *

  “WHY ME?”

  Kim had already pulled up to Scarlett’s house. She had said good night. She had even offered
to walk the girl to the door, risking a run-in with the girl’s father. But Scarlett sat, legs pulled up to her chest, barely breathing.

  Of course, Kim didn’t have the answer to Scarlett’s question, not that she hadn’t struggled to answer it already. It dogged her from the moment she gave voice to her theory that Scarlett had . . . absorbed these lost souls.

  “The time capsule . . . it was buried on the same day I was born?”

  Kim nodded. “Yes.”

  “And the little boy, he died inside? On that same day?”

  Kim nodded again. “It looks that way.”

  “That must have been horrible. To die alone like that. In the dark.”

  Kim reached over and touched Scarlett’s hand. “You shouldn’t think about this.”

  “I was dead once.”

  At first, Kim thought maybe she misheard Scarlett; the girl was whispering so softly that it sounded as if she hadn’t meant anyone to hear her confession.

  “What do you mean, Scarlett?”

  The girl shrugged. “I’ve heard my dad tell the story before. About the day I was born. He was in the delivery room, and I guess there were some complications . . . my heart stopped. When I came out, I was . . . dead.”

  “You were stillborn?”

  Scarlett nodded. “I was dead. The, um . . . doctors and nurses, I guess they gave me CPR, compressions, broke my rib cage. When my dad tells the story, he always cries, talking about seeing his tiny baby on that big steel table, not moving. Not crying. He says they worked on me for close to three minutes before I started breathing again.”

  Kim teared up just hearing the story secondhand. She could only imagine what it was like to be there. The desperation.

  And that’s when it hit her. What if Scarlett had died at the exact same time that Henry died? Maybe in that traumatic moment, in the chaos of Henry’s fear, he lost his way to the afterlife, and in his panic, found haven inside an empty vessel—inside Scarlett’s empty vessel, which was, for a moment, soulless.

  Or maybe Kim just needed more sleep.

  But deep in her gut, something about her theory rang true. She reached out and took Scarlett’s hand. “Whatever the reason, we’ll find a way to fix this. Together.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  It took Zack until the following afternoon to get the necessary warrants, but at a little after two o’clock he texted Kim to say they’d picked up a suspect and would be interviewing him immediately.

  Kim had called him the night before, begging for more information about the man Henry had been describing. “I promise not to say a word to anyone,” she insisted, “but I can help you.”

  Kim’s pulse quickened with excitement when Zack immediately agreed. “That’s a great idea.” He hesitated for a beat before adding, “I’m honestly not sure why we don’t always invite civilians to help interrogate possible child murderers.”

  Despite her frustration, Kim smiled. He got her. But she continued to plead her case. “I’ve had experience working with sociopaths. It’s possible that, if you let me watch your interrogation, I might be able to help you learn something he wouldn’t ordinarily disclose.”

  Zack refused adamantly, but Kim patiently described some of the other cases she’d seen during her internships and in San Diego, working to convince him that she had the skills to discern the truth even when faced with the most gifted liar. With a sigh, Zack relented and told her about the man he’d encountered at the basement porn production studio.

  “Sullivan had the same tooth,” he said. “The same limp. And while we don’t have any proof of his involvement with the studio—these kids were smart enough to run the business all in cash—it’s very possible he was there for underage material, which seemed to be a specialty of the place.”

  He explained that he had pulled Albert Sullivan’s record and discovered complaints going back as far as the seventies. Peeping, following children home, lurking outside of schools—and a notable incident where a complaint from a young mother had resulted in his arrest. But there had been insufficient evidence, and in the end no charges had ever stuck.

  “The age could be right, too,” Zack continued. “Twenty years ago, he would have been in his late fifties—and that definitely would have seemed old to a five-year-old. Plus, he already had the limp by then, we confirmed that this morning—it all checks out.”

  In the end, Kim had convinced Zack to let her be present at the interrogation by reminding him that he’d never have gotten this far without her help, and swearing that she wouldn’t divulge anything she learned or interfere with his investigation in any way. After he reluctantly agreed, Zack told Kim a few details from the police investigation that the public wasn’t privy to, like the fact that the little boy was wearing Winnie-the-Pooh Tigger pajamas when he was abducted, and the fact that he had been taken from his bed in the middle of the night.

  At 8:58 a.m., Kim breezed past the front desk at the police station—at this point, she recognized nearly everyone in the place—and headed for the interview room where yesterday Henry had finally left Scarlett for good. That morning Scarlett had called Kim to tell her that she could actually feel his absence in her body and her mind. Kim felt a new confidence bubbling up; if she could help Scarlett to get her other alters to tell their stories, perhaps she could actually cure the girl for good. It might not be easy, but for the first time, it seemed possible.

  Zack had left the shade up on the one-way mirrored glass of the interview room window, and she peered through at an old, shabbily dressed man sitting in the same chair Scarlett had occupied yesterday. His chin was held high, and he was looking around defiantly. Even with his mouth closed, his snaggletooth protruded slightly from his withered lips. The bald patch on top of his head gave way to gray, ratty snarls that hung limply around his face.

  Kim knocked, and Zack got up and let her in, never taking his eyes off his suspect. Even though he was handcuffed, Sullivan’s eyes were bright and alert, as though he was looking for an opportunity to bolt.

  “Albert, this is the expert I was telling you about.”

  “You didn’t tell me she was such a looker.” He grinned at her, showing his yellowed, twisted teeth.

  “Dr. Patterson is a psychiatrist,” Zack said coolly. “Your little games won’t have any effect on her, so you might as well drop it.”

  Sullivan licked his lips and made wet smacking sounds. Kim had faced men like him during her training, but she still chose a chair on the other side of the table, next to Zack.

  Before Zack sat down, he clarified, “If at any time, you’d like Dr. Patterson to leave the room, just say the word.”

  Sullivan still hadn’t taken his eyes off Kim. “What if I want you to leave the room? So I can be in here alone with her?”

  Zack responded flatly, “And here I was questioning my boss as to why we picked you up. I tried to tell him you weren’t as creepy as people claimed.”

  Sullivan’s eyes shifted toward the detective while his head remained motionless. Kim’s pulse picked up again. She knew that her best course was to say as little as possible, to give nothing away that could provoke him. But, clearly, Zack had a different agenda.

  “To fill you in, I’ve been through Mr. Sullivan’s alibi for March 1998,” Zack said, tapping the pad of paper in front of him, which held a few scribbled notes. “Says he can’t remember anything. County records show he was employed by the building and grounds department at the time.”

  “Hard work, that was,” Sullivan said. “Kept my head down and did my job. Didn’t have time to go chatting up anyone like you’re accusin’ me.”

  “No one is impressed by your act, Albert,” Zack said calmly. “Don’t forget I’ve got your record right here in front of me. We received complaints of lewd behavior—peeping and inappropriate interest in children in the public parks.”

  “That’s a lie,” Sullivan snarled. “Can’t very well work in a park without talking to a kid now and then. That’s all it was.” He then turned bac
k toward Kim, biting his lip before smiling. “Besides, this one’s my type.”

  “Maybe if you shaved off twenty years. And she were a boy.”

  Sullivan shook his head toward Kim, putting on his best innocent face. “Can you believe this? Is this any way for a police officer to act?”

  Kim didn’t say anything, worried that if she got involved, Zack might pull her out of the room himself—so she was surprised when Zack nodded, welcoming her to respond.

  “You are attracted to children, Albert,” Kim said, keeping her tone clinical and detached. “You find them sexually arousing.”

  Sullivan shrugged, irritation flashing across his features. “Only the ones who go around showing off.”

  “Showing off,” Kim said. “That is an interesting choice of words. How do children show off to you?”

  “You know,” Sullivan said. He grimaced, his twisted tooth pressing into his bottom lip, and glared at the table. “The way they . . . you know.”

  “Actually, I don’t. Albert, my interest here is purely professional. I’m not here to judge you,” Kim lied. “There is a huge range of human sexuality that includes many things that our society considers . . . aberrant. In other cultures, these same practices may and often are considered within the range of ‘normal.’ ” She made air quotes with her fingers, willing him to focus on her words, not the emotion behind them, knowing she could never completely hide her revulsion at the thought of what he had done.

  She had his attention. His eyes glittered in their wrinkled, spotted nest of flesh.

  Under the table, she felt Zack’s foot touch hers—it was clearly a sign to continue. She realized that at this moment, he was the bad cop and she was the good cop. Encouraged, she drove the spike a little deeper. “Sexual mores are an artificial construction. What that means is that what one society might consider healthy and natural, another might consider deviant. Neither is ‘right’ nor ‘wrong,’ because it’s all viewed, in scientific and anthropological circles, as dependent on context. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”