Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.
    “Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good.”
    “Mine neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”
    “I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents too.”
    The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.
    “God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”
    “Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”
    Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.
    “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm droop a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”
    “You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”
    “Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”
    Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.
    Unlike the woman walking toward him, Jeremy Howell had a singular focus. Once he’d found out who he was, he’d known that it was his birthright to follow in footsteps marked with his own DNA.
    And that of his father.
    He bent over and fell to the pavement. He pretended that one of the crutches was just out of reach.
    “Can I give you a hand?” Lisa said.
    He looked up at her with an embarrassed half smile.
    “No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”
    She stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.
    Smaller bones, likely meant—though he was inexperienced and unsure—an easier go of it in the basement when he went about the business of butchering her. Butchering her, by the way, was as far as Jeremy would ever go.
    The idea of sex with a corpse sickened him. The idea of visiting human remains in the woods of the Pacific Northwest was wholly unappealing. This wasn’t about some psycho sexual conquest, like it had been with his dad, but about control and technique.
    He wanted to take what had been done before and improve it. As if he were revising code on a slow-moving, jagged-looking, computer game. That was cool. It was all about the cool factor and the fame that came with being the best.
    Being better than his father, a man he had never even met, but one he’d admired and fantasized about from the time his mother told him the truth. He’d been cheated a little and he knew it. Other serial killers had unwittingly or purposefully involved their family members. When Jeremy read about Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s proclivity for bringing his little boy while hunting prostitutes along the SeaTac strip, he felt a pang of jealousy. He’d never had that time with his dad.
    That had been taken from him when Jeremy was but a child and his father was strapped into Florida’s Old Sparky. The flip was switched. Human flesh burned and his dad was electrocuted to death. That moment, as much as anything, set things in motion. Not right away, of course. Jeremy was a sleeper cell and it was that night on the Pacific Lutheran University campus that he was awakened.
    The dark-haired girl with the pretty blue eyes had done that. She was a shot of adrenaline. She was a ringer for the others.
    “Let me help you,” Lisa said, bending down and hooking her hands under Jeremy’s arms. He stood wobbly on one leg, like a flamingo at the zoo. A good wind would knock him over. Lisa handed him his other crutch and picked up the backpack.
    “You must be taking some heavy courses,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed about the unintended pun. She got a good look at his face. He actually was a handsome dork, dark hair, large brown eyes, and stylish stubble above his upper lip and on the tip of his chin.
    A goatee in the works?
    Lisa grinned, not outwardly, but inside. The breed existed after all. She’ll tell Naomi the minute she helped him to his car.
    “Where are