Page 1 of Some Saviors Can Break You

Chapter

One

February 9th

9:24 P.M.

The dumpster smelled awful.

It wasn't that she was surprised, it was just that she had a bit of a weak stomach and a strong gag reflex, and the smell of garbage was one thing that always set her off.

Thankfully, the sight of dead bodies and the smell of blood and decaying flesh wasn't something that made her want to throw up. If it did, she would be pretty ineffectual as a homicide cop.

Detective Florence Harris opened her mouth and tried to breathe through it to eliminate some of the stench as she put her hands on the rim of the dumpster and boosted herself up. It must have been fairly recently emptied because there were about a dozen bags of trash scattered across the bottom, maybe enough to fill it a quarter full.

But enough bags to cover a body if one was in there.

This particular killer she was hunting liked to leave his victims in dumpsters after he’d strangled them and left his particular calling card behind. Over the course of the last eighteen months, he’d killed over a dozen young women between the ages of twenty and thirty. All were beautiful, all had long hair—although he didn't appear to have a preference in color, he’d killed blondes, brunettes, and redheads—all were Caucasian, and all had longer than usual eyelashes.

It was an odd detail, but one she had found to be true with every single one of the fourteen victims.

Each woman had been missing for forty-eight hours, and while Florence wasn't sure exactly what that meant, it was obviously important to the killer that he keep them alive for two days before killing them. All the women lived alone, although some were involved with someone and others were single, all were killed in their own homes, their bodies dumped in random dumpsters around Manhattan.

Only Florence was positive that the dumps weren't actually random.

There had to be a pattern, she just hadn't managed to figure out what it was yet.

She would though.

She’d find the pattern and then she’d find this killer. Just like she found every other killer in every other case she worked.

Her job was the most important thing she had in her life. Well, besides her older brother, but since she left the small town where they had grown up to move to New York City, she didn't see him much anymore. They talked probably once a week and texted daily unless she was consumed by a case she was working, which happened more often than it should.

Florence had friends, she was close with her partner and his wife, and there were several women from her gym that she would catch up with for the occasional coffee at a café or nightout at a club, but she took her job seriously, and she gave it every ounce of herself that she could.

While she had never once regretted her decision to get out of River’s End—too much had happened there and the place was full of bad memories everywhere she turned—sometimes life in the city got to her. She felt like a mouse stuck in a wheel, constantly running in circles. Hunting one killer after another after another, letting the darkness that had infected her when she was a little girl seep further and further into her soul until she wasn't sure anymore whether she could ever extricate it.

With a sigh, she pushed away thoughts of her depressing childhood before they could consume her. That was a rabbit hole well worth avoiding going down. Unlike Alice, she wouldn’t end up in a Wonderland full of singing flowers, grinning cats, talking rabbits, and crazy queens, she’d end up in a place full of pain and fear and heartbreak. A place that she couldn’t just wake up and walk out of because for her, it wasn't a dream, it was the reality of a messed up childhood worthy of a book or a movie.

Swinging a leg up and over the side of the dumpster, Florence gingerly lowered herself down. If there was a body in here, she didn't want to stand on it and compromise any evidence the killer had left behind.

Not that he ever left any forensic evidence behind.

After killing his victims and leaving his calling card on their body, he very carefully washed them down in their own bathrooms. Washing away any fingerprints or DNA he might have accidentally left on their bodies, he then wrapped them in a tarp, drove them to a dumpster somewhere in the city, and tossed them away like garbage.

But they weren't garbage.

They were human beings who had parents, siblings, friends, people who loved them, and who were grieving them. They had jobs, pets, and hobbies. They had lives. Lives that had been cutshort by someone with a complex about himself that he felt the need to take out on others.

The Dumpster Killer—as he’d been dubbed by the press—was escalating. There had been just under four months between his first and second kill, but now that time had diminished to only eight days between the last two victims.

Four days had passed now since victim number fourteen had been discovered in a dumpster on the Upper East Side, and Florence knew that any day now, victim number fifteen would be discovered. Already the killer might have chosen his next victim and have her holed up in her apartment, doing whatever he did to her in those missing forty-eight hours. He didn't rape his victims, that much they knew, so what did he do with them for two days?

Her booty covered shoes stepped carefully on the bags of trash as her gloved hands lifted each bag, both hoping and dreading that she might find the body of a beautiful young woman whose life had been cut short.

One after the other, she moved each of the garbage bags to search underneath them, but her search turned up empty. There was no tarp-covered body lying in here. Frustrated, Florence groaned, this was the second dumpster she’d tried tonight, and the second time she’d come up empty.

Not that she was giving up.

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