Some shall break, p.1
Some Shall Break, page 1
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 © 2023 by Ellie Marney
Cover art copyright © 2023 by Janelle Barone. Cover design by Jenny Kimura.
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Interior design by Karina Granda and Jenny Kimura.
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Quote here from the poem “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020), published by Greenwillow Books. Used with the permission of Naomi Shihab Nye. Quote here from the poem “Power” by Adrienne Rich, from The Dream of a Common Language (1978), published by W. W. Norton. Used with the permission of W. W. Norton.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marney, Ellie, author.
Title: Some shall break / Ellie Marney.
Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2023. | Series: The none shall sleep sequence | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Summary: Travis Bell and Emma Lewis reunite to help the FBI capture a serial killer in Pittsburgh, and they must again turn to a notorious teenage sociopath and his twin sister for help finding the murderer.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030339 | ISBN 9780316487719 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316487818 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Serial murderers—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—Fiction. | Criminal investigation—Fiction. | Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Fiction. | LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M34593 So 2023 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030339
ISBNs: 978-0-316-48771-9 (hardcover), 978-0-316-48781-8 (ebook)
E3-20230422-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
By Ellie Marney
For all the survivors
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“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”
CHAPTER ONE
In a dark, unfamiliar bedroom in Beechview, Pittsburgh, Patricia Doricott, a twenty-year-old Duquesne poli-sci major, wakes up groggy.
She lies there for a second until her brain regurgitates the cab ride to Stanley Theatre with Fletch and Lori. The concert. Patricia’s older brother, Tom, bought the tickets for her as a gift, so she was glad Elvis Costello delivered. The music was great.
Her memory is hazy post-concert. She remembers afterward, another cab to Zack’s on Fourth Avenue. Then another club: getting drinks, chatting to a guy at the bar. It was crowded. There were any number of drinks. She’s gone home with someone, which is not a first, but it’s the first time she can’t remember the guy’s name.
The bedroom she’s in now smells of some kind of nauseating air freshener. She makes out a nightstand but no lamp. The room is damn dark: Maybe she just can’t see the lamp? Her mouth tastes terrible and her head hurts. Fumbling off the blanket, she realizes she’s still in her clothes. Not the typical Walk of Shame scenario, then. Patti stubs her toe on the way to the door, then twists the handle and opens onto—
Light, god.
A white hallway with dark dado and beige carpet, wincingly bright. She has the world’s most awful headache. Framed pictures in the hall show her reflection in the glass. Her dark hair has gone from tousled to bird’s nest, yeesh.
But framed pictures mean she’s in a house, not a dorm room. Okay, this is better. Easier, in some ways. Just say hi to the guy, thanks for being a gentleman, ask to call a cab, get home.
Patti walks onward until the hallway reaches stairs. She descends slowly, holding the banister, turns right past a front door, walks until the trail spills her out into the kitchen. A plain wooden table with one place setting: a bowl, spoon, glass of water, white coffee cup in a saucer. A box of Cheerios and a carton of milk on the table. Maybe the guy has gone to work. She’s honestly trying to remember his name, but that information lives somewhere just out of reach.
She sits at the table and drinks the water, wishing her head wasn’t fracturing everything into bright, painful prisms. Low music, somewhere farther away—KC and the Sunshine Band. Jesus, how much did she have to drink?
The sound of a door opening, closing, and a young man walks into the kitchen. Tallish, medium build, brown hair, white dress shirt and dark trousers, cute professor glasses. He looks like the guy from the bar, but she can’t be sure.
“Hi, honey,” he says cheerfully.
“Hi,” Patti replies, but she is thinking, What?
He takes the chair opposite, across the table. “How are you feeling?”
“Uh, yeah.” Her tongue, thick in her mouth. “Like my head got steamrollered.”
“Oh, would you like something for that?” He grubs in his trouser pocket, pulls out a blister pack of tablets. Pops two and pushes them across the tabletop. “Here you go. Tylenol.”
“Thanks, it’s fine. I’ll wait until I get home.” Better not to accept strange tablets. Nice place, do you mind if I call a cab? She rehearses mentally as she sips the water.
The guy cocks his head and smiles. “You do look so much like her.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s nothing. Would you like me to show you to the bathroom?”
“Uh, if you wouldn’t mind. Then I should probably call a cab.”
“Sure.” He smiles again as he rises from his seat and hurries over to help ease Patti’s chair out from the table. “Follow me.”
He leads her back the way she came. The music murmur fades the farther they get upstairs. Patti’s trying not to trip over her feet. How embarrassing. No wonder she woke up in her clothes.
Confession time. “I’m sorry, but what was your name again?”
“Peter.” He looks over his shoulder as they reach the hallway, walk past the pictures. “And you’re Patricia?”
“Patti. Yeah.”
“Peter and Patricia. Sounds nice together, don’t you think?”
“Uh—”
“Here we are.” He angles to open a door on the left side of the hallway.
White bathroom, not huge, compact. A showerhead on the wall over a bathtub. A toilet, a freestanding sink. Security bars on the window, which is pretty standard for Pittsburgh, although not usually on the second story.
“I’ll just leave you to freshen up,” Peter says, smiling away.
He closes the door. There’s no lock but Patti needs to pee, so she uses the toilet, washing her hands after and splashing her face for good measure. This headache is not going anywhere, god. Another twenty minutes of polite conversation while she calls a cab and waits, then skedaddle. She’s looking forward to getting in the cab.
Half her makeup comes off on the hand towel. She can’t see her panda eyes because there’s no mirror in here. Weird.
A knock on the bathroom door, and it swings open a foot. Peter, smiling again—he has a real commitment to smiling. It’s a bit more than she can deal with right now.
“Brought you something you’ve always wanted…” His voice is singsong.
“Sorry?”
Peter bites his bottom lip. Swings the door wider. He’s holding a clothes hanger up high, and suspended from the hanger is a long white dress. “I know, I know—I’m not supposed to see. But it’s a special occasion.”
“What—”
“I don’t want to hurry you, but you should get changed quick so we can get started.”
Peter is smiling now in a different way. His eyes are glinting. The dress has pearlescent sequined roses around the bodice. In Patti’s fuzzy state, it takes a moment to register.
Then it all comes into focus.
The white dress. News reports.
When she looks back at Peter, he’s got a long-barreled gun of some bright metal in his other hand. He holds it across his chest. The cock of the trigger echoes loudly in the security-barred bathroom.
“Come on, Patricia.” He smiles and smiles. “I can’t wait to get started.”
Patti Doricott begins to cry.
CHAPTER TWO
Kristin Gutmunsson, twin sister of the most infamous juvenile serial murderer in American history, watches the oak trees through a window one floor above the Quantico library. The outside leaves ripple in a breeze. Insulated behind the window, Kristin cannot feel the breeze, but she can imagine the coolness of it.
Kristin has a richly developed imaginary life, and right now she is using it to tune out the people talking at her.
She feels nostalgic, looking at the oaks. In her mind, she and her brother, Simon, are lying down together under the big oak in the back garden of the Massachusetts house. It is the end of the summer of ’78, and they’ve played croquet all afternoon with Janet and Marlowe. Once their friends left, Simon and Kristin finished the game without them. Now, with the sun lowering, the grass is pleasantly shaded.
Simon reclines with the bottle of lemon water from the tray. Kristin flops beside him, her hair spun out like a silver fan. Simon plays with it idly as they pass the bottle back and forth.
“You’ve got grass stains on your skirt,” he notes.
“And a sweaty face.” She swipes the long cotton sleeve of her blouse against her forehead.
Simon gives her the handkerchief from his trouser pocket. His snowy hair matches her own, and they are both wearing croquet whites. Against the bed of verdant lawn and fall’s first russet oak leaves, Kristin imagines that she and her twin look like a sculpture of marble angels.
“You were very mean to Marlowe,” she says. “I think that’s why he and Janet went home.”
Simon shifts to lean on his elbows, looking at the sky. “I’m not mean to Marlowe. He brings it on himself. I wanted to play, not watch Marlowe make cow eyes at you all afternoon.”
“I like the cow eyes.”
“Good god.”
“I like Marlowe.” Kristin traces a gnat’s flight in the air above them with her finger. “I think he wants to ask me out.”
“It’s a shame, then, that he’s already dating Janet.”
“I know.” Kristin makes a vexed frown. “It’s most annoying.”
Simon laughs. Kristin loves to see him laugh more than anything. She loves her brother most when he is at his most free. Every pointed edge of him seems to smooth away. At fifteen, she senses him becoming sharper.
And he grew up to become the keenest blade. The knowledge of what her brother is tinges Kristin’s thoughts with melancholy. A few short months after this pastoral scene, Simon will lead Marlowe to a small clearing at the edge of the woods outside town and open up his innards to the air.…
“Kristin? What do you think?”
She looks away from the window, half-tumbled in the memory. Travis Bell is the person calling her name. She understands why Bell sometimes seems uncomfortable working with her. Yes, they both survived the fiasco of the Butcher case, three months ago. But she is the sister of his father’s murderer. Socially, it makes things rather awkward.
They also look like perfect opposites, her white skin and hair next to his dark Mexican American coloring. He’s standing now in his G-man suit, jacket open and hands on hips. Bell’s father was a US Marshal, and Bell has inherited a measure of law enforcement attitude. But his social intelligence is above standard, and Kristin is intrigued by his personal development. She wonders if he’s aware that his empathy—and his attractiveness—may be a liability in the bureau. Bell is young, but he has one of those faces that will become even more rugged and interesting with age. He is still in training and doesn’t yet have the closed-off expressions of a proper FBI agent.
Kristin looks back to the window. “I don’t think you need more explanation from me. I mean, I appreciate that you’ve kindly allowed me to visit you here at Quantico, but I’ve already given you my opinion about what you have to do.”
Special Agent Howard Carter’s baritone. “Miss Gutmunsson—”
“I knew it after the first girl’s case appeared in the newspaper, of course, but I wasn’t completely sure. By the second girl, I was sure. That’s why I contacted Mr. Bell last month, to give him my instinct. I asked to come here today because I wanted you to confirm it, and act on it.”
“It can’t be just about instinct, Miss Gutmunsson.”
Kristin turns again to face the room. A long table of some beige wood runs down its length, a Rolm business-phone unit set in the middle. The briefing room is this afternoon’s temporary location while the basement area of FBI Behavioral Science is being fumigated. Light from the windows makes the blond brick walls and tan carpet glow.
“Instinct is only useful with evidence,” Carter reiterates. “We have to compare the evidence.”
Special Agent Howard Carter stands at the opposite side of the table to Bell. Carter is a Black man in his early fifties, with a close-cropped beard and mustache. He is wearing a brown three-piece suit, and his glasses are on a chain. Carter is reasonably smart, Kristin suspects. He presents as reserved and calm, even when he is frowning like this. His facial expressions are much more standard FBI.
Kristin tries again. “Then examine the evidence—I’m sure you’ve started doing that already. Because I know what this is, and I think you know what this is.”
Carter nods, slow and reluctant. “We have been tracking some superficial similarities between these new murders and the Huxton case—”
“You see? So you already know. And you know you need to call Emma.”
“Kristin,” Bell says. Low, warning.
“The flowers at the crime scenes are a different touch, certainly. So is the posing and the locations of the bodies. But even without all the same elements, the flavor is the same.”
The mention of flavor seems to make Bell uneasy. “Daniel Huxton died in 1979. We’ve got photos. We’ve got autopsy reports—”
“Obviously I’m not saying it’s the same man. But I know it feels similar enough. You should call her.”
Bell chews his bottom lip, exchanges a look with Carter. “Is Agent Martino still on the ground in Pittsburgh?”
Carter nods. “Day after Labor Day though, he’ll be trying to get caught up on any backlog. He might be hard to contact. You want to talk with him about it?”
“Maybe, yeah,” Bell concedes.
“You reviewed the Huxton case file?”
