Marie Ferrarella - Colton Copycat Killer

The whole scene, which was whizzing by and moving in painfully slow motion at the same time, seemed totally surreal to Zoe, like some sort of an ill-conceived, macabre scene being played out from an old-fashioned B-grade horror movie about a rampaging slasher.

And if the dreadfulness of all this wasn’t enough, someone—the killer?—had gone on to draw a bizarre red bull’s-eye on Celia’s forehead. There was a single dot inside the circle, just off center, and whoever had drawn it had used some sort of a laundry marker, so the bull’s-eye stood out even more than it normally might have.

This can’t be real, it just can’t be real.

The desperate thought throbbed over and over again in Zoe’s head. She’d just left Celia, what, a couple of minutes ago? Five minutes, tops?

How could all this have happened in such a short period of time?

Who could have done this to her sister?

Why hadn’t she heard the gunshots when they were fired?

And for God’s sake, what was that awful noise she was hearing now?

Zoe tried to see where it was coming from, but for some reason, she just couldn’t seem to turn her head.

She couldn’t even move.

The noise was surrounding her. It sounded like wailing, or, more specifically, like keening. It approximated the sound that was heard when someone’s heart was breaking.

Zoe had no idea the noise she was attempting to place was coming from her.

* * *

“You realize this is probably going to be the happiest day of your life, you lucky son of a gun.” The declaration, uttered by one of the men waiting to be ushered down an aisle and into a pew, was directed at the bridegroom. “It’s all downhill from here,” the older man chuckled.

Detective Sam Colton kept the half smile he had been sporting for the past half hour pasted on his handsome, tanned face and merely nodded.

Words were not his strong suit and he couldn’t think of anything to say in response to that, other than the fact that if this was to be the happiest day of his life, it certainly didn’t put the bar up very high.

And as for it being “downhill from here,” well, he already knew that.

He was marrying Celia Robison, who some of the other detectives on the force had made very clear they regarded as being quite an eyeful, as well as a number of other clichéd descriptions.

None of that had entered into the reason why he was standing here, waiting for everyone to take their seats so the ceremony could begin. Waiting for all this to be over with.

He was marrying the woman for one reason and one reason only.

She was having his kid and he’d vowed a long time ago that if he ever did happen to have any kids—most likely by accident, which this was—he was sure as hell going to be there for him or her. He wanted this kid’s upbringing to be completely unlike his own. His childhood had involved his father killing his mother and then his siblings and him being scattered to the winds.

More specifically, they had all been sent off to different foster homes, but they might as well have been scattered to the winds for all the time they’d managed to spend together during all those awful, soul-scarring years.

No matter what it took, his kid wasn’t going to go through that, wasn’t going to feel abandoned, alone and ashamed because no one wanted him or her. If he had to marry Celia for that to happen, well, so be it. He’d managed to survive all this time—and had gotten as far as he had—by learning to roll with the punches. He’d roll with this one, too.

And in the end—

Sam’s head jerked up as everything within him went on high alert the second he heard it.

Part of his response was due to his police training, the rest had evolved based on pure survival instincts. The latter had been necessary in order to live through some of the foster home stays he’d been forced to endure.

“Did you hear something?” Ethan, one of his brothers—they had pretty much managed to find one another and reunite in these past few years—asked him.

By now, Sam had broken into a run and ran past him without responding.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ethan said, answering his own question and hurrying after Sam.

Once they reached the hall, it was obvious the sound was coming from the bridal room. It grew louder and more jarring the closer they got.

“It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding,” Ethan called after Sam. It wasn’t meant to stop his brother. Ethan was just stating a point of fact.

The next moment, as he came to a skidding halt behind Sam and took in the scene Sam was viewing, he muttered under his breath, “And this has got to qualify as the worst possible kind of luck a groom ever encountered.”

For an excruciating, shattering moment, Sam froze several steps away from Zoe. At first, he wasn’t even aware she was the one screaming.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Celia.

It wasn’t a sense of loss that was echoing through every fiber of his being. It was shock. Complete, total and utter shock, swaddled in disbelief. The shock was not tied to the fact that Celia was dead, but to the symbol he was looking at on her forehead.

He knew that symbol.

He recognized it from both photographs he’d seen originating from crime scenes, and from the nightmares that had haunted his earlier dreams.

That was the symbol his father, the infamous serial killer, Matthew Colton, used to draw on the foreheads of his victims.

But those victims were all men of a certain size and age who reminded Matthew of his older, far more successful brother, Big J. It had been Matthew’s way of doing away, by proxy, with a man whom he hated with every fiber of his being and whom he blamed for everything that had gone wrong in his life.

Matthew killed men, not women. The thought echoed over and over in Sam’s head. And while Matthew had killed his wife when she stumbled across his heinous secret, he hadn’t made a practice of killing young women in their twenties. If nothing else, it would have come to light by now if he had.

Besides, Matthew Colton had been behind bars for twenty years. He couldn’t have killed Celia.

Then who had?

This didn’t make any sense.

The detective in Sam wanted to focus exclusively on the murder—Celia was clearly already dead—of the woman whom he would have married in ten minutes. The human side of him that was struggling to resurface after being buried for more than twenty years felt obligated to offer some sort of comfort to Celia’s sister.

Zoe looked as if she was bordering on going into shock—if she wasn’t already there.

“Zoe—” Sam began, then fell silent, at a loss as to what to say next.

But he didn’t have to talk. The moment he said her name, she turned toward him. He saw the tears flowing from her eyes and the stricken look on her face just before she collapsed into his arms.

He barely caught her in time.

Sam held on to her awkwardly, as if he felt that making any sort of contact would wind up cracking his carefully built up, impenetrable walls.

“She’s dead,” Zoe sobbed. “I was just in here and now Celia’s dead. Why did I leave her? She’d still be alive if I hadn’t left the room. Oh, God, why didn’t I stay?” she sobbed.

Sam looked over her head helplessly toward Ethan. He knew what to do at a crime scene, knew how to defend himself against a killer and knew how to handle himself in all the steps between. But when it came to dealing with something like someone else’s grief, or a woman’s tears, he hadn’t a clue.

Completely at a loss, he looked toward his older brother for help.

Ethan picked up his cue effortlessly. “Why don’t you come outside, Zoe, get some air?” he suggested gently, trying to take hold of Zoe’s arm. He was ready to lead her out of the room.