She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,42

decade or so. Now forty-three, he had eleven years on his partner. Sometimes that mattered, most of the time it didn’t. This was apparently one of those times it did. Vision went with age, and he wasn’t getting any younger.

Considering the odd time, Fogel looked wide awake and together. She wore little makeup, just some eyeliner. Her blonde hair was pulled back in the usual ponytail, still damp.

She wasn’t a large woman. In fact, she was downright tiny, only about five-two , but she spent most of her free time in the department gym. Over the three years they’d been partners, Faustino had seen no less than five other officers comment on her petite size and had also seen her take down those same five officers with relative ease within hours of said comment. “Meet me in the gym after your shift,” was not something you wanted to hear from her, and it became a running joke in the department. As new officers cycled in, it was only a matter of time before they said something about her—a comment on her short stature or her looks—and the person would soon find themselves staring up at her from one of the mats in the gym, little birdies dancing around their head as they tried to piece together what just happened. Her father insisted she take Taekwondo beginning at eight years old, and at last check, she now had her third black belt. She also took jiu jitsu and yoga (to relax, she said).

There had been a time early on when Faustino thought the two of them might actually try dating, but they quickly moved past that. He found her to be attractive, same as the other guys. She had seen something in him, too, but they spent so much time together they quickly shifted from that mutual attraction to something more like a sibling relationship. In the few instances when Faustino had actually gone out on a date with other women (typically women he met through a dating service—homicide detectives rarely encountered live women through work), Fogel studied each one closely and offered her “unbiased” opinion—none were particularly right for him, but they were right for now. If Fogel dated, she didn’t talk about it, at least not with him. That was okay, too.

“I got in a little after midnight,” Faustino told her. “Couldn’t sleep. How about you? What are you doing here so early?”

She glanced up at the large bulletin board on wheels next to Faustino’s desk. “It’s August 8. I knew that would be coming out. Wouldn’t miss it.”

The bulletin board spent most of the year tucked in the far back corner of the Pittsburgh PD homicide division’s pen, gathering dust, the side with clippings, photographs, and notes turned to face the wall, the blank side out. Most of the detectives were too new to know much about it and left it as is. The older detectives had written it off long ago as Faustino’s personal project and also left it as is. At one point, someone had written, FAUST’S WALL OF WEIRD across the top in red chalk, but that had slowly faded away.

“Do you want to walk me through it?”

“Are you sure you want to hear it again?”

Fogel nodded. “A refresher is good. It’s been a year.”

Faustino stood, scooped up his coffee mug, and went to the machine near the door to get a refill. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted like shit, but he felt the caffeine working through his cells even before he got back to his desk. He set the mug down on the corner and went to the board—sixteen dead in as many years.

“Do you want me to start with the most recent and work my way back, or the other way around?”

“Your call.”

Faustino turned back to the board. “Backwards it is.”

For each of the sixteen victims, the board displayed a photograph of the deceased, and in many cases, a secondary photograph taken when they were still alive, necessary because of the state of the bodies when found. Above each photo was a strip of tape with the date. The earliest contained the full date—August 8, 1978, as did the six that followed, but by 1984, they only listed the year. With all the murders taking place on August 8, it seemed redundant to keep repeating the same date.

Faustino, along with all those who didn’t refer to this case as the Wall of Weird, called these murders the August Eights. Aside from the