Humpty Dumpty: The killer wants us to put him back together again (Book 1 of the Nursery Rhyme Murders Series) Read Free

traffic was brutal. Flying seemed extravagant, and Sariah hated airports with a burning passion that bordered on psychosis.
    But trains? Trains were perfection.
    She sat in a section that was close to empty. It had started out much more full, but over the course of the last hour it had gradually thinned out, leaving Sariah on her own. A little strange, sure, but it suited her just fine.
    Cooled and filtered air washed over her as she gazed out at the brown and shimmering landscape of one of the hottest summers on record on the East Coast. The soothing clackety-clack of the iron wheels on the rails was a constant background presence that spoke of a gentler time past. She’d spent a year abroad in Europe right after high school with the only real friend she’d had, Rachel, whose wealthy parents were trying to make up for past neglect with present extravagances. It hadn’t worked, but Sariah had been the happy beneficiary of the guilt of Rachel’s parents.
    Swiping her hand across the screen of her tablet, Sariah stared at another crime scene photo, one of a severed hand. This one was from the last case up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The case that had finally convinced her boss, Special-Agent-in-Charge Nicholas Tanner, that the Humpty Dumpty Killer was active again.
    Sariah worked in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, or BAU, a part of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The BAU used behavioral sciences to assist in criminal investigations throughout the US.
    And just days ago, she’d been given the case of her life. The one that could make or break her career at the BAU. Humpty Dumpty.
    A serial killer who had killed more than twenty men and women and then seemed to have disappeared into thin air, leaving nothing but pieces of the victims he’d killed, spread across the US. It was the stuff from which legends were born.
    Problem was, when you went to resurrect a legend, people got cranky.
    Working as a junior agent at the BAU, Sariah had been assigned to the most menial of tasks, one of which was to deal with all of the random body parts that turned up anywhere in the US. There were a surprising number, and each one ostensibly needed to be accounted for. In actual practice, there were as many cold cases when it came to body parts as there were with actual full-blown bodies, but there it was. That had been Sariah’s task for the last year and a half after coming out of Quantico.
    That was also where she’d come across what she had started to think was Humpty Dumpty’s work. After 13 years of nothing from the prolific killer, several body parts matching Humpty’s MO began appearing. One could be dismissed. Two wouldn’t keep the scoffers from scoffing. But when she’d come across that hand up in Ann Arbor while working an unrelated case, Sariah not only became sure that Humpty Dumpty was active again, she was beginning to believe that he was taunting her.
    And wonder of wonders, her boss had believed her.
    Which made her much less popular with her fellow agents, most of whom thought she was bat-guano crazy, or worse, an ambitious climber. The fact that she hadn’t been popular to begin with was her own fault. She was smart, capable and not all that social. A lethal combination when it came to making friends.
    A little boy, looking to be about five or six, groped his way up the aisle and happened to glance at the picture of the hand. He cocked his head as if he were trying to figure out what he was looking at, and then backed away, looking up into Sariah’s eyes. Turning around, without warning, he dashed away from her as fast as his chubby little legs could carry him, screaming bloody murder the entire length of the car.
    Kids were annoying.
    She swiped back to a previous file that was still open. An outdated picture of the man she was on her way to meet. The last address she had for former Agent Joshua Wright was one in Queens, but when she’d contacted the super, he’d told her that Joshua had