Missed Connections Page 6

  Chapter Eight - Sheila

  “Arden!”

  I straightened when I heard Dumas bark my name, accidentally kicking a cup of pens off my desk as I put my feet back on the floor. The cup hit the floor and rolled, spitting Bics across the tile like miniature projectiles. Dumas caught one beneath his shoe and picked it up. I clicked out of several windows on my monitor. Dumas didn’t need to know that I was snooping through the articles on the latest Simone City homicide. Yet another big player in the business world, Karl Murphy, turned up dead in his own yard last night. That made three of the city’s wealthiest residents dead in two weeks, and it was the second murder in two days. Our killer, whoever it was, was ramping up his agenda.

  Dumas put the cup on my desk and replaced the single pen. The others remained on the floor. “Pick those up before someone trips.”

  “Yes, sir. Did you need something?”

  “You got access to the case files on the recent homicides?”

  I made direct eye contact with him. “Did you give me access to the case files on the recent homicides?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t have access.”

  The irritation in my voice tipped him off to my mood. Halfway on his way to sitting on the corner of my desk, he thought better of it and did an awkward skip to keep himself upright. He straightened his tie. “I’ll send you the password,” he said. “I want you to have a look at everything we’ve got.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because everyone else is stumped,” Dumas said. “No one has any idea where to start, and this guy’s dropping bodies left and right. Did you see the news? Got a fresh corpse in the morgue from last night.”

  “Gutted again?”

  “Yup. Right across the throat like the others. And a nice slash to the back of each leg.”

  “So our perp likes knives,” I mused. “That means they’re getting up close and personal with the victims. Some kind of personal vendetta?”

  Dumas actually sat down on my desk this time. Three lines appeared between his brows. The beat cops called it Dumas’s “triple threat.” It meant he was either incredibly focused or incredibly pissed off. “What makes you say that?”

  “The perp isn’t killing these guys from far off,” I explained. “If he’s getting that close to the victims, it’s because he wants them to know who’s killing them. I have a feeling all three of our dead guys knew exactly who murdered them.”

  “But there’s no connection,” Dumas said. He stole the rainbow stress ball off my desk and passed it between his hands. “Other than the fact that the victims are rich businessmen from Juno. What, we got a killer Robin Hood out there or something?”

  I snatched the stress ball out of the air in between Dumas’s tosses to himself. “Could be. Simone City is infamous for neglecting its lower boroughs, and the separation between classes isn’t getting any smaller. Maybe this is modern-day vigilantism.”

  “See, you’re helping already,” Dumas said in a tone of voice that suggested he might award me with a sticker of a gold star as if I were a five-year-old learning the alphabet and he was my kindergarten teacher.

  I pinched the inside of my cheek between my teeth to check my tongue. “Unfortunately, sir, I can’t offer any further insight. I’m swamped. Got a string of robberies downtown that needs seeing to.”

  “You wanna work robberies over a trio of homicides?”

  The man was truly clueless. “You assigned me the robberies, Captain.”

  “And now I’m assigning you the homicides,” he countered.

  “I thought the upper-level detectives were working these cases,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was pressing the situation. This was what I wanted. Dumas was finally handing me a case that I could sink my teeth into, and I was fighting against it. “Why would you hand them off to me?”

  “Like I said, we could use a fresh pair of eyes.”

  Payne walked by on the way to his desk, interrupting our conversation. “Morning, Captain. Anything good?”

  “Never,” Dumas said. “But we can use you too. You’re with Arden on the Switchblade case.”

  Payne contained a sneer in my direction. “The Switchblade case?”

  “That’s what we’re calling it from now on.” Dumas glanced from me to Payne. “You got a problem with that, Officer?”

  “No, sir. You call the case whatever you want.”

  “I meant with your leadership.”

  Payne’s eyes flickered toward me. I grinned and reclined as far back as the plastic rolling chair would allow. Payne said to Dumas, “No, sir.”

  “Good. Get to work. Arden, I’ll send you those files as soon as I get back to my office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain strode off, leaving the two of us behind to duke it out. Payne wouldn’t face me, and his shoulders rode up to his ears.

  “Hey, Payne,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Pick up those pens before someone trips.”

  I spent the day picking over the case files and assigning Payne to useless work. While I pored over the details of Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, and Karl Murphy’s deaths, Payne ran out to get coffee, made copies of the paper files, and ran out again for sandwiches from the nearest deli. By the end of the day, we were both at the end of our ropes. Payne was ready to rip my head off for making him my errand boy, and I was ready to rip Payne’s head off purely because I needed to rip someone’s head off and he happened to be in the immediate vicinity. There was nothing in any of the files to indicate that the three homicides were related to each other. The killer seemed to have pick them at random out of Juno’s wealthiest. I had to consider that maybe this wasn’t the work of a single hand, but it was too much of a coincidence for all these murders to bear similar marks and occur within weeks of each other. Worse still, there was no indication that the killer or killers intended to stop. At the end of it all, Simone City was in danger, and someone needed to bring this guy down before he hurt anyone else.

  Payne was unlucky enough to be working the night shift, so I left him at the precinct and went home with the copied case files stuffed into a briefcase. I lived in an apartment building near Simone City College in Venus, where I’d gone to school. After completing my degree, I stayed in the area. It wasn’t a bad drive to work in Juno. My mother’s house was far enough away so as to not impede on my independence, but close enough for me to keep an eye on her. It was a decent part of the borough, not quite as rowdy as the streets near Penthouse and the G-Spot, but not so nail-bitingly quiet as most of Vesta. The tenants in my building were mostly students, but since the apartment was right across the street from the college’s biggest library, it attracted a more dedicated type of scholar. I liked the collegiate feel of the hallways and that I was mere steps away from an esteemed educational institution with loads of research options. More than once, I’d returned to the library to work on a case for Dumas. As I drove by it, I considered stopping in to take another look at the case files, but my stomach growled and demanded food.

  “Hi, Minnie.”

  My black cat, Minnaloushe, greeted me when I opened the door, bounding over the sofa and chattering like a happy dolphin. He wound himself around my legs. I dropped the briefcase on my desk, shook off my jacket, and opened the fridge in the kitchen, all while Minnie weaved in and out below, never compromising my step. I popped open a can of cat food and set it down for him. He meowed happily and dug in.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re really after,” I said, nudging him aside. “And it’s not my affection, is it? Enjoy.”

  For myself, I heated up leftovers from last night and sat at my desk to eat them. It wasn’t long before the contents of the briefcase were spewed out in a disastrous pile. Hours passed as I read through everything again. Minnie came by for a scratch but abandoned me when he realized I was too distracted to pay him any attention. I drank a cup of coffee around eleven, wired until two in the morning. I couldn’t let this go. There had to
be something to connect these attacks, and I was going to find it.

  Around three am, when my eyelids felt like someone was attempting to sew them shut, I finally found something. I’d abandoned the case files hours ago in favor of the Internet, clicking through pages and pages of useless information on the three men who’d been murdered. Eventually, it paid off. I came across an article from twelve years ago.

  “Dumas!”

  I raced into the detective’s quarters, brandishing a stack of papers I’d printed out last night at my apartment. I knocked into Gadsden’s desk, and a full cup of coffee toppled over into his lap.

  “Shit, Arden! Are you kidding me?”

  “Not really sorry,” I called over my shoulder. It wasn’t like Gadsden didn’t deserve a hot beverage spilled across his crotch. I skidded into the captain’s office. “Dumas, I found something.”

  Dumas looked up lazily from his computer, lips pursed.

  “I mean, sir.”

  “What is it, Arden?”

  I slapped the papers down on his desk and spread them out. “I looked up Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, and Karl Murphy last night. It turns out that they do have something in common. All three of them attended the Bauer Technology Charity Gala twelve years ago. I found their names on the list of attendees and several photos of them at the actual event.”

  The captain squinted at the papers. His glasses sat, obsolete, in an organizational tray in the far corner of his desk. He preferred imperfect vision to being seen with nerd goggles on. “So?”

  I shuffled the papers around and pointed to another headline. “This was the same night Vivian Bauer was found dead in her apartment, and their daughter disappeared.”

  “Again, so?”

  “So don’t you think it’s strange?” I said. “That all three of these men had connections to Bauer Tech? Each of them has been photographed with Wallace Bauer, and now they’re turning up dead. Sir, this could be the key to figuring out who the killer is.”

  Dumas rifled through the materials, examining the pictures and the articles before he collected the papers and tapped them into a neat stack. “Wallace Bauer is serving a lifetime sentence in prison, Arden. I put him there, remember? That case was open and shut. Vivian Bauer is dead. Veronica Bauer is dead. Bauer confessed to killing them.” He flicked the stack of papers. “All these men ran in the same circles, and they still do. Of course they’d all have gone to the gala. Bauer was the biggest name in business back then. Hell, it still is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He handed me the papers and returned his gaze to the computer, losing interest in our conversation. “After Bauer went to prison, John Halco took over the company. He rebranded everything, but it’s no secret that the tech and the money and the success is all Bauer’s.”

  “Halco Industries used to be Bauer Tech?”

  Dumas nodded. “Halco was CFO for Bauer Tech and Wallace’s best friend. Guess they came up with a plan to keep the business from going down without Bauer.”

  “So someone’s targeting Bauer’s business contacts then. Did Bauer and Halco screw a bunch of people over when they transferred ownership of Bauer Tech?”

  “I’m sure they did, but you’re barking up the wrong tree, Arden,” said Dumas. “Like I said, the Bauer drama ended when I put Wallace in prison. This isn’t related.”

  I shook the article with the gala’s guest list printed at the bottom of the page in Dumas’s face. “Someone’s hunting down the names on this list, sir, and I’m going to find out who it is.”

  “Go with God.”

  Chapter Nine - Vee

  I gave it a week before looking into P3n173nc3’s next name, Kyle Fisher. I needed time to let the SCPD cool down. It was irresponsible to go out every night, especially after my two-in-a-row streak with James Honey and Karl Murphy. At this rate, I could snuff out all ten men who were involved with my mother’s death in a matter of weeks, but did I want to? I wondered if the remaining seven had caught on to the pattern yet, if any of them realized they were next on my list. I hoped they sweated in bed at night, drenching the sheets, hyper aware of every creak of the floorboards and scratch at the door. I hoped they looked over their shoulders in the streets, kept their phones gripped in tight fingers with 911 on speed dial. I hoped they knew fear, that it was a constant companion of theirs, whispering paranoid thoughts in their ears like personal demons from hell. And I hoped that all ten of them would eventually find hell.

  In my spare time, I worked on getting my hands on a motorcycle. Legally purchasing a vehicle when your given name rested somewhere in Simone City’s “deceased” list was no mean feat. I hired a twenty-year-old Minerva local to visit one of Juno’s BMW dealerships. He paid for the bike in total, rode it off the lot, and parked it at our agreed-upon location. I never saw his face, and he never saw mine, but I transferred enough money to his depleted checking account to keep his questions at bay. All of the money, including the payment for the bike, checked out. It came from an account that I’d set up under an alias, one that I could access whenever I needed it. Yet another perk of being the prodigy of the biggest name in the technology business.

  Every night, I took my new ride out in the middle of nowhere to practice. When I was younger, I rode dirt bikes with the boys instead of horses with the girls like my mother preferred, but the sleek, matte-black speed bike had more horsepower than I was used to. The basics came back to me quickly, and it wasn’t long before I pushed the speedometer to its limits on Minerva’s loneliest backroads. If the police managed to catch on to my trail, I could easily outrun them.

  Li Hui let me park the bike in her private garage. She didn’t ask what I needed a motorcycle for if I never left my apartment, but she did give me this knowing look that instilled a fraction of anxiety in me.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, cricket,” she’d said as I covered the motorcycle with a drop cloth to keep it hidden amongst Li Hui’s junk. I nodded and smiled.

  Other than the bike, I continued to make advancements in other areas of my new profession. I modified the leather pants and jacket by sewing knife sheaths along the thighs and sleeves. Now I could bring along more than just the karambit, and every blade remained within easy reach. I practiced drawing each one a million times. The drywall in the apartment was destroyed from knives that missed the corkboard. Li Hui was definitely keeping my deposit.

  When I finally sat down to track Kyle Fisher, I went into it with the same cool mindset as with the previous three targets, but when I turned up a picture of Kyle Fisher, my blood ran cold. I could not mistake the shape of that man. Not his ridiculous height or broad shoulders that bullied me into submission. Not the long, cold fingers that pressed my cheek against the floor of my family’s apartment. Not the waist that straddled mine and locked me in place. Not his eyes, blue and cold, taking in a sight that didn’t belong to him. Kyle Fisher was the nightmare that haunted me. He was the man I wished I could set fire to and watch burn, and he deserved a special kind of death.

  I hacked into Fisher’s private computer with relish. I wanted to dismantle his life piece by piece, slowly but surely. I could empty his bank accounts, ruin his relationships, and make his life a living hell, but it wouldn’t be enough. I needed to watch as his heartbeat stopped, as his blood gushed from his veins. I wanted him to see my eyes and my face as he held on to the last thread of his life. I clicked through his digital life, digging for an opportunity, and found one. Kyle Fisher planned to attend the Simone City Hospital Fundraiser this Saturday. It was at the performing arts theater downtown, where the biggest names in Simone City paid thousands for a single ticket to benefit the hospital. The fundraiser included a catered dinner and a night at the ballet, and I was going to go.

  It wasn’t quite the takedown I originally planned, and neither were the preparations. First, I created a new identity for myself, Amelia Benson, and added her to the event’s guest list. Then, I ordered a ball gown from Juno’s finest dress shop, e-mail
ed my measurements, and had the dress delivered to a nearby post office. I sent the same kid who’d bought my motorcycle to pick it up since he was more than happy to make another quick buck. Then I ordered a long, jet-black wig.

  On the night of the event, I got dressed, did my makeup, and put on the wig. With the concealer and the fake eyelashes and my own hairstyle hidden beneath another, Veronica Bauer, or Vee, was unrecognizable. The scarlet gown fit perfectly, though I hadn’t missed the cinched waists and squashed breasts that came standard with such attire. The train of it swished across the ground behind me. Not a problem for the marble floors at the performing arts center, but certainly an issue for the dirty alleys of lower Minerva. I put on a long trench coat that covered most of the dress’s extravagance, gathered the train up in a handful to keep it above ground, and walked to a secluded corner along the border of Minerva and Vesta. From there, I called a private car, and when I climbed inside, I pretended I’d come from one of the nicer houses along Vesta’s edge rather than the utter wreckage in Minerva.

  “You look beautiful, miss,” the driver said. “I assume we’re heading to the fundraiser?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We made eye contact in the rear-view mirror, and I tore my gaze away. My heart pounded against my rib cage. I stopped breathing, realized it, and deeply inhaled. I wasn’t ready for the challenge of tonight. I hadn’t been around this many people or attended an event since the last Bauer Tech Gala. I hadn’t socialized with Simone City’s elite class or raised a pinky finger to drink a cup of tea or legally consumed alcohol in public. Now, I was going to do it all and murder someone in the process.