Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I swear to you I didn’t.”

  His words hit me like a tidal wave. I was there to ask him what he’d witnessed; it had never occurred to me that he might be Mirelle’s killer.

  “I’m not accusing you of that,” I said. “But I remember your face. I saw you the night Mirelle died. You . . . I think you carried me. You put me on a plane. My sister, Juliet, was there.”

  He nodded. “I remember her. She was angry. She said, ‘Drop him.’ She wanted me to throw you on the floor of the plane, I think. I put you in a seat and buckled you up.”

  “It sounds like I should be thanking you. Please put the gun down. I’m not here to hurt you. All I want are answers.”

  Badem stared into my eyes for what felt like a month before lowering his gun. He rolled up the lower half of his shirt, revealing a thin torso with two bullet holes in it. They were old and healed, but the flesh around them had settled in jagged mounds, like miniature volcanoes.

  “That’s what happened the last time I took an assignment from Harris,” he said.

  It jolted me, hearing the name of my father’s trusted lieutenant. My father had grown the business with shady side ventures, and Harris and Klaus were his partners in those crimes. “I would’ve jumped off a cliff rather than work with Harris on anything.”

  “I should have done that,” Badem said, lowering his shirt. “But for several years, it was a very good living.”

  “I don’t remember the night Mirelle died, and I’m trying to piece it together. I need you to tell me what you remember. Please, will you do that?” There was desperation in my voice, and I believe he heard it.

  Badem gestured with the gun for me to sit on the sofa. I took the cushion Snoopy had vacated. Badem went into the kitchenette and rattled around, out of sight for a minute. When he returned, it was without the weapon. Instead, he brandished two glasses and a bottle filled with a clear liquid. He returned to the kitchenette and came back with a bottle of water.

  “You have raki before?” he asked me.

  “In Istanbul once,” I answered. “That was enough.”

  He chuckled lightly. “It’s not poison; it just tastes like it.” He poured some liqueur into each glass and chased it with water. Instantly, the liquid became cloudy. He took a drink and made a face. “You too,” he said, and I followed suit. It was bitter and bracing.

  “Tell me what you remember,” I prompted.

  “I had been working at the hotel for six, seven years then. It was a good job, the best job I ever had in this country,” he said. “One afternoon, Harris came in. He said he needed me to be on call that night.”

  “Hold on, Harris was in Berlin? We’re talking about twelve years ago. January thirtieth.”

  “Yes, it was Harris. Most of the special assignments I did were for Klaus von Strohm. But the particularly dangerous ones were managed by Harris.”

  I stared into the pale clouds swirling in my glass. Harris was almost always by my father’s side. When I’d called my father, he’d been traveling. Only . . . I didn’t actually remember calling my father; I’d been told I called him. What the hell had brought Harris to Berlin?

  “Did Harris tell you what you would be doing?”

  “No. He said it would be a late night, but it wouldn’t be dangerous.” He took another swig. “I got his call at three in the morning. I lived in Charlottenburg then; it wasn’t a long drive, maybe ten minutes. He picked me up, and we drove to the edge of Mitte, near the zoo. Harris told me to wait for him. I remember it was a freezing night, and he turned the engine off. It was so cold, and he was gone for fifteen minutes.”

  He was staring into his glass as if a vision of that night were playing out in it.

  I was trying to process the details he’d laid out. It chilled me that Harris had been there; I didn’t remember that at all. It made sense that my father would send him to clean up the scene—Harris’s military background and total lack of ethics would’ve been assets in that—but I couldn’t understand why he’d told Badem to be ready earlier in the day. It was as if he’d known something terrible was going to happen.

  Or, perhaps, he was going to make something terrible happen.

  “And after you waited outside?” I asked.

  “Harris came back and ordered me to come in. He said I had to keep quiet, not say a word. We went to an apartment on the first floor. You were there, lying on the floor. There was a beautiful girl lying next to you.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “She was dead. There was a knife in her chest. Blood was still pouring out of her body. It was getting on you.”

  “But the knife . . .” My throat constricted; it was almost impossible to choke the words out. “The knife was in my hand.”

  “Because Harris put it there,” Badem said. “You were out cold. After he moved the knife, Harris told me to wake you up. I tried shaking you. Harris told me to stop being so delicate and slapped you a couple of times. It was impossible to wake you up. I told Harris I couldn’t, and he said we had to. He said it was the whole point—you had to see this.”

  A vicious thought had been coiling around my brain as soon as Badem mentioned Harris. I wanted to throw up. I’d spent more than a decade with the awful certainty that I was a killer, only to find out that I had been set up. If Mehmet Badem could be believed, Harris had murdered Mirelle while I was dead to the world.

  “You finally came around, and you were very confused. You stared at the dead girl for a long time, like you couldn’t focus. Then you screamed ‘Mirelle!’ over and over. You were crying. You tried to get up, but Harris was holding your head down. I was holding your body in place.”

  I remembered seeing Mirelle’s dead body and screaming. I’d had no sense of time, or how I’d stabbed her. I’d never understood why I’d attacked her in the first place—the voices in my head quieted when violence was done to me, not when I committed it. What I’d struggled to understand was how I’d blacked out from blood loss, yet had enough strength to attack and kill Mirelle. For the first time, the fog in my head lifted.

  “I didn’t call my father, asking for help, did I?”

  “You didn’t call anyone. Harris hit you, and you went out cold.”

  Everything I’d thought I knew about that night was a lie.

  “We drove east to a small airstrip. There was a private plane waiting for you. Your sister was already on board. Like I told you, she was furious.” Badem gave me a sorrowful look. “I remember feeling worried about you. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I pitied you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  DEIRDRE

  Leaving the garage, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. I should never have gone to see my father, even if curiosity was killing me. He was bound to ramble on about how much he’d changed, and I was going to hate him as much as ever. I’d thought I could control it, but seeing what Caro had written to him had put me over the edge.

  I was ashamed I’d let the situation devolve into our old, tired battle. We mixed like oil and water. It had been that way between us since the day I’d discovered my mother’s desperate letter hidden in the family Bible. I’d hated their fights long before that, but finding the letter gave me a clarity I’d lacked before. Acknowledging my mother was a kind of hostage, living in terror of the man she’d married, changed everything. Before, I’d thought of the fights as their fights, as if the battles belonged to both of them and were as routine as dancing on Friday nights. After all, my mother had a sharp tongue, and she wasn’t cowed by her husband, no matter how hard he hit her.

  I got back on the 7 train, switching to the G at Court Square. The G was the lone train connecting Queens with Brooklyn, and taking it was always a weird adventure as it zigged and zagged. Every so often, I glanced around furtively, worried someone might see a tear glimmering in my eye, but I had little to fear. The G train was half-empty, and nobody who glanced my way looked past my tattoos.

  It was an unusually slow train.
It took me over an hour to get to Fort Hamilton Parkway. From there, I walked to Green-Wood Cemetery. As I headed in, I wished I had a place where I could visit my mother. I didn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but I didn’t disbelieve in them either. Energy had to go somewhere, after all. My mother’s ashes were, as far as I knew, still in an urn from the funeral home at our father’s house. Caro once told me our father hadn’t even opened the paper bag; he’d stuck it in a cabinet. I hated my father for many reasons, but the fact he hadn’t given my mother any kind of decent resting place was high on the list.

  I wasn’t sure I could find Caro’s grave on my own. I’d driven in with Theo, looping around the twisting roads in a car. On foot, entering from a gate on the far side of the cemetery, I could roam over the grassy hills with tombstones sprouting like toadstools, walking in a crooked approximation of how the crow flies. I was distracted by monuments and mausoleums whispering of grandiose fantasies. There was a lot of beauty in this place, but everything I appreciated was a reminder of another family’s loss. I didn’t mind the detailed pyramids and castles—even if they felt more like monuments to big egos instead of people—but the statues of sweet children and gentle lambs and doomed lovers overwhelmed me. I wasn’t the sentimental type, but the atmosphere of unrelenting grief inched under my skin like dampness, making my bones ache.

  By the time I got to my sister’s grave, I was ready to lie down beside her. The line from her letter—I know Deirdre is difficult—still stuck in my craw, but it wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t just difficult—I prided myself on it, going toe-to-toe with people I despised. I wondered how, exactly, I’d gotten that way. It had been part of my nature as long as I could remember.

  “You could’ve told me how you felt when you were alive,” I said, plopping down onto the grass. “It would’ve made everything easier.”

  The gravediggers had filled the hole with dirt, leaving a raised brown scar in the green grass. The small stone marker was covered by a bouquet of white roses with their heavy blooms drooping, as if they’d fallen asleep.

  I sat quietly for a while, wishing I could channel my sister’s spirit. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on with you? I wanted to ask her. Why feed me a handful of bread crumbs after you’re already gone?

  In the quiet of the graveyard, I couldn’t help but think about the difference in tone between the letter she’d written to our father and the one she’d sent me. The guy from Osiris’s Vault, Todd, had said something about different versions of her note to me. Maybe that was because she’d dashed it off early in the morning, less than an hour before she died. Her letter to our father was thoughtful and measured, even if it contained painful truths. Her message to me was rushed and panicked. Something had terrified her.

  Theo killed his first wife and got away with it. Bring him to justice, no matter what you have to do.

  Theo’s father had admitted his son had shown up around five that morning, but his visit had been brief. Ben had told me he was supposed to meet Caro near her house, but that plan had changed, with my sister deciding to come down to his neighborhood. I understood that Theo’s surprise appearance had rattled Caro—it had to be why she’d dashed off her message to me—but I felt like there was something I was missing, some detail that would thread everything together.

  I didn’t know what she expected me to do. She’d left me with exactly nothing . . .

  Or had she?

  All her data in Osiris’s Vault was gone, but that wasn’t her only digital footprint. I thought of the photographs and the memory card she’d given me. The spreadsheets had been a surprise. What if there was something else on there, a detail I’d missed because I hadn’t known what I was looking for?

  That thought pricked at me like a thorn all the way back to Queens. I didn’t even stop at Kung Fu Tea on my way home. But when I landed on my block, a cop car was parked outside the house, lights flashing.

  My landlord, Saira Mukherjee, was on the lawn, talking to a uniformed cop. He was taking notes and nodding. When she noticed me, Saira waved me over frantically.

  “We’ve been robbed!” she yelled.

  I hurried over. “What happened?”

  “Wilson was in the basement”—Wilson was the human foghorn in the room next to mine—“and he heard some strange sounds. When he poked his head out of his room, he saw your door was open. There was a man ransacking your room.”

  “You caught him?”

  Saira gave me a look that said, Are you for real? Wilson hid from his own shadow most of the year.

  “The burglar saw him and punched Wilson in the head. He dragged him into your room and messed him up. Poor Wilson’s at Elmhurst now.” Saira meant the public hospital nearby.

  “We’re going to need you to do an inventory, see what was taken,” the cop said.

  I nodded and moved on autopilot toward the house.

  My room was a mess. Whoever had broken in had ignored the lock and splintered the plywood door. I didn’t own much, but most of what I had was lying on the floor. I sifted through the rubble but couldn’t find the envelope from Caro. My laptop was gone. I searched on my hands and knees in case the memory card had somehow fallen out of the envelope, but it had vanished.

  CHAPTER 32

  DEIRDRE

  There was no way I could stay at my apartment that night. I gathered up some clothes and toiletries and made my escape to Reagan’s house. I felt embarrassed, standing on the porch. There I was, asking for them to take care of me. Again.

  “Would it be okay if I stayed here tonight?” I asked when Mrs. Chen answered. “Someone broke into my place.”

  Reagan wasn’t even there—she was working crazy hours as usual. Her mother set me up in what had been my bedroom as a teenager. The window overlooked the street, and the tree next to it was a favorite spot for blue jays. I had no way to thank her enough.

  “Who would break into your room, Dee?” Mrs. Chen asked me, perplexed. “You have no money! What could they take? This city is too dangerous now.”

  I lay awake for part of the night, asking myself the same question. As much as I hated Theo, he was an ocean away. Ben seemed like the obvious suspect—he’d wanted me to hand over the memory card—but another part of my brain was stuck on Theo’s father. I’d mentioned the card to him. Even though I hadn’t said what was on it, he surely knew Caro had a memory card on her when she died. The cops said it had been given back to her family, so maybe the old man even knew what was on it.

  I told myself I was being paranoid. Aubrey Sutton-Braithwaite was definitely out to get me. I could see him breaking into my room and smashing everything I owned for fun. But he wouldn’t care about the memory card.

  In the morning, I managed to stop Mrs. Chen from waking Reagan up.

  “Do you have any idea how hard she works?” I asked.

  “Let me tell you about working hard,” she shot back. I listened quietly while she regaled me with stories I may have heard a few times before. In the end, I promised to go to Mass with her—on a Saturday, no less—and that mollified her enough to let Reagan rest.

  Caro’s funeral aside, it had been a long time since I’d set foot in a church. Mrs. Chen attended St. Adalbert’s. Growing up, I’d taken First Communion at the Church of the Ascension, another Elmhurst institution. It lay on the north side of the train tracks that bisected the neighborhood, just like my father’s house did. St. Adalbert’s was on the south side, which meant the odds of running into him were low.

  “You have a mask?” Mrs. Chen asked me on our way in. “People still wear them here.”

  “Always.” I pulled one out of my bag and put it on. It had become normal to carry one at all times, especially for taking public transit. That was ironic because New York’s subway was better ventilated than most buildings in the city, yet it remained a collective source of anxiety.

  St. Adalbert’s looked like a church from an old lithograph, with its Gothic bell tower and clean white trim over sandy bricks. It had been found
ed when the neighborhood was Polish, and that was still part of its identity even in a diverse community—the notice board said the service after ours would be in Polish. My mind drifted as I stared at the stained-glass windows, much as I had as an antsy child. The sermon was about charity, and the word stuck in my brain. I’d been pulling at the threads of my sister’s life, but not that one, even though everywhere I went there were reminders of her philanthropy. Mrs. Chen frowned when I pulled out my phone and looked up the Diotima Civic Society. Dr. Adinah Gerstein’s contact information was on the site, and I tapped out a quick email, asking if we could talk in person, before mouthing a contrite “sorry” and tucking the phone away.

  “Whose butt are you kicking today?” Mrs. Chen asked as we headed out after the service. She was almost my height, which made her unusually tall for a Chinese woman of her generation. She wore her hair in an angular bob, liked to wear black as much as I did, and never left the house without red lipstick.

  “Why do you think I’m kicking anyone’s butt?”

  “It’s what you do. Some people need kicking.”

  “I’m going to see a woman who knew my sister,” I said. “Then I’m visiting my nephew. There’s a risk my brother-in-law will show up. In that case, you might have to bail me out of jail later.”

  “Try not to let that happen.” She touched my cheek. “You need some rouge.”

  I rolled my eyes, but inside, I was smiling. Mrs. Chen could drive Reagan crazy with her constant stream of unsolicited advice. Her daughter took it as criticism, but I looked at it differently. Mrs. Chen was one of the only people in the world who actually cared if my face was rosy. Or if I lived or died, for that matter. Nitpicking was her way of helping, and the truth was I needed that kind of help sometimes.

  “Do you have any with you?” I asked.

  “Of course.” She dug into her purse, pulled out a little pot of color with blooming flowers and Korean words on the lid, and dotted cream blush onto my cheekbones. “Better,” she added, rubbing it in. “Be careful when you’re out.”