Missed Connections: Book 0

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Not according to these lab results,” I said. “Apparently, she was in that alleyway with Kyle Fisher less than twenty-four hours ago. Apparently, he shot her, and she killed him.”

  Dumas leaned back and massaged the bridge of his nose with a deep sigh. “Arden, I don’t know why I have to tell you this, but someone who is legally dead would not be able to stab someone else in the middle of the night.”

  “Then how do you explain this?” I asked.

  “The lab probably screwed something up. It wouldn’t be the first time. Got a couple incompetent idiots who work down there.”

  “Dumas, I’m telling you, we have to take this seriously. It makes sense, doesn’t it?” I flapped the files in his face, trying to get him to sit up straight. “I already told you that I thought this case was connected to the incident with the Bauers. If Veronica’s alive—”

  “She’s not,” he barked. He straightened up so quickly that I recoiled away from him. “Her mother is dead. Her father’s in prison. And Veronica Bauer died the same night.”

  I studied his furious face, the furrowed brow and the pursed lips. There was a reason, something that had to do with the Bauer case, behind Dumas’s vehemence. He silently screamed for me to let it go, to leave his office without pissing him off any further, but I wasn’t going to give this up so easily. “How do you know?” I asked him. “How do you know she’s dead if her body was never recovered?”

  The red faded from his face. “Do you know something I don’t, Arden?”

  “No. No, sir, I don’t.”

  Chapter Thirteen - Vee

  I wasn’t dead. That was a plus. I woke up in my own bed, in my own apartment, with no memory of how I’d managed to make it back there. The morning sun struggled to penetrate the dirt on the window, casting dusty yellow streams across fresh sheets that I didn’t remember changing. In the kitchen, bacon sizzled in a pan, and the scent of freshly ground coffee beans floated around my pillows. Someone else was here. One of my knives rested on the nearest bookcase. I stretched toward it, but a sharp pain crested through my abdomen, and I let out a suppressed squeal of discomfort. In the kitchen, whoever was cooking set their utensil on the counter. Quick, light footsteps pattered toward me. I lunged for the knife, biting on my lip to keep quiet, and grasped the handle of the blade. A small face peeked around the weathered molding of the kitchen alcove.

  “Li Hui?”

  The little woman gave a flimsy wave with a greasy spatula, her face half hidden behind the wall of the kitchen. “You are okay, cricket?”

  Everything came back to me all at once. Following Kyle Fisher out of the ballet. Confronting him in the alleyway. Stabbing him in the neck. Blacking out because he shot me. He shot me. I yanked up the blankets and checked the wound. My torso was wrapped in clean gauze. The bloodied and torn dress was nowhere to be found.

  I looked up at Li Hui. “Did you do this?”

  She nodded and shuffled toward the stove to finish cooking. As she rustled around with breakfast plates and coffee mugs, I wrestled with what to ask her about last night. I pressed lightly on the spot above the gunshot wound and winced. It was painful but not unbearable. Li Hui emerged from the kitchen with a plate piled high with eggs, bacon, muffins that she’d made from scratch, and a ton of fruit. She set it on my lap and placed a cup of coffee on the bookshelf beside me.

  “Eat, eat,” she said. “You need your strength.”

  I shuffled around, trying to sit up straighter. Li Hui motioned for me to lean forward and stacked the pillows to support my spine. As I ate, Li Hui watched with a keen eye. When I reached for the coffee cup, she got to it before me and placed it in my hands.

  “How did you find me?” I asked her. “How did you know where I would be? Did you take me to a hospital? Tell me you didn’t take me to the hospital.”

  Li Hui raised a hand to stop my babbling. “I know more than you think about you. What you do in the night.”

  My skin prickled. I set down my fork. “What do you mean?”

  She gestured to the row of knives on the bookshelf and the motorcycle gear draped over the foot of the bed. “You are her. The woman killing the men on the news.”

  The bacon in my stomach threatened to reappear. My skin was damp and cold. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She rested her hand over mine, but I jerked away. “It’s okay, cricket. I don’t judge you. I wish you safe. I wish you here where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “You gave me the mask,” I recalled. “After the first time, you gave me the mask in the takeout bag. I wasn’t sure if you meant to or not.”

  “I meant to.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “You are Veronica. Or you were. Are you someone new now?”

  I swallowed hard, unaccustomed to hearing my name spoken by someone who actually cared about me. I didn’t want to hear it. Veronica Bauer was a different person. She was a scared, broken teenager. Furthermore, she was dead, and I didn’t want anything to do with her. “You can keep calling me Vee. Or cricket. I don’t mind either.”

  She took my hand again. This time, I let her pat it with her soft fingers. “You are always cricket to me.”

  “Where’d that nickname come from anyway?”

  Li Hui smiled. “You are small but mighty, like cricket.”

  I smiled back, a genuine one that stretched the muscles of my face into a shape I was no longer familiar with, but the expression quickly faded. “Why haven’t you called the police yet?”

  “Because you have a story,” she said. “And I want to know the story. Juno police don’t come to Minerva anyway.”

  “They would if they knew I was here.”

  “Tell me story.”

  Li Hui was the only constant in my life, the only person I pretended to depend on. All this time, she knew I wasn’t the person I claimed to be, and yet she allowed me to rent a room in her building. She’d saved me from either death or incarceration, and all she wanted in return was the truth. I didn’t trust her. Not because I didn’t believe her, but because I didn’t trust anyone. It was no longer in my nature to do so, but it had been so long since I’d confided in anyone, and Li Hui proved herself by getting me home safely.

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  “What happened to your family? How are you alive?”

  “You probably know the news story, right?” I set aside my plate, no longer hungry, and propped myself up at a better angle to drink my coffee. Li Hui served it black, no sugar, and its bitter bite lent me the bravery to explain what happened that night. “Twelve years ago, my father confessed that he murdered me and my mother after the Bauer Tech Charity Gala and disposed of my body. Clearly, that wasn’t the case. My father is innocent. To this day, I have no idea why he told the police that he killed us.” I played with a leftover strawberry, picking out the seeds with my fingernail. “That night, ten of my father’s coworkers and friends broke into our apartment in Juno. They raped me and my mother. They killed her, by accident, I think, but then they decided that they shouldn’t leave any witnesses. They planned on killing me too.”

  Li Hui made a noise between despair and rage. I tried to hug my knees up to my chest, but the hole in my torso protested. I stretched out and pulled the blankets up to my chin to cover as much of myself as possible. Like the blankets would protect me from whatever might come to pass.

  “And then what happened?” Li Hui said. “Where did the men go? Why did they leave you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think I went into shock or something because I don’t remember much. All of a sudden, they were gone, and there was a girl there.”

  “A girl?”

  “Yeah, the pizza delivery girl from Giordano’s.” I rubbed the bags under my eyes. The girl’s face, her wacky red and green visor, had never left my memory. “My mom ordered pizza right before everything happened, and when the girl showed up to deliver the pizza, she found us instead.”
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  Li Hui covered her mouth. “What did she do? Did she call the police?”

  “Yeah, she did. From my mother’s cell phone,” I said, prying through my memory to clear out the cobwebs. “But I didn’t want to be there when the cops got there. My mother’s body was lying on the couch. I couldn’t look at her. They left her half-naked, bleeding all over the place. I begged the girl to help me leave. She didn’t want to at first. She thought the cops would want to talk to me, and that I needed to go to the hospital. I’m pretty sure I cried all over her until she gave in. She carried me downstairs. We went out the back way so the doorman wouldn’t see us. She was driving her mother’s car. It was full of pizza. Smelled like it too. She didn’t deliver the rest of them. She drove me to her house in Vesta, snuck me into her bedroom, and took care of me. Her mom was sleeping in the next room. I was there the whole night, and the girl never told her mother about me. She did what I asked her to.”

  “She helped you?”

  I nodded wearily. “She put me in the bath and helped clean me up. Made me eat and drink something. Gave me ibuprofen and something else from her mother’s medicine cabinet to calm me down. We fell asleep in the same bed. The next morning, I woke up before her. She was a heavy sleeper. I snuck out her window.”

  Li Hui’s brow wrinkled. “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be Veronica Bauer anymore.” I bowed my chin to my chest and massaged my neck. It was sore from lying on the stone-cold pavement for however long. “And she would have eventually told her mom about me. I’m sure she did at some point.”

  “But there were other things that needed to be done,” Li Hui insisted. “You needed to see a doctor to make sure everything was okay. You could have spoken the police and told them the truth. They could have caught those men. Your father wouldn’t have gone to jail—”

  “I went to a free clinic in Minerva for obvious reasons,” I told her. “They didn’t recognize me. I looked awful, so I couldn’t possibly be the pristine Veronica Bauer. I was wearing the pizza girl’s clothes. As far as the police, I already told you. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I wanted to disappear, to stop existing, so that’s what I did. I stayed in Minerva and lived on the streets until I could get my hands on a laptop. That’s when I started doing what I do now to make money. I bounced from apartment to apartment until I finally landed here. You were the first landlord I trusted to sign a lease with for more than six months at a time.”

  “And the girl?” Li Hui asked. “Did she ever try to contact you?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since that night. I have no idea if she ever told the police what really happened.”

  “But someone in Simone City knows you’re alive.”

  “Yeah. Two someones now. Her and you.” I said. Li Hui’s expression was unreadable. “I’m a killer, Li Hui. I’ve killed four men, and I intend on killing at least six more.”

  If my blunt statements scared her, she didn’t show it. Rather, she gently brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and watched me with sad eyes. “You’re no killer. Just scared. You stay here. I take care of you.”

  “No, I don’t think—”

  “Stay,” she said again. “Trust me. I won’t call police. You need to heal. Long time before you go hunting again. Several weeks. But, cricket—” she leaned toward me, cupping my cheek in her palm “—vengeance like this does not go without consequences.”

  Chapter Fourteen - Sheila

  The Simone City killer was on a break. A month passed without a murder or any other leads on the case. My investigation was at a standstill. I read every possible article on the Bauer incident. I combed through every single police report from that night. I almost listened to the nine-one-one call, but Dumas was passing through, and I wasn’t ready to share that kind of information with him yet. I ran an old photo of Veronica Bauer through facial recognition software and looked for matches in recent license pictures, traffic cameras, and security footage, but there was no evidence Veronica Bauer, who would be twenty-seven years old by now, was living in Simone City and murdering the men who once worked with her father.

  The investigation was so cold that Dumas had stopped asking me for updates. He preferred to walk by my desk on the way to his office every morning, fix me with a look of withering disappointment—pursed lips included—then shake his head in resolute silence before strolling off. It was monstrously frustrating. If Veronica was the person who’d taken down Beatnik, Honey, Murphy, and Fisher, she was doing a damn good job of keeping herself under wraps. What stumped me was how she had managed to escape the alleyway after killing Fisher. She should have died from that amount of blood loss, but Simone City hospital didn’t have any GSW patients on file from that night. Either Veronica got lucky, or she had an accomplice. I was betting on the latter.

  One Monday morning was no different than the others. Spring was in full bloom. Cherry trees blossomed along the sidewalks on my way to work. The pollen did wonders for my allergies. My sneezes jet-propelled me to the precinct, and by the time I arrived, my eyes were so swollen and red it looked like I’d been crying for hours.

  “Ay, mamacita!” Diaz, who happened to be passing through the precinct for a case, took me by the shoulders. “What happened?”

  I wiped my streaming eyes. “It’s the fucking cherry trees. I’m fine, Diaz, I swear. It’s just allergies.”

  “Well, take some Loratadine or something. I thought someone died.”

  “No, the only thing that’s dying right now is my career.”

  Diaz chuckled. “Still no luck on the Switchblade case?”

  “We’re not calling it that anymore,” I reminded him. “And no. Not since the lab results came back with a dead person’s name attached to them.”

  He patted my back. “I’m sure you’ll find something soon. Hang in there—”

  Dumas brushed by and gave Diaz a hard look. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  “Yes, sir,” Diaz said, stumbling over his feet on the way to the door.

  “So go be there,” Dumas ordered. “Arden, get to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, but the captain was halfway to his office.

  “That man scares me,” Diaz said.

  “He scares us all. See you later.”

  One of the secretaries had dropped off a load of paperwork on my desk that wasn’t mine. I’d been a detective for almost two months, and I still didn’t have a place amongst the others at my level. Maybe Dumas didn’t want to bother moving my desk from the bullpen to the detective quarters since I was going to flame out anyway. At this rate, I was starting to believe him.

  Payne emerged from the break room with a coffee in hand. “Is this my paperwork? Why do you have it?”

  “Ask Beth.”

  He transferred the files from my desk to his. “Why the fuck do you look like that?”

  “Like what, Payne?”

  “Like you’re about to step out in traffic.”

  “I have allergies, Payne,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “This happens to me every spring. You’ve known me for ten years. You should expect this by now.”

  He shrugged, sat down, and propped his feet up on his desk. “I figured you were crying over the fact that you can’t figure this case out.”

  “I’d rather cry over the fact that I have to sit next to you.”

  He pointedly put on his headphones, switched on the noise-cancelling feature, and began to work on his own monitor, facing away from me. Every so often, he slurped on his coffee.

  I turned on my computer, more for show than anything else. I didn’t expect to hit a breakthrough today. An audio file—the nine-one-one call from that night—waited for me to listen to it. I couldn’t avoid it for much longer, so I put on my headphones and clicked play.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  “Please, I just found Vivian and Veronica Bauer in their apartment.” The answering voice was laden with worry and fear. “I th
ink—I think Mrs. Bauer is dead.” A choked sob interrupted the report. “I think someone killed her. Veronica—”

  The voice cut off.

  “Hello?” the emergency operator said. “Miss, are you still with me? We’re dispatching units right away, but I need you to stay on the line. Can you check Mrs. Bauer’s pulse?”

  Someone breathed heavily into the phone, as if debating whether or not she should say something else. “Please come,” the voice said, and then the line went dead.

  I sent the audio file to my phone and packed my things. Payne glanced up, not from his paperwork, but from a rousing game of antique Minesweeper.

  “Where are you doing?” he asked, shaking off his headphones. “You just got here.”

  “Got a tip,” I said. “See you later, Payne in my ass.”

  I caught a cab to my mother’s house and left the windows down because damned if I was going to let such a beautiful day go to waste just because of the stupid cherry blossoms. The cab driver stopped offering me tissues one by one and tossed the entire box into the back seat. When we arrived in Vesta, I thanked him profusely and gave him an extra tip to let me keep the tissues. He agreed, happy to have my runny nose out of his cab.

  “Mom?” I called, letting myself into the house. My mother worked from home as an online private tutor, so I was counting on her to be here. I found her in her study, a room at the back of the house with wide windows that opened to the butterfly garden she’d planted in the backyard when I was five. The breeze wafted in with the scent of roses. A hummingbird zipped around the sap-feeder that hung just beyond the window.

  “Sheila, honey.” My mother was reading on the sofa. “Haven’t you been using that nasal spray?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I wiped my face on the cab driver’s tissues and sniffed. Mom closed the windows. The air inside the study went still. “I need to tell you something.”