Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  “We’ll stop him,” Hank said, but in fact, he did know that what she said had more than a grain of truth in it.

  “As long as he’s coming after me, we all know where to look, right? We all know who we have to watch.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Because if I screw up this time, if I read things wrong, if I can’t figure my way through the killer’s twists... then you’re going to be the one to die.” He squeezed her hands. “You have to let us find another way to get this guy.”

  And she pulled away from him. “I’m not going to. I’m not going to make myself safe; I’m not going to hide away from everything I can do just so some other woman can die in my place. Some woman who might be somebody’s mother or sister or wife or daughter. I’m not going to do that, Hank, and you shouldn’t even think about asking me.”

  He stood up, angry. “There’s a part of you, Jess, that thinks you deserve to die. That your sister’s death is your fault, and that if you can’t kill the killer, at least you can be dead, too.” He clenched his hands into fists, and felt his stomach knot. “You think I haven’t felt that all along? This guilt of yours? This totally unreasonable, totally stupid guilt from all the way back when you were twenty-one? That you’ve been carrying around on your shoulders like it was the world, and you were chained to it?”

  She stepped up to him, right into his face. “I don’t care what you see, and I don’t care what you think. I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it.”

  “You’re trying to kill yourself.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “You’re so scared to face the truth that you can’t think straight. You want to believe that you have all these noble reasons for hanging on to this case and putting yourself in stupid, unnecessary jeopardy, but when it comes right down to it, you’re in it to play Russian roulette with yourself. Get the killer or die trying — that’s you. And there’s a whole police force out there that can do exactly what you think you have to do alone. You’re not the only good cop in Atlanta, Jess. Not by a long shot.”

  “Get out,” she said. “I’m doing my job whether you like it or not. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take shit about the way I do it. Not from you, not from anyone.” Her face was red, her fists knotted, and she looked like she wanted to kick down a wall. “You have no stake in how I do my job, Hank Kamian. You have no say in the risks I take, or why I take them, or what value I place on my own life. I won’t put a partner in jeopardy. I won’t get stupid. But no more women are going to die if I can do anything about it.”

  “Fine,” he said. “People get what they want, Jess. And you want some dark, awful things. You want to be a martyr... well, that’ll make your mother happy, won’t it? You don’t want my help; you want to be stupid. Then be stupid. I’m out of here.”

  He stalked to the door, turned back to her, and said, “Don’t forget the potatoes.”

  He slammed the door behind him so hard it shook the light fixtures up and down the hallway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The slamming of the door was like a shot of adrenaline. Jess stomped into the kitchen, muttering, “Don’t forget the potatoes. Don’t forget the fucking potatoes? Yes, Sarge; I’ll jump right on that, Sarge; just what I want in my life is to have you tell me how to live it, Sarge.”

  The bags were in the way, and she had to have someplace to put the potatoes, didn’t she? And, dammit, she was going to eat her steak with him or without him. She pulled one of the two slabs of meat — God, he’d paid a fortune for those steaks; they were really nice — out of the fridge, and everything inside jingled like Tinkerbell when Jess banged the door shut.

  Steak. She knew how to make a damned steak. She’d show him. Broiler pan — Hank already had it laid out. Throw the steak on the pan, put the oven on broil, put the potatoes on the bottom shelf. Salt, pepper — there you were. She could do a steak.

  She jammed the broiler pan and its single hunk of beef onto the top rack, then stood there staring at the oven, too angry to even move, until the steak started to sizzle. She realized she needed to clear space on the counter. The two bags Hank had brought with him were in her way. She tossed the first, but the second wasn’t empty. In it she found two fat white candles, scented. A bottle of red wine. Chocolates.

  And behind the bag, flowers sitting on the counter, arranged in a cut-glass vase, sweet-smelling and somehow homey.

  Flowers? He’d brought her flowers?

  And all of a sudden, her eyes were full of tears again.

  The hell with that. He’d been trying to manipulate her. To get her to do what he wanted her to do. Get off the case, take a backseat, be safe, let more women die.

  Except he hadn’t given her the flowers first, had he? Hadn’t lit the candles, put the big yellow box of candy in her hands, offered her a bunch of sweet butter-her-up nothings. He’d been saving those, she guessed.

  For after she agreed with him.

  Or something.

  The possibility that she might have been a bit more graceful in turning down his offer to go stay with him occurred to her. The possibility that she had been, well, sort of a bitch about it... that also crossed her mind.

  I could have been with Hank right now.

  With two steaks broiling, with the wine and the chocolates sitting there waiting. With Hank with his arms around her, which had been both comforting and wonderful.

  He didn’t want her to get killed.

  When looking for a man, that was, in fact, the sort of thing she’d hoped one would care about. That she stayed alive from day to day. A man for whom that wasn’t important wouldn’t exactly be a great find.

  Okay. So. She’d give him not wanting to see her die. But she wasn’t mad at him because he didn’t want her to get killed. She was mad at him because...

  Because...

  He wanted to keep her safe? Maybe, but if that was why she was so pissed off she’d rattled the refrigerator, it wasn’t a very good reason. Men wanted to keep their friends safe. Women wanted to keep their friends safe. And he was her friend. Friend. Yeah. Uh-huh.

  Men didn’t often ask friends to come live with them. Offer to turn their lives completely upside down for friends. Buy friends flowers. And chocolate.

  Have wild, fantastic, mind-blowing, howl-at-the-moon sex with friends.

  So the odds were pretty good that he wasn’t actually thinking of her as a friend, precisely.

  In which case, the protective urges were more understandable. Jess realized she smelled smoke. It took her a second longer to get her head back to real time and discover that the steak she’d been cooking — out of spite — was no longer sizzling, but in the process of reducing itself to charcoal.

  “Shit!” She yanked it, and the ruined potatoes, out of the oven, considered opening her window to clear the smoke, and then considered again. Opening the window meant removing the one barrier between her and the fire escape.

  Shit, shit, damn.

  So she could spend the rest of the night breathing smoke and staring at the wonderful food she’d ruined, and feeling guilty about being a complete jerk with Hank. He cared about her. That was not a bad thing.

  She didn’t need to bother cooking herself another meal. She had no appetite. That had walked out the door with Hank. She cared about him, too. She didn’t know where they were headed — she couldn’t be sure they were headed anywhere, because when this case was over, her life was going to go back to worse hours than she had at the moment, and to twenty to thirty cases on her desk all the time, and how could she ask anyone to be part of that?

  And the phone rang.

  Be Hank, she thought, so I can say I’m sorry.

  But it was Jim.

  “Want a bit of good news?”

  She was in too dark a mood for good news, but she said, “Sure.”

  Jim gave no sign that he noticed her lack of enthusiasm. “We found good, good evidence at Alton’s place. Hank told you about Wayne Alton, right?”

  “Yeah.
He passed everything on.”

  “Good. He said he would. Anyway, we found another fourteen new girls in photos, none matching those found in Hemly’s trophy stash. Plus more pictures of ones we found at Hemly’s. Alton had pictures of the most recent two dead girls, along with jewelry, clothing, little hair clippings, and other trophies. A vial of blood. A bloody pair of handcuffs.”

  “Where was he hiding them?”

  “Toilet tank in one of his dozen guest bathrooms. Alton had shut off the water in the toilet, drained it, and used it as storage.”

  “All right. Not the cleverest place in the world, but he probably didn’t imagine anyone would ever look there.” She sighed. “Any bodies at Alton’s place?”

  He sounded a lot less enthusiastic as he said, “We’re still searching, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to find anything. Which is where this call comes in, actually.”

  No call without a catch. “Shoot,” Jess said.

  “Both Alton and Hemly are dead silent regarding Lenny, and their very expensive lawyers are running interference. What’s worse, Lenny’s whole cadre of lawyers caught wind of our interest in him, and the captain has been hovering over our heads like the angel of death, telling us that if we fuck up gathering the evidence on this, he will personally nail our balls to the wall. Lenny has friends in high places in this city; if everything we do with him is not pure as puppy love, his lawyers will break us on a technicality, and Northwhite, Hemly, and Alton will all three walk free.”

  “And my part in this is...?”

  “I got the transcript of your talk with Teri. It looks promising — if she can give us something solid on Lenny, we’ll be able to get the judge to give us a search warrant. At the moment he’s stonewalling us, refusing to consider Lenny’s priors, or his proximity, or anything else. We think odds are good that he has the bodies at his place. If you can get Teri to come through, we could break this thing wide open.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I’m not going to make promises.” Jess stood by her narrow bed, wishing she and Hank were both in it. Wishing she’d done everything differently, and that she’d at least gotten the chance to see what Hank had planned for the evening. “I don’t get the feeling that Teri’s going to be talkative about Lenny as long as he’s in a position to hurt her.”

  “Maybe not. Give it your best shot, Jess. We need you on this.”

  Jess had nightmares. Ginny, begging for rescue and Jess unable to find her, running through endless corridors past countless locked doors, listening to her sister screaming and begging for help while no one came.

  And then jumping on a bus, and seeing the back of Ginny’s head in a seat in front of her. Running forward, but for some reason not being able to reach Ginny.

  Jess woke puzzled. The sun was sliding over the horizon, and she’d had a full night’s sleep. Not good sleep, but sleep.

  Something about buses nagged at her.

  Buses. And Ginny on a bus.

  She closed her eyes and tried to let her mind relax and play with those two puzzle pieces. Ginny. A bus.

  Supposedly Ginny had gone missing from a bus. One of her fellow dancers had taken her to a bus stop and seen her off to California.

  Jess knew the dancer’s name. Lori Wedder.

  And as she thought about the bus, about Ginny, she was almost certain she’d seen that name somewhere. Recently. She couldn’t remember where, though, or in what context. In an interview? One of the murder books, maybe? She could not have seen it someplace she would expect to find it, though. The murder books were out. If Lori Wedder’s name had shown up there, Jess would have immediately made the connection. Lori Wedder was the last person who had seen Ginny alive. Or who had claimed to. If Lenny had actually killed Ginny, then Lori Wedder, who had managed to fall off the radar between the time Ginny vanished and the time Jess became a cop and started looking on her own, was lying.

  Lori. Lenny. Lying.

  And there it was. The click she’d needed.

  In Teri Thomas’s office, Jess had noticed the brag shelf she kept. Photos, posters, trophies. Almost everything had been about Stormy FoXXX. But not everything. There had been a few photographs, taken when Teri had been very young. Probably barely twenty-one. And one of them had been inscribed to her. It had been a picture of an old man with his arm around her waist. Jess had just skimmed past it at the time. It was small and faded, and the handwriting had been a messy scrawl.

  Whatever she had seen, she’d registered only subconsciously. But if she closed her eyes, she could almost convince herself that those faded letters on that old photograph spelled out Lori Wedder.

  Jess sat up, considering possibilities.

  The picture had been of Teri; otherwise she wouldn’t have kept it on that shelf.

  And dancers changed their names sometimes. The names they danced under, the names they worked under. Sometimes, if things got particularly messy, the names under which they lived their lives. Jess could not be sure that was what that messy, half-seen scrawl had said. But neither could she ignore the possibility that Teri might be Lori. It was an outside chance. But if it did say Lori Wedder, that fit. Teri was afraid of Lenny, and Lenny had worked with Lori, and Lori had seen Ginny last, and Ginny had loved Lenny, whom Jess believed had murdered her. If Lenny had murdered Ginny, then Lori had lied about seeing her safely onto a bus — which, if Lori was Teri, would give Teri a hell of a good reason to fear Lenny.

  Of course, this was all going to fall apart if Jess went into Teri’s office and saw that the fading letters spelled out something like Lisa Warner.

  But if the photo had Lori Wedder’s name on it, Jess had a few questions for Teri.

  She got up to face the morning without Hank there. She faced flowers he hadn’t had a chance to give her, and candles they hadn’t lit, and wine they hadn’t shared.

  She should have called Hank last night. But she hadn’t called him because she couldn’t bear to talk to him over the phone and face the possibility of his rejection.

  Which she’d earned. She’d been stubborn and rude and thoughtless, and hadn’t looked at anything from where he was standing, and hadn’t tried to understand his concern for her. She’d been a jackass. A bitch. That summed it up. She’d been a thoughtless jerk, and she wanted to do something for Hank to apologize. Something to let him know that he mattered. She’d considered buying a replacement steak, then asking him to come over while she broiled them, but that wouldn’t fix the night before, and it wouldn’t make him feel any better, either.

  Not that she could cook worth a damn. Any attempt at cooking on her part was likely to be mistaken for attempted assault.

  She could, she thought, buy him breakfast. Biscuits and bacon as a peace offering, a way to get back to where they’d started. He wouldn’t be coming over to her place. She could bet on that.

  So she’d go over to his place. Grovel. Apologize. Admit she was wrong. She had been wrong. He’d only been trying to watch out for her. She’d take her dance stuff with her, and they could both leave from his place when it was time — and in the meantime, they could catch up on all the things they’d missed out on the night before because of her.

  She showered quickly, dressed, threw things into a bag, and was out the door and on her way to pick up breakfast. Smiling. Hopeful.

  She could fix this.

  He’d had a horrible night. He’d sat in his car outside her place for a good twenty minutes, hoping Jess would either come after him, or call him, or something. But she didn’t. And he’d been too mad at her to try to make up. He hadn’t been trying to oppress her, or enslave her, or turn her into the little woman in the kitchen. God forbid. He’d been trying to save her life, and she was too stubborn to do anything but take offense.

  He finally went home and, after a night of tossing and turning, managed to get a few minutes of restless sleep, but it didn’t last long. He woke to the ringing of the phone beside his head.

  He allowed himself a moment of hope before he look
ed at the caller ID, but it wasn’t Jess. And the disappointment when Charlie said, “Hey, Hank, can you come by HSCU for a while before you and Jess start work this afternoon?” caught him like a punch in the gut.

  That was life. A few days of happiness, followed by repeated kicks in the crotch. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  Charlie met him at the door. “Jim is talking to a dancer who thinks she might have useful information for us,” he said. “And both the FBI and the GBI liaisons are in there with the two of them. We stick any more cops in there with her, she’s going to clam up. She was already nervous as hell. So you can’t join us, but I want you to come down to the evidence room with me and hold a couple of photographs. We’ve already gotten everything we can from them. Now I want to see if you can give us your perspective.”

  They sat at a clean table outside the lockup, with the evidence signed out and the cop in charge of the room watching them with interest. Hank wore thin latex gloves. He closed his eyes and Charlie handed him a photograph.

  “This is an old one,” Hank said. “The killer has handled it a lot of times — likes it, likes the memories it brings. The girl... he had some new piece of equipment he tried out on her. And she gave him the thrill he was looking for. There’s nothing of the girl here, though, except for the killer’s perceptions of her. And those are mostly of quivering flesh and screaming.”

  “What was the equipment?”

  “Something electrical. I don’t know.” Hank put the picture down. “Holding the thing is making me sick. I spent a whole lot of years not throwing up. Working with this monster, it’s all I seem to do.” He didn’t say that when he held the picture, he could catch fringes of the killer thinking about Jess. Anticipating.

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the photograph. The date on it put it eleven years earlier. The picture had been taken while the girl was still alive. She was naked except for high, high heels, down on her knees, handcuffed to a stripper’s pole. Begging for her life. The expression of terror and desperation on her face burned into Hank’s brain.