Awaken the Devil

by A. J. Chase

  He would never change. She had known it, of course, but the bitter reality still hurt. The maid slipped out the door, and Fielding dressed quickly, yesterday's clothes feeling rough and strange. The walk of shame was really a taxi ride of shame, but it felt equally as embarrassing. Her apartment was cold and empty, but at least she was alone to wallow in her humiliation.

  She went back to sleep almost the instant she lay down in her own bed, the constant exhaustion of the last week or two finally catching up to her. She woke up in the afternoon dizzy and confused, with a thick mouth and a headache. She stumbled into the kitchen and drank two large glasses of water in quick succession. Then she checked her messages and discovered one from a rambling Mac and one from Josh.

  She was in no mood to answer either. She logged into her computer looking for today's news. She thought she probably ought to eat, but felt like she didn't have it in her to make something and then force it down her throat. She got another glass of water and sat down to read.

  The headline screamed at her. "Chorus Line Killer Claims Another Victim?" She choked and put her water down. The Chorus Line Killer? Why did papers have to give everything a name? There was a large picture of Charlotte that had captured her sultry beauty well. Next to her there was a picture of Leslie that was also incredibly flattering. Her dark red hair pooled around her shoulders, and her strange blue/purple eyes looked sad, like she had known she would end up a victim some day. Probably she was just sad because her parents wouldn't leave her alone.

  Maybe she had run away. Fielding liked the idea, although it seemed unlikely. She could only hope that Leslie's being kidnapped meant that she had not met the same end as Charlotte, although being kidnapped might be altogether worse, and still end in death. At least Charlotte had never been scared. She probably hadn't even realized there was someone else in the room.

  Fielding kept hearing Leslie's horrified scream in her head. If she had been the praying type, she would have been hitting her knees with Leslie's name on her lips, but as it was she just spoke to the woman herself.

  "Please be okay," she whispered. Of course, there was no answer.

  The article went from the first to the third page and was getting considerably more play than it would have another day about another murder because of Leslie herself. Or more specifically, because of her parents. Fielding simply hadn't realized who Leslie was. Sanford was a common enough name. There had been no real reason to associate the young woman with Donna Sanford, the Connecticut senator, or Brice Sanford, the Supreme Court justice. No wonder Leslie was so repressed.

  The article mentioned both Fielding and Chandler vaguely, as "the director" and "another dancer in the line," and mentioned that they had both been questioned extensively. At the demand of the Sanfords, an FBI profiler was going to be appearing on the scene within the next few days to try and get some specifics on what the Chorus Line Killer was really like.

  The article rehashed Charlotte's murder and background and went on extensively about Leslie who had been sent to school in France, trained with a classical ballet academy in Paris, and graduated first in her class from Harvard with an MBA. Things Fielding would never have guessed about her.

  What was she doing in a chorus line? Had her parents even known where she was? Somehow Fielding doubted it. The newspaper article didn't come right out and say that her parents hadn't known what she was doing, but it was implied by their actions and remarks. If they had ventured a guess, they probably wouldn't have come up with living in a cheap apartment in New York, slamming Jell-O shots, and getting herself kidnapped.

  There was no comment in the article from anyone in Charlotte's family, or from Pettigrew. There was a terse comment from Zave Wallace, saying that the police were handling it, and another terse comment from the police spokesperson saying pretty much the exact same thing.

  The phone rang, and she jerked her head up from the article. "Are you there?" It was Josh again. "I'm not going to bother calling your cell phone since I know you're there, and you just don't want to talk, but I have something I think you should see. It might be important—it might not." There was a long pause while the machine whirred. "Swing by the paper tomorrow around three so you can see this." He paused again. "Okay, well. Bye." He hung up his end.

  She shook her head and read the story again. Then she spent a couple hours researching Leslie, her brother Dorsey, and her very newsworthy parents on the internet. Leslie appeared on paper to be exactly what she was. Proper, repressed, and shy. In every picture that accompanied the articles, she was dressed in something floral or pastel and looking altogether miserable.

  Her parents were a couple of ballbusters who pushed their way through life never taking no for an answer. But that didn't make them murderers, and after two hours Fielding decided to knock them off her short list of suspects. She believed they had other ways to get Leslie to bend to their will and would never resort to something as dirty as murder.

  By seven thirty, she was exhausted again. Maybe she was coming down sick. Or maybe it was good old-fashioned depression. Fielding microwaved a frozen dinner and was back in bed by eight. She meant to read a book, but she was simply too distracted and tired. She read the same paragraph five or six times and her eyes kept falling closed. Finally she abandoned all pretense of reading and turned out the light. She was in a deep sleep almost instantly. It was not even nine yet.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  For the first time in two months Chandler did not show up at the theater for rehearsals on Monday. That was simply going too far to avoid her. What was the matter with him? Did he literally regret spending the night with her enough to actually abandon his precious Pirates so close to opening night? What a horrifying thought. Was that a commentary on her or on him? Fielding didn't even know.

  She spent the first two hours in angry rumination before Kyle finally asked, "Hey, where's Bentley anyway?"

  Sara, who was sitting casually in Chandler's usual spot, was the one to provide the answer. "Anne, that's his daughter you know, had an accident skiing in Switzerland and has broken her leg in two places. He's been gone since Sunday morning and probably will not be back until Wednesday, but we shall carry on without him, and no doubt be very successful."

  There was a general murmuring of the masses, mostly about how much it would suck to break your leg in two places, before everyone got back to work. Fielding felt pity for Anne Bentley and for the worry that she knew Chandler must be suffering. And stupidly glad that he wasn't purposely avoiding her. He had not just checked out and left her for no reason. He had ridden off to his daughter's rescue, and she loved him even more for that. Although, he could have left some kind of message.

  It seemed ridiculous to be pushing on as though everything was normal. There were three new police officers on the scene along with the omnipresent Pettigrew and Wallace. Leslie's parents were all over the theater harassing the detectives as though they knew better how to do their jobs.

  She knew that if Chandler had been here, instead of hovering over his wounded teenage daughter, he would never have allowed the Sanfords to hang around. They were scary and imperious, but they had nothing on Chandler. He would have booted them out without as much as a proper goodbye.

  As it was, they were unchecked in their reign of terror because everyone else in the theater appeared to be afraid to call them on their behavior. Their favorite victims were the two original detectives, Pettigrew and Wallace. Of the two, they seemed to favor laying their unwanted attention on Wallace, and she just couldn't help but think of Leslie's words less than an hour before she disappeared. He's Jewish. Fielding hated to think that anti-Semitism actually still existed in the world, but then people like the Sanfords came along and tried to destroy her faith in the goodness of the universe.

  She was leaving the stage after they had been dismissed for the day, and she almost ran into Zave who was standing in the shadows being patronized by Leslie's mother. Donna Sanford looked exactly as Fielding would have pict
ured a senator from Connecticut looking. She wore a pink cashmere sweater set, a double strand of Jackie O pearls, and a pair of furiously starched and pressed khakis. She was waving one manicured shell pink nail in Zave's face.

  "And don't think that we'll be afraid to sue if the FBI or our private detective tells us that your incompetence is what led us to this place. I will get Leslie back, with or without you."

  "Okay, well, thanks for your input Mrs. Sanford. If you'll excuse me?" He turned around and ran right into Fielding. "Oh, sorry, Miss French."

  Donna Sanford managed to snort with disdain and still give off the impression of ladylike perfection. She turned on her expensive but practical heels and headed toward the stage, no doubt to spread her wrath to those not yet terrorized. They both watched her go. Zave sighed.

  "How did she come from that?" He murmured under his breath.

  Fielding jumped on the comment, eager for any conversation starter that might lead her to information about Leslie. "You mean Leslie?"

  He looked down at her like he had forgotten for a moment that she was there. "Yes, of course. That woman…" He gestured after the senator. "She's a real piece of work."

  Fielding nodded to the assessment, and then brought up the subject she really wanted to talk about. "Tell me the truth, Detective Wallace. From what you've seen here, do you think there's any chance that she's going to come back safe?" She couldn't help the way that her voice cracked on the last words.

  His gaze softened. "Don't worry, Miss French. I promise she'll be okay."

  "How can you promise something like that? What do you know?"

  He shook his head. "You'll just have to trust me. That's all the comfort I can offer you." He turned and followed the path that Leslie's mother had taken.

  She left the theater and caught a cab straight to the Village to hear Josh's news that might or might not be important. Thoughts of Leslie were bothersome, until she decided that all she really could do was listen to Zavad Wallace and trust that he knew something she didn't. Josh was in his office with Janine, and Dale wasn't even bothering to call him on it although Fielding had no idea why. Janine smiled at her but didn't offer any commentary as Josh laid out his newest discovery.

  "I've continued to be bothered by the only connection between Bentley and the poem being that dumbass play. I just didn't think it made any sense, so I just kept looking."

  "You found something that makes more sense?" Fielding asked hopefully.

  "Actually, no. As far as I can tell it probably makes less, but I'm going to tell it to you anyway. When Thomas Hood wrote the poem The Bridge of Sighs, he was speaking about a specific bridge in London called Waterloo Bridge. It's been a popular place to attempt to commit suicide since the seventeen hundreds. Although people who've actually succeeded are hardly a handful. About fifteen. Apparently it's harder to kill yourself by jumping off a bridge than people think it's going to be."

  "What's the connection between the bridge and Chandler?"

  "Yeah, okay, here's where we get into weirdness and supposition, but weirdness and supposition might be better in this case than that freaking play. The last person to actually accomplish killing themselves on Waterloo Bridge was a woman named Annabelle Aylesworth.

  "She jumped off the bridge, and, like so many before her, she failed to get the necessary lift off and missed the water altogether hitting the concrete at the base of the bridge, which is what actually killed her. In reality, she still might have survived but she had received extensive damage to the neck."

  "Did Chandler and Annabelle Aylesworth even know each other?"

  "That I don't know. But here's what I do. Aylesworth was twenty when she committed suicide.. She was living in the East End and working as a waitress, but the information on a form that she filled out for a medical appointment at the English equivalent of Planned Parenthood listed her occupation as a dancer."

  "Planned Parenthood?" Fielding echoed.

  "Yeah, my guess is that she was planning to have an abortion, although it's all supposition since I don't know if she was even pregnant. Whether she was or not was pretty much a moot point since she killed herself before the appointment."

  "So what about Chandler?"

  He rolled his eyes. "It's always about Chandler with you, isn't it." But he didn't seem nearly as offended as once he had been. "Where did you guys go at the party anyway?"

  She crossed her arms and glared at him. "What's the connection between Annabelle Aylesworth and Chandler?" She repeated.

  "I don't know exactly. I do know that the one and only play that I have a record of her doing was an incredibly bad musical in Piccadilly. Bentley wasn't on the cast list. Other than that, I think most of her dancing was probably of the lap and pole varieties."

  Incredibly bad musical in Piccadilly. Incredibly bad folly. Where had she heard that recently? Then all at once she knew and felt a sense of horrible dread.

  "Chandler ran away when he was seventeen. He told me all about it. He said he got cast in this terrible folly until his parents came and dragged him home. He went by the name of Everett."

  Josh pulled out another one of his famous lists. He scanned it in silence for almost a minute. "There's an Everett Dawson who joined the cast before the first performance, but left after six months."

  "That's him," she whispered. "He said it was six months before they found him."

  "Okay, but here's the problem. Aylesworth was a late addition to the show to replace another girl. She joined the cast probably about three days before Bentley left it. She killed herself about four days after that. Not a lot of time for Bentley to have made much of an impact on her life. Plus she was almost twenty-one and he was seventeen. And I would honestly be surprised if they even spoke in so short a time. There were seventy-three dancers in that line."

  It just didn't make any sense, and yet it seemed like a flash point connection. The kind that solved mysteries. Although as far as Fielding could tell, it was only creating more of them at this point. "Why did she kill herself? Just because of the baby?"

  "That's another thing I just don't know. I tracked down some of the other girls who worked at the restaurant with her. They said they never really knew. Apparently they weren't terribly surprised though. I guess she'd never been accused of being mentally stable.

  "Two of them had never even heard of Chandler Bentley, and one of them went on for like thirty minutes about how much she loved Just North of North, but none of them had ever heard that he and Annabelle had ever even seen each other."

  "Did she have any family?"

  He shook his head. "None that I know of. Her father raised her. Mother was a prostitute who took off when she was really young. I have no exact dates, but I'm thinking she was about three. The father married literally about a dozen times over, but at the time she died, he was between wives. She had a brother named Denny who died in a bar fight about a year before she did. Her father died of liver disease about twenty years ago."

  Fielding rubbed her eyebrow in frustration. "I don't get it. I mean, it feels important, and yet it doesn't seem to be."

  He threw his hands up. "That's exactly what I said wasn't it, Hon?"

  Janine nodded and chewed her gum in silence. She was much quieter than she had been at the party. Maybe Dale had made conditions under which she could stay and one of them was that she remain silent.

  "So, what now?"

  He shrugged leaning against his desk. "I don't know. Again. I guess I keep looking, and you keep dancing. We promised Mac, and I can't help but feel that time is running out."

  He was right of course, but it was a truth in which she found no comfort.

  On Wednesday, December twentieth, the full orchestra arrived, and the line and the principles were all going through the process of being assigned costumes for each number. The FBI profiler and the playbills arrived, but Chandler did not. Mac had another heart attack, but was doing as well as could be expected, so Fielding only missed Tuesday. She came back to
total chaos. Sara had been dead wrong. In Chandler's absence, everything had fallen apart.

  The Sanfords still had free reign of the theater, and the FBI profiler was back where every profiler seemed to end up. The Chorus Girl Killer was a white male between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, who was probably very smart and successful, and would appear totally normal except for possibly seeming a little more withdrawn than the average Joe.

  He would have trouble reaching sexual fulfillment and had a poor relationship with his mother. He would never kill anyone except chorus girls. They were his necessary victims in order for him to feel vindicated. He would be a trophy keeper and viewed himself as keeping or meting some kind of justice. Really, was there any other kind of serial killer?

  Liz was furious about how badly the playbill had been done and had sent the entire pile back to the printer, the original viciously slashed with her red marker, corrections all over its cover and contents. She was stomping all over the theater cursing Chandler's absence with language that any biker would envy. She was convinced that everything would be working out far better if he were present. Fielding thought there might be some truth in it. Even the fates seemed to bend to Chandler's will, let alone the printer.

  The profiler had made himself at home, along with all the other strangers that now blanketed the theater. Fielding didn't know why he was still there, but she suspected it was to see Chandler and try to figure out if his analysis fit. She knew personally that the part about reaching sexual fulfillment wasn't true. Who knew about the other stuff? But it didn't matter. She didn't believe he was a killer. At around one o'clock, the profiler got his wish. Chandler suddenly descended on the theater out of nowhere, like the wrath of God, one second not even there; the next taking very badly needed control.

  He was gorgeous as ever, even though he looked ragged and worn. In the unfair way of the universe, he, like all men, looked sexier with mussed hair, shadows under his eyes, and a need to shave that had passed five o'clock a couple days before. His eyes met hers briefly, burning almost as hot as they had in the hotel, and then he went to work on addressing the chaos the musical had become.