Missed Connections

by Alexandria Clarke

  I was furious. With myself mostly. Kyle Fisher continued to smoke carelessly on the balcony above, alive, and Arden had my face burned into her memory. I slipped through the crowd in the main hall, positioning myself near other women in red dresses. Behind me, Sheila Arden stood at the doors to the stairs. There were too many people for her to separate me from the crowd. Exactly what I wanted. But the rest of the ballet guests were beginning to filter into the concert hall for the second half of tonight’s performance. If I struggled against the current of people, Arden would spot me, so I followed along with everyone else before ducking out a side door and into the night.

  The breeze from the waterfront chilled the skin of my back. I was rethinking my choice of dress now, wishing I’d picked one with more fabric up top and less around my feet. The train brushed along the concrete as it followed me like a stray puppy, picking up dry leaves and dirt. I gathered it up and darted down the stone steps of the Arts Center. I didn’t call for the car to take me home. I couldn’t leave while Kyle Fisher watched the performance with his date inside, alive and well, so I crept along the side street, looking for a place to sit and wait. The Arts Center sat on a major intersection in Juno, right across from the lake. The waterfront restaurants, including the Waterfront itself, were bustling with those who couldn’t afford a ticket to tonight’s concert. I contemplated getting a table and waiting for Kyle Fisher with a drink and appetizers, but I’d already pushed my luck far enough this evening. Detective Arden had probably alerted her coworkers to my presence already. It was better if I remained in the darkness.

  I ended up on a windowsill of the office building adjacent to the Arts Center. The windows were dark. Everyone had left for the day. I was safe on the second floor, high enough above street level that no one would notice me unless they decided to admire the stars. I had a decent view of the main exits of the Arts Center, but it didn’t matter anyway. Earlier, I’d hacked Kyle Fisher’s phone and enabled the GPS tracking application. From my own phone, I could see where he was in real time.

  The second half of the ballet was worse than the first, though perhaps this had something to do with the fact that now I was waiting outside the Arts Center instead of in the concert hall with everyone else. The little green dot that represented Fisher on my screen remained in the same place. Around ten o’clock, when the performance was due to finish, it began to move. The doors to the Arts Center opened and vomited its crowd from within. People surged across the stone steps, some to waiting cars, others to the restaurants and bars. Some remained in the Arts Center’s courtyard to mingle and avoid the eventual return to their homes. Fisher’s dot moved swiftly. My eyes darted from the phone screen to the front of the Arts Center, hoping to match Fisher’s virtual self with his real one. The green dot stopped moving. I watched it for a full minute before it began traveling again. Finally, Fisher appeared on the steps with his date. He flagged a car down, but when he opened the door, the woman protested. They argued before she conceded and got in the car. He did not join her. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she turned away, so he closed the door and patted the window. As the driver joined the line of traffic trying to get away from the Arts Center, Fisher looked up and around. His eyes skimmed over the alley where I was hiding, but his gaze made me uneasy. Why hadn’t he gotten in the car with his date? Surely he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to take her home with him. I imagined that was the whole point of this evening for him anyway. Why else would he sit through the entire performance? It wasn’t because he harbored a secret interest in ballet.

  Fisher buttoned his coat and walked up the street. He lived in an apartment that way, not far from the Arts Center. It was a quick drive, but a lengthy walk. I clambered out of the windowsill and slid down the gutter. I splashed into a puddle of leftover rainwater in the street. It drenched my dress. I picked up the soaked hem and circled around the back side of the Arts Center. Fisher had a head start, but with the GPS device, he couldn’t lose me. I knew the alleys and side streets better than the main ones. I crept from shadow to shadow, picking up speed in the less conspicuous areas of town. A sweat broke out along the hairline of my wig. I scratched my scalp, wishing I could ditch the disguise, but to leave anything behind would give Detective Arden a leg up in her investigation.

  Fifteen minutes into the slow chase, Fisher turned off the sidewalk of the main road and onto a side street. Nearby, I paused to catch my breath and consulted the GPS to keep track of him. He was heading away from his apartment for no apparent reason, but he grew closer and closer to my position. Whatever his reasoning, it provided me with the opportunity I needed. The narrow side street was deserted. I tucked the phone away and waited, my back scraping against the brick wall of my cover building. Around the corner, Fisher clumped noisily along the side street. Heavy, dragging footsteps. Different than his usual brisk stroll. Drunk, probably.

  I let him walk past me. At least, that’s what I told myself. In reality, being in such close proximity to him made me weak. My hands shook. My body shivered. My brain shut off. If it didn’t, all of the memories would come flooding back. The things I’d spent over a decade trying to forget. I couldn’t suppress them for long. As he passed my hiding spot, the sight of his shoulders, the back of his head, and his hands stirred the maelstrom of emotions waiting to get loose inside me. I took the karambit from its holster and stepped out of the shadows. Fisher paused. He planted his Italian leather loafers shoulder-width apart, but he did not turn to face me.

  “I knew you would follow me tonight,” he said.

  The voice. His terrible, terrible voice. How I hated it.

  “A detective pulled me aside before I left the ballet and warned me about you,” he went on. “But she didn’t have to. Ever since Beatnik turned up dead two and a half weeks ago, I was wondering if you would find me. Then you took down Honey and Murphy, and I knew that you would.”

  Slowly. Purposely. He turned. The toes of his loafer pivoted against the street’s grime. His eyes raked over me. The red dress with the dirty train. The plunging neckline. Every inch of my exposed skin. He looked at me as if I was his. As if I belonged to him. As if he had finally come to claim what he hadn’t been able to entirely consume when I was fifteen.

  “Look at you,” he murmured. He kept his hands in the pockets of his coat. “You’re even more beautiful than your mother was.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about my mother.”

  He nodded in acquiescence. “Okay. Let’s talk about you then. How do you intend to kill me?”

  “Slowly,” I said, gripping the handle of the karambit tighter. “So that you drown in your own blood.”

  Fisher smiled and glanced at the blade between my fingers. “You’re going to take me down with that little knife?”

  “It’s what killed Honey and Murphy. Not big enough for you? I can run home and find something larger if you prefer.”

  He smirked. “I see your sarcasm is still intact after all these years.”

  “You should run,” I advised him. “I’m going to kill you anyway, but the chase is part of the fun.”

  “No, no,” he said, clicking his tongue. His hand rustled in his coat pocket. “I don’t plan on turning my back to you. In fact—” Swiftly, he drew a gun from his coat. “I’ve been waiting for us to come face to face.”

  He pulled the trigger before I registered what it meant to be standing on the wrong end of the barrel. The shot was muted, no louder than a car backfiring. The bullet punched into my stomach. I staggered backward. The knife dropped out of my hand and clattered to the street. Blood spilled across the front of the dress, darker than the red of the fabric. It didn’t hurt. Probably a bad thing.

  Kyle Fisher dipped his arm around the curve of my back. He lowered me into the street, fingers digging into my spine. The pavement was cold, but the blood wasn’t. It pooled beneath me, soaking through the dress. I stared up at the moon, bright white, centered between the two buildings that bordered the alleyway. Exhausted. Hurting.
Helpless. Fisher tugged up the hem of my dress, and I felt his fingers on the insides of my thighs.

  I exploded. Everything hit me at once. The searing pain in my abdomen. Fisher’s hands between my legs, then and now. His hips on mine. His blue eyes staring at me with the same unabashed determination from the first time.

  “No,” I gasped, pushing his face away from mine as he tried to kiss my neck. “Not again.”

  “You can’t fight this, baby.” He groped at my stomach and pressed an intentional finger against the open wound. My moan of pain seemed to spur him on. He lay across me, his weight pinning me against the cold street. “Just let it go.”

  “No,” I said again, but it was barely a whisper. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. He crushed me beneath him. My fingers scrabbled against the pavement, connected with something cold and metallic. Slippery with blood.

  Fisher groaned. “Here we go, baby.”

  With my last ounce of strength, I plunged the karambit into the side of Fisher’s neck. Blood spurted. I pulled the blade out. Blood gushed from the artery there. He clapped both hands to his neck and rolled aside. Off of me and onto his back. I blacked out.

  Chapter Twelve - Sheila

  “Shitty morning, eh, Detective?”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried not to look at the black tarp that covered Kyle Fisher’s body in the middle of the bloodstained alley. “You could say that, Diaz.”

  Despite my vigilance, Simone City’s assassin had killed again. I had warned Fisher that this might happen. I caught him on his way out of the ballet and told him that he was likely to be next on the hitman’s—or hitwoman’s—list. The dumb idiot told me not to worry, that he was going to hop in a car and go straight home. Stupidly, I believed him. Now, here he was, dead in an alley with a knife wound to the neck.

  Diaz, the CSI guy with the friendly smile and warm demeanor, patted me on the back. “Try to take it easy. We’re all a little stumped on this one.”

  “Thanks, Diaz.”

  A cloud shifted overhead to reveal the sun. I shrugged off my jacket and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt. It was the first hot day of the year in Simone City. Sweat beaded around my temple and dripped down the sides of my neck. The bright sunshine mocked my raging headache. I felt sticky and warm all over from the humidity. Last night, I had to drive Payne home from the Arts Center since he’d been vomiting too much to get himself back to the precinct. Afterwards, I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling to keep the image of the mysterious woman’s face fresh in my head. I’d reported my encounter to whoever was on duty at the precinct, but with so many women in red dresses in attendance at the ballet, there wasn’t much our beat cops could do. Whoever she was, she’d hit her next target. I promised myself it would be her last. I was going to figure out who the hell she was, and I was going to bring her in to make sure she never killed again.

  “Looking a little rough there, Arden,” Dumas said, creeping up behind me. He pursed his lips at my rumpled collar and the dark circles around my eyes. “Hangover?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you sure?” he said. “I heard there was an open bar at last night’s event.”

  “Payne told you we were there, didn’t he?”

  “This morning when he called out sick. Should I be worried that my newest detective and one of my beat cops are engaging in less than professional activity with each other? I’m pretty sure that’s a matter for HR.”

  I scoffed. “Me and Payne? Come on, Dumas. That’s gross.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Whatever you say, Arden.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Aren’t you going to yell at me for going to the ballet?”

  “You did it for your investigation, right?” Dumas asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you find anything out?”

  The moment in the hallway by the balcony played through my head. The woman in the red dress taking the knife out, watching Kyle Fisher with the intensity of a falcon hunting its prey.

  “Yeah, I did,” I said.

  “You gonna share with the class?”

  I folded my arms, the suit jacket tucked between them. I wished I could put it down somewhere, but most of the alley was drenched in blood. “I need some time to piece everything together in my head, but I’ll let you know as soon as I figure anything out.”

  “Alrighty, then.”

  He strolled off to talk to one of the CSI guys, but I called after him, “Where’s Kaminsky and everyone else?”

  Dumas looked over his shoulder at me. “You identified the next hit before it happened, Arden. That makes you the only person who’s had any luck with this case. Congratulations. You’re leading the investigation now.”

  Kaminsky was going to be pissed. Sure, he was supportive of me on my first day a few weeks ago, but that was before I’d stolen this case out from under him. My second thought was pride, just a little hint of it that tweaked my lips upward in a brief smile. Then Payne’s words from last night about Dumas waiting for me to fail crashed through my brain. They weren’t true, right? Dumas knew that I was a good detective. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have handed over the biggest case in Simone City to me. Or maybe that was exactly why he had done it, to prove that I wasn’t capable of handling it.

  Diaz offered me a water bottle. “Drink this. You look like you’re melting. You should get some air for a few minutes.”

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, uncapped the water, and took a long, refreshing swig. I nodded my thanks to Diaz, who gave a casual salute in reply. He was right. I needed a break from the macabre scene in the alleyway.

  “I’ll be right back,” I announced to no one in particular. No one replied, busy with their work. I stepped out of the side street and onto the main sidewalk, where the breeze swept my sticky hair away from the nape of my neck. I combed through it with my fingers and closed my eyes, but the image in the alleyway wouldn’t leave me alone for long. My brain worked to fit all of the puzzle pieces together. The blood pooled on the ground, smeared across the street, and splattered on the walls. After a few minutes, something clicked. I walked back into the alley and bumped Diaz’s shoulder.

  “Hey, did the vic have a gun on him?”

  Diaz checked his notes. “Nope. Why?”

  “Because he wasn’t the only one who got injured here last night.” I led him along the alleyway. “We’ve been thinking that all of this blood is Fisher’s, right? But check this out. There are two different patterns. Fisher went down here—” I pointed to the pavement “—and bled out pretty quickly, but over here—” I led Diaz a few feet away “—this is someone else’s blood.”

  “You think?”

  “You’re CSI.” I said. “Shouldn’t you know? Check out the splatter here. That’s from a gunshot wound, not a stab wound. And there were two pools of blood, one for each body.”

  Diaz examined the stains on the pavement. “Anyone who loses that much blood is dead without medical treatment, but where’s the other body? I don’t see a trail leading out of here.”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, kneeling down for a closer look. “Get some samples of this to the lab. If this blood belongs to the Simone City killer, then we can identify her.”

  “Her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Her.”

  Sometime later, I sat at my desk in the bullpen to scrutinize the photographs of the crime scene, but people kept coming up to me and interrupting my thought process. Word had spread that Kaminsky was no longer in charge of the case. Some officers congratulated me while others made joking comments that I should watch my back if Kaminsky got pissed. Kaminsky himself was nowhere to be seen, but Gadsden and Sutton showed up at some point. Gadsden hung back, poorly disguising a sneer, while Sutton walked up to my desk.

  “Hey, Arden.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figured I’d help you out,” he said.

  That got my attention. “Wha
t makes you think I need help?”

  Sutton raised his eyebrows. “You probably don’t from what I’ve heard, but it doesn’t hurt to have multiple eyes on the same case.”

  “Fine. What have you got?”

  “Coat check from last night’s event,” he said, handing me a purple sticky note. “The girl working it said someone forgot to pick theirs up. Name was Amelia Benson.”

  I took the note. “We have a name?”

  “And possibly DNA,” Sutton said. “I picked up the coat this morning. There was hair on it.”

  “Did you get it to the lab?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Thanks, Sutton.”

  “Anytime.” He and Gadsden left together.

  I was more excited than I’d let on. Between the blood and the hair, the lab should be able to identify the killer. For the hell of it, I Googled Amelia Benson. An obituary popped up. The woman in question had died three years ago at the age of twenty-seven in a car crash in Venus. Before that, she worked at Simone City hospital, the same hospital that sponsored the charity ballet every year and invited all of its employees to the event. Our killer had used a fake identity to get tickets.

  “Whatever,” I muttered, clicking out of the windows. “I’ve still got your DNA, Not-Benson.”

  “Detective Arden?” It was the secretary, Beth, this time. She tapped the monitor of my computer with one long pink nail. “They told me to tell you that the lab results are up on your case.”

  I logged into the police database and clicked my way through the case files until I found the new results from the lab. When I opened them up and saw the name they’d matched the blood to, my heart stopped.

  “No way,” I said aloud. “That can’t be right.”

  “Veronica Bauer,” Dumas read aloud off his computer screen. We were in his office with the door closed. I’d forced him to take this meeting with me, unable to sit at my desk and process this information on my own. “Arden, Veronica Bauer is dead.”