by Daniel Kalla
I needed to go very fast this morning.
I rode out past Lake Washington, then turned back and headed for the airport. Unmoved by the striking view of the snow-capped Mt. Rainier jutting into the blue morning sky, I raced through downtown Seattle’s quiet dawn. I screamed past my usual turn-back point and just kept cycling. Twenty-five miles later, and my agitation finally calmed. I turned around and headed home at a more leisurely pace.
Riding home, Aaron’s assessment of my cycling came back to me. Three years after he spoke the words, I could still hear them.
Out in front of his townhouse in the trendy and pricey Queen Anne neighborhood, I straddled my bike while Aaron stood beside me swaying slightly on the pavement, as if carried by the light spring breeze. The pupils in his faraway eyes were constricted, his voice slurred.
“What’s going on, Aaron?”
“Not much,” he said. “Taking in the breeze. Chatting with my twin bro…”
“You’re high.”
Aaron shrugged and almost stumbled.
I shook my head. “Seems like you’re always high.”
Aaron didn’t respond.
“This what you want for your future?”
“It will do for now.”
“Listen to me, Aaron. You need help.”
At first, I didn’t think he’d heard me, but after a few moments, he said, “I’ve had help. Doesn’t work.”
“I know a new treatment facility. Experimental, but promising. The guy who runs it is a friend—”
Eyes glazed, he stared beyond me. “Save your breath, Ben.”
I slammed my front tire in frustration. “Aaron, you’re a fucking addict!”
With that, he snapped into focus. He pointed a finger at me. “Of course I am! Don’t you get it, twin? It’s genetic. In our blood. Remember Dad and the booze?” His finger shook. “We got no choice. We’re both addicts.”
“Oh? And what’s my addiction?”
His finger indicated my riding getup and then settled on my bike. “You’re sitting on it. That bike of yours is your bottle, bro. Your pipe and needle, too….”
I had little doubt Aaron was right. But I also knew that as stupid and reckless as I might be on the bike, it was less risky than his alternative. Besides, unlike the drugs, cycling usually cleared my head. I did my best thinking on the bike. Not today, though. As I pulled back into my driveway, I hadn’t sorted out any of this mess.
I stepped into my living room to the sound of the ringing phone. I was relieved to see that this time the call display offered a local name: SEATTLE POLICE.
Half an hour later, I arrived in Helen’s office. Her royal blue blouse was a relatively subdued choice for her. I took a seat across from Helen and beside Rick Sutcliffe, who sported another thousand-dollar trendy jacket-pant ensemble. As usual, I sensed a degree of contempt in his smiley welcome.
“Get some sleep?” Helen gave me the once-over and grinned, as if to suggest I didn’t look quite as shitty as yesterday.
I nodded. “Couple hours.”
“We were at Emily’s autopsy this morning,” Helen said.
“And?”
“No big Quincy-like surprises, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
I swallowed. “Any evidence of sexual assault?”
“None.”
I nodded my relief. “I was thinking, there was so much blood in her bedroom…”
“Which happens from time to time at double homicides,” Rick said.
I ignored him. “You need a beating heart to spray blood like that. Emily must have been alive for a while.”
Helen leaned back heavily in her chair. “Yeah.”
“And judging from the surface area covered,” I said, “she must have been moving around after she was already stabbed but before the blow to her neck.”
“Your point?” Helen asked.
I offered a disclaimer. “Maybe Emily just struggled hard. I don’t know. But it seems to me someone took his sweet time. You ever heard that expression ‘death by a thousand cuts’?”
Rick and Helen shared a glance, possibly even impressed. “It looks that way on autopsy,” Helen said. “Whoever was responsible wanted her to bleed. Pathologist figures the cut to the neck was the final blow. She had little left to give by that point.”
“All that blood…” I tasted the acid in the back of my mouth. “Someone wanted her to suffer.”
Helen nodded slightly.
“Anything else on autopsy?”
“The tox screens are still pending. But under the second victim’s fingernails, they found traces of Methylen…” Helen’s voice trailed off and she threw up her hands in defeat. She laughed. “I don’t even know why I tried. I didn’t stand a chance of coughing out that hairball.”
“Methylene dioxymethamphetamine?” I said.
Helen nodded and chuckled. “You make it sound like butter.”
I sighed. “Easier to just call it Ecstasy, like the users do.”
Rick eyed me with a grin that had acquired a fingernails-on-chalkboard quality for me. “My guess is that Emily wasn’t quite as clean as she made out to you.”
Prudently, I just turned back to Helen. “What else about the John Doe?”
“More like Jason Doe,” she said. “Or more precisely, Jason DiAngelo from Redmond. Twenty-nine years old. Went by ‘J.D.’”
J.D.! I fought off a shudder at the memory of the name being whispered by the predawn caller. “What do you know about him?”
“For starters, he wasn’t a complete stranger to the King County criminal justice system.” Helen patted around her desk until she found a piece of paper, a copy of his criminal record. “A bunch of charges for theft, assault, and small-time drug trafficking. J.D. did about three years in total. Then, two years ago, he was arrested for narcotics possession. A kilo of coke in his trunk.”
“And?”
“J.D. switched attorneys. Michael Prince.” She waited for a sign of recognition but I shook my head; the name meant nothing to me. “Of Pratt, Prince, and Higney. Known affectionately around these parts as the Prince of Darkness.” Still didn’t ring any bells for me. “Anyway, Prince convinced the judge to rule the search of J.D.’s car illegal. For all I know, Prince got the Seattle P.D. to pay for the cleaning and detailing on poor old J.D.’s violated vehicle.”
Rick grunted a chuckle. “Curious how a small-time dealer from the bottom of the Public Defender’s barrel rose to a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer in a few short years.”
“Maybe J.D. found a better employer?” I offered.
Rick nodded, but then sighed as if it pained him to agree with me. “Maybe the kind of employer with a brutal termination policy.”
“Even the Prince of Darkness can’t get poor old J.D. out of this scrape.” Helen stretched her long arms out wide and yawned. “Autopsy showed that J.D. died from the same knife used on Emily Kenmore.”
“But not quite the same M.O.,” I pointed out.
Rick shot me another unreadable glance, while Helen nodded. “J.D. didn’t have a single defensive wound,” she said.
“He never saw the knife coming,” I said.
“More than that,” Rick said. “He let the perp get very close without defending himself. No question, he trusted his killer.”
Helen’s eyes sparkled playfully. “Which loses him IQ points on my scorecard.”
“Maybe J.D. was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “Like the guy with O.J.’s wife?”
Rick folded his arms across his chest. “Or maybe he played an active role in the torture of Emily Kenmore, never realizing he was going to be the encore victim.”
“Jesus…,” I muttered.
Helen cleared papers off her desk and looked at me with uncharacteristic solemnity. “From the lack of forced entry right down to the M.O., all evidence suggests Emily Kenmore knew her killer.” She paused. “Ben, we’re hoping you can help us navigate her circle of friends.”
My stomach tighten
ed. “Long time since I ran with that crowd, if I ever did. But I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks.” Helen lifted a photo off her desk and passed it to me. “We did get one unexpected break at the crime scene.”
Expecting another snapshot of Emily, I hesitated in taking it. I knew it would only elicit another wave of unwanted memories. But Emily wasn’t in the photograph. No one was. Confused, I stared at a color photo of Emily’s gruesome bedroom wall. One of the arcs of blood was marked with a black arrow and a caption that read AB-.
I shrugged at Helen, though I already had an inkling of what it meant.
Rick was quick to explain. “Emily’s blood type was O-positive. And most all of the blood at the scene was of that type.” He tapped the photo in my hand over the arrow. “But this streak was AB-negative.”
“And J.D.?”
Rick’s grin widened. “B-positive.”
“So this streak of blood came from the killer?” I said.
“Emily or J.D. might have got in one shot before the end,” Helen said. “Or just as likely, the killer accidentally nicked himself with his own blade.”
I said nothing.
AB-negative is the rarest of blood types, found in fewer than one in two hundred people.
It also happens to be mine.
Chapter 5
Lights off, I sat in my living room. The room was lit by only the dim glow from the solitary streetlight and the flash from the occasional passing headlights. A slight autumn chill drifted in through the open window. The beer bottle dangled in my hand like a dead weight, never nearing my lips. A revved engine or braking tires disrupted the silence from time to time, but I didn’t turn on the stereo; I’d learned last time around that music only intensified the sense of loss.
In the weak light, I could barely make out the eerily beautiful black-and-white sketch, Bather with Her Back Turned, over the mantle. Drawn by an “up-and-comer” in the Seattle art scene—or so I was told—I thought Emily could have just as easily sketched the desolate figure. Maybe that’s why it resonated so strongly with me.
The numbing shock of Emily’s murder had receded. Sorrow welled in its place. No surprise. I knew the memories would be skewed and unbalanced—summer weekends at “our” bed-and-breakfast in Anacortes, mornings frittered away at Pike Place Market, meals playfully improvised in the kitchen, those long showers together…I’d expected to relive all of that usual romantic bullshit and none of the misery—the volatility, the missteps, the betrayals. What caught me off guard was how many memories of Emily also included Aaron.
With or without one of a string of transient girlfriends, Aaron’s presence was a constant in our relationship. But my closeness to my identical twin never threatened my sense of identity. We were very different people. And despite his weaknesses, I always looked up to Aaron. After all, born four minutes before me, he was my big brother.
Staring at the sketch, I realized that not only had I lost Emily but that her death made me relive the loss of my brother.
The ringing phone startled me. I bobbled my bottle, spilling a few drops of beer on the cloth sofa Mom had helped me select. I glanced at my watch: 10:11 P.M. I steadied the bottle on the coffee table and picked up the cordless receiver.
“You okay?”
The question threw me. For a moment, I wondered if the whisperer had called to torment me again, but then I found my bearings. “Alex,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Hmmm,” Dr. Lindquist sounded unconvinced. “What are you up to now?”
“Nursing a beer.” Then I added the truth: “In the dark while I reminisce about Emily and Aaron.”
“You call that fine?”
“What can I say?” I said. “I have boundless capacity for self-pity.”
Hearing Alex’s soft staccato laugh lifted my mood. “You sure you don’t need company?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Dad’s staying over with Talie and me. She’s asleep. And he’s too proud to get a hearing aid, so the TV is cranked up to rocket-launch decibels.” That explained the distorted echo in the background. “I could use a change of scenery.”
I wanted nothing more than for Alex to come over, if only for a break from the cascade of memories, but I knew it risked a complication I couldn’t face at this point. “Alex, it’s a sweet offer, but I think I’m better off alone right now.”
“Okay,” she said breezily. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
Hanging up the phone, my own words—“better off alone”—sunk in. Having grown up with a twin, I’d never before thought of myself as much of a loner, but I had to concede that during the last few years, since my engagement crumbled and Aaron disappeared, the description had begun to fit. I had my work, a few intermittent relationships, and a small circle of friends, most of whom had either moved afield or had become understandably preoccupied with their growing families. Alex Lindquist was the closest I had to a best friend. And we had almost capsized the friendship that drunken night in San Francisco.
Through the rumor mill at St. Jude’s, I’d heard how rocky Alex’s marriage was. Her husband’s business travel had proven too tempting for a guy with an incurable wandering eye. His affairs grew habitual; I’d even once caught him trying to prey on Emily. Marcus and Alex were already separated when she discovered she was pregnant with Talie. The pregnancy led to a revival of their marriage, but word was that if anything, Marcus’s philandering only worsened.
Alex had too much dignity to share the details. But as she sat on the bed in my hotel room with a glass of red wine precariously tilted in her small hand, I knew exactly what she meant when she said, “Marcus’s latest business venture has kept him in New York for weeks on end.”
I sat down beside her on the bed, straightening her wineglass. Then I rested a hand on her shoulder. “I wish things had worked out better for you.”
She viewed me with a smile, then tilted her head and nuzzled my hand with her face. I understood that the contact was more than friendly, but I left my hand where it was.
Alex looked up at me with her almond-shaped brown eyes and then leaned her face closer to mine. Her breath warmed my lips. I got a whiff of wine. “I should go back to my room,” she said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “You should.”
She stared at me a moment. Then she inched her lips to mine. She touched my lips so slightly with hers that the pressure barely registered. I kissed back, harder. I squeezed her shoulder. She wrapped a hand behind my back and pulled me to her. I felt the wetness of her lips part and her tongue on mine. I guided her back on the bed, our bodies side by side, pressing into each other.
Alex dropped her hands to her waist and slid off her top. Then her fingers reached for my shirt buttons. She moaned into my mouth. Our kisses grew more urgent as her small hands moved steadily down my shirt front. She slid her hand over my shoulders and peeled off my shirt, the smooth steady pressure electric on my skin.
I broke off the kisses just long enough to pull off my shirt. I hesitated, only for a moment, but when I moved for Alex, she turned her face away from mine. She sat up on the bed. “I should go,” she said, subdued. She groped the bed for her top, snatched it up, and pulled it over her head.
Instead of bolting, she sat where she was and stared at her feet. She was so silent that it took me a moment to notice the tears running down her cheeks. I sat up beside her and wrapped my bare arm around her. “Alex?”
“This wouldn’t be fair,” she said hoarsely.
“To Marcus?”
“Talie.”
“And you?”
She shook her head. “She’s only five. She needs a stable home. I can’t do this to her. Not now. Not with the way her father flies in and out of her life.”
“It will be okay.”
She buried her head in my shoulder. “Ben, I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I said and stroked her lustrous hair, the eroticism of my contact replaced by concern. “We’re both a little mixed
up.” I paused. “Actually, I’m a lot mixed up. But we stopped in time.”
“I wonder,” she said into my shoulder.
Time had sanitized that evening for me, so I could recall it without guilt; it had become almost an innocent pleasure, like my first sixth-grade kiss. But since that night in San Francisco, things had changed for us. We stopped going out for dinners or movies after shifts. Our restraint wasn’t born from awkwardness or regret, but rather the mutual realization that next time temptation would prove too strong.
A soft rapping from my front door drew my attention back to the moment. I stood up and headed for the door.
More than his late-night presence, I was shocked by the appearance of my cousin, Kyle. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, Kyle looked even more gaunt and pale than when I’d last seen him three months earlier. He used to be the incarnation of health and vigor. Even when my brother and he were heavily into drugs, Kyle carefully maintained his cut physique and bad-boy good looks. I knew Kyle was lucky to have survived the aggressive leukemia, but I had yet to adjust to his chronically sickly appearance since his bone marrow transplant more than two years before. Pale and balding, not only had he lost his natural ruddiness but his once smooth complexion now always seemed to scale or erupt with various rashes—today’s variation was a line of dried, encrusted sores over his right eyebrow.
“Ben.” He threw his arms around me and squeezed his bony frame against my body. “Damn, Ben, I’m so sorry about Emily.”
I nodded. “Beer?”
“Don’t do beer, not anymore.” He grinned. His eyes lit up, shaving years off his face. “But if you have some Coke lying around…”
With a sigh, I turned for the kitchen. I knew he meant the soda, not the powder. Kyle had been clean since his bone marrow transplant, but neither beating cancer nor finding God had claimed his irreverent sense of humor.
After I dug out a can of Coke from the back of my fridge, I flicked on the lights and we headed into the living room. We sat across from each other on the couches in silence. For appearance’s sake, I sipped my beer, indifferent to its warm flat taste.