Chaos, Desire & a Kick-Ass Cupcake

by Kyra Davis

  I then pulled out the note from his work:

  Eight months in: Subject had half a glass of wine and then stopped, without wanting more. Can stand among smokers without wanting a cigarette. Minor hair loss, but that seems to be tapering off.

  Eight months in… that didn’t make sense. This was clearly notes on the results of a clinical trial. The only drug that Nolan-Volz was developing was Sobexsol and they had started clinical trials less than a year ago. London had stopped working there six months ago. Soo…how did that add up?

  And speaking of timing issues…

  I went to my desk and pulled out the anniversary card from my top drawer. I studied Anita’s note.

  My love,

  Ours was a forbidden love, too powerful to deny. Seven years later I still feel the power of our love every day. I know how much you’ve sacrificed for me and I know I’m not always the easiest person to live with, but never doubt how grateful I am to have you in my life.

  Yours Always and Forever,

  Anatoly had told me Anita and London had been married twenty-four years.

  “Oh,” I whispered to myself and and then louder, “Oh!” Mr. Katz strolled into the room and looked up at me with mild curiosity.

  “I think I figured this out!”

  He blinked his eyes at me while simultaneously swishing his tail. That’s kitty language for: Took you long enough.

  “Dear God, don’t let today be another learning experience.”

  --Dying To Laugh

  I sat in my car, parked right across the street from Nolan-Volz, a large travel mug of coffee in my hand and a handgun in my purse. I watched as workers trickled in through the front door. Some in jeans, some in suits. It was just a little after seven forty am so these were the early birds looking to impress the powers that be. I was never out of bed by this time of day, but this was a worthy cause to sacrifice both sleep and tradition for.

  She didn’t show up until eight twenty-five and my coffee mug was empty and my bladder uncomfortably full. I spotted her when she was still half a block away and immediately got out of my car, impatiently waiting for a few cars to pass before jaywalking across the street to greet her.

  “Charity!” I called out, just in time before she went inside.

  She turned, surprised. But when she saw me her face lit up. “What are you doing here?” she asked but before I had time to answer her hand went to her head. “Look at my hair!” she squealed. “All this time I’ve been trying to blow out my curls or pull them into a braid or a bun and then your brilliant friend gives me the perfect cut and hands me some products and look! My curls are gorgeous! Aren’t they gorgeous?”

  “They’re gorgeous,” I confirmed. “Hey, do you have a minute? I need to ask you something.”

  “Um,” she looked back at her place of work. “I really need to get in there. Gun likes me to arrive before he does to get everything ready for him and he always arrives before the other executives…”

  “He’s not in there yet,” I assured her, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I tried not to think about how much I needed to pee.

  “How can you be sure?” She asked, now glancing at the time on her phone.

  “I’m sure because I’ve been watching.”

  Immediately she looked up, now with a new level of curiosity, and maybe a little wariness. “Why?” she asked as a car drove by, Sergeant Pepper blasting from its speakers.

  “Look, I told you I knew Aaron London and that I had met his wife, the thing is, I didn’t meet his wife until a few days ago.”

  “But…” she shook her head, indicating that was impossible.

  “Yeah, I know what you told me,” I said, still bouncing. “She’s supposed to be dead. But the thing is, I met their daughter.”

  Charity shook her head again. “Someone’s messing with you. I’m telling you, his wife was Ann and she’s dead.”

  “What did she look like,” I pressed.

  “Blonde…well, not naturally. She had these great, dark eyebrows. She wore her hair past her shoulder blades and it was always kind of wild…like I just-had-sex hair.”

  I thought about Anita London. She probably wasn’t naturally blonde either although her eyebrows were a light brown, not really dark. But that could be a dye job too.

  “She had tan skin,” Charity went on. “Well, maybe not tan exactly, she had an olive complexion.”

  I wouldn’t call Anita’s complexion olive, but it was sort of a subjective term.

  “And of course she was tiny, barely above five feet. And that British accent really set her apart. It sounded almost sexy when she was on the phone.”

  And now there was no doubt. We were not talking about the same person. “This woman, Aaron’s…wife, did she go by the last name London?”

  “No,” Charity said, with a little laugh. “I was told she thought a British woman living in America with the last name London would be a little too on the nose. She kept her maiden name.”

  “It wasn’t Jaynes, was it?” I asked.

  “Not even close,” Charity said, tilting her head to the side. “Her last name was Keller.”

  Anne Keller. The woman London lived with. The woman he loved. But not his wife.

  “Charity, what would have happened to London if he had given Anne samples of Sobexsol before the clinical trials had begun?”

  “Are you serious?” Charity asked. “You could go to jail for that. Hell, if he was caught? He could bring down this entire company.”

  “My husband and I see the world differently. When he hears the word decadent he thinks scandalous, sexual adventure. I think chocolate cake.”

  --Dying To Laugh

  I knocked three times on Anatoly’s office door and waited. When he opened the door and saw who it was both his eyebrows shot up into his hairline.

  “You never knock,” he noted.

  “Well, somebody told me he was trying to bring stability or some such crap into our home. I figured I’d meet you half way and refrain from barging into your office without knocking.”

  “That’s nowhere close to halfway.”

  “Whatever, I need to talk to you.” I pushed past him and plopped myself down on the chair in front of his desk.

  “I need to talk to you as well.” I looked over my shoulder to see he was grinning. Not just smiling, grinning. There were teeth on display and everything.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, suspiciously.

  Anatoly walked past me and sat down in his chair. “Ladies first.”

  I studied him for a moment. He knew something. Something big. But then so did I. I couldn’t decide if I was more eager to hear his news or to brag about my recent discovery.

  “I was sure Anita was a fraud,” I said, opting for the latter. “Particularly when Charity told me his wife was named Anne but I was wrong.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Anatoly said with a little half smile.

  “No, no, not the way you think I was wrong. I was right that someone was lying about being London’s wife, but it wasn’t Anita. It was Anne Keller.”

  “Who?”

  “Anne Keller,” I said again. The sun was coming through the window behind Anatoly, forcing me to squint. “That’s the woman who he had introduced as his wife to everyone he met over the last seven years. Anne Keller took Anita’s place in London’s life. Anne Keller was Anita London’s imposter. And like London, Anne is now dead.”

  “Anne was the usurper,” Anatoly said, thoughtfully. He stroked the stubble that clung to his chin. “That’s motive.”

  “Damn straight!” I slapped my hand against my knee. My God, how long had it been since Anatoly and I were truly on the same page. This absolutely rocked. “And there’s more!”

  Anatoly lifted his eyebrows, silently inviting me to continue.

  “I think London was giving Anne Sobexsol before it was approved for clinical trials!” I reached into my purse and took out copies I had made of London’s personal notes and slammed them on An
atoly’s desk. “I’m guessing Gundrun knew about it,” I continued as Anatoly picked them up and started to scan them. “Or at least that he knows about it now.”

  “When did they start clinical trials on Sobexsol?” Anatoly asked.

  “Less than a year ago.”

  He looked up from the papers and met my eyes. He was putting the pieces together the same way I was. “If you’re right, London was giving Anne access to the drugs before they were even supposed to be giving it to humans. And if Gundrun knew….” Anatoly’s eyes glittering with something that looked a lot like satisfaction. We were finally figuring this thing out!

  “And read those notes!” I said, walking over to him and shuffling through the papers in his hand until I saw the one I wanted him to read. “Read that one. It sounds like Anne is falling apart here…London is definitely falling apart by the time he wrote this. Maybe the long-term side-effects of this drug aren’t so hot.”

  “That seems plausible,” Anatoly agreed.

  “That would explain why Gundrun is so eager to have Nolan-Volz absorbed by another company,” I said excitedly. “And his assistant thinks he’s planning on leaving the company soon. He knows the drug is never going to make it to market.”

  “Again, that’s possible,” Anatoly agreed. “Maybe even probable.”

  “Yeah, but…” I faltered, looking up at him. “That would mean that all those people who are part of the clinical trials…Anatoly, they’re being poisoned.”

  “Only if we’re right,” Anatoly cautioned. “And we might not be. All of this is pure speculation. And if we are right it’s also possible that London’s girlfriend didn’t take the pills as instructed or that she mixed them with something else. A lot of things could have gone wrong. But no matter how you play it, if Gundrun knew what was going on he could lose his company and go to prison.”

  “Right, okay,” I said doubtfully. Speculation or not I knew I was right. And those people taking that drug right now…

  I shook my head. I couldn’t get caught up in the horror of it yet. I had to be calculating and figure out how to prove my suspicions or at least get the authorities to investigate. “What did you need to talk to me about?”

  “Anita London,” he said, quietly. “The start up she works for develops GPS technology. They’re working on developing miniature location device instruments that are so accurate and so discreet they could earn them military and government contracts.”

  “Government contracts,” I repeated, uncertainly. “You mean this technology could be used by…” my voice trailed off as I thought of the possibilities.

  “By the CIA and FBI,” Anatoly finished for me. “And of course the NSA.”

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, suddenly feeling nervous. “She actually put a tracking device on London’s car.”

  “And possibly yours,” Anatoly warned. “Wherever you’re parked, leave your car there. You can take an Uber home.”

  “Anatoly, we’re in a commercial area…in San Francisco. You know my car’s in two hour parking. I’m lucky I didn’t have to park it at a meter.”

  “Leave the keys with me, I’ll move it somewhere else,” he advised.

  I rubbed my right thumb against my left palm as I tried to decide if this was truly the most plausible theory. “But…Gundrun has even more motive to kill London than Anita.”

  “I still think it was Anita,” Anatoly said, in a rather definitive tone.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s one more thing I found out today.”

  I leaned forward, waiting for him to proceed.

  “Anita,” he said with a smile, “has a Zipcar account.”

  “Discomfort leads to innovation. Dissatisfaction leads to creativity. Happiness leads to champagne. I choose happiness.”

  --Dying To Laugh

  I couldn’t stop writing. The words were spilling from my fingers. I was typing so fast my hands were beginning to cramp. Ms. Dogz was on one side of me, Mr. Katz on the other, watching in wonder as I created new characters, new adventures and a brilliant story.

  I had left Anatoly’s office via Uber three hours earlier. I now knew Anita was the killer. Anatoly had warned me that it was still a flimsy case. We needed hospital records to show the possibility that London had been poisoned. We needed information from the hospital about whether or not Anita was called when London was brought in or if she just conveniently happened to show up. And most of all, we needed records of exactly when Anita had checked out Zipcars.

  None of that was information Anatoly would be able to get on his own. So he was going to talk to a contact he had at the Police force, a senior detective, and see if he was willing to take the matter up. That was the benefit of not repeatedly pissing off the police over the years, they were more likely to help you when you needed a favor. It was ironic that of the two of us, it was the one with the mafia past that had managed to maintain a good relationship with the cops, but there it was.

  Of course if the police refused to help us, we could always reach out to hackers to get the information we needed. We were living in the center of Silicon Valley after all.

  And tomorrow we would voice our concerns to the FDA.

  Regardless of what route we would end up taking, right now I just had to wait and waiting was making me antsy and anticipatory...and prolific.

  I was averaging ten pages an hour. Anita had killed her husband and revitalized my career.

  That was an awful thing to say…even to yourself. I stopped typing for a minute so I could focus on feeling guilty.

  And then I was back at it, baby!

  Seven pages later Ms. Dogz started whining. I stared at her uncomprehendingly as she trotted to the door and stood there expectantly. I looked down at Mr. Katz for clarification.

  Mr. Katz blinked twice which is kitty language for These dogs aren’t smart enough to use a litter box.

  “Oh,” I said aloud, “you have to go out!” I pressed save and pushed myself away from my computer, grabbing my phone just in case Anatoly called with more news. “This way, Ms. Dogz.”

  Ms. Dogz trotted after me through the house until we got to the laundry room where I disarmed the alarm (I had told Anatoly I would keep it on and for once I was following through with a promise) then back through the kitchen to our little backyard. I was really enjoying being a dog-person. I suspected Mr. Katz would always be first in my heart but it was nice to have an animal that wasn’t always so judgy.

  As I held the door open for Ms. Dogz, I studied the kitchen. I should make dinner tonight…well, not dinner. If you lived with someone who could whip up Duck a l’orange at a moment’s notice you stopped cooking.

  But you didn’t stop baking.

  I smiled to myself and pulled up Mary Ann’s email on my phone. The recipe was a little more complicated than I was used to, but I could totally pull it off.

  Look at me, writing, baking and catching murderers!

  I hummed to myself as I pulled out the mixing bowls, hand mixer, sifter and everything else the recipe required. After doing her business, Ms. Dogz joined me in the kitchen, watching the floor carefully so she could pounce on any bit of food I accidentally dropped. I stepped aside and let her lick up the little bit of sugar I had spilled. That was another wonderful thing about dogs! Three seconds after I made the mess it was gone! Ms. Dogz left me with a sparkling, saliva-cleaned floor…which is a little more disgusting than bleach cleaned but whatever.

  I mixed, sifted, mashed, melted and all the rest of it. I didn’t have cupcake liners so I greased the hell out of a muffin pan and poured in the cupcake mix, leaving the newly made frosting in the refrigerator. Sadly, my frosting didn’t have the consistency of Mary Ann’s. It was runnier and didn’t look nearly at appetizing. But it tasted nearly as good so I didn’t beat myself up about it. These cupcakes that I was putting into the oven were a reflection of the positive turn my life was taking. These were my magical cupcakes of empowerment. I made a quick detour by going outside t
o get the mail and then strode back into my office.

  “I am woman, hear me roar,” I said proudly to Ms. Dogz who had taken to following me everywhere.

  And the writing gods were still on my side. The words were spilling out as I got lost in my little fictional world, steering my protagonist into danger only to pull her out at the very last minute. I was brilliant!

  Except I lost track of the time. I was alerted to that particular mistake by the smoke alarm in my kitchen.

  Ms. Dogz immediately jumped to her feet and started barking. Mr. Katz leaped onto the chair on the other side of the room, his back arched and his eyes wide. “Shit!” I hissed and rushed out of the room to the kitchen, Ms. Dogz close at my heels. I had to stand on the kitchen island to reach the alarm and turn it off. The smoke wasn’t that bad. But when I got down and took the cupcakes out…well, they weren’t looking too hot. I studied their blackened surface. “I can save these,” I said aloud and tried to take one out of the muffin tin, burning my fingers in the process.

  “Okay, try again.” I turned the tin over and with the help of a butter knife got the muffins out. They landed on the counter with a thunk.

  I was pretty sure baked goods should never thunk. Using a clean dish towel, I gingerly picked one up. It was way heavier than a cupcake should be. This was more like a cupcake paperweight.

  In an act of pure desperation I arranged them on a plate. “It’s possible they still taste good,” I explained to Ms. Dogz. She looked at me doubtfully. “Well, with frosting?” I ventured. They had become just cool enough to touch and I lifted one to my lips. “I bet it’s still salvageable,” I assured her and tried to take a bite.

  Tried because it was actually much too hard to sink my teeth into.

  This could not be explained by burning alone. Somehow I had managed to completely fuck up my empowerment cupcakes. I looked down at Ms. Dogz who gave me a look that…while not judgy, was not impressed either.