Crossed

by Meredith Doench

  Kaitlin pulls back her long hair into a ponytail showing off the fleshy planes of her face and her pouty black-painted lips. “This is about Emma’s date, isn’t it?”

  “Date?”

  She picks at the remainder of black polish on her nails and avoids eye contact with me.

  “Kaitlin, we need your help. Emma needs your help.”

  Eventually she nods. “I want you to catch this creepster.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “I stopped in the other night to buy some supplies. Emma was working alone. That’s when he stopped in to see her.”

  “Have you seen him before?”

  “Yeah. We both sort of know Tristan.” Kaitlin doesn’t look at me. She continues to pick at her chipping nail polish. “Emma said they got to know each other better a few weeks back at Bledsoe’s in Columbus. Tristan is from here, too.”

  “What do you mean sort of know?”

  Kaitlin shrugs and slumps back in her wooden-backed chair. “I’ve seen him around. If you live in Willow’s Ridge, you sort of know everyone else.”

  “What’s Tristan’s last name?”

  “Not sure. He’s older than us. We didn’t go to school together.”

  I wait for Kaitlin’s eyes to meet mine. “Bledsoe’s? The gay club?”

  Kaitlin gives me a stone-cold glare. “I’m not a lesbian.”

  Who does she think she’s kidding? Surely not me. “Okay.” I tread lightly for the sake of the interview. “I’m not asking about you. Only Emma.”

  “I just want to clarify.” Kaitlin’s sudden defensiveness tells me that sexuality is an issue for her. “Emma never really dated guys and she wanted to meet a great girl. Tristan was with what Emma called a hottie at the club last week. He promised to set them up last night. He picked Emma up from work and the plan was the hottie would be at his apartment waiting for her. Emma was stoked.”

  That’s why no one was alerted to Emma getting into someone’s car. She’d gotten in willingly and with the promise of meeting a girl.

  “Tristan was acting kind of creepy.”

  “Creepy how?”

  “He has this dyed-black hair and like six or seven lip rings.” She waves her hands, as if to say start over. “That didn’t creep me out. I mean, I have dyed-black hair and a lip ring! It was that he kept telling us about dead bodies. He even said he’d tasted blood. I figured he was one of those vampire-wannabes, you know, Twilight shit?” She shivers and hugs herself. “Twilight is one thing, drinking blood is another.”

  “It sure is. Did you have plans to talk with Emma after this big date?”

  “She was supposed to text, but I never heard from her.” Kaitlin’s eyes fill with sudden tears.

  I reach into my coat pocket for the supply of tissues that are mandatory equipment for any investigator. “Why didn’t you report this information to the police?”

  She busies herself wiping away tears with smears of dark eye makeup. “I wasn’t here when the cops came to do questioning.”

  “You could have called. I mean, the story is all over the news. Why tell me?”

  Fresh tears spout from her eyes again. “You’re cooler than I expected.”

  I laugh. “Thanks. I’ll tell my superiors that.” We sit in silence for a few minutes as she wipes away the tears. “Do you have a record, Kaitlin?”

  “Just tickets for speeding. Is that a record?”

  I shake my head. Where is this avoidance of the police coming from?

  “Besides, I don’t want anyone to think that Emma and I are more than friends. Sometimes that happens.”

  “People think you and Emma are a couple?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Were you sexually involved with Emma?”

  Kaitlin shakes her head, but I’m not convinced. I’m suddenly filled with compassion for Kaitlin. Not only has she lost a friend and possibly a partner, but she is also clearly struggling with herself. It’s not easy to come out in a small town, and I want to tell her everything will be okay, to be herself no matter what. This is what I wish someone would have said to me when I was coming out. But this is my personal reaction, not my professional response. Kaitlin’s personal struggles have nothing to do with Emma. Focus.

  “You’re doing Emma a favor by talking to me.” I reach out and squeeze Kaitlin’s hand. “What else can you tell me about Tristan’s features? Any tattoos? Race?”

  “White. Really pale. I mean, he had to have on some kind of white powder or paint to be that white. He looked the way vampires do in all the movies. Jet-black hair and black clothing against the super-pale skin. You know, stereotypical vampire-wannabe.”

  I can’t help but make the connection that the girl before me has many of these same features. “Where can I find him?”

  “He has an apartment not far from here.”

  “You said everyone in town knows everyone. Did Emma know the other young women who died?”

  Kaitlin shrugs. “Not well. She mentioned partying a few times with Chandler. But Chandler was a cheerleader. They weren’t friends or anything.”

  I note the possible tie to Chandler Jones, the second victim. I thank Kaitlin and write my cell number on the back of one of my cards. “Call if you can think of anything—any bit of conversation that comes back to you about Tristan. Even if you don’t think it’s important.”

  Kaitlin turns the card over in her hand. “Lucy?”

  “I go by Luce.” I wind the scarf around my head.

  *

  My truck’s engine eventually turns over, slow and sludge-like, but catching, thank God. While the car warms up, my cop gut pulls at me. I remember the damage to the victims’ vaginas. The precise incisions to replicate some sort of flower or the brutal removal of the flesh. The posing of the bodies. Our killer is an artist of sorts. It seems an odd coincidence that Emma was interested in photography—a visual art. Coincidences and crimes, I’ve learned from experience, rarely go together.

  When I was in the academy, I studied with a professor who claimed all serial killers were artists at heart. The difference between a celebrated artist and a vilified serial killer, this professor said, is that at some point in their young lives the creative vision turns dark. We value art that speaks of humanity, but a serial killer values art that speaks of consumption and death. Instead of the examination of life, serial killers examine what it means to inflict unnecessary pain. I think of Rowan, who paints and sculpts for a living. Like other artists, she’s generally in need of supplies. Wilson’s would provide supplies and the full knowledge of Emma and her schedule.

  Before I pull the gear into drive, there’s a tap on my window. Ice patterns splinter and I can’t make out the dark shadow on the other side of the glass. The window’s frozen closed. When I kick the door open with the sole of my boot, it’s Kaitlin shivering in her thin clothing, all elbows wrapped tight around her skinny waist.

  “I remembered something else. Emma teased Tristan and said he only knew about blood from vampire movies. He argued with her. I think he said something about putting makeup on dead people.”

  Something clicks inside me. I bounce my gloved thumb against the steering wheel. The funeral home. The dead. The pieces fit. Emma Parks had been with one of the Willow’s Ridge police department’s prime suspects in the three murders: Nicholas Sambino, aka Tristan.

  Chapter Four

  I sink into a deep armchair inside Captain Davis’s office and wait. Everything is in its place—from the files neatly lined in the inbox to the police procedure manuals inside the bookcase arranged from tallest spine to the shortest. Even his coat and scarf are hung square and smooth on a hanger on the back of the door. This is Davis’s way of controlling the chaos. His office is as neat and organized as an Ikea model room, while the biggest case of his career mushrooms around him.

  I expected an office like this from Davis. His appearance borders on immaculate with every hair in place. While I noticed that he has the body of a runner, I am surpri
sed by all the running medals and celebratory photographs of him and teammates at finish lines. It makes sense that Davis is an endurance runner; he has the patience and the intensity of someone used to pushing himself to be nothing but the best. There is one element missing from Davis’s office that I didn’t expect: no family photos. I’d taken Davis as a family man, or at least a father who was very proud of his children and their accomplishments. Yet the office is completely devoid of any photographs of children or scribbled drawings of unidentifiable objects that only parents can love. The untanned circle around his ring finger tells me the split is fresh, and judging by the impersonal flavor of his office, he’s not too happy about it.

  I reach for my iPhone and check for messages. Nothing from Rowan. I turn to my next-favorite activity on the cell phone, flipping through my pictures: Rowan and the kids, Toto and Daisy, our two Labs; Rowan and her latest painting that’s so obscure I only recognize the amazing spread of color; Rowan with her explosion of natural curls, lounging on the beach in Maui in her old T-shirt that says I’m not a dyke but my girlfriend is!; and a multitude of Maui beach shots.

  This morning, Rowan and I fought over my involvement with this case. I tried to hide the details from her, particularly the fact that the serial case was located in Willow’s Ridge. She’d overheard the location during my phone conversation with Sanders. After her initial burst of anger and my defensiveness, we sat together on the corner of the bed, the dogs wrapped around us like enormous commas.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I reached over and took Rowan’s hand in mine. Her skin was smooth and warm—so safe.

  Rowan closed her eyes. “I can’t go through this again, Luce. You know that.”

  I squeezed her hand in mine. Even though the words weren’t spoken aloud, we both thought about my recent bout with depression, a crippling darkness that settled in and left me close to catatonic at moments. “It’s different this time, Ro.”

  She shook her head, but her voice trembled. “We won’t make it.”

  Her words stunned me to silence, but I didn’t let go of her hand. The dogs panted with affection around us.

  “If I want to keep my job, and you know I do, I don’t have a choice. I just took two weeks off for the Maui trip and they worked three cases without me.” When this declaration of missed cases doesn’t work, I switch tactics. “This is a serial, Ro! You of all people know how long I’ve waited to work one.”

  Rowan eventually softened next to me.

  “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

  We sat together, uncomfortably hand in hand for a while, neither of us saying aloud what we were both thinking, that the Willow’s Ridge case could be the end of us. I never like to admit it, but I sometimes struggle without Rowan near. We haven’t been apart for more than a day or two for over a year. She met me halfway for a quick kiss before she went downstairs to start the coffee. I put my hand to my lips. I pressed my fingertips there as if to hold in Rowan’s kiss—to memorize it—to never let it go.

  Nothing will make Rowan like my job. The dangers of what could happen terrify her. Most days when I’m headed out of our home in Dublin and she’s loading up her art supplies, she says, “Remind me again why I fell in love with an agent.”

  I can’t help but to crack jokes in those moments. “Maybe the uniform? Don’t tell me it was the gun?”

  I put the iPhone back in my pocket and touch my Christmas gift, a silver ring, just to make sure it’s still there. The warm silver band is a reminder that the whole trip to Maui with Rowan really did happen. Rowan designed the ring for me, a thick band with continuous etchings of swirls and waves. She even embedded a spray of small diamonds in the eye of the ring, ones that she picked out from a diamond dealer in Columbus. Inside the band she engraved the infinity symbol. Rowan nearly burst in the attempt to keep her plan and ring hidden. She can’t keep a secret to save her life. Still, the plan went off with only one hitch. On one knee in the sands of a Maui beach, she presented the ring on the last day of the year while the island’s signature New Year’s Eve firecrackers crackled around us, painting the sky and sea brilliant yellows, greens, and reds.

  I love Rowan. But something always holds me back, something I can’t quite explain. I term it my personal Berlin Wall, a sort of block I can’t get past. Everyone holds something back from a lover, no matter how many years they’ve been together, right? Don’t most people keep that get-out-of-jail-free card tucked inside their back pocket, just in case?

  Sometimes, though, in the quiet predawn hours, in bed with Rowan asleep beside me, I find the courage to be honest with myself, to pull a few stones down from that wall one at a time. No matter how tragically slow the process, the wall is diminishing. There is hope for me, Rowan says. She places all her trust in that, but I can’t shut off the constant deluge of what-ifs. That faint doubt in the back of my mind stokes my conscience. What if Rowan leaves me? Finds someone new? What if she gets hurt or deathly ill? What if, what if, what if.

  Rowan surprised me by popping the question with the ring. Even though we’d been together over two years and living together for a year, I never saw the question coming. Call me stupid. The ring, the humid island, the fireworks raining down around us. The question hung in the air between us like a word balloon from some kind of cartoon. I looked down at the ring on my hand, the silver against the berry-brown tan from the Hawaiian sun, and said, “I need to think it over.”

  Rowan turned away, looked out over the water. “That’s a no.”

  “It’s not a no and it’s not a yes.” I didn’t want to hurt her; I only wanted to love Rowan and keep everything the same. It was Rowan, though, who finally conceded that my silence and lack of eye contact meant it might not be the right time. We should only do it if we were both 100 percent sure.

  Rowan is sensitive, fragile, with an artist’s temperament to match her career as a painter. My hesitation to accept the proposal was like a jackhammer to her shivering heart. Still, no matter how hard I try, my Berlin Wall holds steadfast even with its chips and breaks, and there is no way to maneuver around or over it. I twist the band round and round on my ring finger and wonder when I’ll be okay with the commitment of marriage. No matter how many scenarios I sift through, I just cannot see myself ever getting to that place. If I could, it would be with Rowan.

  Captain Davis closes the glass door behind him and takes a seat on the other side of his desk. His lithe movements are whisper quiet, his demeanor calm and controlled. There is an element of exhaustion in his movements, though, the pull of sleep along the corners of his eyes. “What do you think, Hansen? What sort of profile are we working with here?”

  “Our guy’s an artist, of sorts.” I pull the case files from my satchel and place them on the desk. “If you look at the way the bodies are laid out, the intricate cutting, it’s as if we’re looking at a visual art piece. He could have used another medium like a painting or a sculpture, but instead he’s using the canvas of the human body.” The crime-scene photographs are spread out before us like a deck of cards at a poker game. “I’ve seen many crime scenes that have many layers to them, but these killings are blatant in their artistry. He’s our Picasso.”

  “Picasso.” Davis rolls the name around on his tongue. “I like it.”

  “We’re looking for someone whose job involves some sort of artistry. The appearance of a space is vital to our guy. He might work in design or the remodeling of homes. He could be a woodworker or even work in an art-supply store. Whatever his job, it will be one where appearance is absolutely vital to the success of his business.” A woman dressed in a business suit waves through the large glass windows of Davis’s office. With her heavy makeup and big hair, it’s clear she must be a television reporter.

  “They’re here already for the press conference,” Davis says as someone from the front desk collects the reporter. “Can’t keep the media away from this one.”

  I ignore the media comment and continue with the
profile. “But when it comes to making art, he is an amateur—maybe someone who paints landscapes as a hobby or someone who works on his sculpture late at night when he cannot sleep.”

  “Why amateur?”

  I push some of the crime-scene photographs across the desk. Davis leans in closer. “In these photos from the Hannerting case, there is disturbance around the body.” I point to the victim’s left shoulder. “Notice the slight abrasion to the shoulder blade? She was pulled or pushed to a very specific location.”

  Davis picks up the medical examiner’s photo and examines it. “Mitchell guessed that scrape to be from the struggle with her attacker.”

  I shake my head. “If there’d been a struggle, even with the victim drugged, we’d see more scrapes and bruises. It looks to me like he placed her on the ground and realized he was off on the exact placement. He pulled her to the location where she was found.”

  Davis holds the photo close to his face and leans toward the window for additional light. Tiny wrinkles of concern gather in the corners of his mouth and the space between his eyebrows.

  “The precise placement indicates that this killer has a vision that he is replicating,” I continue. “I’m not sure how much experience you have with artists, but many talk about finding their voice in work, whether it’s writing or painting or photography, or whatever. We are witnesses to this killer as he perfects that voice.”

  Once Davis puts down the Hannerting photo, I hand him a crime-scene photo of Jones. “The killer is much more precise with Jones. He’s either displayed the body correctly the first time or manipulated it in a way to hide his efforts. We don’t see the same amount of disturbance around the body,” I say. “And as he gets more skilled with his art…”

  Davis finishes the sentence for me. “He’s becoming faster and shortens the time between his kills.”