by Alex P. Berg
I waved my hand, hoping to veer him off. “It’s a personal matter. Nothing that’s appropriate for work hours.”
Dean glanced at his watch again and gave me a sly smile. “Once again, you’re not supposed to be here this early, and though I don’t have a set schedule, strictly speaking, neither am I. Neither one of us is technically on duty yet.”
Part of me wanted to open up to him—he’d shared with me the painful story of his fiancée’s overdose, after all—but the dynamic was different. Dean was my supervisor, and he’d shared a story that was pertinent to the case. I wasn’t sure if it was the right call to bring my problems to him, even if he’d asked.
In addition to his other impressive qualities, Dean might’ve been a psychic. “You know, Phair, when I brought you onto this team, I intended for you to be a part of it. Teammates help and support each other, on and off the field. You don’t have to share anything you’re uncomfortable with, but it’s okay to do so if you want.”
Dean flashed a brilliant white smile, and it crossed my mind that one of the reasons I might not want to open up to him was his role in my predicament. But gosh darn it if that smile of his didn’t make me want to be honest with him.
“My boyfriend and I are breaking up, I think. The complicated part is that we live together.”
“You think?” Dean lifted an eyebrow. “You haven’t talked it over with him?”
“You sound like Justice. And yes, we did. A couple nights ago. I think we both know it’s over, but neither of us wants to say it out loud because of our living situation.”
“Penelope, you realize ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away.”
It was the first time he’d called me by my first name. He probably didn’t even know I preferred to go by Nell, but he was making an attempt to be personable. I appreciated that. “I know. I have plenty of experience ignoring problems only to have them get worse. It’s just… ending things can be hard, even if you know it’s the right path forward.”
Dean nodded. “Accepting the truth is challenging sometimes, even when you don’t have a choice in the matter. I’ve been there.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Dean didn’t try to convince me everything would be okay, which I appreciated as much as his company.
Dean clapped his hands on his thighs. “Well, the good news is, we can help you get back on your feet. I know an apartment hunter. There’s got to be something close to the precinct, if location matters to you. And if you need a place to crash until you find something permanent…”
My heart fluttered a beat. “Yes?”
“Well, I imagine Moss could host you. She’s got a pretty nice place.”
I swallowed back a lump. I might’ve thought Dean was handsome, but jumping out of one office romance only to dive into another, with a superior no less, was a terrible idea. Perhaps I should try to learn from my mistakes rather than endlessly repeat them.
“Thanks, Dean. I’ll talk to Moss. I appreciate the support.”
“Any time.” He nodded to my desk. “Although clearly I wasn’t completely wrong about the Vernon case being on your mind.”
I spread the nude photographs across my workspace. “Guilty as charged.”
Dean eyed the photos with a raised eyebrow. I thought he might crack a joke about him or Justice being better suited to spending long hours poring over them, but I should’ve known he wasn’t that crude. “What are you trying to parse from those? You already tracked down the photographer.”
I sighed. “Have you ever had a criminal get away from you? And I don’t mean in the sense that you failed to catch the perpetrator of a crime. I mean have you literally chased someone and had them escape?”
“A couple times, actually,” said Dean. “Believe it or not, I wasn’t a track athlete before I joined the academy. We ultimately caught both of those criminals, though one committed another murder before we did so. Why do you ask?”
I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “It’s weird. I kept tossing and turning last night, seeing the woman who got away with Vernon’s cash through my closed eyelids. It’s as if the image burned itself into my retinas. Dean, I feel as if it’s my fault. I abandoned my post on that side of the bleachers when I saw the kid slide underneath them. She got away because of me.”
Dean reached out and lay a hand on my knee, his touch soft but firm. “It’s not your fault. We had an entire team there, all of us working together. The woman who stole that money eluded capture by outsmarting us, not because of your actions. I know it might be hard for you to accept that, but you need to hear it all the same.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“That said, it’s not uncommon to feel the way you do, or to have the image of that woman seared into your memory. I was the same way both times murderers slipped my grasp, one more so than the other. Roberts was the guy’s name. I couldn’t forget his face, no matter how hard I tried. I remembered every pore, every scar. He was always there, taunting me. It was a tough few weeks until we apprehended him.”
“Right. That’s the thing.” I picked up the photographs. “Even though I wasn’t that close to her, her face imprinted itself upon me. When I close my eyes, I see her there, as if I’d stood no more than ten feet away. And when I look at these photos… I don’t see the same woman.”
Dean took the blackmail photographs from my hand. “You’ve changed your mind? Now you think it was an imposter after all?”
I pointed to the evidence. “It’s her face. These are the most recent photographs we have of Stella Vernon. You can see her cheeks are drawn. Her face is gaunt. She looks tired, for lack of a better word. The woman I saw in the crowd had the same features, but her face was fuller. Her cheeks redder. She was more vibrant and full of life.” I shook my head. Now that I said it out loud, it didn’t sound as convincing. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining things.”
Dean chewed on his lip while he eyed the photographs. “She might’ve been wearing blush, or the cool night air could’ve brought some color to her cheeks. Or perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the woman we saw wasn’t Stella. That’s the logical conclusion, anyway. Either way, I’ve learned over the years to follow my instincts. You should stick with this.”
Dean handed the photos back, and I tossed them onto my desk. “While I appreciate the vote of confidence, I’m not sure staring at these photos any longer is going to help me come to new conclusions.”
“No, but getting the image in your mind on paper might. Come on. Let me introduce you to our department’s sketch artist team.”
Dean stood and led me to the second floor. In a set of cubicles in the back, he introduced me to the only member of the team currently at her desk, a young woman by the name of Feoris with pointed ears and a complexion that was more green than olive. Like so many others in the city, she was almost assuredly of mixed parentage, but she was quite nice regardless of her species. After Dean made the introductions, Feoris sat me down, pulled out her sketch pad, and started asking questions. Not all of them were about my encounter at Vernon and Daly’s. She asked about me and shared a little of her own journey to being employed by the police, which not only put me at ease but gave her pencil an opportunity to catch up with my mouth. She’d take breaks to check reference books with sample features, then ask me whether the cheekbones she’d sketched should be higher or lower, the forehead broader or narrower. I’d answer those, and we’d drift back into conversation. A story about one of her professors in art school stretched on for so long that I wondered if I should check back in with Dean, but as the thought crossed my mind, Feoris turned her pad around and showed me the final drawing.
I was gobsmacked. I no longer had to close my eyes to see the woman from the circus. Now all I had to do was glance at Feoris’s drawing.
I thanked her and wished her well before skipping back to the third floor. Dean looked over his shoulder at the sound of my footsteps. I gave him a beaming smile as I showed off the sketch, almost as if I’d drawn it
myself.
“Check it out. Its Stella Vernon, but it isn’t at the same time. It’s Strella Dernon, if you will.”
Dean snorted, but he smiled too. “Maybe we can call her Jane Doe. But I’m with you. After having looked at those photos some more, I don’t think that sketch shows Stella. Seems like our impostor theory is on firmer legs than our faked death theory.”
Justice’s smooth bass tickled the back of my earlobe. “You can say that again.”
I turned to find Justice and Moss coming around the edge of the partitions. “Morning, guys. Where have you been? Dean and I have been on the clock for—” I glanced at my watch. “—almost an hour. Jeez, didn’t realize I’d been talking to Feoris that long.”
Moss pushed past Justice. “Your insistence on getting up early is your problem, not ours. But for the record, Justice and I were up catching the worms, too. You want to show them, big guy?”
Today, Justice wore a black pinstripe suit that slimmed him down from four bills to a clean three and a half. He pulled a manilla envelope from under his arm and held it to Dean. “You were saying you thought the woman we saw last night was impersonating Stella Vernon? If Moss and I are right, that’s only the half of it.”
Dean’s eyebrow rose as he accepted the envelope. “What’s this?”
Moss sat on the edge of her desk. “Stella Vernon’s birth records, among other things. Justice and I dropped by public records first thing this morning. Figured if we were going to ferret out who Stella Vernon was, we might as well start at the beginning. As it turns out, Stella’s maiden name was Stella Middleton, but her real name was Stella Cross.”
Dean pulled the papers from the envelope. “What do you mean her real name?”
“Stella was adopted,” said Justice. “Given up at birth by her mother and taken in by the Middletons when Stella was less than a year old. Her sister, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.”
Dean looked up from the documents. “Sister?”
“Twin sister,” said Justice. “Gillian Cross. Her birth records are in your hands, too. She was never adopted. Bounced around in foster care before running off at age fourteen, as far as we can tell.”
“And when you say twin…” said Dean.
Moss smiled. “The birth records don’t say whether they’re fraternal or identical, but as you can see from the photo in the file, regardless of which, Gillian and Stella look a hell of a lot alike.”
I blinked, trying to put it all together. “Are you saying the woman I saw last night walking off with Vernon’s money was Stella’s sister?”
Moss cast a quick glance at Justice before turning back to Dean and me. “Here’s our theory. Stella and Gillian weren’t separated at birth, but they were nonetheless split apart young enough to have no memory of each other. There’s no reason anyone at the adoption agency would’ve told Gillian she had a sister, or vice versa. Adoption records are usually sealed tight, after all. So the two led their lives blissfully unaware the other existed—until Stella appears in the news following the announcement of JT Vernon’s congressional campaign. Gillian probably cracks open a newspaper and sees, for all intents and purposes, herself hanging on JT Vernon’s arm. She’s dumbfounded, but she digs a little deeper. Pulls her own birth records and finds out she has a sister. Most people would be overjoyed. They’d reach out, try and connect with their long-lost sibling, but not a career criminal like Gillian. You see, after running away she fell in with some bad people. She has debts. Obligations. So instead of contacting Stella, she impersonates her. Takes photos of herself nude and passes them off as Stella in order to blackmail JT. And why stop at one successful extortion attempt when three is such a nice round number?”
Dean flipped through the documents. “That is a nice theory, but do the facts support it?”
“You can see the photo for yourself,” said Justice. “As for the rest? We pulled Gillian’s criminal record. She’s been arrested multiple times for solicitation and drug possession. Once for burglary. Plus, someone pulled her and Stella’s birth records before we did. Seven weeks ago, to be precise. About the same time Vernon’s campaign began to blitz the papers and airwaves, and only a couple weeks before the first blackmail letter arrived.”
I blinked, still confused. Ginger’s theory about Stella’s long-lost sister made total sense. It would explain Stella’s insistence that she never took the nude photographs. It would explain the motive behind the blackmail, as well as last night’s incident at the circus. It explained just about everything—except for why the woman I saw at the circus, who I now presumed to be Gillian, did not appear to be the same woman as the one in the nude photographs, who we also presumed to be Gillian.
If Dean was similarly confused, he didn’t show it. “Do you have a current address on Miss Cross?”
“I don’t know about current,” said Justice with a smile, “but we have an address. A quick trip would prove it one way or another.”
Dean stood and grabbed his jacket. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s pay Miss Cross a visit.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Dean knocked on the door again, louder this time. “Gillian Cross, this is the NWPD. We have a warrant for your arrest. This is your last chance to comply!”
I stood beside the door, pistol drawn, while Justice hunched at the other side, sidearm similarly in hand. I strained my ears, but I didn’t hear any response from within, nor even the sound of footsteps.
Dean took a step back from the apartment door. “Justice?”
The big detective nodded. He squared himself, planted one foot on the ground, and slammed the other into the door, level with the lock. The door groaned and cracked. Upon the second kick it flew inward, rattling as it bounced off the backstop. Justice surged inside with his pistol in front of him, and I followed.
The apartment was, quite frankly, a dump. The living room into which I stepped looked as if it had been trashed by a group of fraternity pledges. Cigarette butts overflowed from an ashtray, spilling onto the warped veneer of the coffee table underneath. A couch sagged beside the latter, its back broken and its cushions worn thin from use. Empty bottles of liquor were everywhere, on the kitchen counter, the coffee table, even window sills, and a stale funk hung in the air, one part body odor, two parts tobacco smoke, and three parts skunky beer.
I tried to ignore the odor as I swept through the living space, my pistol always leading me. I checked behind the couch before sidestepping into the attached kitchen, making sure both were empty. “Living space clear.”
Justice replied from the next room over. “Found her.”
His lack of screams for Gillian to get on the ground or put down her weapon suggested she wasn’t an immediate threat, but I didn’t realize how right I was until I followed Justice into the bedroom. On a bed that was dressed with a stained fitted sheet and nothing else lay a woman who until recently I would’ve assumed was Stella Vernon. She was nude except for a pair of skin-tone underpants, her arms wrapped around a completely nude gentleman whose eyes were as glazed as her own.
I coughed at the smell, which was worse than in the living room. “Good gods. Are they dead?”
Justice stood by the bed, index and middle finger held against Gillian’s throat while he gripped his pistol in his other hand. “Pulse is weak, but no. They’re high as kites, though.”
Dean walked into the room, his nose wrinkling. “Smack, unless my nostrils deceive me, although who knows what they’ve mixed with it. Alcohol, if nothing else.” Dean picked up a hypodermic needle from a nightstand and scowled. “We need to call the EMTs. Just because they’re alive now doesn’t mean they will be for long. Moss?”
Ginger called from the living room. “On it. Headed to the car now.”
Dean shook his head as he regarded Gillian and her lover. Color blossomed in his cheeks, but he held his anger better than he had at Vernon’s. “Justice, get them cuffed. I doubt they’ll be able to move under their own power, but I don’t want to take any ch
ances. I’m going to see if I can find anything that confirms Miss Cross’s identity. Phair, search the rest of the apartment. See if you can find anything more incriminating than these narcotics.”
“Got it.” I holstered my pistol and headed back to the living room. I hadn’t done much more than give the space a quick glance to make sure there weren’t armed thugs lurking in the shadows, but I hadn’t seen sacks of cash or firearms laying about either. Instead of turning over the couch cushions in search of weapons, I started with the coat closet by the front door.
My instincts paid off. Underneath the coats, a mix of ratty cotton affairs with frayed edges and thick furs that still had department store perfume on them, sat a duffel, brown in color to last night’s black. The top was unzipped, so I pushed the fabric to the side and took stock of the contents. I wasn’t the best at estimating, but there seemed to be far less than fifty thousand crowns inside, something the brand new furs might’ve been able to confirm could they speak.
“I found some cash,” I called. “From one of the initial blackmail drops, I’d guess. Looks like some of it’s been spent.”
Dean’s voice echoed around the corner. “Good. Leave it be for now. We’ll have CSU see what they can pull off it.”
I stood and took stock of the rest of the living room. Now that I looked closer, most of the liquor bottles were of expensive brands, Glendale whiskey, Black Swan vodka, and Jimmy Dunworth bourbon, red label no less. Had Gillian Cross blown most of her ill-gotten blackmail gains on booze, drugs, and furs?
There was only one other door beside the one to the bedroom. A hint of dirty tile suggested its purpose as I entered, but the bathtub and toilet further confirmed it. The bathroom was as disorderly as the rest of the apartment: the mirrored medicine cabinet hung ajar, clumps of bluish-white paste stuck to the sides of the washbasin, and a wastebasket next to it overflowed with tissues, as well as from bottles of solvent and other chemicals. Those would’ve seemed out of place if not for the string hanging between eye hooks in the walls. There weren’t any wet, glossy photographs affixed to the string, but as I opened the medicine cabinet, I found what I was looking for. Hiding amidst pill bottles that didn’t look as if they’d been administered by a pharmacist I found a half dozen clothespins and two strips of negatives. I pulled a glove from a uniform pocket. Once I had it on, I picked up a strip and held it to the light. Sure enough, there was Gillian in all her glory, small though she might be.