by Hayton, Lee
Feeling overwhelmed, Victoria cut short the greetings and the small talk. She followed close behind Stanton and Arbeck and tried not to catch anybody's eye.
“These are the two girls in that age range reported missing,” Arbeck said, pushing the files toward her. “With the state of the body, we couldn't be sure, either way.”
To Victoria, either one of them could be correct. She hadn't looked at the face of the girl on the table—she didn't need the heartbreak—but when she checked the heights, she crossed them both off.
“These girls are much taller. Are there any others?” she asked. “Guardiola said fourteen to eighteen, so are there any college students who could've gone AWOL?”
Arbeck brought the missing persons register up on his computer, and they looked through it. Nothing.
“Whoever this girl is, then. Either nobody's missed her, or nobody loves her,” Stanton said. “She was well-nourished, so it's unlikely she was genuinely homeless.”
He ran his hand through his hair, then muttered a curse under his breath. “This means we'll have to do an appeal for information. Unless Guardiola can place her through her medical records.”
Victoria shook her head. “You'll need to get a move on, then. If you don't have a suspect for this before you go out to the media, you'll welcome the whole distressing circus to town again.” She waited for a beat and then stood to leave. “Sucks to be you.”
“Wait, aren't you staying? Captain!” Stanton called out, and Victoria's saw movement in the corner office, then the face of the unit Captain—Haggerty—appeared around the corner of the door.
“Collins. Good to see you. Do you have a minute?”
Victoria shot a disapproving glance at Stanton, then and empty smile at her old boss. “Sure thing. It really does have to be a minute, though. I have some appointments I'm running late for.”
Stanton checked his watch, and Victoria realized a beat too late that it was already dark out. They’d either think she was lying, or she had a hot date.
“The guys have caught you up on the latest?”
Victoria nodded as she took a seat. Haggerty's desk was boringly pristine, the only thing on it his computer. The shelves on his wall were another story, piled high with books and reports that threatened to topple at any moment. Nothing changed.
“This is irregular, but I'd like to pick your brains for this case if you're not employed elsewhere. We can add you to the list of consultants and pay by the hour.”
She shifted in her seat. With her funds fast running out, the money would come in handy. The anxiety wouldn’t.
“I'd rather not,” she said. “I'm still recovering from the last investigation. I don't need to add more stress to my life.”
“You don't need to be involved in the active investigation,” Haggerty rebutted, his voice smooth as silk. “It'll just save us a lot of time if you bring along your superior knowledge of the last case.”
“It's all in the file.”
“Your gut feeling isn't in the file. Nor is the initiative that led you in a different direction to the rest of the team.”
Victoria sat back, catching the hostile edge in his voice. He hadn't liked her heading off on a tangent at the time, and he didn't like it now. No matter that she'd tried over and over to explain her reasoning, her deduction.
“You know, you have a real talent for this job, Collins. A real instinct.”
Victoria felt acrid bile edge up the back of her throat, and she swallowed hard to keep it down. Talent. She'd never had a talent for this job, nor any other. What she had was hard work and the willingness to go over and over the same information until she could put the pieces together in a new way. She had case files instead of a family, and she had hard-earned rote memory instead of sleep.
She was a grunt. That the man she'd worked under for over a decade couldn't see that made her feel tired in a way that Stanton and Arbeck's questioning hadn't.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I've got other things on my plate.” Victoria paused and looked out into the squad room in time to see Stanton hastily look back at his computer, pretending indifference.
She stood up and rubbed her right eye where it was beginning to twitch. Worry and guilt. It hadn't done that in a long time. “I'm back in town for the deposition, and that's it. You need anything else, use the team you have left.”
An embarrassed flush spread up her cheeks at her level of rudeness, but she wanted him to get the message. Victoria turned and walked out without waiting for a dismissal. As she'd just taken pains to point out, she didn't work there, after all.
“So?” Stanton said eagerly as she reached his desk. “You back on board?”
Victoria shook her head and held out her hand to shake. He did it with a look of astonishment. “Nice to see you again, Stanton. You too, Arbeck. If I were you, I'd start at the helpline. If Gregory Mancini confided his tips and tricks to anybody, it would've been someone from there.”
She walked out without looking back, knowing they wouldn't take her advice even if they had paid for it.
CHAPTER FOUR
“The decedent was pregnant at the time of death,” Dr. Guardiola announced.
He swiped a long-stemmed cotton bud around the inside of the dead woman’s vulva and popped it into a plastic tube, sealing the top tightly. “I’ll send away the samples for further analysis.”
Victoria shivered and, without meaning to, looked at the empty face of the young woman on the table. Her lips were a dismaying shade of blue. Her skin was puffy and discolored. Aggressive purple bruises flowered on the woman’s neck, and her eyes were open in an apathetic stare at the harsh fluorescent lights on the ceiling. There was a thick cloud of yellow-white over her blue irises, and they sank in the middle like a crushed eggshell.
“Her neck is extremely mobile,” the doctor continued, maneuvering the girl’s head from side to side as an example. When he released his grip, the head stayed tilted to one side, empty eyes gazing straight at Victoria.
“You know that the Birdman killed her, don’t you?”
Guilt jammed up Victoria’s throat. “He’s dead,” she whispered.
Her throat closed to a straw’s width. Her heart hammered in her chest. She didn’t want to look at the girl’s face, didn’t want to see yet another pathetic victim, but she couldn’t stop staring.
A bruise marred the young woman’s cheek. The left-hand side, high on the cheekbone. If she’d lived, it would have stood out in stark relief against her creamy skin, but decomposition had already turned her face a frightful shade of blue and black. Dead veins leaking dead blood.
“Haggerty was right. You went rogue, and you followed up the wrong lead. He’s still out there. He’s still killing.”
Victoria looked up. Stanton had replaced Dr. Guardiola. A sneer curled his lip in open hostility.
“I was right,” she insisted. “You know that I was right. If you’d only listened—”
“What?” Arbeck said from beside her. “We would’ve been chasing up the same wrong leads as you? If you hadn’t interfered, we’d have caught the Birdman and locked him up. Someone would’ve shanked him by now. Instead, you chased down some sad sack copycat, and you let him get away. And now look.”
Arbeck waved his hand across the dead girl’s body like an apathetic model displaying a shampoo bottle lineup.
Victoria recognized that the victim was Shelly. She was confused why she hadn’t been able to see that before. Her dead sister stretched out submissively on the slab. Waiting to be cut open.
Her body still composed of the same sweet flesh that Victoria had sniffed when Shelly first came home from hospital. She’d smelled like freshness and love.
A few seconds more and an indifferent scalpel would slice through the layers. Shelly’s chest would be cut open, and her heart would be laid bare. Strong hands would peel her face up over the top of her head like it was nothing more than a humiliating mask.
I held you so carefully. Mom was so scare
d I’d drop you.
“You were meant to look out for me. You were meant to protect me,” Shelly said, her voice full of perplexed anger.
Victoria tried to withdraw a step, but rough hands pushed her forward, bumping her hip against the side of the table.
“I tried,” she protested, her voice weak and distant. Hands reached up her back, took hold of her head, forcing her to look when she would’ve turned guiltily away.
“I thought that you’d come to rescue me,” her sister said.
Except it was no longer her sister. Star Harris lay full-length on the table. Angry bruises only just beginning to form on her crystalline skin. Beginning to form because she was still alive. Her tender heart was still beating.
Victoria reached out to Star. She tried to pull the invasive choking hands from around her throat. Star’s eyes opened wide, her chest heaved once, twice, and she fell back against the table, her head lolling to the side.
“I was on my way to a party,” she said. Her voice was equal parts critical and confused. Her empty eyes filmed over. “I was on my way to a party.”
#
Victoria woke with a start, not certain for a moment if she’d cried out. Her heart beat in triple time. She couldn’t catch her breath.
She sat up and pressed her hand against her chest, keeping her eyes fixed on the wardrobe across the room. Tiredness pulled at her eyelids, but she ignored the drag. She couldn’t risk closing them. Victoria knew the score. Close them, and within seconds she’d be back in the dream, back in the nightmare. Each time finding it harder to force herself awake.
Deep breaths. In, one-two-three, out, one-two-three. In, out. That was the ticket. Focus on slow breathing, and her heart would start to calm, too. The images scored across her brain would start to fade, the remorse would ease its angry grip on her stomach.
In, out.
When she felt less overwhelmed, Victoria pushed the cover back with her feet and stood up. The first dim rays of light from the dawning sun picked out shapes in her room.
She made it safely to the door without needing to turn on a light, then to the kitchen for a glass of water. Victoria preferred to let the water run for a while, to empty out the liquid already warmed from the pipes, but she was mindful that there were other people in the house. She didn’t want to wake them up for the sake of a few degrees.
The water was flat and the tang of chemicals strong. There was bottled water in the fridge, but Victoria didn’t like to drink out of the plastic containers. It left her with the rubber taste of balloons in her mouth, even though she knew the taste existed only in her own head. Cans gave her the slightly more pleasant taste of copper. Sometimes with the weird buzz of a 9 -volt battery, both ends in contact with her tongue.
“Can’t sleep?”
Her heart was jackhammering away again before Victoria recognized the voice as Arnaud. He padded on soft bare feet into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, pulling out an apple. He rubbed it against his chest until the soft morning light sent reflections back from its skin.
“I had a nightmare,” she said. She kept her hand pressed against her chest, suddenly aware of the skimpy singlet she wore as a pajama top. “I didn’t want to go straight back to sleep.”
Arnaud took a bite from the apple, the sound crisp in the quiet of the house. “I usually check on Grace about now,” he said in explanation to a question Victoria hadn’t asked. “Just to make sure she’s safe.”
He took another bite of his apple and Victoria moved to the sink for a second glass of water. This time it was cooler, the taste fresher. She could feel a small anxious pulse behind her right eye that would turn into a headache later in the day. It happened when she didn’t get enough sleep. It was so frequently a companion these days, she’d stopped taking painkillers for it. The thumping was like an old friend.
The house gave a loud creak as the first real sun warmed the roof. Both Victoria and Arnaud stared upward, then they caught each other’s eye and laughed.
“I’d better get dressed,” Arnaud said, tossing his apple core into the garbage. “Grace’ll be waking up soon.”
“See you at breakfast,” Victoria said. She turned her empty glass upside down to put it into the dishwasher, then pressed her forehead to the cool metal for a moment, her eyes closed.
A voice echoed through her head, “You know it’s the Birdman.” She shook herself, a desolate shiver working down her spine.
CHAPTER FIVE
Victoria had gathered three blouses, two t-shirts, and a pair of beige slacks she was confident would go with anything in her kart. She stopped herself from reaching out to pluck a blazer off the nearby hanger and forced herself to walk to the counter.
After lunching with her old friend, she’d wrangled a boring insurance job—answering phones mainly. The job began on Monday. When Victoria walked through the office on her way to the interview, she hadn’t seen a single woman there dressed as casually as she had been.
The amount of clothing seemed excessive, but after the young, spiky-haired shop assistant rang them up, she cheerfully announced, “Thirty-eight ninety-five.” Victoria hesitated before handing over the twenties, sure she must have misheard. The assistant handed back a receipt and change before layering her new purchases into a plastic bag. A much less expensive trip than the one she’d taken to purchase a second-hand car.
The food court was half empty, and Victoria took a seat at a table outside a Chinese restaurant to sort through her belongings. The scent of soy sauce and noodles triggered a growl in her stomach, reminding her that breakfast had been a very long time ago indeed. Giving in without much of a battle, she ordered herself a chicken-fried rice and watched in fascination as the man behind the counter tossed everything about in a wok that she didn’t think she’d be able to lift, let alone swing about.
A giant television hung over the area, earning itself a few bleary gazes from shoppers trying to gain their second wind. Victoria smiled as the sports segment ended and half of them disengaged. The news started, a young woman’s photograph taking over the half of the screen that the presenter didn’t fill.
In an instant, Victoria’s hunger disappeared. Instead of growling for food, her stomach tied in a painful knot of anxiety. That face. She recognized that face.
For a second, she held her breath. Expecting to see the word murder, death, victim. Instead, the word missing came up on screen and Victoria exhaled slowly. Missing. Well that was okay, wasn’t it? College age kids went missing all the time. She could’ve just gone to a party and stayed there for a few days instead of going back to her dorm and lectures.
Except, of course that wasn’t it, and even if the television news anchor didn’t know that yet, Victoria did. There was a pregnant girl on a slab down at the medical examiner’s office and that happening in the same week that Miranda Walsham turned up missing was no coincidence.
She pulled her phone out and searched for the story. Missing. Missing. Missing. It was all anybody had. No link to a homeless victim who died in a shop doorway. She scrolled through her phone log and hit the call from Stanton.
“It’s Victoria,” she said when he answered. “Is it her?”
Stanton took a moment, and Victoria was scared that he was going to tease her, criticize her, ask her why it concerned her when she didn’t work there. He was just gathering himself, though. She heard the catch in his voice when he answered.
“We don’t have the full records through for her, so Guardiola won’t comment.” He breathed in, sounding the teakettle whistle that constricted her own throat in full force. “Shit, yes. It’s her.”
“I’m coming in. Let Haggerty know.”
“I will.” There was a pause that seemed to stretch out for eons as Victoria’s mind went into high gear, sorting information into compartments, drawing together the facts she’d need. “Thanks, Collins.”
CHAPTER SIX
“So, for those of you new to the case, Miranda Walsham first came onto our
radar three years ago, when she was fifteen years old. She claimed that she was attacked in a side street by the Birdman and was saved when a passing pedestrian heard her calling for help and came to her aid.”
Overwhelming guilt forced Victoria to stop for a moment, and she scanned the room. Each face was turned to her in rapt attention. No one was bored or distracted. Good. There was a limited window before the media would find out about the case and curtail the investigation whether they meant to or not. Captain Haggerty was leaning against a table at the back, and he gave her a concerned nod to continue.
“When we originally investigated her claims, we couldn’t find evidence on the CCTV down in Chester Street. We also advertised heavily for the passer-by who intervened to come forward but never had any takers. There was no physical evidence of the attack and Miranda Walsham was unable or unwilling to identify her attacker.”
She’d also been shit-scared and barely able to talk when she was enduring their questioning. Nothing about her fit the normal profile for the Birdman’s victims. She wasn’t a troublemaker; she was a studious pupil. Member of the debating team. Member of the chess club. Victoria hadn’t met another person during the investigation who was less likely to take drugs, drink, or have sex than Miranda Walsham. She also wasn’t pregnant.
“There was no corroborating evidence ever found for her attack, and Miranda eventually admitted that she’d made up the accusation.”
That had been a devastating interview. At first, Victoria had taken Miranda through each statement, hoping she would back down. Admit that it had all happened. When she continued to recant, Victoria lingered over every awful detail. Made her take back every word. Shaming and punishing her for letting Victoria think that there might be an end in sight. For thinking that at long last, this was the break she’d been waiting for. Punishing Miranda, because doing her job wasn’t working and Victoria felt powerless. Didn’t know what else to do. She’d walked out of there feeling dirty and ashamed. And still furious.