by Julia Derek
I turned to him. “Do you remember any specific details about that serial killer? The Smiley Killer, right?”
He ran a hand over his face and blew out a breath. “Yeah, she was vicious, man. And so smart that she outwitted the cops every step of the way. She kept people terrified for like a year. If it hadn’t been for her best friend, who knows if she’d ever have been caught. She killed them, too. The entire family and the boyfriend. The best friend’s boyfriend that is, not Alyssa’s. That was her name. I think she also killed her own parents, but I’m not sure.”
I frowned at him. “The entire family? What are you talking about?”
He stared at me. “You missed that part? It was all over the news!”
“It seems I must have missed it because I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” I clarified. “Please enlighten me.”
“Alyssa escaped out of prison a few days after she was captured. I think she was at Rikers Island.”
“What? She escaped?” I felt the frown between my eyebrows deepen. “Did they catch her again?”
“She was killed as they chased after her.”
I chewed on the inside of my lower lip. “Or so they say…”
“Anyway,” Burt continued, “soon after she escaped, she blew up her best friend’s family as they were driving out to their country house in Connecticut. She used some kind of car bomb.”
I gasped. “Are you kidding me? She blew up the girl who caught her and her family?”
“Uh-huh. And the boyfriend was in the car, too. If you ask me, he was a hybrid, just like Alyssa.”
I snorted, flabbergasted. “How can this not have been on the national news? I’m a total news junkie, so I’d have seen it if it were. And I don’t think I’d forget about it so completely had it been in there.”
“I don’t know about the national news,” Burt said, “but it was definitely in the local news. I remember seeing Channel One reporting about it and feeling so bad for that entire family.”
“Well,” Ian said, inserting himself into the conversation for the first time. “My guess is that The Adler Group pulled some strings to keep it out of the news as much as possible.” He gazed at me. “As you know, they’re good at controlling what the media puts out. And if this… Alyssa, was it?”—he looked at Burt, who nodded—“I was deep undercover in Europe at the time, so I haven’t heard about this until now. Anyway, if this Alyssa is a hybrid gone nuts, they’re definitely going to do everything they can to keep under wraps what she did. It was bad enough that she went on a killing rampage and was caught.” Again, he looked at Burt. “What makes you think the boyfriend was a hybrid? You mentioned he was the friend’s boyfriend, correct? The one who caught Alyssa.”
“Yes,” Burt said. “He was the friend’s boyfriend. I saw him standing next to the friend when she was being interviewed. As I looked into his eyes, I was convinced that he had to be a hybrid like Alyssa and myself. We hybrids can instantly tell if someone else is a hybrid by looking into their eyes. That method doesn’t work quite as well when you do it through a television screen. But the fact that he was about as good-looking as they come further confirmed it for me. Most hybrids are very good-looking. Especially the younger models.”
“But he was also killed in the car explosion you’re saying?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Burt replied.
“And then no one ever heard from Alyssa again?” I continued. “Because she was shot dead?”
“Yes, it was reported that she was killed by the cops chasing her,” Burt explained.
“But now it seems like that might have been a lie then,” Ian stated as he gazed down at the carvings on the hardwood floor. “Claiming to have shot her dead would be the most effective way to get rid of a misbehaving hybrid.” He raised his head and met my eyes. “I’m thinking that they never got hold of her and she just vanished. And ended up using this house as her new dwelling. It’s the perfect hideaway as you can tell.”
“Yeah,” I said, “the fact that there are so many items belonging to a woman—a young woman, judging from the style of the clothing—speaks of her having been here a while, too.”
“Did you get a chance to connect with your contact at the LAPD?” Ian asked me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s gonna be complicated to get that blood checked out. But now that we can be fairly sure Alyssa is the person behind Nadja’s disappearance, we should instead focus on finding her fingerprints and compare them to the ones in the system. Just to be sure she’s the one we’re looking for. Hers are definitely in the system. You can easily hack into it and find them, right?”
“Yes, it should be easy enough,” Ian said. “But I’m no expert dusting for fingerprints. It’s not exactly my expertise. Are you any good at it?”
“Not particularly,” I said, “but how hard can it be? I’m sure we can find guides how to do it online. It’s worth a shot. At least we’ll know who to look for.”
“And hopefully Nadja is still alive somewhere,” Burt added morosely.
I put a hand on his back, fully realizing then how much harder it must be for him than for us to talk about this. “Yes, I really hope so, too...”
***
Ian and I drove back to the city an hour later so I could train my afternoon clients and he dig for Alyssa’s fingerprints on his computer at home. Burt stayed at the house, armed with Ian’s gun should Alyssa appear in the meantime. After seeing all that fresh food in the kitchen and all her clothes, we definitely thought she would return to the place she apparently considered home at some point. The question was, how long would it take? Did she have another place where she also stayed? Was that where she’d taken Nadja? There was no way of knowing.
We both decided to return to the house after I was done with work. By that time, Ian should have found her fingerprints in the system and whatever we needed to dust for prints in the rooms. Several of Alyssa’s prints should be there, and then we could be sure she was still alive.
I received a text from Jonah when I was approaching Nikkei in which he apologized profusely for canceling on me the previous night and promising that he’d make it up to me tonight. The promise was followed by several obscene emoticons.
His vulgarities didn’t bother me as much as they usually did. All I could think of was how he’d waved his gun at Nicki last night, forced her to keep moving farther out on the slippery cables that stretched out from the Brooklyn Bridge railing. How she’d fallen into the abyss right as that thunder had exploded through the air, drowning my attempts to get their attention, warning them they had witnesses to what they were about to do.
Only now did it strike me that the thunder might have done more than drowning out my calls for help. It might have also taken Nicki by surprise, the heavy rain and winds that followed right after making her lose her grip of the cables. I pictured the way the three young men had stared at the space she had occupied, then taken a couple of steps toward the railing and peeked down into the darkness below, the rain beating down on their heads.
As I pondered how they’d been gazing down into the water below, I wondered if their intention had in fact only been to scare Nicki, not to actually kill her. Make a video of how terrified she’d been and send it out to all the other hybrids to ensure they would think twice before misbehaving. It sure seemed like that would be sufficient.
I shook my head to make all the images disappear. As Ian had already pointed out, it would do me no good dwelling over what had happened. There was nothing I could do to undo it no matter how much I wished I had thought of making myself noticed sooner, before that earth-shattering thunder tore the sky apart.
Entering Nikkei, I thought about what excuse I could make up not to see Jonah tonight. I needed to invent something as we absolutely needed to get back to that house as soon as possible. Neither Ian nor I liked the idea of Burt being there alone, even if he was a man and armed. If Alyssa had managed to stay hidden for so long, doing only God knows what during those ye
ars, she might be able to easily outwit Burt. The young woman had fooled the NYPD, so she could probably handle a single person, hybrid or no hybrid.
I sighed as I rode up the elevator, thinking how tomorrow was Saturday and how Jonah surely would insist on me spending the night with him as neither of us started early on weekends. Well, I didn’t have any clients at all on Saturdays at the moment. Which was another reason I needed to come up with a plausible excuse why I couldn’t see Jonah at all in the near future. Who knew when we’d be back from Philly?
I’ll just tell him I’m sick, I decided, exiting the elevator and entering the club. But I wouldn’t tell him until later, so I texted him back, saying that I couldn’t wait to see him and that I was done with my last client at seven. That wasn’t true—I finished at six—but this would give me a chance to leave the building before Jonah would expect me to.
If he can stand me up, so can I. At least once, I told myself, well aware that I could not use this excuse another time or Jonah would know I was avoiding him.
Against all odds, Jonah and I didn’t bump into each other on the gym floors as I trained my clients, nor did I hear anyone say anything about Nicki, or even Burt being gone. I wasn’t surprised that no one had begun to wonder what was going on with Nicki—I doubted her death had even reached the news yet. It would likely take weeks before her body was found. I was pretty sure the only ones who knew what had happened to her were me and Jonah and his buddies. And while they might make it known in certain circles—amongst the other hybrids—they would hardly bother to spread the word at the gym in general.
Ian waited for me outside his Upper East Side brownstone when I arrived there. I had just texted Jonah that I was hanging over my toilet, throwing up, so I didn’t think I’d be able to see him tonight. Hopefully, the image of me vomiting would disgust him enough not to insist.
Ian waved a folder at me as I left the cab.
I smiled eagerly. “Those are her prints then?”
“Yep. They were very easy to find. I also have them on my tablet where we can make them larger.”
“Fantastic,” I said and slipped into the passenger seat of Ian’s blue Honda as he held the door for me, ever the gentleman. “Any word from Burt?”
“The last time we spoke was an hour ago,” he said and walked around the car. Taking a seat before the steering wheel, he added, “Nothing new to report then.”
We took off and drove as quickly as the speed limit would allow us to get to Burt and the house. On the way, I spoke to George again and told him it looked like I’d be able to solve the situation without his help.
When we arrived at the house having driven less than two hours, the sun had set and it was dark out. There was a faint sheen coming out of the kitchen window, like someone had lit a few tea candles and placed them on the table there, but other than that, the house was shrouded in darkness.
“I guess he doesn’t like to keep the lights on,” I said as we parked the car in front of the closed garage and walked across the gravel-covered front yard to the main entrance.
“I guess not,” Ian responded, his eyes fixed on the closed door.
“I think it’s a hybrid thing,” I said.
“How so?” Ian asked as he climbed the two stairs that led up to the door.
“When I found Burt at my place, he was sitting in the dark. He said something about him having better night vision than regular people and how he tended to forget about that.”
“Oh,” Ian said and put his hand on the doorknob, turning it. The house was just as quiet and dark on the inside as it had appeared on the outside, and it didn’t feel like anyone was there.
“Burt!” I called out as we walked into the house and continued into the kitchen, which was empty, a candle burning in a holder on the table. We left the kitchen and walked back out into the big space that was in front of the L-shaped staircase. We walked into the dining room adjacent to the long sitting room with a fireplace that took up the entire wall on the other side; we checked the office and the downstairs bathroom. Burt was nowhere to be found on the ground floor that was now lit.
“Burt!” I called out again. I glanced at Ian as we walked toward the staircase. “Maybe he’s sleeping.”
“Yes, perhaps,” Ian said, then added in a wry tone, “In which case he’s sleeping very deeply. My bet’s on him having gone out for a walk. But let’s see what the upstairs look like.”
We climbed the stairs in silence. I sensed that Ian felt as uneasy about Burt not being around as I did. I walked ahead of him into the bedroom where we found the mess next to the bed. There were no longer any shards or blood on the floor, and the rug was gone. We both stopped to stare at it, probably thinking the same thing—why had Burt felt compelled to clean up while we were gone?
My eyes went to the bed that had also been straightened out, now neatly made. But there was something on the blue bed throw, wasn’t there? A piece of paper? It was hard to see in the shadowy room. Ian switched on the light in the ceiling then, and I instantly saw what it was—there was a sheet of paper on the bed throw. And text was written on it.
Chapter 5
We hurried over to the bed to get a closer look at the sheet of paper. Ian picked it up, sitting down on at the edge of the bed and began to read it.
I sat down beside him, peering over his shoulder.
“What does it say?” I asked.
He held it up so I could see for myself.
DO NOT RETURN TO THIS HOUSE. IT BELONGS TO ME NOW. IF YOU DO, YOU WILL END UP LIKE YOUR TWO FRIENDS. GONE. YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME OR THEM. GO HOME, FORGET ABOUT THIS. I DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYMORE. I DON’T WANT TO INFLICT MORE PAIN. PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME.
ALYSSA
I raised my gaze to meet Ian’s, not particularly surprised to find and read those words; after everything that had happened in my life in the last few months—and kept happening—I didn’t think I had the ability to be very surprised any longer. But I still had the ability to get upset about it, because I could feel how the anger surged through my blood now, heating up my insides.
“Well, I guess we don’t need to dust for prints then,” I said through gritted teeth.
Ian lowered the sheet to his lap, frowning. “I spoke to him a little over an hour ago, in the car. He didn’t appear like anything was wrong then, which means she must have shown up after that. Burt is a strong man and he was armed. She must have surprised him in order to take him out. I’m assuming that’s what happened after reading this.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “She also had time to clean up the area afterward.” I tilted my head to the now clean, rug-free hardwood floor before us. “That must have been her doing, not his, and I highly doubt she would have been able to do that while Burt was here. Which suggests they can’t be that far away. Unless she had someone to help her move him. Which I also doubt. Serial killers usually operate on their own.”
“Those are good observations,” Ian said, nodding slowly.
“We should search the premises. Maybe she’s hiding them in the basement, hopefully alive still. The house has a basement, correct?”
“Yes, it does. We should absolutely search that and the rest of the house more in depth.” Ian put the paper away and got to his feet. “We should be grateful she felt compelled enough to write this note and use the words that she did. She was obviously upset when she wrote them because they don’t quite make sense. The fact that people are showing up here clearly bothers her tremendously.”
I watched him as he stroked his chin in that way I’d come to learn he always did when he pondered something deeply. I thought I got where he was going with his words.
“Yes, she clearly values her privacy to the point that she’d do anything to keep it,” I said sarcastically. “She also seems to be very, very attached to this house for some reason. So attached that she can’t stay away for long.”
The corners of Ian’s lips went up into a small, mirthless smile. “Exactly. So far it seems she c
an’t stay away for more than a day or two. Burt had been here less than forty-eight hours before she returned. And after leaving this note, we know that she’s planning on returning again. She’s nice enough to give us a warning that she’ll kill the person who’s in it when she does. And that we shouldn’t doubt her ability to do so.”
“Well, let’s see about that. If we can’t find her, we’ll just have to wait her out and prove her wrong.”
Ian nodded. “Exactly. Only in her psychotic mind will she be able to kill us. When she gets here, we’ll capture her and make her tell us where and why she took Burt and Nadja.” He sighed heavily. “Hopefully they’ll both be alive still when we do. It’s unclear based on what she’s written whether she’s taking her time killing them or if she’s already killed them.”
I looked at the sheet Ian had placed on the bed and quickly scanned the words there again. I don’t want to inflict more pain. What exactly did she mean by inflicting more pain? As in torturing her victims, or just generally speaking? It was impossible to tell.
“Do you remember what her MO was when she went on that killing spree in New York?” Ian asked. “Twelve-year-old girls, was it?”
“Yes, all with long, dark hair because apparently they reminded her about herself, how she used to be before she started to change. It made her hate all such girls. I’m not one hundred percent sure if she killed them right away, or if she tortured them first.” I scrunched up my face, trying to remember what I’d read about the case. Even though I’d been fascinated by it, it was years ago now, making my memory fuzzy. “I think she may have tortured them for some time, but I’m not sure. That sad smiley was carved into the victims’ midriffs, but maybe it was after they were dead. Either way, serial killers tend to evolve. As they get better at their crimes, the MO, even the signature may change.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve heard as well,” Ian said. “Let’s go down to the basement and see what’s going on there. By when do you have to be back in town?”