Slash and Burn

by Valerie Bronwen

  She placed her hand on top of mine. “It was awful of me, I know. But you were shutting me out, Trace. You just kept getting colder and colder. I felt like you didn’t want me around anymore.” She squeezed my hand. “And I need to feel needed, and you weren’t giving me that. I’m sorry.”

  After that, things were vague. I knew we talked about a lot of things, but I really couldn’t remember much of anything else. It was all foggy, other than bringing her back here and letting her spend the night.

  And wild, drunken, crazy insane hang-from-the-ceiling sex, of course. I remembered that all too well.

  I sighed and took another swig of my coffee. Things were going to be awkward when she woke up. I just hoped she remembered as little of the evening as I did.

  I got up and picked up the clothes scattered all over the entryway and living room floors, separating mine from hers. I picked up my pants and the magnifying glass flash drive fell out of my pocket.

  Jesus Christ, how could I have forgotten this?

  I opened the bedroom door—she was still dead to the world. It really was amazing how deeply she could sleep. I’d always envied that about her, especially on nights when my insomnia was dialed up and I just lay there in bed next to her staring at the ceiling. Alarms didn’t work for her—she slept through them. I would hit snooze and try to stay in bed longer, but not Dani. When we’d lived together her damned alarm would have gone on ringing for hours had I not woken up almost immediately and shaken her awake.

  I closed the door as softly as possible—just in case—and sat down at the desk. I hesitated for just a moment before plugging the drive into one of my laptop’s USB ports. Hopefully, my computer could read it. I could hear the drive whirring as the operating system tried to decipher its contents.

  After a few moments, it appeared on my desktop as an external drive named Demi’s Backup. I let out a sigh of relief and smiled to myself. I clicked on it to bring up the file directory. There were three folders: WIP, Old Stuff, and Images. I clicked on Old Stuff, but there didn’t seem to be anything of interest there; all the subfolders were named in a kind of shorthand that made no sense to me, but I could see that everything inside was Word documents. Surely she wasn’t just giving me her goddamned work-in-progress to read? I thought as I clicked that folder closed. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pushed his or her work on me to read and evaluate. I always try to be polite when people ask if I will read their work or if I can recommend them to my agent and / or publisher. It wasn’t like I had this overabundance of free time to read the work of a total stranger. I had papers to grade, books of my own to write, and wasn’t I entitled to some free time to read for pleasure or watch television or drink wine or—no, I didn’t need to justify myself to a stranger. I opened the WIP folder—again, a series of Word documents, titled Chapter One through Chapter Thirteen.

  I opened the Images folder and started clicking through the images, which showed up as thumbnails in the next column of the directory. The first ones were pictures of an airplane and scenes from an airport—obviously, Demi had been documenting every step of her trip. There were several shots of the airplane cabin, mostly the backs of people’s heads and their seat backs, but apparently she was trying to get a picture of a male flight attendant. When I got to one of him pushing a cart next to her row, I saw why. He was rather attractive, if you liked men—short dark hair, deep dimples, full lips, his uniform shirt clinging tightly to his muscles. I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling. I recognized the airport in New Orleans, shots from a cab heading east on I-10 coming into the city, the Vieux Carré / French Quarter exit sign, the highway view of St. Louis Cemetery. There were some photos of the entry hallway of the Maison Maintenon, and then some pictures of the pool, taken from her room. The table I’d sat at was clearly visible, and I could also see the door to the room on the second-floor gallery that must have been Antinous’s room.

  And there was the blurry figure of a man walking down the gallery from the left.

  My heart started racing. Had Demi actually photographed the killer?

  He was still blurry in the next image, but the third image showed him no longer walking. He had his back to the camera, and I didn’t recognize him. I tried to zoom in on him, but the bigger I made his image, the more pixilated it became. Maybe a computer expert could blow it up more clearly than I could—my own computer skills were pretty limited.

  In the next picture, the door to the room was open, and he was going inside.

  I saw him.

  I heard her saying it again, and then the look of horror on her face as she saw something—or someone—over my shoulder.

  I cursed myself for being so distracted by Dani’s appearance that I hadn’t paid attention to her.

  “Do you mind if I make a cup of coffee?”

  Startled, I jumped and spun around in my chair. Dani had put on one of the guest robes the hotel provided, and belted it tightly. Somehow, she managed to simply look a little disheveled, rather than the mess I always looked when I woke up.

  Seriously, a comb through her hair and some makeup and she’d be ready to go on the air. I’d always envied her that.

  She crossed the room and kissed my forehead. “What are you looking at?”

  Uh-oh, I thought, biting my lower lip. Not a good sign. “I’m not really sure,” I said slowly, finally deciding what the hell. I wasn’t an investigator, I wasn’t a cop, and she was a reporter. It was her story. “A woman named Demi something gave me this yesterday—you remember her? She interrupted us in the Carousel Bar, said she needed to talk to me? I went outside the bar with her?”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t sure you were actually going to come back.” Dani squinted at the screen. “Is that—is that the room where the victim was staying? She gave you a photograph of the killer going into the victim’s room?” She was wide awake now. “Can you tell who it is?”

  “No, I can’t.” I frowned. “There’s just blurry images of him from the side and from behind, and I don’t pay enough attention to men’s asses to tell them apart.” I tried to zoom in on the image again, to no avail. “I’m not good enough at this sort of thing to get a decent look at him.” I leaned back in the desk chair. “I need to just turn this over to the police and be done with it.” The thought of calling Detective Randisi wasn’t appealing.

  “Well…” She leaned over me and clicked on the directory. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she copied the Images folder onto my desktop. She still smelled slightly of sweat and sex. “There.” She stood up when she finished. “Now you can turn the jump drive over to the police for evidence, but you have a copy of the pictures. Can you email them to me? Please? I’d owe you.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that,” I said slowly. “They really aren’t mine to do anything with—they belong to Demi. And they’re evidence. I wouldn’t put it past that Randisi dickhead to charge me with obstruction or something.”

  “She gave them to you, didn’t she?” Dani replied. “She wouldn’t have done that if she wanted you to just keep them for her. And even though it’s evidence, there’s no law that says you can’t keep a copy for yourself or share them with your favorite investigative reporter. You do have to turn the pictures over to the cops, but you aren’t breaking any laws by copying them.”

  I wasn’t sure I should believe her. “Yeah.” I closed my laptop and stood up, stretching. My back cracked in several places, which felt really good.

  “You said you wanted coffee?” I asked as I walked past her back into the bedroom. “The coffeemaker’s in the bathroom.”

  “Sure.” She followed me into the bedroom, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I really need to brush my teeth—I don’t suppose you have a spare?”

  “No, but if you call Housekeeping they’ll bring one up.” I put a new K-Cup into the coffeemaker and filled it with water. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and sighed, reaching for my brush. My hair looked like a rat’s nest, the way it always did wh
en I woke up in the morning. The cottonmouth was pretty much gone, and so was the little headache.

  “Shall I order breakfast, too?”

  I closed my eyes and sighed to myself. “No, we can go down and have the buffet in the restaurant.”

  It probably doesn’t speak well to my character that what I really wanted was for her to get dressed and leave. I didn’t want to pretend or play along, even for another minute, that things were better between us now, or God forbid, that this was the first step in getting back together with her.

  Fucking prosecco, anyway.

  But it would be nice to be friends with her and not have to worry about running into her whenever I came into town. We had a shared history, and we both had experienced deeply painful losses. As hard as it had been on me when my parents were killed or when I’d watched my brother’s slow decline into death, it was just as hard to watch your partner slowly die. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even though, really, it was something you had to factor in when you were involved with someone.

  My, wasn’t I wise in the morning after a drunken debauch with an ex? I heard her asking for a toothbrush and splashed some more water on my face once I finished brushing my recalcitrant hair so it looked somewhat presentable.

  I started another cup for me once hers was finished, and she took it from me gratefully.

  “I forgot how potent prosecco can be,” she said, putting the coffee down on the nightstand. “Thanks for letting me stay last night, and…” Her voice trailed off and her face flushed.

  Glad I’m not the only one feeling awkward.

  I sat down next to her on the bed and took both of her hands in mine. “Look, Dani—I’m not going to say last night was a mistake”—even though that is exactly what I think—“and I am really glad we’re now at a place where we can talk and be friends”—that’s sincere, I really do mean that—“but as far as anything else, I—I don’t know.”

  I was a little taken aback by her obvious relief. “Oh, thank God.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, a quick friendly little peck that meant nothing. “I was so worried when I woke up and realized where I was! The last thing in the world I ever want to do is hurt you again, Tracy.” She ran a hand through her hair. “It’s too soon for me—Mary hasn’t even been dead a full year yet. I feel like—I feel like I cheated on her.” She bit her lower lip and I was surprised to see tears form in her eyes. “I know that’s a shitty thing to say to you, given—well, you know—but I’ve missed you so much! I don’t know.”

  “Friends is fine with me,” I replied, trying to inject some warmth and feeling into my voice, hoping that if I could convince her, I could convince myself as well. “Anything else, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  I was saved by a knock on the door, and Dani bounded out of the bedroom to get her new, hotel-issue toothbrush. I walked back into the bathroom and shut the door, leaning against it and staring at myself in the mirror.

  You still have feelings for her, I told my reflection. Even after all this time, you still have feelings for her.

  Dani returned and knocked on the bathroom door. When she was finished brushing her teeth, she frowned at herself in the mirror. “I should really get my car out of the lot, go home and change clothes.” She smiled at me. “It’s bad enough having to do the walk of shame this morning, but I don’t want people to see me in the restaurant wearing the same clothes! Tell you what, I’ll run home and come back and we can have lunch. Would that be okay? We can talk some more about the case—if that’s okay with you?”

  I nodded. “I’m going to take the jump drive back to Demi and tell her she needs to turn the photos over to the cops. If she doesn’t want to, I’ll have to.”

  “Great.” We exchanged numbers, plugging them into our respective cell phones. “I’ll text you when I’m almost here, okay?”

  Once Dani was gone, I jumped into the shower and got cleaned up as quickly as I could. I couldn’t stop thinking while the water coursed over my body, no matter how hard I tried.

  The truth was—the guy in those pictures sort of looked like Jerry.

  Was that why he’d been late to meet me for dinner on Thursday? Because he was too busy killing Antinous?

  I shook my head.

  There was simply no way I could ever believe that Jerry was a killer.

  And why would he kill Antinous? It didn’t make any sense. The proper thing to do, of course, was talk to him—but I did want to talk to Demi first. It was worrisome that I hadn’t seen her since she’d given me her flash drive—and that her friends hadn’t, either. The fact she wasn’t at the party was a bit of a concern as well.

  I put on a pair of jeans and a green SLU T-shirt after pulling my hair back into a ponytail. I made sure I had everything I needed and hurried out of the hotel.

  It felt like it was going to rain at any moment when I stepped outside. Royal Street was bumper-to-bumper traffic, and in the heavy air the smell of exhaust was horribly nauseating. I hurried down Royal Street and up Toulouse to the Maison Maintenon. The big, heavy front door was open, and I climbed the steps to the entryway. There was someone standing at the registration desk, and I just breezed right past like I had every right to be there. I climbed the hanging, curved staircase in the next room and headed for the outdoor stairs. I walked over to the railing and realized that the angle was wrong from this floor—Demi’s room had to be on the third floor. I was sweating as I climbed the stairs to the next level, and sure enough, there was a flash, a crack of thunder, and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees as fat drops of rain started falling from the darkened sky. The wind had definitely picked up, but the building on the other side of the pool courtyard helped block it somewhat. I got a little wet when I went to the railing but was able to confirm that this was the right floor—and the door to my right with 323 on it in gold-painted numbers was undoubtedly Demi’s room.

  I took a deep breath and knocked—and the door opened a crack.

  “Demi?” I called out softly. “It’s Tracy Norris. Can I come in and talk to you for a moment?”

  Another roar of thunder drowned out any possible response that could have come from inside, so I knocked again, louder. The door swung farther open—

  —and I could see a pair of feet sticking out from the other side of the bed.

  “Demi? Are you all right?” I called, stepping into the room.

  It wasn’t until I got to the side of the bed that I could see the staring eyes and the puddle of blood.

  Chapter Eight

  I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the body.

  At least this time I didn’t scream.

  Goose bumps came up on my arms. The air conditioner kicked on again as I stood there directly underneath the vent, and I rubbed my arms to try to warm up my skin. I knew I was in borderline shock, and probably the best thing to do was go back outside into the heat and humidity. I took some deep breaths and could hear the thudding of my heartbeat in my ears. I managed to somehow reach into my shoulder bag and dig through all the debris and crap with my hand until I found my phone. I’d forgotten to charge it overnight—across the screen were the words Less than a 20% charge left—but I managed to touch the keypad icon and dial 911 for the second time in three days.

  This is why I don’t go to writers’ conferences flashed through my mind, and I almost laughed out loud. I realized I was verging on hysterical and willed myself to remain calm while I spoke to the woman who took my call. I robotically answered her questions after telling her that there was a dead body again at the Maison Maintenon.

  I can only imagine what the reviews on Yelp were going to say.

  She told me an ambulance and the cops were on their way, and I hung up, dropping the phone back into my bag. I was coming back into myself—the initial shock was past, even if I was still freezing; Demi must have turned her goddamned thermostat down to about fifty degrees—and knew I should go back outside to wait for the cops and paramedics—not tha
t there’s anything they can do, she’s been dead for quite a while—and think about the inevitable interview I was going to have with Detective Randisi.

  Interrogation, more likely. If you think he was a sexist asshole Thursday night, he’s going to be in rare form today. Two corpses, and both times I’m on the scene. Yeah, that’s going to go over well.

  If this happened in one of my books, of course, my point would be to make the person look really guilty to Laura. But this was real life, not fiction.

  Remember how this feels for the next time you have Laura stumble over a body.

  But wouldn’t that be in incredibly poor taste?

  Go outside. Staying in here with a dead body isn’t doing your mental state any good.

  I closed my eyes, controlled my breathing, and counted to ten.

  It worked, as it always did. My heartbeat slowed down to a more normal rate, and I felt more like myself.

  I’ve always been good in a crisis.

  And as long as I didn’t touch anything or move around, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around, would it?

  The air conditioner turned off, and I rubbed my arms again. It was fucking freezing in Demi’s room, and I couldn’t help but think that’s probably going to wreak havoc with estimating the time of death as I willed myself to look at the body again.

  I couldn’t look at Demi yet with her wide, staring eyes, so I looked around the room. The wreckage of a MacBook Pro—the same kind of laptop I used—lay scattered around on the carpet just to the side of the corpse. The power cord was still plugged into a socket to the side of the nightstand—she’d obviously had it set up on the nightstand, which struck me as weird. There was very little room for anything other than the lamp and the telephone, both of which had been shoved to the back to make room for it. I mentally shrugged. I preferred to sit at a desk or a table when I was using mine, but different strokes and all that—everyone has a different method, which is something I emphasized over and over to my writing students. Find the method that works for you and stick to it.