Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  “Sounds fun,” she said, still smiling. She suddenly knew who he was, though. Wayne Alton. Atlanta’s best-known software mogul. And he might be a jerk and he might be dull, but he was being utterly honest about all his money. He’d been in the news a few times, as family groups tried to get his games off the shelves because of excessive violence. Attila was supposed to be the worst of the lot. She wondered if his follow-up was going to be a game allowing the player to become Pol Pot, or Idi Amin, or maybe Torquemada. Nero for a Day, maybe.

  And she kept smiling.

  He talked about his work, about how the games his company developed in-house were actually educational tools that permitted teenagers and adults to explore the historical horrors of bygone days in full color and at first hand, and how what he was doing made people aware of the pure hell that was most of history.

  Jess thought that if he’d wanted to do that, he could have made a game in which the players tried to stop Attila. Not be him. She didn’t say anything of the sort, though. She oohed and ahhed and nodded and smiled.

  He paid her for a lap dance, she danced, he kept his hands to himself, and she thanked him and moved on.

  And suddenly Teri, looking frantic, burst out of the back door and waved to her.

  Jess hurried over.

  “Call from the hospital. Take it in my office.”

  So this was how they were going to pull her out. She ran to the phone, kept in character. “This is Gracie.”

  “This is Dr. Smith,” Jim’s voice said. “Your brother has had a relapse, and we need you in here immediately to sign papers. This is an emergency. Can you come in, or do you have someone else we can call?”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  She turned to find Teri right behind her. “Is everything okay?”

  “No. I have to leave right now. I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch—”

  Teri waved it off. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “Dr. Smith said it was an emergency. I’m guessing that means they don’t know.”

  Teri pursed her lips. “Go on. We’ll do fine here. Tell your brother we’re all thinking about him.”

  Hank was at her apartment when she arrived. “Change and come on,” he said as soon as they were through the doors. “I set up a meeting with Jim and Charlie — we need to talk about what I discovered today. It may be the break they’ve been looking for, and all four of us need a chance to talk it out.”

  Jess threw on jeans, a T-shirt, and running shoes over the spangly bra and thong. “I’m ready.”

  She saw Hank swallow hard. “You’ve had a rough two days,” she said.

  “You don’t know the half of it.” He cleared his throat and watched her pick up her handbag. “You were right to suspect Lenny. His touch, the killer’s touch: same thing. And, worse, you’re supposed to be next. I could see the ‘six by six’ image I’ve been hearing in my head, Jess. I could see you lying in a shallow grave with someone shoveling dirt on top of you. It was as real for that instant as you and me standing here right now. Six by six — it means graves. The killer has thirty-six graves hidden away somewhere, with the last hole in the square already dug and waiting for you.”

  Jess rested a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not going to happen, Hank. I’m not a helpless stripper. We know who this killer is.” By unspoken agreement, they put the subject on hold as they headed out her apartment door and down to Hank’s car.

  But once in his car, she said, “There’s more, though. Lenny thinks I’m my sister, Ginny. He asked me why I let him think I was dead for so long.” She turned to Hank and frowned. “He said he isn’t sure what happened that night.”

  “What night?”

  “That’s what I have to find out,” she said. “Hank, what are the odds that I’d get put on this case and end up running into someone who knew Ginny? What are the odds that the same man would be our prime suspect in the deaths of other women? If you’re reading that ‘six-by-six’ thing right, maybe thirty or so other women. Jesus — could it be a coincidence? Have I finally found Ginny’s killer?” Her throat tightened and she blinked back tears. She fought to put some distance between herself and this possibility. She couldn’t let herself get bogged down by emotion; if Lenny was Ginny’s killer, her personal involvement and her emotion, however justified, could throw off her judgment and lead her to do something that would destroy the case.

  She cleared her throat and got a grip on herself. “His real name isn’t Lenny Northwhite. It’s Mitch Devon, and he was the deejay at the club where my sister danced back when she disappeared. Even more suspicious, she was dating him. She was head-over-heels in love with him.”

  “And the police back then didn’t check him out?’

  “Sure, they checked him out. He had an airtight alibi that accounted for every minute in which she could have been killed. He was deejaying a long-weekend Hugh Hefner-type party at the club owner’s mansion as some sort of promotional thing for the club. It was attended by all the rich and influential men in Atlanta who could be dragged away from their lives, as well as by a bunch of strippers, was fueled by booze and drugs, and everyone partied around the clock from Friday night through Sunday night.”

  “And Ginny?’

  “He wouldn’t let her attend the party. She’d complained to me about it at the time — that her boyfriend was going to be having all this fun and she wouldn’t even get to see him for the whole weekend. And she didn’t, either. Everyone who attended the party was certain that she hadn’t been among the dancers there.”

  “So he was always in the public eye, and she was nowhere near him.”

  “That was the story.”

  “Funny. He has an airtight alibi this time, too. That’s one of the things that has Jim so frustrated.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of an all-day buffet, and Hank led Jess into one of the private rooms. Jim and Charlie were already there.

  Both rose when she came in. After greeting one another, everyone sat down. One of the servers appeared, carrying a gallon pitcher of sweet tea and a stack of clean plates.

  Jess wasn’t in the mood for food right then. Apparently Hank wasn’t either. Jim and Charlie were already eating.

  “Hank told me Lenny Northwhite has an alibi for the night of the murder,” Jess said.

  “He does,” Jim said. “Charlie.”

  Jess turned to stare at Jim’s partner. “You?”

  “I staked out his place; Jim and one of the other guys watched the dancer. We figured Lenny was our most likely candidate.”

  Hank said, “Why?”

  “Because Lenny has records as Mitchell Devon Leonard, his birth name, as Mitch Devon, the name under which he worked as a club deejay for a number of years, and as Leonard Mitchell Northwhite, which is a combination of his last name and his mother’s maiden name. He’s been arrested for breaking and entering, for a string of sex-related complaints, and for a lot of shady financial crap. Nothing that got him put away, but he has money and a good lawyer he apparently keeps busy.”

  “And both the breaking and entering and the sex-related crimes suggest at least the capacity for sex-related murder,” Jess said.

  “Right.”

  “I didn’t know about his aliases until today,” Jess told them. “But I have something I need to talk to you about. My twin sister went missing thirteen years ago. She was stripping at a little club called the Palomino X to earn her tuition back to dance school, and she started dating Mitch Devon about a month before she disappeared.”

  She was watching faces. Neither Jim nor Charlie looked surprised when she mentioned her sister, though both looked stunned when she told them about Ginny and Mitch.

  “You guys knew about Ginny?”

  “Everyone knew you spent all your free time investigating something,” Jim said. “I took a couple of days and backtracked some of your file requests. It didn’t take me all that long to figure out you were looking for your sister.”

  Ch
arlie nodded. “He told me before you joined up with us, because he thought I needed to know. We only knew the basics, though.”

  Jess sat there, frozen, disbelieving. She thought of all the careful tiptoeing around her real work, of making sure she never let her personal mission interfere with her job, of making sure she never let the loss of her sister intrude into similar situations. She’d been the consummate professional. And they still knew? They knew? “Why didn’t you say something?”

  Jim said, “I thought it was pretty clear this wasn’t something you were willing to discuss. It didn’t affect your work, as far as I could see. It sure as hell didn’t affect your competence. So why would I say anything?”

  She stared at her hands, thinking that if she had known someone knew and that what she was doing wasn’t a problem for him, if she had been able to discuss her unending, heartbreaking search with someone, maybe she would have done better dealing with it.

  But that had been her fault, for keeping her problems to herself. She couldn’t blame Jim or Charlie or anyone but herself that she’d dealt with this alone.

  “You wouldn’t. You were right not to,” she said at last. “I would have brought it up if I’d been ready to talk about it.”

  Jim said, “Okay. Then let’s get back to this. How did you find out Northwhite’s real name?”

  “He told me. He thinks I’m Ginny.”

  Jim and Charlie turned to stare at each other, frowning.

  Jim moved mashed potatoes and gravy around on his plate for a few seconds. “Hank called me and told me he’s dead sure Lenny is the killer, and that you’re his next planned victim. So far, what I’m hearing makes that sound like a real possibility.”

  Jess nodded.

  “But you clearly think Northwhite killed your sister.”

  Jess nodded again.

  “How could he have killed her and still think you’re her when he looks at you?”

  “I don’t know. And that’s what he says, too. He doesn’t understand. When I walked into his office that first day, though, and he looked at me, I saw a man who was looking at a ghost. He was... petrified. That’s the only word for it. He just fucking turned to stone.”

  Charlie asked Hank, “You’re sure you read this right? Lenny touched Jess, you touched Jess with nobody else in between, and you read Lenny.”

  Jess said, “He wasn’t watching me walk through the crowd toward him. But no one touched me after Lenny did.”

  “All right. We need to get past Lenny’s lawyer, who so far has fielded and blocked any requests for us to meet with Lenny, in his place of business or ours. Lenny has the best possible alibi for the night of the latest girl’s death, but we still have three men and three separate hair colors on our fourth victim — blond, redhead, and brown. Two secretors and one nonsecretor, like the other three times. This girl died in exactly the same fashion as the previous three known victims.”

  “Lenny’s in on this,” Jess said.

  “We’ll keep someone on him,” Jim told her. “Right now, though, the evidence we can use is contradicting the evidence we can’t use. I’ve worked with Hank on these things enough to be sure that when he says the killer touched you, the killer touched you. But I can’t take Hank’s reading to a judge. So. You know who to watch. Watch him. Give me something I can use.”

  From Jess’s studio, Hank called the dojo and made sure everything was running all right. Jeni, his part-time secretary, answered on the fourth ring. “Hey, sensei,” she said when he identified himself. He could hear the laughter in her voice. She called him sensei only when she had good news.

  “I’m not going to be in for a couple of days. So I’m checking to see how things are going."

  “You wouldn’t believe. This story on the serial killer broke, and we are all of a sudden hip deep in young women wanting self-defense training. We had six sign up yesterday, and eleven more today. It’s like a blondes-and-boobs beauty contest in here. You’re going to have to set up a special implants-only class.”

  “They’re dancers.”

  “Strippers. Lots of them. Mike already volunteered to take the overflow. Then Crunch said he’d teach that class for free. I’m just waiting for Wills to hear Crunch’s offer and appear with a box of chocolates and a dozen roses for me if I’ll schedule his name in. It’s been a gooood day for us, sensei.”

  “Figures,” Hank said.

  That was the business. People came to him after something horrible had already happened. But better they learned to protect themselves late than not at all.

  “So how long are you going to be out?” Jeni persisted.

  “I don’t know. I have something major I’m working on right now, and I cannot be there.”

  “You’re really Agent Double-Oh-Six, aren’t you? James Bond’s boss.”

  Hank laughed politely, told Jeni to let Mike take the receipts and cash to the bank, and to go ahead and set up a class for the dancers and to give it to Kevin, not Mike, and hung up.

  The secret-agent question rang in his ears. What he had in mind was a little more secret-agent than either Jim or Charlie would have liked.

  He intended to get himself invited into Lenny’s office, and following that, to see if maybe he couldn’t wrangle an invite to one of the infamous Goldcastle Weekender parties that Lenny hosted at his mansion these days.

  Hank wanted to feel things out. And in the meantime, he intended to keep an eye on Lenny for a while. See where he went and who he went with, find out what he did, try to get a read on the location of Lenny’s plot of graves, in six neat rows of six graves each.

  Off the phone, he turned to Jess. “Are you going to be all right here?”

  “I’d be better with you,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “I’m going to be doing a couple of things you shouldn’t know about.”

  Jess shook her head. “Don’t. If you collect any evidence in an illegal fashion, it will be fruit of the poisoned tree. It will kill our whole case, and the bastards who did this will walk scot-free. If that happens, they can shout that they did it from the rooftops and we won’t be able to lay a finger on them.”

  “Jess. Stop. Jim has been beating me over the head with the rules of legal evidence collection for years. I’m not going after anything but observations and impressions. I’m not going to be eavesdropping, and nothing I find will ever show up as evidence to be haggled over. I’m not going to screw up your case. You need to trust me.”

  He sat down beside her on the bed and wrapped an arm around her. “I know that the possibility that Ginny is somehow a part of this mess makes it worse for you. You’re going to get justice for her. I’m going out now to do my part to see that happens.”

  Jess nodded, not saying anything. Guilt radiated from her like heat from an oven; it made him feel like he was smothering, like his lungs would catch fire if he breathed too deep.

  “Jess?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you blame yourself for her death?”

  Jess gave him a nervous smile. “You know, when I’m done, I think I might start insisting that you don’t touch me except when you’re wearing rubber gloves.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Wouldn’t make a difference. I routinely work gloved when I’m reading for Jim and Charlie, so I don’t contaminate fingerprint evidence. Now, though, I want you to tell me about the guilt.”

  She leaned her head against his chest and he pulled her close. “I should have left Harrt when things got so bad for Ginny. I should have come home and helped Mama get over what my bastard father did to her. I should have found a job that would have helped Ginny raise money. We should have both done other things for a while.” She made a funny little noise in the back of her throat. “It all seems so trivial now. Dancing. But I had my scholarship, and I wasn’t going to walk away from it and see my dream go into the toilet, too.”

  He tightened his arms around her. “Dreams are never trivial.”

  “Is a dream worth dying f
or?” Jess whispered. “Because it’s what Ginny died for. She died because she had to be a dancer.” He realized that she was shaking. Crying, but without any sound.

  “No. She didn’t. She died because she crossed paths with a killer. Probably a serial killer who had been specializing in dancers already. She died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she met up with the wrong man.”

  “If I’d only been with her—”

  “Shhh. You could have done everything differently. You might have done everything better. I don’t know. But you don’t know, either. You might have simply found out that Lenny was really into twins, right before he killed you both.” His own what-ifs slammed into him again, and for a moment he could smell the baking dust at midday, see the explosion, catch the sound of it as pressure in his ears that became a sudden white eruption of pain. And silence. Everything in silence, and then darkness. And then faces over him, up close, and blood and friends and fear: a war movie that had run in his head so often the images were faded around the edges, scratched, worn thin.

  “You won’t do a single thing in life that you couldn’t have done better somehow. Not one. That’s the bitch of life. It ain’t a rehearsal, darlin’. You make it up as you go and you do the best you can. Maybe once in a while, you’ll be good enough that you won’t have any regrets. That’s what you hope for.” He pulled back from her, lifted her chin, and looked into her eyes. “But most of the time it isn’t what you get. You did what you did. Now you’re doing what you’re doing. We both are. We’re giving it the best we have, the best that’s in us. We’ll get through this. And we’ll make it count. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said. She breathed in deep. Gave him a shaky smile. “Yeah. We are making it count. You and me.”

  Mostly it was the light. Pale, greasy gray. It made everyone in the department look like zombies. Jess sat across a battered, institutional desk from a detective with tired, old eyes. He was missing the first joints of two fingers on his left hand.

  “I’m sympathetic, Miss Brubaker,” the detective said. “I am. It’s hell to have a loved one go missing without a word. But you have to understand we have a witness who saw her get on that bus. We have no suspect. We have no body. We have no sign of foul play, and every indication that she had, or at least believed she had, a movie role waiting for her out in California. We did investigate, but we cannot continue to expend the resources of the department on your sister’s missing-persons case. I have over thirty murders on my desk alone right now, and I’m no busier than anybody else.” He reached across his desk and patted her hand. “I spent a fair amount of personal time tracking down what I could on your sister. But I have to start focusing on other cases now. I’m sorry. I truly am.”