by Rick Wayne
“What kind of faces? Rage? Flirtation? Jealousy?”
She was shaking her head as I spoke. “No, no, nothing like that. I can’t describe it. Faces you’d expect someone older to have, not a 15-year-old girl with a disability. Serious faces. And if she caught you looking, she’d just go blank, like . . .”
“Like?”
She shook her head. “Like there was someone in there with her, in her body. In her mind, maybe. I know how it sounds,” she added quickly. “And I know how my house looks. I know what people think of me.”
“If that’s true, wouldn’t that make Alexa the real victim?”
Bea got very quiet. “The truth? Fine. It was seven years ago. It doesn’t matter anymore and I don’t care what people think anymore. Alexa Sacchi is the reason I moved out here. Okay? She’s the reason I quit the city and don’t stay out late. Does wonders for your social life, lemme tell you. You think many men hang around when they see this place? I know how it looks. Like I’m a crazy person. I go to work. I lock up. I come home. I toss salt over my shoulder and look at everyone’s reflection in the—” She stopped.
I looked up at a little cracked mirror hanging on an angle above the door frame. I hadn’t noticed it before. I was pleased to see I looked exactly as I expected. Nothing hitching a ride.
Bea was half a world away then. Her gaze passed through the wall in front of her as her leg shook under the table. “There was one time, before everything got really bad, when I went over there.”
“To the Sacchis’?” I asked.
She nodded. “Alexa was looking at me. In the mirror. She was just staring. In the reflection, her eyes weren’t blinking. And her mouth was closed. She just looked at me. But the thing is . . . I could hear her voice. Understand? I could hear her talking to Dom. I could see his reflection talking back, having a normal conversation. But . . . Not her.” Bea turned her eyes to me finally, wet and wide. “I know what I saw. I didn’t imagine it. Whatever her body was doing, Alexa’s reflection was staring right at me. Just, staring. Like she wanted to burn a hole in me with her eyes. And then—”
She shook her head.
“Then?” I asked.
“I saw someone else’s face.”
We were quiet a minute.
“I had a lab,” she said. “You remember that? A black retriever.”
I nodded.
“Smartest dog ever,” she said. She sniffed. “My best friend. I got her after I got out of the army. They use dogs. Did you know that?”
“Was that your job?” I asked. “K-9 detail?”
She nodded. “I love animals. I loved Betsy. I trained her. We went out off-leash in the city. Got fined for it a couple times, but I didn’t care. She was a good dog. She didn’t jump on people. She didn’t chase. Squirrels would run right past her and her ears would perk up and she’d reeeeally want to”—she laughed through forming tears—”but she’d look to me first to see if it was okay.”
She coughed once and sniffed again and rubbed her nose. I waited.
“She ran out that day . . . Dogs have expressions, did you know that? And they can read our faces. They’re the only animal that can. She bolted that day and I can tell you, it wasn’t from fear. She was chasing something. Doing her job. And whatever it was led her right in front of that car. She was so fixed on chasing away the danger, protecting me, that she didn’t notice it coming until it was too late.”
Her eyes were wet now.
“That night, I heard a voice. Lying in bed. I couldn’t make out the words. It was like someone was inside the wall talking to themselves. I couldn’t hear the words. Except for two. They rose up from the others. ‘Get out,’ they said. ‘Get out.’
“I don’t care if you think I’m crazy. I’ve made my peace with the whole thing, and I’ve come to accept that it’s just something people get or not. I know what I heard. Something like that, it changes you.” She tapped her gut. “In here. I started getting obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“With the unexplained. Ghosts and ESP and all that crap that everybody wants to believe is real, but only because they’ve never experienced it. When you do . . . And I got obsessed with Alexa. She was a medium. Did you know that?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t. I didn’t even know what that was. I just thought what everyone thought, that she was ‘special,’ that she’d just invented all these imaginary friends she talked to. They were so specific, though. She had this woman she talked to, Mrs. Wells. Dom mentioned it once. We used to talk about Alexa a lot. Everyone did. She was that special, ya know? Dom said Mrs. Wells had two wooden fingers.” She held up her left pinky and ring finger. “He said Alexa told him Mrs. Wells had lost them to a weaving machine. What kind of kid makes up a detail like that?
“I saw her. Maybe two years back. In the newspaper.”
“Alexa?”
“Her picture. She was with a group of special needs kids. At a school in Spanish Harlem. I was looking into reports of paranormal activity there, and there she was. I couldn’t believe it. So I started digging.” Her face grew dim. “Eventually, I saw what he was doing, what was happening, and—” She stopped.
“He?”
She looked at me very seriously. “He doesn’t have a name. Not a proper one. Not that anybody knows. But he has lots of aliases. Here. I’ll show you.”
She led me out of the house and back through the pack to a shed on the other side of the dirt lot. She unlocked it and dug in junk for several minutes before dragging a cardboard file box from the corner. It had brown water stains on the sides. There was a file on top. Underneath it were old books. One side of the file was charred from where she’d started to burn it and then changed her mind.
“I just couldn’t,” she said, as if apologizing to herself. “Burning it all felt like giving in. He’s already won. I know that. But hiding the truth made me feel like I was helping somehow. Collaborating. But I’m a coward. I didn’t want to end up like the rest of them. So I moved out here. To the middle of nowhere. I got my dogs so nothing can sneak up on me.” She looked at the file. “But I’m glad I didn’t burn it. This is better.” She handed it to me.
“What is this?”
“Just take it,” she said. “Please. I’m in a good place, now—as good as I can be. I want to put all of it behind me. Just take it. And don’t ever call me again. Understand? And don’t come out here. Not for any reason. I’m done. I’m glad I didn’t burn it, but it’s your burden now.”
I took the file and she turned back to the house, where the pack was waiting with pants and smiles. She stopped halfway.
“I know how I look, Detective. I know how I live. But I wasn’t always like this. Just be careful which path you follow. I didn’t think anything could ever scare me the way Alexa did that day. But I was wrong.”
I put my chin on my palm and clicked through the footage again. The problem wasn’t that there was no color or sound so much as the angle was off. But then, the camera was intended to capture foot traffic in front of the gym and not what was going on across and down the street. As such, only the steps below the side door of Dr. Massey’s building were in frame, not the door itself. The good doctor was a little younger than I expected. She trotted down the steps and disappeared down the sidewalk toward the main road. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a four-door sedan identical to the one I found pulled in front of the curb and stopped. She got out and started loading boxes.
At some point, a bearded man in fashionable, thick-rimmed glasses waited by the open trunk of the blue car. Doctor Massey came out and seemed surprised to see him. They had words. First it seemed like she was threatening him. Then it seemed like he was threatening her. She got spooked. She ran to the steps, like she was going to flee back to her condo, but something out of frame stopped her. Just then a big vintage car stopped in the street and blocked most of the shot. I could see some movement, but that’s all, and by the time it pulls away, everyone is gone, including Dr. Mass
ey’s blue sedan.
All of this took place in one tiny corner of the video footage. Blowing it up made it blurry—too blurry to make out any real detail. I was at the office until after midnight, going frame by frame, trying to find a clean still shot of the bearded man, but it was no good, and eventually I gave up and went home, where I sat at my kitchen bar with my laptop and kept at it. I was right about Amber not being local and not being married but wrong about family. I couldn’t find any who would’ve missed her. They were all dead. No one at her work or former residence had seen or heard from her in over a year. That hadn’t raised any alarms because she’d quit her job and paid for an early exit from her lease. No one had expected to see her. She had packed her car herself, which suggested she was running from something, as Lt. Miller guessed. In all likelihood, the video footage was the last anyone saw of her before she disappeared. Where she was between then and the day she died, no one knew, but wherever it was, they had a helluva weight loss program. She was quite a bit heavier on the tape than when we found her bobbing in the reservoir.
I snapped awake, still sitting at the kitchen counter. My laptop screen was blank, meaning I hadn’t touched anything in at least ten minutes. That didn’t seem possible. I didn’t remember nodding off, or even feeling tired. My head wasn’t bobbing or eyelids drooping. I had been totally awake, working. Next thing I knew, I woke up in shock with that sense that someone was watching me. I was still sitting, but I had my head resting on one hand, and it had been that way long enough for my hand to have fallen asleep. I’d had a dream, I realized. Or nightmare. In it, I was sitting right there at my kitchen counter, and I wasn’t alone. But it wasn’t a person with me. It was a wolf. And not the cuddly kind you see romping through the snow on TV. This was a wild animal, a natural hunter. Huge. Easily the size of a horse. Mottled coat. Dark grays. I couldn’t see or hear it. But I knew it was there, studying me.
The wolf’s two eyes stared at me intently. Motionless.
Then a third opened. Sideways. Right in its forehead. A vertical fold of fur just opened to midnight. Speckled in tiny stars.
I sat there at the counter for a moment. Like, what just happened? I held my breath and listened. I was certain someone else was in the apartment with me. Just beyond the half-closed bedroom door. Or maybe in the closet. But the little voice in my head wasn’t saying to run. Not at all. It was saying I missed something.
On the tape.
God knows how long I looked at it. Backward. Forward. Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. Rewind more. Play. Stop. I took breaks for coffee and breakfast. I went to the bathroom a few times. But I was certain there was something there. Something I’d missed. I got a few hours’ sleep and went to the office. The mail came around 11:30, including a fat official communication from the department. The date of my review had been set for the following week. The letter made it clear the outcome wasn’t necessarily permanent, that the point of the preliminary proceeding was only to determine if the immediate facts warranted “a temporary suspension of active duty pending a final determination by the promotions and disciplinary committee.” And since it was just an internal department action and not a formal legal proceeding, they advised me I didn’t need an attorney—but I could bring one, or my union rep if I wanted. Most of the session would be private, but I was to appear at the appointed time to state my case and answer questions.
I shoved the letter into my pencil drawer and turned back to the screen. By then I’d gone over it enough to know that if I really had missed something, versus simply deluding myself, then it wasn’t something obvious.
“So what’s unobvious?” I asked myself out loud.
The answer came almost immediately.
“Harriet, you idiot.”
Twenty-five minutes later, I was in the computer room, getting the guys to clean up the reflections in the windows of the condo building. The trick is that you gotta show up in person. Most of my colleagues just send an email and mark it urgent.
I was back at my desk, bent over a series of grainy, blown-up video stills I’d had printed, one from each window, when Craig came storming through the doors at the other end of the office. He wore a coat and matching brown tie. He wasn’t happy, but he was doing his best to hide it. I watched him walk right toward me and sit down in the chair next to my desk.
It had taken him a full thirty-six hours to figure out I’d already talked to Bea Goswick. He was slipping.
I set the photo printouts down and sat back. There was no point in antagonizing him.
“What’s going on, Har?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“My partner was reaching out to all the people who might have been in contact with Palmer Bell or her family. Guess what Bea Goswick told him on the phone this morning?” He looked at me and waited for an answer. “I thought we were on the same page.”
“We are.”
He looked away. “You know, Rigdon’s all right. He can get on cruise control sometimes, but he’s got good instincts. And he understands the shit that flies around this place. So he was cool when I asked him to let me handle it and to please forget what he’d heard.”
I nodded like that was the most reasonable thing I’d heard all day.
“You have a disciplinary review coming up,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“How do you know about—ah.” He’d gotten a letter, too. As the only detective who’d worked with me for any length of time, they’d probably asked for his testimony. “You wouldn’t have asked the right questions,” I said.
His face flushed in anger. But he kept his voice down. “And what questions are those? Something about voodoo dolls?”
“It’s not voodoo.”
“What?”
“They’re not voodoo dolls,” I repeated. “The practice didn’t originate with Vodun animism. It’s actually Roman, if you can believe. It got mixed up later when the Catholics brought the slaves from Africa. The Louvre has a figurine dating from the—”
“For fuck’s sake, Har.”
I was quiet for a minute. “You wouldn’t have asked the right questions. She wouldn’t have said any of—”
“That’s enough!” he yelled. Then he collected himself. He stood and leaned closer, face red. “I stuck my neck out for you. And I was happy to do it. And you fuckin’ turn around and stab me in the back. I-am-trying-to-help. Do you understand that?”
“I do.”
“If you were gonna talk to her, at least you could’ve—”
“What? Told you first? For Chrissakes, Craig, then you’re party to it. If I go on my own, then when someone asks—which it looks like they’re going to next fucking week—you can look them in the eye and honestly say you had no idea what I was up to. Come on, man. You know how it works.”
“So that’s how it is?”
He meant that I was rogue, that we weren’t actually working the case together.
“I’m not off on my own,” I said. “I haven’t done anything else.”
“Bullshit!” He slapped the desk.
Miller stepped into her office. We waited until things were quiet and she went back to whoever she was talking to.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “You’re working my case. Just fucking admit it instead of going behind me back. I didn’t want to believe—” He grabbed the still photo from my desk, the printout from the security footage of the man in the reflection, and waved it. “What the fuck is this?”
I was indignant. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on! Cut the bullshit, Har. I have eyes.”
“That’s my case.” I snatched the picture from his hand. “My Jane Doe. A doctor at a free clinic was found butchered in a ditch. As far as I know, that’s footage from the last time anyone saw her alive.”
Hammond was fuming. He studied my face, unsure what to believe.
“It’s on the network. Check for yourself if you don’t believe me.” I motioned to my computer screen. I w
as going to do it for him, just to make the point, when it hit me. “Wait. Why did you think this was yours?”
We stared at each other for a long, cool moment. He turned the paper around and looked at it again.
“Hammond?” I urged.
He took it and sat.
“This guy,” he said looking at the picture. “Rigdon and I have a triple from last summer.”
“A triple?”
“Well. Maybe. There were three confirmed vics. They seem to have been involved in some kind of scam. Over some kind of religious artifact or something. One of them was an office worker. Didn’t really have anything to do with it, as far as we can tell. Wrong place, wrong time kinda thing.”
He kept looking at the still image.
“Yeah?”
“Assailants broke into his apartment building. He was stabbed repeatedly. And . . .” He pointed. “This guy’s on the security tape. In the courtyard. Moments before.”
“Are you sure?”
“I mean, we can’t see his face there either, but it’s gotta be the same guy, right? Same bald head. Same heavy coat. Jesus, he’s even got his face hidden by a tree just like this. It’s like the foliage of this city is conspiring to hide this guy or some shit.”
I made a face, grabbed the mouse, and accessed the central evidence system. With a few clicks, I brought up the digital security footage from the front door of an apartment block in Sunnyside.
Hammond walked around the desk and leaned close to the screen. “There.” He pointed.
I saw a round courtyard between a cluster of medium-height residential towers. It had a short retaining wall, the kind you can sit on, and there was a tree at the center. I could make out a young woman at the back—Asian, it looked like—sitting next to a man in an unusual coat. His face was obscured by the trunk of the tree.
“Is it just me,” he said, practically in my ear, “or does that guy match the eyewitness description we found out at the house?”
I zoomed in and printed a still capture. Hammond walked to the printer several steps away and waited. He was on edge. The house had gotten to him. Now this. His instincts were good and they were telling him something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t make sense of it. And he wouldn’t be able to—not from where he was coming. He needed the same hard reset I’d had. But I didn’t have the time.
