by K. R. Conway
Kian leaned against the table, all our eyes on the former FBI agent. “You think he was murdered? Why?”
“After Sollen’s death, his computers were searched. I didn’t know why, until they started digging through mine. I found out that he had been selling all the details of the Breakers case to someone. My office was able to retrace where he had gone, including the last place he was seen. He was dead by the next morning, but when they searched his home, they uncovered tickets to Mexico for the following day. He was going to take the money and run. No way he killed himself.”
We all were stunned, but Raef spoke up, “So all our details are in someone’s hands. Who? Who was the buyer?”
“We don’t know. Whoever he dealt with was brilliant at covering their tracks. My bigger concern is WHY he sold them and who would even want such information.”
I could think of a bunch of immortal people who would love to dig deeper into the “incident” at Christian’s ball. People who would like nothing better than to fully exterminate my kind once and for all. I could see that my friends were thinking the same exact thing. Plenty of money? Good at covering their tracks? Well practiced in the art of making murder look like suicide or an accident? A Mortis had to be the buyer.
Howe scanned the room, completely defeated, but then he looked at me. “Listen – I know you guys know what happened in Newport, but after being on this case for weeks on weeks, I am fairly certain none of you are terrorists. None of you had previous plans or knowledge of what was going to happen, but I do know you are all scared of something. Perhaps someone has you all silenced. Whoever you are hiding from may have just uncovered everything they ever wanted to know about you.”
I looked to my tense comrades and then back to Howe. “Why are you telling us this? Won’t you be in huge trouble? Won’t you get, well, you know.”
“Suspended? Yeah – already done that, so I figured how much worse can it get for me? They suspended me because of the files being taken from my computer. I know Sollen got into the hard drive, but I am responsible for the safety of the information in my care. I also feel I am responsible for YOUR safety – all of you – and I thought you needed to know that you all may be targets. I’d appreciate it, however, if you tell no one that I was here.”
Well, this information was definitely not headed for the plus-side column of Rillin Blackwood. I could tell that my friends believed he probably was the mystery buyer and Agent Sollen’s killer. Damn. Maybe I was a bad judge of character. Maybe Raef was right to not trust my instincts.
I pointed to the boxes. “What are these?” I asked as Raef pulled one of the striped boxes with my name on it towards the two of us. Ana pulled another box with her name written on the side towards her as Kian stepped next to her.
Marsh got up on his hind legs and placed his front paws on the edge of the table, looking on. Howe gave him a curious glance, no doubt shocked to see the dog showing interest in the boxes. Either that, or the ex-agent was unsure of the dog’s “safety” in general.
He managed to pull his eyes off of Marsh’s bear-like presence. “These things belong to you and Ana. They were released from evidence a few weeks ago, but I never had a chance to get them to you.”
I slowly lifted the lid as Ana did the same.
“Our dresses,” she whispered, slowly lifting the dust-covered, ruby-red gown from its spot in the box. Kian reached around her and let the fabric trail through his fingers, no doubt remembering how it had hugged her curves and left him entranced.
I braced myself, and looked down into the box in front of me. Tucked into the cardboard rectangle was a lush pile of silky fabric, laced with thousands of beads and crystals. I slowly reached in and began lifting the dress, once a beautiful white, but now dusted with the ash from the soul thieves I had killed. But when I saw the brown streaks and blotches covering the beadwork, I gasped, and dropped the dress.
Raef stepped in closely behind me, his chest brushing against my back as he reached around me, one solid hand on my hip as he started to pull the lid back on the box. “Don’t look at it,” he breathed into the side of my face, but I placed my hand on the dress, stopping him.
“I want to see it,” I whispered, pushing the lid farther away and pulling my dress slowly from its resting place in the box. As it emerged in my hands, the dark stains and torn bodice revealed just how gravely I had been injured the night of the Breakers. The bloodstains, now brown with time, ran down from the beaded bodice, fading outward. The elaborately sewn beads and crystals tumbled off the dress into my hands and scattered over the table. The center of the bodice had been torn down the midline, the threads now sticking out at funny angles towards the gap, as if reaching across the divide to re-stitch themselves together.
I heard Ana come up next to me. “Dear god,” she breathed, reaching out carefully to the once-stunning dress that had made me feel like a princess.
Raef’s arm threaded under mine, his hand open, and I carefully tilted my wrist, allowing a few beautiful beads to fall into his palm like discarded raindrops. His fingers curled around the broken gems, forming his hand into a fist that guarded my gift, “All that matters is that you are alive. The details of what happened back then are not important – only that you are here now.”
A lump had formed in my throat and I nodded as he and Ana eased the dress back into its cardboard coffin and slid the lid back on, attempting to shut out the pain and desperation of that night.
Howe, who had been watching us, slid a small envelope across the pool table to me. “This is also yours,” he said, and I opened the envelope, pulling my beloved bracelet from the paper.
My voice cracked as I thanked him and Raef helped me put it back on – a beautiful silver bangle with a ball in the center. Raef had given it to me the night of the bonfire and I treasured it. He called it my ‘badge of belonging’ – a reminder that I was part of the Cape. That night felt as though it was a dream, distant and unreachable after all that had happened.
Howe picked up the two wide envelopes and looked at them for a moment. “The truth is, something larger than what I understand is going on, and I am left baffled by a few things. First of all, I started digging through anything I could find on any of you and was shocked to find a file on Sula Lane.” Howe looked at Ana, who had wiggled her way up to sitting on the table, her legs dangling off the edge. I swear she only sat on non-chair furniture.
She looked at the envelope in his hand as she crossed her arms, decidedly not pleased to hear the name of the mother who had left her when she was a toddler. “Terrific – my mother has a criminal record. Why am I not surprised? My Dad said she was an addict and now she is a drug dealer as well.”
“Miss Lane, I know that is what your father told you, but this is not a criminal file. This is your mother’s agent file. She worked for the FBI,” said Howe, holding out the envelope for Ana.
Ana however was frozen in place. Kian realized she was too stunned to move and he gently placed an arm at her waist as he stood in front of her and accepted the folder, thanking Howe. Rather than moving away from Ana, however, Kian stayed where he was, tucked in front of her, and I noticed one of his hands had become interlaced with hers. Ana, however, just stared at the envelope in his hand with disbelief.
“What division?” asked Kian, as Ana braced herself for any information on her mother, who had apparently left her in favor of a job with the feds.
“Sula was a profiler in the serial killer division,” replied Howe.
“Was?” I asked, realizing he was talking about Ana’s mother in the past tense.
“I’m very sorry to inform Miss Lane that her mother and her associate were murdered sixteen years ago.”
Ana didn’t move, but her hand turned white as she clutched Kian’s fingers tighter. I was sure that Ana had believed her mother was still alive, or at worse, dead from an overdose. But to learn Sula Lane was murdered and her disappearance from her daughter’s life was not her fault, was a massive shock for A
na. She didn’t burst into tears, however, and she didn’t scream or flip out. Instead, she simply closed her eyes and leaned against Kian’s wide chest. His arm wrapped around her shoulders and he held her tightly, as if trying to somehow pull the pain out of her and into him.
As I looked at her, I made a silent plea to the universe for mercy and for the past to stop haunting us.
I cleared my throat and looked at Howe. “You said a few things left you confused. What else?” I asked.
“Well, we think we know how Dalca located you,” replied Howe, pulling a printed photo from his jacket pocket that was of me from a few years ago. It showed me in a tankini standing by a lake in my old hometown, a few classmates playing frisbee. I was not the focus of the shot, but rather just an extra – someone who happened to be caught by the camera’s lens. It was a photo I also had on my bureau.
“When we looked through Dalca’s files, she had no previous searches related to your name. But at one point, she came across this photo on one of your former classmate’s FaceSpace page. It was only after pulling up this photo, and saving it to her computer, that she started trying to locate you. Eila, your branded scar in this photo and on the paper we recovered, are a match, but the photos of your back taken at the hospital show a far more elaborate scar. Care to enlighten me as to how your scar managed to . . . grow?”
“Maybe it was Photoshopped by Dalca herself?” I replied as I looked at the old photo, trying to stay calm. I knew exactly why this photo stopped Dalca cold. The kill mark that deemed me a Lunaterra showed as plain as day on my lower back, just above my boyshorts.
Howe crossed his arms, leaning into the pool table. “Somehow I don’t think Dalca Anescu knew a damn thing about Photoshop, Miss Walker.”
Stupid. Social. Networking.
27 Raef
Howe left not long after dropping the bomb about what he had uncovered in the FBI files. Somehow, Kian had managed to convince Ana to not open the envelope, and in the back of her mind, I was sure she knew why.
Eila, god bless her, managed to get Ana over to the fire and the two girls snuggled together, using Marsh as a pillow. While I knew that MJ wanted to see the file, he sensed the girls needed his warm, strong presence more than anything else.
Eila spoke in quiet tones while Ana absently ran her hand over Marsh’s thick, black ears, causing them to fold down and then pop back up. She did it over and over, like a nervous habit that managed to keep her from losing it entirely.
In the library, Kian and I went through the paperwork in Sula’s file, all of which appeared to be copies of photos Howe took with his cell phone. I had to give Howe credit – he couldn’t take the files from the FBI’s office, nor could he Xerox them, but he was slick enough to make copies via his phone’s camera. Mr. Boy Scout had less-than-perfect morals.
Flipping through the pages, Kian and I were looking for anything graphic or violent that would haunt Ana, though luckily there were no photos of the crime scene from her murder. Sula’s file was thick, but huge swaths of information had been blacked out. It was all about Sula’s murder and that of her partner, whose name was also blacked out. They had both been shot in the back of the head, execution style. The only pages that had not been edited were a few sheets of journal-like paper with some strange numbers and letters she had written in pen. At the bottom of each page, she wrote the same word over and over – reloaded postmortem.
“Does it say who killed her?” I asked, looking over the pages.
Kian shook his head as he picked up one of the pages that seemed riddled with nonsense number and letters. “You don’t think she was going . . . insane, do you? I mean what is with the reloaded stuff over and over?”
“I have no clue,” I replied. “And who was her partner? This damn file tells us nothing.”
Kian kept peeling back the pages, one after another. Coroner reports, witness logs, more gibberish, a page of scribbles . . .
“Wait!” I grabbed the page of haphazard drawings from the stack Kian had placed aside, my heart freezing in my chest. I turned it over and there, in the upper corner and somewhat faded with time, was Eila’s strange drawing. It was an elaborate atom, with curving lines that rotated back on themselves. A round cage, just like Ana had said.
“What is it?” asked Kian, looking down at the paper.
“I saw Eila drawing this at lunch one day. She said it was the symbol on the gear that Howe had shown her,” I replied, unnerved by what this could possibly mean. How did Sula Lane, murder victim and gifted profiler of serial killers, have Eila’s drawing? A dark, menacing thought curled through my mind – was this symbol somehow related to the death of Sula Lane?
“Sula has the same thing that Eila has been drawing? There is zero possibility that is dumb luck,” replied Kian. “I’ve had enough of this waiting for the right moment crap. I say we just kill Nikki Shea and get the damn necklace from her if we need to. If both Sula and Eila were obsessing about this pattern, and it looks like it was on Dalca’s gear, then I guarantee Elizabeth knew something about it as well.”
“We are not murdering the captain of the cheerleading squad, no matter how irritating she is.”
“She bashed Eila’s face into a goalpost not long ago. Did you forget about that?” asked Kian, trying to stress how good it would feel to bump off Nikki.
I gave him an stern glare. Killing Nikki was not an option. Sadly. “What are you going to tell Ana about the file?”
“The truth,” said Kian. “She is owed nothing less than the truth. Unfortunately this file only gives me snippets of what happened and no reason why. I’ll tell her what I know and if she wants to see the file, she can. I’d definitely show Eila the sketch though.”
“I will,” I replied glancing out towards the girls and their furry black pillow. “I know what Eila’s going to say though.”
Kian looked at me, “We need the necklace?”
I nodded. “We need the necklace.”
A half hour later, Kian and I were walking through 408, doing a security sweep of Eila’s home. After the disaster of an evening that was the past few hours, I was really surprised that E and Ana didn’t want to just crash at Torrent Road. Mae and Christian were both gone and Ana had once said that 408 could feel “intimidatingly large and creaky” if you were ever there alone.
Alas, they were determined to sleep in their own beds and Kian and I were determined to break Mae’s rules entirely. If the girls slept at 408 tonight, we would be there as well.
MJ however could not escape his mother for a full evening and phased back into his lean, two-legged self to head home. He gave each girl a big hug and told them that he would run a patrol past the house during the night . . . and possibly howl to terrorize the neighbors. His ability to make the girls smile, despite how rotten our luck had been, earned him a gold star in my book. MJ was a good guy, plain and simple, and I knew he would have been a friend of mine in my former life.
When I had shown Eila the mark in Sula’s drawings, she could barely speak, though she did manage to demand we get the necklace from Nikki, as I predicted. Ana, however, refused to look at Sula’s file, instead asking Kian some heart-wrenching questions about her mom – did she feel any pain when she died? Did she know she was going to die? Did he think Sula was thinking of her when she died?
She asked all her questions with an eerie calm and listened while Kian answered as he sat next to her, his fingers brushing her own. He was worried for her and I could see the tension in every move he made through the house. He was waiting for Ana to crumble. To Scream. To do SOMETHING.
Yes, she had not known her mother for sixteen years and she never expected her to return. But to learn that her mother was murdered, rather than just disappearing due to an addiction problem, were two entirely different things. Kian and MJ knew Ana in a way that Eila and I had yet to fully understand, but the way Kian watched her now was more than just sympathy.
He watched her now as if she might become a threat to herself. The
reasons behind why he would think such things about Ana made me uneasy, and I became acutely aware that I only knew the smallest of details about what happened the summer they met.
Eventually, the girls took showers and headed for their rooms. I came up the staircase after checking the house once again and saw Kian leaning against the doorframe to Ana’s room. He watched her as she cocooned herself into her blankets, shutting out the world. She muttered a “goodnight” and “stop staring” to Kian, who reluctantly left her to sleep and headed down the stairs.
Eila’s door stood open about a foot and light poured from her room. I eased the door open a bit more as I said her name, “E? Can I come in?”
“Sure,” she replied, and I stepped into her bedroom. The air instantly stole from my lungs.
Standing in front of a long mirror in a pair of pinstriped PJs and a cropped t-shirt was Eila, methodically dragging a comb though her wet hair, separating her mane into rail-straight lines. She concentrated on her reflection, making sure not to miss a single ribbon of hair.
As I watched her, I was hit with a desperate desire to touch her and feel her coffee black hair stream through my fingers, leaving a damp, cold trail in its wake. I wanted to run my hand down the side of her neck, tracing the edge of her collarbone that rolled so perfectly under her delicate skin.
When she had been injured, I had come in and out of this room with things she needed, or simply sat and kept her company when Mae allowed. Back then I was filled with a brutal longing to see her well and on her feet again. Now, however, I was hit with a different kind of longing entirely.
She glanced over at me, and I noticed the t-shirt stuck to her shoulder because of a wet blotch from her hair. I envied the blotch . . . and the fabric.
“Are you planning on standing in the doorway like a stalker, or are ya coming in?” she asked, finally snapping me out of my trance. I moved into the room, my eyes drifting over Eila’s space as she began braiding her hair.
