by Jon F. Merz
I took my iPhone out and scrolled through the pictures I’d snapped initially at the Luxe development. “I have to warn you the images are sightly graphic.”
Eva waved a hand. “I’ve seen some fairly horrible things in my time, Mr. Lawson-“
“Just Lawson, actually.”
She smiled again. “Lawson.” She leaned back in her chair and looked me up and down. “I don’t mean to be so forward, but are all Fixers as handsome as you?”
“Why would you think I’m a Fixer?”
“Who else works on a case like what you’re about to show me? And besides, even if I didn’t know for sure that you are one - I have friends as well - you have the air of lethality about you. That cloak of a man who has done the dangerous and dirty, who has sallied forth to do battle with the sort of demons most would run from and come away time and again unscathed.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say unscathed.”
“You’re still alive,” said Eva. “That must count for something.”
“I suppose it does.” The way she spoke was almost musical, but her word choice interested me even more. She’d mentioned ‘demon,’ which immediately brought my guard up. It could have just been a coincidence, but I don’t happen to believe in them.
I showed her the iPhone. “This was from a crime scene we located the other day.”
The expression on her face faltered slightly as she looked at the picture. After a moment, she put the phone down and turned toward the fire.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s a great deal of…blood.”
I nodded. “Yeah. It is. So you can see why we’re interested in finding out who did this and why.”
“An what exactly am I supposed to be able to help you with? I don’t specialize in understanding the workings of a maniac’s mind, which is the person I’m assuming did this.”
I took the phone and blew up the image to show the symbol on the wall that Newby had already translated. “Can you tell me what this means?”
She squinted closer at the phone and tried zooming in even more. After a minute, she shook her head. “It doesn’t resembled any of the languages I am familiar with. I’m sorry.”
I watched her face very carefully as I weighed my next words. “It’s Akkadian script. Have you ever heard of it before?”
“Akkadian?” She frowned. “I can’t say I have. My expertise runs more to more modern Middle Eastern languages than that. I’ve heard of the Akkadian empire before - weren’t they around at some point with the Sumerians and Babylonians? But that was many millennia ago. And long before my interest in the area started to develop.”
“Are you absolutely certain you can’t translate that symbol?” I offered her the phone again but she declined to take it.
“Unless you suddenly are able to transpose ancient Greek or Latin over it, no.” She put a hand on my knee. “I’m afraid you might well have come all the way out here to meet me for nothing. I can’t help you with this.”
31
I looked at her with disbelief upon my face. “Are you absolutely certain?” I felt certain Eva should have been able to at least get some sense of what the symbols meant. Was it possible to study ancient Greek and Latin and not have a clue about what came before that? Was she simply trying to get me out of her house without giving anything away?
“What do you want me to say, Lawson? It’s not my area of expertise.”
I had to remind myself that there was no guarantee that Eva was the killer. And I had to be doubly sure that I didn’t subjectively assume she was. After all, Letourneau himself was running down another possibility and if I condemned the wrong woman, there would be hell to pay.
I sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I was very much hoping you could assist us with this. It’s been nothing short of an enormous problem over the last few days.”
Eva nodded. “I assure you, if there was anything I could do to help, then I certainly would.” She gestured to the kitchen. “Can I fix you a cup of coffee or something before you leave?”
I stood. “I don’t drink coffee, but thank you anyway.”
“I could offer you something stronger,” said Eva with a smile on her face. “Perhaps a stiffer drink that isn’t necessarily as boring as coffee?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I have an ample selection,” said Eva. “Come take a look.”
I followed her into the kitchen and she showed me the area where she’d set up a wide range of liquor bottles, glasses, and various shakers. “I’m something of a cocktail-o-phile. If that’s even a word,” she laughed. “What’s your pleasure?”
“I see you’ve got Bombay Sapphire,” I said.
“Of course. I happen to think it’s one of the better gins available. The quality of its taste surpasses other higher priced premium gins, if you want my honest opinion.”
“I’ll take that with tonic water and three lime wedges please.”
Eva turned and put a hand on her hip. “Well, that’s a fairly precise drink order if ever there was one. I wonder how you came to like your drink made that way?”
“An old bartender friend of mine, Jimmy Bats, introduced me to it a number of years back. Way back, actually.”
“What sort of name is ‘Jimmy Bats?’” asked Eva as she twisted the cap off the bottle and poured a measure into a highball glass over ice.
“He used to keep a Louisville Slugger behind the bar to help people remember their manners when they’d had too much to drink.”
“Sounds like a lovely man,” said Eva. “Isn’t that always the way, though?”
“What do you mean?”
She reached into the small wine fridge below the bar area and pulled out a bottle of tonic water. “With interesting people. Don’t you find that the strangest of environments tend to produce those with the most fascinating stories?”
“I don’t know what Jimmy’s background was. I thought he was just a hard case from the streets of Southie.”
Eva topped the glass off with tonic water and then pulled a tray out of the wine fridge that had some precut lime wedges on it. I watched as she squeezed a few of them into my drink - an act I usually like to reserve for myself, but this time found strangely alluring when Eva did it.
“Well, even if he was a hard case from Southie, you can’t discount the fact that his environment had a great deal of influence upon him. Can you?”
“I suppose not.”
Eva handed me my drink and I waited while she mixed herself up a vodka and tonic with a lemon wedge. When she was done, she toasted me and clinked her glass against mine. “Here’s the new…friends.”
“Cheers.” I took a sip and found that Eva had mixed the drink perfectly. I didn’t even mind that she’d squeezed the limes in instead of allowing me to do it. She’d given them just enough of a squeeze to cut the taste with a pleasing vibe of citrus.
“How come three lime wedges?” asked Eva.
“Jimmy always took two,” I said. “One for him and one for the woman he loved. I guess I adopted three for some other reason.”
“What-a ménage à trois?” Eva’s eyes twinkled with mischief.
I laughed. “Uh, no. At the time he introduced me to it, it just didn’t seem right to do it with two wedges, the same as him. So I asked for three and I guess it kind of stuck.”
Eva nodded with mock solemnity. “Very honorable of you, Lawson.”
“Well, you know, I try to be honorable when I can.”
“And is that often?”
“Often what?”
“That you try to be honorable.”
We walked back to the sitting room by the fire. I took another sip of my drink and regarded her. She was staring right into my eyes with the same level of intensity that Lilith had done. Why did I have to be such a sucker for women with amazing eyes? If I wasn’t careful, it was going to be the death of me.
“Honor is ingrained in my soul,” I said. “A lot of times, my acti
ons don’t jibe with what people consider to be honorable, but they are. They’re just seeing it from their perspective and not from mine. To them, it looks like something else. Something less than honorable, I suppose.”
Eva sipped her drink. “Like what?”
“You want an example?”
She shrugged. “Why not? We’re sitting here getting acquainted. I’m enjoying having a drink with a handsome man while a cold wind blows outside. Tell me more, Lawson. I’ve been starved for good company as late. It seems I can’t keep anyone around me.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “You really want to know?”
She smiled. “I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t truly interested.”
I paused. I could have come up with something on the fly, I suppose. But once you start lying, then you have to remember the lie or it could come back to bite you on the ass. Most of the time, lying turns out to be too much of a pain in the butt to keep up, so I try to tell the truth as much as I am able to without compromising secrets or myself.
“I knew a girl once.”
Eva leaned back and toasted me with her drink. “Oh, it’s always a member of the opposite sex, isn’t it? We are so driven to extremes for the quest of love.” She nodded. “Go on.”
I smirked. She was clearly getting ready to enjoy this. “We used to flirt with each other all the time. Back and forth, back and forth. We’d see each other at school and she’d treat me like I wasn’t even there. But outside of school, it was a different story. She was a different person, always hanging on my every word. In school, she used to be extra friendly with this other guy. It drove me crazy.”
“Games,” said Eva. “They are so utterly tiresome, aren’t they?”
“Indeed,” I said. “I felt certain there was something going on between the two of them. I couldn’t prove it, and they never came out and said as much. But even though she used to flirt with me when we were outside of school, I was convinced she and this other dude were together.”
Eva leaned forward in her chair. “So, what did you do? Did you confront her?”
I smiled. “This was before I was as forward as I am these days. If that happened now, I’d just ask what was up. But back then - it was a different time after all - I was far from what I am now. So I started doing certain things.”
“What sort of things?”
“I used to open her mail and see if she was getting letters from the other guy.”
“Was she?”
“Every once in a while, but nothing incriminating.”
“So what happened?”
“I wrote a letter to her and pretended it was from the other dude.”
Eva laughed. “Oh my, that’s rich. And you sent it to her?”
I nodded. “Yes. With the intention of discovering once and for all if they were into each other or not.”
“Did she write back?”
I sipped my drink. “I was careful to use a return address that would bring her letters back to me. And she wrote back. The content of them was flirtatious. And it was enough to confirm that she was into this other guy and not me.”
“You wrote back to her still pretending to be this other individual?”
“Yes, we had quite the exchange for a while. Certainly, I gathered enough information to know that she wasn’t interested in me at all, but for the purpose of playing around. She was into the other guy.”
“Did you confront her with this?”
I sighed. “No, she actually went up to the other guy and laughingly asked him about his recent letter to her. He, of course, had no idea what was going on and denied ever sending her one. She showed him the letters and then the entire thing unraveled around me.”
“How so?”
I smiled. “Apparently, when they tried to figure out who would be capable of doing what I did, my name came up almost immediately.”
“So she knew.”
“Yes. I was going to go over to her house to apologize, but she made it abundantly clear that she never wanted to see me again. And that was that.”
Eva paused to take another sip of her drink and I listened to the ice clink in her glass. Finally, she looked at me. “You said that you had done things others would consider dishonorable and yet you think of them as honorable.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you mind me asking how you think of that event as being honorable? From my perspective, I can’t see how it would be considered anything but deceitful.”
I nodded. “That’s how most everyone else saw it, too. I was scorned by people I’d called my friends. They were far too busy being judgmental to ever even attempt to see it from my perspective.”
“And what perspective is that?”
“This girl had jerked me around. Played with my feelings. Hot and cold, hot and cold. I’d been nothing but good to her. I showed her endless amounts of affection. I helped her move things when she could count on no one else. And I used to think at some points, she cared for me. But it was just a lie. She didn’t give a shit about me. And frankly, she didn’t give a shit about really anyone. She was out to make herself look good, and if that wasn’t happening, then she made sure she looked like a victim so everyone else around her would rally and prop her up.”
I took another sip. “I got tired of being treated like shit. So I took the steps I considered necessary to regain my life.”
“You could have just walked away,” said Eva.
“No,” I said. “I couldn’t have. I didn’t want to give her that out. I wanted her to know it was me. I wanted her to know that as much as she liked to believe she held all the cards, when it came down to it, I’d made a fool of her. She’d fallen for what I did and no one - nothing - could ever change that fact.”
Eva said nothing for a moment and when she finally did, there was a playful smirk on her face. “You’re not one to take abuse lightly, are you?”
“No.”
“And you’ve got quite the vengeful streak in you as well.”
“I do.”
“Well, there’s something to be said for a man who is willing to risk public humiliation for the sake of a grander ideal. It’s far more than most men would ever do, that’s for damned sure.”
“Correct.”
Eva leaned forward. “And frankly, I think it’s kind of hot that you cared so much for this woman that you would go to those ends to prove a point.”
“She didn’t see it that way. She just saw it as an attack on her.”
“Then she’s a damned fool,” said Eva. “And she missed out on loving you. I’m sure that decision will haunt her until her dying day. Unless, of course, she’s ever reached out to make amends?”
I laughed. “I’m fairly certain that will never happen. She was always fond of saying, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ so personal responsibility and this girl never got along very well. I mean, it’s possible, I suppose. But probable? That I don’t know.”
Eva shrugged. “Her loss then.” She smiled. “And my gain.”
32
“And what do you mean by that?”
Eva grinned at me. “What do you think I meant? Are you going to pretend there’s not something here, right now?”
“Uh…I just met you.” I took a drink and put the glass down. “Maybe I should be going.”
Eva stood and came over to sit on my lap. She leaned over and whispered in my ear something I couldn’t quite make out. Was she singing? I could feel the warmth emanating from her body and bleeding into me. Her lips brushed against my ear lobe and then down to my neck, making the hair all over my body stand up. “Lawson,” she said then. And then she let out a low moan that sounded extremely sexy and strange at the same time.
I tried to move her off of my lap, but she wouldn’t budge. Eva must have studied martial arts at some point, because she certainly seemed to have an innate understanding of how to pin someone down on a piece of furniture.
“Eva, come on, get off of me.”
She leaned back, s
till straddling my lap. “You’re saying no to this?”
“I’m saying we should slow down,” I said. “This is all moving a bit too fast for me right now. Besides, I’ve got a girlfriend.”
Eva laughed. “I’m not looking for a proposal, Lawson. Just take me to bed. I’ve never had one of your kind before.”
“You’re my kind,” I said. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“A Fixer, silly.” Eva started unbuttoning her top. I could see she wore a white lace bra underneath which was another one of the things I was an absolute sucker for.
I grabbed her hands and held them fast. “Stop. This sort of vibe isn’t working for me. I didn’t come here for a piece of ass-“
“But you could have one,” said Eva. She finally climbed off of me but stood in front of me, unzipping the skirt she wore. It fell to the floor faster than I could have said anything to stop her. And apparently, Eva was a fan of wearing matching bras and underpants, which was always nice to see.
It was tempting, no doubt. Eva was an attractive woman, but I had no idea if she was the killer or not. She was certainly aggressive enough. But did I have any real concrete proof that I could use to make a judgment call here? The answer was no. What I needed was to get a look around the house and see if I could find any incriminating evidence. Just shooting her now wouldn’t fly with the Council, and with them, I had to be sure I’d obeyed all the aspects of making a compelling case for a sanction.
I hadn’t yet.
I stood up and Eva moved to embrace me. “Just stay for an hour, Lawson. I promise I will make it worth your time. I’m a very good lay.”
“I have no doubt you are,” I said. “But this isn’t the time for this sort of thing.”
She pouted. “So come back later then. I’ll make dinner for us. Some good wine will help things relax nicely. And then perhaps afterward I’ll undress you and do all sorts of incredible things to every inch of your sculpted body.”
I smiled. “I’ll call you later. You’ll be here?”
Eva started putting her skirt back on. “I have to run out and take care of some errands first. Shouldn’t be too long. You go and get your head right. When you’re ready to come back and enjoy the wondrous female before you, just call me. I’m sure you have my number.”
