Nobody's Damsel

by E. M. Tippetts

  “Which leg was bent?”

  “The… her right one.”

  “And was her face down or turned to the side.”

  “Angled to the side a little bit, but mostly face down.”

  I sketched a simple outline of a person, nothing fancy, just something that would give some idea of where she’d lain.

  “Legs angled more that way.” He pointed to the far wall.

  I resketched and he nodded.

  “Yeah, and her hair was all matted with blood. Seriously thought we were looking at a homicide, but she was breathing and had a pulse.”

  I noted that down.

  “Where on her body was she shot?”

  “Vanderholt?” Miguel shouted.

  “I’m in the hallway.”

  “Hard to say,” said the firefighter. “There was a lot of blood and we didn’t move her once we saw that she was alive.”

  Miguel appeared at the far end of the hall, his cellphone to his ear. “Night princess. I love you. I promise I’ll come hug you when I get home.”

  I finished the sketch. Every spot of blood, every fallen picture, every scuff on the wall, I had to record in both photographs and the sketch, and note down the measurements. The process would eat up hours, literally.

  “Vanderholt, did you even eat yet?” said Miguel.

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, give me the camera and go do that real quick.”

  I left the house again and walked through the rapidly cooling air to the van. I could still feel some heat radiating up from the asphalt, though. That would take a few hours to cool down to the same temperature as the air. My dinner was cold, but still delicious. I finished it off and washed it down with a bottle of water that had come with it. Jason had been thoughtful and thorough as always. I wanted to believe that meant he was devoted to me and only me, but my father had been a charmer too. The fact that Jason was a professional actor meant he could probably lie better than the average person, but I didn’t want to even entertain these thoughts. I wanted to carry on with my marriage, which had only just started. It was all still so new and shiny; I wasn’t ready for dings and scratches yet.

  When I emerged from the van, I found myself face to face with a woman who definitely did not belong inside the roadblock. Her stance was shy and tentative, one knee bent, hands behind her back. Further down the street another front door was open and another silhouette watched us. Understanding dawned. She’d come from her house, so hadn’t been herded away in Miguel’s sweep. Her blond hair with dark roots was swept up in a casual ponytail and she wore jeans and a t-shirt with a picture of a teddy bear on the front.

  “Can I just ask you what it’s like?” the woman asked.

  A broad question if there ever was one. “I’m really sorry. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  The woman followed me across the street like an eager puppy. “Wow, the media’s right about you. You’re a total snob.”

  Not what I needed. I tried to make nice. “Sorry, I’m under some stress right now-”

  “Because you’re going to get a divorce?”

  My terse refusal to engage her would only fuel these rumors, but I wasn’t sure I could feign the relaxed happiness required to dispel them. I took a moment to remember Jason’s unreserved smile as he lay in the back of his car, waving at me, amused at how we couldn’t even be seen together for two seconds on a random street on the West Side without attracting a crowd. I remembered the way he always turned his full attention to me when I walked into the room, his gentle, caring touch, even if it was just a squeeze of my hand in passing.

  “I’m not getting a divorce,” I said. “I’m stressed because this is a nasty crime scene and I’m not good with those.” It was the best excuse at hand.

  The woman’s expression melted into one of sympathy. “Oh, right, of course. Because you were almost killed.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “So why do this job? I mean, it’s not like you have to work.”

  “Some things are more important than money.”

  “What’s it like to go to bed with him?”

  I wished I had the same control over my features that Jason had over his, but I didn’t. I knew I let my flash of indignant outrage show. When I’d gotten engaged to Jason, I was still so inexperienced that questions about our sex life just bounced off me. We didn’t have a sex life yet, but Jason had embarked on a campaign to make ours a good one, and he did that by teasing me mercilessly. On the red carpet he’d lean down as if to whisper in my ear and nibble my skin instead. Whenever we had even so much as a second alone, he’d kiss me hungrily and break it off so I always wanted more. Soon I was biting my lip to keep from trembling every time he so much as ran a finger across the back of my neck, and when we’d reached our wedding night, I’d all but hauled him into the bedroom. Even then, he was a tease, making me wait, taking control, and looking down at me with such intensity that I’d had to close my eyes at points just to endure it.

  Ever since, questions about our love life bothered me. I wanted all of it to myself; that’s what everyone else seemed to get, but for Jason’s fans, these questions weren’t the least bit off limits. They watched his movies and therefore each felt entitled to a piece of him.

  “Miss Chloe, there you are.” Detective Baca leaned out the front door. “I need you-”

  “Answer one question. Just one, okay?” said the woman.

  “Ma’am,” said the detective. “Move along now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I do need to get back to work.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, he can do better.”

  I watched her storm back across the street with a mix of relief and annoyance. Relief because she was finally gone, annoyance because simple etiquette didn’t seem to apply to the famous. I didn’t understand why people assumed that if you had your face in the papers, you wouldn’t mind people hurling insults at you at the drop of a hat. It was as if fame made me not a real person, but a media construct, like the fictional characters Jason played.

  “You just ignore her,” said Detective Baca. “She’s got no business here.”

  The woman met up with the other woman who’d been watching from her doorway. They stood in the middle of the street and spoke in indignant tones, casting sharp glances in my direction.

  “You all right, Miss Chloe?” asked the detective.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re doing great. Any time you need to take a break, vomit, any of that stuff, you do that. Nobody gets through this without feeling something.”

  It took me a moment to grasp that he was talking about the crime scene. I really needed to get a grip and forget the rest of the world, because right now, tonight, some little girl was away from her mother. I took a moment to ask any deity who might be listening for help finding a clue, any clue, as to where she might be.

  I don’t know how much time passed before Miguel called the hospital to check on the victim. “Hey, Vanderholt,” he said as he hung up. “They don’t have any bullets. Looks like they all exited her body. Has the detective found any here?” He retracted the measuring tape with a metallic hiss and a click and moved to another corner. Together, we were taking the measurements necessary to triangulate the location of each bloodstain on the carpet.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s take a break here and look.”

  I nodded. We needed a bullet to be able to see its score marks, which would enable us to find the gun that fired it, and that meant we needed a bullet in good condition. I picked up the high powered flashlight that Miguel had borrowed and had left on the floor of the entryway, switched it on, and we both got to looking.

  Bullets were so tiny, and given they could ricochet and tumble in any direction, they could be anywhere in the floor or walls. I paused to try to imagine the scene, some faceless criminal who tried to subdue the victim before he shot her and left her to crawl after him as he went to the little girl’s room. In my imaginatio
n I saw the perp fire one bullet into the air at the beginning of the encounter to scare her.

  I turned the flashlight upwards. There was a hole in the ceiling of the entryway. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, Detective,” said Miguel.

  Detective Baca shouldered his way past two firemen and came to look at where I shone my flashlight. “We’re gonna need to get into the attic space up there. You two got the kind of protective gear you need to climb through the insulation?”

  “I guess you could say that,” said Miguel, “but I’m probably too big to fit. Vanderholt? You’ll need to do it.”

  His smirk made me hesitate. “What?” I said.

  “We do have protective gear, but it was kind of a gag gift to the lab. It’ll be all good. I’ll get the bullet trajectory kit.”

  And so, minutes later, I was in a hazmat suit crawling through the attic. At least Miguel hadn’t had me put on the stupid suit while standing outside where the paparazzo could shoot me. It was absurd overkill and I gather part of a running joke about a now retired crim who’d been extremely squeamish. We’d found an access hatch to the attic in the garage. As I crawled, I placed my hands and knees carefully on the wood frame to avoid crashing through the drywall into the house below. The insulation was the roll out, fiberglass kind and the peaked roof gave plenty of room to move in the middle, and very little room at the edges, where I would have to go search. I gripped a smaller flashlight in my hand – the high powered one Miguel had used was just too big for me to haul around. The beam bounced unsteadily as I made my way along, casting its light haphazardly around at the otherwise pitch black space. At least my suit meant I didn’t have to worry about spiders dropping down on me.

  A house looks very different from the attic. Without the walls as a guide, I had to guess where the entryway was. It wasn’t as if the gun had blown a huge hole in the insulation. Hollywood liked to add things like that for dramatic effect. One bullet shot into the ceiling in a movie or television show would make plaster rain down, but in reality, it just punched a little, teeny tiny hole as the itty bitty bullet passed through. Talk about looking for a needle in the haystack.

  I could hear the blare and static of the police radio outside and voices talking below. A tiny, focused beam of light appeared right at the edge, near where the roof met the wall. That beam of light was the bullet trajectory kit, a laser that shone with enough visibility that I could see the path the bullet would have travelled if its course were straight, but whenever a bullet had to pass through anything, it could begin to tumble, so once it entered the attic it may have veered off in any direction.

  I was lucky, though. I found it wedged into the underside of the roof only a few inches from the dot of laser light. Before I could extract it, I had to measure, record, and take pictures. All of this had to be documented. But we had a bullet, which was an important piece of the puzzle.

  Later, once we’d finished our documenting and extracted the bullet, we saw that it was in good condition. That gave us a moment’s happiness in an otherwise dark and ugly evening.

  “The dogs follow the girl’s trail to the driveway, where it ends,” Detective Baca told us. “She was probably loaded into a car.”

  “Well, if it’s the driveway, that means it happened in plain view,” said Miguel.

  “We can hope, can’t we?”

  I tried not to sound too bitter when I chuckled and said, “If the woman across the street can recognize me from the tabloids, maybe she can remember seeing a little girl loaded into a stranger’s car.”

  “Yeah, don’t we wish people paid attention to stuff like that?” agreed the detective. “I should question that woman, though. You know which house she’s from?”

  “I’d guess the one right near the CSI van, but I’m not sure.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder and gave me an encouraging smile. “You’re doing great, Miss Chloe. I’ll go knock on some doors.”

  Miguel shot me an irritated look, as if I were a fawning teacher’s pet.

  “How does he know you?” he wanted to know once the detective had left.

  “He saved my life.”

  “Huh?” He gave me his full attention now. “When?”

  I gave him a curious look. “So you don’t read tabloids.”

  He snorted. “No.”

  “Good. My brother tried to kill me when I was eleven. Officer Baca was one of the first people on the scene and he helped airlift me.”

  Miguel looked me up and down.

  I pulled the neck of my shirt down over my right shoulder to show him one of my scars. His eyes widened and he gave a low whistle.

  “That is why I’m a crim,” I said. “And why I really wanted to work here.”

  A hint of respect dawned in his expression. He nodded and turned away.

  There were some advantages to working late into the night. Grudges became harder to hold onto when one was exhausted.

  Our job was far from done. Minutes later I was down on my hands and knees extracting two long strands of hair from one of the big blood splotches. As I lifted them loose with tweezers, I noted they weren’t tangled in the carpet pile, which meant they’d fallen recently. It didn’t mean they had anything to do with this attack, but I packaged them up anyhow, as per the detective’s orders.

  I got back to the house just after two a.m. and found Jason and Jen still awake. Jason leapt to his feet at the sound of the latch, his iPad in one hand. He’d been seated on the floor next to the coffee table. Jen was reclined on the couch with her feet up, her pregnant belly covered by an oversized bathrobe that I surmised was Kyle’s. Boots sat on the arm of the couch, surveying the scene with his usual melancholy superiority, orange tail twitching.

  At my querying look at Jen, Jason said, “Kyra’s not home yet.”

  “Did you guys call-”

  “She called.” Jen still looked apprehensive though. “Told us she’s at a friend’s watching movies and told us not to wait up. She hasn’t pulled any stupid stunts for over ten months. I’m being paranoid. I can’t help it.”

  Her restraint was a major step. Jen and Kyra had been butting heads for years, ever since Jen married Kyra’s father. There had been some real close calls in Kyra’s adolescence, including a miscarriage when she was only thirteen.

  “Did you solve the crime?” asked Jason.

  “Mmm-hmm. Ran the perp down myself and knocked him to the ground. Really wore me out. How much trouble will I be in with your publicist when you show up tomorrow for interviews after getting no sleep tonight?”

  “Eh. I’m way ahead of all the drug addicts and other crazies in the business. It’s all about having a good makeup artist.”

  “Thanks for dinner. And thank you,” I said to Jen, “for not cooking it. That was amazing of you.”

  She burst out laughing. “I should have stopped cooking years ago. I’m getting way more compliments than I ever did for my food.”

  “That is just not true,” said Jason.

  She took her feet down and rocked herself a couple of times to get to her feet. “I’m going to go lay down. Have a good night. You need anything, Boots?”

  The cat just blinked a long, slow blink in reply.

  “We don’t know what happened to his owner,” she said, “but it was something permanent. He clearly misses them, but he doesn’t ever go looking for them.”

  “Poor kitty,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s better to have someone to miss than to never have had anyone at all. It’s worth knowing people worth missing huh, Boots?” She held out a hand which the cat regarded suspiciously for a moment, then stood and allowed her to scratch his ears. “Night guys,” she said to us.

  Jason watched her go, then turned to smile at me. He was still in his jeans and shirt, but was barefoot. His hair was rumpled and his smile sleepy. “Was it bad?”

  “Yeah. Awful.” We’d gotten no leads on the whereabouts of the little girl. Detective Baca was determined to question everyone on th
e street, though. He’d be working through the night. Time was of the essence. I’d run the prints I’d lifted and Miguel got to work preparing samples for DNA testing, though we’d be lucky to get the results of those in two days. Everything took time, and it didn’t seem like we had time. I now realized that when I’d been kidnapped as a child, having the police on my tail the moment it happened was a rare stroke of luck.

  Jason grasped my shoulder, his eyes conveying worry, sympathy. He didn’t bother to ask about any details as he knew I wasn’t at liberty to divulge them. The police would decide what information to release. Key points would be kept under wraps so that they could identify credible witnesses, all of whom would know facts that hadn’t been released.

  I wanted to lean against him and accept his comfort like I usually did, without question.

  His gaze searched my face. “Everything all right?”

  No, I thought. I’m being stalked by the media because they’ve got some reason to think, this time, that you really are cheating on me. My own mother told me to be on the lookout. I was so tired, though, that I felt like my bones were melting and I’d just slump into a heap right on the floor, and yet I was too stressed to actually let go of consciousness.

  He slipped his arms around my waist and touched his nose to the outer whorl of my ear.

  I turned to meet his gaze and then and there, decided I didn’t feel like talking anymore. Right now, in this moment, he was all mine and that would get me through tonight. “Can you just hold me for a while?”

  He nodded.

  “A long while? It might be hard for me to get to sleep.”

  “Yeah, I can do that.” He brushed my cheek with his fingers and leaned down for a kiss.

  Jason woke with a start before dawn and I cracked one eye to see him tapping away on his phone. I wondered if he’d overslept, but that didn’t seem likely. It was still dark outside. He got up and left the room. Moments later, I heard him talking in a low voice. Who on Earth would he call at this hour? I decided to believe it was Dave and that they were talking logistics for his schedule today. That made the most sense.