by G. G. Andrew
Letting out a shaky breath, she surveyed the complex. Nothing else seemed awry: no doors open, no yellow police tape, no signs of distress. Only a few cars in the lot, a white delivery van across the street. Why had a burglar broken into her place instead of one of the first floor apartments? It was Stealing 101. Easy come, easy go. Though she wasn’t versed in B&E. Her thefts had never been break-ins, but pilfers of small things at stores or friends’ homes—steals that she kidded herself were nearly victimless.
She probably deserved this.
Scott reappeared in the doorframe. “It’s clear. Come on in.”
“Great. I guess?”
She flipped on the light switch as she walked in—all the light switches. It was probably a mistake, because even though she’d seen the mess the night before, she was shocked anew at how much her home had been trashed. Her small end table and cheap futon couch had been overturned, exposing their pale undersides. Cabinets and drawers were laid open, closets emptied and her coats flung on the ground, their pockets turned inside-out.
“Do you notice anything missing?” he asked.
She shook her head and tried to speak, but it took a few seconds for the word to travel from her brain to her mouth. “No.”
Scott started carefully examining the living room, his eyes sharp. “Try not to touch anything,” he said.
This was what she’d seen last night before getting the hell out of there, but in the daylight, with all the lights on and Scott here, she ventured down the short hall to her bedroom. On the way she spotted her tiny bathroom similarly gutted, dozens of cotton balls scattered on the floor like fallen snow. The mirror swung open to reveal her medicine cabinet, and it hung wide on its hinges now, shoving her reflection into her line of sight. Out of all the things here, that was the most frightening, because her dark eyes, pale face, and open mouth looked more scared than she’d ever admit she was.
She closed her mouth and flipped on the bathroom light. “Fucking assholes,” she muttered. She grabbed a bottle of pills before slamming the medicine cabinet shut. “Hope you found all the cotton balls you need. You better not have used any of my facial toner.”
Pill bottle in hand, she moved towards her small bedroom. In the doorframe, she inhaled sharply. Her sheets and comforter had been ripped from the bed, and there were slashes in the mattress, like someone had stabbed it. It stole the air from her lungs, but she couldn’t think about that now. She dropped to her knees, set down the pill bottle, and reached her hand into the dark recesses under her bed.
Her bed was king-sized and heavy oak, a gift from her parents. It’d held up, providing her room to rumble with men she’d brought home and, most importantly now, was too heavy for a single person to lift. Underneath the frame, behind a pair of pink sneakers, her fingertips grazed the edge of a tampon box. She reached in further and pulled the small cardboard box out.
She guessed it hadn’t been touched, because when she unearthed the box, its lid was still on, its contents still within. Even if the asshole who’d come here had seen it, men were usually too afraid or disgusted by anything related to feminine hygiene to go near such a thing, and this one was too stupid to realize women knew that.
She opened up the box. Inside was a riot of color: a burgundy bracelet, yellow floral headband, fuchsia tube of lipstick. A candy necklace nicked from the convenience store. All her tiny parcels of shame, many of the little things she’d stolen over the years and couldn’t return, cheap jewelry and makeup and trinkets and some things she couldn’t even remember taking.
All her secrets.
And in a matching box still under the bed, there lay Scott Culpepper’s police badge, the one she’d taken from the coat pocket of his jacket last Thanksgiving. She’d been clean then for months, but after meeting and lying to him that fall to protect her sister—and pretending to be someone she was not, a good person—her anxiety had skyrocketed. With it came a desperate need for release. So when she’d seen his badge peeking out of that pocket, all shiny and silver, she knew that stealing something so small and potent would more than take the edge off.
She’d never returned it, never admitted to taking it. When she saw Scott from her parents’ driveway some weeks later, glowering at her like the scum he then knew her to be, he had a shiny new badge affixed to his uniform. No harm, no foul.
Except to the part of her that felt terrible when she saw the badge she took. It was delicious to touch and see, a reminder of the high it’d given her to steal. But the memory also made her mouth dry and gave her a stomachache. Maybe this is why she kept those two boxes: not to relive klepto highs of the past, but to remind herself of the tiny black holes punched in her every time she stole.
Tears sprang to her eyes. She sighed and sat down on the carpet, her back to the wall. Left the first tampon box open there on the floor—the one with the badge still secure under her bed—because she was suddenly too exhausted to put it back, and the rest of her life was already so laid bare.
Of all the things the intruder had manhandled, her bed, a place of intimacy, had to be the worst. The place where she slept and dreamed and daydreamed she was someone else. It still smelled of lavender pillow spray but someone had stabbed it with a knife. It wasn’t hers anymore.
She grabbed an unopened Sprite off her nightstand, twisted open the medicine bottle she’d reclaimed from the floor, and popped a pill in her mouth.
She was cracking open the soda to swish it down when Scott appeared in the doorway. He took a cursory glance around at the damage and tampon box before noticing the pill bottle in her hand with laser focus.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Chapter Four
Scott
Kim sat on the floor, staring up at him. For a second, Scott was caught off-guard by how vulnerable she looked: knees drawn up, face pale, brown eyes large in her face. Then he saw the bottle she clutched in her hand and his gut twisted.
“Is that—”
“It’s a prescription,” she said quickly, a note of irritation entering her voice. “Antidepressant.”
“Okay.”
Her gaze travelled to her bed and his followed. The white comforter and sheets had been ripped off the mattress and dumped haphazardly on the floor. There were even some knife wounds in the mattress, like the thief had been searching for something hidden there. Or the thief was enraged the object couldn’t be found. Scott’s bicep muscles tightened at the thought.
There was also a small feminine hygiene product box on the carpet, but it was filled with little tchotchkes and pink things. If Lily were here, she’d pore over such a box. Tags and labels were on many of the objects, like they’d been purchased but not used. Or maybe not purchased at all.
“I need all the serotonin in my brain today,” Kim said as he studied the box, her voice cracking in a way that made his eyes shoot back to hers.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said. “I know it’s difficult.” He’d been to enough crime scenes like this to guess how she must feel. Upset. Enraged. Violated.
She shrugged but looked down, her chest rising and falling.
Sensing she was close to tears, and knowing she was the type to hate that, he tried to get her mind off it.
“You still working at the coffee shop?”
She nodded to the floor. “Yup.”
“That’s where you’re going after this?”
“Yeah, eventually. My shift starts at three. I was going to swing by my sister’s.” She sniffed, and he sensed her trying to calm her voice. “If there’s time.”
“There should be time.” He paused. “Your sister still…”
“Hooking up with the graffiti artist known as KaveMan? Yeah.” Still not meeting his gaze, she crawled on her knees to the box, tucked the lid in, and slid it underneath the bed. “There’s even an Instagram dedicated to her called KaveMan’s Muse. We’re all very proud.”
Her voice had regained some of its usual liveliness, and Scott’s muscles relaxed in response. Though she was alw
ays full of sass, sarcasm, and defensive comebacks that drove him to drink, something about Kim Xavier sounding like she was about to crack made him want to haul her up from the floor, wrap his arms tight around her, and press her head to his chest. Which was something that shouldn’t ever happen.
Still, he regretted having to bring reality back into their conversation.
“Kim,” he started, “where’s the note?”
She stood up and took a deep breath, her eyes finding his. “I shoved it in the mailbox.”
“What?”
“I was freaked out,” she retorted. “I came home, grabbed it. Then I thought, Why am I taking this terrible fucking thing? So I crammed it in the mailbox on my way out.”
“Damn it.” He turned on his heel and walked swiftly to the front door.
“Sorry,” she called. “I wasn’t exactly thinking straight!” She muttered the next part, but Scott could still make out her saying, “Guess I flunked Crime Scene 101.”
He strode across the apartment, hoping the note hadn’t been taken and discarded. This break-in confounded him, made the hairs stand up on his arms thinking about it, made his cop spidey sense kick into high gear. Nothing had been taken, but Kim Xavier’s apartment had been ransacked by someone desperate or angry, maybe both. It was a threat, not a theft. And a threat promised more of the same. Promised worse.
The whereabouts of the note was the first question he wanted to ask when he’d found her on the floor of her bedroom, but it wasn’t the last. He had questions. He had more questions than answers. Who had broken into her place? What had they been looking for? And why did a woman with obviously wealthy parents and privilege feel the need to steal small barrettes and makeup like the ones he’d seen in that box?
He opened the door to the mail slot affixed next to her apartment. A crumpled white piece of paper peeked out. Thank God. He clasped a corner of the note with his fingers and gingerly removed it.
Give it up bitch. Put the thing you took in your mailbox.
“Damn.”
Kim stood in the living room as he came back in. “Was it still there?”
He set the page on the kitchen counter. “It was. We’re lucky.”
He read the note again. Studied it. Slipped it into a clear plastic bag fished out of his pocket. Something about the way the man—he was almost sure it was a man, based on the scrawl—drew his Ts high appeared familiar to him. He had to think about it. It would come to him. He had to think about it hard, then try not to think about it at all while his subconscious did its work.
He looked up. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”
She drifted over, glanced at the note quickly and turned away. “No.” She poked a drawer shut with her finger.
“You sure?” Without meaning to, he reached out and touched her forearm and pulled her to face him until she met his eyes. “I know it’s hard to read again, but I need you to look closely and make sure you definitely don’t recognize the writing of the person who did this.”
She looked again. “I don’t,” she said. “Really. Trust me, I wish I did, because I know a guy or two who’s gone to prison that could help me out with my problem here.” She smirked. Her face had gotten back its color, and her lips were their usual bright red. A lock or two of her brown hair stuck to the corner of her lipstick and he wanted to remove the strands, but he was suddenly nervous he wouldn’t stop there.
They stood a foot apart in her kitchen, face to face, cabinets open and exposing their guts behind her. She was close enough for Scott to catch a whiff of her perfume, a hint of orange and jasmine and something he couldn’t place. Had she stolen that too? He studied her face, trying to figure her out.
With her creamy white skin, painted red lips, and soft crimped brown hair, she was like Snow White meets Amy Winehouse. Fragile beauty and punk cool. A fairy tale but a cautionary one too, topped off with the most fucking luscious mouth he’d ever seen. He’d lost a few nights’ sleep last fall imagining that mouth as he lay in bed, growing hard and damp with sweat. After he realized who she was, he’d lost three times as many nights trying to forget it.
His jaw tightened. “You should let the police handle this. Get an officer on the case.” Not me, he could’ve added, but they both knew that’s what he meant.
“Why? So they can make fun of me and make me feel worse? Maybe I deserve this.”
His voice went low. “No one deserves this.” He reached up and pulled that damn stray lock off her mouth.
Her lips parted, and she tilted her head at him, her big brown eyes blinking once, twice. A wild thrill raced through him, like he didn’t know what was about to happen, but he suddenly didn’t care. Like he was on a tilt-a-whirl at the carnival and it was about to spin, spin, spin.
God, she was beautiful.
Her phone rang.
Kim glanced down, and he realized he still had his hand on her forearm. He removed it and she took her cell out of her pocket.
“It’s my brother, Ian. Do you mind if I take this?”
He nodded his assent and went back to examining the note while she assured her brother that she was fine about twenty-seven times, and that, Yes, she was staying with Mom and Dad, and No really, she was staying with Mom and Stop laughing.
It wasn’t only the Ts in the note. It was the way the handwriting slanted up at the ends, the way it was relatively neat for a man but still the lines quivered. It was the penmanship of a man who tried to be controlled, but held a simmering rage that threatened to burst out of him.
He knew where he’d seen it. At least his mind had been working while he’d gotten lost in Kim Xavier’s face.
He recognized the handwriting, all right.
Chapter Five
Kim
After leaving her apartment, Kim headed straight for her sister’s, the music in her car turned high enough to drown out the memory of Scott Culpepper’s warm, strong hand on her forearm.
On the front door of Laurel’s small suburban home, a small red mouse had been painted on one lower corner of the frame. Kim knocked and glanced around quickly for reporters or kids holding up their phones. The fervor from her sister’s infamous hookup with a notorious public figure had died down, but you never knew if someone wanted to catch a glimpse of a mysterious graffiti artist in his new, depressingly suburban habitat.
The coast was clear, but Laurel hadn’t opened the door, which Kim cursed her for because her mind drifted yet again to Scott and his clear blue eyes and the way they’d studied the details of her face as they’d stood in her kitchen. Like she was a found thing. Then when he’d met her eyes again, his had been simmering with something she thought she’d extinguished months ago.
Maybe he didn’t want to be away from her as much as he acted like he did.
After a long minute of Kim nearly chewing off all her lipstick from nerves, Laurel opened the door, one hand smoothing down her straight dark hair. She’d taken so long, Kim wondered if she’d been doing more landscaping out back, a hobby Laurel had turned into a career.
“Hey, there!” Laurel smiled. She wore a big white-and-black flannel shirt Kim didn’t recognize, a change from her usual put-together outfits.
“Oh, sorry,” Kim said. “Were you working out back?”
“No.” Laurel bit her lip. “Just doing house stuff.”
“Okay.” Kim bypassed her and crossed the threshold, not standing for ceremony with her sister. “I like the mouse.”
Laurel wrinkled her nose at the graffiti as she closed the door. “It’s growing on me. So what’s going on?”
“Oh, you know, not much.” Kim strolled over to play with the fringe on an afghan on the back of the couch. “Someone did break into my apartment yesterday.”
“What?”
She met Laurel’s blue eyes, which were widened in shock. She still stood beside the door.
“It’s no big deal probably. They didn’t take anything,” Kim said, though she let a bit of fear quake her voice in a way she’d nev
er do with her mother.
“Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you come here?”
“I went to Mom and Dad’s.”
Laurel’s eyes grew rounder. “Really?” She closed her mouth and paused. “Why?”
“Because they’re our parents.”
“No, really. Why?”
Kim started laughing. “You sound like Ian.”
Laurel had always gotten along with her parents better—she was the first-born, the Yale grad, not a kleptomaniac, and, recent dalliances aside, generally the good girl of the family. But she knew Kim’s tumultuous history with their mother especially, and was rightly doubtful of Kim suddenly running to her in a time of need.
“I was going to come here, but…” Kim smirked. “I thought you and your boyfriend would be here doing sex things all the time.”
“Sex things?”
“You know…” It was then she noticed Laurel’s flannel was buttoned up incorrectly, one side hanging down. “Ack! You guys were doing sex things right now!”
Laurel opened her mouth to speak, but a British man’s voice drifted down the stairs. “Well, we hadn’t got that far. Not quite.”
“See, this is what I mean!” Kim protested as she heard footsteps coming down the stairs. God, she was slow on the uptake. She’d usually have noticed her sister’s slight pink flush and guilty smile within the first thirty seconds, if she hadn’t been so distracted by the break-in or thoughts of Scott Culpepper. “House stuff, my ass.”
“It’s fine,” Laurel said quickly, her eyes shifting with warmth to the man hitting the landing. “Right, Jamie?”
“Right,” Jamie said unconvincingly as he drifted over, hands in his pockets. He had on jeans and a faded gray shirt and Kim didn’t want to think about the sex things she’d interrupted between them.
His hazel eyes met hers. “Someone broke into your place?”
Laurel inhaled quickly, like she’d just remembered it anew. “Sit down, Kim.”
“Why? It’s not going to make me any less robbed.”
