 
Missed Connections: Book 0

_DBS Publishing LLC_

Copyright 2018 by _DBS Publishing LLC_

Smashwords Edition

Prologue

The Bauer Technology Charity Gala was the event of the season in Simone City. Anybody that was somebody showed up, decked out in tailored suits, designer dresses, and jewelry so precious that the diamond pieces were loaned out temporarily and insured for thousands of dollars by their true owners. The gala was held at Bauer Tech's main building, a high-rise in Juno, the business district and the wealthiest of the city's four boroughs. The rich and privileged lived and worked in Juno, and they often partied there too. On the surface, charity events and galas were dignified soirees. The attendees drank champagne, ate salmon puffs, and kept the language polite and stuffy, but when the auction or donation part of the evening concluded, the events devolved into less attractive conversation. The men relieved the bars of whiskey, the women of wine, and the evening wore on without the worry of maintaining propriety. It was just shy of this hour that Vivian Bauer said goodbye to her husband Wallace—the CEO of Bauer Tech—and excused herself from the gala to accompany their fifteen-year-old daughter Veronica home to their penthouse apartment.

"Good night, my dear," Wallace said, helping Vivian into her coat. "The car is waiting for you at the curb."

John Halco, Wallace's best friend and business partner, chastely kissed Vivian on each cheek. "You always leave early. You're missing the best part of the evening."

"I'm afraid once the shrimp cocktails are gone, I no longer find your jokes amusing, John," Vivian teased. "And Veronica is bored out of her mind."

The fifteen-year-old girl mustered a smile for her parents' benefit. Her dress itched, her high heels pinched her toes, and the pins that held her hair in place dug against her scalp. She was ready for the stuffy evening to end.

Halco almost ruffled Veronica's hair then thought better of it. "Sometimes I forget that you're a young woman now. A few years ago, you were drawing on my office walls with crayon."

"I was five, John," Veronica said, employing that sardonic tone children seemed to learn as soon as they hit their teens. "Let it go."

Her parents, Halco, and the other men who waited patiently for her father's attention all chuckled. Veronica, despite her indifference to the goings-on at Bauer Tech, was a charmer. Her father's friends and business partners found her smirk and quick wit amusing. Wallace used it to his advantage, often allowing his daughter to speak freely to his associates. She had a quick mind and picked up every detail of the business speak. One day, Wallace hoped she might take over the company in his stead.

Wallace hugged his daughter tightly, careful not to spill his drink on her emerald dress. "Get out of here, troublemaker. I'll see you at home."

"Night, Dad."

Vivian and Wallace exchanged one last kiss before mother and daughter left the businessmen to their whiskey and cigars. A black Town Car with tinted windows was parked on the curb of Bauer Tech. The driver opened the door to the backseat so Veronica and Vivian could slide in, and then they were off. Veronica pulled the pins out of her hair, letting the strict updo unravel and cascade around her face.

"It wasn't too bad, was it?" Vivian collected the discarded pins in her palm. "Did you get enough to eat?"

"Someone ate all the veggie rolls," Veronica said, massaging her scalp with the tips of her fingers. "I'm starving."

"How about I order a pizza when we get home?" her mother said. "I get tired of all that fancy food sometimes too. We can pop in a movie and relax for the rest of the night since you don't have school tomorrow."

"Sounds good to me." Veronica rested her forehead against the cool glass of the Town Car's window and watched the big buildings of the borough pass her by. "I want a bath first though. My hair feels like a helmet from all this finishing spray."

The Town Car dropped off the mother and daughter at the foot of the Ivory Hotel, where the price per room was so extravagant that it was not spoken aloud. The Bauers owned the suite on the top floor of the Ivory. Once or twice, Wallace entertained the idea of buying the entire hotel to make it more affordable for others, but the world of advanced technology left him no headspace to consider real estate. The Bauers' top floor suite was everything you expected out of the place Simone City's god of tech called home. There was no key to get in. Veronica pressed her finger to a small blue pad that lit up, scanned her print, and unlocked the door. As the teenager pranced inside, motion-sensor lights switched on and Wallace's patented Smart Home device, named Jeeves, sprang to life.

"Welcome home, Vivian and Veronica," the cool robotic voice said. "May I be of service?"

"Run a bath for me," Veronica requested.

"Running bath," the device replied. In Veronica's personal bathroom, the faucet turned on and spilled hot water into the tub.

"And order a large pepperoni pizza from Giordano's," Vivian added. "Delivery, please."

"Ordering one large pepperoni pizza from Giordano's."

Veronica left her mother in the living room and headed to her wing of the massive apartment. She kicked off her heels then unzipped her dress and stepped out of it with a relieved sigh. The bathwater steamed as she added organic lavender oil to it. She slipped into the water.

"Play my relaxation playlist, Jeeves," she requested. A series of speakers placed around the bathroom turned on, and a soothing coffee house singer crooned at Veronica as she submerged herself underwater.

Veronica washed the hairspray out and let the oil soak into her skin, savoring the slippery warmth of the bath. As she smoothed conditioner into her hair, the music cut off.

"Jeeves, continue playing relaxation playlist."

The Smart Home device did not reply.

" _Jeeves_. Continue playing relaxation playlist."

More silence. Too much silence. A thump echoed down the hallway from the living room. Veronica's breath quickened.

"Mom?" she called out. "Is everything okay?"

No reply. Veronica climbed out of the tub, dripping water across the bathroom floor. She put on her fluffy white bathrobe and cinched it tight around her waist, then crept through the door and down the hallway. Deep voices emanated from the living room.

"Shut up! Do it quietly."

"Sorry for enjoying myself."

"We're taking turns, right?"

A group of men gathered around the white leather sectional that stretched across the length of the living room. Each man wore an expensive tailored suit and a black ski mask to hide their faces. Splayed across the couch, her dress ripped free of her body, was Veronica's mother. A fresh bruise blossomed across her forehead. Her eyes were glazed over. She was conscious but unaware. One of the men had removed his bowtie and shoved it in her mouth to stifle her moans.

A gasp of horror escaped Veronica. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. The men turned. Shirts untucked, belts unbuckled, flies unzipped. Vivian exposed and vulnerable.

"Shit!" One of the men did up his zipper and thumped one of his friends on his shoulder. "I didn't know she'd be here!"

"Where else would she be?" His friend, a tall man with broad shoulders and a blue patterned tie, showed no shame at the group's activity. He turned to face Veronica in full. "We should have fun with both of them."

Some of the men hesitated. One of them said, "She's just a kid."

"She's fifteen," the tall man replied, stalking across the room toward Veronica. "She's a woman."

"Get away from me," Veronica said. Her voice trembled. On the couch, her mother stirred and moaned.

"Shut her up!" the tall man ordered. One of his cohorts slammed his fist against Vivian's head. A loud crack split the air.

"No!" Veronica screamed, sobbing. "Jeeves, call the police!"

The tall man laughed. "Silly girl. We disabled your father's ridiculous Smart Home device as soon as we walked in. It's just you and us. But don't worry, baby. We're all friends here."

He lunged for her, but she ducked out of the way and aimed a front kick at his head. Her heel connected with his nose and broke it, but that didn't deter the man. Rather, it spurred him on. He chased Veronica down the hallway. She ran into the bedroom and locked the door, spinning around to look for her cell phone, but she'd left it on the counter in the living room.

The door crashed open as the man put his foot through it. He dove toward Veronica, wrapped his arms around her, and dragged her into the living room. She kicked and screamed, bit his forearms, and yanked at his hair, but nothing worked. He lay her down on the rug in front of the couch and straddled her hips. When he leaned over her, she dug her thumbs into his eye sockets. He roared in pain, cradling his face.

"You'll pay for that, bitch," he growled. Blood dripped through his ski mask and onto Veronica's chest. His knuckles landed on her temple. Her head swam. Her stomach turned.

As the man pushed Veronica's cheek to the floor and ripped open her robe, she lost her grip on reality. Maybe it was the blow to her head. Maybe it was dissociation. Whatever the case, she stopped fighting and lay there. She watched her mother on the sofa. Vivian's eyes rolled back in her head. The men didn't care. They kept going. And going. Veronica hoped the darkness at the corners of her eyes would finish the job, that it would take over her entire body and pull her under until all of this was over.

The door slammed. The men were gone. The worried face of a teenaged girl appeared in Veronica's blurry line of sight. She cupped Veronica's cheeks. She whispered for Veronica to hold on. And Veronica did.

Chapter One - Vee

In Simone City, the four boroughs were named after Roman goddesses. Juno, to the north of Slickwater Lake, was the business district, akin to Manhattan. It was full of high-rises and hotels and museums. Venus, to the west of the lake, was known as the party borough, home to every club, concert venue, and independent movie theater imaginable. Self-proclaimed artists, musicians, and philosophers lived in block buildings of studio apartments to perfect their crafts there. Vesta, to the east, was a little square of suburbia. It was block after block of cookie-cutter houses, matching mailboxes, and soccer moms that all went to the same salon to get the same haircut. Minerva was south of everything, including moral standards. It was the poorest district of Simone City, where the streets were lined with garbage, rats, and despair. In one night, I went from Juno to Minerva, and I'd stayed south of everything for twelve years.

A bicycle messenger whizzed by. I flattened myself against the alley wall, breathing hard. The moisture of the red bricks soaked through my hoodie. I shivered. It was springtime in Simone City. The frost had melted, and there were fresh buds on the trees. But the winter's cold lingered, especially at nighttime when the sun had foregone the concrete jungle of inner city Juno. The bike messenger took the corner too quickly. The back wheel slid out across the damp concrete and knocked into a trash can. The can wobbled and fell over, spilling rotten food and garbage across the mouth of the alley. The cyclist shot off, oblivious or indifferent to the mess. I was alone again, thankful for the solitude, grateful that empty alleyways in Juno were easy to come by. The people who lived here didn't walk in the shadows. They stayed in the light. They walked on the wide sidewalks. They rode in their Town Cars. Brisk, professional, and above it all.

I crept along, stepping through the garbage rather than hopping over it. The soles of my shoes had witnessed worse. At the end of the alley, I stopped again. Breathed in. Breathed out. It was late, too late for the nine-to-fivers to be wandering around, yet there were people in the streets. Men in expensive coats with expensive wrist watches and expensive smartphones. Women with red-bottomed heels and Birkin bags who left a cloud of Chanel Number Five in their wake. My jaw tightened, teeth clenched, each time one of them passed too closely. Another shiver rocked my spine, but not from the chill. People—all of them—made me nervous. And nervous was an understatement. I shouldn't have come to Juno. I shouldn't have left my apartment in Minerva at all. Leaving home was how people ended up dead. But it wouldn't be my death on anyone's hands tonight. The thought strengthened my resolve. I stepped from the alley.

"Heads up!"

A kid on a moped cut around me, aiming for the shortcut through the alley. He wore a red and green visor instead of a helmet. The design looked familiar. I tracked it as he swerved to avoid me. An elaborate G was embroidered on the visor. The kid had a stack of pizzas strapped to the seat of the moped. He was a delivery boy for Giordano's.

"Shit, lady. Get out of the way," he called over his shoulder as he straightened out his path and bounced over the curb.

My stomach turned. _Go home_ , a voice said. Not my voice. It lived inside my brain, but it didn't belong to me. _You don't have to do this._ Shut up, little voice. Shut up. My hand balled into fists in the pocket of my hoodie, fingers wrapped tight around the handle of a freshly sharpened chef's knife. Could people see it? The outline of the blade pressed against the black fabric? A woman—passing with her friend—stared. When she drew level, she broke eye contact and shook her head.

"More and more riffraff from the south every day," she said to her friend, not bothering to lower her voice. "The cops really need to do something about it."

The friend, unabashed, looked over her shoulder. I turned my head. The pair continued on, laughing. About me and the other riffraff, no doubt.

I ducked from alley to alley, avoiding the main avenues as much as possible, until I reached an extravagant office building downtown. There, I sat down on the corner and drew my hood up. Hunched over. Any passersby would take me for just another one of the beggars. A minute later, someone tossed a handful of change and a piece of pocket lint into my lap. Good. It was working.

I waited there for a while. One hour, maybe two. Watching the door of the office building. Scanning the faces of those who emerged. Finally, he came out. He was a little man, shorter than the average woman. At street level, I noticed the lifts in his loafers right away. He had fat fingers. His university's class ring pinched his skin. The face of his Rolex gasped every time his thick wrist flexed. The man buttoned his jacket and crossed the street. Once he made it to the opposite curb, I stood up and followed.

He walked with his back erect and chest puffed out, a man who tried to make himself look bigger that he actually was. The shoulders of his jacket did not sit flush with his actual shoulders, as if he'd accidentally, or perhaps intentionally, given the tailor incorrect measurements. He did not go, as I expected him to, uptown toward the expensive apartments near the park. Rather, he turned west toward Venus. I tracked him across the bridge from one borough to the other. It was a lengthy walk for a man who not only had such short legs but could also afford to hire a cab, but when he reached his destination, it all made sense.

Penthouse Gentlemen's Club. It was one of the classier strip joints in Venus, though its title was a bit of a head scratcher. The club was in a basement beneath a gay bar. The sign above the door was small and dark, unlike the rest of Venus's neon advertisements. The people who went to Penthouse were the ones who already knew it was there. The man with the fat fingers descended the stairs to the barred door with familiarity, sparing one glance at his surroundings before entering the club.

I didn't go inside. Penthouse was for men like the one who'd just entered it, rich business professionals who preferred less than dignified entertainment. If I walked in, someone would yell at me to take my top off. I couldn't be noticed, so I had to wait. A lot of this game required waiting. I didn't mind. I was patient. Disciplined. Waiting was the easy part. As the man disappeared inside, I crossed the street and leaned against the wall opposite the bar, out of the bouncer's sight. From here, I had a clear view of Penthouse's entrance.

The night was young in Venus, but it grew old as the hours passed by. It grew rowdy too, despite the weeknight. The bar drew a crowd around one in the morning, as did the curb. Young women in fishnets and stilettos smoked cigarettes outside Penthouse, suppressing shivers when the breeze found its way across their breasts, pushed up into unrealistic orbs of perfection like an "open for business" advertisement. Occasionally, a man would emerge from the gentlemen's club and whisper in one of the girls' ears. If the price was right, the duo disappeared together. A bitter taste flooded across my tongue each time, and I forced myself to turn a blind eye to the transactions.

I caught sight of my reflection of the blacked-out bar window. I blinked slowly to make sure the woman in the makeshift mirror was me. The last time I'd seen myself, I had long wavy hair and a teenager's plump cheeks. I'd shorn the hair myself, so that the honey-brown strands remained chopped at chin length. My face was hollow, leaving nothing but sharp edges. I wasn't petite, but I made myself small. Hunched shoulders, thin but wiry, and a bowed head. My brown eyes were dark and vacant, sunken into the purple circles of late nights and too many hours of close proximity to a computer screen. I looked away.

Hours later, the man staggered out of Penthouse. I clocked his bumbling path. He walked right past me, reeking of vodka, not three feet away. I let him pass, holding my breath. My hand trembled in my pocket. He grinned stupidly at one of the sex workers, then reached out to squeeze her ass. She nimbly stepped aside and wagged her finger. _No, no. Nothing for free._ The man winked, tucked a leftover dollar bill into the hemline of her fishnets, and moved on. When he disappeared into the dark corridor next to the bar, I slipped unseen after him.

The angle of the light from the street elongated his shadow. He gazed up at it as he stumbled along, as if imagining it reflected his true height. He tripped over a crack in the concrete. I quickened my pace. I couldn't let him reach the other end of the corridor. Here was good. Here was right. Behind the bar's dumpster, where no one from the street would notice the happenings in the shadows.

_Don't do it_ , said the voice that wasn't mine.

"Do it," I whispered out loud.

I sprinted. My sneakers splashed through a puddle of foul-smelling standing water. The man turned around. The whites of his eyes flashed. He lifted his hands in defense. Too late. I was already upon him. Had already drawn the knife from my pocket. Had already plunged it into his chest. Logistically, it was more difficult than I thought it would be. The knife made it through his skin then hit a rib. I drew it out and tried again. More bone. The man fought to free himself, blood dotting his Brooks Brothers shirt, but I dragged him behind the dumpster as planned. He was drunk but mobile. He landed a wild punch to my rib cage, pushed my face away with the flat of his palm. A brief flash of panic overwhelmed me. Not again.

I gripped his too-wide suit jacket in one hand and slammed him against the wall. Then I regripped the knife, turned it sideways, and tried a spot lower down. This time, the blade slipped in between his ribs with a satisfying wet squelch. The man spluttered. He slid down the wall. I knelt with him and tried to yank the blade free, but his body kept it suctioned in place. I planted a foot against his torso and wrenched it out. Plunged it again. Pulled it out. In. Out. And again. Blood dribbled from his mouth. I flung off my hood, put my face right up to his.

"Do you remember me?" I said. My voice was strong, level, even, but raspy from disuse. "Do you know who I am?"

"V-Veronica Bauer," he sputtered, spraying blood. "You—you're supposed to be dead."

"Twelve years ago, you watched as your friends raped me and my mother." I traced the knife across his cheek, savoring the look of pure terror that made his eyes flash. "You found pleasure in it. You had a hand in her death. I wanted to ask you. Was it worth it?"

His voice bubbled. "Was it worth what?"

I leaned closer. Whispered. "Dying for."

I didn't allow him the chance to answer. Something primal, urged by seething, unbridled rage, lifted my hand again. I drew the knife across the front of his throat. Warm blood gushed over my hands, across my face. The man gurgled and slumped over. He was a painting in red, and I held the brush. I waited—more waiting—until the rasping breaths stopped. Until the steady beat of blood from his wounds slowed and ceased. Until he was no more than a shell of a man. Maybe in death, he would achieve the height he always dreamed of. But I hoped not.

Finally, I stood. Pocketed the knife. I was drenched head to toe. My shoes left bloody footprints in the alley. I took them off and carried them. I breathed in, then out, then in again. The air tasted good, of something satisfying and unfamiliar. Salty and free, like ocean wind.

Justice. I tasted justice.

Chapter Two - Sheila

Wyatt Payne would not shut up. Not at the precinct on Fifth, or the donut shop on Fourth, or the friggin' stop sign on Third. His lips flapped as he yammered on and on about this case or that suspect or the Captain's wife or the probability of picking up a venereal disease from the showers at work. He talked so much that I couldn't hear the radio over his non-stop chatter, and only when I slammed my foot against the brake pedal so abruptly that his forehead nearly hit the dashboard did he finally take a fucking breath.

"What the hell was that for?" He combed our surroundings, but at this time of night, there weren't many cars out on the road other than the wayward taxi. "Are you nuts?"

"I can't hear the radio."

My partner and I were the worst matchup since Sid and Nancy. We met at the police academy then continued as rookie officers for the Simone City Police Department. I couldn't stand him. It wasn't that he was a bad cop. He was actually a pretty good cop. I trusted him with my life. I had to trust my partner, but I didn't have to like him. Wyatt was the epitome of every boy who harbored the dream to protect and serve. He came from a family of cops and grew up parallel to the justice system. He wore the same police officer costume for four Halloweens in a row before he grew out of it and his mom had to buy him a new one. He learned to shoot a gun when he was nine and how to cuff someone one-handed when he was eleven. And he was a pretty boy. Tall, muscled, and blond. That made him all the more annoying, but his constant attempts at romance worsened the issue.

Wyatt leaned forward and turned up the radio volume as if the volume was the problem. We drove through Juno in an unmarked car. It wasn't one of the cruisers painted black with the siren removed that people could spot a mile away like a narc at a high school. It was a piece of crap on the outside, painted to look like a rusty old sedan that would blend in with the other cars in the lower boroughs. The inside, though, had all the accoutrements of the average squad car. Wyatt and I had drawn the short straw for the night shift. We were on our way to our assignment. One of the clubs in Venus was having one too many issues with prostitution. Tonight, we had a bait girl waiting outside. The plan was to park outside the club and let her attract a few customers. If they offered money, we could pick them up.

"I can't believe they picked Marcy for this," Wyatt said. "Have you seen Marcy? She does not look like a prostitute."

"What do you think a prostitute looks like, Wyatt?" I asked him. "You think women apply to be sex workers? That they have to meet a standard of beauty to sell themselves to desperate, horny men?"

"Whoa, don't get all feminist on me, Sheila."

"Someone's got to."

"I meant that I can't picture Marcy in stripper heels and a skirt," he said. "That's all. I wasn't trying to say she's not pretty or anything."

"Not the point." I guided the car across the bridge that connected Juno to Venus. The clean white street lights of the wealthier borough faded in the rearview as hues of neon welcomed us to the club district. "Marcy could kick any guy's ass in under three seconds. That's probably why Dumas asked her to do this."

"I definitely would not fuck with Marcy," Wyatt agreed.

We cruised past the address to scope it out. A gay bar called the G-Spot took center stage. It was disco night. Remixed seventies music pumped from the club, bass rattling the windows of our car. When the bouncer opened the door to let someone in, mirror ball lights bounced off the asphalt. Half-dressed men lined up to get inside. They checked each other out free of shame, gazes loaded with competitive melodrama or potential lust.

"I wish I could do my eyeliner that well," I sighed as one of the men, dark black wings around his lightning blue eyes, flashed the bouncer a smile.

"Maybe Marcy can teach you," Wyatt suggested. "She looks like she's got it down."

Marcy was easy to spot among the rest of the ladies on the curb. She had broader shoulders from years of combative training, and she was the only one not smoking. When we cruised by her, she shimmied her shoulders, shaking her chest by way of hello. I choked back a laugh as her glittery crop top shimmered in the moonlight. It was hilarious to see her out of her uniform and looking like that, but we were here for a job that I needed to focus on. Hiding behind the theatricality of the G-Spot, its entrance nestled below street level, was Penthouse Gentlemen's Club.

This wasn't the first time SCPD got involved with Penthouse. The place was notorious for encouraging illicit behavior. Strip clubs weren't illegal in Venus, but selling sex was. The owners of similar joints in Venus made a point to protect their girls from skeevy customers, but Penthouse was known for its loose rules and wealthy clientele. As long as you walked in with a wad of cash, you could do whatever you pleased with the employees. If I had the pleasure, I would've shut Penthouse down years ago. The problem was the club owners had a mysterious way of keeping everyone quiet. The girls refused to admit they were taken advantage of and the customers refused to admit they had taken advantage. When everyone pretended the business was legitimate, the police had no evidence to suggest otherwise.

At the end of the street, I pulled a U-turn and parked by an abandoned bar where our sketchy car and tinted windows kept passing club goers unaware of our profession. From here, we could keep an eye on Marcy and Penthouse's entrance. If anything unsavory went down, we would see it.

Wyatt unbuckled his seatbelt and dug around in the glovebox for a bag of Cheetos and a Diet Coke that he'd stuffed there earlier. "So I've always meant to ask you. Where'd the name Sheila come from?"

"My mother."

"Your mother's name is Sheila?"

"No, my mother was a nun."

The plastic Cheetos bag made the squeaky, crinkly sound that chip bags do as he pried it open. "If your mother was a nun, then how do you exist?"

"I never said she was a good nun."

Wyatt popped a Cheeto into his mouth and dusted orange powder from his fingers. It stained his black uniform pants. "I like your mother."

"Uh-huh."

"Does she like me?"

"Wyatt, I know you're desperate, but you can't date my mother."

"That's not why—"

"Officer Payne? Shut up."

I only called him Officer Payne when my patience was running dangerously low. He got the picture. For a few minutes, I listened to the muted bass from the G-Spot, the police radio chatter, and Wyatt's fingers going in and out of the chip bag. He popped the lid on his Diet Coke. The aluminum hissed as carbonation bubbled over and soda spilled into Wyatt's lap.

"Shit," he said, shaking the droplets of processed sugar off his pants. "Can't fucking win."

"You drink that thing, you'll have to piss in an hour."

As Wyatt stared longingly at the can, I swept the scene. I watched the entrance to the Penthouse for a few seconds, checked on Marcy, and gave the entire street a general once-over. Then I started the process again. It was dull work. The minutes felt longer and less important. Wyatt fidgeted, bored in the first half hour.

"So Dumas is looking to promote someone," he said. I had to give it to him. He'd waited a good while before opening his mouth again.

"Yeah, I know."

"Should be happening pretty soon."

"I know."

Wyatt cleared his throat, but there was nothing to clear other than soda. "You up for it?"

"Yup."

"Cool, cool." He nodded, rubbing his palms against his knees. "Me too."

"I figured."

He drummed his fingers. "Detective, huh? Think you can handle that?"

I drew my eyes away from the bar and looked at him in the passenger seat. "Can you?"

"Well, you know, I've been working toward this kind of thing my whole life," he babbled, pretending to check on Marcy through the windshield. "Moving up through the ranks. My dad was a detective by the time he was thirty. That's hard, you know? That's young for a detective's shield, but I want to follow in his footsteps, you know? And, well, you don't really have the same background. You don't know—"

"I don't know what?"

"What it takes."

I continued to look at him. His eyes flickered back and forth from the club to me. I let the hint of a smile touch my lips to freak him out. "How about you let me worry about whether or not I've got what it takes?"

"Sure, sure." He cleared his throat again. "But, you know, no hard feelings."

I captured my lip between my teeth to prevent myself from replying, biting down hard enough to taste the bitter tang of blood. Wyatt thought he was a shoo-in for the promotion, and maybe he was, but it wouldn't be his hard work that got him the job. It would be his connections. The thought tasted worse than blood.

"Sure, Wyatt. No hard feelings."

I scanned the street again. Someone new leaned against the wall opposite the G-Spot, facing the entrance to Penthouse. The person wore a baggy hoodie, but the curve of the hips indicated it was a woman. She hardly moved. She didn't shuffle her feet or shift her weight. She watched, surveying the scene with the same amount of concentration as me. I leaned over the steering wheel and squinted across the street, but the woman's face was hidden by the hoodie. When a man came out of Penthouse, she perked up. He was shorter than me—which was saying something—and clearly inebriated. For a brief second, he harassed Marcy. I tensed up, my knuckles white against the steering wheel, but the man moved on. He lurched along and slipped into the dark corridor alongside the bar. The woman in the hoodie waited long enough to let him get a head start then trailed after him, her stride sober and purposeful.

"Did you see that?" I asked Wyatt.

"See what?"

"That guy going into the alley," I said. "And the woman in the hoodie."

Wyatt propped himself up on the center console to peer over my shoulder, his Cheeto-scented breath hot and moist against my neck. "I don't see anything."

"There was a short guy, totally loaded, and this girl—"

Without warning, Wyatt kicked open his door and jumped out of the car. "Shit! Sheila, we got one."

In front of Penthouse, an oily middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit was waving a stack of bills in front of Marcy and belligerently demanding her attention. The other girls scattered as Marcy pulled a pair of handcuffs from beneath her blouse—how she had room for them in there, I had no idea—and tapped them around the man's wrists with expert ease. As Wyatt and I jogged across the street to finish the job, the men waiting in line for the G-Spot cheered.

"Go get him, honey!"

"Oh, he is delicious in that uniform. Work it, boo!"

I let Wyatt take care of the perp since he was so sure that tonight was his last night as a beat cop. This way, I didn't have to touch the rich guy with the comb over who was practically sweating booze.

"Nice job," I told Marcy. "You okay?"

"Peachy." She flashed a grin and playfully shook her hips. "Wanna take me home, Officer?"

I rolled my eyes. "I think your cover's blown, miss. Let's get out of here."

We followed Wyatt as he led our new friend away from Penthouse and across the street. As I slipped into the driver's seat of the car, I looked back at the alleyway. It was dark and empty. Not even the moonlight touched it.

Chapter Three - Vee

I made it back to my place in Minerva unnoticed. The streetlights were busted in the lower borough. All of them. When the teenagers were bored, they threw rocks. It resulted in shattered glass, broken dreams, and streets darker than the corridors of hell. The blood on my face had dried. I scratched it off in crusty flakes, rubbing the essence of that horrible man between my fingertips. The rest of it weighed down my clothes like cold, wet mud as it congealed. No one spared me a second glance. Or a first one. Minerva didn't stare or ask questions. The borough knew what was best for itself. Keep to yourself. Mind your business. Lock your doors. If a woman walked by you drenched in blood, duck your head and pretend you didn't see anything.

The front door of my apartment building had iron bars on it. The building itself was smack in the middle of the Shithole, or Minerva's business district. Everyone called it the Shithole because that's what it was. The borough's epicenter was a jagged circle of shops and businesses. The corner store sold bail bonds. The gas station was missing four out of five fuel dispensers. Everything was covered in a layer of soot and grime, leftover from a fire that wiped out half of the borough's population a few years ago. Long ago, the Shithole scared me. Now I took comfort in its ability to sweep me under its rug. The rest of Simone City ignored Minerva and everyone in it. No one here existed, so neither did I.

The list of residents next to the building's intercom system didn't have my name on it. People who don't exist don't need their names on intercom systems or to use the front door. I took the back way through the Shithole. The alleys were skinnier here than in Juno, but I squeezed through. Got to my building from behind. Blood from my sweater smeared against the red brick. I wiped it off with the palm of my hand, hoped nobody would look too closely at the smudge in the morning. _Nice plan_ , the voice taunted. _Totally foolproof._ I wiped it again.

Along the side of the building, I got a leg up on a pile of trash to the top of the dumpster. Made a flying leap. Grabbed the underside of the rickety fire escape. I swung back and forth a few times, getting my bearings, then pulled myself up to the actual stairs. A pale face peeked through a window as the metal groaned and complained. I took three stairs at once, gone before the curious eyes could clock me. On the fifth floor, I pried open a window and slipped inside.

My unit wasn't much larger than a prison cell. It was one room, two if you considered the alcove that led to the kitchen door. The bathroom didn't have a door either, but that was because I'd kicked it off its hinges and used it to block the other window. There was room enough for a bed and a desk, but no chair. The desk was set up at the end of the bed so I could sit on the mattress while I worked. Peeling green wallpaper lent the room a sickly tint. The ceiling was stained straw yellow from a leak in the room. Water dripped into a metal trash can below.

I closed the window and jimmied a wooden dowel in it so that no one could open it from the outside. The table lamp was being obstinate again. I turned the switch. The bulb flickered and went out. I turned the switch again, delicately. The lamp turned on, casting stale yellow light across the squalid apartment. I dumped the foul water from the trash can into the kitchen sink. Then, piece by piece, I removed my bloodstained clothing. The shoes went first, clunking to the bottom of the can. Then the hoodie, jeans, socks, and underwear. Just in case.

I lit a match, dropped it in. Lit another. The twin flames started small then reached outward to eat up the stained fabric, meeting in the middle. Smoke rose from the trash can and spread through the room. I moved the dowel and opened the window again. Wafted the fumes toward the outside with an old tech magazine. The fire consumed the clothing, burning the fabric down to nothing then burning itself out. I looked into the can. The hoodie zipper survived. I plucked it out and squeezed the melted hunk of cheap metal between my forefinger and thumb. It seared my skin. I squeezed harder. When my prints on those two fingers were bright red and no longer visible, I placed the zipper on the top of my computer monitor.

In the bathroom, I turned the water in the shower on as hot as it would go. The building's plumbing sucked. In five minutes, the scalding temperature would turn to ice. I stepped in, leaving the shower curtain open. Water cascaded over the lip of the freestanding tub and splashed across the moldy linoleum. It was a small price to pay for visibility of the entire apartment. I preferred mopping the floor to cornering myself behind a transparent piece of plastic.

The water ran red. I soaped up my body. Washed my hair. The water was pink now. I washed my hair again. Scrubbed my skin until it was sensitive and raw. Clear water. Just in time for the sputtering shower head to spit an icy stream at the back of my neck. I rushed to turn it off. It squeaked in protest but gave up save for the ever-persistent drip. Drip, drip, drip. I shook my head like a wet dog, spraying the bathroom, then flipped over and worked a fresh towel through my short hair.

In a robe, I opened the tiny fridge in the kitchen. Wilted spinach, a nearly empty package of prepared chicken, and a single apple. It was time to order groceries again. I took the apple and sat down at my desk, propping myself up with a fat pillow from the head of the bed. I shook the computer mouse, waking the machine from its slumber. The computer was the one thing I owned that mattered. I did everything from my computer. I practically lived in it. I logged into my administrator account, navigated to the order page for a grocery delivery service, and placed an order to tide me over for a couple weeks. Li Hui—the little Chinese woman with an age-defying face who owned the building—let me use her address. Later, a random delivery boy would drop my order off at her door, and Li Hui would walk it up the five flights of stairs to me. It was our tradition.

I closed out of the grocery page and navigated to an online message board. It was a private board—black background, green font—the type of online communications forum that you had to earn a place in. Everything was anonymous. It was improbable, albeit not impossible, to trace the roots of the other users. It also happened to be my main source of finding work. Like my father, I developed a prodigal understanding of technology. That included IT. I put it to good use. People sought me out online and paid me good money to do things that came easily to me. I'd poached usernames and passwords, stolen Social Security numbers, rearranged identities, and managed bank accounts that didn't belong to me. I was good at it too, so good that my customers started referring to me as the poltergeist. I'd turned it into a new username, P0lt3r6315t, and offered my services to a wider demographic. I was virtually untraceable. After all, the police couldn't trace cybercrime, or vigilantism depending on your outlook, back to a dead person.

The last message I received, from a user named P3n173nc3, blinked on the screen. It was a file, a tiny document that contained a grand total of two words when I decrypted it. Phillip Beatnik. I looked at my nails. Dried blood caked along the cuticles. I scratched it away. I wondered how long it would be before they found Phillip Beatnik's body in the alleyway alongside Penthouse Gentlemen's Club. What would the police make of it?

The computer chimed. I had a new message.

P3n173nc3 _: Is it done?_

I typed back. _It's done._

How do you feel?

My fingers lingered over the keyboard, unsure what letters to press. I considered the question. How _did_ I feel about my first murder? I typed four letters. _Good._

P3n173nc3 replied with another encrypted file. I downloaded it and ran it through my decryption software. It was another name. James Honey. The man it belonged to was not as sweet as his surname implied. I crawled across the bed to the bookshelf, where several external hard drives sat stacked next to my humble collection of books and tech magazines. I picked one with a peeling yellow label with "Mom" written on it in faded permanent marker and plugged it into the USB drive. The drive was full of old newspaper articles that I scanned in years ago. The headlines, bold and blatant, screamed inside my head. _Tech Genius Wallace Bauer Gets Life Sentence in Prison for Wife's Murder. Veronica Bauer Officially Declared Dead After Months of Searching for Body. Bauer Tech CFO, John Halco, Takes Over Company._

Not all of the articles were about the end of my parents' legacy. I'd made a point to gather as much information on my family and Bauer Technology as possible. I had an entire terabyte of data dedicated to the Bauers, too much information to skim through visually, but I knew a good place to start. I pulled up a number of articles that covered the Bauer Technology Charity Gala from twelve years ago. Many of them included photos and interviews of the various businessmen who donated significant amounts of money to the cause. I chewed on my apple, scrolling through the pages until I located James Honey's name in the caption beneath a black and white picture. The picture had been taken between two massive gold lion statues that flanked the entrance to the ballroom at Bauer Tech's main building. A group of men, my father at the center, posed for the camera. It must have been taken later in the evening. My father's bowtie was crooked, and many of the men sported glazed expressions from over-imbibing in the evening's spirits. The men were people that my father either employed or dealt with. James Honey was three to the left of my father. He didn't look at the lens. The camera caught him mid-laugh. The arms of his suit jacket rode up to his wrists. I remembered Honey. He was tall and thin, younger than the more experienced men in my father's business. He'd bought himself a way into the technology business then piggybacked off of the success of others. Then, he was known as a serial bachelor, the pretty playboy who dipped his toes in the big boys' pool. Women loved him. It was his laugh.

I looked into what James Honey was up to now. His company was doing well. I expected no less. Honey was married. The woman was taller and blonder than Barbie, but she'd bagged the most notorious bachelor in Simone City, so there had to be something substantial to her. I hoped she was in it for the money. Honey didn't deserve a loving, attentive wife. I found the Honeys' address without issue. They lived in one of the most expensive high-rise apartment buildings in downtown Juno. I hacked into the building's files, found the exact floor and room, and committed it to memory. Then I returned to the message board.

P0lt3r6315t: _Two weeks._

P3n173nc3: _Why so long?_

The rapid click of the keys was always a comfort to me. _Need time to prepare. Want it to be cleaner than tonight's._

You know the deal. Finish one name, you get the next. Until they're all gone.

P3n173nc3 logged off without a goodbye, vanishing into the depths of the Internet. I tossed my apple core into the metal trash can. It vibrated against the twangy aluminum. I lay back on bed and followed the blades of the fan round and round. Then I sat up and consulted a new forum on the message board site.

Need knife recommendations for self-defense. Please advise.

Chapter Four - Sheila

There was a sprinkled donut on my desk when I got to the precinct the next morning. No napkin or anything. The pastry sat right on the laminate wood, sprinkles and sugary flecks of glaze scattered across the keyboard of my computer. I pulled out the desk chair and dusted crumbs off the seat, then sat down, tipped my head back, and heaved a sigh.

"Aren't you going to eat your donut?"

I groaned and opened one eye. "Five seconds, Payne. You couldn't give me five seconds of peace."

He sat on the corner of my desk, the one unoccupied by dessert. "I was trying to be nice. Got you coffee too. Well, it's the free stuff from the break room, but Kev made it this morning, so it doesn't taste like dirty water." He scooched the donut toward me. "So?"

"You know who was sitting on my desk yesterday?" I asked him. "Mickey Miller."

"Who's Mickey Miller?"

"A drunk that I picked up in Venus," I said. "He was sitting on a street corner in a pile of his own vomit. So, you see, even if I did eat processed sugar, I wouldn't eat that donut."

Payne immediately dropped the donut, hastily stood up, and wiped his hands on his pants. "Oh."

I tossed the pastry into a nearby wastebasket. "But it's the thought that counts and you don't think of these things unless you want something from me, so what's up?"

"Hey, there's no ulterior motive here," he said, adjusting the collar of his uniform. "Can't a guy do something nice for his partner?"

I crossed my arms and leaned back in the rolling chair, making it squeak in protest. "Mm-hmm. What do you know that I don't?"

The police captain, Victor Dumas, clapped Payne on the shoulder. "Eavesdropping again, are you, Payne?"

Payne snapped to attention, hands clasped behind his back. "No, sir. Not me, sir."

"At ease, son. This ain't the military."

Victor Dumas was a formidable man. In his mid-fifties, he looked more like an ex-convict than a man in charge of protecting the streets of Simone City. He had a shaved head, a grizzled and pockmarked face, and a permanent five o'clock shadow from his cheeks to his neck that professionalism, or a razor, couldn't contain. His lips were always pursed. Didn't matter the situation or time of day, Captain Dumas's lips always came back to the same bitchy resting place. It gave him a perpetual look of disapproval. The officers under Dumas's command constantly sought verbal praise, as if they needed audio confirmation that he wasn't upset with them. To add to his just-got-out-of-prison look, he had a tattoo of all four suits of Ace cards on his right forearm. Most days, it was hidden beneath the sleeve of his captain's uniform, but when the station was working a particular difficult case, he shed the jacket and cuffed the sleeves for everyone to judge the tattoo. No one asked him about it. No one dared. Dumas, despite his gruff demeanor, wanted his team to be competent and safe, and he worked to ensure those two traits daily.

"What's up, Captain?" I kicked my feet up on the desk and lounged. Dumas's lips deepened their pout. "Got something for us?"

"A question actually," Dumas said. "You two were down in Venus last night, right? Around Angel Street?"

"Yeah, we were outside Penthouse," Payne said. He puffed his chest out as Dumas turned to look at him. "Booked a guy for solicitation."

"Super," Dumas said. "While you were down there, did you notice anything else? Anyone shifty or out of place?"

Something was up. Something had happened in Venus while Payne and I were on patrol. I could tell by Dumas's casual presentation of the question. He wanted a quick, honest answer out of us. If we had information, it was best extracted before our memories made a mess of it. I stood up to close in the triangle of our party, but my height, or lack thereof, didn't afford us quite the privacy I hoped for.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Answer the question, Officer Arden."

"No," I said. "I didn't see anything. Payne?"

Payne shook his head. "No, sir. I—wait a second." He pointed at me. "Weren't you talking about some guy taking off out of Penthouse right before we made that arrest?"

I'd forgotten about the non-incident, the drunk man staggering out of the strip club and down the alley, followed shortly by the mysterious woman in the black hoodie.

"What'd the guy look like?" Dumas said.

"Short," I recalled.

Dumas combed me from head to toe. "How short?"

I pursed my lips to rival his own expression. "Five-three, I'd guess."

"So your height?"

"I'm five-four."

"Congratulations, Stuart Little. Was the guy wearing a blue suit?"

"Yeah."

Dumas squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Aw, fuck."

"What is it?" Payne said. Inch by inch, he moved in front of me, slowly edging me out of Dumas's line of sight. "You got a case?"

"Yeah," Dumas said. "The short guy's Phillip Beatnik. He's dead. Murdered in the alleyway next to Penthouse. You sure you two didn't see anything else? I'm guessing it happened after you made your arrest, maybe during it."

Payne opened his mouth, but I jabbed my first two knuckles into the back of his rib cage, the only part of him that I could reach, and he shut up. "No, sir," I said. "Just the ladies outside Penthouse."

Dumas sighed. "All right, then. If anything jogs your memory, let me know."

"Will do, sir," Payne said. As Dumas walked away across the station, Payne added to me, "I thought you saw some girl follow Beatnik down the alley. That's withholding information, Sheila."

"I said I saw a girl," I replied. "I never said I saw her follow him."

"She could be a suspect."

"Or she was just another Venus lowlife looking for love." I whacked him across the shoulder and sat down at my desk. "Shut up. Dumas is coming back."

"Something else, Captain?" Payne asked Dumas.

"Yeah." The captain sidestepped Payne to reach my desk and tossed a shiny gold shield on top of my pile of paperwork. "I almost forgot. Congratulations, Arden. You've been promoted."

I picked up the detective's shield and ran my fingers across its surface. It was mine. Not Payne's. Not some other officer's. At twenty-nine, I was officially the youngest detective in Simone City.

"Usually, we would have some kind of promotion ceremony for this kind of thing," Dumas said, "but we've got a lot on our plates today. Go see HR to update your information. And get out of that uniform. You've got a suit or something, right?"

I didn't. "Yeah. I mean, yes, sir."

"Good. Oh, and Arden?"

"Yes, sir?"

He planted a hand on my desk and leaned over, his face too close to mine. "Don't fuck this up."

"I won't, sir."

"Good."

He walked away. I sank lower in my chair, staring at the detective's shield. It was a minute or two before I realized that Payne was still standing beside my desk. He, too, made eyes at my new badge, and he wore a similar expression of utter shock.

"I don't fucking believe this," he said.

I clenched the shield tightly between my fingers and slid it into my pants pocket, as if Payne might steal it and claim it for himself. "I thought you said no hard feelings."

"Yeah, that was when I thought that Dumas was going to promote me!"

He towered over me, so I stood, which didn't improve the situation by much. "Are you seriously mad about this?"

"I've been after this promotion for years," Payne said, not bothering to keep his voice low. We had the entire station's attention. It wasn't the first time. Payne and I argued so much on the job we were practically a reality show. "My father—"

"You won't always be able to rely on your daddy to do your work for you."

Payne stepped away like I'd smacked him across the face. "Wow, Sheila. You know, I always knew you were selfish, but I honestly thought you cared about this community. I thought you'd want what's best for Simone City. You know I'm more cut out for this job than you are."

"Why? Because you're a man?"

"Well—"

"Don't answer that." I pushed past him, making sure to lock my shoulder against his so he had to adjust his footing in order to stay upright. The other officers watched as I marched out of the bullpen and down the hallway toward the HR office, but I stopped halfway there to duck into the breakroom. I slammed the door, huffing for breath.

"Bad day, Arden?"

I turned around to find four other detectives—Kaminsky, Sutton, Clooney, and Gadsden—clustered around the water cooler. All men. All wearing nice, professional suits. All cool and composed. In contrast, my hair had escaped from my ponytail and cascaded in messy waves over the shoulders of my uniform, I hadn't ironed my shirt that day, and my face was red and warm from my confrontation with Payne.

"It shouldn't be," Kaminsky, one of the older guys on the force, answered for me as he dunked a tea bag into a mug of hot water. "Arden here just got promoted. She's one of us now."

Gadsden laughed outright. Clooney muttered something under his breath that made Gadsden laugh harder. Sutton gave me a sheepish grin, like a half-hearted apology for the other two's reactions. Kaminsky elbowed Gadsden in the ribs, who coughed into his coffee before excusing himself from the room. Clooney followed him, and both of them cracked up in the hallway.

"Congratulations, Arden," Sutton said with what I hoped was sincerity. He shook my hand. "Sorry about the guys. We're used to this being a boys' club, but I guess we're going to have to clean up our act a bit now, huh?" He chuckled, but I didn't laugh. Sutton cleared his throat. "I'll see you around then."

Kaminsky ripped the top off four packets of artificial sweetener all at once and dumped the contents into his tea. "The wife made me give up coffee. This stuff's unbearable." He took a sip and shuddered. Then he noticed that my shoulders hadn't relinquished my ears since the moment I'd walked in the room. "Listen, Arden. Dumas wouldn't have given you that badge if he didn't think that you could get the job done. Ignore these idiots. It's like Sutton said. It's a fucking sausage fest in here, but I think we could use a fresh perspective." He tossed the entire cup full of tea into the garbage bin and filled another one with coffee. As he passed by, he gave me a gentle bump on the shoulder. "Hang in there, Detective."

After my visit to HR and a few hours of desking, I used my lunch break to comb the nearest department store for new things to wear to work. In the fitting room, I discovered I looked ridiculous in a suit. The shoulders of every jacket were too wide for my tiny frame, and I didn't have the time or money to go get them tailored. The pants were too long, and I hated the black loafers with the slippery insides that made it feel like I was going to take a dive with every step. I dumped my initial choices into the return bin at the front of the fitting room, roved the store a second time, and returned to the fitting room with a few choices I knew I'd be more comfortable in. I settled on a neutral gray button-up, tight black pants that hugged my calves and ankles instead of flopping around like trip ropes, and a pair of black leather boots with a low sturdy heel. I tucked the shirt in, straightened everything out, and took a look in the fitting room mirror.

Detective Sheila Arden looked back. This was better, more of what I wanted. It was a comfortable, practical, professional look, one that said _I may be little, but don't mess with me._ The neutral colors contrasted well with my olive skin, and I left my long dark hair down as a subliminal act of defiance. For years, I wore the same ponytail day after day, even when the weight of it pulled at my scalp and gave me headaches. No more of that. I was a damn detective now, and I'd wear my hair however I liked. I hooked my detective shield to my belt loop. Then I took out my phone and dialed the first number in my Favorites list. The other line picked up.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Mom. It's me."

"My baby!" my mother exclaimed. "I've missed you."

"It's only been a few days."

"And yet I still miss you."

"I miss you too." With the phone pressed between my ear and my shoulder, I folded up my uniform and stacked the pieces on top of each other. I planned on wearing my new outfit out of the store. "Guess what?"

"What?"

"I got promoted."

Chapter Five - Vee

I laid low for two weeks, biding my time and preparing for my next hit. It wouldn't be like last time. Last time, I tracked down Phillip Beatnik on the same night that P3n173nc3 had given me his name, fueled by rage and determination. With the recent headlines— _Juno Businessman Found Dead Outside Venus Nightclub_ —I was all too aware of how sloppy the job had been. There were no prints for the police to discover. I'd been wearing gloves. And no murder weapon. The chef's knife currently rested in the dish dryer next to the sink. And no one had seen me follow Beatnik into the alley that night. Even so, it was important to take precautions. I studied every aspect of my target's life. I hacked the cameras in James Honey's apartment building, the traffic cams on his route to work, and the ones in his office building too. I flagged every single movement he made. I charted out his weekly schedule and noted any deviations. I hacked into his personal computer, found his calendar, and arranged the best time for his homicide.

In the interim, I prepared myself physically. There was just enough floor space in my apartment to do a wide variety of bodyweight exercises. P3n173nc3 wasn't just good for intel. He also had a wealth of knowledge about workout drills you could do within the confines of a small place. I didn't ask where he learned them. I focused on push-ups, pull-up, jump squats, lunges, and other strength-building exercises until I was lean and trim. I jumped rope for cardio. I practiced Tai Chi for discipline and mindfulness. It was Li Hui's idea. Once, when I went to her apartment to drop off my rent for the month, I accidentally walked in on her flow. She transferred from one pose to the next like a wave in the ocean, her entire body moving in tandem. The poses themselves looked like fighting stances, but the process was slowed down.

"I'll teach you," Li Hui had offered. "But you'd have to come out of that room of yours for more than five minutes at a time."

"No, thank you."

That night, I went home and looked up the basics of Tai Chi on YouTube. It took months of practicing footwork, nights of intense frustration and disrupted attempts at meditation. Without a teacher to correct my mistakes, I had to become aware of them myself. Eventually, the movements started to make sense. I thought less and felt more, allowing my body to guide itself through the flow. Now, I practiced Tai Chi every morning. Sometimes, I wanted to tell Li Hui about my journey, to let her know that she inspired a new hobby in me. Then I remembered of all the things I was afraid of, people came in at the top of the list.

On the morning of James Honey's scheduled murder, I finished up a workout, emptied an offshore bank account for an anonymous client, and practiced a few moves with my new collection of knives. The message board community had come through in droves. I was the proud owner of five new blades, though I did not intend to use them for self-defense. My favorite so far was a karambit with a serrated blade. The knife type originated in Southeast Asia and was curved to resemble a tiger's claw. It was less for stabbing, more for gutting and slashing. Irreparable damage. I liked the thought. As usual, I consulted the Internet for lessons then spent hours slicing through the air in practice. There were a few casualties. One of my pillows spilled feathers out of a tear in the fabric and the bookshelf was missing a chunk. My hands and forearms were covered in little scabs and scars from where I'd nicked myself, but there were no more fresh wounds. I hadn't cut myself in days. Improvement was nigh.

A knock on the door startled me as I slashed low around an invisible enemy. Gripping the knife behind my back, I looked through the peephole. A tuft of black hair was visible. Nothing else. It was Li Hui, the only person who bothered to stop by my apartment.

"Hello, cricket!" she said, waving to the peephole. "I can see your shadow underneath the door."

I looked down. Sure enough, the meager light from the overhead fan outlined my bare feet in darkness, betraying my presence. I set aside the knife and opened the door. "Good morning, Li Hui."

She knew better than to try and come inside. I valued privacy above all else, and I paid Li Hui an extra hundred every month to ensure my privacy was never compromised. She carried a number of paper bags, stapled shut. My grocery order for that week. An additional plastic bag with "thank you" printed on it swung from her pinky finger. I relieved her of her burdens. The distinct scent of soy sauce wafted up from the plastic bag.

"This one's yours," I said, handing that bag back to her.

"No, no. For you."

"Li Hui, I told you I don't need you to buy me food." But I set the plastic bag down with the rest of the paper ones. We'd had this argument before. I always lost. "I can cook, I swear."

She squeezed my arm, and I tensed, the muscle jumping to attention. "So skinny," she said. "Eat more." She pointed to the plastic bag. "Special surprise. Chinese donuts." Then she backed out of the doorway and closed my door herself.

"Thank you!" I called through the warped wood.

"You're welcome, cricket!"

I put away my groceries then rooted through the plastic bag. By the looks of it, Li Hui had ordered one of everything off of the China Garden menu. I pulled out cartons of rice, plastic containers of chicken and vegetables, handfuls of individually wrapped fortune cookies, and finally, the donuts. I popped those open first and took a whiff of the sugar-coated, deep-fried goodness. Four donuts later, I noticed that there was something else in the bottom of the plastic bag. I pulled it out, wondering if Li Hui knew it was there.

It was a black face mask.

At eight o'clock, I got dressed for my night out. The occasion called for a new outfit. I intended on being more careful with this one. I couldn't burn all of my clothing after every hit. The new gear was more durable though. Leather motorcycle pants with reinforced padding in the knees and hips. A matching black jacket, the collar of which I'd sewn in a wide hood. Lightweight boots with a decent grip to the sole, ideal for making a run for it. And the mask. No matter how it came to be in my possession, it was useful. It covered my entire face from forehead to chin without impeding my vision. I felt safe behind it. I tucked the karambit into a pocket, checked a few things on my computer, and leapt out the window.

Getting from Minerva to Juno was less nerve-wracking this time around. I kept above the streets when I could. Leapt from fire escape to fire escape. Traveled along roof edges or balconies. Stuck to the darkest corners of the borough. Eventually, I'd need a better mode of transportation. Walking wasn't going to cut it. But I was calm tonight. Not riled up, shaking with anticipation, like two weeks ago. Maybe it was because I was more prepared this time around. Maybe it was because the thrill of the first kill was gone. Phillip Beatnik's face didn't haunt me as I thought it might. It inspired more. Go. Do. More.

At nine o'clock, I made it to James Honey's apartment building. At nine-oh-one, his wife left the building, waved goodbye to the doorman, and got into a waiting car. According to my research, she would attend dinner at The Waterfront with three of her friends and not return home for two and a half hours, three if the group decided to order an additional bottle of wine. When the car pulled off the curb, I ducked around the side of the building and went in through an emergency fire exit that led to a staircase. I started up. It was a long way to the top.

On the thirtieth floor, I caught my breath. Gently opened the door to the hallway. Peered out. There were two doors, one to the elevator and one to the top floor suite. The hallway itself was clear. I left the stairwell, approached the door to the suite, and knocked. A minute or two passed without an answer. Annoyed, I knocked again. The maid answered. Her skin was damp. She smelled of lavender bath oil. The buttons on her blouse were uneven.

"Who are you?" she asked, eyes wide as she saw the mask. "I'm calling security—"

She didn't have time. I dropped her with a quick hook to the temple, caught her before she crumpled. I set her unconscious body on a nearby chair, shut the door, and looked around. The suite gave me uncomfortable flashbacks of my previous life. It was enormous, bigger than all of the houses in Minerva and most of the houses in Vesta. The kitchen alone was larger than my entire apartment. I sniffed the air. Bath oils. The master bedroom was at the end of the hall. I crept toward it, the lush carpet softening the sounds of my footsteps. A man's voice called out.

"Missy? Who was at the door? Not my wife, I hope." The man laughed. Water splashed and gurgled. "Get back in here. We were just getting started."

The master bedroom was empty, but the bed clothes were awry. I followed the man's voice into the adjoining bathroom. The tub sat in the middle of the room, away from any of the walls. James Honey lounged within it, his legs too long for his knees to make it beneath the layer of bubbles. He faced the opposite window, away from the door. He was balding now. The hair on the back of his head was combed in a way to make it less obvious, which somehow made it more obvious. He held a glass of wine in one hand and flicked bubbles off the fingers of his other. I took a step toward him. Then another. And another. Until I stood right behind the bathtub, my shadow flickering in the dim candlelight. James chuckled again, reached back to grasp a part of me that he thought belonged to Missy the Maid. I pivoted away from his touch.

"Oh, we're playing games now?" he asked. "I like that."

"You won't like this game."

By the time James realized that my voice didn't match that of his paramour, it was too late. I wrapped an arm around his neck and dunked his face below the water level. He fought, flailing his arms and legs. The slippery porcelain of the tub fought back. He couldn't pull himself out of the water, and he couldn't find a part of me to grab hold of. I yanked his head free for one quick second. When he opened his mouth to gasp for air, I put him under again, forcing him to inhale bathwater and lavender-scented bubbles instead. I did that again and again, ignoring the way his manicured nails scrabbled at the sleeves of my jacket. When he was properly waterlogged, I finally let him go and lifted my mask.

"James Honey," I said. He choked and sputtered, recognition in his eyes. Half-drowned, he was not the dreamy ex-bachelor that Simone City so adored. "Tonight, you face retribution for crimes committed against the Bauer family twelve years ago. Any last words?"

His throat was raw from inhaling and exhaling water, but he managed to spit out, "Stupid bitch. Should've killed you when we had the chance."

I shrugged and tugged the karambit free from my pocket. "Suit yourself."

James Honey looked less appealing with his throat slashed from chin to collarbone. This time around, I avoided the splash zone. As his blood blossomed like roses on the surface of the bubbly water, I wiped the karambit off on Honey's nearby bathrobe. Two down.

Chapter Six - Sheila

Apparently, hazing was a thing at Simone City P.D. My shield mysteriously vanished my first day on the job. When I admitted to Captain Dumas I had lost it, he walked off to the break room, shouted at someone, and returned with my badge in hand. A few days later, I started getting "secret admirer" letters in the form of singing couriers. They would turn up at my desk and belt out various love songs for the station to mock later. When I started tipping them to shut up, they stopped turning up. The other detectives refused to talk to me. Every time I entered a room, they clammed up and pretended I didn't exist. Kaminsky and Sutton were the only ones at the precinct that bothered to acknowledge me, but even they kept their distance as much as possible. No one wanted to give up the game.

To make matters worse, Dumas assigned me the cases that no one else wanted to work. For two weeks, I rooted out robbers, burglars, and auto thieves. The other detectives were ensconced in their offices, doing the real work in narcotics and homicides and the crime that actually mattered in the city. Most of the time, I was stuck behind my desk doing paperwork. I almost missed being a beat cop. At least I was able to get out of the station for some fresh air more often.

On a Friday morning, I had just finished following up a lead on a domestic abuse case. Payne and I had gone after the guy together, cornered him where he'd been hiding out at his ex-wife's house, and brought him back to the station. I held open the door for Payne as he maneuvered our guy inside.

"Get him to booking," I said. "Then report back to me. I think there's more to this one than meets the eye."

Payne shoved the guy into the station. "You book him. I've got work to do."

This was another side effect of my promotion. Payne was being a complete jackass about it. He questioned my every move and never did what I asked of him on the first request. On the upside, he'd finally stopped hitting on me.

" _You_ book him," I hissed. "It's your job, and if you question my authority again—"

"You'll what?" he said. "Tell Captain Dumas?"

He knew I wouldn't. Telling the captain about any of this was equivalent to admitting defeat, and I'd already humiliated myself enough with the whole missing badge thing. "Listen to me, _Officer_ Payne. I am your superior, and I suggest you do as I say unless you want to be working night shifts from here to eternity."

The guy in handcuffs gave Payne a look. "Your mom's mean."

"Shut up," Payne said, jostling the perp. He didn't respond to my threat, but he walked the guy to booking without further argument.

I almost returned to my desk, but the pile of paperwork next to my computer taunted me from afar. Usually, when a beat cop got promoted, their desk was moved from the bullpen to another, quieter area of the station down the hall, a collection of cubicles that belonged to the precinct detectives. According to Dumas, they were trying to free up some space back there for me, but I suspected that this was yet another gag to keep me out of the club. It was petty and childish. A bunch of lawmen shouldn't act like fraternity brothers.

I squared my shoulders and strode down the hallway, intent on making the other detectives talk to me, but none of them were at their desks. Tara, one of our assistants, walked by with a tray of coffees.

"Tara, where are the other detectives?" I asked her.

"In a meeting. Conference room. It started five minutes ago."

"And why wasn't I fucking invited?" I muttered under my breath as Tara walked off to deliver her coffees. The conference room was at the back of the detective quarters. I paused near the door to listen.

"So we've got another homicide on our hands?" Kaminsky was saying. Everyone was there, including Captain Dumas. I was the only detective that had been excluded. "We're still trying to track down a lead on Beatnik's case."

"Any luck?" Dumas asked.

"No, sir. No fingerprints or murder weapon, and all the blood on site belonged to the victim."

"I find it hard to believe someone knifed a guy that many times and got out of there unnoticed," Dumas said. "Who's this James Honey guy anyway? Sutton?"

Sutton's chair squeaked as he leaned forward to flip through a file on the conference table. "James Honey. Forty-five. Looks like your average Simone City multi-millionaire. He's a businessman. Works in tech."

"Doesn't Honey live in one of those high-rises near the lake?" Clooney said. "He was killed in his own bathroom. There's gotta be security footage of the perp somewhere."

"Not from the building," Sutton said as he checked his notes. "The apartment complex reported having trouble with their cameras from eight o'clock to ten o'clock last night. All but one shorted out. We have a split-second glimpse of someone in a black mask in the south stairwell of the building. The nanny confirmed it was the same person who showed up at Honey's suite around nine-fifteen."

Clooney chuckled. "Are we sure it wasn't the nanny who killed Honey? Wouldn't be the first time something like that's happened, right?"

"She was unconscious at the time of Honey's death."

"Or so she says."

"What about the wife?" Kaminsky said. "Say Honey was cavorting with the nanny. Wife gets home early, sees them together, clocks the nanny over the head, and kills her husband."

Sutton, who apparently worked the homicide, consulted his notes again. "The wife has an alibi. She was at the Waterfront Restaurant with three of her friends. A number of people saw her, including the table's server. She didn't return home until eleven o'clock, well after SCPD already showed up."

"So the wife's out," Dumas said. "Anyone else got beef with Honey? This guy used to be a playboy, right? Any psycho ex-girlfriends out there? Wronged women?"

"Of course, it always has to be a psychotic wronged woman," I muttered as the detectives continued their discussion. "Bunch of misogynistic asshats can't come up with another theory."

"What the hell are you doing?"

I jumped. Payne had snuck up behind me. I drifted away from the conference room. "What are you doing back here?" I said. "I thought I asked you to get our mutual friend to booking."

"And then you asked me to report back to you," Payne reminded me in a grudging tone. "Which is what I'm doing now." He looked over my head into the conference room. "Are you eavesdropping?"

I pushed against his chest to shove him out of the detective quarters and down the hallway, but he didn't budge. "No. Mind your own business."

"Wait, wait, wait. Is that everyone in there?" He laughed. "Are they meeting without you?"

"No! They just—"

"Just what? Sent you on a coffee run?" He doubled over, wheezing with laughter. "Oh, man. This is too good. You know, I'm glad I didn't get that promotion. At least I'm actually working. You've basically been demoted. Tell me, Arden. What's it like going from beat cop to secretarial assistant?"

I stormed past him. "I fucking hate you."

"Oh, don't go!" he said, _still_ laughing. "Captain Dumas needs you! How fast can you type, Arden?"

I left the office in a huff. I needed a break from it all. Payne's stupid laughter echoed in my head. I wanted to deck him in the face, but it was the underlying embarrassment of not being included in the detectives' meeting that really bothered me. Why did Dumas promote me if he wasn't going to let me work on the important cases that landed on his desk? I thought I'd already proved myself worthy of this job, but maybe Dumas didn't see it that way. What more could he want when he kept assigning me the shittiest cases?

I got in my car, turned off the radio, and just drove. I cruised around the block a few times, passed by the shops at the waterfront, and stopped at a food truck to pick up a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Ten minutes later, I found myself parked outside my mother's house in Vesta. She lived in one of the less Stepford-ish neighborhoods, in the same house that I'd grown up in. It was small but cute, with yellow paint and a swing on the front porch. When I arrived, she was sitting on the swing, using her foot to propel herself back and forth.

"This is a nice surprise," she said, patting the empty seat next to her. I sat down, opened the pint of ice cream, and handed her a spare spoon. She let me have the first bite. "Mint chocolate chip, huh? Must have been a hard day."

"It's been a hard two weeks." I shivered as the ice cream melted on my tongue. In the shade beneath the porch, the spring temperature was quite cool.

"You mean ever since you got promoted?"

"Yup."

She tucked my hair behind my ear and patted my cheek. "I was wondering why you never came over for that celebration dinner we talked about."

I jabbed at the ice cream with my spoon, not eating it so much as destroying it. "I didn't feel like celebrating."

"What's going on?" Mom asked. "You should be over the moon about this job. It's what you've been working for since you were seventeen."

Twelve years. That was how long it had been since I'd strolled into my mother's bedroom at this very house and declared to her that I wanted to be a detective. Not just a cop, but the person in charge of hunting down criminals who thought they could get away with the hurt and the pain they inflicted upon others. I graduated from high school early, went to college to get a degree in criminal justice with a minor in psychology, and got right into Simone City's Police Academy by the time I was twenty-one. I had been with the force, working with the same guys, for eight years. Now, all of a sudden, I was a pariah. This wasn't what I had worked so hard to accomplish.

"Honey?" Mom said, patting my hair again. "You still with me?"

"Yeah, just thinking." I handed her the pint of ice cream. "How did you deal with the church when you got pregnant?"

She chuckled. "Are you comparing detective work to an unplanned, sinful pregnancy?"

"It wasn't sinful."

"According to them, it was," she reminded me. She dug through the ice cream to collect a spoonful of chocolate chips. "At first, I was ashamed. I felt enormously guilty for betraying my promise to God, but I had to stop worrying about that stuff and start worrying about you. The health of my child was my number one priority. My order also cared for you before you were born."

"But they kicked you out."

She nodded and went in to hunt for more chocolate chips. "They did, and rightly so. My relationship with your father was ongoing. I exhibited a pattern of behavior that implied I was no longer dedicated to the church. Originally, they gave me the option to return to the order after giving birth to you, but that also would have meant giving you up for adoption."

"Do you ever regret not doing that?"

"Not a day in my life." She capped the pint and set it aside. "You are my religion, Sheila. I love you every day. Just because something doesn't work out the way you expect it to doesn't mean it's the end of the world. You're living proof of that. So what's going on at work that feels like the end of the world?"

"It's not quite so dramatic," I said. "There's a big homicide investigation going on, and Captain Dumas has intentionally kept me out of it. I guess he thinks I can't handle it yet."

"Do you think you can handle it?"

"Absolutely. Cases like this are why I became a detective in the first place."

Mom smacked my thigh. "Then put on your big girl pants and get yourself in the ring."

"It's not that easy."

"Who says?" she pushed. "If you've got enough time to come visit me in the middle of the day when you should be at work, then you've got enough time to put in a couple hours on that homicide case. Get your hands on the information and get to work."

"None of the guys have found any leads on either murder," I told her. "I'm just starting out. How am I supposed to do this without their help?"

"Honey, you keep forgetting the most powerful weapon in your arsenal." She leaned forward, as if she were about to impart some great secret, winked, and said, "You're not a guy."

Chapter Seven - Vee

James Honey's murder was so clean that I arrived home without a speck of his blood on my hands. Literally. Like before, I felt free and alive. I slept through the rest of the night without waking once. Two of my mother's torturers were dead. There were eight more to track down. I didn't remember much from that night. P3n173nc3 knew more than I did. If he was telling the truth, he knew all ten names of the men who were there that night. Whoever he was—if he even was a he—he had inside knowledge of the Bauer family tragedy. Did I trust him? Not entirely. That's why I fact-checked the names and dove into my murky memories to root out physical markers of the men I intended to kill. This wasn't a blind revenge scheme. It was an odyssey, one without a finite finishing line. The ten were a personal crusade, but there were other men in Simone City repeating the same crimes. They, too, needed to face justice. In the morning, after cleaning the karambit to make sure nothing remained of James Honey on its blade, I logged in to the message board.

P0lt3r6315t: _Success._

P3n173nc3 was away from his computer, but he was never far. I lay back on my bed and tossed a knife into the air to practice catching it by the handle. The moonlight caught its reflection in the shiny blade, sparking with every revolution of the knife. I dropped it twice, rolling to one side of the mattress or the other to avoid the sharp edge. It thumped harmlessly against the bedspread.

My computer chimed. P3n173nc3 sent a file, then immediately went dark again. I frowned. He wasn't a chatty fellow, but he was usually good for a quick conversation. I tried not to dwell on it, hoped he wasn't in trouble, and downloaded the file. This time, I recognized the name as soon as it was decrypted. Karl Murphy. My stomach turned. I clenched my torso, containing the queasiness. I remembered Karl Murphy. He was one of my father's investors and a close friend of the family. His wife was my mother's best friend. I used to babysit their kids, Charlie and Lindsey, when I was a teenager. I'd been to their house. I'd eaten dinner at their table. I'd _prayed_ with them before the meal was served. Karl Murphy bowed his head, took his wife's hand in one and his son's in the other, and delivered a prayer to the Lord in thanks for the food on the table and the money in the bank. The hypocrisy of it all made me sick. Did Karl Murphy go to church the day after he helped rape and murder my mother? Did he ask for forgiveness? Did God come through?

I consulted my hard drive and found Karl Murphy next to my father in multiple photos. His wife, Christina, was always at his side, and he always had a gentle hand on her waist or elbow. They were a good couple. They complemented each other. Each of Karl's bow ties matched the color of Christina's dresses. Occasionally, they brought the kids along if the event was age appropriate. I found a picture that was taken at Simone City's concert hall, where the city orchestra played famous scores from various movies while the actual scenes were projected on a giant screen behind the band. There were Karl and Christina with my father and mother. There I was, holding Charlie, who was about two years old at the time, in my arms, and Lindsey, who was four, by the hand. Karl Murphy had his hand on my shoulder. I dragged the photo to the trash bin, almost dumped it, and thought better of it. This was fuel for my fire. I zoomed in on Karl's face. The longer I stared at it, the more I hated Karl Murphy. I hated his half-smile, the way his lips only turned up at one corner, as if he couldn't muster the energy to complete the expression. I hated the gray streak through his sideburns in his otherwise black hair. I hated the minuscule patch of stubble he'd missed near the corner of his mouth whilst shaving. But most of all, I hated that, when I searched his name for recent information, he was still living in the same enormous house in Vesta with his happy family and his happy life and had not faced any retribution for the pain he'd caused to his supposed best friend. Tonight, that would change.

It was the longest day of my life. That included the day after my mother's death. I couldn't wait two weeks to kill Karl Murphy. I didn't have the patience to space out my targets like that. The only reason I'd waited that long between Beatnik and Honey was to refine my process. All of this was easier than I thought it would be. Maybe it was because these men never expected for their deed to come back to haunt them. Their privilege kept them safe, but that was coming to an end. Privilege wouldn't protect them from me.

I trained for most of the day, throwing knife after knife at a corkboard that I'd hung on the wall. Some of them stuck, but most of them clattered to the floor. I picked them up or pried them loose and tried again. Hours later, when the sun began to sink toward the horizon, ninety percent of the knives embedded themselves in the corkboard. Satisfied, I finally collected them all and locked them away. I hadn't eaten all day, too consumed by my practice. It was six o'clock. Around seven, the Murphy family would sit down to pray and eat dinner. I bet Karl Murphy never forgot to eat.

I waited until dusk turned the night purple. Then I got dressed, pocketed the karambit, and left the usual way through the fire escape. I left the throwing knives at home. Until I could throw them with one hundred percent accuracy, I wouldn't employ them. Accidentally leaving a weapon behind would give Simone City's incompetent police department a clue to my existence.

Karl Murphy and his family lived in one of Vesta's wealthier neighborhoods. In Vesta, the closer you were to Juno, the more expensive your mortgage was. The richest people lived right on the border of Slickwater Lake with private docks and enormous speedboats. As you made your way outward, away from the city center, the income level dropped. The quality of living steadily declined, but the rundown houses at the edge of Vesta were palaces compared to the places people called home in Minerva.

As usual, I kept to the shadows and the alleys, where I belonged. With each passing night outside my apartment, I grew stronger and more confident in my ability to go unnoticed. I slipped around corners and ducked into doorways to avoid anyone out late. For those who were too quick, I hid my face beneath the hood. From afar, I looked like the average motorcyclist running a late-night errand. Minus the motorcycle. A motorcycle, though, was an interesting thought.

Naturally, Karl Murphy lived in one of the giant houses on the lake. It was too big for four people. I stopped playing hide and seek with the kids when I lost Lindsey for two whole hours, only to find her in the closet of a guest bedroom I hadn't known was there. The yard was enormous too, bordered by the picture-perfect white picket fence. Years ago, the Murphys owned a dog called—wait for it—Murphy, a purebred German shepherd who was fiercely protective of the property but gentle with the children. As I vaulted over the fence and encountered no resistance, I assumed Murphy had retired. However, the Murphys had installed motion-activated outdoor lights that sprang to life as soon as my boots touched the lawn. If any one of them looked out the window, they would see me highlighted in the high beams. Crouched over, I dashed along the fence line and darted behind a row of bushes in the tastefully arranged landscaping. With my hands and knees in the dirt, I crept toward the house, where two windows were lit along the side yard.

The first window showed an after-dinner scene in the Murphys' kitchen that was too cookie-cutter, after-school special to be true. Christina washed dishes in the sink while Karl dried them. Every so often, Karl attempted to swat Christina with his wet dish towel. She giggled and flicked soapy water at him in her defense. They were the same people from twelve years ago. Karl put on the same charade as the happy husband with no hidden skeletons in his closet. Their children, more than anything else, symbolized the passage of time. In the next window over, Charlie and Lindsey lounged in the living room. Charlie, now fourteen, played a video game on the big screen, reclining on the floor, while Lindsey did her homework on the sofa, her laptop perched on her knees.

The scene shifted in the kitchen. Christina finished up the last of the dishes, dried her hands, and pointed her husband to the trash can. He rolled his eyes, collected the overflowing garbage bag from its home, and tied up the ends. Christina poured herself a glass of wine and joined her kids in the living room. She tapped her cheek as she passed her husband, and Karl placed a kiss on the requested area. Christina passed from window to window and sat next to Lindsey on the big leather couch. She smoothed her daughter's hair as Charlie took down a squadron of enemy soldiers in his game. For the Murphys, it was a normal, peaceful night with the family. For me, it was a tear in my soul. Karl deserved his impending fate, but his family didn't. Christina was seconds away from losing her husband. Charlie and Lindsey would lose their father. They would face a mental pain that could not be rivaled by much else, and they wouldn't sleep until the killer was caught. That pain would be on my conscience, but my conscience was a quiet presence compared to the vindication that would follow.

The front door opened and shut, signaling Karl's exit from his home. He would never return to it. He dragged the trash bag around to the side of the house with one hand. The white plastic stretched and bulged, threatening to tear as it bounced across the grass. Karl, busy with a phone call, didn't notice.

"I can't come tonight," he said in a hushed whisper. "No, I can't. My wife wants me to spend time with her." He paused to allow the other speaker time to reply. I strained to catch the voice, but the rustle of the breeze through the bushes disguised the other end of the conversation. "What am I supposed to do, baby? She's my wife."

I rolled my eyes. Were any of the men in Simone City loyal to their spouses? Karl pried the lid off the garbage bin with his elbow and began to lift the bag inside, but it tore before he could get it there and spewed trash across the impeccable lawn.

"Mother fucker," he said. "No, not you, baby. I have to go. I'll see you later. Yeah, tomorrow night. Maybe." He hung up, pocketed the phone, and bent over to gather the trash, tossing it into the bin with ferocious annoyance. "Piece of shit bags. Why don't they make them sturdier?"

I stepped out of the bushes, the karambit in hand. With one slash, I took out both of Karl's legs from the back. He fell, clutching at his hamstrings, blood pooling amongst the trash. When he rolled over and saw me, his mouth opened to yell, but I stuffed a wad of balled-up paper towels between his teeth. I yanked him upright and dragged him to the living room window.

"Do you see that?" I hissed in his ear. Inside, Christina, Charlie, and Lindsey enjoyed their evening. "Do you think you deserve the very thing that you deprived me of, Karl?" He choked on a gasp through the paper towels, confirming his guilt. I traced the knife around his throat. "You squander the thing you should value most. A loving family. Remember that as you're bleeding out."

The karambit slashed, and I dropped Karl in the grass. I fished his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911. When the operator answered, I left the line open but didn't say anything. They'd show up anyway. I didn't do it for Karl Murphy. He was already dead. I did it so that Christina or Charlie or Lindsey, whichever one of them came to check on him first, didn't have to be the ones to find his body. This was his retribution. Not theirs.

Chapter Eight - Sheila

"Arden!"

I straightened when I heard Dumas bark my name, accidentally kicking a cup of pens off my desk as I put my feet back on the floor. The cup hit the floor and rolled, spitting Bics across the tile like miniature projectiles. Dumas caught one beneath his shoe and picked it up. I clicked out of several windows on my monitor. Dumas didn't need to know that I was snooping through the articles on the latest Simone City homicide. Yet another big player in the business world, Karl Murphy, turned up dead in his own yard last night. That made three of the city's wealthiest residents dead in two weeks, and it was the second murder in two days. Our killer, whoever it was, was ramping up his agenda.

Dumas put the cup on my desk and replaced the single pen. The others remained on the floor. "Pick those up before someone trips."

"Yes, sir. Did you need something?"

"You got access to the case files on the recent homicides?"

I made direct eye contact with him. "Did you give me access to the case files on the recent homicides?"

"No."

"Then I don't have access."

The irritation in my voice tipped him off to my mood. Halfway on his way to sitting on the corner of my desk, he thought better of it and did an awkward skip to keep himself upright. He straightened his tie. "I'll send you the password," he said. "I want you to have a look at everything we've got."

"Why me?"

"Because everyone else is stumped," Dumas said. "No one has any idea where to start, and this guy's dropping bodies left and right. Did you see the news? Got a fresh corpse in the morgue from last night."

"Gutted again?"

"Yup. Right across the throat like the others. And a nice slash to the back of each leg."

"So our perp likes knives," I mused. "That means they're getting up close and personal with the victims. Some kind of personal vendetta?"

Dumas actually sat down on my desk this time. Three lines appeared between his brows. The beat cops called it Dumas's "triple threat." It meant he was either incredibly focused or incredibly pissed off. "What makes you say that?"

"The perp isn't killing these guys from far off," I explained. "If he's getting that close to the victims, it's because he wants them to know who's killing them. I have a feeling all three of our dead guys knew exactly who murdered them."

"But there's no connection," Dumas said. He stole the rainbow stress ball off my desk and passed it between his hands. "Other than the fact that the victims are rich businessmen from Juno. What, we got a killer Robin Hood out there or something?"

I snatched the stress ball out of the air in between Dumas's tosses to himself. "Could be. Simone City is infamous for neglecting its lower boroughs, and the separation between classes isn't getting any smaller. Maybe this is modern-day vigilantism."

"See, you're helping already," Dumas said in a tone of voice that suggested he might award me with a sticker of a gold star as if I were a five-year-old learning the alphabet and he was my kindergarten teacher.

I pinched the inside of my cheek between my teeth to check my tongue. "Unfortunately, sir, I can't offer any further insight. I'm swamped. Got a string of robberies downtown that needs seeing to."

"You wanna work robberies over a trio of homicides?"

The man was truly clueless. "You assigned me the robberies, Captain."

"And now I'm assigning you the homicides," he countered.

"I thought the upper-level detectives were working these cases," I said. I wasn't sure why I was pressing the situation. This was what I wanted. Dumas was finally handing me a case that I could sink my teeth into, and I was fighting against it. "Why would you hand them off to me?"

"Like I said, we could use a fresh pair of eyes."

Payne walked by on the way to his desk, interrupting our conversation. "Morning, Captain. Anything good?"

"Never," Dumas said. "But we can use you too. You're with Arden on the Switchblade case."

Payne contained a sneer in my direction. "The Switchblade case?"

"That's what we're calling it from now on." Dumas glanced from me to Payne. "You got a problem with that, Officer?"

"No, sir. You call the case whatever you want."

"I meant with your leadership."

Payne's eyes flickered toward me. I grinned and reclined as far back as the plastic rolling chair would allow. Payne said to Dumas, "No, sir."

"Good. Get to work. Arden, I'll send you those files as soon as I get back to my office."

"Yes, sir."

The captain strode off, leaving the two of us behind to duke it out. Payne wouldn't face me, and his shoulders rode up to his ears.

"Hey, Payne," I said.

"What?"

"Pick up those pens before someone trips."

I spent the day picking over the case files and assigning Payne to useless work. While I pored over the details of Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, and Karl Murphy's deaths, Payne ran out to get coffee, made copies of the paper files, and ran out again for sandwiches from the nearest deli. By the end of the day, we were both at the end of our ropes. Payne was ready to rip my head off for making him my errand boy, and I was ready to rip Payne's head off purely because I needed to rip someone's head off and he happened to be in the immediate vicinity. There was nothing in any of the files to indicate that the three homicides were related to each other. The killer seemed to have pick them at random out of Juno's wealthiest. I had to consider that maybe this wasn't the work of a single hand, but it was too much of a coincidence for all these murders to bear similar marks and occur within weeks of each other. Worse still, there was no indication that the killer or killers intended to stop. At the end of it all, Simone City was in danger, and someone needed to bring this guy down before he hurt anyone else.

Payne was unlucky enough to be working the night shift, so I left him at the precinct and went home with the copied case files stuffed into a briefcase. I lived in an apartment building near Simone City College in Venus, where I'd gone to school. After completing my degree, I stayed in the area. It wasn't a bad drive to work in Juno. My mother's house was far enough away so as to not impede on my independence, but close enough for me to keep an eye on her. It was a decent part of the borough, not quite as rowdy as the streets near Penthouse and the G-Spot, but not so nail-bitingly quiet as most of Vesta. The tenants in my building were mostly students, but since the apartment was right across the street from the college's biggest library, it attracted a more dedicated type of scholar. I liked the collegiate feel of the hallways and that I was mere steps away from an esteemed educational institution with loads of research options. More than once, I'd returned to the library to work on a case for Dumas. As I drove by it, I considered stopping in to take another look at the case files, but my stomach growled and demanded food.

"Hi, Minnie."

My black cat, Minnaloushe, greeted me when I opened the door, bounding over the sofa and chattering like a happy dolphin. He wound himself around my legs. I dropped the briefcase on my desk, shook off my jacket, and opened the fridge in the kitchen, all while Minnie weaved in and out below, never compromising my step. I popped open a can of cat food and set it down for him. He meowed happily and dug in.

"Yeah, I know what you're really after," I said, nudging him aside. "And it's not my affection, is it? Enjoy."

For myself, I heated up leftovers from last night and sat at my desk to eat them. It wasn't long before the contents of the briefcase were spewed out in a disastrous pile. Hours passed as I read through everything again. Minnie came by for a scratch but abandoned me when he realized I was too distracted to pay him any attention. I drank a cup of coffee around eleven, wired until two in the morning. I couldn't let this go. There had to be something to connect these attacks, and I was going to find it.

Around three am, when my eyelids felt like someone was attempting to sew them shut, I finally found something. I'd abandoned the case files hours ago in favor of the Internet, clicking through pages and pages of useless information on the three men who'd been murdered. Eventually, it paid off. I came across an article from twelve years ago.

"Dumas!"

I raced into the detective's quarters, brandishing a stack of papers I'd printed out last night at my apartment. I knocked into Gadsden's desk, and a full cup of coffee toppled over into his lap.

"Shit, Arden! Are you kidding me?"

"Not really sorry," I called over my shoulder. It wasn't like Gadsden didn't deserve a hot beverage spilled across his crotch. I skidded into the captain's office. "Dumas, I found something."

Dumas looked up lazily from his computer, lips pursed.

"I mean, sir."

"What is it, Arden?"

I slapped the papers down on his desk and spread them out. "I looked up Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, and Karl Murphy last night. It turns out that they do have something in common. All three of them attended the Bauer Technology Charity Gala twelve years ago. I found their names on the list of attendees and several photos of them at the actual event."

The captain squinted at the papers. His glasses sat, obsolete, in an organizational tray in the far corner of his desk. He preferred imperfect vision to being seen with nerd goggles on. "So?"

I shuffled the papers around and pointed to another headline. "This was the same night Vivian Bauer was found dead in her apartment, and their daughter disappeared."

"Again, so?"

"So don't you think it's strange?" I said. "That all three of these men had connections to Bauer Tech? Each of them has been photographed with Wallace Bauer, and now they're turning up dead. Sir, this could be the key to figuring out who the killer is."

Dumas rifled through the materials, examining the pictures and the articles before he collected the papers and tapped them into a neat stack. "Wallace Bauer is serving a lifetime sentence in prison, Arden. I put him there, remember? That case was open and shut. Vivian Bauer is dead. Veronica Bauer is dead. Bauer confessed to killing them." He flicked the stack of papers. "All these men ran in the same circles, and they still do. Of course they'd all have gone to the gala. Bauer was the biggest name in business back then. Hell, it still is."

"What do you mean?"

He handed me the papers and returned his gaze to the computer, losing interest in our conversation. "After Bauer went to prison, John Halco took over the company. He rebranded everything, but it's no secret that the tech and the money and the success is all Bauer's."

"Halco Industries used to be Bauer Tech?"

Dumas nodded. "Halco was CFO for Bauer Tech and Wallace's best friend. Guess they came up with a plan to keep the business from going down without Bauer."

"So someone's targeting Bauer's business contacts then. Did Bauer and Halco screw a bunch of people over when they transferred ownership of Bauer Tech?"

"I'm sure they did, but you're barking up the wrong tree, Arden," said Dumas. "Like I said, the Bauer drama ended when I put Wallace in prison. This isn't related."

I shook the article with the gala's guest list printed at the bottom of the page in Dumas's face. "Someone's hunting down the names on this list, sir, and I'm going to find out who it is."

"Go with God."

Chapter Nine - Vee

I gave it a week before looking into P3n173nc3's next name, Kyle Fisher. I needed time to let the SCPD cool down. It was irresponsible to go out every night, especially after my two-in-a-row streak with James Honey and Karl Murphy. At this rate, I could snuff out all ten men who were involved with my mother's death in a matter of weeks, but did I want to? I wondered if the remaining seven had caught on to the pattern yet, if any of them realized they were next on my list. I hoped they sweated in bed at night, drenching the sheets, hyper aware of every creak of the floorboards and scratch at the door. I hoped they looked over their shoulders in the streets, kept their phones gripped in tight fingers with 911 on speed dial. I hoped they knew fear, that it was a constant companion of theirs, whispering paranoid thoughts in their ears like personal demons from hell. And I hoped that all ten of them would eventually find hell.

In my spare time, I worked on getting my hands on a motorcycle. Legally purchasing a vehicle when your given name rested somewhere in Simone City's "deceased" list was no mean feat. I hired a twenty-year-old Minerva local to visit one of Juno's BMW dealerships. He paid for the bike in total, rode it off the lot, and parked it at our agreed-upon location. I never saw his face, and he never saw mine, but I transferred enough money to his depleted checking account to keep his questions at bay. All of the money, including the payment for the bike, checked out. It came from an account that I'd set up under an alias, one that I could access whenever I needed it. Yet another perk of being the prodigy of the biggest name in the technology business.

Every night, I took my new ride out in the middle of nowhere to practice. When I was younger, I rode dirt bikes with the boys instead of horses with the girls like my mother preferred, but the sleek, matte-black speed bike had more horsepower than I was used to. The basics came back to me quickly, and it wasn't long before I pushed the speedometer to its limits on Minerva's loneliest backroads. If the police managed to catch on to my trail, I could easily outrun them.

Li Hui let me park the bike in her private garage. She didn't ask what I needed a motorcycle for if I never left my apartment, but she did give me this knowing look that instilled a fraction of anxiety in me.

"I hope you know what you're doing, cricket," she'd said as I covered the motorcycle with a drop cloth to keep it hidden amongst Li Hui's junk. I nodded and smiled.

Other than the bike, I continued to make advancements in other areas of my new profession. I modified the leather pants and jacket by sewing knife sheaths along the thighs and sleeves. Now I could bring along more than just the karambit, and every blade remained within easy reach. I practiced drawing each one a million times. The drywall in the apartment was destroyed from knives that missed the corkboard. Li Hui was definitely keeping my deposit.

When I finally sat down to track Kyle Fisher, I went into it with the same cool mindset as with the previous three targets, but when I turned up a picture of Kyle Fisher, my blood ran cold. I could not mistake the shape of that man. Not his ridiculous height or broad shoulders that bullied me into submission. Not the long, cold fingers that pressed my cheek against the floor of my family's apartment. Not the waist that straddled mine and locked me in place. Not his eyes, blue and cold, taking in a sight that didn't belong to him. Kyle Fisher was the nightmare that haunted me. He was the man I wished I could set fire to and watch burn, and he deserved a special kind of death.

I hacked into Fisher's private computer with relish. I wanted to dismantle his life piece by piece, slowly but surely. I could empty his bank accounts, ruin his relationships, and make his life a living hell, but it wouldn't be enough. I needed to watch as his heartbeat stopped, as his blood gushed from his veins. I wanted him to see my eyes and my face as he held on to the last thread of his life. I clicked through his digital life, digging for an opportunity, and found one. Kyle Fisher planned to attend the Simone City Hospital Fundraiser this Saturday. It was at the performing arts theater downtown, where the biggest names in Simone City paid thousands for a single ticket to benefit the hospital. The fundraiser included a catered dinner and a night at the ballet, and I was going to go.

It wasn't quite the takedown I originally planned, and neither were the preparations. First, I created a new identity for myself, Amelia Benson, and added her to the event's guest list. Then, I ordered a ball gown from Juno's finest dress shop, e-mailed my measurements, and had the dress delivered to a nearby post office. I sent the same kid who'd bought my motorcycle to pick it up since he was more than happy to make another quick buck. Then I ordered a long, jet-black wig.

On the night of the event, I got dressed, did my makeup, and put on the wig. With the concealer and the fake eyelashes and my own hairstyle hidden beneath another, Veronica Bauer, or Vee, was unrecognizable. The scarlet gown fit perfectly, though I hadn't missed the cinched waists and squashed breasts that came standard with such attire. The train of it swished across the ground behind me. Not a problem for the marble floors at the performing arts center, but certainly an issue for the dirty alleys of lower Minerva. I put on a long trench coat that covered most of the dress's extravagance, gathered the train up in a handful to keep it above ground, and walked to a secluded corner along the border of Minerva and Vesta. From there, I called a private car, and when I climbed inside, I pretended I'd come from one of the nicer houses along Vesta's edge rather than the utter wreckage in Minerva.

"You look beautiful, miss," the driver said. "I assume we're heading to the fundraiser?"

"Yes, sir."

We made eye contact in the rear-view mirror, and I tore my gaze away. My heart pounded against my rib cage. I stopped breathing, realized it, and deeply inhaled. I wasn't ready for the challenge of tonight. I hadn't been around this many people or attended an event since the last Bauer Tech Gala. I hadn't socialized with Simone City's elite class or raised a pinky finger to drink a cup of tea or legally consumed alcohol in public. Now, I was going to do it all _and_ murder someone in the process.

The anxiety grew as the private car joined the line of its fellows outside the performing arts center. I considered telling the driver to forget about it, to take me home, but Kyle Fisher's stupid face flashed in my mind. He was here, inside, and he was going to die tonight. When the driver opened my door, I stepped out, thanked him with a generous tip, and joined the crowd heading up the steps and into the arts center.

"Name?" said the woman at the door, hardly glancing up from her tablet as she digitally checked guests off one by one.

"Amelia Benson."

She scrolled through the list and tapped on a checkmark. "Welcome to your night at the ballet, Ms. Benson. Enjoy."

I walked right in. The crowd was so thick and colorful that no one would ever spot me. On the downside, that meant locating Kyle Fisher would be just as challenging. Lucky for me, his ticket was electronic. Earlier, I'd accessed it through his email and gotten his seat assignment for the ballet. Then I'd shifted some seats around and positioned myself three rows behind him, close enough to keep an eye on him during the performance.

It was a long night. The pre-show appetizers and cocktails dragged on and on. I kept to the edge of the room, nursing one glass of champagne for a solid two hours, and hunted for my target. There was no sign of him among the masses. Paranoid, I used my phone to consult the guest list. Kyle Fisher had checked in at the door. He was here somewhere, in the very same room.

"I love your dress!"

I found myself face to face with a woman around my age. She hung off the arm of her date, a man in an Armani suit who looked bored despite the fact the ballet hadn't begun yet. I looked behind me to make sure the woman wasn't addressing someone over my shoulder.

"Who, me?" I asked, gesturing to myself with the champagne glass.

She giggled. "Yes, silly. Oh my gosh, turn around, would you?" She piloted me in a circle and gasped when she saw the gown's daring low back. "Wow, I wish I could pull off something like that."

Her own gown was gorgeous but modest with long lace sleeves. I tried to think of something that a normal person might say in this situation and went with, "You could."

The woman shook her head. "No, no, no. I'm not that audacious."

I beckoned her forward as if to share a secret, and she leaned off of her date's arm to catch my reply. "Audacity is learned. Be bold. Make a statement. Wear what you like." I withdrew from our bubble of supposed secrecy. "After all, life is short. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've just spotted my husband across the room, and he appears to have fallen into too interesting of a conversation with one of the pretty ladies serving hors d'oeuvres. I must demand his attention at once." I disappeared into the crowd, leaving the woman behind with a confident gleam in her eye.

The short exchange loosened me up.. The wig and makeup were doing their job. No one suspected Veronica Bauer walked amongst them. At long last, a bell chimed to indicate everyone should take their seats for the show. I followed the crowd into the theater, sat down, and waited. Three rows ahead, Kyle Fisher's seat and the one next to it remained empty. I fidgeted, clutching the program for the ballet between sweaty fists. I stood and sat multiple times to allow other guests to find their seats in my row. After the fourth or fifth time, Kyle Fisher was suddenly there in his own seat, his arm around the shoulders of the woman next to him. He faced her, and I caught sight of his profile for the first time. Shaved head. Sharp, pointed nose. Thin lips that whispered against his date's ears. My stomach flipped over as she laughed at something he said and kissed his thin lips. She gave herself to him voluntarily now, but would the sentiment hold firm later?

The lights dimmed. The director lifted his baton. The music started. The dancers took the stage. I did not take my eyes off of Kyle Fisher for an hour and a half. Near intermission, he whispered in his date's ear and got out of his seat, ducking low as he escaped his row. I clenched the armrests, knuckles white, head turning slowly to clock his movement. I'd give him a ten-second head start, so it didn't look like I was following him when I got up.

Ten, nine, eight—

I shifted in my seat. The holster around my thigh, which held the one and only knife I'd brought with me, pinched my skin.

Seven, six, five—

The music crescendoed. The ballerinas pranced across the stage.

Four, three, two—

I lifted myself from my seat. That's when I saw her. The gorgeous, dark-haired woman in the devil-blue dress with the thigh-high slit, standing next to the closest exit of the theater. She was petite, somehow short in four-inch heels. And she was staring right at me.

One.

Chapter Ten - Sheila

I clocked the woman in the red dress as soon as she walked into the arts center. She was familiar, though I was sure I'd never seen her dark hair or elegant features before in Simone City. She arrived alone, unusual for a social event like this one, and kept to the outskirts of the room. While everyone else got drunk on refills at the open bar, she kept one glass of champagne with her for the entire first half of the evening. I was so focused on her that, at one point, Payne elbowed me in the ribs.

"You're supposed to be keeping an eye out for the killer's potential targets," he said. "Not checking out the competition."

Much to Captain Dumas's chagrin, I hadn't dropped my hunch about the killer's involvement with Bauer Tech. Over the last week, I'd narrowed down the hundreds of names on the charity gala guest list from twelve years ago to a group of twenty, excluding Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, and Karl Murphy. These were the men who were closest to Wallace Bauer, personally or financially. If my hunch was correct, they were also the ones with the highest probability of getting knifed by Simone City's new assassin. Every one of them was in attendance at the ballet tonight. I wasn't sure if the killer was bold enough to pick one of them off at such a public event, but I also didn't want to take any risks. Since keeping an eye on twenty men within a crowd of two thousand wasn't something I could do on my own—I could barely see above the heads in the crowd—I brought Payne along as backup.

Payne shoved a glass of wine into my hand. "Here. Stop fidgeting. We're supposed to be blending in, remember?"

I accepted the glass and took a sip, wincing at the sweetness of the wine. It was a Moscato or a Riesling, something far too akin to fruit juice for my taste. Payne, in contrast, chugged his and set the empty glass on the tray of a passing server.

"Man, can you imagine going to events like this on the regular?" He watched a woman in a racy black gown. "I'd friggin' die."

"Not used to the tux, huh?" I asked him, standing on my toes to get another glance around the room. One of the guys on my list, a man whose bottled black hair didn't match the color of his gray mustache, stood by the server's entrance. Each time a server emerged with a fresh plate of hors d'oeuvres, he picked several off the tray before the poor girl could make the rounds. I nudged Payne. "There's Rene Rogers. He was on the board of directors at Bauer Tech. He's sitting in row F, seat 36."

Payne studied Rogers. "He's acting like he's third-world level of starved. You think his wife feeds him? Oh, look—that's what's-his-face, isn't it?"

I craned my neck, but it was no good. Payne rolled his eyes and surreptitiously lifted me at the waist. Across the room, another potential target checked his coat. "Carlton Cohen," I said as Payne set me down again. "Row D, seat 25. One of Bauer Tech's shareholders."

"Yeah, I know," Payne said. "He holds a hefty portion of Halco Industries, right?"

"Did you actually read the notes I gave you?"

He shrugged, snagged a crab roll from a passing server, and popped it in his mouth. "You asked me to help out with the case," he mumbled around the food. "That's what I'm doing. I am a good cop, you know."

"You're usually so busy dicking around that I forget sometimes. Especially lately."

"Sorry."

It was the best apology I was going to get out of him. Hopefully, this was the end of his ridiculous grudge against me for winning the detective position over him. I pointed to another man. "Clifford Burton. Row H, seat 43."

"Did you memorize their ticket stubs?"

"And a map of the concert hall," I said. "Once we get in there, I want to have eyes on all twenty of these guys. It's good to be prepared."

"Speaking of prepared." Payne's eyes raked the full length of my body, from my elaborate braid to my black stilettos. "I didn't know you owned a dress like that. Hell, I didn't know you owned a dress at all."

"Don't judge a woman by her preference for pants," I said. "Besides, I bought this off the sale rack at the mall yesterday, so don't get too excited."

His gaze lingered at the top of my thigh, where the silky blue fabric split to showcase my smooth tan skin. "Totally not excited. Okay, maybe a little excited."

He reached out to touch, but I smacked his hand away. "I'm your superior, Payne. We work together. Don't forget that."

He cleaned up well too, but his sleek black tux, smoldering eyes, and perfectly coiffed hair did nothing for me. For fuck's sake, he was still Wyatt Payne. He pouted, drained a second glass of wine, and gobbled another crab roll.

"Tell me again why we have to pretend to be on a date?" he said, whining as if he hadn't held my hand on the way in and kept close to my side ever since.

"Because we're not technically supposed to be here."

"Dumas didn't clear this?"

"That depends on your definition of 'clear.'"

"Arden!"

I shushed him as other guests turned in our direction. "Can you not blow our cover? If anyone finds out that the cops are on the lookout for a murderer here, this whole place will go up in chaos. And then who will save the kids with cancer?"

"Everyone's already paid for their tickets, Sheila."

"Still, keep your mouth shut."

He leaned over to compensate for our height difference and said, "If I get fired for this, I'm taking you down with me."

"Relax, Payne. No one's getting fired."

"You know Dumas only gave you the promotion because he wants to see you fail."

Apparently, I was wrong. Payne was still nursing his bruised ego. "What are you talking about?"

"Didn't he tell you?" His voice had that sneering laugh to it that I hated, the one that implied he was hiding his own insecurities from himself and everyone around him. "You and I got the same score on the detective's test. He could have hired either one of us, but you were so eager that he was determined to put you in your place. He knows you can't do this. You won't solve the Switchblade case, and you won't solve any others either."

"I wish everyone would stop calling this the Switchblade case since the killer clearly isn't using a fucking switchblade."

"What?"

"The causes of death on the three victims weren't stab wounds or slashes," I said. "They were rips. The killer used a curved, serrated knife, not a fucking switchblade."

Payne watched me with a stunned expression. "That wasn't in your notes."

"And it wasn't in Dumas's either," I said. "Or Kaminsky's, or Sutton's, or Gadsden's, or anyone else's, but the _fucking morgue attendant_ knew and no one except me bothered to ask him any further questions about it." I took a deep breath, stifling the tantrum that threatened to erupt. Blowing up at Payne wouldn't help at all. It would give him more ammunition. Proving him wrong, demolishing his argument, was more satisfying. "I was the one who figured out that all three men were connected to Bauer Tech somehow, so do me a favor, Payne, and shut the fuck up."

My profanity, however hushed, was beginning to gather attention. The ballet guests looked around for the source of the foul language, but when their eyes landed on me, dainty and delicate in blue, they couldn't match the offensive words to the sweet face. I smiled at each of them in turn, and they returned to their own business. Payne was too stupefied to taunt me further. Overhead, a bell rang.

"Let's go," I said, looping my hand around Payne's elbow. "It's almost time."

We followed the crowd into the concert hall, but when Payne tried to lead me to our seats, I jerked him back.

"What?" he said.

"We're not sitting down."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Because I can't see everyone from a seat." I tugged Payne against the wall near the door to let everyone else flow by us. The concert hall was built to angle downward toward the stage. We were at the center of the room, where I had a visual on almost every seat. The mezzanine overhead would keep us in shadow during the show, so it was unlikely that anyone would notice we were standing there. One by one, I pointed out the men on my list. "Cohen, Burton, Rogers, Holloway—"

"I can't believe we're not sitting down," Payne grumbled, crossing his arms as he leaned against the wall.

"This is a stakeout, Payne. Not a date."

The guests gradually took their seats. As they did so, I spotted the woman in the red dress again. She sat a few rows from where I stood, her gaze trained on something in front of her. I traced her line of sight and found—

"Kyle Fisher."

"Who?" Payne said.

I nodded toward the tall man with the shaved head. His seat was level with our position. "Right there. I originally crossed him off my list, but I'm having second thoughts."

"Why?"

The lights dimmed, and the crowd hushed. I looked at the woman in the red dress, whose eyes had not left the back of Fisher's head. "Just a guess."

An hour into the performance, Payne doubled over, clutching his stomach. "Oh, God," he groaned. "Something I ate didn't agree with me."

"Probably a combo of too much white wine and all of those crab rolls," I said. He was turning green. I took a step back. "Payne, get out of here if you're going to hurl."

He made a break for the exit, clapping a hand over his mouth. I slumped against the wall of the concert hall. These heels were not doing me any favors. The circulation in my toes had completely cut off, and we weren't at intermission yet. For the next half hour, I switched from standing on one foot to the other. Payne didn't return. Indisposed, I guessed.

Right before intermission, Kyle Fisher stood. He wriggled out of his row, doing his best not to disrupt the other guests watching the ballet. He nodded politely to me as he ducked out of the theater. I smiled back. Then I looked at the woman in the red dress. She shifted, planted her palms on either armrest as if to lift herself from her seat as well, but when she looked at the door Fisher disappeared through, she found me instead. For a split second, we stared at each other, unblinking. Then the woman settled in her seat again, crossed one long leg over the other, and watched the rest of the performance. Her gaze never wavered from the stage.

A few minutes later, when the lights went up for intermission, Fisher had not returned from his bathroom break. I slipped out of the concert hall before the rest of the crowd and waited for the woman in the red dress to exit. Most of the guests hastened to the restrooms or to the bar to refill their drinks, but when the woman emerged, she strode purposefully through the crowd and up the stairs to the mezzanine. I followed her at a safe distance.

The woman beelined for the balcony on the second floor, where the arts center held fashion shows and other outdoor events during the warmer seasons. She never faltered or looked around. Several glass doors led to the balcony. She glanced through each one until she found what she was looking for. Several paces behind her, I steadied my gait and slipped behind a large stone bust to stay hidden. I peered through the glass door at my side for a glimpse of whatever the woman was staring at. Kyle Fisher stood on the balcony, smoking a cigarette.

The woman hiked the train of her dress all the way up to her thigh and drew a knife—one with a curved, serrated blade—from a holster there. She twisted the handle of the balcony door, blade at the ready.

"Hey!" I shouted, sprinting down the corridor and trying to free my shield from beneath my dress at the same time. "Freeze! Officer—Detective Sheila Arden. You're under arrest!"

She booked it. One second, she was halfway through the door to the balcony, and the next she was tearing down the corridor toward the emergency exit. How she ran that fast in heels, I had no idea. I kicked mine off and raced after her. The emergency exit led to a less extravagant set of stairs. The woman's hurried footsteps echoed upward, and I caught a flash of her red dress whipping around the corner. I took the steps three at a time and leapt the last five to the bottom. There were two doors. I kicked open the one that led outside, but there was no hint of a woman in red fleeing across the well-lit streets of Juno, so I burst through the one that led into the main room of the arts center.

It was full of ballet guests, waiting for intermission to end. The place was wall to wall with suits and dresses of every color. The woman had vanished, lost in the crowd.

Chapter Eleven - Vee

Careless. That's what today's mission was. That woman, the detective, was too close. I underestimated Simone City's police force. From what the news reported, they had no leads on the murders around Juno, but if that were true, what was Detective Sheila Arden doing at the ballet? Coincidence, maybe, that she had turned up there, but there was a reason that she had been standing by the door of the concert hall rather than enjoying the performance from an actual seat. The biggest problem was that she'd seen me. We looked right at each other, and I'd stared for longer than I should have because there was something familiar about the shape of Sheila Arden's face. Like I'd seen her before. I didn't know any of Simone City's detectives personally, not even the one who'd put my father in prison. By that time, I was already dead.

I was furious. With myself mostly. Kyle Fisher continued to smoke carelessly on the balcony above, alive, and Arden had my face burned into her memory. I slipped through the crowd in the main hall, positioning myself near other women in red dresses. Behind me, Sheila Arden stood at the doors to the stairs. There were too many people for her to separate me from the crowd. Exactly what I wanted. But the rest of the ballet guests were beginning to filter into the concert hall for the second half of tonight's performance. If I struggled against the current of people, Arden would spot me, so I followed along with everyone else before ducking out a side door and into the night.

The breeze from the waterfront chilled the skin of my back. I was rethinking my choice of dress now, wishing I'd picked one with more fabric up top and less around my feet. The train brushed along the concrete as it followed me like a stray puppy, picking up dry leaves and dirt. I gathered it up and darted down the stone steps of the Arts Center. I didn't call for the car to take me home. I couldn't leave while Kyle Fisher watched the performance with his date inside, alive and well, so I crept along the side street, looking for a place to sit and wait. The Arts Center sat on a major intersection in Juno, right across from the lake. The waterfront restaurants, including the Waterfront itself, were bustling with those who couldn't afford a ticket to tonight's concert. I contemplated getting a table and waiting for Kyle Fisher with a drink and appetizers, but I'd already pushed my luck far enough this evening. Detective Arden had probably alerted her coworkers to my presence already. It was better if I remained in the darkness.

I ended up on a windowsill of the office building adjacent to the Arts Center. The windows were dark. Everyone had left for the day. I was safe on the second floor, high enough above street level that no one would notice me unless they decided to admire the stars. I had a decent view of the main exits of the Arts Center, but it didn't matter anyway. Earlier, I'd hacked Kyle Fisher's phone and enabled the GPS tracking application. From my own phone, I could see where he was in real time.

The second half of the ballet was worse than the first, though perhaps this had something to do with the fact that now I was waiting outside the Arts Center instead of in the concert hall with everyone else. The little green dot that represented Fisher on my screen remained in the same place. Around ten o'clock, when the performance was due to finish, it began to move. The doors to the Arts Center opened and vomited its crowd from within. People surged across the stone steps, some to waiting cars, others to the restaurants and bars. Some remained in the Arts Center's courtyard to mingle and avoid the eventual return to their homes. Fisher's dot moved swiftly. My eyes darted from the phone screen to the front of the Arts Center, hoping to match Fisher's virtual self with his real one. The green dot stopped moving. I watched it for a full minute before it began traveling again. Finally, Fisher appeared on the steps with his date. He flagged a car down, but when he opened the door, the woman protested. They argued before she conceded and got in the car. He did not join her. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she turned away, so he closed the door and patted the window. As the driver joined the line of traffic trying to get away from the Arts Center, Fisher looked up and around. His eyes skimmed over the alley where I was hiding, but his gaze made me uneasy. Why hadn't he gotten in the car with his date? Surely he wouldn't pass up the opportunity to take her home with him. I imagined that was the whole point of this evening for him anyway. Why else would he sit through the entire performance? It wasn't because he harbored a secret interest in ballet.

Fisher buttoned his coat and walked up the street. He lived in an apartment that way, not far from the Arts Center. It was a quick drive, but a lengthy walk. I clambered out of the windowsill and slid down the gutter. I splashed into a puddle of leftover rainwater in the street. It drenched my dress. I picked up the soaked hem and circled around the back side of the Arts Center. Fisher had a head start, but with the GPS device, he couldn't lose me. I knew the alleys and side streets better than the main ones. I crept from shadow to shadow, picking up speed in the less conspicuous areas of town. A sweat broke out along the hairline of my wig. I scratched my scalp, wishing I could ditch the disguise, but to leave anything behind would give Detective Arden a leg up in her investigation.

Fifteen minutes into the slow chase, Fisher turned off the sidewalk of the main road and onto a side street. Nearby, I paused to catch my breath and consulted the GPS to keep track of him. He was heading away from his apartment for no apparent reason, but he grew closer and closer to my position. Whatever his reasoning, it provided me with the opportunity I needed. The narrow side street was deserted. I tucked the phone away and waited, my back scraping against the brick wall of my cover building. Around the corner, Fisher clumped noisily along the side street. Heavy, dragging footsteps. Different than his usual brisk stroll. Drunk, probably.

I let him walk past me. At least, that's what I told myself. In reality, being in such close proximity to him made me weak. My hands shook. My body shivered. My brain shut off. If it didn't, all of the memories would come flooding back. The things I'd spent over a decade trying to forget. I couldn't suppress them for long. As he passed my hiding spot, the sight of his shoulders, the back of his head, and his hands stirred the maelstrom of emotions waiting to get loose inside me. I took the karambit from its holster and stepped out of the shadows. Fisher paused. He planted his Italian leather loafers shoulder-width apart, but he did not turn to face me.

"I knew you would follow me tonight," he said.

The voice. His terrible, terrible voice. How I hated it.

"A detective pulled me aside before I left the ballet and warned me about you," he went on. "But she didn't have to. Ever since Beatnik turned up dead two and a half weeks ago, I was wondering if you would find me. Then you took down Honey and Murphy, and I knew that you would."

Slowly. Purposely. He turned. The toes of his loafer pivoted against the street's grime. His eyes raked over me. The red dress with the dirty train. The plunging neckline. Every inch of my exposed skin. He looked at me as if I was his. As if I belonged to him. As if he had finally come to claim what he hadn't been able to entirely consume when I was fifteen.

"Look at you," he murmured. He kept his hands in the pockets of his coat. "You're even more beautiful than your mother was."

"Don't you dare talk about my mother."

He nodded in acquiescence. "Okay. Let's talk about you then. How do you intend to kill me?"

"Slowly," I said, gripping the handle of the karambit tighter. "So that you drown in your own blood."

Fisher smiled and glanced at the blade between my fingers. "You're going to take me down with that little knife?"

"It's what killed Honey and Murphy. Not big enough for you? I can run home and find something larger if you prefer."

He smirked. "I see your sarcasm is still intact after all these years."

"You should run," I advised him. "I'm going to kill you anyway, but the chase is part of the fun."

"No, no," he said, clicking his tongue. His hand rustled in his coat pocket. "I don't plan on turning my back to you. In fact—" Swiftly, he drew a gun from his coat. "I've been waiting for us to come face to face."

He pulled the trigger before I registered what it meant to be standing on the wrong end of the barrel. The shot was muted, no louder than a car backfiring. The bullet punched into my stomach. I staggered backward. The knife dropped out of my hand and clattered to the street. Blood spilled across the front of the dress, darker than the red of the fabric. It didn't hurt. Probably a bad thing.

Kyle Fisher dipped his arm around the curve of my back. He lowered me into the street, fingers digging into my spine. The pavement was cold, but the blood wasn't. It pooled beneath me, soaking through the dress. I stared up at the moon, bright white, centered between the two buildings that bordered the alleyway. Exhausted. Hurting. Helpless. Fisher tugged up the hem of my dress, and I felt his fingers on the insides of my thighs.

I exploded. Everything hit me at once. The searing pain in my abdomen. Fisher's hands between my legs, then and now. His hips on mine. His blue eyes staring at me with the same unabashed determination from the first time.

"No," I gasped, pushing his face away from mine as he tried to kiss my neck. "Not again."

"You can't fight this, baby." He groped at my stomach and pressed an intentional finger against the open wound. My moan of pain seemed to spur him on. He lay across me, his weight pinning me against the cold street. "Just let it go."

"No," I said again, but it was barely a whisper. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. He crushed me beneath him. My fingers scrabbled against the pavement, connected with something cold and metallic. Slippery with blood.

Fisher groaned. "Here we go, baby."

With my last ounce of strength, I plunged the karambit into the side of Fisher's neck. Blood spurted. I pulled the blade out. Blood gushed from the artery there. He clapped both hands to his neck and rolled aside. Off of me and onto his back. I blacked out.

Chapter Twelve - Sheila

"Shitty morning, eh, Detective?"

I rubbed my eyes and tried not to look at the black tarp that covered Kyle Fisher's body in the middle of the bloodstained alley. "You could say that, Diaz."

Despite my vigilance, Simone City's assassin had killed again. I had warned Fisher that this might happen. I caught him on his way out of the ballet and told him that he was likely to be next on the hitman's—or hitwoman's—list. The dumb idiot told me not to worry, that he was going to hop in a car and go straight home. Stupidly, I believed him. Now, here he was, dead in an alley with a knife wound to the neck.

Diaz, the CSI guy with the friendly smile and warm demeanor, patted me on the back. "Try to take it easy. We're all a little stumped on this one."

"Thanks, Diaz."

A cloud shifted overhead to reveal the sun. I shrugged off my jacket and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt. It was the first hot day of the year in Simone City. Sweat beaded around my temple and dripped down the sides of my neck. The bright sunshine mocked my raging headache. I felt sticky and warm all over from the humidity. Last night, I had to drive Payne home from the Arts Center since he'd been vomiting too much to get himself back to the precinct. Afterwards, I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling to keep the image of the mysterious woman's face fresh in my head. I'd reported my encounter to whoever was on duty at the precinct, but with so many women in red dresses in attendance at the ballet, there wasn't much our beat cops could do. Whoever she was, she'd hit her next target. I promised myself it would be her last. I was going to figure out who the hell she was, and I was going to bring her in to make sure she never killed again.

"Looking a little rough there, Arden," Dumas said, creeping up behind me. He pursed his lips at my rumpled collar and the dark circles around my eyes. "Hangover?"

"No, sir."

"Are you sure?" he said. "I heard there was an open bar at last night's event."

"Payne told you we were there, didn't he?"

"This morning when he called out sick. Should I be worried that my newest detective and one of my beat cops are engaging in less than professional activity with each other? I'm pretty sure that's a matter for HR."

I scoffed. "Me and Payne? Come on, Dumas. That's gross."

He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Whatever you say, Arden."

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. "Aren't you going to yell at me for going to the ballet?"

"You did it for your investigation, right?" Dumas asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Did you find anything out?"

The moment in the hallway by the balcony played through my head. The woman in the red dress taking the knife out, watching Kyle Fisher with the intensity of a falcon hunting its prey.

"Yeah, I did," I said.

"You gonna share with the class?"

I folded my arms, the suit jacket tucked between them. I wished I could put it down somewhere, but most of the alley was drenched in blood. "I need some time to piece everything together in my head, but I'll let you know as soon as I figure anything out."

"Alrighty, then."

He strolled off to talk to one of the CSI guys, but I called after him, "Where's Kaminsky and everyone else?"

Dumas looked over his shoulder at me. "You identified the next hit before it happened, Arden. That makes you the only person who's had any luck with this case. Congratulations. You're leading the investigation now."

Kaminsky was going to be pissed. Sure, he was supportive of me on my first day a few weeks ago, but that was before I'd stolen this case out from under him. My second thought was pride, just a little hint of it that tweaked my lips upward in a brief smile. Then Payne's words from last night about Dumas waiting for me to fail crashed through my brain. They weren't true, right? Dumas knew that I was a good detective. Otherwise, he wouldn't have handed over the biggest case in Simone City to me. Or maybe that was exactly why he had done it, to prove that I wasn't capable of handling it.

Diaz offered me a water bottle. "Drink this. You look like you're melting. You should get some air for a few minutes."

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, uncapped the water, and took a long, refreshing swig. I nodded my thanks to Diaz, who gave a casual salute in reply. He was right. I needed a break from the macabre scene in the alleyway.

"I'll be right back," I announced to no one in particular. No one replied, busy with their work. I stepped out of the side street and onto the main sidewalk, where the breeze swept my sticky hair away from the nape of my neck. I combed through it with my fingers and closed my eyes, but the image in the alleyway wouldn't leave me alone for long. My brain worked to fit all of the puzzle pieces together. The blood pooled on the ground, smeared across the street, and splattered on the walls. After a few minutes, something clicked. I walked back into the alley and bumped Diaz's shoulder.

"Hey, did the vic have a gun on him?"

Diaz checked his notes. "Nope. Why?"

"Because he wasn't the only one who got injured here last night." I led him along the alleyway. "We've been thinking that all of this blood is Fisher's, right? But check this out. There are two different patterns. Fisher went down here—" I pointed to the pavement "—and bled out pretty quickly, but over here—" I led Diaz a few feet away "—this is someone else's blood."

"You think?"

"You're CSI." I said. "Shouldn't you know? Check out the splatter here. That's from a gunshot wound, not a stab wound. And there were two pools of blood, one for each body."

Diaz examined the stains on the pavement. "Anyone who loses that much blood is dead without medical treatment, but where's the other body? I don't see a trail leading out of here."

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out," I said, kneeling down for a closer look. "Get some samples of this to the lab. If this blood belongs to the Simone City killer, then we can identify her."

"Her?"

"Yeah," I said. "Her."

Sometime later, I sat at my desk in the bullpen to scrutinize the photographs of the crime scene, but people kept coming up to me and interrupting my thought process. Word had spread that Kaminsky was no longer in charge of the case. Some officers congratulated me while others made joking comments that I should watch my back if Kaminsky got pissed. Kaminsky himself was nowhere to be seen, but Gadsden and Sutton showed up at some point. Gadsden hung back, poorly disguising a sneer, while Sutton walked up to my desk.

"Hey, Arden."

"Yeah."

"I figured I'd help you out," he said.

That got my attention. "What makes you think I need help?"

Sutton raised his eyebrows. "You probably don't from what I've heard, but it doesn't hurt to have multiple eyes on the same case."

"Fine. What have you got?"

"Coat check from last night's event," he said, handing me a purple sticky note. "The girl working it said someone forgot to pick theirs up. Name was Amelia Benson."

I took the note. "We have a name?"

"And possibly DNA," Sutton said. "I picked up the coat this morning. There was hair on it."

"Did you get it to the lab?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Thanks, Sutton."

"Anytime." He and Gadsden left together.

I was more excited than I'd let on. Between the blood and the hair, the lab should be able to identify the killer. For the hell of it, I Googled Amelia Benson. An obituary popped up. The woman in question had died three years ago at the age of twenty-seven in a car crash in Venus. Before that, she worked at Simone City hospital, the same hospital that sponsored the charity ballet every year and invited all of its employees to the event. Our killer had used a fake identity to get tickets.

"Whatever," I muttered, clicking out of the windows. "I've still got your DNA, Not-Benson."

"Detective Arden?" It was the secretary, Beth, this time. She tapped the monitor of my computer with one long pink nail. "They told me to tell you that the lab results are up on your case."

I logged into the police database and clicked my way through the case files until I found the new results from the lab. When I opened them up and saw the name they'd matched the blood to, my heart stopped.

"No way," I said aloud. "That can't be right."

"Veronica Bauer," Dumas read aloud off his computer screen. We were in his office with the door closed. I'd forced him to take this meeting with me, unable to sit at my desk and process this information on my own. "Arden, Veronica Bauer is dead."

"Not according to these lab results," I said. "Apparently, she was in that alleyway with Kyle Fisher less than twenty-four hours ago. Apparently, he shot her, and she killed him."

Dumas leaned back and massaged the bridge of his nose with a deep sigh. "Arden, I don't know why I have to tell you this, but someone who is _legally dead_ would not be able to stab someone else in the middle of the night."

"Then how do you explain this?" I asked.

"The lab probably screwed something up. It wouldn't be the first time. Got a couple incompetent idiots who work down there."

"Dumas, I'm telling you, we have to take this seriously. It makes sense, doesn't it?" I flapped the files in his face, trying to get him to sit up straight. "I already told you that I thought this case was connected to the incident with the Bauers. If Veronica's alive—"

"She's not," he barked. He straightened up so quickly that I recoiled away from him. "Her mother is dead. Her father's in prison. And Veronica Bauer died the same night."

I studied his furious face, the furrowed brow and the pursed lips. There was a reason, something that had to do with the Bauer case, behind Dumas's vehemence. He silently screamed for me to let it go, to leave his office without pissing him off any further, but I wasn't going to give this up so easily. "How do you know?" I asked him. "How do you know she's dead if her body was never recovered?"

The red faded from his face. "Do you know something I don't, Arden?"

"No. No, sir, I don't."

Chapter Thirteen - Vee

I wasn't dead. That was a plus. I woke up in my own bed, in my own apartment, with no memory of how I'd managed to make it back there. The morning sun struggled to penetrate the dirt on the window, casting dusty yellow streams across fresh sheets that I didn't remember changing. In the kitchen, bacon sizzled in a pan, and the scent of freshly ground coffee beans floated around my pillows. Someone else was here. One of my knives rested on the nearest bookcase. I stretched toward it, but a sharp pain crested through my abdomen, and I let out a suppressed squeal of discomfort. In the kitchen, whoever was cooking set their utensil on the counter. Quick, light footsteps pattered toward me. I lunged for the knife, biting on my lip to keep quiet, and grasped the handle of the blade. A small face peeked around the weathered molding of the kitchen alcove.

"Li Hui?"

The little woman gave a flimsy wave with a greasy spatula, her face half hidden behind the wall of the kitchen. "You are okay, cricket?"

Everything came back to me all at once. Following Kyle Fisher out of the ballet. Confronting him in the alleyway. Stabbing him in the neck. Blacking out because he shot me. _He shot me._ I yanked up the blankets and checked the wound. My torso was wrapped in clean gauze. The bloodied and torn dress was nowhere to be found.

I looked up at Li Hui. "Did you do this?"

She nodded and shuffled toward the stove to finish cooking. As she rustled around with breakfast plates and coffee mugs, I wrestled with what to ask her about last night. I pressed lightly on the spot above the gunshot wound and winced. It was painful but not unbearable. Li Hui emerged from the kitchen with a plate piled high with eggs, bacon, muffins that she'd made from scratch, and a ton of fruit. She set it on my lap and placed a cup of coffee on the bookshelf beside me.

"Eat, eat," she said. "You need your strength."

I shuffled around, trying to sit up straighter. Li Hui motioned for me to lean forward and stacked the pillows to support my spine. As I ate, Li Hui watched with a keen eye. When I reached for the coffee cup, she got to it before me and placed it in my hands.

"How did you find me?" I asked her. "How did you know where I would be? Did you take me to a hospital? Tell me you didn't take me to the hospital."

Li Hui raised a hand to stop my babbling. "I know more than you think about you. What you do in the night."

My skin prickled. I set down my fork. "What do you mean?"

She gestured to the row of knives on the bookshelf and the motorcycle gear draped over the foot of the bed. "You are her. The woman killing the men on the news."

The bacon in my stomach threatened to reappear. My skin was damp and cold. "I don't know what you mean."

She rested her hand over mine, but I jerked away. "It's okay, cricket. I don't judge you. I wish you safe. I wish you here where I can keep an eye on you."

"You gave me the mask," I recalled. "After the first time, you gave me the mask in the takeout bag. I wasn't sure if you meant to or not."

"I meant to."

"You know who I am."

"Yes, I do," she said. "You are Veronica. Or you were. Are you someone new now?"

I swallowed hard, unaccustomed to hearing my name spoken by someone who actually cared about me. I didn't want to hear it. Veronica Bauer was a different person. She was a scared, broken teenager. Furthermore, she was dead, and I didn't want anything to do with her. "You can keep calling me Vee. Or cricket. I don't mind either."

She took my hand again. This time, I let her pat it with her soft fingers. "You are always cricket to me."

"Where'd that nickname come from anyway?"

Li Hui smiled. "You are small but mighty, like cricket."

I smiled back, a genuine one that stretched the muscles of my face into a shape I was no longer familiar with, but the expression quickly faded. "Why haven't you called the police yet?"

"Because you have a story," she said. "And I want to know the story. Juno police don't come to Minerva anyway."

"They would if they knew I was here."

"Tell me story."

Li Hui was the only constant in my life, the only person I pretended to depend on. All this time, she knew I wasn't the person I claimed to be, and yet she allowed me to rent a room in her building. She'd saved me from either death or incarceration, and all she wanted in return was the truth. I didn't trust her. Not because I didn't believe her, but because I didn't trust anyone. It was no longer in my nature to do so, but it had been so long since I'd confided in anyone, and Li Hui proved herself by getting me home safely.

"What do you want to know?" I said.

"What happened to your family? How are you alive?"

"You probably know the news story, right?" I set aside my plate, no longer hungry, and propped myself up at a better angle to drink my coffee. Li Hui served it black, no sugar, and its bitter bite lent me the bravery to explain what happened that night. "Twelve years ago, my father confessed that he murdered me and my mother after the Bauer Tech Charity Gala and disposed of my body. Clearly, that wasn't the case. My father is innocent. To this day, I have no idea why he told the police that he killed us." I played with a leftover strawberry, picking out the seeds with my fingernail. "That night, ten of my father's coworkers and friends broke into our apartment in Juno. They raped me and my mother. They killed her, by accident, I think, but then they decided that they shouldn't leave any witnesses. They planned on killing me too."

Li Hui made a noise between despair and rage. I tried to hug my knees up to my chest, but the hole in my torso protested. I stretched out and pulled the blankets up to my chin to cover as much of myself as possible. Like the blankets would protect me from whatever might come to pass.

"And then what happened?" Li Hui said. "Where did the men go? Why did they leave you?"

I shook my head. "I don't know. I think I went into shock or something because I don't remember much. All of a sudden, they were gone, and there was a girl there."

"A girl?"

"Yeah, the pizza delivery girl from Giordano's." I rubbed the bags under my eyes. The girl's face, her wacky red and green visor, had never left my memory. "My mom ordered pizza right before everything happened, and when the girl showed up to deliver the pizza, she found us instead."

Li Hui covered her mouth. "What did she do? Did she call the police?"

"Yeah, she did. From my mother's cell phone," I said, prying through my memory to clear out the cobwebs. "But I didn't want to be there when the cops got there. My mother's body was lying on the couch. I couldn't look at her. They left her half-naked, bleeding all over the place. I begged the girl to help me leave. She didn't want to at first. She thought the cops would want to talk to me, and that I needed to go to the hospital. I'm pretty sure I cried all over her until she gave in. She carried me downstairs. We went out the back way so the doorman wouldn't see us. She was driving her mother's car. It was full of pizza. Smelled like it too. She didn't deliver the rest of them. She drove me to her house in Vesta, snuck me into her bedroom, and took care of me. Her mom was sleeping in the next room. I was there the whole night, and the girl never told her mother about me. She did what I asked her to."

"She helped you?"

I nodded wearily. "She put me in the bath and helped clean me up. Made me eat and drink something. Gave me ibuprofen and something else from her mother's medicine cabinet to calm me down. We fell asleep in the same bed. The next morning, I woke up before her. She was a heavy sleeper. I snuck out her window."

Li Hui's brow wrinkled. "Why?"

"Because I didn't want to be Veronica Bauer anymore." I bowed my chin to my chest and massaged my neck. It was sore from lying on the stone-cold pavement for however long. "And she would have eventually told her mom about me. I'm sure she did at some point."

"But there were other things that needed to be done," Li Hui insisted. "You needed to see a doctor to make sure everything was okay. You could have spoken the police and told them the truth. They could have caught those men. Your father wouldn't have gone to jail—"

"I went to a free clinic in Minerva for obvious reasons," I told her. "They didn't recognize me. I looked awful, so I couldn't possibly be the pristine Veronica Bauer. I was wearing the pizza girl's clothes. As far as the police, I already told you. I didn't want anything to do with it. I wanted to disappear, to stop existing, so that's what I did. I stayed in Minerva and lived on the streets until I could get my hands on a laptop. That's when I started doing what I do now to make money. I bounced from apartment to apartment until I finally landed here. You were the first landlord I trusted to sign a lease with for more than six months at a time."

"And the girl?" Li Hui asked. "Did she ever try to contact you?"

"No," I said. "I haven't seen her since that night. I have no idea if she ever told the police what really happened."

"But someone in Simone City knows you're alive."

"Yeah. Two someones now. Her and you." I said. Li Hui's expression was unreadable. "I'm a killer, Li Hui. I've killed four men, and I intend on killing at least six more."

If my blunt statements scared her, she didn't show it. Rather, she gently brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and watched me with sad eyes. "You're no killer. Just scared. You stay here. I take care of you."

"No, I don't think—"

"Stay," she said again. "Trust me. I won't call police. You need to heal. Long time before you go hunting again. Several weeks. But, cricket—" she leaned toward me, cupping my cheek in her palm "—vengeance like this does not go without consequences."

Chapter Fourteen - Sheila

The Simone City killer was on a break. A month passed without a murder or any other leads on the case. My investigation was at a standstill. I read every possible article on the Bauer incident. I combed through every single police report from that night. I almost listened to the nine-one-one call, but Dumas was passing through, and I wasn't ready to share that kind of information with him yet. I ran an old photo of Veronica Bauer through facial recognition software and looked for matches in recent license pictures, traffic cameras, and security footage, but there was no evidence Veronica Bauer, who would be twenty-seven years old by now, was living in Simone City and murdering the men who once worked with her father.

The investigation was so cold that Dumas had stopped asking me for updates. He preferred to walk by my desk on the way to his office every morning, fix me with a look of withering disappointment—pursed lips included—then shake his head in resolute silence before strolling off. It was monstrously frustrating. If Veronica was the person who'd taken down Beatnik, Honey, Murphy, and Fisher, she was doing a damn good job of keeping herself under wraps. What stumped me was how she had managed to escape the alleyway after killing Fisher. She should have died from that amount of blood loss, but Simone City hospital didn't have any GSW patients on file from that night. Either Veronica got lucky, or she had an accomplice. I was betting on the latter.

One Monday morning was no different than the others. Spring was in full bloom. Cherry trees blossomed along the sidewalks on my way to work. The pollen did wonders for my allergies. My sneezes jet-propelled me to the precinct, and by the time I arrived, my eyes were so swollen and red it looked like I'd been crying for hours.

"Ay, mamacita!" Diaz, who happened to be passing through the precinct for a case, took me by the shoulders. "What happened?"

I wiped my streaming eyes. "It's the fucking cherry trees. I'm fine, Diaz, I swear. It's just allergies."

"Well, take some Loratadine or something. I thought someone died."

"No, the only thing that's dying right now is my career."

Diaz chuckled. "Still no luck on the Switchblade case?"

"We're not calling it that anymore," I reminded him. "And no. Not since the lab results came back with a dead person's name attached to them."

He patted my back. "I'm sure you'll find something soon. Hang in there—"

Dumas brushed by and gave Diaz a hard look. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"Yes, sir," Diaz said, stumbling over his feet on the way to the door.

"So go be there," Dumas ordered. "Arden, get to work."

"Yes, sir," I said, but the captain was halfway to his office.

"That man scares me," Diaz said.

"He scares us all. See you later."

One of the secretaries had dropped off a load of paperwork on my desk that wasn't mine. I'd been a detective for almost two months, and I still didn't have a place amongst the others at my level. Maybe Dumas didn't want to bother moving my desk from the bullpen to the detective quarters since I was going to flame out anyway. At this rate, I was starting to believe him.

Payne emerged from the break room with a coffee in hand. "Is this my paperwork? Why do you have it?"

"Ask Beth."

He transferred the files from my desk to his. "Why the fuck do you look like that?"

"Like what, Payne?"

"Like you're about to step out in traffic."

"I have allergies, Payne," I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. "This happens to me every spring. You've known me for ten years. You should expect this by now."

He shrugged, sat down, and propped his feet up on his desk. "I figured you were crying over the fact that you can't figure this case out."

"I'd rather cry over the fact that I have to sit next to you."

He pointedly put on his headphones, switched on the noise-cancelling feature, and began to work on his own monitor, facing away from me. Every so often, he slurped on his coffee.

I turned on my computer, more for show than anything else. I didn't expect to hit a breakthrough today. An audio file—the nine-one-one call from that night—waited for me to listen to it. I couldn't avoid it for much longer, so I put on my headphones and clicked play.

" _Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?_ "

" _Please, I just found Vivian and Veronica Bauer in their apartment._ " The answering voice was laden with worry and fear. " _I think—I think Mrs. Bauer is dead._ " A choked sob interrupted the report. " _I think someone killed her. Veronica_ —"

The voice cut off.

" _Hello?_ " the emergency operator said. " _Miss, are you still with me? We're dispatching units right away, but I need you to stay on the line. Can you check Mrs. Bauer's pulse?_ "

Someone breathed heavily into the phone, as if debating whether or not she should say something else. " _Please come,_ " the voice said, and then the line went dead.

I sent the audio file to my phone and packed my things. Payne glanced up, not from his paperwork, but from a rousing game of antique Minesweeper.

"Where are you doing?" he asked, shaking off his headphones. "You just got here."

"Got a tip," I said. "See you later, Payne in my ass."

I caught a cab to my mother's house and left the windows down because damned if I was going to let such a beautiful day go to waste just because of the stupid cherry blossoms. The cab driver stopped offering me tissues one by one and tossed the entire box into the back seat. When we arrived in Vesta, I thanked him profusely and gave him an extra tip to let me keep the tissues. He agreed, happy to have my runny nose out of his cab.

"Mom?" I called, letting myself into the house. My mother worked from home as an online private tutor, so I was counting on her to be here. I found her in her study, a room at the back of the house with wide windows that opened to the butterfly garden she'd planted in the backyard when I was five. The breeze wafted in with the scent of roses. A hummingbird zipped around the sap-feeder that hung just beyond the window.

"Sheila, honey." My mother was reading on the sofa. "Haven't you been using that nasal spray?"

"Yeah, yeah." I wiped my face on the cab driver's tissues and sniffed. Mom closed the windows. The air inside the study went still. "I need to tell you something."

"Oh, boy." Mom set down her book and led me to the kitchen, where she put a tea kettle on the stove. "Nothing good ever starts with 'I need to tell you something.' What is it?"

"I think it might be easier if I show you this." I navigated to the audio file on my phone. "Here, listen."

She rested her elbows on the counter. "I'm ready."

I pushed play.

" _Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?_ "

" _Please, I just found Vivian and Veronica Bauer in their apartment._ "

My mother's eyes widened at the familiar sound of the caller's voice.

" _I think—I think Mrs. Bauer is dead. I think someone killed her. Veronica—_ "

I pressed pause and waited for my mother's reaction. She stared at the phone, then at me, her jaw unhinged.

"That's your voice," she said. "Sheila, that's _your_ voice."

I tried to swallow the giant lump in my throat, but it stubbornly remained where it was. "Do you remember how I got fired from that job delivering pizzas?"

"Yeah, your boss said you took the orders from the restaurant, but the pizzas never made it to the customers," Mom replied. "Are you finally going to tell me what happened?"

"That night, I delivered a pizza to the Bauers' apartment," I said. "When I got there, Vivian and Veronica were lying on the floor. They were beaten to shit, and it looked like whoever did it left in a hurry. Vivian was already dead, and I thought Veronica was too. Halfway through that call, Veronica woke up and begged me not to tell the police about her. I knew I shouldn't have listened to her, but she was so incredibly broken, Mom. She—" My voice cracked, and I rested my forehead on the kitchen table so I didn't have to look at my mother. "She'd been raped, Mom. Her mother, too. I couldn't leave her there. I couldn't, Mom. I couldn't do it—"

"Oh, baby." Mom folded over me, cradling my head as I broke down. She kissed my temple and smoothed my hair back and let me cry, but when my breath started to even out again, she had more questions. "What happened, honey? I need you to tell me what happened."

I rubbed my eyes, smooshing my fists against the swollen skin like an exhausted toddler. "I brought her here and took care of her. You were asleep the entire time. I figured I would clean her up, and maybe she could talk to the police the next day after she got a decent night's sleep, but when I woke up, she was already gone."

I stood up and wandered down the hall. My mother followed me into my childhood bedroom, which looked the same as when I'd left home at eighteen. I ran my fingers across the comforter on the twin bed. Then I opened the bottom drawer of my old school desk, rifled around, and drew out an envelope. It was from a stationary kit I never used, and the handwriting on the letter inside wasn't mine.

"She left me this," I said, pulling the letter out of the envelope and unfolding it to show to my mother. I recited the note out loud without looking at it. The words were burned into my brain. "'Thank you for everything. You saved my life. I won't forget it. Vee."

My mother studied the letter then carefully refolded it. "You kept this a secret for twelve years, honey. Why are you telling me now?"

"Because of my case." I tucked the envelope safely away in the drawer. "The four men who have been murdered worked for or with Bauer Tech years ago. We got blood from the perp at the most recent crime scene, and when it came back from the lab, they identified it as Veronica Bauer's. Dumas thinks it's a mistake. He thinks Veronica Bauer is dead, but—"

"But she's not," my mother finished.

"No, she's not."

"Why would Veronica kill these men?" Mom said. "What's her motive?"

Another bead of snot threatened to escape my nose. My mother frowned, led me into the bathroom, and gestured for me to wash my face in the sink. As I rinsed off the pollen and saltwater, I explained my theory.

"Wallace Bauer confessed to murdering his wife and daughter," I said. "Dumas worked the case then. He said it was open and shut. They put Bauer away and didn't bother to think about anything else. I followed the story in the news as much as I could, and it never made sense to me that Bauer told the cops he'd murdered his own daughter and buried her body when I knew she'd made it out of there alive. I saw what Vivian and Veronica looked like after they were attacked. There was no way one man did all of that. I think it was a group of them. I think Bauer's associates ganged up to make a sick fantasy come true, and now Veronica is hunting them down for revenge."

Mom blew out a long breath and handed me a towel to dry off my face. "You don't think that's a bit of a stretch, my dear?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense," I said. "I saw the killer at the ballet before she murdered Fisher. I thought she looked familiar, but I couldn't place her. Now—"

"Are you sure it's her, Sheila?"

"Not at all. I hope it's not her because I can't fathom trying to put the girl I saved all those years ago in prison for murder."

Mom brushed the damp hair out of my face. "Listen to me, honey. You did what you could. You saved a desperate girl who needed your help, but if that girl grew into the woman who's terrorizing Simone City, you can't let your feelings get in the way. This is your job, Sheila. You need to find her before she hurts anyone else."

"What if they deserved it?" I asked. "The men she killed?"

She cupped my face in her hands. "You of all people should understand that justice is not upheld by mindless murder. If those men are at fault for what happened to the Bauers, then I have faith _you_ will bring them to justice. You work for the law, honey, not Veronica Bauer."

Chapter Fifteen - Vee

Breathe in. Breathe out. Flow. I moved into a twist, attempting to mimic Li Hui's steady pace and fluid movements, and winced. The damaged muscles in my stomach twinged. Ever since that night, Li Hui kept a close watch on me. Unaccustomed to company, I found her presence irksome at first, but as the days passed and she refused to leave, I grew used to having her around. She arrived every morning with fresh food. I hadn't ordered groceries in four weeks. She cooked, cleaned, and tended to the hole in my torso. The details about the injury were dependent on Li Hui's ability to explain her off-brand medical expertise. Kyle Fisher's bullet had lodged itself between my ribs, but none of my vital organs were hit, so Li Hui plucked the smashed bullet out with a pair of tweezers, sewed up the wound, and treated any possible bacterial infection with a potent mixture of unknown herbs. So far, I hadn't experienced any complications. The wound was closing up as well as it could, but I'd had to run point on my own physical therapy. Mostly, I ended up doing a lot of yoga and core-strengthening exercises to get the muscles back in shape. Once, Li Hui walked in while I was in process of pushing myself too far with endless crunches.

"No, no, no!" she said, dropping her armload of fresh vegetables for that night's stir fry. "You will hurt yourself!"

"I need to get back on track," I said.

"Look what you've done, cricket."

Blood seeped through the bandage. Li Hui sighed and redressed the wound. Later, when the stir fry had settled in our stomachs, she walked me through a restorative Tai Chi flow. We pushed the bed and the desk up against the walls to practice every day. It was a satisfying routine, a practice of discipline and meditation. In the beginning, my balance was off, my muscles were weak, and I couldn't shift from one pose to the next in the same flawless fashion as Li Hui. After reminding myself that she'd been practicing for several years, I started to calm down and retrain my focus. Now that we'd been at it for a few weeks, I was starting to get the hang of it. The best part about Tai Chi was its practicality. You trained slow, similar to yoga, but if you sped up the movements, they could be applied to self-defense. It was the sort of thing I needed to learn more of if I was going to continue my crusade.

That morning, I felt different. Stronger. I took a deep breath, realigned myself, and caught up with Li Hui's pace. I focused on matching my movements to the rhythmic sound of our breath, like ocean waves lapping against the shore. The pain in my torso subsided, or I became self-aware enough to control it, and we finished up the flow and bowed our heads toward each other.

"Very nice," Li Hui said. She stood up on her toes to pat my shoulder. "You have improved."

"Thanks." I dragged the bed and the desk into their rightful places again as Li Hui made tea in the kitchen. "How did you learn all of this? Tai Chi, cooking, the medical stuff. I haven't even heard of some of the herbs you use to make tea, but they always seem to do the trick. What's your secret?"

"No secret," Li Hui said. "I was born and raised in China. Lived there for most of my life. It's my culture, my life, like how your computer is for you."

I absentmindedly tapped the keyboard. The rapid click comforted me. "I don't think my computer is my life."

"No? You spend all your time there."

This was partially true. When I wasn't eating, sleeping, or training, I worked or researched on my machine. It was an obsessive pattern. I found a subject and fixated on it. At the beginning of this, I stalked the men on P3n173nc3's list. I hacked into their bank accounts and phones, found out all about their wives and families if they had them, and watched them go about their daily business on whatever security or traffic cameras I could access. But ever since I'd told P3n173nc3 I needed time to recover from my injury, I'd been obsessing over a new subject. Detective Sheila Arden.

She was twenty-nine. Born and raised in Simone City. She'd lived with her mother in Vesta until she was eighteen, then attended Simone City College in Venus, where she obtained a degree in criminal justice. She joined the SCPD Academy after an early graduation. Her dark hair, green eyes, and olive skin spoke of a Mediterranean background. She was petite for a career in chasing down hardened criminals, but a picture from a vacation to Mexico on her social media pages showed her displaying a ridiculous amount of muscle mass in a pink bikini. With those biceps, the woman could take down an angry lion.

Recently, Sheila Arden had been promoted to detective status, and if my research was correct, she was the youngest one in the division. I was hesitant to hack into the police's database to find out more about her. It was a violation of Arden's privacy. Eventually, I did it anyway and discovered Arden had been assigned to lead what SCPD was calling the Switchblade case. I wondered why a novice detective had been given the biggest investigation haunting Simone City at the moment. There had to be something special about her. She had to know something that the other detectives didn't.

"Who's that?" Li Hui appeared over my shoulder, carrying two steaming tea cups as she peered at the picture of Arden on my screen.

"The detective who's working my case."

"Pretty," she said. Her eyes widened at the sight of how much information about Arden was available to me. "Are you—? Cricket, no! You can't! She has a life, and she is just doing her job!"

"I'm not going to kill her, Li Hui."

Li Hui's shoulders relaxed. "Are you sure? You won't kill her?"

"No."

"Good."

"But I am going to follow her."

She muttered something in Chinese, set down the tea cups, and threw her hands in the air. Apparently, my reply had not done much to reassure her. I got access to Arden's cell phone and navigated to her calendar, but her schedule was less organized than my refrigerator before Li Hui got to it. If I wanted to track her down, I'd have to do it old school.

I got dressed in dark jeans and a linen blouse that no longer suited me but blended in with the wealthier residents of Juno. On top of that, I wore a blonde wig and knockoff Dior sunglasses that obscured everything from my eyebrows to the tops of my cheekbones.

"Are you sure?" Li Hui said as I spun around for her.

"She saw me that night at the ballet," I said. "I have to make sure she doesn't know any more than she needs to."

"And what if she does?"

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't figured that out yet."

Li Hui sighed as I climbed through the window and down the fire escape. I rode the motorcycle to Juno, the first time I'd used it in the light of day. The wind whipped as I leaned low over the handlebars. I zipped in and out of the other cars, enjoying the bike's easy handling. There was a cop car on the bridge across Slickwater Lake, so I slowed down and hid between two large trucks. Then I whizzed out of sight on the other side of the lake.

I rode to Arden's precinct, parked the bike across the street from the entrance, and straddled the seat to wait. Juno's daily commuters filled the streets, nursing coffees on the way to their nine-to-fives. I couldn't imagine having a life like that. Wake up, work all day, go home to the spouse and kids, sleep, then wake up and do it all over again. It was immeasurably boring to me, but my parents had led a similar life and never complained about it. My father threw himself into work because he had a passion for technology, and my mother loved organizing the social side of things and taking care of me. Then, I was happy and satisfied to be their child. Now, I shuddered to think of the life I might have led if everything went according to plan. I'd be here, no doubt, shuffling along with the rest of Juno, drinking coffee as if my life depended on it as I fretted away in an office for eight hours a day.

My mind stopped circling around the indefinite purgatory of a nine-to-five work day when Sheila Arden turned up at the precinct. She was shorter in real life, if that was possible. Unlike the other robots in the streets, she did not hold a cup of coffee. There was no slump to her posture. She strode up the sidewalk, exerting a proud, confident energy. Then she stopped, sneezed, and swore so loudly that I could hear the expletive from all the way across the street. She wiped her nose on a used tissue from the pocket of her jacket and headed into the station.

Now began the waiting game. Obviously, I couldn't follow Arden into the precinct, and I wasn't all that interested in her job anyway. Despite what I'd told Li Hui, I didn't want to see Arden at work. I wanted to find out what she did during her off hours. Where she went, who she spent her time with. Those things would give me a better clue as to who Detective Sheila Arden was as a person than the sight of her scrolling through her computer at her desk. I got comfortable on the seat of the motorcycle and kept my eyes trained on the door to the precinct.

An hour later, sooner than I'd expected to see her, Arden emerged from the station with a tall blonde officer at her side. His movements were relaxed and easy, but he kept stepping into her path to keep her from leaving. Finally, she ducked under him and landed a quick punch to his kidney. He rubbed his back, raised his other hand in defeat, and retreated to the station. Arden glared at him until he went inside. Then she glared at the cherry trees that lined the sidewalk. Then she glared at the set of car keys in her hand as she unlocked a nearby squad car and got in. I fired up my bike, gave her enough time to pull into traffic, and followed behind the cruiser. As we merged onto the interstate and she flipped on her siren to cut off another car, I shook my head with laugher. If I'd learned anything from the past hour of observation, it was that Detective Sheila Arden had one hell of a temper.

Chapter Sixteen - Sheila

The morning was a grumpy one. Payne was being a pain, as per usual. It was a relief to lose him at the station and drive away from the precinct. I wanted to roll down the windows, but my allergies weren't cooperating. The over-the-counter medication only did so much, so I kept the windows up and turned on the air conditioning instead. I settled into the drive. Slickwater Regional Prison was about an hour and a half out of the city, past the outskirts of Minerva. It was nowhere near Slickwater Lake, but somehow it qualified for the namesake. I wasn't sure if going out there was the best idea, but ever since I'd spoken to my mother about Veronica, I'd gotten it in my head that if anyone knew anything about that night, it was Wallace Bauer himself.

No one had heard from or about Wallace Bauer since the hubbub around his wife and daughter's murders had died down. His life sentence was satisfying enough for Simone City's population to stop gossiping about him. His company was dismantled and rebranded. John Halco became the new name of technology in town, and no one bothered to mention that Halco and Bauer were once best friends. As far as anyone knew, Bauer was rotting alone in prison to atone for the sins he committed, but something told me this wasn't the case. I wanted to talk to Bauer in person.

The last time I'd driven through Minerva was as a nervous rookie cop fresh out of the academy, working her first beat. Back then, they paired us with an older, more experienced cop. Dumas, before he'd made detective, was my assigned babysitter. He scared the shit out of me back then. We never spoke, just listened to the radio chatter as we cruised through the rough neighborhoods of the lesser boroughs and looked for trouble. Dumas wasn't pleased with the assignment. Patrolling Minerva was reserved for officers lower on the food chain than he was. On my first day out, we ended up in a shootout when we tried to stop a couple of guys from robbing a bodega. I got shot in the vest, which left one hell of a bruise. The experience scared me more that Dumas's poor attitude. I almost quit that day, rethinking my entire career, but Dumas convinced me to stay. Ever since then, I had mixed feelings about the lowest borough.

What astounded me about Minerva was how poverty like this could exist so closely to the wealth in Juno. Growing up, I never considered my mom and me to be privileged. The church gave Mom money to take care of me—they cared for the welfare of the child even if the mother had sinned to bring the kid into the world—but it wasn't enough for us to live off. Mom started her job as a private tutor, but she clipped coupons, shopped for everything on sale, and reused paper towels to save a few cents here and there. When she bought me a new pair of jeans, they were too long and I'd fold up the hems to avoid tripping over them. A year later, the same pair would be too short as I outgrew them. I wore tennis shoes until my toes poked holes through the fabric, and I signed up for the free lunch program all through elementary and middle school. But all of that didn't compare to the situation in Minerva. Some of the kids here didn't have shoes, let alone food, and the rest of Simone City turned a blind eye to it. We preferred to forget about Minerva, as if the city were made up of three boroughs instead of four. The people of Minerva were simultaneously outraged and indifferent to this. They made their own way, refusing to count on aid from the upper boroughs. As I drove through the trashed streets, I wished I could do something to make a difference, but cleaning up Minerva was a job for a superhero, not a fresh detective.

Once clear of Minerva, the rest of Simone City was wide open land. Mountains loomed in the distance. One year, Mom saved up for the two of us to go on a ski trip out there. Neither one of us knew how to ski, so we ended up spending the majority of our time drinking hot cocoa by the fireplace in the lodge. If you drove the opposite way, you eventually hit the coast, which I'd never been to. I'd never seen the beach before. That post-college desire to get out and see the world never hit me. All I wanted was to be a real Simone City cop as soon as possible.

The prison was equidistant from the mountains and the coast. It sat in the middle of a thick forest where the trees were always gray instead of green. The prison was gray with all of its cinder block construction, and no matter the weather forecast on the day you visited, the sky always managed to be gray too. Visiting Slickwater Regional Prison was like slipping into a colorless dimension, where the only hue allowed to exist was the sunshine yellow of the inmates' uniforms. I drove through the gray gates, parked in the gray parking lot, and said hello to the guards in gray outfits. I'd called ahead to say I was coming in to speak with Wallace Bauer. They set us up in a private room instead of the regular visitors' center. When I walked in, Wallace was handcuffed to the table.

"Hello, Detective," he said. "I don't believe we've met before."

Wallace Bauer had sad eyes and deep lines around his mouth. His thick hair, once all black, was now as gray as the rest of the prison. The paleness of his skin contrasted harshly with the bright yellow jumpsuit, and the fluorescent lighting made his cheeks sallow. He looked healthy though. There was some bulk beneath his clothes that hadn't been there before he'd been put away. Even restrained, there was a fluidity to his simplest of movements, like crossing one ankle over the opposite knee.

"Sheila Arden," I said, flashing my shield. "I have a few questions for you."

"Regarding?"

I shooed the guards from the room and took the seat across from Wallace. He smiled kindly back at me. It raised the hair on my arms. "I'm working on a new case. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but four of your prior acquaintances—"

"Are dead," he finished.

"You know?"

"We get the news in here too, Detective."

"Then you know that the killer is still on the loose." I popped open a briefcase and pulled out a few things, starting with the photos from the charity gala. "Every single one of these men—Phillip Beatnik, James Honey, Karl Murphy, and Kyle Fisher—attended the Bauer Tech Charity Gala on the night of the, er, incident."

"You mean the night I murdered my wife and child." He was not cold or calculating. He was merely stating a fact. "That's the incident you're referring to, is it not, Detective?"

I struggled to meet his eyes. They were warm, honey brown. Far too similar to Veronica's for my taste. "Yes, that incident."

"What do you want to know, Miss Arden?"

I leaned over the table and lowered my voice. I'd requested privacy with Wallace, but the guards were never far away, eavesdropping on every conversation. "Wallace, I want to know why the killer is targeting these men. You're the connection. Every single one of them has dealt with you on a business or personal level."

Wallace remained impassive. "I don't understand. Are you accusing me of something?"

"It's difficult to accuse you of murder when you're sitting in prison," I said. "But I am curious."

Wallace leaned forward too. I resisted the urge to back up, but his expression changed from stony to earnest, so I remained where I was. "Detective Arden, I can assure you I have absolutely no idea as to why someone is targeting these men. I have not spoken to any of them in over twelve years."

I put away the photos of the murdered men and took out a new one. It was blurry, a still captured from the security camera footage in the Arts Center, but the woman in the red dress, knife in hand, was plain to see. The long, dark wig obscured her face, but stance and posture were more than enough to identify someone. "Wallace, do you know who this is?"

He glanced at the photograph. "No. Should I?"

I placed another picture on top of the first. Wallace blanched and lifted his hands to cover his eyes. The handcuffs rattled, jerking his wrists back to the table. "Why would you show me that?" he whispered.

"Because you supposedly did it." It was a picture of the Bauers' apartment. At the time, it had been a crime scene. Blood was splattered across the white leather couch. Vivian Bauer's body lay splayed out for all to see. Veronica, however, was nowhere in sight. "When the cops arrested you that morning, you immediately confessed to murdering Veronica and Vivian," I went on.

He bowed his head and cupped his face more carefully so as to not jostle the handcuffs. "Don't, Detective. Please don't."

"Because of your confession, the police did not bother to further their investigation," I said. "But I often lie awake wondering what would have happened if they had."

Wallace's mouth, the only part of his face that I could see, quivered. He took in a deep breath that rattled in his lungs.

I flipped over the photo, unable to bear his grief. "Why would you cover for them?" I asked him. "The men who really did this?"

He stayed stoic and quiet.

"Okay, fine. I'll talk," I said. "I don't think you killed your wife and daughter. I was there that night, Wallace, but you weren't. There were footprints in the hall. Two sets. Veronica's and someone else's, but if someone was forcing your daughter down, then who was restraining your wife?"

Wallace dipped his face into both hands, rocking back and forth. He made no effort to join in on the conversation.

"Victor Dumas put the wrong person in prison, didn't he?" I whispered. "These men are at fault, aren't they? Someone's hunting them down out of revenge. Someone close to your family. Here's the thing, Wallace. This isn't the way the law works. I can get you out of here, but you have to be willing to help me."

"Why would I want to leave Slickwater?" Wallace said, looking up from his hands at last. His eyes were red, but there were no tears. "I have nothing to go back to. My business is gone. My wife and daughter are dead, and it's my fault. It's _my_ fault."

I slid the picture of the woman in the red dress toward him again. "Vivian is dead, yes, but the police never found Veronica's body."

He traced the outline of the woman's hidden face with the tip of his index finger.

"Please," I said. "If you know something, I need you to tell me. Anything at all would help. I just need to get a handle on this investigation."

He lifted the photo. "Can I keep this?"

"Yeah, sure." I collected the rest of the pictures to put back in the briefcase. It looked like Wallace didn't feel like sharing, so I stood up and signaled the guards that we were finished with our conversation. "I've got copies."

"Gerald Cain," he said out of the blue.

"What?"

He looked up from the photo to make eye contact with me. "Gerald Cain. That's all I've got."

I nodded. The name was familiar, yet another wealthy millionaire in Simone City. "Thank you, Wallace."

"Be careful out there, Detective."

The guards and I switched places. As I left, I heard them complaining about something. One of them said to Wallace, "Sorry, Mr. Bauer. You're going to have to hang tight here for a while. The city's doing electrical repairs in the area, and our entire system is offline."

Wallace replied politely, "Not a problem, sir."

Chapter Seventeen - Vee

I followed Detective Arden for as long as I could, but when she turned off the interstate and the traffic died down, I let her take a few miles to herself. On that route, there was only one place that she could have been going to anyway. There was nothing past Minerva until you reached the campgrounds in the mountains or the coastal town in the opposite direction. The only thing that lay between them was Slickwater Regional Prison, where my father sat in a jail cell. When I saw the green road sign that spelled out the name of the institution in reflective white lettering, I hit the brakes so quickly that the bike skidded to a wobbly stop and tipped forward on the front wheel.

My father's confession and incarceration were mysteries to me. That night, my mother and I had left him at the charity gala. Every year prior, he stayed there for hours on end until all of his business transactions were closed in drunken handshakes and empty whiskey glasses, but when the police investigated his case, my father had no alibi. No one had seen him at the gala after my mother and I left. The darkest thought in my mind was that my father had been one of the masked men, but I would have recognized my father's posture and gait even if his face was covered. Besides, he was not that kind of man.

I was sure that Arden had plenty of reasons to visit Slickwater Regional Prison, but there was no use in denying the obvious. The detective had connected the dots. This was Bauer family business, so she went straight to the source. I couldn't bring myself to wait on the side of the highway until her squad car reappeared from the trees. I was closer to my father than I had been in years. I turned the bike around, revved the engine, and shot off in the opposite direction. The good thing about Arden heading out of town was that it gave me plenty of time to gear up for my next hit.

P0lt3r6315t: _Ready for next target._

P0lt3r6315t: _Hello?_

P0lt3r6315t: _Where are you?_

With a frustrated groan, I clicked out of the IM window. P3n173nc3 was unusually absent from the message board. Generally, if I logged on and sent him a message, he replied within the minute. It had been an hour since I'd sent my first message to him. He should have been excited. After nearly a month, our mission was back on track. I wanted someone else to take down, but I needed a name. If P3n173nc3 wouldn't get me one, I'd find it myself.

Hours later, when Li Hui retired from her self-appointed job of taking care of me, I sorted through hard drives, old photos, and information regarding that night. I was at a stalemate. Without P3n173nc3's help, I couldn't be sure of anything. Dozens of men attended the charity gala that night, all of them with a connection to my father. I made a list of those I suspected to be involved, but there were more than thirty names on it. I couldn't pick one at random. What if I chose wrong, and the man was innocent?

In the end, I rode to Juno around ten o'clock in the evening. This was a different kind of mission. I found a name, one that was as familiar to me as my own, and wanted answers from the man it belonged to. When I got close to my destination, I parked my bike in a dark alley and walked the rest of the way, head bowed beneath my hood. A few blocks later, I arrived at the Ivory Hotel. It was taller than I remembered, but less grand. Gold exterior paint peeled off the once immaculate front doors. The doorman was different too. Long ago, he was a young man with a neat mustache that made my mother laugh. Now, it was a different man whose many chins protruded over the tight collar of his uniform. I supposed I should've been pleased—it was almost too easy to distract him and slip into the lobby—but I missed the handsome doorman from my childhood.

Security was lax. The girl at the front desk who was meant to check in all visitors chipped paint off of her nails. The actual security guard, who usually stood by the elevators to survey the lobby, begged for the front desk girl's attention. I walked right past them, got in the elevator, and hit the button for the top floor. The elevators smelled like lemon cleanser. I used to hate the smell when I was a kid—it stung my nostrils—but now I took comfort in it. The elevator dinged as it came to a halt, and the doors opened into the hallway of the top floor.

There was a single door, one with a keypad and a blue fingerprint scanner, at the end of the hall. The lush carpet ate my footsteps. A security camera blinked its red dot at me from the ceiling. I made sure my mask was in place. The fabric squeezed the bridge of my nose, making it hard to breathe. Then, my mind blank of common sense, I placed my finger against the keypad scanner. It lit up, and a thin line of light read my fingerprint. I tensed, expecting the pad to turn red and sound the silent alarm inside the penthouse, but it turned green instead, and the lock clicked open.

"Welcome home, Veronica."

The Smart Home's familiar voice stopped me in my tracks. I froze in the doorway, completely exposed. Memories bulldozed me like thick waves before a big storm. The apartment was exactly the same and totally different all at once. Most of my family's furniture was gone except for the dining room table. The new resident had retired the minimalistic look my father preferred. The home was warmer now, with a dark leather couch, intricate throw rugs, and tan walls instead of the blank white ones I once knew. It was messier than the immaculate home of my childhood. There were dirty dishes in the sink, muddy shoes kicked off by the front door, and high school report cards taped haphazardly to the refrigerator. A rumpled blanket was thrown across the couch, along with a few pieces of escaped popcorn. The apartment felt distinctly lived in.

"So it is you," someone said.

Without thinking, I flicked a knife in the direction of the sound. It embedded itself in the drywall. A perfect stick. John Halco, my father's best friend, didn't flinch, though the blade had whizzed right past the side of his face. He stared at me with an unreadable expression. Eyes wide and shiny, lips parted as if he wanted to say something but couldn't find the words. He seemed to look past my mask and all-black outfit.

"My security advisor told me I should have reprogrammed the fingerprint scanner," John said. He pried the knife out of the wall and examined it. Then he held it out as if to offer it back to me. When I made no move to accept it, John walked to the kitchen and laid the blade on the counter. "I asked him what the point was of doing that. Wallace was in prison, Vivian was gone, and you—" his chin wobbled "—the police told us you were dead."

One step at a time, I walked toward him, shoulders up like a prowling cat. His spine stiffened, but he didn't move. He didn't ask the Smart House to call the police. He just stood there by the counter and watched as I approached him. I lunged the last three feet, knocking the knife beyond his reach, bending him backward over the counter and putting the karambit to his throat. Something prevented me from placing the blade right up next to his skin. Tears leaked from his eyes.

"I wasn't there, Veronica," he said, keeping his hands in full view for me. "If I was, I would have killed those guys. You know what your family meant to me. Your father was like a brother to me, and I thought of you as my niece." He hiccupped and swallowed his nerves. "I looked for you afterward. I couldn't believe you were dead. I wanted to find you and make it better. I talked with my wife. We agreed that if you were still alive, we would take you into our family. That's what we hoped for, prayed for. I hired a team of private investigators to find you, but they never managed to get any decent leads. How did you do it? How did you disappear like that?"

My mind flashed to that night. The pizza girl pulling me out of the wreckage, carrying me down the stairway and into her mother's car. Falling asleep next to a total stranger who kept her promise of never giving me up to the police. It was because of her that no one tracked me down. No one expected Veronica Bauer to end up in the middle of the suburbs hours after the attack, especially when my father claimed to have dumped my body in Slickwater Lake.

"Give me a name," I said.

John stuttered. "W-what?"

"I believe you." I let up on my grip but held him firmly in place just in case. "I believe that you had nothing to do with that night, but I need the name of someone who did."

"Veronica—"

"Don't call me that."

"It's not right," he said. "You can't go around killing them."

My fingers tightened around the collar of his shirt. "You just said that's what you would have done."

"In the heat of the moment," he clarified. "But this is going to take a toll on you. You may not realize it now—"

"No, what's taken a toll on me was what happened that night," I said, volume rising. " _This_ is fixing it, John. I'm fixing myself." When his teeth clicked together, I realized I'd shaken him without noticing. He looked at me differently now. Not with pity or sadness, but with fear. "Give me a name," I said again. "I don't want to have to hurt you, John. Not after everything you've done for my family."

"I don't know for sure who was involved, _but_ ," he added when my knife neared his throat again, "I heard that Gerald Cain disappeared right after the attacks started. Rumor has it that his wife finally figured out what he'd been doing on his 'business trips,' but I think it's something else. I think he's scared, and I think he's hiding. From you."

Chapter Eighteen - Sheila

Gerald Cain was a fucking scumbag. He was registered in the police database as a repeat offender for all sorts of things, including public intoxication, use of illegal drugs, and domestic abuse, but the most frustrating thing of all was he had never faced any of the repercussions for his actions. Every time, he managed to buy his way out of it. The domestic abuse charges scared me the most. Cain was married to a woman half his age. She was pretty and thin, a dark contrast to his overweight, middle-aged man-ness. The couple had an eight-month-old baby, and it turned my stomach to think that it might not have been a consensual conception. The woman, Alyssa, attended every social event on Cain's arm. She didn't smile in any of the photographs. She wore modest, long-sleeved gowns, even to the outdoor events in the middle of the summer. It didn't take a genius to work out what that meant; she was using her attire to hide the evidence of the violence in their relationship. If she dared wear a halter top, I would've bet my new detective's salary that she was covered in bruises. I visited her first, not only to get information on her husband's whereabouts, but to make sure she was okay as well.

"Hello, Mrs. Cain," I said when she welcomed me into hers and Gerald's apartment. At this point in my investigation, I'd come to expect the lavish interiors of Juno's finest dwellings. The Cains' place was no different. The polished tile floors were so clean I could have eaten a pizza off of them.

"Call me Alyssa, please," she said. She didn't offer to shake my hand. Up close, she looked younger than she did in the photographs. She was twenty-five, but her closed expression, slumped shoulders, and crossed arms gave her the air of an insecure teenager. She wore an off-white, long-sleeved cotton shirt and matching pajama bottoms. Her breakfast, a single grapefruit and a cup of coffee, lay abandoned on a table on the balcony. The baby was confined to a play pen in the living room. He scootered around the perimeter like it was a jail cell.

"He's cute," I said. It was a lie. The kid, like most infants, was nowhere near the age when babies were actually considered adorable. To make things worse, he had the face of a bulldog, similar to Cain's countenance.

"Yeah, he just figured out how to crawl," Alyssa replied, closing the door behind me and gesturing for me to come in. "If I don't keep him in there, he disappears."

"Like your husband?"

Alyssa poured a fresh cup of coffee, ignoring the unfinished beverage on the balcony. "I figured that was why you asked to come over. I don't know what to tell you, Detective. Coffee?"

"No, thank you. People are saying you kicked Mr. Cain out of your apartment upon finding out about his, er, extracurricular activities."

"Wow, you really like to jump right into things, don't you?"

"There's no point in beating around the bush," I said. "I have a job to do."

She stirred soy milk into her coffee and sat on a kitchen stool. "What does my husband have to do with your job?"

I leaned against the counter, far enough away to give her enough space but close enough to imply I didn't intend on leaving without information. "I have reason to believe that Mr. Cain is in danger."

"In danger of what?"

"Of losing his life."

"Because someone is murdering the wealthy businessmen of Simone City," she said. "Logically, that makes sense."

"You don't seem bothered by this or your husband's disappearance. Doesn't it frighten you that he might already be dead?"

"He's not," she said matter-of-factly.

"How do you know?"

She set down her cup too hard. The glass banged against the countertop, startling the baby, who began to cry. "Listen, Detective. If I kicked my husband out of the apartment every time he was unfaithful to me, he would have disappeared a long time ago. As it is, I don't have that happy power. More often than not, he likes to rub his infidelity in my face." She caught sight of my expression. "You're a smart woman. I assume you think you already know what's happening here."

The baby wailed loudly, railing against my eardrums. "Alyssa, I want to help you—"

"You want to locate my husband," she said. "That's not exactly helping me, is it?"

"You do realize how suspicious this conversation sounds, right?" I asked her, raising my voice to be heard above the baby. "All this evidence of domestic abuse, and then your husband mysteriously disappears? You know how that looks?"

"I wouldn't be so frank with you if I were the one responsible for my husband's vanishing act." She got up and went to the baby. With one soothing touch to his cheek, the infant fell silent. "But the truth is that Simone City's assassin is the best thing that's happened to me in a while. When Phillip Beatnik turned up dead, Gerald nearly pissed his pants. I've never seen him like that before. My God, it was cathartic. He left that night, and I haven't seen him since. Can't say I'm eager to have him back."

"Why didn't you leave?" I asked her. "Why put up with this?"

She bounced the baby on her hip. "Because you don't leave a man like Gerald Cain."

"I can protect you," I told her. The conversation was reminiscent of the one with Wallace Bauer the day before. How many people were wrapped up in misery and torment over the Bauer family's incident? The web of lies extended much further than I anticipated. "If you can tell me where Cain is, I promise to get you out of here. I'll get you somewhere safe with your baby."

Alyssa paced back and forth to soothe the baby. He hiccupped, his cheek smushed against his mother's shoulder. "If Gerald is alive, he'll never stop fighting for me."

"If Gerald is guilty of the crime that I'm thinking of, you'll never see him again anyway," I said. "He'll go to prison for the rest of his life. But I can't let the assassin kill him. That's not how the justice system works. Please, Alyssa. If you know where he is, I need you to tell me. We can make this better together."

She pulled the baby away from her chest to look down at his bulldog face. "You swear you'll get us away from here? I want out of Simone City. I never want to hear Gerald's name or see his face ever again."

I decided not to remind her of the resemblance her child bore to her husband. "I can make it happen. Tell me where to find him."

"He has an apartment in Venus," she said. "Where he goes for his extracurricular activities, as you referred to them. He thinks I don't know about it. No one else does. My best guess is that he's there."

An hour later, I showed up at Gerald Cain's other address. The apartment was near the main strip of clubs and venues. Penthouse, which I assumed Cain used to frequent with Beatnik, was within walking distance. It was one of the nicer buildings in the area, reserved for "artists" who never worked for their money and decided that freedom and bohemia was their preferred lifestyle. From a few minutes of observation outside, I figured out the majority of people who lived in the building were trust fund kids in their early twenties who fancied themselves artists when, in reality, they were consumers. Most of them sported tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, or a combination of the three, smelled of patchouli, and smoked curious substances out of old-fashioned wooden pipes. Each one was a carbon copy of the last. There was no originality in their self-expression. The fact that Cain was hiding out here almost made me laugh out loud. A man in his late fifties with a designer suit, leather loafers, and solid gold cufflinks would be massively out of place here. It was a miracle that Cain had flown under the radar for so long.

When I reached the door to his apartment, he didn't answer after the first knock. Or the second. Or the third insistent one. "Gerald Cain," I called. "This is Detective Sheila Arden with the SCPD. I need to speak with you. It's urgent."

The door flew open, someone yanked me inside, and the door slammed shut again. The action was so rapid and charged that I drew my gun from its holster and aimed it at the man who'd pulled me in.

"Whoa, whoa!" He held both hands up. "What the fuck, Detective? You asked to come in!"

I steadied my racing breath. "Mr. Cain?"

"Obviously," he said. "Thanks for shouting my name in the hallway by the way. Now the whole block will know I'm here."

The man standing across from me did not look like the Gerald Cain I'd seen in photographs. His thin gray hair was tousled, revealing a shiny, sweaty forehead. An unkempt beard hid his usually clean-shaven face. There were bags under both of his eyes. He wore a bathrobe, the tan color of which made it look like it had never been laundered. The smell of cheap booze lingered in the air. A half-empty bottle of bourbon sat on the kitchen table. Gerald Cain was letting the fear of his impending murder tear him apart.

I put my gun away but swept my jacket away from my belt in case I needed quick access to the weapon again. Cain made me uneasy, and it was no secret he liked taking advantage of younger women. "Don't ever grab a member of the police like that," I said. "You might not get so lucky next time."

"You call this getting lucky? How did you find me?"

"I'm a detective," I said. "I detect."

"And how can I help you, _Detective_?"

I planted my hands on my hips and fixed him with a blank stare. "Let's not lie to each other, Gerald. We both know you're an ass. We also both know you're not bunking out here because your wife kicked you out. The Simone City killer is after you, and you're scared shitless."

He grabbed the bottle of bourbon and went to take the cap off without realizing it was already open. Bourbon sloshed down the front of his robe. He shook off the droplets and took a swig from the bottle. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about," I said. "If you want to stay alive, you'll listen to me. Hiding out here won't stop the killer from finding you. They found Phillip Beatnik, remember? In fact, I have reason to believe that the killer is honing in on you."

"Reason? What reason?"

"It's classified," I retorted. "I need your cooperation, Gerald. My main goal is to catch whoever's responsible for the past four murders. Your main goal is to not become the fifth. How lucky for us both that our goals are so intertwined."

Cain chugged from the bottle, swallowed, and wiped his mouth. "What the hell am I supposed to do? What do you want from me?"

I smirked. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy watching Cain completely wig out. The guy deserved the stress. "Well, Gerald. I want to use you as bait."

Chapter Nineteen - Vee

For a man who desperately wanted not to be found, Gerald Cain was easy to track down. First of all, he hadn't bothered to ditch his regular phone and get a burner one. That alone gave me all I needed to find him. I found the address of his apartment in Venus by breaking into his personal records and taking a look around. The apartment was in his name, a bold move for someone who used the place as a personal brothel. He relied too much on his own discretion, or his money, to keep the apartment a secret. The funniest part was that he thought the Simone City killer wouldn't be able to track him down out there. I guessed it followed a logical train of thought. So far, I'd killed all four men out in the open. Cain was the first one to attempt going into hiding. The location did shift my plan of attack though. In Juno, the buildings were too high to consider any entrance above the ground floor. In Venus, the rooftops were lower and closer together, which meant I could come at Cain from above. He would never expect it.

Li Hui caught me climbing out the window of my apartment, fully dressed in what I'd come to think of as my combat gear, each hidden sheath stocked with a blade. She clicked her tongue, and I pulled the mask down to speak to her.

"That's a lot of bok choy," I said.

She brandished the vegetables. "Making stir fry. Where are you going?"

"Venus."

"Who?"

"Gerald Cain."

Li Hui set the bok choy down and coaxed me in from the window. "Cricket, I don't think you should do this anymore."

"Li Hui, you told me—"

"I know what I told you," she said. "I don't think you understand what I'm saying. This is not going to end well for you. You're going to get caught, and you are going to bear these deaths on your soul for the rest of your life."

"So be it." I headed for the window again.

"You're going to regret this," Li Hui warned.

"You know, I don't think I will."

A few blocks away from Cain's address, I scurried up a fire exit and clambered onto the roof to take a look at the scene from above. It was late. The club-goers were out in full swing. The night was similar to the one where I'd taken down Phillip Beatnik. Wealthy men snuck into Penthouse. Scantily clad women waited on the street corners for propositions. Music blasted from the windows of the surroundings clubs. The air was thick. It was a foggy night, and the club-goers contributed to the poor visibility by puffing away on cigarettes and vape pens. The neon lights made it look like colorful clouds hovered above the pavement, but the vibrant hues faded beyond the main strip of clubs. Cain lived a block away from Penthouse. I kept low as I scurried across the rooftops, lest someone happen to look skyward and see the figure of the Simone City killer silhouetted against the moonlight.

I'd religiously studied the street maps of the area to plan out my route. I watched Cain's apartment from an adjacent roof. Most of the building was dark—the other residents were out partying for the evening—but there was a single lit window on the fourth floor. Before long, Cain crossed through the beam of light. I recognized his outline from my research, but an earlier memory surfaced too. His build triggered a deeper reaction. I shifted in my crouch, uncomfortable. What was it about about Cain, beside the obvious, that made me so uneasy?

His window was open. Stupid. He figured just because he was on a higher level, no one would be able to break in, but there was a rain gutter that ran along the side of the building two feet from his window. I sprinted toward the gap between this building and the next and leapt. It was the biggest jump I'd done so far. For one heart-stopping moment, I thought I might not reach the other side. Instead of rolling safely to the rooftop, I slammed into the edge of it. It knocked the wind out of me, and I nearly slid off. I caught the lip of the roof with one hand, dangling off the building like a monkey. I swung myself forward and let go. The momentum gave me the push I needed to grab hold of the rain gutter. I shimmied down it, approached Cain's window, and peered inside. Cain had his back to me. He appeared to be speaking to himself as he waved around a bottle of bourbon. I swung myself inside and landed like a cat on Cain's carpet, the karambit at the ready.

We weren't alone. A shot went off with a loud bang, and a bullet knocked the karambit out of my hand without so much as nicking my skin. I drew another knife and spun around to face my attacker. It was Detective Sheila Arden, wearing a protective vest over her crisp, blue button-up shirt. Gerald Cain cowered behind her, shielding his face with the bourbon.

"It's over," Arden said. "Put down your weapon and raise your hands in the air. We have this building surrounded. If you try to escape, I'll radio down and let my unit know to apprehend you. You won't make it out."

She held the gun with both hands, steady and sure. The radio in question was clipped to her belt. I stood completely still. I already had plenty of proof that she was a good shot, but that wasn't the only thing keeping me in place. At this distance, I couldn't deny the weird familiarity of Sheila Arden's face. I knew her somehow. From years before. As if we'd gone to elementary school together but forgotten about it.

"Drop the knife," she ordered. "I don't want to shoot you."

"Why not?" Cain hissed from behind her.

"Shut up," Arden said to him. Her eyes flickered away from me for a tenth of a second. It was all the time I needed.

I dove across the floor and rolled. Arden fired twice and missed before I slammed into her. She was small but sturdy. It was like running into a brick wall, but I had more weight to throw around than she did. I wrapped my arms around her waist and tackled her to the ground. Cain dodged out from behind us, putting as much space between our scuffle and himself as possible. I slashed at Arden's hand, the one holding the gun, without dedication. The knife grazed her skin and she smacked it away. We rolled over. Once. Twice. Knocking into Cain's table and chairs. All the while, Cain screamed and swore like a madman. Arden pinned me to the floor. The carpet smelled like mold and liquor. Her dark hair fell out of its ponytail and into her face. As she swept it out of her eyes, I yanked the radio from her belt and tossed it as hard as I could across the room.

Arden flipped her hair out of her face like she was in the middle of a shampoo commercial and, in the same move, landed a sharp blow to my mouth. My lip split open, and I tasted blood. Arden raised her gun, this time aiming right between my eyes. I got my hands free and pushed the barrel up and away from my face, then lifted my hips to dislodge Arden from where she straddled my waist. She bucked upward, splaying her hands out to catch herself as I forced her over my head. She dropped the gun. I ducked under her, swiveled around, and knocked the butt of my knife against her skull. She dropped, unconscious.

The room was quiet. Cain was gone. I looked at Arden, face down on the carpet, hair a mess. I swallowed hard. Never had I meant to do something like this to another woman. I knelt down and gently pushed Arden over so that she rested comfortably on her side. Hopefully, the new bruise on her temple wouldn't have any lasting repercussions.

I recovered the karambit and looked around the apartment. It was a simple one bedroom. Either Cain had gone out the window, or he'd found a place to hole up in. My bet was on the latter since he didn't come off as the type of man ballsy enough to jump out of a fourth-floor window. I crept toward the bedroom, knife in hand. I eased the door open. It was dark inside.

"Come on out, Cain," I cooed. "I promise I won't hurt you."

As soon as I stepped fully into the bedroom, Cain launched himself out of the closet and came at me from behind. I didn't have time to turn around. He wrapped his arm around my throat and squeezed, but the idiot didn't restrain my hands. I jabbed upward with the knife, catching the tendons in his forearm. He swore and let go, cradling his maimed arm. He stumbled out of the bedroom and into the living room again, aiming for Arden's abandoned gun. Just as he was about to reach it, I threw another blade across the room with my left hand. It hit the gun and ricocheted off, knocking the weapon beyond Cain's reach.

"I know who you are," Cain said, circling around the room. "As soon as Beatnik turned up dead, I figured it was you. I can't believe you aren't dead."

"Surprise," I said.

He continued to move around the living room. I prowled along the opposite side, right across from him, keeping our distance equal.

"Well?" he prompted. "Here I am. The cop's down, and there's no one standing in your way. Come get me."

I remained where I was, but tightened my grip on the karambit. Cain's gaze flickered toward the weapon.

"You can't do it, can you?" he said. "You can't kill me." He laughed, tipping his head back to expose his throat. In a second, I could lodge a knife in his artery, but something stayed my hand. "Oh, this is rich. You're too scared to kill me, aren't you? Do you know why?"

The feeling came back again, the unsettling tremor that had first hit me on the rooftop a few minutes ago. Cain remembered something I didn't. He laughed again.

"Silly Veronica," he said. "Don't you recall? I'm the one that killed your mother."

And then it came rushing back. My mother moaning. Kyle Fisher demanding someone shut her up. Cain raising his hand and bringing it down with unnecessary force on my mother's face. He'd done it again a few minutes later. Harder. As if the noise of his fist against her skin made him feel alive. Here and now, Cain cackled and smirked. I lunged across the room.

Perhaps he'd been expecting me to be paralyzed with fear, because his eyes widened with shock when I latched myself to him and ripped the karambit across his torso. It was an intentionally shallow cut, but it reached from his shoulder to his hip. Blood splashed across the dirty carpet as he attempted to fend me off. I ducked under his poorly aimed attacks and slashed at his legs, deliberately holding off on a kill strike. I wanted Gerald Cain to suffer. He staggered around the room, unable to get a grip on me. I wove in and out, cutting into his skin like a sculptor. He ducked below one of my attacks. I missed, fell off balance, and swung around to face him again.

"Don't move," Cain said. He had Sheila Arden, who was barely conscious, around the neck. Her gun was in his hand, pointed at her temple. "Take one more swipe at me, and I'll kill her. Her death will be on your hands."

I didn't look at him. I looked at Arden. She wore an intense expression of worry, one I'd seen before, and I finally realized why she was so familiar to me. "It's you," I said to her. "You're the Giordano's girl."

She nodded.

"Shut up!" Cain pressed the gun to Sheila's head. She squeezed her eyes shut as he clicked off the safety. "I swear to God, I'll do—"

He never finished his sentence because I threw a knife through his eye.

Chapter Twenty - Sheila

The knife lodged itself in Cain's eyeball with a sickening stick. The gun clattered to the floor. Cain thumped to the carpet, and that was it. The knife had punctured his brain. The Simone City killer had murdered someone right in front of me. Though it only took me a moment to process the quick second of violence, it was enough time for her to escape. She leapt out of the window, grabbed hold of the side of the building, and climbed upward. I recovered my gun and my radio and sprinted after her.

"Target's on the run," I shouted into the radio. There were cops stationed at every corner of Cain's building. It had all been a part of the plan to lure the killer into the apartment. Theoretically, someone should have spotted her, but I hadn't expected her to come in from overhead. "Rooftops, heading west."

I hoisted myself out of the window and looked up. The killer's boots disappeared over the roof of the building. "Please don't let me fall and die," I muttered, standing with shaky legs on the windowsill. The only way up was the rain gutter. I tested my weight on it, yanking on the rickety aluminum, and climbed up. At the top, I swung one leg over the lip of the roof and got myself on level ground again. My head throbbed from where she'd knocked me out. I rubbed the lump as I examined the rooftops. There. One building over, sprinting away like a cat.

The fact that she'd cleared the gap between the buildings seemed impossible to me, but I had no choice except to follow her. Down below, red and blue lights flashed as my unit responded to my directions. Sirens filled the air as I careened toward the edge of the building, pumping my arms to build up speed. Where the rooftop ended, I jumped. A yell ripped out of my throat as I hurtled through the air. Miraculously, I made it to the other side. The toe of my shoe clipped the roof, and I slammed face first into the concrete. I barely felt it. The killer paused to look at me, surprised by my audacity to take the jump. Then she ran off again.

I got to my feet and took off, nose streaming blood. The buildings were all connected, and we raced across one long rooftop. The killer dodged behind air conditioning units and access doors, trying to lose me in the maze of confusion, but I kept a close eye on her. Finally, she reached the end of the group of buildings and disappeared over the edge. I skidded to a stop and saw her clambering down the fire escape. I followed, taking the rusted metal steps three at a time. She dropped the last few feet and landed in an empty alleyway. Her head whipped toward the mouth of it, where a cop car drove by with its blaring siren, and took off in the opposite direction. I reached the bottom of the fire escape and let go, the air whooshing through my hair as I dropped to the pavement.

She was fast—that was for damn sure—and she knew the area well. Just when I thought I was gaining on her, she'd dart down a side street or another skinny alleyway, forcing me to switch directions. In those precious seconds, she put a few more feet between the two of us. Then I changed tactics, slowing down to anticipate her moves. No matter how quickly she ran, I kept up with her, a step behind but never far. I hadn't run track in high school and college for nothing. Speed might have been the killer's secret weapon, but mine was stamina. She began to falter, her leg muscles unable to keep up such a rigorous pace. As she headed for another empty street, a squad car drove right by her escape route. Her toe caught a lip in the pavement, and her ankle dipped to the ground at a terrible angle. When she tried to put weight on it, her whole leg shook.

I dashed forward, but as soon as I was close, she whirled around and jammed her elbow toward my jaw. The hit clipped me as she toppled over, unable to balance on a single foot. In another unexpected move, she grabbed the front of my protective vest and dragged me down with her. We tussled, rolling around on the damp pavement. Neither one of us was willing to put in a hard hit. I didn't use my gun, and she was holding back too. From the feel of it, she had plenty of knives left to throw, but she never reached for another one. Instead, she landed petty jabs on my ribs or cheeks. I fended them off, trying to catch her hands long enough to put her in cuffs, but she was wily. We rolled over again, and her injured ankle knocked into the curb. She let out a whimper of pain and reached down, leaving herself unguarded. I sat on her chest so her arms were pinned down. She squirmed but couldn't dislodge me, not even with the hip-chuck trick she'd done earlier.

"You didn't kill me," I said. My breath was thick and heavy. The chase and subsequent fight had knocked it all out of me. "Up in Cain's apartment when he had the gun to my head. You could've killed me and gotten out of there totally free. Why didn't you?"

"You know why."

I shifted my weight so that she could breathe better. Tentatively, I pulled the mask off to reveal the rest of her face. She looked relieved. Relieved and scared. And though her face had thinned out since she was fifteen, there was no denying who she truly was.

"Veronica," I said. "I wasn't sure it was you. Well, I was _pretty_ sure."

Her eyes were damp and confused. I felt like a teenager again, trying to find the right words to say to the girl who'd disappeared all those years ago. But I wasn't a teenager, and the once innocent girl had turned into a murderer.

"You saved my life," I said. "Even though I'm the one trying to track you down and put you in prison. I have to know why. You have to say it out loud."

She wriggled one of her hands free and touched the outline of my cheek, as if trying to commit the shape of my face to memory. "You saved my life. I saved yours. Now we're square."

A squad car stopped at the end of the alley. The flashing lights gleamed in the whites of Veronica's eyes. She tilted her head back to look at the car, panic settling into her expression. I sat on my heels, freeing Veronica's other hand, then rolled off of her.

"Go," I said.

"What?"

"Go," I said again. "Before I change my mind."

She pushed herself up from the pavement, leaning heavily on her good ankle. The doors of the squad car opened and shut as the officers got out. I looped Veronica's arm around my shoulders and half-carried her to another side street. When she was hidden from the police lights, I set her down and urged her to keep moving.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I guess I just have to keep saving you. Don't make me regret it."

My radio buzzed with static, startling both of us. The nearby officers steadily approached. "Detective Arden?" one of them called, squinting into the dark alley.

"Here." I stumbled out of the side street and planted my hands on my knees as if I'd run a race. "Suspect's gone. She gave me a run for my money."

The officers shined their flashlights around, checking the various offstreets. I looked after Veronica, but the shadows of Venus had swallowed her whole. My gut squirmed. I'd just let a killer go free.

