To Catch a Killer Read online

  “What the hell?” she grumbled. Reluctantly, she removed the chains and the deadbolt and opened the door.

  “Hi,” her new partner said, trying to keep his cheerfulness on a low setting out of respect.

  She ran a hand over her messy hair. “Hi. What brings you here?” She also wanted to ask who had given him her address, but she let that question go for now.

  “I heard that you came up empty with the mug book and the system records,” he said. His dark eyes scanned her, and then looked over her shoulder into the dim living room. “May we come in?”

  No, she thought, but aloud she said, “Sure.”

  She stepped aside and let Soldano and his companion into her private sanctum. The woman was tiny and birdlike, with thin and nervous hands that clutched a large shoulder bag. When Soldano crossed the threshold, he brushed against Anya’s shoulder. She caught a whiff of his aftershave, spicy and masculine with just a hint of musk.

  She could have kicked herself. What are you thinking? Who cares about his aftershave?

  Her dead partner’s voice spoke in her head. “Well, clearly… you do.”

  Soldano turned to face her after she closed the door and re-set the chain and the deadbolt. “Pearl Nguyen is a sketch artist from Farmington. She’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. Since you didn’t find a photo, maybe she can help you come up with the next best thing.”

  The artist waved to her subconsciously. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” She looked around. “Thanks for coming. Sorry the place is so messy… maid’s day off.”

  Instead of nailing her for the cliché joke, Soldano grinned. His dark eyes sparkled, and a distant part of her mind noticed that he had dimples. “I have the same problem. It’s so hard to find good help these days.”

  Pearl gestured toward the coffee table, the only flat surface in view. Anya had never purchased a dining room table, since she lacked a dining room in her efficiency. “Can I set up here?”

  “Sure.”

  The artist sat on the floor facing the couch and opened her bag. She pulled out her sketchbook and her drawing tools and placed them on the coffee table.

  Anya sat on the couch, and Soldano sat beside her. His breath smelled like spearmint. She realized that her palms were sweating, and she wiped them on the knees of her pajama pants. Sheepishly, she realized that she was wearing the sleep set with the Wonder Woman logo printed on the fabric. She glanced at Soldano, embarrassed, wondering if he’d noticed her guilty pleasure.

  For the next two hours, she described Rob’s killer in the most detail she could manage. When the image in her head seemed to get vague, she relied on her invisible partner. Rob made corrections and suggestions for her to relay to Pearl. Since the killer’s face had been his last sight among the living, his recall was more or less perfect. She couldn’t say the same.

  Finally, Pearl put her pencil down and turned the sketchbook around. “Is this who you saw?”

  The face was triangular, with a weak jaw and a long, narrow nose. The pale eyes were small and tilted down at the outer edges. His lips were thin, and his ears stuck out like open car doors. It was him.

  “Yes. That’s what I saw.”

  “Great.” Soldano rose, and Anya felt suddenly deprived when his warmth went away. “I’ll take this down to the station and see about getting it posted.”

  She stood, too, and walked them to the door. “Thank you for coming over,” she said sincerely. “This was a big help.”

  “No problem.”

  “Just one question.”

  He smiled. Why did he keep smiling at her? It was distracting. “What’s that?”

  “How did you find my address?” As soon as she asked, she knew it was a stupid question to ask someone whose job revolved around obtaining such details.

  If he was insulted, he didn’t show it. He tapped the badge that was still clipped to his belt. “Detective, remember?” He laughed. It was an infectious sound, and even in her grief and scattered emotional state, it made her smile.

  “Well, good job.”

  “Thanks.” He and Pearl stepped out into the hallway. “Sorry we woke you up.”

  She had that insecure feeling again, as if she was in high school, talking to a cute boy in homeroom. “It’s, uh, it’s okay. I should have been up, anyway.”

  The two of them started to walk away, but he stopped and turned back. “I think the Cartoon Channel is running a Superfriends marathon today.” He grinned and nodded toward her pajamas. “Just... thought you’d like to know. Once DC fan to another.”

  “Thanks.” She closed the door, and then let her head fall forward so her forehead bumped the wood. Irritated, she thought, He thinks I’m a dweeb.

  Rob appeared in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the jamb. “Nah. I’m the only one that thinks that.”

  She went back to the couch and sat down again, feeling drained. “Thanks for your help with that sketch.”

  “No, thank you for yours. It’s not like I could tell her anything.”

  She leaned back and rested her head against the back of the couch. “Am I the only one who can see and hear you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re special.”

  “Don’t dick around with me.”

  “I’m serious.” He pointed to her bookcase, where her few family photographs were standing in silver frames. “You always told me that your granny was gifted. A medium. You inherited it.”

  She shook her head. “Inherited what?”

  “You’re a medium, too, jackass.”

  Anya wanted to deny it, but she knew that she couldn’t. She had seen too many ghosts over too many years, but had just brushed away the sightings as tiredness or stress. Now was the first time that she’d had a personal connection to the deceased. She sighed. “I guess.”

  Rob walked over and sat on the couch beside her. Unlike Soldano, his presence was cold, as if she were sitting on a block of ice. “You like him.”

  “I guess.” She gave him a suspicious side-eye. “What are you doing?”

  “I think he likes you.”

  “Rob…”

  “He does.” He leaned back. The couch cushions and the pillows did not react to him. He was losing his ability to put weight on material things. “He even has your same lame sense of humor and your bad taste in comic books.”

  She rose and paced away from him.

  “I’m a ghost, and I can hear what you’re thinking. Don’t lie to me.”

  Anya sighed and stopped walking. “Yes, he’s kind of hot, but if he’s going to be my partner, that sort of thing just can’t happen. You know we can’t date within the department.”

  “Tell that to Schultz and Schultz.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “That’s different. He’s a beat cop and she’s a dispatcher.”

  “Why is it different?”

  He was giving her that keen look, the one that said he was going to win his argument come hell or high water. “Because it is.”

  “He’s posted to Farmington. That makes it totally legal.”

  “He’s working in our office.”

  “Only temporarily.”

  Exasperated, she went to her refrigerator and pulled out another beer. “For a dead guy, you sure can be annoying.”

  He laughed. “It’s almost like I’m still alive, right? Admit it. I always did drive you to drink.”

  “Sometimes,” she allowed.

  Rob sighed. The edges of his form flickered and faded like the images on an ancient movie reel. “Anya,” he said, “Listen to me. The unfinished business I told you about? It’s not just the case. It’s also you.”

  “Me?” she echoed.

  With a nod, he pressed his point. “You spend all of your life working. You never take time off, you never let down. I’ve never seen you date anybody. You’re wasting the best years of your life, and for what? You’re trying to wi
n a war that can’t be won.”

  He rose and walked toward her. His feet had disappeared, and he was only visible from the shins up. She realized that he was running out of time.

  “I need you to live for me. I need you to take this chance. I told you to go to the office because I knew he was there, and he’ll only be there until you go back to work. If you hadn’t gone today, you’d have missed him, and that would be a tragedy, because the perfect match doesn’t come along every day.”

  “Perfect match,” she repeated, bitterly. “There are no perfect matches.”

  “There are.” He tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but it passed through her, leaving only the feeling of a cold breeze behind. He looked startled and dismayed for just a moment. He dropped his hand.

  “You and Susan were a perfect match,” she said sadly.

  “I know.” He looked down in his own sorrow, but he returned his gaze to her face a moment later. “That’s how I know one when I see one.”

  She walked to the window and opened the blinds. Sunlight poured into the room, and it made Rob’s transparency more acute. Afraid she was somehow hurting him, she closed the blinds again.

  Rob kept talking. “From this side of things, you can see so much. So much that I can’t tell you, so much that you’ll have to wait to find out when you get here yourself. What I can tell you is that everyone has a fate, and sometimes that fate is really shitty, like the one I got dealt. But sometimes it’s really, really good.”

  Anya asked, “What’s my fate?”

  “Your fate?” He began to fade from view. “Your fate is in your hands.”

  Chapter Four

  She spent the rest of the day driving around the Jefferson neighborhood, hoping that

  she’d catch of glimpse of the suspect in some unguarded moment, like taking out the trash or leaving a corner store. The midwinter sun was disingenuously bright, and she resented it. Sunny mornings like this weren’t supposed to happen when someone you loved like a brother was being prepared for his funeral.

  She considered going to check on Susan, but the thought of seeing Rob’s widow made her own grief amplified. She couldn’t bring herself to walk up those familiar steps, to sit at the kitchen table and listen to the children, knowing that Rob was never coming home.

  She thought back to her grandmother and the readings that she used to peddle to the gullible public when Anya had been young. Her grandmother, an immigrant from Poland, had been the one to raise her after the catastrophic breakup of her parents’ marriage had ended up with both of them interred in St. Casimir’s boneyard.

  Babcia Irenka had supplemented her meager pension by selling psychic readings and telling fortunes with cards and tea leaves. Anya remembered helping her prepare her reading room for a client: spreading the little round table with a black velvet throw, lighting candles, burning incense.

  Her grandmother had a round mirror that she had painted black, and she kept it in a hat box under the table. Babcia Irenka had told her that it was a scrying mirror, and that she could see the faces of the dead in its non-reflective surface. Anya had always thought she was a complete phony and a liar, which had made her grandmother incensed with anger.

  When she was in high school, Anya had broken that mirror in a rage, accusing her grandmother of theft, of taking advantage of people’s grief and desperation. The old woman had thrown her out of the house, screaming at her, “You will see, you little shit! You will see! And then you will be sorry you left me!”

  Anya hadn’t been sorry until today. She would have liked to have talked to her grandmother now. Maybe Babcia Irenka could have given her some advice on how to live with a ghost.

  She drove on automatic pilot, cruising through the city in aimless, ever-widening circles. The squared-off city plots conspired to help her make endless right turns and still wind around the center of the city like a plumb bob on a string. Finally hunger and thirst broke through her bitter reveries and she decided to stop and get something to eat.

  As a cop, and with a cop’s salary, she had become a connoisseur of low-end diners and cheap family restaurants. One of her favorite lunch hangouts was the Copper Pot, a family-style place that specialized in large portions for small prices. Rob had discovered it one day when they were leaving a crime scene, and they had eaten there at least once a week ever since.

  She parked in the tiny parking lot, barely able to make out the chalky white paint of the parking space lines through the cracks and potholes. The freeze/thaw pattern of the weather was unkind to pavement in these parts. She walked into the restaurant and past the “seat yourself” sign, selecting their favorite booth that was under a television that was screwed into the wall.

  The midday news broadcast was on, and the sound on the television was turned down so low that she couldn’t hear a word. She wondered if sitting in this booth so many times under a silent TV had been the genesis of her own propensity for watching the tube with no sound.

  Marty, who had worked here as a waitress for as long as Anya had been coming here, strolled over to her table and poured a big cup of coffee without asking first. She leaned over to a neighboring table and grabbed a saucer full of creamer packets, which she put down at Anya’s elbow.

  “I saw it on the news,” Marty said without preamble. “How’s his wife?”

  Anya opened the creamers and poured them into the coffee, one by one. “About as well as you’d expect.”

  “And how are you?”

  She looked up at the older woman. Marty’s hair was the kind of improbable orange that only came from bottles, and she was wearing an entire cosmetics counter on her face, but her eyes were kind. She looked back down at her mug.

  “About as well as you’d expect.”

  Marty put a strong, square hand on Anya’s forearm and gave her a comforting squeeze. She put the menu in front of her, then said, “Take your time, sweetheart. We’re open 24 hours.”

  Anya read through the menu, as if she hadn’t already memorized it from hundreds of visits in the past. The same blurry pictures stood over messy, hand-typed stickers, hiding the original offerings from when the menu had first been printed twelve years before. The Copper Pot made good, cheap food, and a lot of it, but their sense of presentation had always been a little lacking.

  She finally gave up the pretense of reading the shabby thing, and the next time Marty came around to fill her coffee cup, she ordered the same thing she always did. Denver omelet, white toast and keep the java coming. She pulled out her phone and looked for missed calls or messages, expecting nothing. The only person who had ever called her was dead.

  To her surprise, there was a text waiting for her. It was from Soldano. ‘Something 2 show u,’ it said. ‘Call me when U R free.’

  She had her cranky moments, and usually text speak brought it out. From Soldano, though, it was like getting an e-mail from a LOLcat. She decided not to think about that too deeply and texted him back.

  “Copper Pot,” she sent. “And I’m always free.”

  She put the phone aside and stared up at the silent television. The local news was on, with the earnest-but-stupid daytime anchor Ryan Silver reading the bulletin. She’d met him before, back when he was a regular reporter. He’s always been very nice and respectful, a supporter of law enforcement, but dumb as a box of rocks. His model good looks had probably gotten him the job, not his IQ. Now he was the face of Channel Five News at Noon.

  He wore it well. At least he managed to read the news without slaughtering too many pronunciations.

  Marty came back, her scuffed brown plastic tray full of food and coffee. She had just finished delivering Anya’s order when Soldano appeared, sliding into the booth across from her. He flashed his ridiculously winning smile at the waitress, who greeted him by name. Apparently it hadn’t taken him long to find his way around.

  “Hey, Carter,” Marty greeted. “Nice to see you. The usual?”

  “Absolutely.” He ke
pt his smile beaming at Marty walked away. Once they were alone, he turned that wattage onto Anya. She smiled back but not nearly as friendly. “Thanks for texting me back.”

  “No worries. What did you want to show me?”

  “Well, two things, really. One will have to wait for later. This is the important one.” Suddenly he was all business, his smile extinguished. She found that she rather missed it. He reached under his raincoat and pulled out a messenger bag, brown leather with brass buckles, an obvious antique.

  “Nice bag,” she said lamely.

  “Thanks. It was my grandpa’s. He was a reporter in Mexico City until the Zeta cartel put a bullet in his brain last year.”