Eight
Six years later…
Two detectives sat inside of a late night diner, a window spanning most of the north wall beside them. It gives a clear view outside, and the periodic white and red glow of moving lights splash onto the street as another random car speeds by. Both detectives are eating burgers, and one of them has a napkin tucked into his tan button up like a bib.
“I told you,” the one without the bib said. “The decision was made. I see these other kids around my neighborhood ignoring their parents and not knowing what to do with themselves because of that flashing color box being on twenty-four goddamn seven.”
The officer with the bib smiled, holding his burger up with two hands. “Why don’t you just say it’s your brother’s kids? No reason to bullshit about it.”
“Well fine, all right motherfucker. One of those little assholes put a hole in the goddamn drywall yesterday, and you know my worthless brother ain’t going to do anything about it. If he can’t afford the damage his kids do at his own house, he sure isn’t going to be able to afford mine.” He wiped his hands with a napkin, crumbled it and dropped it on the table. “Makes me so sick I don’t think I can finish eating.”
“I have total sympathy for you, Roscoe. But hey, what are you going to do?”
“Disown the motherfucker as my brother, that’s what. Shit, get a restraining order and get CPS on his kids.”
“Oh, come on. Now you know that ain’t right.”
Roscoe had his brown fingers interlocked beneath his chin, his gaze dark and directed out the window. “You know I don’t mean it,” Roscoe said in a low voice. “But sometimes it you wears you down man. Especially, when you have to deal with relatives from three different cold cases calling you endlessly. Just one unsolvable headache on top of another.”
Bobby considered this for a moment, his head tilted slightly up and his brow furrowed. “You have that one case, don’t you? The famous author?”
“Hmmm?”
“The famous author. The Ridge case. You have that, right?”
“Yeah, I don’t want it. If there was ever a case to tack the word unsolvable to.”
“Not a single suspect? Not an inkling of who the suspect might be? Nothing at all still, huh?”
Roscoe snorted. “If we had that this case might not be so unsolvable.”
“There hasn’t been a single tip that you even wondered about? You know everyone gets those tips where…well, you wonder. Even if there is not the slightest string of evidence to support it.”
Roscoe seemed to consider this, his brow wrinkled in thought. “Well Bobby, there was one tip from some wack job heroin addict.”
Bobby smiled. Clapped his hands together “All right, good. So what happened with that?”
Roscoe waved a hand in dismissal. “She kept claiming she saw the woman Dennis was with getting on a school bus.”
Bobby pursed his lips. Then he shrugged and opened his mouth wide for a gigantic bite of his burger. He chewed for a few moments, then swallowed.
“Oh, well. Sometimes I guess a case is just fucked, right?”
“Yeah,” Roscoe said, his eyes distant.
“Tell me something, though,” Bobby said, through a mouthful of food. “How old did this girl look?”
“Fifteen. And says she saw her in the South.”
“And she was black, right? I mean for her to say she looked like the girl Dennis was with she had to be black, right? Dark skinned.”
“About my shade,” Roscoe said, pointing at himself.
“What? Midnight?”
Roscoe chuckled, pointing at his partner. “You’re the only white boy in existence I’d let get away with saying some shit like that. But yeah, she said the girl was dark and got on a school bus.”
“And?”
"And she thought the girl looked familiar, like maybe she'd seen her somewhere before."
"That's all?"
Roscoe shrugged. "She wondered if it might be the daughter of someone famous. I don’t know, she was a heroin addict, after all."
Bobby leaned back in his seat, three-quarters of his burger eaten. He chewed the bite in his mouth slowly. Swallowed. He leaned forward.
"Okay, so she must've mentioned who the celebrity was."
Roscoe shook his head. "No. That's just it. Actually she didn't. She did a lot of rambling at that point. Really just seemed kind of lost, like she forgot who she was talking to, forgot what she was saying and why she was with me in the first place."
"What, did she fix in front of you," Bobby said, and chuckled.
"Come on. You know I wouldn’t let her do that.”
“I’m just kidding.”
“Yeah, I know Bobby.”
"I don't know...I'm just saying that it's odd how she suddenly lost her place in the story. It's like...what the fuck? Did she know how big this case is?"
"At times it seemed she did and at times it seemed like she didn't even know what year it was. My opinion, she's on more than heroin. Met her on one occasion and it was enough to convince me whatever story she told, about whatever subject, was something that could've all been made up in her head."
"You follow every lead?"
"She had nothing else to give." Roscoe took a sip of his Coke. "She was a lost cause and the case a lost cause right along with her."
"The girl was black and looked like the daughter of a celebrity. And this was in the South. Well, that doesn't really tell us anything."
"In Louisiana, I think she said."
Bobby considered this, leaning back in his seat with his hands across his belly. "A celebrity from Louisiana. Black. Who's been big out there, lately. Haven't heard much about anyone from Louisiana, ever."
"It's not something people would probably pay a lot of attention to. I mean, there's probably a lot of names if you Google it."
"Whoever she mentioned must've been a household name," Bobby said. "Or a name fast on the rise."
Roscoe pursed his lips.
"There's only one notable celebrity I could think of," Bobby said. "But it's as good as shit, seeing how your tipster doesn't even know what celebrity she was talking about."
"What celebrity you got in mind?"
"Versha Mitchell. She's black, young. Looks very young as a matter of fact. You wouldn't think she had kids. Her face has been plastered all over TV since she won a seat in the Senate this year. People wanted her to run for president."
"And you said she has kids?"
"I think I heard something about kids. But I was back and forth out the room, you know. You can only half believe the bullshit that's on these days."
"I think I know who you're talking about. Real cutie. I only remember her face on a magazine. I don't know anything about her kids though. You have any idea of their ages."
Bobby shook his head.
"And it wouldn't matter," Roscoe said, rubbing his temple with his left hand. "The girl who killed Dennis was an adult, not a child. I doubt this Versha has any adult children or did when Dennis was killed, anyway."
"That's true. But it could be something worth looking into. Fifty year old cases have been solved by the smallest detail, sometimes details overlooked by one detective and followed more strenuously by the other." Bobby, shrugged. “But then again, it might just be fucked city.”
"You've seen the footage of the girl in the hotel with Dennis. There's not even a clear shot of her face and it's in black and white. So even if the girl the addict described really looks like the girl in that picture, you couldn't know for sure."
"Yeah, but you could look into her whereabouts around the time Dennis was killed. It'll probably turn up nothing, but it's worth looking. Right?"
"Yeah. But Versha would have to have a kid that could've managed to disappear for long enough to make it from Louisiana and all the way back unnoticed."
Bobby extracted his smartphone and started a search. "Well, I'm going to check something man, because in the year 2014 the answer to most questions is often right in your pocket."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to Google Versha's kids, see their ages."
"Okay," Roscoe said. "But you should try not to get your hopes up. Save yourself the money on migraine pills."
It took less than a minute for Bobby to look up the info. "All right," Bobby said, “her oldest girl is twenty four. Attended William Grady High, a private school, and was valedictorian for the first three years—wonder what made her miss the mark senior year. She was in gymnastics, ran track, played women's basketball, and her favorite thing to do is to go camping with her mom and dad. Ah, and the perfect family portrait of the family in the yard of a house with a white picket fence."
"So she would've been seventeen at the time of the murder."
"A person can be damn deceptive at that age. Trust me, I know from experience."
"Well, whether you know or not that doesn't tell us anything. And my witness saw the girl get on a bus. She's the daughter of a millionaire, mom. You're telling me she didn't have a car at seventeen. I don't know if I could buy that Bobby. Anyway, on a side note. I've picked up a Ridge book, one of the ones from after his death."
"How was it?"
"Decent. Not much better than any of the other shit I’ve read. And he’s sure as hell no Stephen King…no J.K. Rowling for that matter. Anyway, seems like the underlying message of his book was that America has no morals."
"Yeah, and what else is new?"
"Yeah. He's smart though. Shame for anyone to take an intellectual out, isn't it? Man, he must've had some demons."
"You think he had a past?"
"Like I said, he must've had some demons. The person that killed him didn't even take anything. His wallet had one thousand in cash in it at the time. His car was untouched. They found no hair evidence or signs of a female in the room. Now that Bobby, is what I would consider eerie."
"Yeah." Bobby was still scrolling through information on his smartphone, what remained of his burger, forgotten.
"So did you find anything else interesting?"
"Well, I'm just reading Versha's Wickipedia page. Her daughter doesn't have one. I'm just seeing if Colorado comes up at any point. Based on the date of Dennis's murder Versha's daughter would've been in school. You might want to consider calling the school her daughter went to at the time. See if there were any scheduled field trips to the state."
"There's no one visiting Colorado from the South on a field trip. What business would they have in Colorado? Touring the weed dispensaries."
Bobby chuckled. "Yeah, that's very funny. But you never know."
Roscoe finished his food, and let Bobby perform his phone searches in peace. He thought of all the ways that a teenage girl in school could've met up with a thirty-year old author and cut his throat in his sleep. If she had been there and he'd tried to sleep with her that would've been statutory rape. Of course, they were nowhere close to proving who had actually been in the room with Dennis.
"Well...shit," Bobby said.
Roscoe's heartbeat sped up, his hands clenched. "You find something?"
"Yeah, but it's not good."
Roscoe sighed. "What is it?"
“There were some pictures were taken for her track teams on the date he was killed. And she's in one."
"Well isn't that convenient!"
"All right," Bobby said. "So the case continues. At least you have another question out of the way. And at least you didn't have to talk to a heroin addict to figure this part out."
"See, that's why I hate going over this case. The other two I can handle. It's just a matter of waiting on DNA testing and at one point I'm guessing both will get closed on the back of that. But with this there's nothing to go on. You know this case has had more outlandish, off the wall tips than any cold case I remember. There's been people claiming that Dennis's murderer lives in Africa and worships a shrine of him of all things."
Bobby chortled. "Well, it's okay Roscoe."
"How does someone disappear? We should at least know if his killer is dead, or if she's been to prison, or if she's a relative, or something. It's all a motherfucking crapshoot."
Bobby picked up a few of his remaining fries and ate them one by one, pondering.
"You know," Bobby said, brightening. "I remember when Bin Laden was still at large. I was convinced that he was dead or that the government had given up looking for him. Hell, I was even in the conspiracy boat as far as the source of the Twin Towers' collapse. There was an old lady that told me once, that Bin Laden was hiding out in the U.S., in plain sight."
"Yeah, how old was this lady? Fifteen hundred."
Bobby smirked. "She said it wouldn't have been that hard. All he would've had to do was change his wardrobe, shave his beard, learn bad English and get a nine to five."
"Yeah," Roscoe said. "Well that's some bullshit if I ever heard it."
Bobby nodded. Seemed to realize his burger was unfinished and continued eating.
"You never know where someone is," Bobby said. “You just never know.”
Seven Year's Earlier...
“How does it feel?”
She had her eyes closed as she straddled him.
“It's good,” Dennis said, putting his hands on her breasts as she arched her back. It was strange, making love to her. Something about her movements were so practiced, so experienced.
“I needed this,” she whispered, her face crumbling as if she were about to cry.
“Yeah,” Dennis breathed. “I know what you mean.”
At least to an extent. It was the afternoon and she'd agreed to stay with him at least for a little while. He wondered if providing her the things that she hadn't had before would do anything for her. After all, she seemed smart as a whip. Not like she didn't have an understanding of the way things worked in the world, especially with her extensive experience with ‘the darker side of nature’. She could probably end this stretch of homelessness if she wanted.
"I'm sorry," Fiona suddenly screamed, her small hands squeezing on his bare chest as she rocked her hips more aggressively.
"Why?"
"I'm...not...not who I say I am."
"You mean your name isn't...your name isn't Fiona?" He was on the verge of a climax, unsure of how long he was going to be able to hold out. It made it hard to think, made it hard to give a shit about anything but a release.
Fiona suddenly shivered as what Dennis took for an orgasm coursed through her. She let out another scream and let her face come gently down to his.
"I know you're not done, okay?" she said, her eyes closed. "Just...ooh."
For the next minute she only lay there, on the verge of dozing, then she suddenly became alert. She started to sit up, ready to help him finish.
"What do you mean you're not who you say you are," Dennis said. He figured that'd she changed her name for safety reasons...or something else, but he needed to know. Suddenly he was concerned. Was this girl legal?
"Do you ever wonder why certain people do the things they do," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Why your wife was the way she was? Why my ex was the way he was?"
Dennis shifted slightly, and for the briefest moment felt something cold against his thigh, but when the feeling went away he thought nothing of it. Fiona's eyes remained firmly fixed on his, as she thrust her hips steadily.
"I don't know," he said. "The best reason I can come up with is what they experienced beforehand."
"You binge write, right?" Fiona said. She moaned a little. "That's your …ah…that’s your thing?"
"Yeah," Dennis said. "But I don't need to binge write for it to be fun. I just...I...I have that period where I like to zone in...ah...with coffee and…coffee and a…a drink."
"And do you think...hmm...do you think it's the same with how I...am homeless...go from place to place?"
Dennis blinked, nearing climax. He squeezed her sides.
"Yes," he grunted, as his bottom jerked shakily upward. Then something flickered above him, catching the shaft of light filtering through the curtains. Before he could react he felt something cold and sharp, slip in and out the front of his neck. The stinging sensation was what he first became aware of, a feeling that was faint the suddenly burning and intense. Then all at once he felt as if his head had been submerged in water and his air cut off. He could feel the water’s wetness actually, feel it splashing up onto his chin, his upper chest. He could feel it swelling in his throat and filling his mouth. But it wasn’t water he was feeling. No…water didn’t feel…or taste quite like this.
"Stay," Fiona gasped, as he tried to roll out of the bed. She leaned forward and put her lips against his open, gasping mouth, as blood began to spill out. "This...this is what I do."
She sat up, arched her back, and began to ride him aggressively, screaming to the ceiling with red lips, and rivulets of Dennis's blood running down between her B-cup breasts and into her navel. She continued her screams of ecstasy, and though Dennis bucked and twisted with diminishing but desperate strength he found her thighs too strong, her weight—though ideal for a woman her height—too heavy. Her abdomen flexed with effort as she used her thighs to hold herself in place, and soon Dennis's attempts weakened. He coughed up a splatter of blood once, his eyelids stretched to maximum capacity, coughed again and felt Fiona's lips against his as if trying to drink the blood.
"I’m sorry," she whispered.
She let out a choked sob right before he felt the tip of the same blade slip back into his neck. A tear trickled from his eye and he heard her say again, "This is what I do."
The second cut, though deeper, didn’t hurt as much, and Dennis's last thoughts were of a book he was working on, and the lead character's relationship with a drugged out prostitute that happened to have a gift for painting large, sweeping landscapes, that were nearly, if not eerily lifelike. He thought of the paragraph he had last written.
And she's full of energy, it's as if the intoxicants are in her system no more. She's alive and breathing, she's alive and.....