Snuff (17 page)

FIFTY

“Messenger sent these over.”  Lisette tossed a thick manila file into John’s lap.  “Final coroner’s findings.  And P.S, Brooke ID’d the voice modifier.  I scared the shit out of her, but I figured a visceral reaction would be more telling than if I’d brought her down here and set up the equipment in front of her.”

He sat back in
the desk chair she’d allowed him to commandeer for the past hour.  “Good.  Make sure you have people looking into local shops that sell the product.”

“Yep.  But don’t hold your breath.”

He wouldn’t.

Lisette
swung out the door, so he busied himself with removing the paperclips holding photos of each dead girl to her autopsy report.  He placed them side by side on the desk in the order they’d been killed.

Beth Grant and Rebecca Adams.
Brianna Weaver and Vienna Lockhart.  Emily Takahashi and Paula Bennet. Death had done horrible things to their complexions.

John bit into the tip of his thumb as his eyes scanned from Beth to Paula and back again.

He found the answer at the same time that voice did.

Well, that’s not a coincidence.  But you don’t believe in those anyway
.

The murdered girls looked
similar. Strip away color and skin and hair, and their bone structure was oddly alike.  Not twins, but cousins.

Broad foreheads, a little longer than was normal.  Left eyes
a different shape than the right.  Crooked smiles, faces more circular than oval, with thick, fleshy earlobes.

That’s all fine and dandy, but who are they surrogates for?

John looked up as Lisette flounced past with a fresh cup of coffee and tried to roust him from her swivel chair.  “Visitor’s seat is across the desk, sir.  I’ve let you post up here long enough. The other chair hurts my ass.”

“Look a
t this, and tell me what you see.” He plucked up the three photos of the murdered women and slapped them into a pile. 

She squinted as Joh
n flipped through the images.  “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Do you see anything similar about their faces?”

Her eyebrows collided over the thin slope of her nose.  “The only thing they have in common is they’re all fucking dead.”

“Apart from that. 
They have asymmetrical faces.”

One brow arched into a
get real
look.  “So?  Lots of people do.  It doesn’t mean anything.”

He placed the photos on the desk.  “But not everyone has
similar asymmetry.  It’s only the murdered girls who share commonalities.”  He dug a pen out of his breast pocket.  “Look.”  He dragged the point of the pen in a vertical blue line through each girl’s forehead.  “You see how they all have foreheads on the longer side?”  He underlined the left eye sockets.  “All their left eyes are different from the right—wider, set lower, or slightly cockeyed.”  He drew a curved path along the undersides of each chin.  “Their faces are rounded.  Almost
too
round, like a child’s face.  They don’t have sharp or angular features, the way you do.”  He capped the pen and ran it up the length of Lisette’s jaw to her earlobe.  “They all have earlobes on the thicker side, too.”

Her nose wrinkled
, and she batted the pen away.  “Couldn’t it be coincidence?  The kidnapper couldn’t have put a lot of time into examining their faces.  They were blitzed from behind.”

He tossed the pen on the desk.  “I’m not saying snatching women with the same asymmetry was plotted.  I’m saying it’s something the abductor may have noticed
before the snatch and grabs, or once the girls were already hostage.  This asymmetry is something the kidnapper recognizes.  Killing the same face over and over can’t be an accident.”

She blew out a sigh and chewed the corner of her mouth.  “Who are they
supposed to represent?  It could be anybody.  She’s not stalking her targets, she’s stumbling on them randomly.  It isn’t like she flipped through Facebook to find the right girl.  It’s all wrong place, right time when she takes them.  There was
zero
overlap when we went through the girls’ lives.  No common names, no telephone number they all called, and it’s unlikely their paths ever crossed until they found themselves in that dungeon.  Different dry cleaners, mailmen and fucking baristas.”

The thing about turning up answers was they always opened the door for more questions.

They both pressed their hands into the glass divider above the desk, under which much-abused pieces of paper with scrawled notes and marked calendars lay.

“I guess you’ve been good for something,” she said.  “I’ll have to forgive Foster for running to the Feds.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard from you.”

She snorted, but didn’t answer.

He knew what she was thinking from the angle she held her head and her slitted eyes staring at her reflection.  “Your features are symmetrical.”

“You think?”  She frowned.  “My lips always look a little swollen.”

They did.  The same way a teenage girl’s lips looked when movie theater lights blinked back on.  Mussed hair, bra straps poking out of an unbuttoned shirt, lips puffy and red when they pulled back into a secret smile.

Rode hard and put to bed wet,
the voice chimed in.
A teenager can’t perfect that look so easily.

“Ah, but they’re swollen on both sides, and therein lies the symmetry.”

She rolled her eyes.

“We’re drawn to celebrity faces a lot of the time because there’s a perfect balance to their beauty,” John explained, rocking on his heels.  “It’s one of the things that make them so pleasing to the eye.  The Perceptual Bias view
says symmetrical faces are attractive because the human visual system can process symmetric stimuli better than asymmetric stimuli.   But the Evolutionary Advantage hypothesizes symmetrical faces are attractive because symmetry indicates how healthy an individual is.  Our genes are designed to develop proportionally, but disease and infections during development cause asymmetries. So, the thought is, only people who withstand infections, like those with strong immune systems, develop symmetrical traits. Studies of human and animal health note a relationship between symmetry and health, with the healthier individuals being more symmetric. Peacocks with symmetrical tail feathers are particularly healthy, thus more in-demand as potential mates.”

She stared at him for a couple seconds before shaking her h
ead and collecting the photos.  “Are you calling me beautiful, or a peacock?”

He fell back on flat feet, wondering if he’d unwittingly shoved his foot in his mouth. “Neither.  I was just waxing on about useless information. I have so much of it I can’t help spreading it around.  You’re attractive until you start talking
, and scare people half to death.  You’d make an Army Sergeant blush.” 

She slapped the file against her desk and flipped him off with her free hand.  “
How come know-it-all’s don’t know how fucking annoying they are?  You need an intervention.  If I hear one more speech, I’m going to punch you.”

“We know we’re annoying.  But we don’t care, because we’re still right.”

FIFTY-ONE

The sounds of LA make my ears bleed.  I prefer night, when all is quieter.  When you can’t hear a thousand clashing car alarms and people screaming into their smartphones.  I never thought I’d miss Michigan, but Los Angeles isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.  Nothing like in television and movies.  Beverly Hills is a long way from the rest of the place—dirty streets, liquor stores, air reeking of bus exhaust and diesel fuel.

I wish I were alone.  Completely alone—post apocalypse or freak plague.  There wouldn
’t be anyone to act normal for.  Peace and quiet sounds nice.

The silence that falls after the music bleeds out is suffocating, unearthly, too big for this white room to contain.  The
shaky stillness that follows an explosion of a bomb, when the survivors are stupefied and haven’t found their voices yet.  But since I’m the only survivor, I can’t speak to anyone if I even found mine.   

Maybe quiet is overrated.

The blinds ruffle behind my chair.  I blink a billion times until the mental image fades.  When I turn, Stripes slinks around the open patio door.  He hurls himself into my lap, purring in oblivious ecstasy. 

I’m giving his head a few absentminded strokes when I h
ear my name called from below.  Jack hears it all the way from the kitchen and is on the patio in a heartbeat, wet hands dripping all over the turf.

Stripes snuggles into the crook of my neck when I stand to peer over the balcony railing.  The sun dipping beneath mountains in the distance bounces off a shiny scarlet head as the woman it
belongs to windmills her arms. 

“It’s Elena,” I tell Jack. 

He’s simultaneously annoyed and relieved, throwing a wet dishrag over his shoulder.  “I let her know you were coming home, but I didn’t think she’d show up uninvited.”

I can’t turn her away
even if I want to, so I wave to Aaron and Brett, Parking Lot Crime Fighters, to let them know she’s welcome.  Her footsteps pound up the flight of stairs, and she hammers on the door. 

“I missed you so much, you whore!” is
her shouted salutation before she throws her arms around me and whirls us in a half-circle.   “How are you?”

Jack rolls his eyes and heads back for the kitchen.  He’s never been a fan of women calling each other bitches and whores, because apparently it’s sexist—how come we can call one another that, but men can’t?

I find that strange coming from him, since I can’t remember a time he’s used either.

“
Okay,” I say, and Elena pulls back to inspect me with sharp faux-amber eyes. 

Elena has the generic good looks required of every wannabe starlet, though her hair color is from a bottle, her skin from a tanning bed, and her eyes from 1-800-CONTACTS.   Even without the maintenance I think she’d still be pretty—unlike me, who requires pounds of it to look
halfway alive. When I’m made-up I’m a completely different person.  I used to wish I was that girl all the time, but being unnoticeable might make for a nice change. 

How can I carry on with the actress thing when I don’t think I’ll ever want to be on camera again?

Elena’s the lead on that sitcom I’ve been cast in—a small town girl who comes to live with her whacky best friend slut of a cousin—me—in sunny LA.  She’s had to dye her hair so we look plausibly related.  The only thing going for me is my hair—my agent said he’d kill me if I dye it. I wonder what he’ll say when I tell him I’m a) pregnant and b) newly brunette.

“Shit,” she says when she pulls away, and smacks herself in the forehead.  Her palm carves a dent in the layer of foundation she’s painted on.  “I brought a bunch of stuff for you
, but of course I left it in the damn car.  I saw you on the balcony and lost my mind.”

“What stuff?”

She tosses professionally blown-out and highlighted auburn hair over her shoulder.  “Flowers.  Food.  Magazines.  Books.  DVDs.  I didn’t know what would be appropriate, so I just bought everything.  Hallmark doesn’t make
sorry you were kidnapped
cards.”  Her eyes dart toward Jack.  He’s hunched over the sink, scrubbing dishes.  Chances are good he can’t hear much over the stream of the tap.  “Are you really okay?”

“
Yeah.”

“You weren’t—?”

What is everyone’s obsession with rape? 

I shake my head.

Her earnest eyes search mine.  For what?  It’s anyone’s guess.  “Jack text me when they found you.  He thought I’d want to know.  We’ve all been worried.”  She clenches my hand.  For someone so little, she’s pretty strong.  “I told Brandon and Kelly I was coming by.  They would have come too, but the day jobs prevented it.” 

Brandon and Kelly, our onscreen on again/off again significant others.  They wait tables
, too.  Between swapping horror stories about bosses and customers, we have a lot in common.  Elena, not so much.  Her great-grandmother died, leaving her independently wealthy.  Though that money hasn’t seemed to help in her quest for fame. 

My cheeks begin to hurt under the weight of my fake smile—why did I think I was ready for company?—but the landline saves me from an immediate response. 

The caller ID tells me it’s Jackie, the middle-aged woman I frequently pull doubles with. 

Jack answers my unasked question with a small smile.  “
Maybe I should have kept the news they’d found you to myself.”

FIFTY-TWO

Lisette cradled her office phone between her neck and ear, flipping through faxed reports as she barked at the person on the other line.  “I want updates on the hour
tomorrow,” were her parting words before she slammed the phone down and looked over at John.

“Large-scale contracting jobs aren’t giving us much.  Seventy-five percent of the names on that l
ist let uniforms poke around their houses.  The other twenty-five percent refused to consent.  We won’t get anywhere with warrants, but we’ve managed to cross off a lot of non-consenters through their alibis.”  She consulted the printed pages.  “Twelve more names.  I’m not holding my breath that we’ll find anything.”

The clock ticked over to nine p.m. John stifled a yawn.  “Might be about time to pack
it in.”

“I’ve got a few hours left in m
e.  I’ll hold down the fort if you want to head out.”  She swept her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck and brushed overgrown bangs out of her eyes. 

“Sleep might do you some good, you know.”

She waved him off.  “I won’t get any sleep.  I’ll go home and lay there until I get bored and come back.”  She tapped a nail on a dusty box she’d had messengered earlier.  “At the very least, I can get through this box of old case files.  I still need to check in on Brooke, too.”

John stood and collected his belongings.  “I’ll see you in the morning.  Call if you find anything.
  Don’t worry about waking me up.”

He never really slept, anyway.