Trixie glanced down to find a guy sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. He was wearing a T-shirt so faded she couldn't read the writing on it. His hair was jet-black, and his eyes were the color of ice, but it was his smile - lopsided, as if it had been built on a slope - that made her heart hitch.
“I don't think I've seen you before,” he said. Trixie suddenly lost the power of conversation.
“I'm Jason.”
“I'm sick,” Trixie blurted out, cursing herself the minute she heard the words. Could she sound any stupider if she tried?
But Jason had just grinned, off-kilter, again. “Well, then,” he'd said, and started it all. “I guess I need to make you feel better.”
* * *
Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein worked at a toy store. She was affixing UPC codes for prices onto the feet of stuffed animals when Mike Bartholemew arrived to talk to her. “So,” he said, after introducing himself. “Is now a good time?” He looked around the store. There were science kits and dress-up clothes and Legos, marble chutes and paint-your-own beanbag chair kits and baby dolls that cried on command.
“I guess,” Zephyr said.
“You want to sit down?” But the only place to sit was a little kidsized tea table, set with Madeline china and plastic cupcakes. Bartholemew could imagine his knees hitting his chin or, worse, getting down and never getting back up again.
“I'm good,” Zephyr said. She put down the gun that affixed the UPC labels and folded her arms around a fluffy polar bear. Bartholemew looked at her stretch button-down shirt and stacked heels, her eye makeup, her scarlet nail polish, the toy in her arms. He thought, This is exactly the problem. “I appreciate you talking to me.”
“My mothers making me do it.”
“Guess she wasn't thrilled to find out about your little party.” “She's less thrilled that you turned the living room into some kind of crime scene.”
“Well,” Bartholemew said, “it is one.” Zephyr snorted. She picked up the sticker gun and started tagging the animals again.
“I understand that you and Trixie Stone have been friends for a while.”
“Since we were five.”
“She mentioned that just before the incident occurred, you two were having an argument.” He paused. “What were you fighting about?”
She looked down at the counter. “I don't remember.”
“Zephyr,” the detective said, “if you've got details for me, it might help corroborate your friend's story.”
“We had a plan,” Zephyr sighed. “She wanted to make Jason jealous. She was trying to get him back, to hook up with him. That was the whole point. Or at least that's what she told me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I guess she meant to screw Jason in more ways than one.”
“Did she say she intended to have intercourse that night?”
“She told me she was willing to do whatever it took,” Zephyr said,
Bartholemew looked at her. “Did you see Trixie and Jason having sex?”
“I'm not into peep shows. I was upstairs.”
“Alone?”
“With a guy. Moss Minton.”
“What were you doing?”
Zephyr glanced up at the detective. “Nothing.”
“Were you and Moss having sex?”
“Did my mother ask you to ask me that?” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Just answer the question.”
“No, all right?” Zephyr said. “We were going to. I mean, I figured we were going to. But Moss passed out first.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I guess I fell asleep eventually, too.”
“When?”
“I don't know. Two-thirty? Three?”
Bartholemew looked at his notes. “Could you hear the music in your bedroom?”
Zephyr stared at him dully. “What music?”
“The CDs you were playing during your party. Could you hear that upstairs?”
“No. By the time we got upstairs, someone had turned them off.” Zephyr gathered the stack of stuffed animals, holding them in her arms like a bounty, and walked toward an empty shelf. “That's why I figured Jason and Trixie had gone home.”
“Did you hear Trixie scream for help?”
For the first time since he'd started speaking to her, Bartholemew saw Zephyr at a loss for words. “If I'd heard that,” Zephyr said, her voice wavering the tiniest bit, “I would have gone downstairs.” She set the bears down side by side, so that they were nearly touching. “But the whole night, it was dead quiet.”
* * *
Until Laura met Daniel, she had never done anything wrong. She'd gotten straight As in school. She'd been known to pick up other people's litter. She'd never had a cavity.
She was a graduate student at ASU, dating an MBA named Walter who had already taken her to three jewelry stores to get her feedback on engagement rings. Walter was attractive, secure, and predictable. On Friday nights, they always went out to dinner, switched their entrees halfway through the meal, and then went to see a movie. They alternated picking the films. Afterward, over coffee, they talked about the quality of the acting. Then Walter would drive her back to her apartment in Tempe and after a bout of predictable sex he'd go home because he didn't like to sleep in other people's beds.
One Friday, when they went to the movie theater, it was closed because of a burst water main. She and Walter decided to walk down Mill Avenue instead, where on warm nights buskers littered the streets with their violin cases and their impromptu juggling. There were several artists too, sketching in pencil, sketching in charcoal, making caricatures with Magic Markers that smelled like licorice. Walter gravitated toward one man, bent over his pad. The artist had black hair that reached down to the middle of his back and
ink all over his hands. Behind him was a makeshift cardboard stand, onto which he'd pinned dynamic drawings of Batman and Superman and Wolverine. “These are amazing,” Walter said, and Laura had thought at the time that she'd never seen him get so excited about something. “I used to collect comics as a kid.” When the artist looked up, he had the palest blue eyes, and they were focused on Laura. “Ten bucks for a sketch,” he said. Walter put his arm around Laura. “Can you do one of her?” Before she knew it, she'd been seated on an overturned milk crate. A crowd gathered to watch as the sketch took shape. Laura glanced over at Walter, wishing that he hadn't suggested this. She startled when she felt the artist's fingers curl around her chin, turning her face forward again. “Don't move,” he warned, and she could smell nicotine and whiskey.
He gave the drawing to Laura when he was finished. She had the body of a superhero - muscular and able - but her hair and face and neck were all her own. A galaxy swirled around her feet. There were people sketched into the background - the crowd that had gathered. Walter's face was nearly off the edge of the page. Beside the figure of Laura, however, was a man who looked just like the artist. “So that you'll be able to find me one day,” he said, and she felt as if a storm had blown up inside her. Laura looked at Walter, holding out his ten-dollar bill. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think I'll be looking?” The artist grinned. “Wishful thinking.”
When they left Mill Avenue, Laura told Walter it was the worst sketch she'd ever seen - her calves weren't that big, and she'd never be caught dead wearing thigh-high boots. She planned to go home and throw it in the trash. But instead, that night, Laura found herself staring at the bold strokes of the artist's signature: Daniel Stone. She examined the picture more closely and noticed what she hadn't the first time around: In the folds of the cape the man had drawn were a few lines darker than the rest, which clearly spelled out the word MEET.
In the toe of the left boot was ME.
She scrutinized the sketch, scanning the crowd for more of the message. She found the letters AT on the rings of the planet in the upper left corner. And in the collar of the shirt worn by the man who looked like Walter was the word HELL.