DIX.
IT HAD BEEN a very hot day until Mitch reached the hospital.
It cooled considerably with the coming of the clouds, while he was inside, and as he pulled out of the parking lot and made for home, feeling despondent and on the verge of an impatient and nagging anger, not at Chloë but at himself, a sudden burst of coolness was unleashed upon the city, a breath of calming air exhaled from the sky, and immediately he felt better.
It began to rain, softly.
What Goddess of thunder was once worshipped here, he wondered, by the indigenous peoples of Los Valles?
What would She take as sacrifice?
He would never know.
∆
Back at home it wasn’t a question of what he had to do.
He spent the rest of the evening and long into the night investigating.
Returning to the coffee table, and the curious art exhibition displayed upon it, he lit a cigarette and went through each page as methodically as possible. Then, after the first pass, he went to his desk and fed the pages one by one into the scanner so he could read and analyze them on his computer. He was so engrossed in this project that he didn't notice the overcast sky had long since become suffused with night, darkening his apartment.
The only light came from the desktop monitor which illuminated his transfixed expression.
And with him in this crucible of creative inspiration, the spirit of the letters, the author’s haunted voice, light as a whisper, hovered in the air about him.
A shadow keeping him company.
∆
The letters worried him for multiple reasons.
Most obvious among them was the disturbing subject matter of the missives.
Murder, manipulation, and the concerning spectre of sexual assault lurked everywhere. Whether such abuse be physical or psychological or psychic, it was definitely always emotional, and these themes were all inextricably intertwined.
Added to such heaviness was the profound strategic effort on the writer’s part, to avoid detection, both from the police and from themself. The latter being not an insignificant detail.
This was just the start. These scandalous elements were but the general milieu.
What haunted him most was the writer’s voice. Her narrative, or literary voice.
That’s how he referred to it, too.
“Her” voice.
When Mitch read literature of any kind, he always imagined. He pictured what it was like, and sometimes he could almost see the person reciting the tale. The Voice.
That the letters before him had a feminine breath was impossible to deny, so he took it for granted that a girl had written them. A girl, or a woman. Une femme. The terms, like the mental picture, was admittedly vague.
Originally, he'd assumed only a man could be a serial killer. Up till then, at the coffee shop and Jordan’s house, it was always he that had committed the crimes. (Is that sexist? History would support such a standard.)
But while reading the slip into the feminine had happened so seamlessly that he had to actively remind himself that, Yes, this was a new and very important case development.
Did it matter? Whether it was a boy or a girl?
Certainly it did in identifying a suspect, but from a literary perspective—and this was an important consideration, he reasoned, because it was important to the killer—the question of gender was more open.
He believed a narrative voice could have its own gender. This could match the writer’s biology or not. Could be a mix. It could be something totally new, or transcend—or fail to rise to—the very idea of gender entirely.
Whatever the individual case, it was never a choice but rather a discovery.
We discover who we are by writing.
At least... that's what the author/killer was attempting to do by writing these letters.
Searching for answers as to the origin of our existence.
Sometimes what we find scares us.
Regardless of individual specifics Mitch believed that one’s written voice was the true one, that no better Rosetta Stone existed to illuminate the hieroglyphics imprinted onto another’s soul, no more complete confession, than words set down by the creative writer.
Every writer gave themselves away the moment they began to write. To limn the brilliance of a person’s imagination was to know them best.
This applies to killers as much as anyone else.
∆
An overbearing and clearly aesthetic sadness marked the tracts of the mysterious letter writer, the would-be harasser of such a macho man, our very own District Attorney Mr Adam Young.
This person was alienated in so complete a fashion that Mitch feared it was already past hope that he, or anybody, might ever be able to reach them.
And if someone couldn’t be reached, couldn’t be helped or reasoned with, what else could they be but an adversary?
Yet despite the desperate need for connection, he found in the writer’s masochistic and melodramatic oversharing only the mirage of engagement.
Whoever had penned these words was far more enchanted by their own mythos, by themselves that is, than any other motive. Spooking the DA was just the delivery mechanism, as was the giant black X on his door. Part of the overall artistic intent.
Even the murders themselves as described were but demonstrations of the writer’s psyche and outlook on existence.
This was a lone individual, an artist, who had chosen their Muse over mankind, and—Mitch thought on this with a sigh and a deep breath—he believed whoever it was had the courage & the audacity to try and make their fantasies come true.
In fact Mitch believed they already had.
The confirmation of his crazy theory pulsed throughout his body all over again, feeling just as it did the first time.
It came to him in the fragrance of jasmine flowers where none grew.
The scent of it, the colour, the ache, the glory, the fear—, the significance of all of this filled his nostrils anyway, filled his veins.
It was his blood.
The Detective Instinct.
His wildest theory, his darkest hope——was real.
The letters were written by the same killer he was already looking for. He knew it.
Jordan’s locked-city murderer.
The epistolary terrorist par excellence.
Mark, Rita, Nelson. Three victims killed on the same night, by the same person.
The April Fool’s Killer.
But that’s… impossible, you say. It’s too convenient. A single killer for the three deaths was already a stretch, but that the killer had reached out to him, personally? Do 1, my sun, you must be thinking. Your ‘avin a laugh.
Mitch himself, as previously noted, agreed that it was a total pisstake,
but this was precisely why he believed it.
The sheer fuck all of it, the randomness that wasn’t random, the hand of Fate curled into a fist that now punched him right in the guts.
No one would ever believe him. Jordan already thought it was dumb, the idea that one killer could have done all three crimes in one night, in such a tight timeline. Balderdash.
Despite his friend's initial thoughts and his belief in the power of machine learning, Jordan had reached out to him in order to disprove the computer’s results.
To add this other, far more scandalous layer? To try and explain that he'd been hand-delivered these ambiguous missives spelling it all out? No one would ever go for it. And as for the DA? The police? Insanity.
Remain skeptical.
Mitch repeated this mantra to himself, as a corrective, because it was his nature to do the opposite. His freedom to choose, to take his hunches seriously and investigate them with all the vigor he could muster, was his only way of operating.
It was why he worked alone, a private detective and not a cop. Why he never took clients.
It wasn’t a job, it was a passion.
A necessity.
His theory was absolutely crazy but all of his best cases started out this way.
He believed it.
The printout he’d gotten from Jordan, and its central premise—three crimes in one night, different parts of the city, all by a single killer—was correct.
And these letters were written by the person who did it.
Find the author.
Find the killer.
∆
This became its own kind of mantra that he’d use as breadcrumbs while he travelled deeper into the labyrinth.
To preserve his sanity for the moment however, and as a potent reminder to be humble in the face of Mystery—he could still be wrong, after all, as sometimes the gods sent false messages to thwart mankind on purpose—he settled on taking it as a metaphor.
A literary device.
He could believe a metaphor and know that it wasn’t literally true. He could walk and chew gum like that. If, upon further deep investigation (using the letters as a secret key) he found evidence that exposed his theory for the joke it appeared to be at face value, great, he could be done with the metaphor. He’d gladly give it up. Surely something would prove him wrong.
The problem was that nothing did.
∆
So many questions.
Only one thing he knew for certain—— He had to be connected to this case, officially. He could barely believe that he’d been given the chance.
Despite never wanting to be involved with the police, from the first moment Young had reached out he’d been fascinated by the possibility of utilizing new and powerful resources to pursue his theory.
He would investigate AFK, on the police dime. They could fire him if they didn’t like it. In the meantime he was going to take full advantage.
He found the contract Vittoria had given him and began to look it over once more.
He still didn’t understand all of the clauses and stipulations and he tried reading it all—as one is supposed to do with a contract—but after a few paragraphs of gibberish he TLDR’d it.
At the moment, the letters were the only thing he wanted to read.
∆
The next morning upon waking he signed the papers and drove back down to the RJB to turn them in.
This time the door was unlocked and open, as was usually the case.
Vittoria was seated behind Donna’s desk with her feet up crossed at the ankle (caramel-coloured loafers with an exaggerated sole and wide two-inch heel).
She was wearing a stiff white business shirt with pronounced collar and cuffs, her hair slicked back into a tight black ponytail. The phone was to her ear and she was laughing.
She smiled when she saw him in a way that struck Mitch as surprising before motioning for him to come in with the pen in her hand.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” she said to the person on the line, whose voice came rattling indistinguishable out of the receiver into her smiling mouth, “Uh huh uh huh uh huh!”
The final syllable was directed right at Mitch, along with a wide-eyed grin.
Mitch mouthed that he had brought back the papers.
“Signed,” he added, barely audible.
Vittoria motioned for him to set them on the desk then gave him a sly sidelong glance as she turned in her swivel chair.
A curious profile, Mitch gathered, full of contradiction.
Curly eyelashes, quite long. Bold cheekbones and jawline. Sensuous mouth. Hair that could have been a wig but wasn’t.
He waited there a moment, expecting more, but she refused to put down the receiver (the voice on the other end kept blabbering a mile a minute) and instead she gestured to him like, “what?!”
“I need to talk to your dad.”
Vittoria visibly reacted to this, the phone turning to ice in her hand, but to his statement she only shrugged and shook her head in ignorance.
“It’s about a parcel I received. Some letters.”
And at this they both hesitated.
The voice on the phone went on but Vittoria’s attention was elsewhere, her eyes seeing something once close now light years off in the distance.
It was the word “dad” that had done it for her while he had paused after saying “letters.”
A wave of cognitive dissonance, of memory/dream confusion, passed over the room, infecting each person.
He turned slightly, regarding the heavy oaken door to Young’s personal office, which was sealed shut.
Vittoria gave him a stoic look, daring him to try.
He studied her more closely, but her look turned hostile and she pointed at the phone with her pen.
“Uh huh,” she spat.