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 to do.
He spent the rest of the evening and long into the night investigating.
Here it was—the living proof—right in front of his eyes. He could touch it with his hands.
The mystery was alive, after feeling so shut down from the previous two encounters.
The maid… there was something there, enough to give him confidence in the case, but Life wasn’t letting him get at it just then, there was some block. And Rita had been a total bust. Whereas here, the package before him, covering the entirety of his coffee table, here was the mystery’s dark heart available in such copiousness, detailed and dense, and constructed with true love.
It came to him in the scent of jasmine flowers where none grew.
He suddenly had all the time in the world.
The true nature of the detective instinct. The real reason.
Was here.
∆
Those were his initial feelings.
His initial thoughts when it came to the parcel, when it came to the letters, were difficult to classify.
Probably his first impression was the immensity of it. The sheer quantity of media. Papers and their attached photographs, the envelopes, stamps, handwritings, graphs, blueprints, maps. A cornucopia of disciplines. And each one so specific with so many attributes, it took the first reading just to notice half of them.
There was a sense that although he couldn’t match all the data yet to a cohesive theory, there was enough there to eventually come to a conclusion of some kind. Was the letter writer and afk the same person? for instance. And if so, how?
He sensed that there were more than enough one offs and side-stories that probably referenced real life events.
A whole backstory of crime, a lifetime, possibly even more, of inhabiting the POV of a killer. More than he would ever have the ability to feasibly investigate by himself. He’d need help….
And here he paused to remember the meeting with Vittoria. The docs she gave him to sign. In their own manila folder on the coffee table they fit right in with the rest of the spread.
He would have to painstakingly go over each document one by one. This he did, reading each page IRL sometimes several times, then scanning a high-res copy onto his computer, where he would then look at it some more, he’d zoom in, he’d highlight things and look things up. Single documents could go on like this for a while.
He investigated long into the night, never noticing that the sun overcast with full clouds had long since set nor how dark it’d gotten in his apartment.
The computer screen lighting up his transfixed expression.
∆
A clear and aesthetic sadness was the primary impression he got from the letters themselves. That, and the more important fact that the killer saw themselves in a creative light. As an artist. That was significant.
Next was the fact that the letter writer was crazy.
They were psychotic in a controlled way, which was way scarier. Years of anticipating so many evils had sharpened the author’s control into a twisted kind of supreme empathy. They knew how people felt and how they’d react, and adjusted the punishment accordingly.
But why?
The aesthetic route might be the only way in, Mitch thought, after many a sigh and deep breath. It was the only side to the killer that offered any hope, that they could see something beautiful in spite of how truthful pain was.
The rest was pure nihilism, as far he saw it. It was using every fact of life as a lever to be pulled in the control of another. The opposite of open. Humans were puppets, machines. No other reason for people doing things than blind biological force. No real sentiment.
But there was belief.
In fact Mitch feared that this voice was the strongest of the killer’s personae and that perhaps they were already past being reasoned with.
He was digging through the stack toward the end of the table when a thin gunmetal colored linen envelope the size of a wallet fell to the floor. He picked it up and saw that it contained two cassette tapes. Marked DA and Metro evidence, quite respectively.
He popped the first tape into the tape player attached to his audio interface and listened through the computer speakers.
The tell-tale crackle.
The tape loop.
The Voice.
It was a girl’s voice reading the letters. A girl, or a woman’s. The age was indeterminate. Une femme, nevertheless.
This changed things.
It changed the way he pictured the letter writer in his head.
AFK was always a ‘he’ in his head thus far, when he imagined the writer, it was always he did this, he killed them. In his head a serial killer is always a man. (Is that sexist? What’s the actual percentage?)
To hear such a breathy, feminine cadence surprised him all over again.
It made him laugh, in spite of himself, and the sound of his own laugh scared him.
It was the icing on the cake to the theory that had been getting stronger following each one of these surprises.
The theory that AFK and the letter-writer were one and the same.
He thought they were, easily. They felt the same. They had the same psychic texture, which seemed to him one of the best forms of confirmation.
He knew it was a pisstake but that was precisely why he believed it. All his best cases were pisstake unbelievable, that’s what made them great, what made them his. And for the skeptics, including himself, all he needed was a reason to disbelieve and he’d gladly forget the whole thing.
Problem was, no reason ever came.
The path forward was clear now.
Find the author.
Find the killer.
The only hard part would be proving it to anyone else. Someone that mattered. The police, the DA. The people cited, at least officially, on so many of these queer documents.
Where the mystery met reality.
As far as the mystery went, he thought to himself, as he picked up that other envelope, the one with the DA Consulting docs in it, and looked at it, contemplating. He was on the right track.
He walked over to the counter by the coffee machine. This called for a late night pot.
He was on the right track, he reasoned, as the coffee brewed, but he still needed something.
Something he never thought he’d do.
He took out the docs, and signed.
∆
The next morning upon waking he took the papers back down to the RJB to turn them in. He breezed through security and took the elevator upstairs.
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 then motioned 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 did a twirl 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.