Killing Ways

7

Ren woke at eight thirty the next morning. Oooh. Where am I? Oh, I’m home. Thank God. Alone. Phew. OK. Janine stayed here. How did I get here? Cab. OK. No — a guy called JD. Nice guy. Nothing happened. That’s a positive. There’s hope for me.

Hope. Victims should never be called Hope. What happened to you, Hope Coulson? Did you get drunk in a bar, take a ride home with a stranger?

Ren got up and stuck her head into the living room.

No Janine. Why didn’t she call me? She hates me. I’m a liability on nights out.

Ren turned on the radio and went into the bathroom. She stepped onto the scales: one hundred and nineteen pounds. Thank you. Don’t ever change. She went to the toilet, washed her hands, dried them, then stepped on the scales again: still one hundred and nineteen pounds. So, I didn’t drink that much.

I’m high-larious.

She looked in the mirror. Ooh: not a good look, though a familiar one. I like the cheekbones, though.

She jumped in the shower and used every energizing product and scrub she could find to startle her awake. She dressed in gray, high-waisted straight-leg pants, a starched white shirt, a pale gold necklace with two pendants: one shaped like a crescent moon, the other shaped like a star. She did a quick makeup job, left her hair wet, and ran.

Fifteen minutes later, she parked outside the Livestock Exchange Building. She began to jog up the steps, but her pounding head slowed her march. She walked through the doors, her footsteps echoing across the polished marble floor. She headed for the wide central staircase instead of the elevator. The staircase led onto a landing, then left or right for more steps to the next floor, and the same all the way to the top. She could hear a man above loudly announce, ‘This is not safe!’

Ren looked up. He was rattling a clearly unstable guardrail along the second floor balcony.

And who the fuck might you be?

‘Is this even forty-two inches high, I have to wonder,’ he was saying.

Really? Do you?

He made his way up to the fourth floor.

The Safe Streets floor.

Ren recognized the woman rushing up the stairs behind him as Valerie, the real estate agent — giving him a tour. There were four office spaces to rent in the building.

On other floors.

Oh — Valerie! She might help me and Misty find a home!

Ren continued up the stairs. ‘Sir, this is not the floor with the vacant space,’ Valerie was saying. She looked down at Ren, exasperated.

‘That’s not the point!’ said the man. ‘How well maintained is this building is what I’m thinking.’ He tried to rattle the guardrail on the fourth floor, but it held firm. He looked disappointed.

Ren smiled at him as she passed by to walk through the door into Safe Streets. He was standing about four feet to her right. She paused. ‘We don’t walk out around there,’ said Ren, pointing down to the second floor balcony. ‘No one does, so, we’ve never noticed the problem. That’s a dummy door at the end. The elevator bank is down the other way. However, I’m sure we can get the guardrail that you will never use fixed for you in no time, so that when you never use it, it will be safe, and you won’t plunge down if you never fall from a place where you will never again be going.’

She walked through the door. She could hear Valerie rambling about the fourth floor being a federal area.

‘And there’s no security in the building?’ said the man. ‘No scanners? Nothing?’

‘This is not the FBI’s main federal building in Denver,’ Valerie was saying. ‘Would you really want to have to be scanned every morning coming to work, Rodney, really? Emptying your pockets? Taking out your phone, your coins, having your bags searched?’

Ren was smiling as she walked down the hallway. No, Rodney, you would not. I wouldn’t want that myself. God bless our compact little squad in our beautiful historic home.

Ren’s cell phone rang.

Ben!

She picked up. ‘Hey, baby.’

‘Hey,’ said Ben. ‘Thought I’d catch you before work. How you doing? How was your night?’

‘Great,’ said Ren. ‘Just let me take off my jacket, sit down. Yes, great night. We met some hilarious guys at the bar... one of them gave me a ride home. Janine forgot her keys—’

‘Who was this guy?’ said Ben.

‘Just a guy called JD,’ said Ren. ‘Why?’

‘Why? I don’t know — rides home with strange guys and I can’t ask who he is?’

‘“Strange guys”... one guy. A regular guy, not strange. Janine met him.’ And tried to keep me away from him. ‘He was fine.’

‘Good to know.’ He paused. ‘Aren’t you exhausted? All these nights out?’

‘No, Mom. I’m good.’

‘Fine, I’ll let you get back to work,’ said Ben.

‘Great,’ said Ren. ‘Talk to you later.’

‘Don’t call me late.’

‘I won’t.’

Bo. Ring.

Everett came into the bullpen with two mugs of coffee and put one on Ren’s desk. ‘We must stop meeting like this,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘God bless you and the caffeine I’ll ride out on.’

Ren opened up her laptop again, and went back to Hope Coulson’s Facebook page.

Something is not right here.

She filled Everett in on what she had read the previous night. ‘I need to pay a visit to Jonathan Briar,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said Everett, ‘news just in: he’s lawyered up.’

‘No, I know,’ said Ren. ‘Janine told me. I just want to ask him about that one night.’

Everett shook his head. ‘Not without his lawyer... who, by the way, is well aware of the lack of hard evidence against his client.’

‘As am I,’ said Ren. She leaned in. ‘Has Gary mentioned to you his exact theory on what happened to Hope Coulson?’

‘No,’ said Everett, ‘but doesn’t he seem a little... distracted to you?’

Ren nodded. ‘Yup. I don’t think he’s himself right now.’ Something is rotten in the state of his marriage.

‘I don’t know him well enough to know what “hisself” is,’ said Everett.

‘I know him too well,’ said Ren. ‘And he’s still a fucking mystery.’ She looked up. ‘Speaking of mysteries...’

‘Hello, flatmate,’ said Janine, walking in.

‘Where did you get to this morning?’ said Ren.

‘I took Misty for a run.’

‘Oh my God — you took my dog for a run. Bad mom, bad mom.’

‘That’s not how it works,’ said Janine. ‘You are hungover. I needed a run, Misty did too: win-win.’

‘How is my baby?’ Whom I haven’t seen in four days.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Janine.

‘How’s Devin?’ said Ren.

‘As happy as ever. Is she not one of the cheeriest people on the planet?’

‘I swear she doesn’t have a bad thought in her head,’ said Ren.

‘Everyone has bad thoughts,’ said Everett. ‘Don’t be idolizing.’

I do idolize, he’s right. Everyone is better than me.

Robbie walked into the bullpen with a stack of files up to his chin. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said. ‘Just don’t.’

‘I’m sorry I missed you last night,’ said Ren.

‘You came out in the end?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ren. ‘We’re going to have to coordinate better...’

She sat down at her desk. Something was tugging at her. Something that had just been said.

What? Idolizing? Bad thoughts?

She opened up Google and stared at it blankly.

Win-win! That’s what it is! Stephanie Wingerter.

Ren jumped up from her desk and went to the file cabinet. She pulled out the file on the rape and murder of Stephanie Wingerter, a twenty-three-year-old meth-addicted prostitute who went by the name of Win-Win. She had disappeared in late June and was found a week later in a shallow grave in Devil’s Head, Douglas County. Ren laid out the photos on her desk. The first was a mug shot — Stephanie’s blank eyes in a skinny, washed-out face dotted with scabs. Her mouth was half-open, showing gaps where two teeth should have been. Her thin, punky blonde hair was a mess, her eyebrows over-plucked.

The next photos were of where she was found, left to decompose in the beautiful July sunshine. Stephanie Wingerter’s face and body had been ravaged by drugs before any killer had gotten near it, but when he did... her right eye socket was impacted, as was her nose, both left swollen and caked in blood. Her upper and lower lips were split, and there was no pale skin visible — it was all shades of blue, purple, red and black. Dried blood darkened her hair. Her throat had been cut. Much of the lower half of her body was burned down to her ankles.

Ren read the autopsy report. Cause of death was exsanguination. Accelerant had been poured on her, post-mortem, then lit.

You poor, tragic soul. Why do some people have to live such miserable lives and die such horrible deaths?

There were photos of a younger Stephanie from before she became an addict, and she was not unlike Hope Coulson: slim, pretty and bright-eyed.

Everyone in Colorado knew who Hope Coulson was. Stephanie Wingerter, visible in life only to those in her shadowy underworld, had scarcely registered in the media. She was the type to be considered a victim-in-waiting by people who could never see her as a young woman struggling to survive or desperately feeding a habit that was never on her list of life’s goals, but was, instead, a marker on a gene.

Ren went through the last photos — what had remained of Stephanie Wingerter’s tiny clothes, filthy, torn and bloodied.