Disconnection (3 page)

“No comment.” He pointed at uniformed cop nearby. “Get rid of them,” he ordered. The cop nodded and opened his arms wide, creating a barrier between Lewis and the press.

“Back off!” the cop ordered.

“Is it true this is the third murder?” a reporter yelled at Lewis from a short distance.

The detective ignored him and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw his partner, Jacek Sawicki, standing nearby, motioning for Lewis.

“What do you got for me?” he asked as he approached the heavyset man.

Sawicki shook his head, drawing one hand through his shortly cropped red hair. “You won’t believe this shit. There’s a good chance that this is the woman that went missing two days ago. Dee Nilsson.” He looked at his clipboard. “Age thirty-two. From Oakland, California.” He handed Lewis the findings. “Take a good look.”

Lewis nodded and took the paperwork. “A load of bullshit.”

“Yep. Killing visitors is bad for tourism, don’t you think?”

Lewis frowned. “I meant, murder in general, Sawicki.”

Sawicki nodded. “Right.”

“Is the CSI here?”

“They’re on their way. The deputy coroner’s here though.”

“How long?”

“He just arrived. He’s over by the body.”

“Witnesses?”

“A daughter-father team found this one, Lew.”

Lewis looked up and saw a man leaning against a police car with a young blonde-haired girl hugging his knee. “What happened?” he asked.

Sawicki cleared his throat. “They were taking a stroll this morning, about oh-seven-hundred hours. The girl pointed out what she thought was a turtle head in the water. The dad got a closer look and called 911. Police got here at oh-seven-eighteen hours. Officer Reginald Tyler was the first on the scene. He called in the divers. They pulled the vic out at oh-seven-fifty-seven hours.”

“Okay. Get Nancy Drew and her dad to the station.”

“Yep.”

“And take some photos of these assholes standing around the crime scene.”

Sawicki called over two uniformed officers. “Is that all?” he asked Lewis.

“For now.” He approached the area where a deputy coroner was leaning over the victim. The limp body lay out on the riverbed like a leftover fleshy party favor from the night before. Her skin was the color of dried paste. A fresh head wound rested just below her hairline. Her lifeless eyes stared out into a sky of lavender clouds. A police photographer snapped the corpse from every angle. With each flash of his strobe unit, the dead woman’s face lit up in an illusion of life.

Lewis sniffed in the fishy, raw smell of the Mississippi River as he turned to look at the coroner. “Tell me what you know,” he ordered.

The coroner glanced up. “Asphyxiation.”

“Shocker,” Lewis said with a sarcastic tone in his voice. He shook his head. “Can I bet a million dollars that she died in a bathtub and was later dumped in the river?”

“You could, only you better hand over half the prize money to me. And now, behind door number two.” The deputy coroner reached down and pulled the body over. Detective Lewis Kline drew out a long, lengthy breath. Carved on her back was the notorious Fishhook symbol. Score three for a psychotic serial killer.

For the first time that morning, Detective Kline forgot about his throbbing hemorrhoid.

T
here was no ending to the inferno, and no beginning. It conquered the floorboards and walls with its hot, flaxen flames, and when it reached Sela Warren’s bed, it lit up her covers and stuffed animals in such a display of blue heat and silver sparks that Sela, who was watching from the safety of the only corner of the room not yet consumed, was reminded of Fourth of July fireworks.

Sela, we’re coming
.

She heard her father’s voice from the direction of the bonfire that had once been a hallway. Suddenly Sela’s mother was standing over her, dragging her from the floor and into her arms in one swift motion.

I’m going to drop you from the window and the firefighters are going to catch you
.

Sela wrapped her hands around her mother’s neck. The smoke brought tears to her eyes. She continued coughing furiously.

Out you go, Sela. Don’t be afraid. We’re right behind you
.

Sela squeezed her eyes shut. The next thing she knew she was falling through the night sky, a million gusts of wind circling her young body, carrying her through to the safe womb of the firefighters’ trampoline.

When she reopened her eyes, Sela was staring at a firefighter with eyes as blue as the hottest flames.

You’re okay, kid
.

It was then that Sela looked above his helmet, where the Warren home was crumbling to the ground in an avalanche of flame and wood.

Sela sat up in bed and screamed. Minutes came and went before she finally had the courage to look around the room. She exhaled with grateful relief when she realized that her bedroom was dark and safe from flames—many years had passed since the night of her dreams, and she was no longer a child watching her parents’ gruesome death, but a twenty-four-year-old woman living alone in a New Orleans apartment.

The dreamlike smell of burnt glass lingered just within her nostrils as she took time to move her arms, her legs. She stretched her hands in front of her face and wriggled her fingers while she cried softly. Though she’d had the nightmare many times before, it never got easier.

The autumn air, fragrant with the foliage of leaves, slid through the window cracks. It was only early evening, but Sela had gone to bed right after her shift at Frank’s Diner. Work had been exhausting as always. Frank’s was a shit-hole of a place, but it paid the rent. She could handle the work, too, even if she did not particularly enjoy it. Whoever said waitressing was hard was lying. Rocket science was hard. Waitressing was just miserable and draining.

The phone awakened with a loud ring. Sela reached over to the bedside table and grabbed the receiver, lifting it to her ear. “Hello?” She wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her nightgown. Whoever was on the other line would not know that she had been crying.

It was Mandy, her closest friend even though the two girls had nothing in common. Sela had met her at Frank’s Diner, but Mandy had only lasted a week before getting fired. She was fond of cussing out unruly customers, and Frank, the owner, was fond of cussing out Mandy for cussing out customers. So she left. She told Sela afterwards that she was not cut out for hospitality, claiming that she was much better suited out there in Corporate America, which was why she’d jumped from job to job ever since.

“What are you doing?” Mandy asked.

“I’m making it a Blockbuster night,” replied Sela. Resignedly she stepped out of bed, reached to the floor, and grabbed her pink terry cloth robe. She wrapped it around her thin frame as she walked to her bedroom door and looked down the hallway at the DVD player and 32” screen TV waiting to provide her evening enjoyment.

“Oh, yeah? Who’s your object of celebrity fixation tonight?”

“Jude Law. I just rented four of his independent British films that never made it to the American big screen. The geeky Blockbuster guy said they were good. You ever see any of them, like
Immortality?”

Mandy whistled low. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but if it’s got a hotty like Jude Law in it, I guess it can’t be too bad.”

“Guess not. What are you doing tonight?”

“The same thing you’re doing tonight.”

“Jude Law?”

Mandy chuckled. “No way. I’ve got two tickets to see Grand Theft Auto on Bourbon Street, and guess who I’m inviting?”

Sela groaned. She would rather be hung by her nails on a clothesline than go to the French Quarter. She had been looking forward to a peaceful evening alone. “I don’t think so,” Sela finally answered. “But thanks for the offer.”

“You don’t
think
so? Why the heck not? Grand Theft Auto is the hottest local band around. People are lining up for these tickets, I’m telling you, Sela. They were signing records at Tower Records today, and the news said the police had to come in and get people out, the store had reached its safety limit. It was a fire hazard.”

Sela knew something about fire hazards, but she kept her mouth shut. “Well, they sound fantastic, Mandy, they really do. I’m just too tired to go out. Really tired.”

Mandy snorted. “You’re always tired.”

“You’d be tired all the time, too, if you still worked at Frank’s.”

“Which is why I don’t. Are you in your bedroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Look out your window.”

Sela walked over to her bedroom window and pulled up the shades. Mandy waved from under a street lamp, her cell phone glittering red under the yellow artificial light.

“Surprise!” Mandy yelled into the phone.

“Jesus,” Sela muttered.
Goodbye, Jude Law
.

Mandy ordered, “Be outside in five minutes. I’ll be in the car.”

The phone clicked. Sela threw the receiver down. She hustled over to the mini TV on her dresser and pressed the biggest button on the TV’s panel. The six o’clock news flicked on. A toothy blond reporter shuffled a pile of papers as she announced the night’s top story—another Fishhook murder. Another body found, another female, this time in the river near the Riverwalk attraction. Police were not releasing any names.

Sela inwardly shivered.
Poor girl
, she thought.
I wonder who she was, what her life had been like? What did she do to deserve to die that way? Why did anyone, for that matter, deserve to die that way?

Sela often wondered why God chose some people to live short, violent lives while others lived on to be healthy and prosperous. What was His method of consideration?

A roll of the dice
, Sela thought.
Or a Bingo game
.

Sela dismissed her morbid thoughts as she walked to her closet and threw on a pair of faded blue jeans. Sliding a white cotton shirt over her head, her hands brushed against the side of her small breasts.
If only they were a little bit bigger
, she thought disapprovingly. Her past boyfriends had never complained, but Sela had always felt self-conscious anyway. The world was geared toward busty women, and Sela was not one of them, though she tried to compensate. What she had lacked in cleavage, she had tried to make up in dexterity, practically doing back-flips in the bedroom. One boyfriend had asked if she was a gymnast. She laughed when she thought about it now.

Her laughter subsided when she stared closer into the mirror, and thought that she looked older than her twenty-four years. Twenty-eight, maybe. Her hair was mousy brown. Dark bags lived permanently under eyes that were deep blue and always cloudy with fatigue. Premature aging reared its ugly head along the deep lines of her forehead and cheeks.

Sela frowned and finally shrugged her shoulders, knowing that no matter how many expensive beauty products were out there now, there was no way to turn back Father Time.

Besides
, she thought,
I’ve earned every single one of those worry lines. Each and every one
.

Life had been hard after her parents’ death. Sela went to live with her grandmother in Hammond. For a long time it seemed as if the days were stretched out like moth wings across a pinning board, solemn but uneventful, gloomy but bearable. Then some kid—Sela suspected Jasmine Love, the curly-haired blonde girl in her math class who knew all the answers to all the problems and who hated Sela for having more stars on the attendance chart than she—found out somehow about the way Sela’s parents had died. Sela suspected her parents had told her, not realizing that their child was a gossiping demon-beast—and within three class periods, the whole school was abuzz with news that Sela had killed her parents.

There were plenty of chants that went around (Kids were so damn creative!), but they all followed the same tone. Sela remembered only two of them:

Sela, Sela, set her house on fire, see her mom and dad on a funeral bier
.

and

Sela, Sela, went quite mad. Torched her home, her mom and dad
.

Sela came home crying so much that her grandmother threatened to send her to a psychiatrist, “If I had the money,” she said. On a particularly gruesome day, in which Sela was chased with lit matches by three hateful boys on the playground, she finally told her grandmother what went on when the old lady was not there to protect her. Her little old granny with the Q-tip hair and laugh wrinkles around her eyes cried for hours on the front porch over a glass of iced tea before deciding that they would just have to move and that way, Sela could go to a new school where no one would know her past.

But they never moved. Eventually the kids grew tired of tormenting Sela, and moved on to a boy who had supposedly gotten his little willy stuck in the tube of a Hoover vacuum. By eight grade, the theories behind Sela’s parents’ death had died altogether, and Sela was allowed a state of boring normality again. Where the kids used to pay attention to her, if for no other reason to accuse her of murder, they now ignored her, which suited Sela just fine. At last, she had some sense of peace.

But only
some
sense of peace. What she had no peace from, the one demon that continued to haunt her, was the element of fire. She had what psychologists called pyrophobia, and it stayed with her always, always. Every aspect of her life, in some form or another, was affected by her fear. Smoking was not allowed, of course, and there were no matches in her apartment, no lighters, no candles, nothing that was meant to burn or be burned. Sela never cooked because she was afraid of the oven and the stove. She enjoyed coffee but only Folgers Instant. Her clothes were bought only after making sure that they were permanent press, for Sela did not iron. Her waitressing job had been difficult at first due to her phobia, because some of the work required going into the kitchen where the stoves and ovens were always lit. After a while, however, Frank and the cooks became used to Sela’s refusal to enter the kitchen under any circumstances, and they no longer bothered her about it.