10. Giselle
GISELLE
FIVE WEEKS LATER
“I hate this,” I mutter, staring at the museum of death that my coffee table has become.
Said aloud, it’s not any more convincing than when it echoes through my head.
I haven’t really slept for all these weeks. Catnaps only. Whenever I sleep long enough to dream, I see his blue eyes, and feel the weight of his hands moving to push my legs apart while his lips hover just out of reach, whispering “little viper” before he bites.
I wake in a tangle of cold sweat and sheets, and the echo of his voice clings to my ear like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
And more than once, I woke up to find that my pillow had migrated between my thighs and my own release frustratingly close yet impossibly far away.
Since our call, he’s been lurking in the periphery of my life, leaving me one disturbing gift after another, carving my name into crime scenes across the boroughs, and sending messages to my burner phone.
I try to sort through which of those things is the worst, but it’s easier to sort through the evidence baggies that he’s been sending my way just before a body shows up.
Each bag contains a critical relic from a crime scene, a clue meant to lead us like a dog on a leash to his handiwork.
First, a silver key that opened a safe in a famous pianist’s studio.
Inside were videotapes labeled with the name of every girl who never came home after private lessons.
The pianist was found with his hands mangled and decorated with a dozen roses—one on each finger and one driven straight through each palm.
Burned into the flesh of his thighs are the words “To Detective Cantiano.”
Second, a gold locket with a single strand of my hair wrapped around two lists: one contains several overseas bank account numbers, and the other contains wire transfers to Russia, Ukraine, and Thailand.
Two days later, the owner of the locket washed up in the East River.
A Wall Street trader with his heart cut out and pinned in place with a dozen roses.
His chest is split open, and scrawled on the inside in the same clean script are those familiar words: To Detective Cantiano .
Third, a matchbook from a Russian restaurant with a date. When we arrived, we found a basement with sixteen cots, each occupied by a girl too drugged to move. Tucked in the freezer was a man nailed to the shelves by his own cufflinks.
In his mouth was another dozen roses. And on his stomach, the same message.
But those aren’t the only ones.
Every day brings another twisted gift. Another mutilated body. Another gruesome piece of what’s clearly a massive human trafficking network being uncovered in real time.
And all of them have the same maddening message on their bodies.
TO DETECTIVE CANTIANO.
And with every fresh murder, the question continues to haunt me: why?
Why was he doing this?
The most important question, of course, is also the simplest one. Why me? I say it’s a simple question because, clearly, he chose well. No one else would have kept his secrets and willingly engaged to the extent that I have.
I tell myself I’m just curious, that I’m playing my own game, not his.
Three cheers for denial. It’s the only thing keeping me together at this point.
I wonder how he knew about his victims. Where does he get such good intel? How does he seem to see and know everything in this city of secrets?
There’s a rhythm to the violence. An anticipation that builds with every delivery. And now, I almost want to skip the foreplay and move straight to the main event each time he drops off another clue like a cat dropping off a squirrel’s head.
But that’s not how this works. I’m as much a part of the dance as he is, and everyone knows it.
Because of him, I’ve become a joke at the precinct.
“Hey, Cantiano! Your boyfriend is calling again!”
“Can’t wait for today’s message from CSI: Lover Boy.”
“Tell your secret admirer to leave donuts next time. He’s fucking us too hard not to buy us breakfast in the morning.”
Russo hates it, I just let the laughter happen. Every time, the body is timed, styled, and presented like a course at a serial killer’s prix fixe.
And every time, I pretend to be disgusted.
“You’ve got too much skin in the game, G. Take the rest of the week off. Let someone else get chewed up for once,” Russo said the first week.
“You’re walking around like a gunfighter with a death wish. I need you in one piece,” he said the second.
“You keep this up, I’ll bench you until Internal is satisfied you’re not compromised,” was this week’s check-in. He wants me off the case as badly as I want to stay on it.
I know I should take him up on the offer.
But I don’t.
“I’m fine, boss,” I always respond. “Just let me do my job.”
I can’t tell him I’m becoming as obsessed with my shadow as my shadow is with me. It’s become an addiction at this point. A darkly delicious addiction that I can’t get enough of.
It’s a good thing Russo doesn’t know about everything else, or he’d put me on administrative leave. And maybe commit me.
But a part of me, the part that’s survived this long, knows we are operating on a frequency I thought was mine alone. It’s a dirty secret that I’ve kept for most of my life. Compared to being alone again, these new secrets feel like nothing.
The worst part of this entire ordeal is the fact that when I went down to ask to see my earrings in the evidence locker, they told me that no earrings ever came in.
Somehow, that cuts me harder than everything else that’s happened.
Seeing Serena’s earrings on Ivan’s corpse is one thing. But knowing that they disappeared forever?
It’s like losing her all over again.
I pace the length of the apartment, each step landing in the exact worn spot my shoes have worn in the wood. Five weeks of tight circles like a prisoner in her cell, never more than five feet from a weapon or a window.
My brain is a snare drum, pounding out the order of operations, always the same: deadbolt, chain, window latch, repeat.
I pour another coffee, and ignore the tremor in my hand. I don’t want to fall asleep.
Because the moment I do, he’ll come in to leave me more gifts.
The first time he got in, I convinced myself that it was my fault. I’d fallen asleep on the futon and left the window open for some fresh air.
The next morning, the door was ajar.
Nothing was missing or broken, and I put it down to exhaustion and changed the locks.
That turned out to have been a waste of time and money. Because every time I come home, the door is already unlocked.
Two days later, a coffee mug moved. Just a few inches, enough for me to think I’d imagined it. But when I touched the mug, it was warm, like it had just been used.
I started keeping a log of similar incidents, each event dated, time-stamped, and annotated in shorthand only I can read.
5/31 17:45 – toothbrush moved to opposite side of sink
6/3 04:37 – running shoes laced up at foot of bed
6/4 19:11 – pillow flipped
Page after page, little acts of trespass. Each entry is a little more frantic, the handwriting smaller, the lines pressed so hard they leave their imprints on the next page.
The way he’s slithered into these rooms just to move things around feels like a mirror of my interior landscape.
Little bits of me that have been stationary for so long are suddenly coming to life.
I can hardly even call them mine now that his touch is starting to turn them into something unfamiliar.
Then came the flowers.
It started with a single red rose, laid across my bed like a punctuation mark. The next time, a pair of lilies, the pollen dusting the sheet with orange. Then a tight bouquet of something pale and tropical, the petals sweating through the paper wrap.
I don’t even own a fucking vase.
I’m sure he’s well aware of that.
The worst was the tampons he dropped off last night.
I found the box on the bathroom sink and my period started this morning, two days early like it’s been trained. The note taped to the box was a single word, in the same neat letters as his messages carved on bodies: “PREDICTABLE.”
I nearly puked, not from fear, but from the feeling of my own body betraying me. The same way it betrays me when these invasions light a fuse inside me, sizzling up my spine and constricting my senses until I’m nothing but a grave waiting to be filled.
My discovery of each present is accompanied by a message to the burner phone.
It’s how I know that he’s watching. He knows when I’m home.
He knows when I walk into the bedroom or the bathroom.
And every time that screen lights up with the same text, I can’t help feel my own heart skip a beat in anticipation:
Did you like my gift, little viper?
I never reply, but I keep the phone charged. He sends me other things, too: artful snapshots.
Of me, naturally.
My face in the window, tilted towards the sun.
Me leaving the bodega, Clear plastic cup of iced coffee at my lips.
My profile as I look over my shoulder before entering the precinct.
No matter where he takes a picture of me, he always takes it when I’m looking at the camera so that I have to look into my own eyes.
So that I can see myself the way he sees me.
Slowly, my fear and unease become polluted with a thrill that buzzes in my teeth, and I find myself hoping that he’ll show up.
He’s not here, not yet, but the possibility is as tantalizing as a physical touch. He knows the pressure point, the spot just under the rib where fear turns to exhilaration. And he touches it each time he violates my privacy just a little bit more.
I’ve done my best to return the favor. On the back of a warrant request, sitting in the center of my coffee table, is a sketch. Just a pair of eyes, blue and absolutely wrong, the color gouged so deep into the paper with ballpoint that it nearly ruptured the fibers.
I stare at them now, and imagine what it would be like to open the door and just let him in.
My phone buzzes. I reach for it, thumb ready to unlock, but the screen is still black. The buzz comes again, and I realize it’s my actual phone, the one buried under a week’s worth of unopened mail and a half-eaten container of lamb over rice.
“Yeah?”
Ida’s voice, bright and sharp as a shot of whiskey. “Giselle. You alive?”
I hesitate. “Define alive.”
“You really know how to make a girl worry,” she says with a laugh. “You want to meet for drinks or do you want to keep being a hermit at home?”
I almost say no. I want to say no. But there’s a heaviness on the line that says Ida knows what’s going on, even if I haven’t told her. She’s worried, and that’s enough to tip the scales.
“Where?” I ask.
“Iron Lounge?”
I glance at the clock. “Half an hour. You’re buying the first round.”
I hang up before she can gloat, then push everything to the far side of the table, gather my hair into a bun, and run a hand over my sink, wishing that Serena’s earrings aren’t lost and gone. They’ve been gone for so long that my ragged earlobes are actually starting to heal.
I hate it.
I don’t want to heal.
I want to hurt.
I check the deadbolt, the windows, and the peephole one last time before I lock the door on my way out.
But I know it doesn’t matter.
He’ll find his way inside.