Chapter 9
Shaw
The overhead light in my kitchen needed to be replaced, just like everything else in my life.
It showed every stain on the table, highlighted the grain from the fake wood veneer, and magnified every fingerprint on the cheap Formica.
The surface was covered edge to edge. Not with my own junk mail or receipts, but with the faces and fragments of dead men, each spread across eight-by-eleven glossies, each rendered in the kind of detail that only forensic cameras or sociopaths appreciated.
In the middle of it all, Spade stared up at me from multiple angles.
I’d started with the basics, building my own timeline because the ones in the official report were so full of holes they might as well have been used for target practice.
Security cam frames, grainy and in black and white, her body language clipped out against a backlit parking lot.
Full-body in some, partial in others, always that same infuriating composure: a stillness that was more provocative than any gesture, a way of holding herself that implied she’d spent a lot of time being watched and hadn’t yet found a reason to give a fuck.
Next to them, the professional stuff. The PR headshots she’d used for a local tattoo parlor, chin up and shoulders back, a smile that was so practiced it could have been painted on, except she never let it reach her eyes.
More candid shots from the Goth lifestyle blog that I’d forked out $20 to see more of the woman I was fixating on in an unhealthy way.
I looked at Spade in a circle of other women, black lipstick being reapplied, her expression so blank she made the others look like circus performers.
Her body. Her eyes. Her violence. It was a dangerous combination that made me want her more than I wanted this fucking job.
I’d been at the table for hours, sifting.
I’d started with bourbon, switched to water, then nothing at all.
There was a rhythm to it—my thumb dragging down the corners of each photograph, tracing the thread of a scar along her jaw, mentally overlaying it onto her face in every subsequent shot.
In the beginning, I told myself it was just a case.
By the third hour, I’d stopped pretending.
The phone buzzed at the edge of my vision. I ignored it for a count of five. The next text came in a burst: three vibrations, which meant either an emergency or someone who didn’t know me well enough to pace themselves. I reached for it, squinting against the blue light.
Cara: All set at 8. Trattoria Bella. They’ve got you down for two—bring your appetite ;) x
I could picture the smile behind the x. She’d used a winky face, which, in my experience, meant she was either nervous or fucking someone else on the side and wanted to level the playing field. I didn’t judge. It wasn’t like I was coming in clean either.
I stacked the photographs face down. Even that motion felt like a kind of surrender—an admission that I was done for the night, or at least that I knew when I was past the point of learning anything new.
The crime scene stills I pushed to the far end of the table, careful not to let the glossy pools of blood overlap with the casual candids.
The last thing I wanted was to let the narrative write itself, not until I was ready to put it into words.
The manila folder was oversized, the kind they issued when you had to consolidate evidence across three jurisdictions and didn’t want the DA to notice how much of it was inadmissible.
I shoved everything inside, snapped the elastic band, and let it sit there.
I didn’t put it away, just left it in the middle of the table, inert but radiating intent like an unexploded shell.
I went to the bathroom, ran water over my wrists, and stared at my own reflection until I could almost see the seams holding my face together. Then I dried off, pulled my jacket from the back of the chair, and went out into the hall, shutting the door behind me with more force than necessary.
The folder waited in the dark, its contents not so much closed as paused, ready for me when I got back.
***
Trattoria Bella was the kind of place you chose because it had nothing to prove.
No slick bar, no open kitchen with a wood-fired oven, just a square of strip mall real estate sandwiched between a day spa and a shuttered vape shop.
The windows were clouded with a patina of fryer grease, which gave the whole place a permanent dusk no matter what the hour.
Inside, the décor was straight from central casting: checkered red tablecloths, Chianti bottles with candles jammed down their necks, cracked murals of the Amalfi coast curling at the edges where the wall met the drop ceiling.
Cara was already seated when I walked in. She saw me and lifted her glass in a little salute, a gesture so practiced and easy I had to remind myself we’d only met twice before.
Her hair was pinned up, exposing the long line of her neck, a row of earrings dotting the cartilage all the way up.
She wore a blouse in some shade of green I couldn’t name and a necklace made of glass beads, the kind you could buy at a farmers’ market.
When she smiled, it was with her whole face—no reservation, no calculation. I’d forgotten what that looked like.
“Detective,” she said, the smile widening just enough to mock the title.
“Cara.” I slid into the booth across from her. “You beat me here.”
“I was early,” she said, which, in my experience, meant she wanted to watch me walk in and see how I looked when I thought no one was watching. I tried not to think about what she saw.
We went through the motions. She made a joke about the menu, mispronounced an Italian word, and ordered a carafe of red for the table.
I asked about her week; she told me about her boss, her new puppy, and the way her landlord had tried to raise the rent again.
I nodded, laughed where appropriate, and made a show of being present. Underneath it, my mind drifted.
I could still see the way Spade’s scar bisected her jaw, the way her eyes cut away from the camera at the last possible second.
It wasn’t just that she’d killed; it was the precision, the ritual of it, like she’d built her own private code and followed it to the letter.
I’d known people like that in the department.
Most of them ended up in Internal Affairs, or dead, or sitting alone in restaurants like this, pretending to be something they weren’t.
Cara poured me a glass. “So,” she said, “when you’re not saving the world one parking citation at a time, what do you do for fun?”
“I don’t,” I said, before I could soften it.
She laughed. “Wow. That was brutally honest. I like it.”
“I mean, I’m not much for hobbies.”
“Not even beer-league softball, or bad TV, or…” she gestured with her hands, searching for a third thing, “…I don’t know, woodworking?”
“I work,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”
She looked at me for a moment, eyes narrowed just a little, like she was trying to decide if I was being evasive or if this was just the way I was built. “You know, you’re a lot less intense over text.”
“Text is easy.” I shrugged. “You can curate.”
“I can see that.” She took a long sip of wine, watching me over the rim of her glass. “So, what made you want to be a cop in the first place?”
I set my fork down, stared at it for a second, and considered lying. “I wanted to solve things,” I said finally. “I didn’t like not knowing.”
She nodded, lips pursed. “And do you? Solve things, I mean?”
“Sometimes.” I felt the word catch in my throat. “Sometimes you just get to a point where knowing isn’t the same as fixing. Or even stopping.”
She let that sit. “Is that what’s going on tonight? Something you can’t fix?”
She had the kind of curiosity that could cut through most people.
It was probably why she’d done so well in her line of work—HR at one of the big convention centers, which meant she spent most of her day triangulating between psych profiles and sexual harassment complaints.
She was good at reading a table. She’d already figured out I was off; what she didn’t know was how far.
I forced a smile. “Just a long week. Paperwork backlog.”
“Uh-huh.” She reached over and flicked the rim of my glass. “You ever think about quitting?”
I didn’t answer right away. My eyes drifted to the window beside our booth, where the neon OPEN sign flickered in time with the headlights passing on the strip. The question should have been simple. It wasn’t.
“Not really,” I said, and it sounded weak even to me.
Cara nodded again, filing the answer away.
She switched topics, telling me about her sister’s upcoming wedding, the nightmare of picking out a bridesmaid dress, and how she was sure her mother was secretly hoping for a grandchild.
I made myself listen, tracing the sound of her voice while my mind assembled a different conversation.
What I didn’t say: There were twenty-four bodies in that folder at home, each one dissected, annotated, tabbed with post-its in my own handwriting.
There were timelines and maps and expense reports, all pointing to a woman with a face like a blank wall and a habit of never saying more than was strictly necessary.
I’d spent months watching her move through the city, always a step ahead, never repeating a mistake.
I’d spent even longer trying to figure out if I wanted to catch her or just understand her.
What I also didn’t say: The part that should have horrified me was the part that drew me in. The symmetry, the pattern, the sense that someone out there was not just improvising violence but composing it, like music. The bodies were almost incidental. It was the intent that kept me up at night.