One
The Canceled Killer murders began in Chicago last summer after Heather Johnston called the police on a kindergartener running a lemonade stand next door and made the kindergartener cry when she kicked over the table, spilling the lemonade.
Johnston was found two weeks later at her home drowned in a bathtub filled with lemonade.
—Crime Hive podcast
I used to be the person who always guessed the murderer’s identity well before the end of the movie.
The husband did it.
The butler.
It was the neighbor. Also, she’s actually a ghost.
I loved mysteries. I devoured them. I had an unhealthy obsession with trying to figure out who the bad guys were.
Shouldn’t we all pay closer attention just in case we’re living next door to a serial killer?
I mean, how often have you heard about mass murderers burying bodies in the backyard garden and when they interview the neighbors on Dateline, they all seem shocked and say, “He was so quiet and kept to himself”?
Yeah, well, not on my watch.
Plus, I knew from personal experience that you can’t just sit back and wait around for karma to punish the bad guys.
Sometimes, karma takes a vacation. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we don’t actually live in a neat and tidy episode of your favorite crime drama. Bad guys get away with it all the time.
Like the Canceled Killer.
He was still running loose somewhere, being quiet and no doubt keeping to himself, while steadily adding to his body count every month.
And because I pointed the finger at the wrong guy, I was back home, sitting on an unmade bed at four in the afternoon in the Airstream trailer in the backyard of my parents’ inn.
The Airstream, as well as most of the rooms in the main house, was usually rented to tourists during the summer high season, but my parents were graciously letting me stay in it while I tried—and failed—to avoid scrolling through social media.
Oh, look! A new meme. A photo of me, headphones on, talking into my oversized podcaster microphone, my eyes half-closed so I looked as foolish as possible. Beneath me in big blocky letters: ALL AMATEUR. NO DETECTIVE.
“At least this one’s clever.” I held up the phone to show my younger sister, Olivia, as she pulled my comforter out from under my butt and swiped a fringe of pink bangs from her eyes.
I rolled to the side and reluctantly got to my feet, my purple plaid flannel pajama bottom hems dragging on the floor, as she tried to tidy up the mess I’d made of the trailer in the less than twenty-four hours I’d been home.
“Normally, people just repost the ‘You tried to cancel the Canceled Killer, but now you’re canceled!’ as if that’s original. I get that one a million times a day.”
“Stop looking at those!” Olivia chided as she whipped my blanket into a tightly folded perfect square. She, with her meticulous cat-eye, high pink ponytail, and matching deconstructed pink-and-green argyle sweater, went about my cluttered Airstream with intense efficiency.
She lifted the platform bed mattress and stored the extra blanket beneath in the empty cubby and then began tucking in the sheets so tightly they’d probably pass any drill sergeant’s test. I moved to the bench seating near the table, even as I wondered how our family’s neat gene had skipped me.
Dad kept the garage so clean you could eat off the concrete floor.
Mom collected different-sized toothbrushes to scrub grout.
Olivia and our older brother, Oscar, made beds tight enough to bounce quarters off of.
Me? I never met a fitted sheet I could fold.
Laundry was something I did only when every article of clothing I owned happened to be dirty.
Olivia stopped fluffing pillows long enough to contemplate me slouched on the bench.
“Let me see.” She offered her hand, and I put my phone in it. She turned slightly, her pink ponytail swishing to the side and offering me a view of her many ear and cartilage piercings that glimmered in gold. She peered at the screen.
“‘The real crime isn’t her bad detective work, it’s that she covers up her amazing tits in those baggy tops. I’d do her anyway, I guess’?” Olivia read aloud, glancing at me with shock, even though on the scale of one to horrible, that was only about a two.
I saw my own dark brown eyes staring back at me, as we shared our Chinese Filipino American mother’s eyes and our Japanese Scottish American dad’s wavy almost black hair.
Our family was the living embodiment of Asian fusion. We were also ground zero for the ongoing debate between Mom and Dad about which Asian culture—and cuisine—happened to be superior. The debate was hotly disputed and still unresolved.
“I mean, of course, you can’t criticize a woman’s professional performance without bringing her appearance into it,” I quipped. “Ah, misogyny. My old friend.”
“Do they talk about Jeremy this way?” Olivia’s eyes narrowed.
My old boss at Crime Radio, the podcast studio in Chicago where I used to record Crime Hive. “No, of course not. Also, he got promoted.”
I talked to Bette, and there’s simply no way to keep you on, Jeremy had said when I’d turned in my building badge, the very morning they’d announced he’d be VP of development. The public has spoken.
“Someone had to get credit for tripling the downloads of the podcast, and it couldn’t have been me.” It had taken Jeremy a hot second to find a replacement host, too.
Olivia kept scrolling. “‘Asian Barbie, go back to your Dreamhouse’?” She whistled low. “Oh, they did not diss Barbie. Let me respond to this one…” She readied her thumbs.
“Nope, you can’t,” I said and swiped my phone back. “Online trolls are like ground hornets. Step on the nest, and then they’ll just swarm you.”
“You’re just supposed to take this silently?” Olivia looked insulted, her strong sense of fairness challenged.
“I could… just not read the comments,” I offered.
Olivia and I both burst out laughing. We both knew I wouldn’t ignore them. Call it a quirk of being a middle child, but I wasn’t about to not tune in when people were talking about me.
“Why do they let people say these things?” Olivia asked.
“Why would they want civil discourse when social media makes billions of dollars on outrage porn?” I said. “Getting us to hate each other is profitable. Because we’d all rather have an enemy to hate than a hero to admire.”
“You’re not the enemy. You were the one who told the Chicago police they had a serial killer on their hands. You named him for goodness’ sake.” Olivia looked so indignant, I just wanted to give her a big hug. I loved my little sister more than life.
I’d been extra protective of her since fourth grade, when she’d first tried to dye her hair pink (it had been an obsession even then), but it had come out an odd shade of orange instead, and her classmates called her jack-o’-lantern.
They teased her until I put the biggest bully in a headlock and threatened to break his arm. Nobody said a word after that.
“No one cares about that.” I waved my EW, PEOPLE mug around until the milky coffee splashed down the front of the Chicago police badge on my hoodie, staining the black-and-white-checkered hat band design running below the two blue stripes and four six-pointed red stars of the Chicago flag.
I looked down at the beige stains seeping into the fabric.
“You’re a hot mess,” Olivia chastened me, dropping the folded blankets and grabbing a hand towel from a small hook on the kitchenette cabinet. “That’s going to stain.”
“It’s not even my sweatshirt,” I told her, frowning, as I grabbed the towel and swiped at my shirtfront. “It’s Aaron Russo’s.”
“The hot detective?” Olivia asked, suddenly very interested.
He was the lead Chicago homicide investigator on the case, and his short sandy-blond hair and piercing blue eyes were impossible to forget.
The man and his every-day-at-the-gym physique, tight-fitting pants, and bare ankles looked like he walked off the set of Law and Order.
Olivia stared at me. “Ophelia Ella Takeda.” My sister enunciated every syllable of my given name. “Did you have intimate relations with the hot detective?”
“One, none of your business, but also, two, sadly, no.” It was one of my greatest regrets.
“But how did you get his sweatshirt?” Olivia asked.
“Because he’s a damn gentleman.” I sighed. “He gave it to me when I visited him Sunday.”
We’d been standing on the rainy sidewalk outside his precinct, and he’d scolded me for not being properly dressed for the weather because I’d blithely headed out without checking the forecast.
He was the adult who watched the weather and always carried an umbrella. He’d peeled off his own sweatshirt—a rare casual, non-blazer Sunday for Russo—and given it to me rather than have me walk back to the El platform wearing just a spandex halter top and leggings in the cold autumn rain.
The sweatshirt was comically too large on me, the arms swinging well below my fingertips, the waistband hanging mid-thigh. When I’d put it on, Russo just shook his head. That’s a dress on you, he’d said and chuckled.
Olivia’s eyes grew misty. “Aw, that is so sweet! Wasn’t he the one who also said you were so good at tracking down clues that you should’ve been a cop yourself?”
“He’s not saying that now.” This kind of work isn’t for everyone, he’d told me.
She frowned at me as I wiped at the coffee. “Dab! Don’t smear!” she chastised. She knew more about fabric cleaning than I did, probably because she took a class on fabric care, since she’s majoring in hospitality at Lake Sanguis Community College.
I released the towel and let her gently pat the front of the shirt. Then she glanced at the tabletop under my elbow. “I’ve got an answer in our secret compartment,” Olivia told me as she whipped up the counter of the small breakfast nook table, revealing the hidden cubby inside.