Twenty-Two
Fandom of the Canceled Killer dwindled when it was discovered she was a fifty-something homemaker and retired spy who believed women should not be able to vote or have their own bank accounts.
A large and ever-growing contingent of Canceled Killer fans refused to believe a fifty-five-year-old woman could even be capable of such crimes.
Most believed Russo to still be the killer.
—Crime Hive podcast
“Jude,” I managed, my voice sounding dusty and old, but I didn’t care because I was alive. Jude’s head snapped to attention, and his puppy-dog eyes lit up.
“Hey, El,” he said, and grabbed my hand through the tangle of IV tubes. “How you feeling?”
“Shitty,” I groaned. Then I remembered. Tammy. The Canceled Killer. “Tammy!” I cried, trying to sit up from my pillow.
“Don’t worry. She’s down the hall. Police are guarding her room. You gave her a serious concussion.”
I wished I’d given her more. Harmless neighbor, my ass.
“You’ll also be glad to know that Barry is absolutely fine. He didn’t drown.”
“Oh—good?” I croaked and rubbed my throat.
“Need some water? Here,” Jude said, handing me a hospital-branded plastic cup.
I took a sip and sank back into my pillow.
“Your mom and dad and Olivia have all been here since yesterday, but they went to grab a bite to eat at the hospital cafeteria. They should be back. I’ll text them and let them know you’re awake.
” He focused on his phone for a second, typing out a message.
He glanced up at me. “Thank God you were able to tell me the chemical. I knew what it was immediately—succinylcholine. Common muscle relaxer.”
I vowed never to make fun of Jude’s nerd tendencies ever again. All those chemistry classes paid off.
“The doctors had to put you on a ventilator for a while until the drugs wore off, but now you’re good. They said you might have a nasty headache.”
“Way ahead of you,” I groaned, holding my head.
“But the doctors told your parents you should be fine,” he said.
I felt rage flare up in me. I shouldn’t even be here at all. “Tammy’s insane.”
Jude nodded. “We know. Police found her diary. She didn’t admit to any killings, but she sure had a lot of hot takes about the victims. Seems like she wanted to take us all back to the 1950s.
She really hated the idea of women in corporate leadership positions.
” Jude shook his head. “You probably won’t be surprised to know the internet refuses to believe it, though.
The Canceled Killer lost support but it seems like the die-hard fans refuse to believe it’s Tammy and not Russo. He’s still getting marriage proposals.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “Russo is an unhinged stalker, a regular old singular murderer. But he’s not a serial killer, so I guess, good?”
“You’re not developing feelings for that guy, are you? He’s cooked,” Jude said, looking alarmed.
“Hell, no. He should rot in prison. I guess I should feel lucky that I had a sick stalker and a serial killer after me,” I said. “What’s a girl supposed to do when everyone wants to kill her?”
Jude squeezed my hand. “I was terrified when I pulled you out of the pond. You stopped breathing just as the paramedics arrived.” Jude’s eyebrows knitted together. “I just… I don’t want… to lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said and squeezed his hand. “We have a lot of living to do, and we might want to look at apartments in Chicago.”
“Wait—we?” Jude’s eyes brightened. “We should? Together? You mean that?”
“Absolutely.”
The door to my hospital room swung open, and my whole nuclear family rushed in.
“Oh! My baby!” Mom cried, flying to my bed and giving me a giant hug. “I am never letting you out of my sight again.”
Olivia, long pink ponytail swaying, grabbed my hand. “There she is,” she said and grinned at me.
“This is a whole new level even for you, Thin Ice,” Oscar said, but he was smiling.
Dad shook his head and reached out to grab my hand. “Thin Ice? Never,” he said, surprising us all since he rarely said much. “She’s tough and never cracks.” He flashed me a look of pride.
Oscar came to the side of my bed, and Dad shuffled off to the side. My brother dipped down and hugged me.
“I’m so sorry,” he told me.
“Why are you sorry?”
“She was right under my nose,” Oscar said. “Tammy. I missed her. You almost…” He trailed off as his voice got thick with emotion. My brother did love me, and I could see clearly just how much in his tortured face.
“I am going to kill that Tammy Anderson,” Mom said. “I just… I never even thought for one second…”
“Nobody did,” I said, meeting Oscar’s gaze. “She fooled us all.”
Oscar sniffed hard and nodded.
“Ted’s beside himself, you know,” Olivia said. “He had no idea, either. The Streamberry people are hassling him for interviews.”
“They’re already making a documentary? It’s been one day,” I said, dumbfounded.
Dad shook his head in disapproval.
“What we really need here is Dateline,” Mom said.
“I heard they might also be coming to town,” Olivia said.
“Really?” Mom beamed, unable to contain her excitement. “I wonder if they’ll interview me? They have to interview me, don’t they? I’ll need to get my hair done.” Mom fluffed her long black waves. “Oh! Maybe this is how I get on the cover of Vogue? I knew it. I knew Octavia was right all along.”
Eight months later
The smell of a freshly cooked omelet wafted from the kitchen in the Chicago Lake View apartment Jude and I shared on the first floor of an old brownstone, as I sat straight up in our bed, the early June sunshine seeping in through the curtains.
I swung my knees over the side of the bed and stretched.
I was wearing one of Jude’s Cheese Council shirts, since he’d gotten two of them after starting his new job at the beginning of the year.
He spent the first months on the job commuting the two hours from Lake Sanguis, but now we’d finally found an apartment and moved in together. I tugged on a pair of leggings and then padded down the hall in bare feet, past our stack of as yet unpacked boxes and to our marble-countered kitchen.
“How did you even find a pot?” I asked him, amazed.
The movers arrived late yesterday, dumping all of Jude’s boxes around six in the evening and walking his furniture up the front stoop and through the narrow front door of our old building.
Thankfully, our apartment was air-conditioned by two hardworking window units.
“Because I labeled my boxes.” Jude dipped down to kiss me, a smug smile on his face.
He didn’t just label his boxes; he had a corresponding spreadsheet for each numbered box, listing every single item contained within.
Meanwhile, I’d pretty much thrown my meager belongings into a few trash bags, which were piled up in the corner of the living room.
“I’m not sure I can live with someone this anal-retentive,” I warned him after we broke the kiss and Jude turned back to the stove and gently lifted the edges of the eggs cooking in the pan.
“Or someone who wants to hang a Fortune Fated mask on the wall.” I nodded to Jude’s small gaming corner of our living room, a small shrine to all things Fortune Fated.
Jude ignored the jab as he watched the egg simmer in the pan. He’d already buttered toast, which waited on a nearby plate along with a few sliced oranges.
“What if I just keep feeding you? Will you reconsider? You should never kick your boyfriend out of the apartment on an empty stomach.”
At the word boyfriend, I felt my toes tingle. We’d actually done it. We’d moved in together. In Chicago. Jude was thriving at his new job at the Cheese Council, and I’d gotten an apprenticeship at the Lawton and Warne Agency.
I’d need to work three years as a private eye before I could apply for my own license, but Kate Warne, my new boss, said I was one of the most promising candidates she’d ever seen.
And that meant something, considering Kate helped form the agency after she retired from the Chicago PD and nearly single-handedly foiled a plot to assassinate the mayor a few years back. She was an icon.
I grabbed the bread and bit into the buttered toast. “You’re right. I should never make big decisions hungry,” I mumbled, mouth full of crumbs. It was hard to believe I was settling into domesticated life with Jude, but I was.
“You’ll never be hungry on my watch,” Jude promised me. A sizzle from the pan drew his attention back to the stove. “Ah! Time to flip!”
He flicked the pan with his wrist, and the solid circle of omelet flipped perfectly around in the pan. He leaned over, grabbed some shredded cheese, and tossed it in the middle before he folded the beauty in half.
My phone pinged, reminding me that I had a meeting with Kate this morning, so I couldn’t be late.
“Is that omelet ready?” I glanced at the time. “I think we’re both cutting it close on time. We could be late.”
“I don’t know—that sounds like an awful lot of ‘we’ you’re using,” Jude teased.
I gave him a playful punch in the abdomen.
“I could always move back to Lake Sanguis,” I offered.
Jude laughed. “You would never.”
It might not be a place I really wanted to live, but I had actually made peace with it. I no longer saw the nickname Thin Ice as a taunt, or believed Lake Sanguis was the place where karma took a permanent hiatus.
Russo was in jail, and so was Tammy.
Tammy had a court date soon, that I knew. Oscar wasn’t on top of it as much anymore, since she’d been transferred to the county jail months ago to await trial. I’d been expecting more follow-up from the prosecutors on both cases, but so far had received minimal information from them.
Russo still had an annoyingly large group of fans that seemed to be growing every minute, with all kinds of conspiracy theories about Tammy being a patsy.
Despite the facts, no one wanted to believe Tammy was the Canceled Killer.
In fact, she all but disappeared from the news, proving we did, actually, ignore women of a certain age.
Meanwhile, the hashtag #FreeRusso trended nearly every day on every platform.
“Omelet’s ready,” Jude said, handing me my piping-hot plate. “Wasn’t Tammy supposed to have a court date today? Do we know for what?”
“I’m not sure. Her lawyer is probably trying to have evidence thrown out,” I said as I shoveled in a big bite of delicious egg.
Tammy had been denied bail, but her indictment was sealed, so I wasn’t sure of the extent of the charges against her.
In fact, the federal prosecutors were being annoyingly close-lipped about the whole case.
Neither Russo nor Tammy had gone to trial yet, and the wheels of justice seemed to be moving very, very slowly.
“Russo’s trial is when?” Jude asked.
“They haven’t set a date yet,” I said. But the sooner they did, the better. I’d testified during the bail hearing, and thankfully, the judge denied him bail, too. He was absolutely a danger to me, Jude, and anyone else in my orbit.
My phone dinged with an incoming news alert.
I dropped my fork.
“Tammy escaped,” I said, scrolling through the single paragraph of news.
“What?” Jude rushed over to my side to look at my phone. We both read quickly. She’d somehow walked out of prison five days ago. I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine. The woman had been free for nearly a week.
“Clerical error?” I read aloud, and Jude and I exchanged a glance. “Another inmate was scheduled for release, and somehow, they confused the names?”
“That can’t be right,” Jude said, and then he kept reading. “Oh, actually, apparently this is the third time this year that has happened at this particular jail. I guess not Wisconsin’s finest.”
“She did this somehow; it wasn’t just luck—or incompetence,” I said. “This is all Tammy.”
The apartment buzzer rang then. Jude glanced up.
“Expecting someone?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. He pulled out his own phone and checked the doorbell camera. On the stoop outside our brownstone stood a delivery driver, a large box in his hands.
We both walked to the door, and Jude swung it open.
“Ophelia Ella Takeda?” the driver in the cap asked as he glanced at the box’s label.
“Yes,” I said, and Jude reached for the box.
“Careful. It’s heavy,” he cautioned as Jude took it in his strong arms. The delivery guy nodded at us and then jogged back to his idling truck.
“I didn’t order anything,” I said, glancing at the huge box as Jude slipped it onto the kitchen table next to my half-eaten omelet.
Jude reached for a knife from the block and ripped into the tape. He peeled back the cardboard lid and pulled out some brown packing paper.
Beneath it lay a basket filled with fresh lemons. All with the stems on.
All Sorrentos.
A note attached to the handle simply said:
Tag, you’re it.