The late hour weighed on them as Vivian and Sterling trudged through the police precinct. They’d simply chosen the one closest to the apartment building where Natalie King had been killed—a quick two-mile sprint in yet another cab. Sterling had called ahead at the insistence of one of the officers at the apartment building, so there was a willing and able officer there to greet them as they entered.
The officer was a tall and striking woman, maybe in her mid-to-late thirties. Vivian noticed within just a few seconds of the woman’s warm greeting that her eyes lingered on Sterling a bit more than was necessary.
“Bonjour,” the female officer said. “I’m Officer Kaitlin Lareaux. I understand you need a place to work?”
“We do,” Sterling said, returning her bright smile.
Vivian chuckled internally. She noticed the sexy and seductive way this woman’s accent sounded—not hard, given that it was French. She was the cornerstone of the stereotype of French women who simply sounded sexy.
“Right this way,” Lareaux said, leading them through a small bullpen area where a few detectives were busy at work behind laptops and pads. “You’ll be using the old records room. It's not much, but it's private. We’ve already set you both up with laptops."
They came to the room at the end of a small hallway. When Lareaux opened the door, Vivian saw that she hadn’t been exaggerating. It really wasn’t much. Sterling grunted his thanks, and they made their way into the office.
“Anything else?” Lareaux asked.
"No, thank you," Vivian said. She watched her look back at Sterling for a moment, not being subtle at all. Lareaux then closed the door with a slightly disappointed look on her face.
“Damn, Sterling,” Vivian said.
“What?”
“I believe you have an admirer…”
“What? Her?”
“Um, yes. Very much so.”
“I didn’t notice.”
Vivian didn’t comment any further on it because she could tell by the confusion and borderline disinterest on his face that he really hadn’t noticed. And even if he had, he didn’t much care. With the door closed, Vivian took a moment to look around the room at their little temporary office.
Towers of cardboard boxes teetered precariously, each one a monument to cases long since cold. The desk that had been unearthed for them was scarred with the ghosts of coffee rings and hasty penmanship. Vivian sat down behind one of the laptops, displacing the thin layer of dust that had claimed the surface of the desk.
As she booted up the necessary programs, Sterling began his own methodical dance, fingers drumming a staccato rhythm against the keys of his laptop. She saw that he was signing into his email, likely hoping for a link to whatever footage had been found by security back at Natalie King’s apartment building.
Vivian, meanwhile, logged into the criminal database. She typed in the name Isabella Marquez, not expecting much. But as it turned out, she was quite surprised.
She got a hit right away. There was indeed a criminal record for the woman. On the screen, Isabella Marquez's face stared back at Vivian. A plain-looking woman of Hispanic heritage from the looks of it. Brown hair, dark eyes, angular chin, and full lips. She looked almost villainous in her mugshot.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” Vivian said.
“Got something already?”
“Oh yeah,” Vivian said as she scrolled through Isabella’s record. "Assault and battery on a former lover. Looks like the lover had been an artist, just graduated from an art school in London when he moved to Paris. Isabella served three months in prison; she apparently broke the guy’s arm in the assault. And then after she was out, she was arrested again for some sort of argument with a neighbor. The file doesn’t go into detail, so I guess there were no formal charges brought against her for it.”
"So she dated an artist and beat the hell out of him," Sterling said. “Does it say why?”
“No. Just relationship strain.”
Vivian's gaze locked onto the screen, her eyes scanning the digital ink of Marquez's past transgressions. A chill slithered down her spine as she noticed the gap in the timeline; Isabella Marquez's slate had remained conspicuously clean between the last entry on her record and now. It was a span of nearly twelve years without incident. But Vivian had learned long ago that a blank space in a criminal record could be as telling as the darkest blot. People didn't just change; they got better at hiding their true nature.
"She’s been clean for the last twelve years," Vivian commented.
"Or just laying low," Sterling countered.
“Could be.” Vivian thought this over for a moment. The art appraiser murders bore the mark of someone with a penchant for control and a deep-seated rage against those who they saw as having slighted them somehow. Who better than a scorned lover with a violent streak and a vendetta against the world that once celebrated her boyfriend?
Vivian switched from the database to a basic online search for more information on Marquez. Her fingers danced across the keyboard, summoning the omnipresent eye of the internet to reveal more information.
“She’s into abstract art,” Vivian said. “And remember, Vowles even mentioned that the feud between Marquez and Natalie was over an abstract piece.”
Sterling nodded, wrapped up in his own business at his laptop. Vivian pressed on, looking for social media accounts or news articles. Anything, really. She did find a Facebook account for Isabella Marquez, but it wasn’t updated very often. There were only six posts within the last year and four of those were pictures of abstract paintings without any captions or descriptions.
However, the most recent post made Vivian pause for a moment. "Her last Facebook post was from five days ago. It's a digital flier for a symposium on abstract art and it just happens to be taking place tomorrow. She's listed as a speaker."
"Well, that’s sort of perfect,” Sterling said. “And here’s one more thing. I just got an email from the security team at Natalie’s building. I’ve got footage of one of the men they’re eyeballing.”
“Let’s have a look.”
She slid her chair over next to Sterling and saw that the security manager had sent the files via email. Sterling clicked the link and was sent to a file-sharing service hosted by the managers of the apartment building. They’d sent four different recordings. Vivian watched over his shoulder as he cycled through them, hoping to catch something that the police might have missed.
"The notes the police sent over said to keep an eye on the man in the black coat and fedora,” Sterling said. “And I guess that’s him, right there.”
He pointed to the screen and sighed. Vivian watched as the man in question, having just come through the doors, made his way through the lobby.
“The hell of it is,” Sterling said, “you never see him again until he comes back out almost twenty minutes later. And you never see his damned face. You do, however, see Natalie King come in.”
Sterling skipped the footage ahead a few minutes after the man in the fedora had walked off-screen. Sure enough, roughly eleven minutes after the man had entered, Natalie King came through the lobby doors. She was carrying a bag in her hand, a shopping bag of some kind. When Vivian realized she was seeing the last few moments of a woman who was about to die, her heart kicked up a notch.
“Now, watch,” Sterling said, backing the footage up to the man in the fedora. “He angles himself in a way where he’s always looking down and slightly to the right, avoiding the camera. It’s the same when he goes in and as when he goes out.”
He played the footage again, and Vivian watched closely. The man in the fedora cast a long, ominous shadow down the polished marble floor. His movements were calculated, unhurried. Vivian found herself intrigued by the man’s posture, the precise way he held himself. This wasn’t a novice; it was someone who had mastered the craft of deception and camouflage. And it wasn’t so much that he came in shortly before Natalie came in; it was that he came back through the lobby less than two minutes after Natalie had stepped off-screen toward the elevators. And when he did, there was a hurried pace to his steps.
It wasn’t a smoking gun by any means but it was suspicious as hell.
“It’s frustrating,” Sterling said. “It’s frustrating as hell because without seeing the guy’s face...”
“It means he staked the place out really well to prepare for this," Vivian said. She knew a thing or two about getting the lay of the land right down to building blueprints and identifying where security weaknesses were located.
"Well," Sterling said, "there's no point in letting this stop us. Yeah, we've got Marquez and that symposium tomorrow, but we also have about six hours of night left. I say we dig."
“You don’t think it’s worth going to speak with Marquez right now?”
He shrugged and then shook his head. “We have absolutely no evidence against her, just the word of a man who admits he was very close to the victim. To go knocking on her door after midnight would be a bit much, I think. I say we wait for the symposium, try to get a word with her before she speaks.”
This made perfect sense to Vivian, and was another of those tidbits of experience she tucked away in her mental file—a mental file that was full of small yet crucial details she’d learned through Sterling.
So, as the precinct clock ticked past midnight, Vivian continued to search. She figured that because she'd found a little nugget of information on Isabella Marquez's Facebook account, maybe there would be something worth finding on the social accounts of their other victims.
She started with Natalie King first. She was the most recent and the youngest of the victims, which meant she was more likely to have active social media accounts. She found Natalie in digital vignettes: her vibrant green eyes shining out from TikTok posts in which she shared her love and knowledge of art in short snippets, the same sort of approach to her less-populated Instagram posts. She didn’t post obsessively, but for her TikTok account in particular, she seemed to post at least four times a week.
But it was on her Instagram account that Vivian found what, to her, was the most striking moment of the case yet. There, amid the curated collage of her life, one image snagged Vivian's attention—a group photo, nine people clustered together in front of a gallery’s decorative arch.
Her gaze zeroed in on one figure in particular, standing to Natalie's left. It was Cassandra Holt, the first victim. Chestnut hair, keen eyes, and an unwitting participant in a deadly series of events. Two lives intertwined not just by their tragic end but by a shared love and appreciation for art.
"Sterling,” she said, trying to stem her excitement. "Have a look at this."
He leaned over from his makeshift workstation, his demeanor shifting from casual interest to sharp focus as he observed the image over Vivian's shoulder. "That's Cassandra Holt and Natalie King…”
"Exactly," Vivian replied, tapping the screen. "Two victims, one photograph. They knew each other."
Sterling straightened, crossing his arms as he considered the implications. “The art world isn’t quite as big as it sometimes seems, though. They could have just been acquaintances. Maybe just sort of like work-friends at most.”
"True. But either way, it’s interesting.”
Vivian continued looking through Natalie’s socials and then Cassandra’s and Elena’s, quickly discovering that Elena had no social media accounts. But even after an hour and a half, that single photograph was the only tangible thing that connected the victims at all. It felt daunting after a while, but she had to remind herself that they were starting tomorrow with two very promising new leads: Isabella Marquez, and the picture showing that somehow or another, Natalie and Cassandra were linked.
And as the weight of the late hour tugged at her, that made it a bit easier to find the resilience to keep searching even when it felt the internet and the criminal database had given up all they had to offer.