I woke up in time to get fixed up for my meeting with Lieutenant Mark. I was intrigued and ready to find out what he knew. I can tell immediately if somebody is just average smart or very—not just by the way they talk, but by their sense of humor. Dumb fucks don’t have one, and there’s no cure for it. Take the late Dick and Bianca, for instance. They only laughed at the misfortunes of others.

I got there ten minutes early and ordered a coffee. I was nervous. Mark was right on time. I watched him walk in. Over six feet, slender but wiry, like a middle-weight boxer. He walked over to the table with a panther’s gait. Although he was dressed casually, he telegraphed elegance. His skin, in the harsh white light, was mocha, his startling eyes almost chartreuse. Nice mix. There’s a dancer at Envy who looks like she could be his sister. Mocha Sundae. Khalika and I have green eyes, but they’re a different shade, more of a forest at dusk.

He scanned the shop, which was busy, walked over and slid into the booth across from me. He reached across to shake my hand. His was warm, even though it was a frigid February day, cold and windy and not wanting to give up its death grip on the city. Mark ordered a coffee and I took a refill. When the waitress asked if we wanted anything else, he looked at me. The woman seemed to be checking him out and liking what she saw. I told her we’d decide later.

I told Mark that the owners and the guys who run the Envy had no idea who I was, mainly because I looked nothing like the departed. Mark looked at me a beat longer than necessary before he spoke. After a little small talk, Mark got right down to it—told me that it seemed like Dick’s associates didn’t do what Khalika called “splatters.” He didn’t put it that way though. He called it “overkill.”

“We pulled in a few lowlifes we knew were involved in your stepfather’s various business interests, at least the ones who have addresses, and they said no way did they have anything to do with it. Your guardian was worth more alive than dead. I mean, he was still making payments—it’s just that they were getting later, and the interest was building up. They wouldn’t have killed him unless he just stopped paying. Or at least they would have roughed him up first before doing anything like that. This looked like it was personal. Whoever it was, he, or they, were very angry.”

Mark rubbed his chiseled jaw with his thumb. “Detective Bruno thought it might have been one or another of their lovers. It took a lot of work, a lot of rage, to stage that scene.”

“I see.”

“If anything, it would have been an in-and-out type of hit. They probably wouldn’t have killed your stepmother unless they were forced to or unless she was part of the operation. And even then, it wouldn’t have been the bloodbath we had here, the… posing.”

I winced on cue, said nothing.

“Sometimes these guys will want to send a message, but I don’t think this was one of those times. A card was left too, like a homemade greeting card, birds and flowers on the front, short message inside. That’s not what these types do either.”

“So, what are you thinking?”

“Nothing was stolen, nobody got raped, not technically anyway, and there was no evidence of any kind—no prints, hand or foot, aside from family members and the maid. Your guardians didn’t have many visitors, did they.”

“They were what you might call private. All their socializing, if you want to call it that, was done elsewhere.”

Mark added that the alarms were in working order but that they had been disabled from inside. The cameras too.

It was so weird, sitting over coffee with a man I couldn’t stop staring at like an idiot. I had never done that before—get all googly-eyed over any boy, man, girl, woman, or anything in between, except maybe one or two on a movie screen. His eyes, yellow and green at once. The sensuous mouth that contradicted the words it formed, the darkness they signified. He told me his mom was Irish and that she still worked checking out groceries, that he was an only child whose dad was killed in Vietnam. He’d gotten a partial scholarship and worked to pay whatever that didn’t cover. He’d boxed as an amateur, moonlighted as a bouncer. He’d graduated college with a minor in English lit, then straight into the police academy.

Ever since I knew what sex was, if I thought about it for more than a couple of seconds, I would get sick in the pit of my stomach. Now, coming up on twenty, I felt like a twelve-year-old with her first crush on a movie star. Nothing creepy leaked out of this guy, not from his eyes, his mouth, the tips of his fingers. His charm was real, not faked, like Dick’s. He said he was twenty-eight, and I could just tell that he would never think of coming on to anybody he thought of as a kid, especially one he was interviewing, even if that kid did work in a perv bar, basically naked. But this guy—there was some kind of deep sadness that lurked under the cop mask. His eyes, the way they hardened, then softened. I thought of the myth—the guy, doomed to carry that big rock up the mountain, only to have to do it all over again, every day, forever. Khalika would have said he just looked like a hot cop to her, to be avoided at all costs. I would have told her she was getting jaded.

“So, this twin of yours—she obviously hit the bricks a while ago?”

“Yep, she just couldn’t handle that particular scene. So she split at intermission. She checks in though, just not often.”

Mark stared at me until I felt my ears get hot and my palms started sweating.