Twenty

Cassandra left her cul-de-sac house in Granada Hills, San Fernando Valley, about an hour after Mr. J. It was Thursday morning, and every Thursday she volunteered at one of the several charity shops for ‘WomenHeart’ – the national coalition for women with heart disease.

Her mother, Janette, with whom she had been very close, had passed away eight years ago, victim of coronary thrombosis, caused by a severe spasm of the left coronary artery. Her father wasn’t home at the time, and Janette, who was outside, attending to her garden, didn’t manage to get to her phone in time. She died in her backyard, surrounded by roses and sunflowers, but the real shock was that no one saw it coming. Cassandra’s mother had never showed any symptoms related to heart disease – no upper-body discomfort, no chest pains, no shortness of breath, no dizziness, no nausea, no sleeping problems – nothing. In fact, she was a fairly fit sixty-one-year-old woman, who exercised regularly and ate a well-balanced diet. The reason for the coronary artery spasm was never identified.

After her mother’s death, Cassandra decided to dedicate some of her time to helping people with heart problems. At different times she volunteered at different heart disease organizations. WomenHeart was her favorite one.

Cassandra checked her watch as she locked her house’s front door behind her. There was no need to rush. She had plenty of time to get to the shop before it opened at 11:00 a.m. She jumped into her silver Cadillac SRX, which was parked on her driveway instead of on the road, and switched on its engine. She shifted the transmission into reverse and checked her mirrors.

‘Huh?’ she murmured to herself, narrowing her eyes at the interior mirror before turning around to check her rear window. There was something caught between the window and the rear wiper. It looked like a white piece of paper. More rubbish advertisement, she thought.

Cassandra flicked on the wiper to get rid of it, but instead of disposing of the piece of paper, it simply dragged it along from left to right a couple of times.

‘Oh, for crying out loud!’

Cassandra undid her seatbelt and opened her car door. As she got to her rear window she realized that it wasn’t a piece of paper, but an envelope. She reached for it. There was no stamp and no recipient or sender’s address. All she could see was the name – Cassandra – across the front of the envelope, but it hadn’t been handwritten or typed. Someone had cut out each individual letter from a magazine page and glued them together to form her name.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ she said out loud, her tone of voice immediately breaching the threshold into ‘anger’ level. She quickly swung around, throwing her gaze up and down her street. There was no one there, and the only cars she could see she recognized as belonging to her neighbors.

She kept her eyes on the street a moment longer, before bouncing them back to the envelope in her hands. She knew that inside it she would find another note.

This one made it three in total. The first two had been left on the counter in the Women’s Heart shop where she had been volunteering for the past seven weeks. Just a white envelope with nothing more than her name across its front, formed by a collage of individual cut-out letters.

‘I think you have an admirer, Cass,’ Debora, a senior fellow volunteer worker, had told her as she handed Cassandra the first envelope almost two months ago. But the note inside it was no admiring one. The clear intention of the message was to frighten her; but it actually made Cassandra chuckle.

Cassandra asked Debora if she had seen who had left the note on the counter, but Debora said that she had no idea. She said that the note had been left by the cash register, and she only saw it when she rang in an item.

The second note, delivered four weeks later, was pretty much a repeat of the first one, also left by the cash register. This time the message it carried didn’t make Cassandra chuckle, it made her angry. In her mind, the notes had clearly been the handiwork of some ‘idiot’ trying to be funny and maybe scare her, but failing miserably at it . . . but who?

Unfortunately the charity shop she volunteered at had no CCTV camera, or else Cassandra would’ve worked her way through the footage until she had identified the culprit, and the next time he or she stepped into the shop, she would have given the person a piece of her mind.

Despite everything, Cassandra didn’t give the notes much importance, so much so that she had completely forgotten about them. In fact, she had never even mentioned any of it to Mr. J, or anyone else.

OK, Cassandra thought, her eyes going back to the note in her hand, now this has gone too far.

Whoever this person was, he or she had come to her home to place the note on her car, and she wasn’t about to just let that one slide.

Cassandra thought about tearing up the whole thing right there and throwing it all in the trash, but, in a burst of anger, she ripped open the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper from inside it. It looked just like the previous two notes – a white, eight-by-five sheet of paper, where someone had glued together letters and words that had been cut out from a magazine to create a message.

Her eyes scanned the short note and she paused. This time the message didn’t make her chuckle. It didn’t make her angry either. It finally made her scared.

Twenty-One

The cut-out letters and words that formed the note Garcia had found in Karen Ward’s bedroom had all come from article and advertisement headlines, varying in color, size, and shape.

Captain Blake repositioned herself by Garcia’s side and silently read the short note on his desk twice over:

A friend once told me that to really know what it’s like to be someone else, one has to step into that someone else’s shoes. Maybe walk in them a little. Well, I’ve just stepped into yours, Karen.

Captain Blake’s gaze ping-ponged from Garcia, to Hunter, and then back to Garcia. ‘This slipped out from inside one of her shoes?’

Garcia nodded and reached for a second evidence bag, which was on the floor by his chair.

‘This one,’ he said, placing the bag on his desk, next to the note. It contained a pair of shiny, black and red, five-inch-stiletto shoes. ‘I was just about to take it all to forensics for analysis.’

The captain tilted her head slightly to the right as she studied the shoes.

‘OK,’ she said at last, indicating the items on Garcia’s desk. ‘So what the hell does this all mean? That the killer tried on her shoes?’

‘Right now we’re not discarding any possibilities, Captain,’ Garcia replied. ‘We’ll ask forensics to check the insoles and the inside of the shoes for DNA or what-have-you, but if that’s the case, the killer is either a woman posing as a man, or he’s got tiny, tiny feet. Those are four and a half sized shoes.’

‘What it does mean, Captain,’ Hunter offered, ‘is that it confirms what Tanya Kaitlin had told us earlier today – that whoever put that note together, whoever was stalking Karen Ward, had once again gained access to her apartment without her knowledge.’

‘Have you found any other notes?’

‘No, and we checked everywhere,’ Garcia replied. ‘Inside every shoe, pocket, drawer, cupboard, under the furniture – you name it, it’s been checked.’

‘But her friend told you that she had received more than one note, right?’

Both detectives nodded.