Jennifer’s boss slammed a file down hard on the desk in front of her, the loud bang startling her colleagues throughout the room. She didn’t flinch, even as the impact sent tremors through her veins. It was a trained lack of response; giving away too much weakness as a woman in her field was the first step to failure.
Markus had been in charge of her division since her first day. He was a former military type, and still wore his old patrol cap to work every day. He had a mustache that seemed to droop sadly on either end, with dirty blond hair buzzed short. She couldn’t actually smell his breath, but she had become accustomed to the scent of cigarette smoke enough to feel as if she could.
“Look at this.” He growled, visibly grinding his yellowed teeth.
She humored him, allowing her eyes to be drawn down at the file. Sitting neatly on top of it was the photo of a corpse.
“There’s been another?” Jennifer brought her gaze back up, expression morphing to a curious frown.
Markus huffed, as if it was somehow an irritating question to be asked. “It’s got the heart.”
She nodded, understanding what he meant right away. The corpse had the shape of a simple heart, two bumps pulled down to a point, carved into the skin.
“Just… figure this out faster.” His aggressive tone melted for a moment, as if recognizing the ineffectiveness. A ghoul made docile by the unflinching nature of its prey. “I don’t wanna keep talking to those damn reporters.”
She gave him a mock salute with two fingers, picking up the file as soon as he had retreated all the way back to his musty office.
As one of the more senior detectives, she had the honor of being put on this sensationalized case. It was the perfect series of crimes to draw the attention of the public; this was the fourth body to turn up with the same mark.
The other crime scenes were sensational in their own right. A butcher had been found dead by his own cleaver. A social media influencer was killed, with music from Pandora still playing through his headphones when he was found. The killer gained the name “Pandora” after this murder, from the death which had truly drawn the media to flock. A taxi driver was found slumped on the wheel of his car, with a watch far too expensive for him to own on his wrist.
The person in this newest photograph was slumped against a brick wall, blood splattered out from their head like the impact of a watermelon thrown with inhuman force. His name was written underneath the picture in rough black pen, scribbled on as a note after the fact; Luke Primrose.
Truth be told, she wasn’t very concerned about finding the culprit. She already knew exactly who it was.
No, she was scanning the crime scene details for something to stick out. Something that seemed odd.
Beyond the normal amount at least. It was hard to explain, but insignificant areas of interest were where her clues were delicately laid. Not “leave no stone unturned” but “hold the stone which should mean nothing to light”.
Her search paused. This killing had been in a convenience store, where the victim worked. There had been three things left loosely on the counter; a ten dollar bill, a bottle of nyquil, and a newspaper called the Sunday Times.
Ten o’clock. Night time. Sunday.
It would seem she had a date.
Jennifer hated the cold.
She pulled the edges of her jacket around her body tighter in a futile effort to further shelter from her old enemy. Her tawny hair billowed behind her, occasionally blown by the wind like a cat swatting a loose bit of yarn.
The first killing had been a butcher. She knew in her gut from that moment exactly what was going on.
She related it to a twisted version of women’s intuition. A feeling circling her head like the very wind she pushed through.
There’s a common trope amongst close friends, where you develop jokes so abstract that they can’t be repeated to a stranger for anything more than a blank stare. A phrase or comment wrapped so tightly in circumstantial humor and mythos that it could never be pulled out for anyone new.
It’s why a murder victim being a butcher stood out to her, and only to her. A flash of something familiar in a grisly crime.
She remembered a simple moment, the type of memory that shouldn’t have stuck after all this time. Sitting on the side of a twin bed with faded blue sheets, legs dangling off the side, with half of a laptop resting neatly on her legs. The other half was on another girl’s, held between them like a bridge across a canyon.
“No like, imagine every serial killer spelling things out with their killings.” The other girl was giggling, despite the grim subject matter. “And the same people keep dying because they make for easy hints.”
“Like… meat workers.” Jennifer had suggested, trying to suppress her own smile. “For, like, ‘meet me here’”
“Meat workers.” The other girl had snorted, and Jennifer recalled feeling proud of making her laugh. “Every time they die the cops go ‘oh goddammit, a serial killer is texting with bodies again’.”
She remembered the conversation devolving into obscure professions and hobbies, collapsing into fits of laughter over absurd ways to send messages. Any time they could, they had referenced the joke (to the confusion of anyone else).
Watcher Park was a local park just outside the city center. It had a single playground, some benches, and a few scattered trees around a central fountain with a large clock face on it. As far back as she could remember, the clock was always running an hour or two behind. No one ever took the time to fix it.
Her mother had loved the park as a kid, and took it upon herself to bring little Jennifer there all the time. She remembered all of her strange stories, all her obscure fixations and mannerisms.
“Arborglyph,” She had said in a voice far too dramatic for the occasion. “It’s the word for carvings in trees. How wonderful is it to have a word just for that? One day, you’ll carve your initials in a tree with some boy, and you’ll understand how beautiful the word truly is.”
Now she could barely feel the comfort of a childhood staple. It felt more like a graveyard, shrouded in a past long gone and buried six feet down.
The state of the playground equipment, far past its prime, seemed more obvious now. The benches, their wood slats frayed and battered, sat just beneath those trees that hadn’t changed a bit. A cruel irony, that someone thought to display the mangled remains of a once living tree right below still living relatives.
A shadow was standing there, waiting for her, by the fountain.
There's a phenomenon, where you see pictures that trigger a faint sense of nostalgia. An image with generic textures or furniture, meant to mess with old memories and fool you into feeling familiarity.
Seeing Cassie down the path felt that way. That gaudy orange coat, worn down to a darker shade. Those black joggers and boots, fraying and worn. That same hairstyle, a long brown ponytail with the same uneven, unkempt strands. Even that messy streak of hair she liked to dye white, just to stand out.
It was as if the fragments of her past had been reshaped in the present, mushed together in a dilapidated jigsaw. Jennifer felt as if the last decade had vanished, and suddenly they were teenagers again.
The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, as Cassie turned to look at her. That face. That face wasn’t the one she remembered. It was thinner, paler, more tired. It was older, the face of a woman instead of a girl.
Her voice was the same though, even if it was a bit deeper. "You came."
"Yeah." She was struggling to keep the cold out of her voice, but fought to maintain a stoic demeanor. "Hard to miss your message. What the hell have you done?"
Cassie tilted her head, and smiled. It was a casual smile, one you might offer to a friendly passerby on the street. "Oh, you know."
Jennifer felt anger bubbling in her throat. She didn't return the smile. A part of her reasoned that things had changed quite a lot, and that she shouldn't risk angering an unstable individual. But how was she meant to stay calm here?
"What is it all to you? Some sick game? Playing out our crime talks for fun?"
Cassie raised her hands, shrugging innocently. "Who can say?"
"Cut the shit, Cassie." She snarled, the rage getting the better of her. "I'm a cop. Do you know what that means?"
"Well, you've got the shiny badge." Cassie's grin widened. "It must mean something."
"It means you're fucked if I call for backup right now." Jennifer was clenching her fists, her entire body tense and shaking. "This was never a game, we never joked about hurting real people."
Cassie's expression darkened. Her smile was gone, her eyes cold. It was a haunting sight, like a look over the shoulder one last time at a house you were moving out of. The furniture and decor all packed away, leaving a recognizable shell around a strangely empty center.
"People... Do you think all humans are people?"
Hearing that sing-song voice of hers in such a twisted way turned Jennifer's stomach to ash.
"I remember us laughing at people. Laughing at the stupid sheep. How we were so different from them, we knew better than them."
Cassie began pacing around the fountain, keeping her eyes trained on the ground as she walked.
“Were the times we cursed out the system jokes? What about when we spent weeks submitting opinion pieces to journals? Or when we swore off men together on the roof, was that a joke?” Each new sentence seemed to build on her mania, every letter becoming more offbeat to some demented tempo.
"It wasn't a joke. Not to me." Her voice was lower, quieter. "They never cared, so I never did."
"That doesn't justify-"
"You know what's funny?" Cassie cut her off, suddenly turning her head sharply, her hair following the movement. "I thought of you when I killed the butcher. I wondered, would Jenn remember our joke? Would she understand it?"
She laughed, her voice growing louder. "I'm so glad I wasn’t wrong."
Cassie turned away, staring back into the fountain."I wanted you to get the message. I wanted you to understand. I wanted to see you again.”
She spun around suddenly, eyes wide and full of wild excitement. "I missed you.”
Jennifer was still. The rage had left her, leaving her body limp and her mind cold. She felt hollow.
Cassie's shoulders were slumped. She was smiling again, but her eyes were filled with sadness.
"I've... missed you so much." Cassie closed her eyes, and shook her head. She sighed, her whole body sagging as if all the life had drained from her.
There was a procedure to interrogations, to confronting suspects. A list of things you did and a list of things you didn’t. Nothing on either list could help her now.
“You always said Pandora was the perfect example of patriarchal oppression.” Jennifer spoke slowly, carefully plotting each syllable as if she were stepping over land mines. “Created for the sole purpose of marrying a man, and for punishing a man. Doomed to bear the burden of humanity’s evils.”
The clues that had brought her to this place were contrived, only accessible if someone already knew who Cassie was. Even then, it required mental leaps that a normal person might not feel comfortable making.
Who else would assume that an expensive watch on a victim in a parking garage meant ‘Watcher Park’? Who else would put together a date with money serving as the time, nightly medicine to mean PM, and a certain newspaper to mean the date?
Who else knew their stupid meat joke?
Cassie didn’t answer, just watching her. It was like she was trying to take in everything about seeing Jennifer, which made her uneasy.
“I get the name. I got the messages. The only piece I don’t get is the hearts.” She continued, trying to at least follow some tenets of questioning criminals. “Why carve them into the bodies? What do they mean?”
The other woman’s lips curled into a small smile, so miniscule that anyone who knew her less would miss it. She still didn’t answer, but there was a strange glint in her eyes now. Something about the question must have amused her.
"... the first victim was a registered offender." Jennifer spoke up again, as if poking the other woman gingerly with her words. "The third was allegedly hitting his kids. The fourth..."
"He was a predator." Cassie's voice was bitter as she finally spoke back. "The second was a far right extremist, powder keg in the making."
Jennifer shook her head. "Why? Why are you doing this?"
"You know why." Cassie's voice was strained. She opened her eyes again, and stared intently into the other woman's. "Or do you need to hear it from my lips?"
Jennifer didn't respond.
"They were exactly what we always railed against. Exactly what we always feared, exactly what ruined our lives." Her voice took on a more fanatical tilt, her volume rising. "They're all monsters. Someone had to stop them."
"By murdering them?" Jennifer's anger had returned, and her voice cracked.
"It was their consequences." Cassie spat the word, her face twisted into a snarl. “Consequences they never saw coming, because they got to live their lives free from the notion.”
Jennifer looked down, away from the other woman's hateful expression. She let the silence hang, heavy and cold, as the wind continued to whip around them.
Cassie's face morphed into a slightly more sympathetic one. "If someone had killed Jason Calman, would you really feel bad?"
Sheer cold, icy liquid unlike anything the weather could conjure poured through her veins. A learned fear, primal terror. The terror of a closed room, vice-like hands, and unanswered prayers.
The name danced across her skull like schoolyard taunts, echoing with laughter as it mocked her. Jason Calman. Jason Calman.
"Fuck you." Jennifer spat, blinking rapidly. "Don't you ever say that fucking name to me."
Cassie sighed. "Fine. Just, think about it. About how satisfying it would have been. How deserved."
"It doesn't justify this."
"Why be so proper about it?" Cassie mused, placing a finger under her chin like she was mock-thinking. "Unless you went and found god since we split, I don't see why killing evil humans has to be such a sin."
"You're sick."
"Maybe. But I'm right." Cassie gave a toothy grin. "They're all just animals, and this world has too many animals."
She looked into Jennifer's eyes, and her expression softened. "Oh Jenn, I don't know how you did it. After all we went through, you became a dog of the state. A tool."
It felt wrong to be called Jenn. She couldn’t bear to call Cassie ‘Cass’ right now, it felt too personal. Like the true name of a demon; a gift only afforded by someone who knew them closer than any other.
"I did it because it's the right thing to do." Jennifer clenched her fists again, her tone low and harsh.
"Right and wrong are just things that big people tell little people, so they'll shut up and accept what's happening."
Jennifer took a few steps closer, marching as if she were moving against a maelstrom.
"Stop it." She hissed.
"No." Cassie's face lit up, latching on to her tone. "Tell me, what happened? You just decided one day, 'no, I don't want to be free, I'd rather be a slave'?"
"Stop."
"We had everything. We were gonna go far, far away from this place. A cottage by the sea, that's what we said." Cassie's face contorted in anger, and she stepped closer, pointing a finger at Jennifer. "Until you got scared."
"Stop."
"We could have been happy. We could have been free." Cassie was screaming now, and her finger shook. "But you loved a cushy desk more than your girlfriend."
Jennifer couldn’t stop herself from shaking. It was impossible to tell if she was scared, angry, hurt, or some amalgamation of them all.
Cassie yelling like this wasn’t something she associated with arguments or rage. All but one of her memories with similar outbursts took place as she sobbed into Jennifer’s chest, cursing her father, her body, and the world.
Those memories of Cassie were memories of a little girl made of glass. A fighter at heart who was forced to be so painfully fragile by the world which never cherished her as it should have. The world which left Jennifer to pick up the pieces, holding Cassie like a gift from the heavens above.
She couldn't help but let the guilty fears that had been long buried in her mind resurface, clawing their way back from the last time the two had spoken. The last time she’d heard that voice scream. The day Jennifer had said goodbye, and left Cassie behind.
Was she selfish, for moving her life on from Cassie? Was she selfish for tugging away the only anchor of stability the love of her life had?
Who was more at fault for Cassie’s mental degradation?
She became aware of the silence. Jennifer had all but frozen in her moment of reflection, and Cassie had been reduced to wordless panting.
If she truly was a part of the blame, then it was time to fix what she could. It was time to end this.
Jennifer grabbed Cassie's wrist.
Cassie paused, her face twisting into a grin. She raised her other hand, making a peace sign in the air.
"Arrest me then. But when they realize who the killer was, what happens to your cushy desk? When they realize the lead detective slept with the serial killer, do you really think they'll keep you on the force?"
Her body froze. She wanted to be the hero you would see on tv, the one who would call the villain's bluff. The one that might take the hit to do the right thing, no matter how damaging.
The right thing that would put Cassie behind bars, and end her career. The right thing that would out her to a frenzy of tabloid reporters, hungry to turn her into some fetishized accomplice.
She released her grip, letting Cassie's arm fall limp. It was an admission of defeat, folding in her cards to end the bluff.
"That's what I thought." Cassie's voice was quieter. "You've already made your choice."
Jennifer was silent.
"You could have helped. But now, it's too late." Cassie's voice was sad again. "I hope it was worth it.”
Jennifer suddenly surged forwards and stepped even closer, until their faces were almost touching. Cassie didn't flinch.
"I loved you, you know." Jennifer's voice was barely above a whisper.
Cassie shook her head sadly, the ghost of a smile etched on her face. "You love me, still. That's why you're here."
"No." Jennifer's voice cracked. "Not anymore."
Cassie closed her eyes and breathed out a long, shaky sigh. "Maybe not me. But you still love Cassie from college. The person I used to be. That's why you came, with no back up or plan. Because you're not a detective, not now. You're just a woman, who misses her girlfriend."
Cassie reached up, and gently pressed a hand against the other woman's face. "You can't change me, Jenn. I'm sorry."
"Cassie, I'm begging you." Tears were falling freely from her face now, and her whole body shook.
Cassie moved her hand down, and ran a thumb across Jennifer's bottom lip. It was such an old sensation, yet it slid back into place within her mind like a broken machine kicked back on.
"Tell me to stop, and I will. Tell me to blow a hole through my head, and I will. All you have to do is ask."
Jennifer's mouth stayed closed.
Cassie leaned forward, and pressed a kiss to her lips. It was warm, soft, and familiar.
It was goodbye.
Only then, in that brief moment where the distance between wayward lovers closed, did Jennifer understand why Cassie had been carving hearts.
Cassie pulled away, and smiled sadly. "Thank you for meeting me."
"How does this end?" Jennifer whispered softly, unable to remove her eyes from Cassie's. "You can't fix the world alone."
There was that familiar smile, that confident mask she remembered. The face of a woman who would push a mountain with her bare hands if it meant the world would be forced to notice her.
"I’m not trying to win." Cassie's voice was lower, and more calm. "We can only survive."
Cassie turned away, pulling the hood of her jacket up. It tucked her hair away from sight, the first bits of Cass that were gone for good.
Jennifer stood silently. The wind blew, and she watched the ghost of a woman she had once loved walk away, into the darkness.
Jennifer sat across from her boss, looking calmly across his desk at the raging man. Her colleagues couldn’t make out any words from within the closed confines of his office, but they could make out the ferocity of the meeting by sight alone.
It would come out later that Jennifer had requested a transfer from her current work on the Pandora case. There was speculation around the office for a time; maybe it was just too hard? Too gorey? One person even wondered if she was preparing for maternity leave.
As the meeting unfolded, words lost to all but the two involved, a file sat innocently on Jennifer’s desk. It was almost the same as her last, but the photograph was of a different man.
The name under the photograph was Jason Calman. He had been found that morning, with a heart carved into his flesh.
