Sketched Page 3

  Piper attempted to sit up, but Detective Harrison placed a hand on her shoulder to push her back down onto the filthy communal couch. “You should give yourself a bit more time. You’ve been out for a while.”

  Her head cradled by the cracked armrest, the events that had caused her to black out fell back into place in rapid succession. The mystery girl, Beth McDonald. She had grabbed her and then she had passed out. Was that what it was?

  Or had it happened again?

  “Where’s the girl?” Piper said, raising herself up again on her elbows. Her long hair had slipped from its bun and she tucked the loose strands behind her ear. “Is she alright?”

  “You did great kid,” Harrison said, frowning at her movement. That was more like it. The even toothed little smile had gone as quickly as it came. “You sure managed to loosen the cap for us. She’s with Detective Parker now and he’s trying to piece everything together. It just looked like…well, it looked like it took a lot out of you.”

  “What happened?” The words sounded false to her. Of course, she knew what had happened. It had been happening for as long as she could remember.

  First, it was the feeling of her ears shutting down, then her chest tightened and finally, the darkness descended. Then she awoke, always with a piece of knowledge brought back with her from wherever she had been. Always against her will.

  When she was five, her kitten had gone missing. Her mother, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other had shrugged her narrow shoulders and dismissed it. “Cats go missing all the time, princess. It was an alley cat, anyway.” The ice in her before work cocktail had tinkled merrily as she refilled the glass. “Alley cats never last long.”

  When her mother had driven her to her uncle’s house on the way to work, Piper had passed out in the backseat. Her mother had blamed the heat and the heavy cloud of cigarette smoke for her collapse. Her uncle had blamed the fact that the last food she’d had was a pop tart the night before. The two of them had argued over her, pointing fingers and yelling as she lay on the bare mattress below. She had tried to tell them it wasn’t any of those things but they were too busy with each other to hear her. She had tried to explain that it had felt like her head was floating off of her body and that now she knew where her kitten was. She had even seen her, trapped in the neighbor’s basement three blocks away. If they’d stop arguing, she’d yelled, she could go save her kitten right now.

  By the time her mother paid attention two days later, her kitten was already dead.

  Her head still swimming slightly, Piper looked around Harrison’s office. She never blacked out like that without some kind of result. Since working at the police department, her ‘episodes’ had only increased. Although she preferred not to think about it, she’d woken up on more than a few separate occasions with information she had no memory of receiving. She’d been the recipient of an address where a local girl was hiding from her parents, a map where a stolen car could be found and a drawing of a middle-aged woman that she’d never seen before and that was just for starters. Initially, she brought her ‘findings’ to whatever officer would listen, but most of the time her scrawls and drawings were ignored. Most of the time being all of the time. She ended up storing her secret messages under her bed, as ashamed and fascinated with them as a teenage boy with an illicit pornography collection.

  “I must’ve passed out or something. I guess.” Hollow words again. She was trying to inject sincerity in her voice but wasn’t sure she was pulling it off.

  Harrison sighed and looked at Piper as if making a decision. He leaned over to a table by the couch and picked up a piece of paper. She immediately recognized it as a torn-out piece from her notebook. Piper sat up, ignoring the fleeting fullness that rang in her ears again.

  “We had no idea you were in trouble. We could see the girl was agitated, but she was talking at least. From what we could tell in the camera, you just,” he made a gesture with his hand, “picked up your pencil and started working.” He looked guilty again. “It wasn’t until you fell out of the chair that we realized you were out. If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “That I was ‘out’?” Piper asked, reaching for the paper. She was suddenly nervous. It had never happened when she had an audience. That made it all so much worse. She felt her cheeks flush.

  “I took a look at the feed from the other camera facing you.” He paused again, moving the paper away from her slightly as she reached for it. The guilty look on his face only seemed to be increasing. He finally spoke, sighing as he did so. “From what I can tell Piper, you weren’t exactly conscious when you drew this.”

  Harrison handed the paper to her. She opened it, blinking to adjust her still slightly blurry vision.

  He was freakishly skinny, whoever he was. Every tendon in his neck was visible and Piper could even make out the lumps against his skin where his trachea descended into his bony chest. He could’ve been handsome but his emaciated face made him appear more eerie than anything else.

  “It’s mine.” Nerves left Piper feeling as if she were expanding just beyond the boundaries of her body. She held the page in her hand dumbly. Those were her pencil strokes, her shading and cross-hatching. “It’s mine. I mean, it’s my work but I don’t remember doing it. It’s a whole portrait!”

  “This is yours, there’s no doubt about it.” Harrison looked down at the picture grimly. “You did it with your eyes closed too. Unbelievable.”

  Harrison took the picture from Piper’s hand. He stood up and walked to his desk, abandoning the sketch on one of the many piles of paperwork that littered the office. He rubbed his eyes.

  Piper watched him silently, noting how much he’d aged since she met him. There was something else too. There was a set to his jaw that she hadn’t seen before.

  “It’s no one, Piper. I know what you’re thinking. It’s no ‘Dixon Demon’. That’s what the press has been calling our perp, right?” he sneered. He leaned back against his desk, crossing his hands over his lean chest. There was a splatter of his morning coffee on the worn white polyester of his shirt. “The girl couldn’t give us a name. She was too out of control by then. I even had the boys run your sketch through the database to see if it matched any known perps. It’s no one. I can say that with all confidence. It’s literally no one.”

  It was Piper’s turn to sigh. Still seated on the torn vinyl couch, she dropped her head and rubbed where the muscles in her neck felt knotted and hot.

  “Yeah, you hit the ground pretty hard. You might want to take a few aspirin.”

  Despite all the times she had been ignored, despite the occasional pieces of information she’s received that ended up being something rather than nothing Piper decided to persevere. She took a breath to steady her nerves.

  “She kept saying there was another girl still there, Harrison. What if it’s too late?”

  Before she could even get the words out, she could feel the heat in her face increase. “What if that picture is the only clue we have, the only way we have to save Beth’s friend? Is it possible that I didn’t ‘black out’ at all?”

  There was a horrid pause where Harrison regarded her carefully. Leaning against his desk, his arms still crossed across his stained shirt, he looked almost as if he were in pain.

  “What if something happened to me when I was in there? I mean, you said she needed a ‘female touch’ to open up.” She paused again, feeling her courage diminishing under the detective’s critical stare. “What if I managed to ‘see’ the man who took the girls? What if I managed to connect with her on some level?”

  Harrison rolled his eyes. His mouth still in an expression that Piper had difficulty comprehending, he walked behind his desk. He pulled a cigarette from the crumpled packet and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he opened his desk drawer with his other hand and removed a bottle of painkillers. He tossed it at Piper, smoke billowing from his sharp nose like some kind of irritable dragon.

  “Connections? Links? Really? Like you read her
mind?”

  Piper caught the bottle awkwardly. She blushed deeper than before.

  “Obviously not so dramatic.” She tried to steady her voice to avoid sounding as flustered as she felt. “But what if I didn’t pass out? What if it was…”

  “What, a trance?”

  He was back at her side, handing her a paper cup filled with cold water from the cooler.

  “Piper.” He sat down beside her, the worn couch gasping under the weight. “You’re an amazing artist. In fact, I’m convinced you’re the best sketch artist this country has ever seen. I shouldn’t have brought you in there, I take full responsibility for that. But you managed to get that poor girl talking, which is exactly what we needed. However, you’re going to have to let us carry on from here. Whatever that picture is of, it’s nothing more than something you hauled up from somewhere deep in that talented head of yours.”

  Piper was disappointed to see him smiling again.

  He was lying.

  She had known Detective Harrison since her mother disappeared ten years ago. As the lead detective on the case, he had been the one to receive her late-night phone calls and obsessive office visits. He had even been the one to suggest she put her talents and intensity to good use around the station when it became clear that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, she had only finished paying him back for the loan he gave her to pay for her composite artist training. She loved and trusted him like family. He was all she had.

  But he was lying to her.

  Why?

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  July 23, 2012 - 8:13 pm

  Piper’s Apartment - Dixon City

  There was something warm and sticky between her toes. Seaweed? Grass? She shuddered, a bitter taste in the back of her throat, rising up from the darkest place inside of her.

  Hair? Was it hair? Just look down, she commanded herself. Look at your feet and see what it is. She wiggled her toes again, feeling the warm tendrils squish against her skin. Piper forced herself to look down. It was carpet, the kind of thick shag carpet she remembered from her uncle’s basement when she was growing up. It was even the same deep green avocado shade. Except where she stood of course. Whatever had soaked into it was making it turn a nauseating shade of rusty brown.

  A smell. It filled her nose suddenly as if it had just walked into the room after her. Wet concrete. Yes, that was familiar. Stale cigarettes. Urine. But not animal urine. It had the mineral, fleshy tang of human waste and Piper felt herself gag. Against her will, she detected another scent, one that was growing stronger with every breath she took.

  It was the smell of copper.

  She blinked as the rest of the room materialized around her. She was facing a fireplace plastered with lazy swirls of stucco and a mantle filled with sports trophies and family portraits. As she looked around, she became aware of a noise.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  She should leave. She needed to leave.

  The dark place inside of her demanded she do so. Now. But she didn’t. Piper willed herself to walk across the room where the noise seemed to be coming from. It was probably just a faucet left on. Somewhere, someone had left a rusty faucet to plink rhythmically into a sink.

  As she passed the plastic covered couches, the shag carpet seemed to grow deeper under her feet. And wetter. It clung to her ankles like weeds as she moved.

  Don’t look down. The dark part told her. Don’t look down and get out.

  Across the basement room was an accordion style door built into the wall. It was the same faux rosewood shade as the rest of the paneling and was shut so tightly that the plastic ribbing bulged toward her. It reminded Piper of a tin can, pregnant with something rotting within.

  She would just turn off the faucet and leave. She wouldn’t be but a minute. Piper reached for the accordion door and pulled it open, the rattle of plastic filling the room as it folded forward on itself. She blinked into the darkness.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  She stepped in, feeling the stench on her tongue now like a slick coating.

  Leave. You need to leave.

  She halted when her bare feet touched cement. She began to feel bubbles and vacuums form against her cold soles as she walked further into the darkness. Piper found herself in front of a chain dangling from a what must’ve been a light fixture above. She stopped before pulling it. There was another noise now. A slow, circular creaking to accompany the steady tap.

  “Turn on the light, Piper.”

  Piper’s heart jumped in her chest. She called out for her mother, recognizing her voice instantly. “Mom.” She hesitated to speak, worried the stench would force itself down her throat. “Mom, what is that noise?”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Piper reached out and grabbed the cord. The wetness under her feet seemed to surge and she felt the warmth reach her ankles. Still holding her breath, she pulled the cord and the basement exploded in front of her in the unforgiving light. Piper screamed.

  A young girl’s torso swung gracefully directly in front of her. Armless and legless, for a second Piper thought it was a pig carcass. But when the pink, fleshy mound turned in its creaking orbit toward her, she was able to make out the blood-soaked breasts and mutilated pubis of a girl barely out of puberty.

  When Piper scrambled backward, she slipped, feeling herself descending into the impossibly deep pool of blood that poured from the torso like some kind of grotesque fountain. Its head was down, folded around the chain that connected it to the spider web veiled two-by-fours that spanned the ceiling. Its hair, blond but crunchy with gore, hung over her face.

  Sobbing, Piper tried to scramble backward but the floor was too slick. The torso continued its orbit, halting suddenly directly in front of where Piper lay, smeared in blood before it.

  Look away. If you can’t get away. Look away. The head began to move, righting itself from its impossible angle and raising slowly to stare down at Piper. Piper’s chest grew so tight she felt it would burst as the torso’s matted head raised far enough to stare directly at her.

  Slowly, so slowly… her mother opened her eyes

  “Turn on the light, Piper.”

  Piper struggled violently out of sleep. She grunted as she fought to breathe, feeling her eyes bulging with panic. She gripped the sides of her couch, her hands and chest soaking wet.

  Not with blood. Please don’t let it be with blood.

  She looked down and saw her t-shirt damp with nothing more than sweat, finally relaxing enough to inhale deeply. Her mind still half asleep she heard an address, like an earworm you pick up from a radio commercial or top 40 song, repeating dully in her head.

  Piper sat up, crouched forward as if she might vomit. It was her mother’s voice, following her out of her dream and filling her head with relentless repetition. There was no mistaking it.

  “3353 Forest Glen Place,” she spoke to the room, long gone was the afternoon light she had fallen asleep in. If she said it aloud, maybe the chanting would stop. Was it her mother’s voice? The more it repeated, the more it seemed to change. Piper spoke the address aloud again, pushing her hair from where it was plastered against her face with sweat. It was like a chorus now. What had begun as her mother’s familiar voice now sounded like an entire choir whispering some kind of deafening requiem that only she could hear.

  Piper stood up from the couch on shaky legs and made her way to the coffee table where a variety of pens and paper were scattered. She collapsed beside it, her heart beating loudly in her ears. Not loud enough. The address played like a skipping CD, an endless panicked loop. With a shaking hand, she grabbed the closest pen and scrawled the address down on a piece of paper.

  The voices stopped instantly.

  Piper collapsed against the table, breathing heavily. It was as if someone had finally turned off a car alarm. She closed her eyes for a moment, forcing herself to calm down. It was just a dream. She never had two visions in one day. Even when she was a child and at her mo
st vulnerable, they had always been rare occurrences. She had always been given time to recover and deal with the after effects. What if she was losing control?

  Piper tried to comfort herself, wrapping herself in her own arms where she crouched by the table.

  Remember what Harrison had said? Maybe he was right. Perhaps there really was nothing mystical here. No psychic connections or any of that bullshit. She had simply fallen asleep on the couch and woken up battling the disorientation of a too long nap after a bad nightmare. That was all.

  And your missing mother’s voice in your head. Don’t forget that. Piper thought, trying to stop herself from shaking. A voice that you haven’t heard in eleven years that turned into some kind of miserable choir deafening you with an address. An address you’d never heard of before. The address even Beth McDonald couldn’t remember.

  CHAPTER FOUR