ELIZABETH BRECK
For my mother and father and Analise
Chapter One
It was speared to her front door with a rusty nail she recognized as coming from the banister of the landing on which she stood; she unconsciously leaned her weight forward to avoid resting against the railing. It was a piece of white paper, 8 ½" by 11". The kind you buy in reams from the office supply store for $6.99. Her hair was up in a bun from her run, and the ocean breeze whispered across the roofs of the houses behind her and tickled the back of her neck as if there were someone standing there, on the five-foot square of wood at the top of the stairs, bleached from a hundred years in the sun and serving as the entrance to her apartment. She whipped her head to one side and then back again, expanding her peripheral vision down the stairs to her right and toward the alley to her left. Silence, except for seagulls calling to one another overhead and the sound of waves crashing behind her. The message on the paper was meant for her. More to the point, the person clearly knew where she lived, since it was nailed to her front door. It had only one line, typed with Arial 12-point font:
Stop investigating me or I will hunt you down and kill you. BITCH. No police.
Between the nail and the piece of paper was a strand of long blonde hair, pierced with precision and gently waving in the breeze.
The note and the hair would’ve been alarming enough, but the main issue, and the one that caused Madison Kelly to stand unmoving on her doorstep for several minutes, was that she had no open cases at the moment. She was investigating no one and nothing. Having closed her first murder case a few months before, she hadn’t gone back to insurance fraud investigations. She was at a crossroads. Stop investigating me. Huh. The thing was … she wasn’t.
Chapter Two
Madison turned and looked over the railing to the alley below. No unusual cars, and there was no one in sight. She glanced down the stairs into the courtyard garden. Her apartment was built above the garage of a 1929 beach cottage in the Windansea section of La Jolla, California, one block from the beach. A famous surf spot that rose to fame in the 1960s, Windansea still had its small-beach-town charm—despite the gentrification that seemed inevitable when hidden gems became known to the world. Her garden sat quiet and serene, unaware of the march of progress around it. She pivoted again and looked at the ocean over the tops of the houses.
As she stared at a summer storm brewing far out over the ocean, she felt the note burning a hole in her back. The thing about being a private investigator was that she liked to investigate things. Madison had never been able to interpret whether she liked mysteries or she hated them; all she knew was that she was compelled to solve them. So the appearance of a threatening note made her want to drop everything and figure out who had left it. And yet, she’d promised herself she would take time off from investigating to figure out what to do with her life. She had to expand out of the insurance field, or she would go hungry while the big Walmart-type investigations firms took all of her work. Insurance companies wanted quantity over quality these days, and Madison’s assignments had been getting fewer and farther between. However, bigger investigations—murders—were very different from insurance investigations.
She enjoyed watching ex-cops stumble and fall when they thought they could retire from the police department and go into PI work with “all of their experience”—which was zero when it came to insurance work. And yet, here she was imagining doing the same thing: moving into a line of work for which she had almost no experience.
Madison turned back to the note. How could she stop investigating someone she wasn’t investigating? Since she didn’t know what she was doing to make this person think she was investigating them, she couldn’t stop. In fact, she might accidentally continue, and what would they do next? What came after a threat to kill you?
Actually killing you.
Madison started to get scared, an emotion she wasn’t used to. Her fear quickly turned into anger. No, she wouldn’t let someone threaten her like this. She reached up to tear the note down but stopped just before she touched it. She saw in a flash what her life would become: constantly looking over her shoulder, checking cars in her rearview mirror, suspicious of everyone, looking out her windows at night to see if someone was watching her; always wondering: was this the note leaver, here to make good on his threat? It didn’t matter that she was in the middle of a mini existential crisis. The only way to prevent a life lived in fear was to do exactly what the note was telling her not to do: investigate—but that could also get an escalation of threatening behavior. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
She knew that if she turned the note over to the police, she would get a cursory investigation at best. This threat would be a big deal only to her; to the police it would be just one of the many small investigations they had on any given day—if they investigated it at all. The note was terrifying only if it was your blonde hair stabbed to your front door. And anyway, the note said no police.
Madison looked down at her sneakers, covered in wet sand from her run on the beach. She kicked them off and pushed them to the side. It was times like these that she wished she still had her father to advise her. He wouldn’t tell her what to do—he would ask questions that allowed her to come to her own decision about the best course of action. She didn’t have anyone else she trusted to help her. She was on her own. To be or not to be? To fight or to flight? What was the right thing to do?
“There might be fingerprints on that note,” Madison said aloud. She went inside to get a pair of gloves.
Chapter Three
Madison went into her apartment, careful not to brush the note on the door as she walked past. She walked gingerly on the hardwood floor, as if she were hiding from someone and trying not to make noise. Even though she wasn’t sure what she was going to do about this note, there was no point in contaminating the evidence. She grabbed a pair of surgical gloves from the built-in cabinet along the wall to the left. Her five-foot-eleven frame took her back to the door in five strides. She put the gloves on and then realized she had nothing to store the note in.
Her apartment was a studio, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase separating the main living area from her bed. She remembered she had a paper bag from Warwick’s Bookstore stuffed in the bookcase. It had held a large greeting card, so it would fit the note without bending it. She snatched the bag, returned to the door, and stopped; she should take a photo first. It had taken some skill to pierce her blonde hair just right, not to mention the whim of finding one of her hairs—her strands tended to cling to things—and using it to bring imagery to the threat. It certainly was effective. She went back inside, grabbed her phone, and came back and took several photos.
Setting the phone down, she pulled on the nail; it wouldn’t budge. Had the person brought a hammer with them? The use of material from the scene—the nail from the landing, the hair—indicated they hadn’t come prepared to place the note on the door, or at least had decided once they got there that those items made a better statement. She put her foot on the bottom of the door to hold it in place and pulled as hard as she could on the nail. She worked out with weights regularly and was no weakling, but this nail was deep in the door. She pulled again, harder. Her pec muscles screamed where they’d been sliced and had healed erratically three years before. She stopped and stared at the nail. She didn’t want to use the back of a claw hammer to pry the nail out, because that would leave a mark on the paper. She thought of calling Dave, but he was probably still in the water for a morning surf session. And anyway, she’d rather not rely on a guy to solve her problems for her.