Sodden with blood, a girl pushes herself up off of the wet morning ground and staggers off into the black of the night. Her clothes are clinging to her so badly that it made her feel like she was trying to move through mud. Spots swam in her vision as she willed herself to keep going. She was desperate to get as far away from the house as possible and get back to civilization.

She’s confident that she can do it, too. She has to be.

That confidence died when the silence of the night broke with an odd mechanical humming. What was that? A plane? She quickly regretted it when she looked at the sky and her vision blurred so much that she nearly fell. The greyish spots turned completely white as the hum got louder.

She figured out it was a car. She hears the car coming but does not see it, and then he has her…

Ellie closed the book she was reading so hard that several pages ended up getting bent. She tossed it across the room thinking, ‘Oh please, this book is such a load of crap.’

...*

...

Jack Laurie had a talent for accidentally walking in on incredibly heinous crime scenes. It started when he was four years old and walked into the bathroom at the movie theater and found a dead body. His luck didn’t improve at all since then, it was mostly just a downward spiral. He decided to put his luck to use and joined the FBI, becoming an undercover agent. ‘This is part of the problem with you, Jack.’ His mother’s voice rang in his head. ‘You make so many bad decisions.’

‘Too fucking right, mother.’ It wasn’t something Jack expected to think but as he stared down at the crime scene in front of him, he started reconsidering his life choices.

“We need you to get rid of the body,”

“Are those teeth marks?” Jack had learned never to ask a criminal questions about the crime they committed, as bad things always seemed to happen afterwards. But this one was particularly gruesome and he could not take his mind off of it. A body so mangled that there was almost no identifying markers left on it. The bitter smell of baking death in Florida heat filled the air and made him feel like he was going to throw up.

“Yeah, one of my boys needed a problem gotten rid of so I fed the sorry sucker to my gators.”

‘Animal smugglers,’ Jack resisted the urge to make a face, ‘they’re all fucking crazy.’ He didn’t say anything else. He buried the body in a place where the other agents could pick it up and went on with his life. Luckily, it was only four more months before he was taken out and the smuggler was arrested.

Jack had thought that he would get a break after that.

Nope.

Not even close.

It was three twenty-eight am on a Thursday when he got a call that started with, “We’ve got a problem.”

Every second Sunday, Ellie checked to make sure that her security system was working. She always watched the fast-forwarded footage seven times over. She didn’t know why, but it always had to be seven. She watched the footage seven times each. She checked every room in her manor at night seven times, always peaking out the window to the back next. It was far too cold for a night in March so Ellie did not open the door to step outside, although she probably would not have stepped outside this time of night if the weather was more suitable.

This was what being a reclusive author who survived a murder attempt as a child did to you. Her therapist said she was being paranoid. She lived in a safe, rich neighborhood. She would be fine. Nothing was going to happen to her. She had responded to that by saying that she had obviously never been nearly stabbed to death before, and stopped going to her because it was obvious that she was not going to be a good fit.

It was cold for March. Yet there had been a lot of people milling about at night, some without a jacket or in pajamas, but Ellie did not go out to see if there was something going on. She just went to her room to go to bed and ignored the bright lights filtered through the blind as her eyes began to close.

That was what Ellie told the detective, in any case, when he asked her about what she had seen and done in the night before. Apparently, one of her neighbors was found dead in her vegetable garden. She had been stabbed to death. Ellie had signed, ‘Oh, my. I didn’t know.’ And informed the detective that she did not know anything else that could help. The detective thanked her for her time and left, which Ellie was thankful for. She didn’t want the detective getting the wrong idea when her hands started to tremble and her throat felt like it was going to constrict. She struggled to lock the four locks on her door.

After that she staggered through the house, checking all windows and locks 1…2…3…4…5…6…7 times. Now the security footage again. She felt like she was going to be sick.

‘Just breathe, just breathe.’ She thought to herself.

Luckily, her cameras did not catch anything. Still, someone in her neighborhood had been killed and the killer was not caught yet. She sank onto the sofa, still shaking. She hated it when she got like this. Panic attacks always left her feeling cold and sore and alone. All that she could do was ride it out.

*

“That is not my job,” Were words that Jack never thought he would hear coming oout of his mouth, “I work smuggling, not homicide.”

“I know,” his boss, Nick, said. “And I don’t care. This is a high priority case,”

“Ah, yes. An aristocrat dying. Such a high priority.” Jack hoped that Nick could hear him giving him the bird on the phone.

“You know what the press is like. Pretty white woman in a rich neighborhood dies and they are all over that shit. You need to be more of a team player. Your flight itinerary will be emailed to you. End of discussion,” Nick hung up the phone before Jack could get another word in.

“Fucking asshole,” Jack groaned. He was not looking forward to this, but he knew that he was going to have to play ball. So, he looked up all of the information that Nick had emailed him and started reading so he could prepare. There were some things that Nick had neglected to tell him on the phone that piqued his interest. He became less and less irritated with the fact that he had been sent out to investigate as he read through the case file.

This was oddly familiar to him. At first, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe after a while in his line of work, crimes started to blend together. He couldn’t write it off so easily though. The posing of the body just seemed familiar. Almost—artistic, even. “Huh,” He furrowed his eyebrows together, “That’s…odd.”

What was it?

Maybe he was too tired to figure it out right now or needed to be in the moment. But he didn’t mind going now. He was curious.

The next couple of hours were filled with fast packing, several cups of coffee, anti-nausea medication, and airplanes with frustrating layovers. He was grateful when he finally got to his hotel. He had exactly one hour to catch some sleep before he would have to call an Uber and get to work, and he was going to cherish every minute of sleep that he got.

It was seven thirty in the morning when Ellie found the finger in her mailbox. That sort of thing would wake you up faster than any cup of coffee could. Luckily there were police officers on the street who witnessed her almost faint. Before she could, someone caught her and a police officer had obviously seen the finger that was in her mailbox because he was motioning for other people to come and check it out. They were trying to talk to her but her eyes could not focus so she couldn’t read their lips. They got her back to her house and she guessed that someone figured out that she was deaf, because they handed her a pad and paper with the words, ‘Are you okay? Do you want to go to the hospital?’ Written in big clear letters.

Ellie shook her head no. Her hands were still shaking and she felt sick. That’s when people started writing down a lot of questions. Was there somebody that wanted to hurt her? Had she seen anything strange going on around her house recently? Was there anything missing? No, no, and no.

‘I have security cameras,’ She wrote down. None of the investigators there knew how to sign, so she knew that she was going to have to resort to this irritating way of communicating.

“Can you show us?” One of the men mouthed. She could tell that he was shouting by the way that his lips moved, as if that was going to make Ellie somehow be able to hear what he was saying. She nodded, forced herself to steady her hands and stop crying, and motioned for them to follow her to the computer room. She pulled up the footage for them and let them have at it before she went back to the living room and curled up in a ball on the couch.

Time passed by like it was on fast-forward, and then she was brought back to reality when a man that she had not seen before knelt down in front of the couch. He was a respectable distance away from her, unlike the other men who had been so close to her when they spoke that they made it hard for Ellie to breathe. He had these eyes that were calculating like a fox, but also warm and inviting like a cup of hot chocolate. He gave her a slight smile that wasn’t forced, more sympathetic, like he understood how jarring it was to find a random appendage in your mailbox.

He signed to her, ‘Hi, Miss Briarwood. My name is Jack. I am a Special Investigator with the FBI. I heard that you had quite the fright this morning.’ He was slower than a native signer, but she appreciated him knowing it enough to actually talk to her. Ellie pushed herself up. ‘Are you doing okay? Are you sure that you don’t want to go to the hospital?’

‘I’m sure,’ She signed back.

Jack nodded. ‘Okay, just wanted to make sure. Is it okay if I ask you some questions? I’m sure the other detectives have already asked you, but I just got here and I would like to hear what happened from you.’

‘Go ahead,’

‘Alright, did you know the victim of the murder last night?’

‘No. I don’t know anyone in this neighborhood. None of them really try to communicate with me,’

Jack wrote that down before he continued, ‘Is there anyone that you can think of that might have some sort of vendetta against you? Made any enemies, I know that you are an author, but I don’t think you would have made any enemies that way, right?’

‘I can’t think of anyone that wants to hurt me.’ Ellie signed back. She was a little shocked that Jack knew that she was an author, but then she remembered that one of her books hit the New York Times bestseller list two days ago, so anyone who barely stepped into a bookstore would vaguely recognize her name. She bit her lip, hoping that this wasn’t some psychopath that had read her most recent book and got inspired by the actions of the serial killer in the book. She decided that even though it was an absurd idea, she should tell Jack because any idea was better than none at all.

‘What are you thinking?’ Jack signed.

‘I was thinking that he may have read my most recent book, it’s a fictionalized account of something that happened to me when I was a child. The finger in the mailbox, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it until now—’

‘Miss Briarwood, I am sorry to ask you but can you please slow down. You’re signing too fast.’

Ellie nodded and then repeated herself, telling Jack about her books and how she mainly wrote thrillers and mysteries. Jack started writing stuff down and asked if she had copies of her books on hand. Ellie nodded and handed him three of her most recent that were on one of her bookshelves, he thanked her and told her that she should think about staying somewhere else for the night before he left. He was probably right, staying somewhere away from the killer would be a good idea, but Ellie kept catastrophizing in her mind. Thinking that the killer could follow her and since a hotel would not have as much security as her house, they might find a way to get into her room and she would become the next victim.

She ended up deciding that she was going to stay here and just triple check all of her doors. It was half past noon by the time the investigators left, Jack told her that he was going to make sure that someone was posted next to her house at all time. She thanked him, feeling a little bit better. She ended up opening a bottle of cabernet early in order to calm her nerves a little bit. She kept thinking about that finger.

Who’s was it?

Was it the victim’s of last night’s stabbing?

Why would someone put a finger in her mailbox?

These were all questions that she kept asking herself. She started staring at a particular point on the wall, out of her periphery she could see a bunch of news vans coming up the street so they could get the latest scoop. At some point, she found herself going to her typewriter. Even though she had a computer, this was what she wrote all of her rough drafts on before she edited it and typed it. She wasn’t really sure what she was going to write, but she needed the distraction. She needed an escape from this moment. So, she started:

...Missing or murdered white woman syndrome has a particular stench. Pungent, bitter, but also sickly sweet. Irina could smell it in the air as she looked down at the crime scene. It was just a matter of seconds that the sharks that were the press started circling, making her job that much harder.

...

The words started flowing over her. She kept feeding pieces of paper into the typewriter and just writing more and more. By the time she stopped, she realized she was going to have to go to the store to get some more paper.