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Welp.
No going back now.
“Right!” I stated loudly. “This is what we’ve got.”
I tapped the vertical line of pictures on the wall of the women who had gone missing with the baby crown end of my pink pen (mental note: requisition a laser pointer for briefing sessions, it could do double-duty when I was cat sitting).
“These are our victims, our first ‘whos.’” I tapped the Post-its under them. “These are the ‘whens.’ We don’t have the ‘hows’ and ‘whys,’ but we kinda have the ‘wheres.’”
I followed the strings attached from various tacks to tacks on the big map of Phoenix, which were the two strip clubs that three of the women worked at. I then followed the strings attached from the victims’ pictures who were sex workers to the patches they worked (a new addition to the wall, something Luna was clever enough to request from Clarice (or “We”), and got). I then followed the strings to the pictures I’d just put up, which Clarice gave us, of the possible other “whos” and kept speaking.
“These might be the perpetrators who, in my surveillance, I noticed were a cut above your normal skeevy. Men who hang outside those strip clubs a lot, which is not normally where guys hang out in those places.”
I tapped repeatedly on Cyrus Gibbons’ picture and continued my briefing.
“This is our number one suspect, considering he’s done time, twice, for crimes against women.” I tapped him again. “That means, this is our number one target tonight. Is he at the club? What’s he do there, outside the obvious? Who does he associate with?” I tapped down the line of the other possible perp photos. “I’ve seen him with some of these guys, but not all. Do we notice him with any of the others, or any of the others at The Slide who I’ve so far only seen at The Pink Slip? Let’s see if we can draw any connections outside of the ones I’ve already done with the blue yarn.” I turned and jabbed the crown in the direction of my girls. “All that said, do not approach. This guy is not a good guy. This is a reconnaissance mission only.”
“They definitely have a turf, Roosevelt to Van Buren, Sixteenth through Twenty-fourth Streets,” Jessie noted.
“Yeah, it all points there,” Harlow replied.
Luna brandished the notepad Cap wrote the outline of an investigation on. “Which might mean crime of opportunity. They’re there because they hang there or they get their jollies with sex workers from there, and shit goes south.”
“Exactly. These pins,” I began, tapping all the black pins, “are where the suspects live. Which is also close to all of this.” I circled ground zero. “However our girls,”—I indicated the scattered pink pins, which were the homes of the missing women—“live all over the place.”
“This is a visual representation of not shitting where you live,” Jessie noted.
This was true.
We all went silent and stared at the mess on my wall.
Harlow broke the silence by saying, “Your landlord is gonna freak at all those pin holes.”
I turned to her. “This is why I’m a dab hand at spackle.” Then to them all, I asked, “We ready to roll out?”
“I vote we take the Mercedes,” Jessie said.
“We are absolutely taking the Mercedes,” Luna declared.
Yes, we absolutely were.
It was time to launch the Merc on her maiden voyage.
Luna looked at me and grinned.
I grinned back.
Then I moved to take our possible perp pictures off the wall so I could tuck them away because people kept breaking into my pad, and so far, they’d all been the good guys.
But I was learning…shit happened.
And you couldn’t be too careful.
* * *
“Okay,I’m quitting SC and getting a job stripping,” Jessie remarked. “Do you see how much money those women are making? Even here, and this place is all kinds of skanky.”
We’d picked a table back from the stage, better vantage point for the whole space.
