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Part V: Victim #9

Lisa Morgan was nothing like her daughter. Even her house was as different from Kelly Morgan's modest apartment as could be.

Whereas Kelly Morgan had lived in excruciating cleanliness, her mother's house was the kind that was only cleaned before company arrived on the holidays. In one of the chairs sat a pile of laundry in need of folding; many of the pictures on the walls - dozens and dozens of them in mismatched frames - were tilted and all of them dusty. Even the furniture was worn and clawed. The culprits, three over-large tabby cats, prowled around, staying close to the walls and giving Wolfwood suspicious looks.

Lisa Morgan made apologetic noises when he arrived. "I'm so sorry," she said in a voice as thin as wet paper. "I just didn't have the time to clean with...with...all that's been going on."

He stooped a little to avoid a hanging lamp, and then stepped over a tabby that hissed, swatted at him, and then fled into what he assumed was the dinning room.

"It's not a problem," he said, wondering if he sounded sincere.

He was glad when she seemed relieved to hear it. She gestured for him to have a seat before settling down across from him. Wolfwood squirmed a little; the seat was lumpy, a spring sticking into his back. There was a part of him with its fingers twitching, wanting to adjust the pictures until they sat parallel to the wall and floor instead of skewed sideways. It wanted to vacuum the cat hair off the tattered carpet where it stuck.

He lifted his eyes to Lisa Morgan's bloodshot ones and let that distract him.

"I'm so sorry for bothering you when you must be so busy," she said. "And I-I know I already spoke to your partner. He told me to call him 'Vash'. He was very helpful. Please tell him...thanks...thank you."

"I will," Wolfwood said. He noticed that everything about this woman was fragile like glass. Her hands were bony with long fingers and she wrung them when she spoke. Her lips were thin and made thinner when she pressed them into a line, as if she were trying not to cry. Yes, she was nothing much like her daughter. This woman was worn out, tired, beaten down.

Kelly Morgan had been slender but curvaceous; her lips had been full, her eyes bright and wide. She smiled out at Wolfwood now from crooked picture frames, a girl who seemed to have loved her life. That smiling girl was a far cry from the way he had first seen her - blue and cold, her body twisted and her eyes dead to the world.

Lisa Morgan's eyes darted about nervously. She wanted to say something, she wanted to talk to him, but it was obvious she didn't know how to go about it. Wolfwood had listened to the recording of her interview with Vash, had read the transcripts through more times than he could count. She had been distraught, that was true, but she had been helpful, telling his partner everything she knew that might help bring her daughter's killer to justice.

She had told Vash what they needed to know with a voice thick with tears, but she had still told him. Now she sat in silence in a grubby house, the minutes stretching, lengthening.

Wolfwood sighed internally. The difference, of course, was him. He knew that if he were Vash, she would have already gotten to the point, explained why she called the station in the first place, requesting to speak to him in person.

Wolfwood knew this because, plain and simple, Vash had a way with people.

Vash could walk into an interrogation room with a cold witness - a cold uncooperative witness - and in the time it took for him to order coffee and donuts for both of them, the guy would be spouting off his story for the world to hear. Vash usually had all the details before the coffee got cold. People trusted him; people scooted closer to him when he spoke and wanted his understanding and attention. People...liked Vash.

It could have been his eyes, which were wide and accepting. It could have been his smile, which was sincere and honest. It could have been any number of things combined that made Vash the ideal person to send out to interview and interrogate.

Whatever it was, Wolfwood didn't understand it, he only knew he didn't have it. If you wanted a crime scene analyzed and catalogued thoroughly, nobody did it better than Wolfwood. If you wanted someone with a solid stomach to handle the gruesome shit, he was your guy.

But if you wanted someone to gather evidence from witnesses, you sent Vash.

And times like this when he had to do it himself, he compensated for whatever it was about him that made people ill-at-ease the best that he could.

He had been taught that eye contact was something that instilled trust and eased conversations. But in his experience, it only made suspects and victims nervous. He didn't know what it was, but there was something about him - or maybe just his eyes - that sent signals to people, told them to be weary, to be cautious. Over the years he had learned that it was better to keep eye contact to a minimum. It usually did the trick.

It wasn't working today.

Lisa Morgan stared at her shoes and didn't talk. She wrung her skeletal hands and didn't talk.

Wolfwood cleared his throat. "I'm sorry for you loss," he said carefully. "I didn't know your daughter, but Kelly Morgan seemed like a wonderful girl. And you've been very helpful. We appreciate everything you've done."

She gave a mechanical nod. "Oh...yes...well I wanted to help. I hope that I...helped."

"You did. Very much. And please call any time if you...remember anything or just need...something." Wolfwood winced on the inside. He was aware that he wasn't doing very well at the moment.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was growing thicker by the second. She reached blindly for a box of tissues sitting on the cluttered table before her and dabbed at her eyes.

"It's just," she continued, "Mr. Vash...Vash...he said some things that were hard to believe. He said my Kelly -" Here she stopped to blow her nose softly. "He said she danced. At a club."

Wolfwood tried to suppress the familiar, heavy, helpless feeling that came whenever he was faced with this situation. Here it was, another example of the unavoidable side effects of people living their lives, and then dying and leaving them behind - messy, half-formed things punctuated by mistakes.

As far as he knew, this was the hardest thing about death. Lives never really just ended. Certainly people died, were murdered, had accidents - that was the way of the world. But what no one seemed to realize was that after they died, they still left their lives behind them, the empty shells of things they used to fill up with what and who they were. Books they read, the places they worked, the things they made and stole and broke. The people they loved; the lies they told.

His own life, he knew, would read like a dark comedy without the humor. Just one ugly blunder after another.

What would they say about him after he was lying beside Kelly Morgan?

But that was a worry for another time, wasn't it?

For now, Wolfwood was one of the ones stuck cleaning up lives that the dead and murdered left behind.

How could he phrase his words to keep this glass woman from shattering? "Yes," he said slowly, "the night it happened, Kelly Morgan had been on her way to work. It was a club called the 'Gentleman's Preferred'."

That was the way you talked to the grieving, never "The night your daughter was murdered." All that got shortened into one tiny word: it.

"The night it happened."

'It' was an amazing paradox in that it hid the truth even while it bared it wide open by creating this gaping hole where everyone listening filled in the gap with their own variation on the same ugly theme: Kelly Morgan was dead.

He wondered if it was better simply to spell it out and get it over with.

Lisa Morgan shook her head, her limp hair falling about her long face. "But you see, that can't be. B-because she never told me that. And she told me everything. So it's simply a mistake. Kelly wouldn't do...that."

Wolfwood closed his eyes slowly. "Ms. Morgan, I'm sorry. I can only tell you what we've learned. Kelly Morgan had been working at that club for three years."

She winced and her breath caught in her throat. "W-why would she....Why didn't she..."

"I'm sure that Kelly Morg -"

She interrupted softly with a single word: "Kelly."

Wolfwood looked up suddenly. Her tone was stronger, firmer now, as if the word gave her strength. "I'm sorry?" he asked, uncertainly. What had he said to make her turn cold? Colder?

She sat up straighter and stared him in the eye. "Kelly. My daughter's name is...was Kelly. Kelly," she spat. "Don't talk about her like she's just another c-case for you."

He blinked once, twice, and then simply stared at her, running over their conversation in his mind. Only then did he realize how it must have sounded to a mother in pain, hearing a stranger use her daughter's full name - always Kelly Morgan - like it was printed on forms, on toe-tags, on mortician's reports.

That, then, was yet another difference between him and Vash, he thought. Wolfwood was certain his partner called her Kelly. Just Kelly. Like she was a person, not a case file.

"I'm...I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was doing that. I didn't mean to upset you."

She wasn't crying now. Her jaw was set, her shoulders rigid. Lisa Morgan no longer looked fragile at all. She nodded then gestured at the wall. "See that girl in the pictures? That was my daughter. You get up and you go look at her. See how I remember my baby."

It was an odd request and at first he considered refusing. But one look at the edge to her eyes, the downward curve of her lips and he rose, moving to the wall of crooked pictures to look at Kelly Morgan.

Kelly.

She was smiling in every frame, her arm draped around friends or cradling kittens. She posed for shots in sombreros at birthday parties with a silly grin on her face; she threw up a peace sign in front of her new car. A car that a madman had used sugar to destroy. But none of that was in these pictures. These pictures were the cotton candy of life, all the snap shots of things that were never bad because everything was frozen like this: alive. Not breathing, no, but still alive, here behind the glass. Here in color on a wall where nothing ever changed but the layers of grime blocking the view.

Wolfwood tried not to think of another wall covered in photographs. One where no one was smiling. Where no one was alive. Not like this.

He paused before a photograph of a sunny day, the barest bit of blue sky peaking out from behind a building that took up most of the frame. Kelly was standing beside a girl with dark curls and green eyes. They were pointing behind them and laughing, both of them in flip flops and sunhats. He followed their fingers to the building that stood behind them where they were pointing.

It was a hotel.

The wall returned to his mind like a flash from an old fashioned camera, too bright, too loud. He saw it in stark black in white, in slick blood red. An entire office wall covered in grotesque photos. One in particular.

Wolfwood couldn't breath, his heart sped. "I'll be a son of a..." he said, not realizing he had said it out loud.

His eyes swivelled back to the girl with the dark hair.

"What's the matter?" Lisa Morgan asked frantically from behind him, but he couldn't answer. His eyes couldn't move from the face of the girl standing beside Kelly. That girl...

Green eyes.

Dark hair.

His hand lifted and he rested a finger on the greasy glass of the photo.

"Angela Beasley," he whispered.

Victim #9.

To be continued...