Girl with the Pearl Earring

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Before me was a gallery of paintings, hung on walls that shoot upwards into the rafters, enough to make me dizzy when I look up at them. It was silent and dark, yet I could see my breath cast in the warm glow of my candle.

I moved towards the center of the room, hoping to find a bit more light nearer to the center. Silence had invaded and that feeling returned, I thought of eyes replacing those in the faces on the walls, watching me walk past them. As I walked to the center, my flickering light caught the shadow of something in the corner. I couldn't quite tell in the dim candle light, but someone—or something—sat in a chair. I reached back into my jacket and pulled out the Model 85, creeping towards the corner of the room.

Long shadows leapt against the walls, my candle waned, the flame flickering pitifully. The darkness of the room seemed to devour the light. Still, I could see the features of someone sitting the chair, their shoulders facing away from me. Shrouded by twilight, their head turned to look over their shoulder.

"Hello?" I called out. "My name is Detective Gianopulos."

They didn't respond.

I walked closer, a chill ran up my spine.

"I'm here to help."

Ten feet away, the candle began to bath her in the waning light. She wore something around her head. Next to her, a sheet was hung on what looked like an easel.

"Ma'am, are you OK?"

Logic taking hold, I freed the safety. I was close enough to see her now, her head was wrapped in some sort of dress, she wore a yellow robe, a single pearl earring shimmered in the candle light. The rigidity in her pose made me worried. I clenched my jaw and swallowed hard, giving her person a wide berth, my gun trained on her.

Her face was caught in an expression: eyes wide, perhaps from trying to see in the dark, but my heart told me it was something closer to terror. I thought of the woman screaming back in the house. She stared off into space, face set in relaxed surprise, but her stillness was inhuman.

I reached out, and touched her shoulder and felt a sudden sense of déjà vu. Her cheek was cold as well, no pulse. Her eyes stared right through me.

"Fuck." I said to the cold, dark room. Another corpse.

I ran my hands through my hair, turned around and faced the wall. For the first time, I really looked paintings. Before me, I saw magnificent pieces, looking as if they had been taken directly from an art museum. A painting of Mary holding a deceased Jesus, but wrong. Bastardized by gore, here Mary was mangled, and not Jesus.

The painting next to it was the same story. I raised my candle higher, and squinted, there was a set of men standing around a corpse, one seeming to be giving a lecture, pointing to the tendons of an opened arm. But in the background a man leered back, seemingly straight through the painting at me. His eyes wide and dead, his lips and chin covered in red, in his hand he held something plump and fleshy.

Then I saw it. A frame housing a woman, no arms, just the bust, standing elegantly next to a bed. If I closed my eyes, I could see the old house from earlier. I could imagine the stairs leading up to the room, and the first victim's body arranged like a piece of art. But here the arms weren't sutured, a bleached, mangled bone protruded from bleeding stumps. I scanned the paintings in the room, not wanting to look but some sick part of me wanted to make sure: there were hundreds here, each a deranged copy of the original. I found a woman in a painting, just like the one here in the room, but her throat was cut from ear to ear, her earring blood red instead of pearl. I sucked in my breath, was the bust the first victim? Or did each painting represent someone's end, each frame an epitaph written in blood.

I hoped to God it wasn't true, the thought still keeps me awake in the cool darkness of night. How many hundreds were missed? Was this truly the first Act? Or had I been dropped in the climax of the story, after the body count had reached staggering heights?

I turned back to the dead woman in the chair, her pearl earring flashing again at me. She gazed pleadingly, as if begging to me do something. To reach in and pull her out of the abyss that someone had sent her to.

Next to her was that easel, with a painter's blanket draped over it.

I thought of Reyes's badge in my pocket and swallowed hard, not wanting to know.

Pulling at the corner, I freed the painting and felt something boiling up inside of me.

The first thing that grabbed me was her face. A mangled woman, bruised and bloodied, lip split and eye swollen shut, looked off into the distance. Despite her wounds, she held a white ferret and looked somber. She was almost unrecognizable by the abuse, but I saw her: in the line of her eyebrows, in the drop of her hairline. The scar on her chin where she'd fallen after having an epileptic seizure as a child. It was Sarah.

I wanted to reach into the frame and pull her out. Ginny said I repressed too much, and now I felt like I had had enough. Buzzing rage burned at my senses, I clenched my fist and felt my heart pound against my chest picking up where the music had left off.

I saw red and grabbed the corners of the painting, screamed and hurled it across the room. It was stupid, disrupting a crime scene, but I felt helpless. The fire would make it moot, in the end, no one believes what I saw, but my rage worried me. Because, for the first time since I'd gotten detective, I'd let one of them get under my skin. Worst part was, I didn't know how to get him out; how to snap free of marionette strings that made me dance. I'd let him get to me, if he was watching, which I was sure he was, he'd be grinning right now.

The painting slid across the room, disrupting the quiet that had fallen upon it since I'd entered.

Something in the air caught my eye: a bag with something heavy slid across the ground.

I picked it up, opened the bag, and found my name typed across the front in typeface. But before I could even think about listening to it, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I didn't recognize the number, and thought about ignoring it but an insane thought grabbed me, thinking it could have been Reyes, despite the logic.

I flipped open the phone, "This is Cooper."

* * * * *

She woke wide eyed, her heart pounding with that feeling swelling in her chest. The Man's face frozen in her vision, like a camera flash that had to be blinked away. Gravity felt like lead blanket draped over her. The handcuff had been moved from the radiator to a pipe running the length of the room.

The man who had taken her was gone, at least from the basement. He had taken with him his easel, palette and painter's tools. Left her with nothing but the clothing on her back and a cup of water next to her. She licked her cracked lips and grabbed the glass, then thought of the drugs running through her body and put it back down.

Reyes clenched her teeth and listened.

Upstairs it was quiet, the music from before had been turned off, all she heard was her beating heart.

She threw a foot against the pipe, but it didn't budge. She had only one thought: get out.

The world was cruel, she most of all could understand such a notion but she'd never be one to allow it to dictate her. Some people are cut from a different cloth, others stubborn, or, if you were Sarah Reyes, you were both: bathed in a crucible of fire, tempered by experience placed by fate or God or probability and thrust into the cold waters of life's great and personal indifference. Panic would have taken hold in most. Dread, and despair. Most would curl up into a fetal position and wait for their fate, like a rodent caught in a trap.

But helplessness was learned. Her mother had taught her that. And then life had solidified it.

She looked back to the pipe and the cuff around her hand. She felt better, not great, but certainly stronger. Anger or perhaps something closer to rage was building. A tool as useful as a set of lockpicks.

There wouldn't be any savior this time, she knew. DEA agents wouldn't pour through like water through a shattered sluice gate. She was on her own and so the choice became clear. If he was gone, she didn't have much time.

With her cuffed hand placed in a curled fist on the ground, she eyed the first knuckle of her thumb like a sharpshooter aiming for a bull's-eye.

Reyes took a deep breath.

She bit down in anticipation and brought her heel crashing as hard as she could, felt a shockwave of pain roll through her hand and up her arm. Teeth grimacing, she kicked again, listening for a pop or crunch or snap.

Her hand was on fire, but she didn't stop. Again, her heel found the mark on her knuckle. Rage had taken hold now, and with it came adrenaline, a welcome drug to soften her sense's razor edge. She kicked again and again and again.

Reyes readjusted her throbbing hand and brought her heel down on bare knuckle, pain coursed through her, her heart pounded against her ribcage. She felt the terrible satisfaction of her thumb dislocating. Fresh tears squeezed from her eyelids, but she didn't scream.

She wouldn't scream. 

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