Eternal Lessons, Chapter 1

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#Chapter One

  The last month had been an agonizing one for Grace McKenna. When she had left the Commonwealth Attorney’s office and opened her own private investigative service, she had hoped she would have a respite from some of the grislier and tragic cases she had been involved in as an investigator for the city. As of late, that hope had been somewhat dashed.

  The attacks had begun a month and a half ago. The first one was a bank teller on the southwestern part of the city. She was found bound and gagged, chained to a wall in the basement of an abandoned meat processing plant. On a table before her, a foot and a half away was a garish banquet of rotting meat, vegetables and molding bread and pastries.  She had been stripped bare to the waist, and across her stomach were carved the words “willful waste -woeful want”.  There were no prints on her body or anything on the table. There was no trace evidence at all to go on. The woman, when she was found, was half-dead from dehydration and exposure. It was unlikely she would have been found as quickly if not for her accidental discovery by a homeless man who had been looking for shelter in the cold. When the woman - Susan Harris- had regained consciousness, she had no memory of her attacker. The last thing she remembered before coming to in the hospital was having lunch with two of her friends three days before. Her friends were questioned endlessly as to the events that proceeded Susan’s attack, to no avail. They couldn’t remember anything- no matter how trivial- that made that lunch date any different from any other. No suspicious characters, no confrontations, nothing.

  When the witness and forensic trail reached a dead end, the local police put the case into the ‘weird, but unsolved’ category, stuck it to the side and moved on to other cases. That lasted until ten days later when they got a call about a body near the canal. This woman, Angel Lazaro, wasn’t as fortunate as Susan Harris.  Miss Lazaro, a call girl who frequented the bars and clubs near the business district had been dead at least forty-eight hours. Her body was marked in the same way- with a cryptic collection of words. This time the phrase the killer carved didn’t leak out to the press as the Harris woman’s had, but Grace obtained the information from a source she had in the police department. Written on the woman’s back with what appeared to be a carving blade were the words; ‘lewd and lavish act of sin’. Grace discovered it was a truncated quote from a 17th century poet, John Milton. Just as the words carved in the first victim had been a literary quote that alluded to some hidden message, this one did as well. But what was the message? 

  It wasn’t until the third victim was discovered that Grace became professionally involved in the case. Nine days after Angel Lazaro had been found dead, the body of a twenty year old girl was found dead in the alley behind a convenience store. Her tongue was cut out and the words ‘falsehood put in practice” carved into her right arm.  When Grace read the name Tina Hagarty in the article outlining the details of the newest in what appeared to be a series of ritualistic attacks, her heart sank. Grace knew the girl from the days she worked in the Commonwealth Attorney’s office, just before she left to open her own investigative firm.

Tina had been a good kid who got mixed up with the wrong crowd.  Her boyfriend at the time was affiliated with one of the more notorious gangs in the city. Grace had come to know the girl because of the activities of her gang-member boyfriend. He and a couple of his companions had been arrested in the robbery of a convenience store, and the assault of the store clerk. To put it simply, they had beaten the poor guy half to death for about a hundred bucks and change.  Tina was her boyfriend Nick’s alibi.

From the beginning Grace had suspected that Tina was lying for the punk, and that she wasn’t too happy about having to lie. In the end, Tina did the right thing, and they nailed the little dirt bag as well as his buddies. Grace, who had taken an instant liking to the girl as well as her mother, who was struggling to raise her right despite limited means and resources, took the girl under her wing. In the end, Tina broke all her ties with her old crowd, and using the brains that Grace somehow knew she had, graduated near the top of her class. The last Grace had heard, Tina had been offered a scholarship to ODU. That had been almost two years ago.

Grace tossed the paper aside as she cursed the fates and the bastard who had taken the life of yet another young woman, especially one who was on the verge of such promise; a young girl who had worked hard to turn her life around.  On the heels of that, Grace couldn’t help but think about Tina’s mother- a sweet woman who had wanted nothing more from life than to give her daughter everything she hadn’t had. She had to call her and offer what meager sympathy she had to give in the face of such awful loss.

Just as Grace was about to call out for her assistant, the woman came sailing into Grace’s  office.

“How do you do that?” Grace asked, a mixture of amusement and bewilderment coloring her expression.

“Do what?” Camilla (or Cami, as she preferred) asked with a pose of innocence.

“Walk in here at the precise moment I’m planning on calling for you?”

“My efficiency is unparalleled?” Cami proposed with a hint of a smile that gave the impression she was teasing, but which Grace surmised was actually closer to Cami’s true opinion of herself.

“We’ll go with that for now. I need you to do something for me.”

“I assumed that was why you called.” Cami replied with a smirk.

“Ignoring the fact that I didn’t actually call for you, I’ll take advantage of your fortuitous timing and get you to look up a number for me.”

“Sounds easy enough, who?”

“Maria Hagarty.” Grace replied, her expression becoming somber as she thought once again of Tina and the awful circumstances that were prompting the call she needed to make. Cami noticed the shift in Grace’s mood, and with a quiet, “I’ll get right on it”, she slipped out of the office, closing the door behind her.

  That was three weeks ago, three long weeks during which she was unable to forget the anguished cries of a grieving mother. During that time Grace had been unable to erase the memory of Maria Hagarty’s desperate pleas for her to find the person who had viciously murdered Maria’s only child. During those three weeks Grace had poured over every piece of information she had been able to obtain about each of the attacks. She had tapped every resource she had within the police department, as well as every reporter she had a relationship with that was working the story. Nothing solid had come from any of it.

When she was just about to throw her hands up in despair and face the reluctant truth that she was at as much of dead end as the cops were, Grace had an idea. She kept coming back to the first victim, Susan Harris. She had been the only one to survive, and was the only possible source of direct information. The police, of course, had interviewed her several times, but nothing fruitful had come from it. Grace was still convinced there was something there, some untapped clue just below the surface of Susan Harris’s memory. She just had to figure out a way to bring it to the surface. 

While Grace was mulling over the best way to approach Miss Harris, Cami walked into Grace’s office, a stack of message slips in one hand and a diet cola in the other.

  “Are those for me?” Grace asked, with an arched brow at her assistant.

“The messages? No, they’re mine. I just like to carry them around. Makes me feel important.” Cami replied with a smirk, as she placed the slips on the desk blotter in front of her boss. Grace rolled her eyes at her impudent young assistant, and wondered fleetingly what had possessed her to hire the girl. She knew the answer, but occasionally- especially at times like these- she needed to remind herself.

Cami had come to work for Grace when she first opened her investigative office. In the beginning she really couldn’t afford to hire a staff and for the first few weeks Grace had tried running the office while building her client base and working cases all at the same time. That hadn’t worked out too well. In a fit of desperation, Grace ran an ad for an assistant/office manager. She purposely didn’t offer a salary in the ad, hoping she could get a qualified applicant in her office and resort to begging if necessary. Begging was always done with optimum success when done in person. After the first half dozen applicants had practically laughed in her face when they heard the salary she could pay in return for the level of work she required, Grace began to rethink her career options. Then Cami sailed in with nearly no practical work experience and what Grace considered an improper respect for authority, and hired herself. It became the smartest move Grace could ever have made. Cami, personality quirks aside, was smart, efficient, and one of the best researchers Grace had ever worked with. The girl read The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the local paper cover to cover every morning. She had the strangest collections of interests that Grace had ever seen and she was a multi-tasking wizard. All in all, she was a wise choice.

“There’s a message from Mrs. Hagarty in there.” Cami noted as she perched herself on Grace’s desk and took a sip of the soda she had brought in.

“I see. How did she sound?” Grace asked, with a sigh. 

“About like you’d expect- sad, desperate, angry. I wish we had something to tell her.”

“As do I. Unfortunately the bag is empty. We have nothing. Except…”  Grace trailed off; not wanting to mention her idea until she figured out a way to approach Susan Harris and ask her the same questions she had been asked a hundred times, only with different results.

“Except-  what?”

“Except…what about Susan Harris?” Grace proposed.

“The cops got zip from her when they interviewed her. Apparently the head injury and the trauma of the experience caused memory loss. As far as they’re concerned she’s a dry hole.” Cami replied, but there was something in her voice that said she might not agree with that opinion.

“What do you think?” Grace asked, setting the stack of messages aside and giving Cami her complete attention.  Her assistant didn’t answer right away. She looked down at the can in her hand and fiddled with the tab for a minute as Grace waited for her response.

Finally, Cami turned to her and said, “I think sometimes cops ask questions in such a way that makes it hard for a person to answer with complete honesty.”

  Grace thought about that for a minute, and decided that Cami was probably right. A good detective knew how to question a witness and get them to tell everything they knew. On the other hand a great detective could obtain the same information along with pieces of the puzzle the witness wasn’t even aware they had. The only problem with that was that there were very few ‘great’ detectives out there. Grace knew the lead detective on the case and great wasn’t exactly a superlative she would attach to him. He wasn’t exactly a think outside the box guy. 

“Do me a favor…”

“You want me to get you Susan Harris’ contact info?”

“What- you’re psychic too?” Grace asked with a hint of exasperation.

“No. That’s somebody else you know.” Cami replied with a smirk.  “Speaking of him-“

“We weren’t, as I recall.” Grace retorted.

“We should be. He could be incredibly helpful and you know it.”

“I know no such thing.”

“I think you should think about it. Seriously.” Cami remarked, giving Grace a rather pointed look as emphasis.

“I think you should get your impertinent behind off my desk and get me what I asked for.” Grace retorted firmly.

Cami had the grace to look marginally chastised- for a moment- before hopping off the desk with a huffy  “Fine! But I’m taking the soda with me.”

“Fine.” Grace replied to her retreating form. As she picked up the message slips and began going through them once again, Grace couldn’t help but think about Cami’s suggestion. More to the point, she couldn’t help thinking about ‘who’ Cami suggested: Conner Jameson

The name itself was enough to conjure too many memories for Grace to handle. To call him, to speak to him, to have him in her life again- if only professionally- was more than she could bear contemplating at the moment. No… she would have to be a hell of a lot more desperate than she was right now to complicate her life that way again.