Awake watching
When I told him I wasn’t interested in skirt-chasing cases, he looked at me, incredulous.
He laughed and said maybe this one could revive my stalled detective career.
Stalled, me? Well… yeah. I guess I am.
— Don’t think you’re the best we’ve got, but I’m picking you because I’d be doing you a favor.
I held the file. The folder was dirty and worn; you could tell they’d been sitting on this for a while.
I read slowly. Just two pages.
I loosened my tie knot while picking apart every letter and paragraph.
— Okay, her name’s Alba? And every guy she slept with… ended up dead?
— She killed them. Or so we think. Three victims, three young men in eleven months.
As I kept reading about this woman, I noticed weird, awfully convenient things. It started when she was twenty-two: the woman forgets—or chooses to forget—people she’s had any emotional connection with. An uncommon coping mechanism, right?
— Are you telling me this woman has a boyfriend, then forgets him, wakes up, doesn’t recognize him… and kills him?
I laughed.
— No, no. That’s nonsense. She’s faking it. We found those three men dead in different alleys around the city. Common denominator? Every single one was an ex of Alba’s.
— A textbook femme fatale, huh.
— If you’re not going to take this seriously, you can go back to your shitty apartment, listen to that cassette on repeat, and remind yourself of failure after failure in your entire career.
— Ouch.
He slid the next page across: a medical report torn in half.
Dissociative amnesia, that’s what she has. Sometimes I think there’s an exit for every mistake—if you lie, you’re a mythomaniac; if you gamble, you’re a compulsive gambler. But there’s never guilt, just an explanation.
— I get it. Her illness is to blame. Doesn’t matter what her real motive is. Her escape hatch is forgetting. Simple as that.”
— There you go.
It all seems crystal clear from the start.
Sick woman with amnesia has killed her three ex-boyfriends. Case closed.
— If you’ve got all this information, why not just lock her up already?
— That’s not how it works, Leonardo. We have to catch her in the act. Right now she’s dating another guy. We checked him out—Maximilian, twenty-five. Dropped out of journalism school a year ago.
— And you want me to save him?
Edmund, the police chief, stood up, grabbed me by the shoulders, gave me a cold smile and said:
— I want you there when she kills him.
What more could I ask for? A practically solved case that would put me back in the game, being the key piece in taking down this serial killer, as long as I showed up at exactly the right moment to witness that final death and give my testimony.
Obviously I didn’t buy any of it, but I said yes anyway.
— Fine. If I’m working for you, I need full access to the entire file. I want the whole story, I want to know those three victims inside out. And I don’t want cops getting in my way because I’m going to tail this woman closely.
— Slow down, detective. Don’t forget your last screw-up is exactly why you’re where you are now. You’ll have surveillance. While you work the case from here. You can’t approach her yet.
I left the building with my briefcase stuffed full of papers stained with guilt, victims, and the forsaken.
I stopped to buy coffee and candy—a lot of it. I quit smoking and now I’m addicted to unwrapping caramels. In such a rush to get home, I didn’t even notice I’d left my ID at the station. But what were they going to do with it anyway?
