Butterfly Girl Read online

  She got up from Jaimie’s bed and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She closed the bedroom door behind her, leaving it open a crack. She pulled off her top as she crossed the carpeted floor into her bedroom and tossed it over a laundry basket and onto a chair. Then, she unclasped her bra, and it followed the shirt. She took out a clean tee from her dresser and a comfy pair of pajama pants before sliding out of her jeans. She took a moment to admire her nude body. Her dark hair cascaded around her shoulders and pooled at the base of her neck. Pink nipples rose from her breasts, and she ran her hands down her slim frame, tracing the stretch marks that lined her otherwise smooth belly. Battle scars, she called them, remnants of her pregnancy. No matter how much she exercised, how well she ate, she just couldn’t lose these last remaining echoes of her pregnancy.

  She did a half twirl in the mirror, studying the butterfly wing tattoos that covered most of the real estate on her back. They were big and bold, with vibrant colours, blues, reds, and yellows with iridescent patterns and gossamer filaments. Her sleeves were brilliant too. They were covered with butterflies, bumblebees, and flowers. Pretty things. She ran her hands along the soft skin on the inside of her forearms. Ugly scars ran from wrist to elbow, invisible except from knowing eyes, hidden by a tattooist’s needle.

  She turned in the mirror. She couldn’t be a stripper forever. She knew that. It was a young woman’s life, and at twenty-five she was ready to pack it in, but not until she had something else to fall back on. She changed into her night clothes and then went into the bathroom, washing all the make-up off and brushing her teeth. She could have graduated from college by now, if she hadn’t gotten into trouble.

  Hazel plopped down into her bed and eased under the warmth of the thick duvet and snuggled down like a chick in a nest. Taking inspiration from Jess, she grabbed her Gillian Flynn novel, the one about a spunky young woman with a dark past, and settled in. She couldn’t concentrate on the words though. Her mind wandered, recalling her conversation with Heck.

  He was an inherently good man. She knew that, without really knowing him. It radiated off him, like heat off pavement on a summer’s day. Heck was the sort of man that was always going to do the right thing. He didn’t know anything else. He was strong, but he never talked about it, like some men do. He didn’t have to.

  He was a cop in the army. Regards told her that much, but they kicked him out. She liked that. It gave them some common ground. They had both gotten into trouble. He seemed like a straight shooter. To hear Regards tell it, it was a bum deal. Heck had been treated unfairly. That made more sense to Hazel. There was no way Heck would do anything wrong. He was sweet on her too. She saw the way he looked at her when he thought she didn’t know. They way he turned his head quickly once he had been found out. The way he looked away from her when she took her clothes off, as though seeing her naked was a right that he hadn’t earned. He was too good for her.

  She felt bad not telling him the truth. He wanted to know, and she wasn’t prohibited from telling anyone. It was just that she was afraid. She was afraid that he’d look at her differently. Maybe he wouldn’t turn away when she stripped off the last of her clothes while the spotlight bathed her in its hot, impersonal glare. Maybe he’d think that seeing her that way, naked, exposed, vulnerable, wasn’t such a privilege after all. She was afraid that he’d see her for what she really was, a killer.

  Heck couldn’t understand, and even if he did, there was still Eddie. There would always be Eddie. He was the albatross around her neck, the extra baggage she’d always be lugging around. He was a damned albatross stuffed into a suitcase. Her Facebook relationship status would always be ‘complicated.’ It was too bad, Hazel thought. Hector Collins was sexy.

  He was older than Hazel, maybe ten years older, but he seemed older than that. An old soul, her grandmother would have called him. The eyepatch did nothing to diminish his attractiveness. It fueled it. It gave him an air of mystery and danger. It made him look like a bad boy, and Hazel liked a bad boy. She wondered what the damaged eye looked like underneath that sleek, black eyepatch. Was it milky-white? Or was it a dark, cavernous hole?

  She replaced the paperback down on her nightstand. Sleep eluded her, and she couldn’t concentrate enough to read. She forgot each sentence as soon it was read. She creeped down the hall into the living room, careful not to wake Jaimie. She lowered herself to the floor and prised off a copper coloured vent, reached inside and pulled out an old laptop. She plugged it in, and it fired up within a minute.

  This was a parole violation. This could land her in jail. Butterflies rumbled in her belly and her hands trembled. Hazel’s fingers danced across the keyboard and she gained access to Mrs. Benoit’s Wi-Fi. Mrs. Benoit was her neighbour down the hall. Hazel didn’t have to work too hard cracking her password. It was ‘password.’ She opened her Twitter account. It had been inactive for years, but she checked it occasionally, seeing if people had forgotten her yet. Her twitter account had very little traffic, but there were new tweets. She scrolled through them; each tweet brought tears to her wet eyes. She raised her hand to her mouth, smothering a sob.

  Fuck u bitch.

  I hope you die.

  Fuck you in the pussy.

  Fuck you u fucking whore. I hope u die.

  Murderer. U deserve to be raped.

  Dozens of people, strangers, who hated her, wanted her dead. She understood how they felt. She felt the same. She traced the scars on her forearms. They burned hot, crying for a kiss from the razor’s edge.

  4

  Hector

  When I woke up the next morning, I woke angry. I was so tired by the time I’d gotten home that I fell asleep in my clothes. I had the good sense to take off my boots but that was it. My head hurt from where the elastic of my patch dug into my skin. I pulled it off and put it onto the table beside my bed. I went to the washroom, stripping off my clothes as I went until all I had on were my boxer shorts. I turned on the water in the shower and let it run for a few minutes, building up steam.

  I studied my bad eye in the mirror. Skeins of scars pulled away from the crater like cobwebs in a forgotten corner, drawing attention to the injury, and one long scar dug a deep gouge into the side of my face from forehead to jaw. The cavity looked alright. As good as it would ever look. At first glance, you probably wouldn’t even know my eye was missing. The ocular muscles were still there, so it just looked off a bit, like something wasn’t quite right. It took a moment for anyone to notice that the socket was empty. People assume the worst, what with the scars and the eyepatch. Sometimes I wear a prosthetic eye, but usually only for special occasions, weddings, funerals, fancy dinner dates, and the like. I kept it in a little white plastic box on my counter. It had been a long time since I wore it. The steam from the shower began to fog up the mirror. I slid open the curtain and stepped in, sighing as the water rained down on me. I stood in the hot stream for a few minutes, letting the hot water work my tight back muscles.

  I changed into some fresh clothes and sat at the kitchen table with a hot cup of joe and my cellphone. There were three texts waiting for me. Two were from my sister, Cass, and one was from Zaki. I read Cass’s first. Cass was my younger sister, and she was everything that I wasn’t. She was fair-skinned, and fair-haired. She was bubbly with a sharp wit and a kind heart. An extrovert. She was married with two kids, a boy and a girl. She was a kindergarten teacher and her husband, Greg, was a real estate agent. She’d built herself the perfect little family. It was hard not to be jealous.

  Even though she was two years younger than me, Cass mother-henned me. Relentlessly. ‘When are you going to settle down? When are you going to marry a nice girl? Should I set you up? I have a friend, she’s adorable! You’d be great together. Are you still working with the dancers?’ Cass couldn’t bring herself to say strippers. She believed they were all exploited. That they were forced into it by Russian mobsters or were just moments away from being trafficked. Admittedly, her world view was narrow, and mostly info
rmed by television and cable news. Not that that was a bad thing. I wish more people were. I was happy that Cass led a sheltered life.

  Her role as mother hen would have been less irritating if I didn’t already have a mother more than happy to take on that role. It wasn’t so bad. At least I had people who cared. When I came home after I was injured, Cass visited me every day I was in the hospital. When I was discharged, she and Greg let me have the spare room in the basement. On the nights when the bad dreams came, they didn’t embarrass me even though they could hear my screams.

  Her message read: Hey bro! just a reminder that we’re having a BBQ and pool party for dad’s birthday next Saturday. Be there at noon.

  I forgot the party, just like she knew I would. There would be another reminder on Friday too.

  Her next message read: Mom asked for you to bring some potatoes. Just make sure you cook them!!

  I groaned. It was a long-standing family joke. Before I deployed, mom threw me a going-away (and come home alive) party. It was potluck and she aske me to bring potatoes. Bear in mind, I was in my early twenties and not nearly the sophisticate I am now. I stopped by the supermarket on my way to Mom and Dad’s, picked up a five-pound bag of taters and continued on my way. I never questioned the odd request. Hell, I doubt I even knew what a potluck was! Everyone laughed when I strolled in and passed the potatoes to mom like it was the Olympic torch. How was I to know that she wanted them prepared? I don’t think I’d ever cooked a potato in my life up to that point. Every time we had a function the potatoes were brought up. I suppose its funny, but not that funny. I texted Regards. Tell him I needed Saturday off. I rarely took any time off, so I knew he’d be cool with it.

  Next, I read Zaki’s message.

  Heck. Here are the crime scene photos. Vic’s birth name is Simeon Mckenzie but went by Sandra Mack. She was an escort. Trying to find out who her johns were last night. FYI. This is your eyes only. Don’t share with anyone.

  What a fucking douche. Like I’d ever share crime scene photos with anyone, let alone an active murder. I viewed the attached photos. Gruesome murder photos had long ago stopped having an affect on me, but these ones jarred me. The similarity to Gracie’s murder was obvious. They could have been done by different people. It just wasn’t possible.

  I studied the pictures closely. In the first photo, Sandra is wrapped up in a khaki blanket. Looked like standard army issue to me. All of her is rolled up inside of it, except her head. Her eyes were closed, and she looked peaceful, like she could have been asleep. The next few shots showed the blanket being unravelled by the coroner, until the interior blanket was revealed. This was a brightly coloured blanket with various sized yellow dots in a seemingly random pattern. Not army issue. The next few shots depicted the blanket being unfurled. Whoever had wrapped her had somehow set it up so that when it was pulled open, Sandra’s arms and legs would be splayed open. She could have been making snow angels.

  Using my thumb and forefinger, I enlarged the image as much as I could before it became blurry, focusing in on the bloody chasm that had once been her penis. It was hard to say for certain, but the cuts looked clean. There didn’t appear to be any unnecessary cuts or tears on the skin around the penis. That told me a few things. First, a very sharp knife was used, and not a serrated blade. This was a straight edge. Serrated blades caused tearing because of the sawing motion needed to cut. Secondly, whoever did this knew what they were doing. There were no hesitation cuts. No starts and stops. This was done cleanly and quickly. Lastly, the murderer was not squeamish. While the crime scene wasn’t heavily travelled, it was very near a busy street.

  Anyone could have stumbled across the murderer at any point. He was brazen enough to commit such a grisly crime out in the open. He didn’t rush either. He took his time. Did what he needed to do. First, he strangled her, then he removed the penis, and then he wrapped her up in the blankets. The entire murder had to have taken some time. That sort of action betrayed a certain level of confidence. This wasn’t his first kill.

  Where was the penis? Zaki hadn’t mentioned it being found. He would have said so. It was kind of the elephant in the room. The killer probably kept it as a trophy. I briefly considered that it was a cannibalistic thing. Maybe he took it home to eat. Was this a Jeffery Dahmer thing? There was no limit to the depravity of humanity. Still, I couldn’t afford to jump to conclusions. All I knew for sure was that there was a missing penis. The jump to cannibalism wasn’t supported by the evidence.

  I went to my bedroom and pulled out a stack of notepads from a dresser drawer. When I was in the army, I kept meticulous notes. It was a habit I picked up from my father. His notes were better than mine, and more like journals, detailing his days. Mine were kept in notebooks, the sort you used to use in school, and which can be bought anywhere. When I left the Forces, I brought my books home with me. The army kept my official reports, but they had no claim on my personal correspondence, and my notes were damn good. I riffled through the reams of notebooks, dating back to high school. Luckily, I kept the dates on the cover, so I knew when I started and finished each one. A wave of nausea washed over me, like I was visiting with an old friend or leafing through yearbooks. In a way I was. I stopped when I came to a yellowing book with dried blood on the cover. I had written in big, scrawling letters; May 11 to June 8, 2008. Kandahar Province. This was the one. I grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen from the drawer and returned to the kitchen table. I took a drink from my mug. The coffee had cooled but was still drinkable, and I started writing notes, comparing the murders of Gracie and Sandra.

  Mark Telford was an east coast boy from Gander, Newfoundland. He enlisted in the army because he didn’t know what else to do. He was good with electronics, especially computers. He hoped that a career in the military might hone that skill, give him something practical to use in his civilian life. It didn’t work out that way. He was a problem child, even before he joined up. He bucked at authority. The army wasn’t a natural fit for him. His fellow soldiers didn’t like him.

  Mark identified as a gay man and then began crossdressing. Some of his bunkmates called him Klinger, a reference to the crossdressing corporal from the television show MASH, but it wasn’t said out of kindness. He’d been cited several times for unbecoming behaviour, which I assume was when he began to dress in women’s clothes. He reported an assault by another soldier, Sergeant Frank Bello. Bello would later be charged for her murder, but the charges wouldn’t stick. It was also around this time that Mark insisted on being called Gracie. I paused and jotted a few more notes on the legal pad. I couldn’t help but wonder why the army didn’t just discharge her? It was obviously not working out, and Gracie couldn’t have been happy in that environment.

  I continued reading. On the day before she was killed, Gracie had been called in to see the commanding officer, Colonel James Cutler. Cutler wouldn’t answer my questions about the meeting, except to say that it was disciplinary. Her body was found fifty metres from the barracks, in a dark corner that was often under patrolled. It was a lapse in security. Gracie used it for not-so-secret rendezvous with fellow soldiers. It was funny how they all hated her unless she was giving them a blow job. A mouth is a mouth.

  Her body was discovered on June 7th, 2008. She was twice-wrapped, once in a colourful sheet, and again in a heavier, khaki blanket. She had injuries on her face. Both eyes were blackened and swollen shut. Her nose had been broken as had several ribs. She had defensive cuts on her palms. Gracie knew she was in trouble and tried to fight off her attacker. Under the blankets, Gracie was nude, and her penis was removed. The cuts weren’t as surgical. They were tentative and jagged. The killer hadn’t been as good. I have no idea if her penis was ever found. On June 8th I was injured by an improvised explosive devise and my military career had begun its spiralling end. I made a few notes in my yellow pad. Zaki wasn’t going to like it. He explicitly forbade me from doing it, but I needed to talk to Colonel James Cutler.

  5

 
; Hector

  I finished the last dregs of my coffee and poured myself another from the decanter. I added two milks and two sugars. None of that black bullshit for me. Then I went outside on the rickety metal fire escape that was supposed to save me if the building ever went up in flames. About the only thing it was good for was making sure that I was up to date on my tetanus shots. I spotted the Brinks truck and checked my watch. 11 o’clock. I really need to talk to Regards about his routine. It was too predictable. It made me nervous.

  I went down to the alley beside the bar. Regards let me keep my car there, so long as it was near the dumpster and not in anyone’s way. If it was a nice car, I might be worried, but it was a 1974 Volkswagen Type 181, but probably better known as the Thing. Volkswagen Things were ugly with a capital Ugh. Mine was avocado green with a black soft top. In the summer, I usually rode with the top down and got a lot of stares. The Thing looked like a cross between a jeep and beetle. I unlocked Macy’s door and slid into the driver’s seat. It started without protest. Anyone with a car will tell you that you have to give it a name. I named mine William H Macy because its ugly, old, but can still perform like a dream.

  I pulled out of the laneway and made my way to Denison military base. As luck would have it, Cutler was stationed only a fifteen-minute drive from me. I considered calling ahead and booking an appointment but decided against it. I wanted the chance to take Cutler by surprise. I might be able to rattle him, probably not, but I wanted every advantage I could get.

  I pulled into a parking spot at the base and walked to the front door. After producing some identification, a private directed me to Cutler’s office on the second floor. It had been a long time since I was kicked out of the Force and being in a base was causing some anxiety. The nerves disappeared when I saw Captain Robert Nowak. Nowak was a lieutenant in Afghanistan and an intelligence analyst. Even then, he respected Cutler, but I was surprised to see him here.