Concerning Death

Chapter 21 - Concerning Catherine

10th of June

"You don't have to do this now," I tell her. "Let me call John, he'll come by and you can talk to him. Right now you should rest."

"I can't do that," she pleads. "If I hadn't been..."

"Don't do that to yourself," I tell her sternly. "It won't do any good."

"Then let me talk," she pleads. I consider her for a moment, but I would want to do the same in her case, I wouldn't want to be idle and quiet. I text John "She's talking" and set my phone to record and put it down next to her.

"Okay then. You might as well start at the beginning." She gives me a thankful look.

"We walked in," she begins. "And they were waiting for us. She had a baseball bat, and she knocked Robert down with it at soon as we entered. The other one grabbed me from behind and gave me an injection. They put a gun to my head to make Robert comply." Tears are forming in her eyes, and she can barely speak clearly, but she continues. "They gagged him and tied him up. They placed me so I was looking at him. He met my eyes... I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything." John enters and sits down on the bed on the other side.

"You didn't find her?" she asks fearfully.

"We're still looking," he assures her and takes her hand. It seems like an empty assurance to me.

"You have to get her John, she has to pay for this. They broke his bones, and there was nothing I could do. He tried not to scream, for my sake, and there was nothing I could do to help him. She has to pay." There's a fury in her voice I didn't think her capable of. I get it. Before it was a threat, now it is real. Before it was everyone else, now it is personal. I didn't think it could get more personal than it was.

"What did the woman do?" John asks, his voice businesslike and his eyes diverted to the floor. Catherine swallows hard but accepts his invite back to business.

"She was keeping a lookout," she answers. "She had cameras on both sides. She saw you coming, so she ran." That explains how she got away so quickly.

"Nicaa saw her on the roof," John informs Catherine. "We think she somehow got on to the next roof, but we lost her after that."

"So she climbed across and down," Catherine says to herself, filling in the blanks in her knowledge.

"It seems like it," John agrees. "Can you tell me anything about her?"

"She seemed to be in charge," she says. "I think it might actually have been her." I recognize the look in her eyes, the disgust, the mistrust, the feeling of being lost. 1,8,11 was in her apartment. There is nothing like the feeling of knowing true evil was in the place you call home.

"How about her physical appearance?" John presses on. Give her a minute, let her process! But Catherine seems thankful for his approach, thankful to not have to sit with it alone, cut off from the team and what they are doing.

"Everything was covered. She had a jester-like hat on, and gloves, and a mask. She was wearing heels too, to mask her height, and I think she was wearing a corset. Even her eyes... they were black, contacts I think, but between the mask and the black makeup her eyes were completely gone, like two black holes in her skull and nothing else." Like a monster.

"Okay, what about smell, voice, anything like that?"

"She never spoke," she says. "But I think... I think she smelled like cigars."

"She did or he did?"

"She did," she says half surprised herself, as if it just occurred to her. "Like really badly, so you could almost taste it, like it might have been on purpose. He smelled of cologne."