Waking the Queen by Saranna DeWylde

before I could work with him. This had never been a problem for me before.
     Grimes released me and I retraced my steps back down the office without looking back at him.
     The maid who found the body was an illegal. I could tell by the way she looked at me. Her eyes were full of fear and desperation. She blanched visibly every time a cop walked past the door.
     Her name tag said “Sarita.” I pulled on another mask, the same I’d use when questioning a child. Calm, kind, and non-threatening. “Hi, Sarita. I’m Brynn.”
     “ No hablo Inglais .”
     And I spoke to her in Spanish.
     I didn’t know Spanish. I spoke English and Old Icelandic.
     Yet, I understood every word she spoke and she in turn understood me. She smiled when I told her that her residency status didn’t matter to me and I just wanted to help those girls and their families.
     Then I saw the MS-13 tattoo on her wrist. It glowed like a bright little star even though they were only three small dots in a pyramid shape and by the untrained eye, could have mistaken for freckles or moles. My guess was she had a bigger tattoo marking who she was and who she belonged to somewhere that wasn’t as easily seen.
     I hesitated to put these things in my notes. MS-13 was one of the most dangerous gangs in the world. There had been a case last year where a young member had slaughtered a whole family for blocking his car in an alleyway.
     Those three dots of her tattoo stood for the three places its members would go after being initiated. Hospital, prison and the grave.
     These murders would be shoved off onto the special FBI gang task force thinking there was some deeper connection to the gang. I couldn’t deny that maybe there was, but the other victim wasn’t a gang member and she wasn’t anyone’s property so far as I could tell. My gut told me this didn’t have anything to do with gang activity outside of the fact that the victims were working girls and one belonged to MS-13.
     Sarita noticed my scrutiny and placed her hands in her lap, so that her fingers covered her tattoo.
     Frankly, I was surprised I’d gotten this far with her. MS-13 didn’t talk to pigs, as they were fond of informing us. I smiled again and shook my head to indicate I didn’t care about that either.
     That’s when she told me that one of the murdered girls was her sister. That explained why she’d talk to me. Revenge was a commandment among the gang. She wanted me to find who’d done it and then when they went to prison, they’d be tortured and killed.
     She provided me with both girls’ names and I saw a rigid determination beneath her fear. Sarita would grieve only after her sister’s killer had been punished. I admired that in her.
     After asking her a few more questions, I went to the precinct to start on the paperwork for the case file. The building lights were dim and most of the staff had gone for the evening, for all intents and purposes, I was alone, but that suited me fine.
     I needed to figure out what the killer had done to the bodies. Sarita had said that the girls had been waiting in the room for him the night before, so these girls had died in the last twenty four hours. But the mummification puzzled me. I chewed on every theory I could think of, but nothing made any sense. Much like the last day.
     My hand was inadvertently drawn to my chest again, the place where my heart was supposed to be. I felt no steady beat against my hand, and there was no pulse in my carotid. I had the sudden urge to slice open the veins at my wrist just to see what was there. Would I bleed? Spurt copious amounts of blood across my desk and the floor in a sticky crimson syrup?
     There was only one way to be sure.
     I opened my desk drawer and took out the switchblade I’d pulled off a perp and I slit my left arm open from my wrist to my elbow.
     
     
    ~The story continues in Part Two:The Siren’s Song , coming in October 2012.~