Sweet Romance17 min read
Don't Be Found
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"I found her through a picture," he wrote, as if the words were dull facts, like the weather.
"You only need one photo," the rest of the file read, and then the voice in the recording—small, flat, almost bored—began to tell a story that sounded like a list of chores. "Her profile showed she was single, lived alone, and went running every Friday night. That made things easy."
I listened to the recording in the interrogation room speakers and let the sound fill the space until it felt like it had weight. There are confessions that explode and confessions that slide out quietly. This one slid.
"I checked her IP," the voice said. "Same city. I downloaded a picture she took by her window. If it's the original, I can get the coordinates. Sometimes the internet throws me a bone. Sometimes it doesn't."
He—Preston Fox—let the recorder hold his breath for a second and then continued.
"I couldn't get the coordinates. The photo was compressed. But the view had a lake, a park, and two U-shaped white buildings. That narrowed things down. The sun was to the left of the frame, so she lived on the north side of the park, and high up. The building plans told me the floor height. She lived on the twenty-second. I called the property office and pretended to complain about noise. They told me 2301 was under renovation. Bingo."
He sighed. "She walked past me the next Friday. I followed her in a food-delivery uniform. No one stopped me. When she opened her door I—" The voice did not change when he said what he did. It was calm in a way that made me feel colder than any loud cruelty could.
"I put a bag over her head. Done." He laughed then, a small, surprised sound, like someone tasting something too sour. "I thought it would be quick. But there were two toothbrushes. Two towels. She wasn't alone."
I turned off the recording before he described the rest. There are limits to how much one can let another man's pleasure in killing sink into you when your job is to untangle what happened out of principle and what we do for the dead.
"You stopped it?" Alice asked quietly.
"No," I said.
Alice Arroyo, junior detective, had the rawness of someone who hadn't yet learned where to draw her own lines. "Then who rescued her?"
"The other person," I answered. "But that's not the end of the file."
Preston had been careful in some places, careless in others. He'd recruited the camera's login, paid money, cut a throat, and dismembered a man after the man dared to blackmail him. He'd done all of this with a small, steady arrogance. In the end he was arrested because he left traces: a discarded glove, a neighbor's stray CCTV, a phone number that only existed through a trail from a dumpster pickup.
We had the voice on the call, but we lacked a second link. The camera recorded, the camera's login had two devices logged in. One belonged to the first victim; the other we traced to a shabby house and a man who scavenged for a living—Julio Cannon. He had been the one who logged the camera and then, later, the one who disappeared.
"Why would a man like Julio even have a phone logged into a home camera?" Alice asked. "He was poor. He scavenged. He had no reason."
"People are strange," I said. "He had curiosity."
In the months that followed, the case twisted into an older file—one that had been our nightmare for three years. The "Red Flower" murders: women found with a small, carved red flower at their ankle, throat cut, random as hail. The city had called it a serial to fear. Red flowers are a small, obscene signature. They mark the killer's hunger for pattern.
"You think Preston is the Red Flower killer?" Alice said. She had read the reports and threaded the dates with furrowed fingers.
"I think he might be," I answered. "Or he knows enough to act like he is. We can't rule anything out."
Ethan Sutton came to the station the day the forensics returned from the lab. He's a profiler, my old colleague, a man who can read the space between a murderer's words as if text on a page. He closes his eyes and the room yields up the shape of the person in his mind.
"You saw his files?" Ethan asked, always pragmatic.
"I did," I said. "He admits to the two murders. He admits he cut the man's body. He says he was extorted through a camera. But his voice…"
He leaned forward. "The voice we have on file—"
"It sounds male," Alice cut in.
"It sounds like Julio's voice," I finished. "But Preston says what he heard wasn't exactly the same. He said the voice was steady and calm, and that it had a confidence that felt like being watched by someone who wanted you to know you'd been seen."
"You all know why I came," Ethan said, and then turned his eyes on me for the first time with the kind of look that slices through pretense. "Look at the Red Flower files. Look beyond the dead bodies. Pattern. The killer could be learning from Preston, or Preston learning from someone else."
"Or someone has been manipulating Preston," Alice said. "Planting ideas."
"Exactly," Ethan said. "Someone pulled three strings: the run of the camera, the targeting of the girl with black stockings, and the lure of money. There is a puppeteer here."
"You imagine a puppeteer sits in a corner, pulling strings?" Alice asked, half teasing, half terrified.
I smiled a small private smile. "Sometimes they're nearer than you think."
When the technical lab returned the camera data, there were two logins. One belonged to Camila Kelly, the woman with the photo of a pair of black stockings that had started this. The other login had no owner. It was a number with no name attached. But it had been used from the house of Julio Cannon. On the network, devices register, and those blind spots leave fingerprints if you know how to see them.
We brought Preston in for a second interrogation.
"Tell me again where you were the night of the murder," I said.
He leaned back in the chair, arms folded, like someone who'd been asked the same question in a million ways. "I told you. I followed her. I went in. I killed her. Then someone called and extorted me. Ten thousand dollars? No. Ten thousand is nothing. Ten thousand is life. It was ten thousand dollars."
"You said ten thousand," Alice repeated.
"Ten thousand only buys you time," Preston said. "Not safety."
I kept my voice flat. "Who extorted you?"
He shrugged. "A voice. Calm. Practical. Told me to put the money in a trash can near the Westgate road at four. Told me to be precise."
We arranged a controlled swap: the money bag was put where he said—only he didn't find the trap we laid. The trap was an observation team in the shadows. He came like clockwork. He pulled the bag, peered around. He disappeared into the alleys a second later, like someone ashamed to be doing the math of dirty bills.
I watched Preston's face when he found out we watched his every movement. He didn't seem surprised. Instead he wore a small grin, like someone whose game had been confirmed.
"Whoever watched you wanted you to know you were watched," I told him.
He said, "Watching and being watched—there's a difference. I wanted to know I could be the first to reach the thing. The world is an order. I did my part."
"Did you do your part because someone guided you?" Alice demanded. Her voice cut. "Or because you wanted to?"
He didn't answer. He folded like a person closing a book and did not open it again.
The lab found a second hard thing: messages. Metadata from the camera contained a sliver of the login source grid. Not much. But enough for an address. The address wasn't official. It was a maildrop for a plastic phone someone had bought and sent to Julio Cannon's usual trash route.
I remember the night we went to see Julio's neighbor. "Julio's been missing two weeks," the neighbor said. She folded her hands around a small cup of tea, the kind people make when they expect bad things. "He always sleeps in shifts. He picks things up around the west gate. He'd take a phone if someone left it on the curb."
"Did Julio have enemies?" Alice asked.
"Enemies?" She laughed without humor. "My God, everyone has enemies. The city hates you for no reason and throws you away like trash if you can't afford anything else."
It was wrong to think of people as things to be cast aside. But there is a cruelty in the way we count human worth by wallets.
The initial crime scene—the apartment of Camila Kelly—yielded its own impossible things. The bed had two towels, two toothbrushes. The evidence suggested she had at least sometimes had another person with her. Her public posts said she was single. Her private life said otherwise.
"She told her followers she was single," Alice remarked. "She used her posts like a script."
"People shape their images," Ethan said. "She wanted a certain kind of attention."
"She wanted a man like Dr. Sutton to notice her," Alice said softly, meaning Ethan's colleague, who’d been a potential target in her flirtatious posts. "That silly hyper-aware affection."
"You don't have to like the dead to see their humanity," Ethan said. "Don't make her into the straw person of a cruel past. She was complicated."
"She was human," I said.
Months of work tightened—which is to say, we kept unraveling threads until they formed a new knot. Preston confessed things in his confession that seemed to fit the Red Flower pattern. He had carved—a small red bloom—on an ankle once before in an old journal we found. He spoke of ritual. He spoke like a man who practiced small violences and then catalogued them.
"You think he was the serial killer all along?" Alice asked one wet morning when rain made the city's glass dull.
"I don't know," I said. "There are gaps."
Gwen Estes. The name echoed in my mind like something you've been warned never to touch and have already touched. People called me the clinic's other half, the woman who sometimes appeared in police hallways clutching a folder and a tired expression. I have always been used to faces, the way they can lie and betray. I am the kind of person who can teach others to read lies. I also keep schedules. I kept the clinic's free outreach records. Preston had attended a free session. I had seen him.
I had decided, then, that he was a vessel: a person who could be pushed into an act and made to own it. I saw him as someone whose rage could be sharpened and then directed. He had anger swaddled in small rituals, an appetite for being watched and an appetite to watch.
"Why help him?" Alice asked me one night. She had been working late and I stopped by the station after the clinic's files had been printed and existing therapy notes reviewed.
"Because someone needed to be watched," I told her.
She looked at me like she didn't understand the scale of what I meant. Most people don't. Most people draw their morality around obvious bullets and polite distances.
The truth is this: people who think they are safe because they look cannot imagine being seen from the inside. They think privacy is an armor they put on and off like a coat. I had been seen when I was a child and then told the world it was a lie. That tastes of rust and salt for a long time.
"You knew Camila?" Ethan asked me once, his voice quiet. He had his profile training edge softened by caffeine and the night. "Did you know her?"
"No," I said. "Not at first. I met her when she came to our clinic hoping to understand why someone she liked didn't like her back. She wanted advice on attracting a man—my colleague's patient. She used the black stockings photo like a label. She wanted him to see her. She wanted attention the way some people breathe."
Ethan's brows drew together. "And you—?"
"I told her to be careful. I told her not to parade the parts of life that make you a target," I said. "She laughed. She thought it was harmless. She liked to be seen."
When Preston's trial came to court, the city swarmed like vultures around a fresh wound. The Red Flower murders had left thousands of small shocked conversations that sometimes felt like confessions of the city's own risk. The press wanted a hammer. The public wanted a punishment. We had both.
Preston had a demeanor like someone who believed he had passed a test. He didn't beg. He explained with the neatness of a man who makes lists for feeling. "I'm proud of my work," he'd said in a low voice once, leaning close to the glass of the interview room. "To cut is to know the truth. The flower is how they bloom."
His trial was swift. There were scenes: the family of the dead crying, the press asking questions that sounded like knives. Forensics laid out the path of blood and shoeprints and the things men try to hide. Preston's behavior in court was chilling in its ordinariness. He ate a sandwich once while the prosecutor described carving. He smiled at a child who came with their mother to watch the trial.
On the day of execution, the city created a line. Not everyone who squawks for spectacle shows up to the killing, but enough do. Cameras waited for the small details, which is probably why the spectacle persists: we are starved to watch ourselves see.
I stood behind the glass of the witness room. Behind me, there was a group of relatives. Alice and Ethan came, but not on the record. They wanted to bear the weight quietly between them. I had come because I had been part of the thread that had brought this to the light. I had also been part of the seam that folded him into the pattern. Guilt has a weight that doesn't announce itself.
Preston came into the room in a slow, deliberate walk that had something of ritual about it. He was dressed in the state's neutral cloth. The room smelled of cleaning fluid and linen. The audience around us shuffled like restless ghosts.
"Preston Fox," the warden said into the microphone. "Prisoner, are you prepared?"
"I am," he said. His voice sounded like wet sand.
We kept our distance as they read the final statements. Some people came to rattle cages—family members, petitioners, angry citizens. The cameras captured faces the world would soon file away as having seen a final thing.
He was strapped into the chair. There was a small click of metal, a sound that felt too intimate to belong to any state machinery. The room quieted. You could hear the slow mechanical breath of the place and the low whisper of some clerks, witnesses aligning themselves with the history of the city.
"Do you have any last words?" the official asked.
Preston looked up as if for the first time he noticed the room was full.
"Yes," he said. "I would like to—"
Then he stopped. For a second there was a shift that felt like the world clicking against a different gear. He looked past the rows and his eyes found mine.
"You," he said. "You're a woman."
The cameras focused without love. The way his voice said the word caused a ripple. He had expected a man—someone with a deeper, rougher control—but here, in front of him, was someone different. He had been calm at everything up to that moment. Now something like surprise—like betrayal—added a new angle to his face.
"Who?" the official demanded.
He pointed with a finger that trembled—for the first time since he'd been taken in, his body betrayed him. "The voice. The one on the camera. The one who told me to put the money there. It was a woman's voice."
Murmurs rose like a small tide. People swivelled, cameras turning like hungry heads.
"Who are you talking about?" someone shouted from the gallery.
Slowly, I turned from the glass. My face was a practiced blank, as if the outside of me couldn't betray what was inside. But inside everything was a flare. The air seemed to press against my throat.
"She was there," he said again, in a tone that tried to be certain and only succeeded in being small. "She told me not to be brave, to be precise. She told me to be quick. She told me…"
His words folded into an array of public sound. For a long moment the room did not know how to act. The press dug for microphones. The official's voice hardened. "State, maintain order."
Preston's expression slid—first confusion, like a man who'd been given an unfamiliar map; then denial, the quick plaster over a crack; then a flash of rage and panic like someone realizing the earth had been pulled from under him.
"No," he said, vehement now, "no, that's a lie."
"You told us a voice," Alice said, her voice a thin blade. "You said you were extorted. You said—"
"I was extorted!" he shouted suddenly. "They—he—whoever—told me—"
"Who told you?" Ethan demanded, stepping forward until the guards motioned him back.
The crowd started to hum. Phones lit like moths.
Preston's face sagged. For a moment he looked like a man exhausted by being believed. He looked at me as if he expected to be punched. He looked the way people look when a table is pulled away and the floor suddenly tilts.
"It was a voice," he whispered. "A woman. She was patient. She was steady, and she told me what to do. She told me to kill the woman who wore the stockings. She told me to come back for the money. She told me—"
"She told you to what?" the warden asked with disappointment, almost like the warden was tired of being let down by novelties.
"She told me to keep the pattern," Preston said. "She told me it was important the world sees the flowers."
Then he opened his mouth and the sound that came out wasn't words. It was a small, keening surrender, as if the city and the machine and the crowd had cut him off from his script and he had to improvise a new end.
His reactions changed in fast, ugly strips. He started by mocking the world; then he tried to bargain; then he denied; and finally the realization of the spectators took him apart: what he had done in secret was now being observed by hundreds. He flailed in his final minutes like a puppet with its strings visible.
The crowd responded in pieces. Some people who had come to watch rose as if to cheer. Others covered their mouths. A woman two rows ahead of me began to sob loud enough to make people turn. Someone in the back started to clap like a perverse metronome, and a few people did record him until the guards made them stop. Slaps of camera shutters and the choked noise of a body going through the motions of death compounded the weirdness of the moment.
"Why did you help them?" someone in the crowd cried into the swirl.
Preston was no longer sure where to put his eyes. "I was lonely," he said at last. "I wanted to be important. They told me I could be important. So I learned to cut a shape."
"Who's 'they'?" Alice yelled.
But the last breath doesn't often answer the question the world brings to it. The state did its thing with cheery efficiency. The machine did what the machine does: it flipped a switch and the body's small private ruin became public, and the city let out a small collective inhale. Cameras recorded, people murmured, the official read out the time, and the room collectively exhaled into the long, raw silence that comes after an end.
Outside, the reporters already framed a narrative. "The Red Flower killer dead," they said on the first line. "A woman watched him die." The line did not yet have her name, and it would remain small until someone chose to make it larger.
The punishment was complete in the formal sense. A man who had made a little private pattern of death was removed. The public had witnessed the state act. Witnesses told their stories; the papers ran quotes in bold. For the people who'd loved the dead, nothing could be fixed. For the family of the executed, closure came at a terrible price: a small, public end.
But the courtroom spectacle had a strange afterlife. Preston's last words echoed: "A woman." Someone had told him a woman's voice. Someone had orchestrated his movements. Someone had put the camera in play. Someone had designed the bait of a person who created attention like a moth. The shape of the liar in the recording would be a woman, and the rumor would spread.
After the execution, people came to the station with new evidence: a message someone had received from the same voice, an old photo with a faint mark, a memory that didn't make sense. The police had done their job. They had taken one criminal off the chessboard. But not everyone felt the relief was total.
"You knew this might happen," Alice said to me one night, after the riot of press had receded into the daily work. She had stayed with me until late, sorting through the folder of the free clinic's records.
"I did," I said. "But not the way you mean."
She looked up, hair falling into her eyes like a shield. "Who is she, Gwen? Who told Preston to do the thing?"
"A woman who was seen," I said. I wanted to be careful with my words. Confession is a blade you sheathe slowly.
Silence sat between us like a third person. The city had a long memory of violence, and we had a protocol: clean up, tag evidence, proceed. But as a person who had listened and suggested, I knew the exact moment when a plan had turned inward and become a weapon.
You might think my role at the clinic makes me a helper. I tell people how to see. But seeing can be used, and I had used it as one uses a scalpel: precise, cold, for what one calls repair.
"Did you plant the phone?" Alice asked finally, because the police mind is practical.
"No," I said. "But I watched the steps unfold. I gave him access to the idea. I told him how to be seen."
"You told him?" Her voice was incredulous. "Why would you…?"
"Sometimes people need to be shown the pattern so they can be used," I said. My voice tasted like metal. "He had a hunger for orders. I offered him one. He wanted to be part of a story."
"You offered him a story," Ethan said, who'd been sitting on the other side of the table. He'd taken in the files with a look that had a new depth of sadness.
"I don't pretend it was clean," I said. "I don't pretend I wasn't angry. I don't pretend it didn't feel like justice when the people who had hurt me were no longer smiling."
"Who did you call justice for?" Alice asked. She looked at me those childlike, raw eyes that had first brought me into this mess.
I could have told her the truth—about being a child who had been handed from house to house, about a mother who had been beaten, about a girl who had poured a bucket of filth on my head and then been left to the mercy of her own choices. I could have told her how years of small violences build into a long ledger of hurt that wants to balance itself in some terrible coin. I could have explained the therapy of revenge.
Instead, I laid open files: clinic logs, altered notes, the small edits that show a hand. The police when they finally looked carefully found something: a blank number in the clinic's outbound logs that matched the voice frequency of a woman who had shown up in their memory.
"You modified his records," Ethan said slowly. "You shaped a man's expectation."
"I offered structure," I said. "I gave him suggestion. I never told him to kill anyone."
"Yet you gave the pattern and the confidence," Alice said.
"We never will get back what we lost," Ethan said softly.
The city likes clean endings, and we had given it one. But clean endings don't account for the shape of people afterwards. Preston was dead. Red Flowers were fewer. But the cruelty of being seen remained.
And in the quiet of my small clinic office, where the light from the window came slanted and weak through the blinds, I let the memory of my mother be a small animal that still trembled. Sometimes a cup slips from your hand; sometimes sound rattles you awake. The dishes clinked that night and I thought I had fallen into sleep.
The plastic cup on my desk slipped and broke. The small sound made me start; Alice's hand, reaching for the broom, made me look up. "Sorry. I knocked it," she said.
"It's fine," I said. I took the broom and moved slowly, sweeping shards into the dustpan like the city sweeps its crimes into files and dates. Outside, a news alert blinked on the phone screen: "Red Flower killer executed. Suspect connected to series."
I had wanted to be sure I had done the right thing. Justice and vengeance share the same family name but differ in the way they look at the dead. I had built things into place and watched them collapse into the laws of men.
Sometimes I think of the woman in the black stockings. I imagine her window view, the park, the little U-shaped building, the way the sun had been on the left as Preston described. I imagine she had wanted attention. I imagine she had wanted to be more.
"Would you do it again?" Alice asked later, when the station was quiet and only the hum of air handlers kept us company.
"I don't know," I answered. "I thought about it. I thought—if you had the power to put things right with a single small act, would you?"
She believed she knew what she would do. People do, until they stand with a body and a stack of papers and a city waiting for an answer.
We kept going. The Red Flower case was closed with a verdict and a stamp. The city felt safer in the way a person feels safe when they have the numbers for the locksmith called. But closure is a tricky thing, and sometimes you forget the face of the person you helped fall so the rest of the world can breathe.
I keep files. I make notes. I counsel people. I teach people to see the truth of themselves and each other. I tell them to protect their windows; I tell them to consider their photos. Sometimes, at night, when the light comes through at a certain angle, I recall a man's quiet voice describing a garden and my small part in the design.
"It's all very tidy," Ethan said one evening, when I met him outside the courthouse for a cigarette. He had his hands in his pockets, like all the weight had been tucked in until there was nothing left.
"Tidy doesn't mean clean," I said. The cigarette tasted like regret.
"You could have just warned her," he said. "You didn't have to…"
"I told her to be careful," I said. "She made her choices."
He studied me and then, because he is always humane even when he should be sharp, he said, "We do our best, Gwen."
We do our best: a small elegy that covers the lot of us. The city files the deaths into rows and columns. People write op-eds. The children grow up with fewer body-shape stories to frighten them—yet stories remain.
The last line in the police report reads: "Camera log number two—source unknown. Voice was male on file, but suspect maintains the voice was female." The last line in my private journal reads: "Some eyes need to be opened by others."
Outside, the park still had its U-shaped buildings and the lake. Someone still jogged in the morning. Cameras watched. People posted photos. Some days I stand at the far edge of the park and watch the light turn over the water and think about how easy it is to be found if you give a piece of yourself away.
I am Gwen Estes. I write reports and I make tea. I listen to the dead speak through their living fragments. And when the cup falls, sometimes I find myself waking up anyway, and the city keeps turning as if nothing had been disturbed.
The End
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