Mischief 24/7

“True enough. But someday this is going to be over, one way or the other. What are you going to do then, Jade? Run the agency by yourself?”

She shook her head. She’d wondered when he’d get around to asking this particular question.

“No, that’s not possible. Teddy was the heart and soul. I was just the nuts-and-bolts person, working the computer and hardly ever going out into the field. I don’t have… I don’t have his flair. The Sunshine Detective Agency is officially out of business.”

“Leaving you free to go out West and be a cowgirl or fly to the moon. Which will it be, Jade?”

Did he have any idea how much he was hurting her? Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them away as she cleared the counter. “Neither. I suppose I’ll have to find a new dream.”

“Or tell me the real one,” Court said, finishing his sandwich. “I’m guessing ‘chef isn’t on the top of your list.”

Jade smiled at his attempt to lighten the moment. Obviously he did know he was hurting her. Yet he kept on pushing. Maybe if they’d talked more before they’d married, they wouldn’t have fallen apart at the first obstacle. Maybe…

“You’re not going to stop, are you? You’re going to push at me and push at me until I tell you what you think you want to know.”

“That’s the general plan, sweetheart, yes,” he said, following her back into the living room. “Is it working?”

She stopped and turned to face him, surprised that he had been walking so closely behind her. “A doctor. I thought I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, all right?”

Court just looked at her, his expression unreadable. “What kind?”

Jade sighed. “What do you mean, what kind? A doctor doctor. Okay, so I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she said quietly. “From the Christmas I was six and got a play medical kit and practiced on all our dolls. And on Jessica and Jolie, whenever they’d let me. It’s all I’d ever wanted. And then our mother took a hike and I had to have other priorities. Now I’m edging into my thirties and too old to think about years of medical school, specializing, going through an internship and residency. A dream, that’s all it was back then, and I’ve put it away. Happy now?”

“No, I can’t say that I am,” Court told her as he reached out a hand and gently stroked her cheek. “A pediatrician. Because you love medicine and you love kids. Ah, baby, it still hurts, doesn’t it? All these years later, and it still hurts.”

She longed to melt against him, feel his arms tight around her, his strength supporting her as she let go of some of her grief. For Teddy. For everything she’d lost. “I told you, Court, medical school was only a childish dream. I’m too practical to live in dreams. I needed… I wanted to help Teddy.”

“Because he needed you. Because he relied on you. And you let him steal your dream.”

“No, that’s not true!” Jade bristled, probably because she’d sometimes thought the same thing. “My mother was gone. She didn’t care enough about me…about us all, I mean, to stick around. So maybe I needed him, too. Maybe I needed to feel indispensable to someone. Did you ever think of that? Don’t dissect me, Court. I know I’m not perfect, I know I’ve got what shrinks call baggage. But it’s my baggage and I can live with it. And we made it work, Court. Look at Jolie, look at Jessica. Look at their successes. We made it work.”

“Not to belittle your achievement with your sisters, Jade, but to hell with Jess and Jolie. I’m looking at you, I’m looking at us. But there is no us. I never really fit in there anywhere, did I? Yet there I was, at least for a little while. Jess and Jolie grown and gone, and you still here, still mothering the bright, personable, but always needy Teddy. What was I for you, Jade? Your one stab at rebellion, at adventure—at independence?”

“You’re wrong. It wasn’t like that between us. It couldn’t have been like that, damn it.” Her eyes shifted involuntarily to the left—according to

Jessica, a sure sign someone is at least searching for an alternative truth—so she quickly looked at Court again. “Don’t cheapen what we had, please, or try some psychobabble explanation to explain it. I loved you.”

“I hope so, Jade. I really hope so. I hope that, somewhere inside, you still do.” He leaned in and kissed her. On the cheek. Like they were friends, pals. Former lovers, one-time mates. “Come on, let’s do what you really want to do. Let’s get back to work.”

Jade nodded, unable to say anything, and Court took her hand and led her back to the couch, back to the stack of files on the coffee table.

He picked up the Vanishing Bride file and tossed it to the floor. “One down. What’s next?”

“The Fishtown Strangler,” Jade said, willing her mind back on the cases. The cases, and solving them, clearing Teddy’s name, that’s all that was important now. Later, when the nightmare was over, when she’d fixed things—yes, fixed things, the way she always did—only then could she think about what Court had said to her. “This is where it all gets tricky, doesn’t it? Jess and Matt found the killer, but he denies that Tarin White was one of his victims.”

“The man’s a terminal AIDS patient in Grater- ford Prison. His confession to Matt and Jess could almost be called a dying declaration. There’s no reason not to believe him. And no real reason for him to lie, come to think of it.”

“I know,” Jade said, looking at the photograph of Tarin White. “Yet the MO, on the surface, is so similar, right down the line. Raped, strangled, dumped in Fishtown. The same brand of plastic wash-line cord used to bind her wrists and ankles, everything. Allegedly a prostitute, just like the other victims, and smack inside the time frame when the Fishtown Strangler was active. So what makes her different?”

“Which of Jess’s many theories do you want to run with?” Court asked her, picking up a legal pad with Jessica’s neat notes written on the top sheet, the main points highlighted in pink. “Crazy as it sounds, I pretty much favor the one where Tarin White dovetails somewhat into the Baby in the Dumpster case.”

“I know, me, too. Tarin as the dead baby’s mother,” Jade said, nodding. “Farfetched, but possible, especially since the infant’s body had been frozen, making time of death impossible to determine. Nobody ever claimed the child, no one reported a child that age missing. With Tarin dead, who could?” She reached for the Baby in the Dumpster file. “Give me the date of Tarin’s murder again.”

After a few moments Court told her the date on the medical examiner’s report. “Does that work?”

“It’s the same year, the same summer. About three months give or take between the day of Tarin’s death and the discovery of the baby’s body. But anything else is conjecture, just another of Jessica’s theories. Let’s review what we actually know, okay?”

Court ripped off the page of Jessica’s notes and picked up a pen, ready to start a new list. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“In a second,” Jade said, shuffling notes and papers. “So much is fact and so much is conjecture. It’s becoming difficult to sort them out in my head. Okay, let’s start just with Tarin.”

“Prostitute.”

“We don’t even know that for sure, do we?” Jade asked, looking at the photograph again. Tarin White had the face of an angel, her dark eyes and dusky complexion surrounded by a halo of soft black curls. “Her former landlord disputes that and told Jessica and Matt that Tarin had a boyfriend. As in singular. Write her name, write prostitute on the first line beneath her name, but put a question mark behind it.”

“You want strict outline form, Roman numerals, that sort of thing, Ms. Sunshine, or do I just wing it?”

Jade finally smiled. “I’m giving orders, aren’t I? I’m supposedly very good at that, being bossy, Jolie says, although I’ve never really noticed. Sorry.”

“All right. And I’ll be sorry that I’m not very good at taking orders and do what you want, even as I add a second line—mother of dead baby, question mark.”

“That’s out of order,” Jade said, and then bit her lip. “No, no, that’s good. Now let’s go back to more on Tarin as Tarin, not as prostitute or as anybody’s mother. We know from her autopsy report that she had extensive dental implants, high-quality work.”

“Unusual for a street prostitute, correct,” Court said as he wrote on the pad. “And thanks again to Jessica and Matt and to one intimidated dentist Teddy found just before he died, we now know that Joshua Brainard, mayoral candidate and husband of the late Melodie Brainard—who, it turns out, is your father’s supposed victim—paid for that extensive dental work.”

“Which still totally blows my mind,” Jade admitted as she turned over pages in the Fishtown

Strangler file. “The connection is definite, easily proved with the dentist’s records, and Brainard has to know that. You’d think he’d be running scared, not running for mayor. But now we get back into conjecture. Like, Tarin wasn’t a prostitute at all. Like, her boyfriend was the very wealthy, handsome Joshua Brainard, just out of grad school, married, and up-and-coming-man-about-town back then, Philadelphia’s fair-haired son now.”

Court consulted Jessica’s notes. “While talking about Joshua Brainard, we have to take into consideration that he and his father were present at the gravesite when Tarin was buried. Jessica and Matt got the tape from her studio archives and there they were, front and center. Them, and a few prostitutes. We think we might know why Joshua was there, but how do you explain the prostitutes?”

“A show of solidarity? They assumed Tarin was one of them, because all the previous Fishtown Strangler victims had been working girls?” Jade shrugged. “And the Brainards were there because Daddy Brainard was a member of the mayor’s commission pulled together to help solve the Fishtown Strangler case. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. And to be fair, the rest of the commission was also there.”

“But that doesn’t explain Joshua. He wasn’t on the commission.”

“He was lending his father moral support, or at least I’m sure that’s what he’d say if anyone asked. I don’t know why he was there, Court. Maybe because he was Tarin’s married lover. Maybe he paid for her dental work and fathered her child and then killed both of them because Tarin was suddenly more inconvenience than potential life partner. Maybe because he’d figured out that with his looks and Daddy’s money and position, he had a big future in politics. He didn’t need the baggage, Tarin didn’t want to go away quietly, so he chose a more permanent way of saying farewell to young love. That’s the conjecture part.”

“Mixed with the facts. Like the dental implants.”

Jade toed off her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her on the couch. “Here’s another fact. With Clifford Brainard as one of the commission members, sonny boy would have had access to anything his daddy brought home from the office. Like, for instance, how the other women died. Right down to the brand of rope used to tie up his former lover, beat her, rape her and then strangle her—and, by the way, strangling someone isn’t easy. It takes time, lots of up-close-and-personal time, so strangling someone is actually pretty rare, rare enough to brand a killer. Strangling someone you once loved, someone who bore you a child, takes a special sort of sadistic bastard, Court. Except…”

“Go on.”

“Matt told me something a few days ago,” Jade said, frowning. “And he took the medical examiner’s one-page summary out of Tarin’s file so Jessica wouldn’t see it and go ballistic, so don’t bother looking for it. According to the medical examiner, Tarin wasn’t raped and then killed. She was killed—strangled—and only then assaulted sexually with a foreign object. Like, you know, the other victims were raped, so Tarin had to appear to have been raped, as well, to keep with the MO. Which is why Matt and I weren’t as surprised as the rest of you when the Fishtown Strangler denied that Tarin was one of his victims.”

Court sat up straight. “What?”

Jade nodded. “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. The other victims were raped perimortem—we know that from their autopsy reports, just like we know from Tarin’s that she’d given birth not too long before she died. Maybe a couple of months,