It wasn't until I was at the hospital and I got an injection from the doctor that I started to calm down, but in that detached, sort of loopy way that comes with some really decent drugs. I didn't really start to come to until it was nighttime, and I noticed that I was now in a room in the hospital. Everything was painted that sort of vomit inducing color that looks like baby blue and mint green were mixed, and I was laying on one of those reclining beds. “Wha . . . What happened?”
“It's okay Bella,” Uncle Carlo said from my left, his voice soft and concerned. Bella was a nickname he often called me. I looked at him and took a deep breath. Carlo was wearing his dark blue suit, one of his suits that I associated with him and work. He must have come straight from the office, where he worked in his day job as owner of Bertoli's Pizza, the largest independent pizza delivery company in the state of Washington. Carlo had even once gotten on television with Guy Fieri, if you can dig that. He had other businesses, including Bertoli Trucking, Sicily Dry Cleaning, and a few others he was a minority investor in, but his day job was at the pizza company.
“Uncle . . . oh, it was so horrible!” I said, my voice still sounding slightly separated from my body. I felt like a little girl again, telling him about the monster under my bed or something. “There was so much blood!”
“I know,” he replied, taking my hand in his. “I seen a little of the crime scene, the police didn’t tell me they had brought you here until after I arrived. Tell me exactly what you saw.”
I recounted my memory, starting with the APE and ending with my seeing Angela's body. It didn't take long, after all until seeing the open window, everything had been a boring yet normal late summer day. I had just taken the last of my first sessions for the semester, and had been looking forward to a good year. The only dark mark was Vincent Drake in the background, but I hadn't seen or heard from him at all that day.
I finished my recollection, waiting while Uncle Carlo sat back, nodding to himself. It’s one of the things that makes him good at what he does, in my opinion. Regardless of how much of a storm he might be feeling emotionally, when it came time to make a decision, he forced himself to step back, setting his feelings aside for the moment. “There were things you didn’t see,” he finally said, sitting forward. “The police haven’t told me much, only what I was able to see quickly when I came to take you to the hospital, but I did overhear some things. Those fools never could keep their damn mouths shut.”
“What did I miss?” I asked, starting to tremble. “Was it bad?”
He nodded. “The killer, it’s most likely Vincent Drake. Tell me what you know about him.”
I sighed, regretting limiting my actions to just a restraining order. Uncle Carlo had been right the first time. “I took Drake's class last fall semester, he was teaching Conceptual Sculpting. He always wore these cheap suits, the kind that you'd get at a Goodwill or something, and they always looked like they were about ten years out of date on his frame. I swear he bought himself a six pack of discount suits when he was thirty, and twenty years later he was still working his way through them, waiting for the seams to give out or something.”
Uncle Carlo chuckled at my description. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Adriana. You always have been a born artist, with such great descriptions of people and things. Tell me about your relationship with him.”
“What relationship? The guy was a loser from day one, I hated the course,” I protested, a bit of my natural temper flaring up. I come from Sicilian and Scottish roots, so me not having a temper would have been a miracle. When he gave me a look, I sighed, and fell back into my recollections. “For the first few classes, things were normal. He was creepy, but nothing I haven't had to handle before. It wasn't until the midterm project, where he started to really focus on me. The sculpture I did wasn't the best, in my opinion, but it was special to me because I tried to carve Dad as if he'd survived all the years to now. I'd poured my heart into it, and planned on giving it to Mom for her birthday, before all this started and ruined it for me. For some reason Vincent really took to it, and he started obsessing over me.”
“Eventually I filed a sexual harassment complaint against him with the school, but they did nothing, saying it wasn't enough to do anything against a tenured professor. They just warned him, and told me to stay away.”
“Adriana, why did you put so much trust in these incompetent fools? Have I not shown you how useless they are?”
“You have, and I don't know why,” I said. “I guess . . . I guess because I know what you would’ve done. He has a family, after all. A wife, and supposedly a daughter.”
“Had a family . . .,” he said. “It was on the news while you were out. He killed his wife before coming to your apartment, another stabbing. There’s talk of some sort of letter or manifesto, but no details have been released. I have men working on it now. Good men.”