Sinful Desire

Only a seamstress would know this pattern wasn’t a pattern. Only a man or woman who attempted to make this jacket would be able to tell it wasn’t for a dog.

Pacing in circles in her living room, she tried to settle her galloping heart. She worked to calm her overactive brain. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions. She needed to check, and double check. That was what she’d done in school. That was always her strategy. Make certain. Make sure.

She headed to her desk, flipped open her laptop, and started plugging in the two addresses on Google Maps. They showed up near each other in the same neighborhood—a dangerous section of town years ago that had since been gentrified. Sophie wanted to know who lived there. Property records weren’t hard to find—everything was online these days in realtor databases. She plugged the addresses into a realtor search. But the records revealed only when the homes were last sold—a few years ago. Nothing showed the owners’ names now, or from when this pattern was made, nearly two decades ago.

But she’d spent a lifetime solving problems. Cracking codes. Creating her own damn codes.

Grabbing the pattern again, she started writing out notes, trying to figure out the rest of the rows of instructions and what they meant. But only that first line translated neatly. The code seemed to shift in each row. Something was missing from the next line. Sophie peered more closely, and it seemed a letter had been turned into a symbol. On the next one, a number was simply missing, like a dropped stitch. She’d have to deal with those at another time.

For now, she zeroed in on the first row of instructions, puzzling over how to find out who these addresses belonged to. She could easily call John and hand him this information in its current form. Or she could tell Ryan what she’d discovered. But she’d never been one to turn in her homework half-done. This code was only partially cracked, and her job was to smash it wide open. Whatever she had in her hands—whether it was a cold, hard clue, or a dead end—she was determined to figure it out.

She tapped her fingers against her temple, as if she could coax out the way to find the names of the inhabitants. In seconds, she had it, because she had friends everywhere in this city, including in the county records office—her friend Jenna’s aunt worked there.

Ringing Jenna, even though it was early on a Saturday morning, she gave her only the barest details, adding that discretion was key.

“I’ll see what she can do,” Jenna said, and five hellishly long minutes later, she called back to say her aunt would be home shortly from a hike and would log into her work computer to check the records for those addresses. “Give me an hour.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Sophie said, then tried valiantly to keep herself occupied.

But fifteen minutes of checking and double-checking that her shoes, jewelry, lingerie, and evening dress were ready for tonight did nothing to cool her mind.

A deep obsession kicked in, telling her to do something.

To understand.

To look.

To see.

She tried to shove all those urges away, and simply exist in this state of waiting. Maybe some tea would help. Maybe she should bake something. Maybe another long shower would keep her focus off of waiting for Jenna’s call.

But something insistent was knocking around in her skull, telling her not to sit still.

Her mind was a pinball machine, whirring and whizzing with crazy silver flippers, sending dozens of balls in new directions. She weighed her options. She could stay here and wait. Or she could conduct some recon on her own.

Twenty minutes later, she drove along James Street, her sunglasses on, as if that would hide her from the kids playing in driveways, the men and women walking dogs, the average, every-day feel of this suburban stretch of street that had been riddled with crime years ago. Following the path of addresses in her hand, she drove past the two homes from the pattern.

Two clean, neat, modern standard-order suburban family abodes.

They gave no clue as to why on earth Dora hid these addresses in a pattern many years ago. She gritted her teeth, wishing she truly understood what she’d uncovered.

Her phone rang.

She nearly jumped out of the driver’s seat, then settled herself when she saw Jenna’s name.

Swiping the screen, she turned her phone on speaker, then pulled over near a park and cut the engine.

“Hey girl,” Jenna said. “I’ve got what you’re looking for.”

“Tell me,” she said breathlessly.

“So, eighteen years ago, one was owned by a family named Stefano,” Jenna said, and Sophie cringed, squeezing her eyes shut at that name—the name she knew belonged to the shooter. “The second was a rental. Owned by a guy named Carlos Nelson at the time. But he didn’t live there. He rented it to his two cousins, T.J. Nelson and Kenny Nelson.”

“T.J. and Kenny Nelson,” Sophie repeated, as if she could decode the names by saying them out loud.

But they meant nothing to her.