Nightmare

were scattered about the porch. Tan pressed her thumb to the doorplate and the lock clicked open. Kendi took a deep breath and followed Mother Ara inside.

It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloomy interior. The air was stuffy and smelled faintly sour. After a moment, Kendi made out a living room filled with second-hand, mismatched furniture and an upright piano. A patina of dust coated everything. Kendi half expected to see a skeleton lying on the couch and chided himself for being ridiculous. Temm would have been buried long ago. Still, a vague feeling of unease crept over him. This was a dead woman’s house, and it had been left just as it was on the day she had died. The Real People told ghost stories, and he shivered at the thought of encountering a pale, angry Iris Temm with a number twelve dripping scarlet down her forehead.

Tan opened a couple windows. The fresh air helped clear away some of Kendi’s unease but didn’t entirely erase it. 'Look around,' she said. 'You can touch anything you want-the techs have been through half a dozen times.'

Kendi poked about the living room but saw nothing that caught his eye. A small foil-wrapped box sat on one of the wooden end tables and he took off the lid. A dozen chocolates, though an empty space gaped like a missing tooth. The remaining ones were covered with a white film. Kendi made a face and replaced the lid. Mother Ara, who was drumming her fingers on the piano, gave him an odd look but didn’t say anything. When Kendi moved away from the table, Mother Ara also reached down and took up the box.

Next Kendi tried the bedroom. The dust made him want to sneeze but he held it back. It seemed disrespectful somehow to spray saliva in a dead woman’s bedroom. He opened a window to let in air and the smell of rain, then looked around. The bed was normal but had been stripped of its linens. Had Iris been on it when she was …? No. Mother Ara had mentioned that the body was found in the living room. Night stand, lamp, dresser. Nothing out of the ordinary.

What were you expecting? he thought. A big box with the word 'clue' written on it?

A bit of thunder rumbled in the distance. Kendi reached for the closet, then hesitated. The knob was cool under his hand. Various childhood fears came back to him. This was a dead woman’s house, a dead woman’s closet. More thunder grumbled. Ghostly images loomed in Kendi’s mind, spirits reaching for his throat with hands that showed bloody stumps of missing fingers.

'This bugs me,' came Mother Ara’s voice from the living room, 'but I can’t say why.'

Her words broke the spell. With a snort at his own silliness, Kendi flung the door open. He saw a perfectly ordinary closet. Dresses, robes, and blouses hung from hangers, all neatly placed. A series of shelves held sweaters. Several pairs of shoes made a perfect row on the floor, and several more were jumbled together in a heap. A bunch of scarves drooped from a set of hooks, one to a hook, all grouped by color.

Something struck Kendi as wrong. He stared into the closet trying to figure out what it was. He looked harder, then stepped back to get the full picture. Something was out of place. Something-

It was the shoes. Kendi knelt on the floor to get a closer look. Most of them were in a row, but a bunch were heaped up.

And then Kendi had it. Everything in the closet was perfectly neat and tidy, including most of the shoes. The jumbled ones were the only messy part of the whole closet, and their presence didn’t make sense. He was reaching for a sandal when something made a slamming noise from the living room and Mother Ara cried out. Kendi jumped up and rushed out, heart pounding.

Mother Ara was in the living room. A handprint in the dust on the piano lid showed where she had smacked it, presumably in triumph. Tan stood by the couch, her braid over one shoulder.

'What’s the matter?' Tan and Kendi asked in unison.

'The chocolates,' Mother Ara said. 'They were bothering me, but I couldn’t say why. I didn’t especially notice them before.'

'Neither did I,' Tan rasped. 'So what?'

'There’s a chocolate missing. See?' Mother Ara opened the box and held it so Tan could get a look.

'She probably ate one,' Tan said. Then her expression grew interested. 'You think the killer ate it? Might be able to find traces of saliva, but it’s a slim-'

'No,' Mother Ara interrupted. 'I saw Iris’s medical records. Wasn’t she allergic to chocolate?'

Tan rubbed her chin. 'I think she was, yeah. So why-'

'— would she have chocolates in the house at all?' Mother Ara finished with a victorious gleam in her eye. 'Her boyfriend would almost certainly have known about her allergy and not given them to her. And she herself wouldn’t have eaten one. So who gave them to her and who took the missing one?'

'It’s worth asking the boyfriend about,' Tan said doubtfully. 'Might have brought them over for himself. Or she might have bought them for him and he left them here.'

'I may be grasping at straws here,' Mother Ara said, 'but Iris was the twelfth victim. There were twelve chocolates in the box and now one is missing. What if the killer ‘gave’ them to her and then took one himself?'

Tan still looked doubtful. 'We’ll check into it, I guess. Don’t get your hopes up, though.'

'Maybe we should count the shoes,' Kendi said.

Blank looks followed. Kendi took the two women into the bedroom and explained. 'Iris was too neat to leave her shoes jumbled around like that,' he finished excitedly. 'Maybe the killer did it or something.'

'But why would he?' Tan asked.

'I don’t know,' Kendi admitted. 'But serial killers do weird stuff, right? Maybe this is one of them.' He knelt down and started sorting shoes. With the air of someone who was humoring a child, Tan joined in. Mother Ara watched from the door. In short order, they discovered there were eleven shoes in the pile. Ten of them made pairs, leaving one extra. The trio searched the closet, then looked under the bed and in the dresser. The mate was nowhere to be found.

'It’s a clue,' Kendi said breathlessly. 'Twelve shoes, but one’s missing. Twelve chocolates, but one’s missing.'

Tan was looking more excited now. 'Twelve victims, but one finger is missing. The killer is taking souvenirs. Dammit, I can’t believe we missed this.'

'Fresh pairs of eyes,' Mother Ara said. 'Do you suppose there’s anything like this in the other houses?'

Visibly restraining her enthusiasm, Tan got to her feet. 'We should search through this house first. Look for anything else that comes in twelves-eggs, flowers, sets of dishes, anything. And good work. Both of you.'

Kendi glowed with pride and excitedly set to work searching the rest of the house, but no other sets of twelve came up. Tan gathered up the shoes and the chocolates as evidence, though she said there was little hope of finding anything on them.

'The killer’s too smart to leave his DNA on them,' she explained.

'What about sweeping for trace DNA?' Mother Ara said. 'If the killer came in to cut off Iris’s finger and take souvenirs, he couldn’t avoid leaving skin cells behind.'

'The same,' Tan replied, 'goes for all the other people who have ever set foot in this house. It’s at least thirty years old. If we sweep for trace DNA, we’ll get hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of sequences. It would take years just to sort them out, let alone identify who they belonged to. Come on-I want to get another look at Vera Cheel’s house.'

Mother Ara turned to Kendi. 'You don’t need to come,' she said. 'Cheel’s house is a recent crime scene, and there’s a greater chance the news services will have found out about it and be there by now.'

'I was there before,' Kendi protested.

'Only because I needed you there to recreate the Dream scene,' Mother Ara said firmly. 'That was risky enough. I don’t want you endangered, and I certainly don’t want your face skating up and down the news webs. Inspector Tan and I can handle this ourselves.' She put a hand on his shoulder. 'You were invaluable, Kendi. None of us will forget that, all right? I promise I’ll tell you all about it.'

'Just don’t talk to anyone else,' Tan added.

'But what am I supposed to do all day?' Kendi asked, feeling only slightly mollified by Mother Ara’s words.

'Do what you like, as long as you don’t stay by yourself.' She cleared her throat. 'Kendi, I know this is a sensitive issue with you, but-well, I’d feel a lot better if you talked about this with someone. You witnessed a horrible act and you were almost killed. You really should talk about this with-'