She smiled at him. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good,” he said with a happy smile and bobbed his head up and down and kept on cleaning.
She studied him, not sure why she had a weird feeling about him but subtly took a photo and sent it to Richard.
When he called, he said, “Is it the same guy as normal?”
“No,” she said, “but we do have a contract with a cleaning company,” she murmured, as she walked into Anita’s office. “And they send whoever is available.”
“I’m sending the guard over to keep you company,” he said.
“Doesn’t he have anything else to do with his life?”
“No, he’s quite happy making sure you stay safe.” And then he hung up.
She wished Richard hadn’t hung up quite so fast, as she, once again, found herself craving even the sound of his voice. She sat down at Anita’s desk and looked around to see if she was supposed to be dealing with something else here. So much of what Anita handled was confusing and beyond Cayce, like bookkeeping, and some ledgers were here. She moved those aside.
As she did so, she caught sight of some papers sticking out from underneath the big desktop calendar pad that Anita always used. Cayce lifted a corner, surprised to see designs. She pulled them out, looking at them and frowning. A lot of them were her designs, but why were they underneath the desktop pad? Unless Anita needed some black-and-white forms of them for some reason. Cayce flipped through them and froze when she got to the last one. She quickly took a photo of it and sent it to Richard.
He called her back again. “What’s that, and why is it important?”
She let out her breath slowly. “I’m in Anita’s office,” she said, “and I noticed a bunch of papers under her large monthly planner thing atop her desk. It’s big. Anyway, I pulled these out, and they are my designs. Or at least a form of them. More like a simplistic skeleton version of them, but, when I got to the bottom one, I had to send it to you.”
“And it has that weird cutout shape to it that looks like an animal skin. What we were talking about earlier, right? Like the first design you sent me.”
“Yes,” she said. “But this design was just a part of one of my early works. I was fixated with borders back then. You can see the border here is similar to the one I saw on Elena’s body from that horrid picture of her defaced torso. I can’t stop seeing that in my mind. Maybe that’s why this black-and-white version hit me so immediately. I think the outer edges of this partial design may match the outer edges of the cuts made on Elena’s body.”
“Right, and who did you say had access to that particular design?”
She took another deep breath. “Not Anita. I’m not sure anyone could have but me.”
*
Richard couldn’t get to her fast enough. He knew the guard was coming from across the city and was about fifteen minutes away, but it took what seemed like five hours for his own dash there. When he burst into the space and saw no sign of anybody, he raced toward her smaller office, bypassing other doors until he heard a call from Anita’s office. He stopped, backed up, and let his breath out with a hard, heavy exhale.
She smiled, got out of the chair, and walked toward him.
He dragged her into his arms and held her close.
“I just don’t understand,” she muttered. “And maybe it’s nothing. But, of course, that’s why you’re here, right? Having dropped everything because of nothing, right?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.
“But we can’t exactly judge this to be good or bad at the moment.”
Just then Anita walked in, catching them still in each other’s arms. “And don’t you two look so cute.” Her voice was sassy and upbeat. Then she must have sensed that something was wrong. “What’s the matter?”
“I found some designs underneath your desk pad,” she said. “I sat down to see if I needed to take care of something else while I was at odds. I noticed them and pulled them out.”
Anita nodded slowly. He watched her face and could see the disturbance in her expression. “And what about it?” Anita asked. “Why would that put those looks on your faces?”
“Well, one of them is a design I didn’t think you’d ever seen before.”
At that, Anita’s face flushed a little paler.
“Where did you get access to that design?” she asked quietly.
Anita, as if holding out hope, said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve just seen it in the office,” she said, looking directly at Cayce and then at Richard, topped by a frown. “I don’t know what the issue is, since your designs are everywhere.”
“Everywhere inside the office, yes,” she said, “but, prior to you working for me, I had a group of designs that were kept in the safe.”
“A safe?” Anita asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know you had a safe.”
“Which is why this design itself is important,” Cayce said. She walked back into Anita’s office, pulled out the stack of designs, and asked, “Why do you have these? Where did you get them? This one in particular. Where did you get it?”
Anita looked at it, frowned, and said, “That page doesn’t have a footer on it with the website and page 1 of 3 or whatever at the bottom. So it wasn’t a Printscreen capture. Yet I could have done a Select All and pasted it into a Word document long enough to print off just what I wanted. Still, I’m pretty sure these came off the internet.” She faced her boss and the detective. “I meant to tell you about them, Cayce, but I stuck them there as a reminder for one of those many times I had hoped we would have a
