Be Still

by thisonegoes

Summary:

Zayn hears the telltale sound of stretcher wheels bouncing up over a weather strip. A tech backs out of the door first, as both Zayn and Harry turn to watch. They wheel the black body bag out and lift it down the stairs, to take her away. She's officially cleared for transport, no longer a resident of the household. She's now just a corpse wrapped in plastic.

When they finally turn back to one another, Harry blinks and then shatters into pieces.

Detective Zayn AU.

Notes:

I was in the middle of writing this when March 25th happened. I hope you like it. Thank you Jasmine and Britt.

Chapter 1: DAY 1

Ghosts are real.

Don’t let anyone tell you they’re not, or that if you feel one, it’s in your head. There's too much evidence, eye witness accounts and odd feelings, cold breaths on necks, goose bumps, sounds that go bump in the night, for spirits to be a fluke of the imagination.

Zayn has felt some, as they creep and crawl around floorboards, like phantom cats trying to catch mice. He's heard them playing. Laughing. Taunting him when he can’t sleep. They like to chase and knock on walls, like it's a game between childhood friends. Wood creaking, long winded wails that aren’t quite the wind, a touch to the arm. They're real and they want you to know it.

It would be surprising to some people, especially to his colleagues, Zayn's belief in the unknown. So like many things, like all things, he keeps it close.

Ghosts are real. They want to be heard, to be known, in a world that so often forgets the dead once they're gone.

Zayn doesn't forget.

Zayn feels ghosts every day.

 

 

---

 

DAY 1

 

March 19, 2019
7:02 am

She likes to play with Zayn's hair. She winds it, tugs it slightly, brushes it messily over his forehead instead of away from it. Sometimes she kisses his cheek, a cool press of lips, never a mark or wetness left behind. Zayn wonders if he reminds her of someone, if he's a long lost lover or perhaps a baby in a nursery. Maybe he's a husband she wants to wake up, a sweet wife with sweet words in his ear, words he can never quite make out.

Zayn swats at her this morning, tries with all his strength to make her leave, but she insists.

He never gives her the satisfaction of yelling out, never lets her have that extra energy. Zayn read once that ghosts take the energy around them to manifest, to move objects and shift the molecules in the air. Too proud, he won’t let her have that. But he does flit a hand against his cheek, to get her to leave him be.

She's gone by the time he opens his eyes. They always are.

But Zayn realizes, as he swings his feet to the bare floor in his cramped apartment, that it's his phone waking him up a full fifteen minutes before his alarm is set to go off. He fumbles for it with numb fingers, his eyes blurry, his boxers bunched up around his thighs.

"Malik," he mumbles, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

"Are you up?"

"I'm up."

"New case, just came in," CJ laments, hurried.

"Details, Ceej," Zayn reminds him. His junior detective tends to get caught up in their cases before Zayn even gets a first name, a crime, an idea for what the problem is. CJ's his right hand, the one to take their calls first thing, the man with the nice penmanship, good for endless hours of paperwork. He's young, like Zayn was when he got into the department, eager. He hasn't even thrown up yet, not while on a scene, so Zayn figures he's around for the long haul.

"Body in South O. Female, early twenties maybe. D-O-A."

"Bangers? A bust?"

CJ doesn't respond right away, the shuffling of papers and a radio being turned on behind him. He must be in their car already, must be on his way to pick Zayn up. Most of their recent cases have been gang related. In fact, all of the recent Omaha cases have been, the shootouts in North Omaha getting more and more violent. But the drug problem, the pallets of H and crank being brought up from Missouri seem to be never ending as well. There's been a crop of ODs the last few years, boxes littering the station, full of file folders detailing the kids from good families getting rocked by meth, their faces pocketed and yellow, their morgue shots too harsh under the halogen lighting.

Both have led to an influx of homicides in the sprawling Midwest metropolis, "the Kansas City of Fly-Over Country." Zayn's seen more gang deaths and drug hand-offs gone bad in the last few months than he has since he joined the force right out of college.

"No, neither," CJ surprises him. "Stabbing in a residence. Call just came in 'bout half hour ago."

The window near his bed looks out over the alley below. Zayn pulls his thick, grey curtains back and glances through the blinds quickly, to assess the day, before shutting them tight. He immediately doesn’t like the feel of it, unhappy with the overcast sky. He gets feelings some days, like before a big storm or a tornado warning, like the air is heavier. It feels different, and not just because he was woken up by a pair of cool lips. He places a hand to his own mouth, the thin skin cracking from the dry air, and tries to ready himself for the day.

Sometimes he still has to do that: remind his body to work correctly, after nights of tossing and turning, after he’s woken up from a sleeping pill haze. Zayn lives in a constant state of altering his melatonin, either by jolting himself awake with caffeine, or coming down from the day with an Ambien that only works about half the time.

Stabbing. In a residence. Zayn will need all the help he can get for this one. He rubs at his face and sighs, suddenly aware of CJ still on the other end of the phone.

"I’ll meet you outside. Bring coffee."

"Done."

---

March 19, 2019
7:31 am

CJ tends to buy the shittiest coffee on the planet, not being a coffee drinker himself. It’s a learned skill, Zayn’s found, knowing what roast is decent. But also what coffee a person drinks or what sort of concoction one orders. He prefers straight black, or if he needs the jolt, a double Americano. CJ never orders it right, must get the lightest roast or smoothest finish, thinking it’s preferred and “less intense.” Zayn likes intense. He craves intense caffeine.

Zayn grips the Styrofoam cup between his palms, the one CJ’s future grandchildren won’t be able to recycle, as they make their way east on Dodge. The morning commuters halt them at every other intersection, since they don’t switch their lights on. There certainly isn’t an emergency to get to.

Outsiders think Omaha is a hick town, some little blip in Nebraska, not realizing the traffic is shit, the four-lane highways rival coastal cities, and the crime rate is through the roof. It’s a sprawling city, miles in each direction. Outsiders don’t realize the size of it, not much smaller (in square miles and in population) than Portland or Atlanta. It’s not an easy place to live, the crime and taxes becoming more of a burden every year.

CJ swerves to avoid a mail truck, Zayn’s coffee sloshing precariously close to the lid. Zayn hates the coffee, and yet can’t imagine letting a drop of it go.

Zayn can feel it; there’s an odd energy to the car, the one he’s been riding in for years now. His boots make a perfect impression on both the driver and passenger side, his ass fits in the seats like a glove. CJ swerves again, but waves out the window to the mail truck he cuts off. When Zayn was a junior detective a few years back, alongside Alberto, he probably would’ve swiped it for being in his way. Zayn doesn’t mention it, since CJ’s on edge, his fingers in his mouth, his eyes darting from the sloshing streets ahead to the rear view. The ice has melted, spring is on its way, and he drives like he’s on a mad dash through Super Mario.

“What is your problem?” Zayn intones, straightening his tie.

He doesn’t want to see CJ on edge. He didn’t sleep well the night before, yet again. Either Ethel from this morning was blowing into his ear, or Jesse was stomping in the attic, or the twins were in his closet playing. He couldn’t pick up the exact sounds, not sure which of them decided to keep him up, but he had a hazy suspicion even in restless sleep that he should’ve been awake. It’s the vague tugging behind his eyelids that has always plagued him, that feeling of someone needing him. Wake up. You’re missing it. You’re missing everything. The Ambien he took before dinner did nothing, he fell in and out of a light sleep all night, worried.

“Just anxious,” CJ switches lanes again, for no reason, heading towards Center.

“Why?”

“I think… I just don’t like the feel of this one.”

“Do we have more details? Anything before we get there?”

“She was found this morning by a roommate, in a boarding house, a privately-owned residence that rents out four or five bedrooms. Some young girl, pretty and nice, I bet,” CJ scrunched his eyes, the nonexistent sunlight getting in them. CJ’s never puked at a crime scene, but he’s cried twice. It was to himself, and only as they got back into the car, but Zayn saw. “Just about to start her day. Someone stabbed her, easy as anything.”

“Well, it’s a shame,” Zayn leans his head against the seat rest. “You take the roommate first thing, then. I’ll talk to CSU and the first responders. Do we know who showed up first?”

“Starzak. He’s who called us in.”

“I’ll get him,” Zayn sighs.

“He said… It – he said she looked weird. The placement, something about her, threw him off.”

“How so?” Zayn turns to him finally. CJ’s not as good at Zayn at holding in his emotions, the frowns and stress line his face before he can stop them. His tone, the way his voice falls at the end, can never escape Zayn. Zayn’s been told he’s perceptive to the point of being creepy about it, so he knows, he always knows, when something is different.

“He’ll have to tell you.”

“Ceej, what did Starzak say to you on the phone? I need to know, I need to hear it from you before I hear it from him. First reaction, first impression.”

Zayn already has his leather folio unzipped and in his lap, pen in hand. Sometimes the first cops on the scene see things, notice things, even get feelings about certain spaces. And sometimes those thoughts or instincts get lost, shoved down, the tough men with badges and guns strapped to their waists too proud to admit their gut feelings and emotions. CJ is important now, the first person to hear about the crime, almost as much as Officer Starzak will be when they arrive on the scene.

“He said it felt planned. On purpose.”

“Pre meditated,” Zayn nods, jotting it down.

“No.”

Zayn looks up at him, the scruff along his chin getting long. He can’t grow it much longer otherwise it’ll be against policy, and Zayn might have to tell him to shave, but it’s not important.

“I don’t know. He just said it felt different,” CJ frowns. “Said she’d been stabbed in such a way and it just looked… odd.”

“Okay,” Zayn frowns to match, confused. “Why don’t you get him first thing then. See if he says anything else to you.”

“Her arms were crossed,” CJ talks over him, staring straight ahead, like he’s trying to remember and hold onto everything said to him over the phone not even an hour before. “Over her body, like she was in a grave already, lying on her back with her hands up on her chest.”

Zayn has a surge of adrenaline then, that painful, rushing feeling that spreads from the stomach outwards, through the lymphnodes and nerve endings, to his face, armpits, groin, extremities. It’s a feeling he gets late at night, and early mornings, when his body jolts awake or keeps him from slipping under in the first place.

“CJ, where are we going?” Zayn tries to level his voice, his hands shaking like maple leaves.

“Some house in South O,” his partner blinks a few times, head still far away, “South 32nd Ave, near that church with the Mary statue.”

CJ doesn’t survey the energy in the car like Zayn can. He doesn’t realize the tsunami he’s just created.

Zayn’s lungs shrivel up like raisins, his irises the size of pin needles. And all at once, he feels thirteen again, like he’s falling down a well waiting for the inevitable landing, the splash to break his fall.

 

---

August 13, 2002
11:17 pm

Zayn’s pretty sure his mom is going to kill him.

Their bare feet look so dark on the bottoms, Zayn already dreads getting picked up in the morning. She’ll take one look at his feet and the scrapes on his knees, and know without a doubt that he walked around barefoot, outside and everything. She’ll whine about him getting tetanus, or worms, and probably kill him for it.

That's something he's come to expect from spending time with Jesse, in the Klein house. It's like the entire Klein family lived barefoot during the summer, their shoes lost in the front closet, or on the cracked front porch, or in the backyard that's small and yet a bottomless pit all at once.

Two months ago, Zayn lost his watch out in the Klein backyard, the one he got for his birthday, and his dad smacked him for it. It’s just that Zayn didn’t have a choice, and he really didn’t mean to lose it. Jesse had the Hope girls over that day, in the rickety playhouse meant for his little sisters. He made Zayn kiss Emma, while he kissed May, said their tongues had to be out the whole time. Zayn pretended to like it, but then he called out about playing hide and seek, rushed out of the plastic yellow and pink house, his watch long gone soon after. They were thirteen, way too old to play games, so he didn't get far before Jesse called him back, to stick his tongue out against May's instead.

Jesse is always barefoot. Tonight his soles look as black as tar, as he leans back in the wicker chair on the front porch. Zayn follows the movement to lean back in his own. Zayn loves Jesse's street, the way it's always moving. Omaha isn't small, it's pretty big compared to the rest of the state, but Zayn lives on the most boring block ever. No cars drive by, there aren't any neighborhood kids to run around with, all their neighbors old and dying. But Jesse's street has a double yellow line running down the center of it, so that means it's busy, cars whizzing past every few seconds, coming and going even in the dead of night. "Too busy," his mom always scoffs, whenever she drops him off to spend the night. "Please be careful and don't run out into traffic." As if they'd be dumb enough to do that, Zayn scoffs back with an eye roll.

Their feet bounce on the concrete ledge in front of them, their dirty toes visible to anyone driving down South 32nd, their sweaty faces on display.

That's another thing Zayn expects from spending time at the Klein house, a messy face. They either get mud on their cheeks from sitting in the overrun garden on the side of the house, or they slurp ice cream from the gas station across the street, their grubby hands paying the bored attendant for chocolate and strawberry with quarters Jesse finds in his mom's purse.

Jesse never has money of his own, since the Klein kids don't get allowances. But his mom always leaves her purse on the banister leading up the staircase. Jesse makes Zayn crouch down, his gross feet digging into Zayn's back, to step up to reach the cheap leather straps that hold the good money.

Tonight, it's late summer, only a week before school starts up for their eighth grade year, and the house behind their heads is quiet. Jesse's parents went to sleep early, before they even had all their kids home. Jesse's younger sister Cassie, only twelve, rolled in (barefoot) at nine, acting sassy with a hickey on her neck, chomping gum like she was in high school. Jesse called her nasty, they fought like a couple of cats, and Zayn had to pretend to look out for Cassie too, like a good older brother best friend. Zayn sometimes can't believe it, the way the Kleins can come and go as they please. His mom knows where he is at all times. He has zero freedom, whereas the Kleins run the neighborhood every day. Zayn can’t take a piss without his mom knowing. It's very annoying.

But now Jesse's brothers and sisters are asleep, the only sounds around them being the cars rushing past. They rub their stomachs, full from the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Jesse can whip up in thirty seconds flat. He always makes Zayn watch, to see how fast he can go, two for each of them. Zayn only ever gets one sandwich at a time at home, his mom says no kid needs more than one, but Jesse always makes him two. In a household where food can sometimes be scarce, Zayn figured they'd save it. He'd never say that out loud, he wouldn't want to embarrass his best friend, of course. Zayn just watches, when Jesse hands him a spoonful of peanut butter, each and every time, for Zayn to lick at while he slathers the strawberry jelly onto slices of Wonderbread.

They’d been counting cars for over an hour, the white count huge compared to the blue and black. Not as many red cars tonight, Zayn noted. Jesse shrugged from boredom, so Zayn shut his mouth for a while.

Jesse sits up eventually, cracking his knuckles like he’s about to tell Zayn a secret.

"You ever burn leaves?" Jesse asks, a blue car clunking from left to right in front of the three-story house this stretch of town is known for. Before it turns into the Hispanic part of town, the South O side painted in bright colors and smelling of fresh tortillas, it's all Catholic families south of Dodge Street. Omaha is a Catholic city in general, completely run by followers of the Pope. But this isn’t West O, where they have fancy churches and expensive Catholic schools. This is the poor side. It's a sea of dirty, white faces, families with no money and upturned noses when it comes to birth control, a million kids running around, like the Kleins. This is where Zayn first went to school and met Jesse, before his parents got "better jobs" and moved Zayn to the boring neighborhood towards Midtown.

"Leaves? Like in a pile?" Zayn wonders. His dad rakes the leaves in their front yard, and for the old people along their block, but he hasn't burned them in years. Maybe it's illegal or something.

"No, one at a time. Like burn the leaves with little holes, to make them look like bugs ate them away or something."

"Why would you do that?"

"Why not?” Jesse frowns at him, angry. Jesse did that sometimes, made Zayn feel dumb. Well, maybe not dumb, but just inexperienced. Every time he's done something Zayn hasn't, something Zayn's never heard of, he acts like it's something Zayn should've learned in kindergarten. “Have you done it or not?”

"Seen it done before," Zayn lies with a shrug, trying to play it off. That's how Zayn usually responds, to fake the feeling of "cool" he's never quite grasped.

"Wanna do it?"

"But how?" Zayn scrunches up his face, confused. What's the point of making holes in leaves? Where's the fun in it?

Jesse and his siblings tend to make their own fun, of course, Zayn's always known that. They don't have cable and the laptop on their dining table is for work only, per their dad Mike. Jesse has a big imagination, because he sort of has to. There's Jesse and Cassie, the oldest kids, who make forts from blankets in the front sunroom just off the living room on rainy days. They're only a year apart, their parents' "unexpected surprises" one after the other when they were barely twenty, before the "babies" came along, Cara, Mariah, and Mikey Jr., in three successive years. Zayn's an only child, the only kid in his house, no one to mix up his comics with, no stray hair bands in his bathroom, no five, six, and seven year olds begging him to take them on adventures. He's never told Jesse, but his absolute favorite part about coming to the Klein house is the noise level, the kids all willing to play, the banging of little feet going up and down the wooden staircase at all hours of the night.

The Kleins exist in a vacuum of noise, laughter and stomping, doors slamming and cars honking just outside. Zayn's house is so quiet, he heard a mouse run across the floor once.

"I'll show you," Jesse wiggles his eyebrows, jumping up to head inside. He slams the massive front door behind them, not even masking the sound of their movements. If Zayn had been up past his parents, he'd at least tiptoe. Jesse barges.

He tells Zayn to wait, as he takes the stairs two at a time up to his bedroom. Jesse has his own, the house is so big, and he thanks his lucky stars every day that he installed that lock. He laughs it off, when he tells other kids that his sisters tried to get in one day when he was jerkin it, that he almost pushed them down the stairs before installing a lock easy as anything. But Zayn knows the real reason because he was there that day: Jesse's brother took something special to him, something he bought with his own money, and ruined it. Zayn never has to worry about anyone ruining his stuff, so when he expressed his sympathy, he’s not sure he sold it.

Zayn hears Jesse banging around in his bedroom, the one smack dab in the middle of his siblings’ rooms: Cassie to his right, the little girls to his left, and Mikey’s room next to theirs. They must all sleep like the dead.

Zayn glances around the quiet main floor, the moonlight filtering in through the open blinds along the dining room. He loves the Klein house, he really does. He begs his mom to bring him over, to run around wild all afternoon, the lies he tells his parents about staying put, tucked in his back pocket. They run the neighborhood, they jump on the Hope’s trampoline, they watch scary as shit movies in the creepy only-half-done basement. And after those idiots flew some planes into the Trade Center in New York last year, Zayn likes disappearing in a neighborhood full of parents too busy and stressed to give him a passing glance. His nice "fancy" neighborhood has too many eyes, too many "old Republicans" giving the Maliks undeserving stares. He saw his mom cry over it once, soon after it happened, when someone threw up middle fingers on their way outside of a movie theater. So for Zayn, disappearing with the poor Catholics is nice.

He loves it here. He does. But as he glances to the front windows now, he feels the bead of sweat go down his back. There's a duality to this house, the big one on the corner of 32nd and Arbor. It's big and looming, and yet each room feels cramped, contained, suffocating. It's right on the edge of "bad South O," close to the interstate. Jesse's mom loves her kids, she kisses their dirty cheeks every night after dinner, but she never locks the front door. None of the kids have keys, they all just sort of come home "around" when the street lights come on. And they never close their front blinds.

Zayn's mom has a thing with blinds. The very second she notices the sun going down, Trisha purposefully walks around the house to close them all. She told Zayn people can see in, once it gets dark. "They can see us, but we only see our own reflections in the glass, love. Someone could be out in the bushes right now, peeping in, and we'd never know."

Zayn has thick wooden blinds covering his bedroom windows, and two sets of curtains.

But as he stands in the Klein living room, he eyes the sunroom, the one with Jesse's dad's old file folders and boxes, the one with two identical chaise lounges. It's a small room, connected to the house by double glass doors, totally surrounded in windows. It's where they sleep, where Jesse insists on having Zayn spend the night in the summer, when their lack of central air feels most suffocating. They open the windows and lay across from each other telling jokes until Jesse appears to collapse. He falls asleep like a dog does: fast and easy.

Zayn hates the sunroom. He hates all the windows, the ones not covered in blinds, the ones anyone can see in. Zayn can never sleep when they're in there, drowsy under thin blankets. Even when he’s exhausted and his eyes burn, he imagines eyes outside, creepy old men and serial killer clowns peeping in, watching his every move. Zayn hopes tonight they sleep up in Jesse's room. His bed is sure big enough, and Zayn's been careful not to touch. He'd never touch Jesse, his best friend, who is a normal boy who likes girls.

Just then Jesse bounds back down the stairs, his hands behind his back, his eyes wild. His parents let him grow his hair long, stick straight and the color of wet sand, brown with flecks of blond from the summer sun. He's getting taller, only a little taller than Zayn, his feet growing like weeds. He told Zayn that's a good sign, that his dick will be past his knees by the time they hit high school.

Zayn follows him out to the front porch, down the three concrete steps to the front walkway. The house barely has a yard to speak of, just a few steps from the sidewalk up to the porch and front door. The tree in the yard is too small, the leaves too brittle, so Zayn wonders where the hell these leaves big enough to burn holes into are gonna come from.

But Jesse reveals an old cigar box, the woodsy, smokey scent immersing them both immediately as they crouch over it. Inside is a stack of leaves, from an oak tree or maybe a maple from the park, a lighter, and two cigarettes.

"See, you light one and then you can burn holes," Jesse explains, holding a cigarette to his lips. He inhales like his dad does, and holds the leaf up to it. Zayn watches as Jesse burns a perfectly round circle there in the center, lit up red and orange around the edge. Zayn knows, as he looks through it and sees Jesse’s discerning eye, that it was for Jesse to assess Zayn through. He smirks as he tosses the leaf between their legs, and takes a second drag.

Zayn's not dumb. He always knows when Jesse has a bullshit excuse to do something. They took candy bars from Hy-Vee that summer, Jesse whispering that his dad paid for a few extra the last time, for this purpose. It's fine, he said so. He swore his mom wouldn't be mad if they took a twenty from her wallet, instead of quarters, since he did so many chores the weekend before. It's cool, Zee. He has excuses for his behavior, reasons for his crimes, and he seems to need them. Zayn lets Jesse have everything, so he pretends not to care, even as he sweated his ass off as they ran back to the house with stuffed pockets those times.

Jesse puffs the cigarette, inhaling and exhaling, the cherry burning bright on the end, and like the times before, Zayn gets it. "Burning holes in leaves" is code for "I want you to try smoking a cigarette, Zayn. Don’t mess it up."

Zayn plays it cool, like always, and reaches for it. He tries to keep his hand from shaking, the cigarette foreign and awkward between his pre-teen fingers. When it touches his lips, it's damp from Jesse's spit. It's right there, the way Jesse must taste. Zayn pretends not to be flustered and overwhelmed by that. He circles his mouth around it, just a little, before bringing it down. It doesn't feel like much.

"Suck it," Jesse nods, eyes wide, excited.

"I did," Zayn frowns.

"You just touched it, you didn't smoke. Try it, really try it."

"How?" Zayn whispers, nervous now. It's just the two of them, zero cars have passed since they came back outside, the block dead silent. The air is still sticky, the July heat hanging onto August for dear life, the humidity making their faces shine.

"Suck it like a straw. Your mouth will feel all full, but pull it into your lungs. Do it slow, breathe it in," Jesse nods again, fingers pushing at Zayn's wrist to keep going.

Zayn tries again, the spit slick cigarette between his lips. He follows instructions well, does as Jesse says, and inhales his first breath of smoke. He does it too fast, way too fast, and ends up coughing so hard he sees stars. He drops the cigarette entirely, his rough palms smacking the still-warm concrete, as he dry heaves between them.

Then he feels dizzy, the nicotine high swirling around behind his eyelids. He has to shift over, to sit on his butt before he can fall like an idiot.

He eventually blinks open his eyes, watering like he's crying, to see Jesse seamlessly and effortlessly smoking the end of the cig. He's done it before, maybe a million times, maybe with the Nielsen brothers directly across the street or Manny Lucero down the block. Zayn doesn’t ask. He doesn’t like to call attention to the things Jesse does when he’s not around, the people he hangs out with, their hoods up, the adult messes they ask for.

Jesse could make fun of him, they both know it. It was Zayn's first time and he failed. He didn't pull it off, the dare Jesse presented to him as a game, as something childish. Zayn waits for it, the smirk or the laugh Jesse can toss his way that makes him embarrassed some days, and then hard other ones, when he has to go home and touch himself under his covers.

"It gets easier," Jesse sniffs, pressing the embered end of it against the sidewalk.

"Yeah," Zayn shrugs, easy as anything, like he's not worried. He's always worried, though. He's also pretty sure he'll never smoke again. He doesn't like the ache it brings to his lungs.

"Did good," Jesse gives him props, Zayn practically preening under his gaze. He lifts a hand lazily, like it's no big deal, and touches his finger to Zayn's bottom lip. It's a quick tap, maybe a reminder to not be so sloppy with his spit next time, Zayn's not sure. But he feels it, sort of wishes it were Jesse's mouth against his lip, maybe his tongue.

Jesse grabs the cigar box and gets up. He whistles for Zayn to follow, so he does. He scurries up after him into the house, cursing under his breath as Jesse kicks the door shut without locking it, and steps towards the sunroom. Defeated, since they’re not going up to Jesse’s bed after all, Zayn sighs. They crawl up onto the lounge chairs, their feet filthy against the fabric, and talk about school. They're assigned to the same home room with Mrs. Neidermier, the science teacher so old they're sure she won't hear them if they talk shit from the back of the classroom.

Jesse promises that either way, they’ll sit at a lab table together, so they can doodle in Zayn’s notebook. They like to do it back and forth, to add their drawings together, to make a scene.

Jesse falls asleep first like always, his left hand up on his face. It's something he's always done, covers his face as he sleeps, like lingering muscle memory of when he used to suck his thumb as a baby. His forefinger and thumb make an L-shape over his eyes, his other fingers curled around his nose, his face hidden from Zayn's view. Zayn only watches him for a few seconds, this older and cooler person curled up like a kid, who chooses to hang out with him. But he can’t stare at Jesse, it’s creepy to do that, so he tries to shut his eyes.

Zayn can never sleep in the sunroom; he can't rid the sensation of people looking through the windows, down on him at that very moment. But he vows to try, exhausted and spent from the day. He can sleep, if he wills it hard enough. So with one last look at his best friend, the stale scent of cigarette smoke stuck to his thin shirt, he pulls the maroon blanket up over his head.

That's the last time he sees Jesse Klein alive.

Hours later, when Zayn discovers his best friend’s body, he screams until his nicotine-laced lungs ache.

 

---

March 19, 2019
7:47 am

It looks the same, unfortunately. The Klein house, large and assuming, the cracked beige paint peeling from the concrete walls, cheaper looking than some of the nice brick houses along 32nd. The white trim along the windows, the painted white steps, the old flowerpots with dying plants on either stoop.

It’s an old neighborhood Zayn knows well, the side of town the Catholics took as their own fifty years before. The houses are big, a few even look like mansions from the outside. But alongside the shitty residences, the small ones with busted screens and slanting porches, they’re all the same: old with cracking foundations, pretty only to the unknowing eye. These families, the ones who have lived and died in Omaha, with at least a half a dozen kids filling each second floor, know better. These houses are burdens, money sucking tax holes, places with loose floorboards and broken A/Cs. Even the nicest looking houses give off the air of tawdry elegance.

But the house also feels different, this corner house Zayn swore was much larger whenever he looked up at it as a kid. The tree in the yard has grown well past the roof now, climbing towards the sun. There's a small shed built into the hill, half covered on the side, accessible from Arbor Street. A back fence, wood, old, to hide the yard. A white screen door now installed to accompany the old wooden front door. A bench on the porch, instead of the chairs Zayn and Jesse used to kick back on to count the cars at night.

It's the same as it was the last day Zayn saw it: covered in police tape, crawling with men in uniform, a group of bystanders or witnesses needing to be interviewed, a coroner van ready and waiting to take the body away. Overcast. No wind. Officer Starzak, the man only a few years older than Zayn, early 30s, paces up and down the short walkway, hands hooked over his belt.

Once they're out of the car, CJ starts to cross the street, dodging the flow of traffic, to get closer. Zayn waves him off, says he needs a quick cigarette, and doesn't look up at the house again until he can feel the heat of it between his fingers. The attic windows, the three of them side by side, are uncovered, just plain glass like how the Kleins had them. Maybe Jesse's parents liked to see the moon from their bed, maybe they were too lazy or preoccupied with five kids to care.

The house was built in 1915, never had any major additions or problems, and until Jesse, nothing bad had ever been reported inside. Zayn spent his high school years equally afraid and obsessed with the property. He thought he heard ghosts that night, convinced himself the noises he heard weren’t real people, that it was justifiable fear that kept him from leaving the sun room to investigate. He swore it was ghosts, instead of what really happened, and kids were allowed to be afraid of ghosts. Ghosts are an easy fear.

But no one died in 2420 until Jesse Klein, until August 14th, 2002. Zayn checked. There were no ghosts. The sounds Zayn heard that night in his hazy half-sleep were real and not his imagination. The muffled voices, scuffing of feet, swishing of clothes. The sounds of a teenage boy being murdered mere feet from his best friend.

Zayn takes the last drag of his Camel Silver and savors the smoke, the nicotine he hardly feels after so many years of addiction. But it's almost there, he can taste the high, barely, and crosses the street.

Starzak stands with CJ in the busted yard, their arms crossed, heads nodding. CJ has a pretty good memory, doesn't write it all down like Zayn does. Zayn planned on talking to the roommate, or Starzak, to get a feel of it first. But he just nods to CJ and heads up the stairs, because he has to see. He has to step inside the house that's plagued his nightmares since puberty, the place where he first encountered a pool of dark, sticky blood settled into the old floorboards.

A blond man sits on the front stairs with his head in his hands, in a pair of ratty jeans and a worn-in white tank top. Roommate 1, most likely. Zayn should stop, should offer condolences and then immediately get his statement. He should find out exactly how many roommates there are, who owns the house, start to wrap his head around it. But he has to see.

He feels CJ behind him, close, as he crosses the open threshold. The scene investigators have set up a few yellow stand lights, to illuminate the atrocity before them in the small front room, a hop and a jump from the staircase, a few steps from the living room couch facing the old fireplace. CSU moves in a tight circle, various team members taking pictures, swabbing, collecting, assessing the body of a human woman who now is but a difficult puzzle to solve, a difficult game of “Operation.”

"Destiny May Houthakker," CJ's voice drifts from behind Zayn, quietly. "Age nineteen. Time of death, sometime between four and six a.m. Multiple stab wounds."

CJ was right before: very pretty. Thin, blonde, blue eyes open towards the ceiling, glazed and still. Her hair fans out around her skull, almost too perfectly, like the rays of a sun a child might draw. Skin waxy and not quite hardened, rigor not all the way set in. Wearing small, gray athletic shorts and a white tank top, no bra, barefoot.

A few hours ago, just a few seconds before in the span of a lifetime, she was alive, breathing, warm. And now Destiny is nothing more than a job for them, the swarm of people around her, assessing. CJ clears his throat and nods down to her, to get the attention of everyone in the room. He does that sometimes, tries to remind their team to slow down, that she’s a person. To be respectful.

“Destiny was found by a roommate,” CJ shoves his hands in his pockets, as everyone stills, to look down at her underneath the harsh lights. “She was a nice girl. A real nice girl.”

Shayla McCabe, the young woman from O’Neil in the blue CSU windbreaker, the one Zayn had dinner with once, nods at CJ with a reverent expression. The camera between her gloved hands snaps away again, as they all get back to work.

Zayn tries to be reverent, too. He really tries to be respectful and honorable, to start asking the appropriate questions of the team, to get the ball rolling. He tries to do his job. But he can hardly breathe, the longer he stares down at her. Defensive wounds on her hands, arms crossed over her chest like she's in an old-time Dracula movie, a slice to her left cheek just below her eye. Two stab wounds, one in her lower abdomen where an appendix scar would sit, one to her chest above her right breast.

Destiny May Houthakker, dead and cold, lays in exactly the same position as Jesse Klein once did, seventeen years ago in this exact spot, in almost identical clothing. Identical crime, identical crime scene, in the place Zayn first encountered the feel of sticky, maroon blood. It’s the substance he’s been drowning in pretty much ever since, either in his sleep or while at work. His job is blood now. His livelihood depends on it.

He stepped in it back then, his best friend's blood. He can still sometimes feel the warmth of it between his toes when he's just woken up from a dream.

He feels the wave of nausea, the bile and saliva in his throat alerting him of impending vomit. He takes the few steps back, is out the front door, and to the street before the coffee is up and out. He kneels in the grass along the curb, crunchy and barren after a harsh winter, and tries to breathe. His colleagues, the entire team of people behind him, must look on in wonderment. Zayn's never let a dead body get him sick before.

But they don't know. They don't know about Jesse Klein or Zayn's past here. No one does.

 

---

August 14, 2002
6:44 am

It happened so fast.

Within the span of three minutes, everything Zayn had ever known was suddenly different. Changed. The red current that was supposed to stay locked up tight beneath Jesse’s skin, the life force that carried oxygen to his brain, the tacky, iron-smelling liquid Zayn never should’ve seen, was there on the floor.

It all came to be after a restless night’s sleep when Zayn woke up needing to pee.

Looking back, he vaguely remembered hearing sounds in the living room that night, while he was asleep. Movement and the swishing of fabric. Like a few puppies play fighting, rustling around on the floor, maybe in a pile of laundry, shuffling and shifting. He remembered blinking a few times, still half asleep, peeking out of the blanket, his eye up near the window ledge, and seeing the man in the front yard. He was in a black sweatshirt and his backpack was broken, one of the straps dragging behind him as he ran away. He remembered thinking it was a dream, that it was stupid, there wasn’t a real man out there to peer through the glass at him. His eyes drooped.

A few hours after that, he remembered waking up having to pee. He remembered looking across to the other lounger in the sunroom, to see it empty. It wasn’t a surprise; Jesse sometimes slept-walked up to his bedroom, forgetting that Zayn was there for sleepovers. Zayn followed him a few times, scared out of his mind to be on the main floor alone, with unlocked doors, wide open windows and glass panes for anyone to look through. He’d crawl in beside Jesse and curl up under his thin comforter, exhausted, finally able to shut his eyes in peace.

Jesse forgot Zayn this time, left him on his own, to go sleep in his bed. Or maybe he went to pee himself, and was on his way back down from the bathroom on the second floor.

Zayn’s bladder didn’t care either way, so he made his way through the double glass doors, quiet as anything, rubbing at his eyes.

His toes felt it first, before he could see or smell it. He stepped right in it, the blood. He remembered later how it was cool against his skin, thicker than the movies made it look, tacky like Elmer’s glue. It looked like something from a busted pipe, everywhere, but not like water. Not thin or gushing, or even moving. It was still.

Jesse was busted. His body was ripped through like it was nothing, like all that made him up was a thin, fatty sausage casing with meat stuffed inside. That’s what Zayn’s mind supplied him with later: we’re all just sausage links, disgusting bratwursts, red and angry meat, muscle and tissue and tendons, our skin a laughably weak shield against an outside force. Against something like a sharp knife.

It took him one full minute to process the blood between his toes, the body of his best friend laid out on the floor, skin almost translucent, his empty, open eyes staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed like a vampire. He looked the same and different, in his soft grey shorts and white tank top. But now it was all red, stained and slashed, splotches of it all across his body. Dead.

Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead.

Zayn screamed it over and over, sure that the neighbors would hear, his voice carrying up the staircase to Jesse’s siblings’ bedrooms. He prayed his weak and feeble voice, not yet affected by puberty or manhood, would wind its way up the second set of stairs, to the Kleins in their attic master, so far away, not close to their kids, too far too far too far.

He screamed so loudly, slapped his hands over his dirty face so he wouldn’t have to see the scene anymore, curled up in a ball behind the armchair by the fireplace.

Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead.

When they finally shook at him, grabbed his arms to see what happened, screamed in his face to explain, to wail about their dead son, he couldn’t speak.

Zayn couldn’t move until his dad came and lifted him up. Yaser held Zayn like a baby, Zayn’s entire body monkeyed around his baba’s torso. He moved his head a fraction of an inch, when Yaser asked if he wanted to change before they got into the car. He had a fresh pair of shorts in his fist, since Zayn wet himself the second his best friend’s blood licked its way up his foot.

---

 

March 19, 2019
7:56 am

CJ's warm hand presses against Zayn's shoulder, as the other hands him a bottle of water. CJ is always warm, everything about him radiates warmth. Zayn is cold, too cold, hard and angular, bad-cop to CJ's good-cop. Zayn tries to wipe his mouth and gain back composure, as a cloud shifts overhead.

Sensing it’s not the time to discuss Zayn getting sick, CJ then hands over his folio and print-outs about Destiny: her driver's license, contact info, and next of kin. He stares at Zayn with concerned eyes, a look that says you don't have a good feeling about this either, do you. Zayn shakes his head, rids himself of all thought. It's time to work. It's time to delve into Destiny's life and close friends, the people milling about in the yard, the ones he'll have to call and notify, the man on the porch. Nine times out of ten, in a close, intimate stabbing case like this, inside a home, one of them either did it or knows who did it. It's time for Zayn to do his job.

It's time to pretend like he's never been inside this house.

He quickly and efficiently heads back to the house, eyes averted from the techs and badges around him, as if he's just hung over. He hasn't had a drink since college, but none of them know that either. “Hung over” is Zayn’s go-to excuse for when he looks especially wrung out and dead-in-the-eyes while at work. People understand “hung over.”

Destiny still has a ways to go before she's transported from the scene, so Zayn decides to use the time wisely. Roommate 1 looks up at him from the front steps, curious about the puking detective with the dark hair and skinny tie, his face pale and blank. Zayn tries to warm himself up, tries to put on his face of courage and complacency, something he learned from Jesse. Jesse could make anyone agree, go along with a plan, tell a secret.

"I'm Detective Malik," Zayn holds out his hand, the guy still staring at him in his thin shirt. He's probably freezing in the early March air, but he doesn't rub his arms, doesn't curl his feet up, doesn't move much, probably too numb to notice.

"Niall Horan."

"Mr. Horan," Zayn sits next to him, to level them out. "Can you tell me what happened this morning?"

Roommate 1, Niall Horan, crosses his fingers in his lap, making himself smaller. Zayn knows how to read people. He can pick up on small motions, eye movements, hitches in breath. Whereas most people see the world as a landscape or scene, Zayn sees it like a Pollock painting, a mess of color, a swirl of chaos, that only makes sense up close, full of incremental details. Zayn is good with details. He's good at seeing people like Niall Horan, the close ones with overwhelming grief. Zayn has been Niall Horan, as well. First on the scene. Witness to the deceased.

Niall doesn't speak right away, his bottom lip red and bitten to shreds. Zayn doesn't have any alarms going off, nothing telling him to look harder. He keeps still and waits it out.

"I found her," Niall mumbles eventually, voice hoarse. "I got home from a party this morning, fucking exhausted, just wanting my bed. And she was there right inside the front door. I - I was the one to call 9-1-1."

Zayn nods. He figured as much. He looked a lot like Niall Horan the day he found Jesse, body so small and tight like he'd been trapped in an old magician's box without oxygen.

"I know you may have told this to the officers who arrived first," Zayn says quietly. "And I know it's hard to keep saying the same thing over and over. But it really helps me, so thank you."

"Yeah," Niall looks to his lap.

"I have to ask if you touched or moved Destiny today, Niall."

"No."

"You didn't check her pulse, or feel her wrist? Didn't get close?"

Sometimes people forget those first few minutes, the decisions they make before they wonder why. Cop shows and crime novels have taught us to keep our distance from dead bodies, the very air around them precious to crime scene investigators. We've been conditioned to back away, to call for help, to close our eyes so we don't disturb evidence. It’s how most people think they’d react, when in the unfortunate position Niall’s found himself in. People like to think they’d be smart about it.

But we're human beings, and more often than not, those closest to the victims need to feel like they've done something to help. They forget the crime shows and run to check wrists and necks, they shake their loved ones, kneel in blood, move clothing, to try. Even when it's too late.

Zayn stares at Niall harder, leans in to get his point across. He can be delicate, there's a time for delicacy, but now's the time to get it out before Niall loses the details. He needs to know if Niall left parts of himself behind, skin cells or fingerprints, disturbances in her placement that will need to be explained later.

"No, I didn't touch her," Niall’s voice wavers, his eyes wet. "She... I knew she was dead already. I could tell. I didn't -- I couldn't touch her, I don't -- I don't want to know what a dead person feels like."

They’re heavy. They feel like a bag of wet sand, without the coarseness.

Zayn doesn't say that out loud. He instead starts to take notes, a page dedicated to Roommate 1, Niall Horan.

"Can you walk me through some things? Can you tell me about this morning?"

Zayn jots notes and listens intently to Niall's alibi, the alibi he's asking for without really asking. Niall nods, must understand, because he does Zayn one better and starts from the night before.

Niall Horan, age 25 from Omaha, one of the renters, got home from his coaching job on March 18th at around 9:30. He took a shower, quickly changed, and drove to his girlfriend's house on 42nd and Farnam. He saw Destiny on his way out the door at around 10:15. He whispers that he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. His girlfriend and her roommates had a low-key party, with at least a dozen people, who will definitively say that Niall Horan was not in the residence at the time of the murder. When he walked in the unlocked front door at approximately 6:26, he discovered the body.

Niall palms at his cheeks, a gesture Zayn would peg as nervous, if not for the look on his face. It's not an expression of guilt, or even confusion. It's one of grief. Helplessness. It’s one of quiet amazement at being a person who can now say they've been in this position, their eyes the first to see the pool of blood from a friend. He's officially a cog in the opening scene of a "Law & Order" episode, the bit actor paid a few hundred dollars to discover a dead body. It's his life now. Zayn grips the paper with Destiny's driver's license, her smiling face staring back at him. Niall looks away from it, and Zayn knows without even having to check the alibi. Roommate 1 did not kill Destiny Houthakker

"Did Destiny say anything when you said goodbye last night? Anything different in her mood? Anything like that?" Zayn clicks his pen.

"She seemed the same. Sweet as ever, you know? People gave her shit, or like, looked down on her, because of her job. But that wasn't fair. She was a good person," Niall nods, face serious at using the past tense to describe Destiny.

"And what was her job?"

"Stripper,” he sniffs. “At the Spearmint Rhino."

Zayn purses his lips at that, agitated and relieved all at once. At first glance, a pretty white girl from a small town up north gets stabbed in South O, and it's news. It could very well be picked up nationally, "Who Killed Our Destiny?" headlines, with Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell chiming in about the murder of a young woman in an already-crime-ridden city. Zayn may have had his face plastered across the country, the lead investigator set to find the vicious killer of such a sweet Midwestern girl.

But that won't happen, not now. No one cares much about a dead whore. That's what they'd paint her as. Pretty white girls who get stabbed are either virgins or whores, and now that Destiny (“of course her name was Destiny” they’d say) is a dead stripper, Zayn is on his own. If he doesn't push and claw for evidence, it will all disappear, departments will get busy with other cases, his bosses will focus on the next gang murders instead. Zayn knows, suddenly and irrevocably, that if he doesn't do his job right, and quickly, Destiny Houthakker’s memory will cease to exist.

He can't help but feel the relief though, at not having anyone breathing down his neck. It's even more of a relief that not many people will clue into the case, since he'd rather no one read up on the house and discover its past, Zayn's past, and connect the two cases together. Whatever the link between Jesse Klein and Destiny Houthakker, he'd rather it be kept close to his chest.

Zayn clicks his pen again. Stripper, he writes in a margin, along with Spearmint Rhino. It's one of the bigger strip clubs in the city, near the airport, not known for its cleanliness. Girls like Destiny from small towns, set on moving to the city to find themselves, end up at places like the Spearmint Rhino, sadly.

"Did she ever complain about customers? Any men ever come around here? A boyfriend?"

"None that I ever saw. She kept it all pretty separate, I guess."

"Were you close?"

Niall shakes his head in anguish.

"We all just rent rooms, you know? It's like... we're roommates, but not. We're more like neighbors, you know? We just share a kitchen and bathroom is all. I just... she was always really nice. I didn't... I don't know much about her."

Zayn knows he has what he needs from Niall, that this is about all he'll be able to give. Zayn needs to keep going, to interview the rest of the renters. Zayn knows this house like the back of his hand, knows which stairs creak, which closets make the best hiding places, the hidden compartment next to the fridge where Marcy Klein kept the mop bucket and Pine-Sol. He knows it has four main bedrooms on the second floor, and a master bedroom in the redone attic. That leaves three more people to look into.

Niall nods to Zayn's folio, to the notes he's taken, the scribbles about roommates, rooms, renters.

"Dennis in the attic, he's been out of town for two weeks. Visiting his dad. And Ellen Marco, she rents the room right next to mine, she's never here on Tuesday and Wednesday nights."

Zayn nods, hurries to get it down.

"So just you, Destiny, and one other person to account for? Were they home with Destiny last night?"

Niall nods, his face serious. He glances over to the few people in the yard, the neighbors and passerbys hidden from view by the investigators and cops near the police tape. Zayn forgot how busy 32nd could be in the mornings, up the street from a Catholic grade school, close to the overpass leading to I-80. It's an area of busybody moms, carpools and kids walking to school, the small printing company just across Arbor Street opening its doors for the day.

Just then, some of the people in the crowd shift. A shorter man with brown hair and sharp teeth steps to the side, as Zayn's eye catches another man behind him. Tall, long hair, eyes scrunched up from either the shifting clouds or grief or pure fascination at Zayn and Niall sitting on the steps.

"Harry Styles. Harry was here last night," Niall says, turning to face Zayn. "You should talk to Harry."

They lock eyes and Zayn knows. He looks back over to the man staring at him, the one Niall can't take his eyes off either, and clicks his pen.

This kid more like, the one with the tattoos and nervous hands, scratching his biceps, shifting nervously, is someone to look at, the only person at home when Destiny was killed.

Harry Styles doesn't look like a sociopath or a killer, so he probably is one.

 

---

March 19, 2019
8:04 am

Zayn pulls CJ to the side of the porch, away from Niall, their heads close. He instructs him to clear the scene, to help the badges move the neighbors and strangers away from the yard. Harry Styles should be brought onto the porch, once Niall has been cleared to leave. Zayn gives CJ a look, one that says the two renters should not cross paths, or be left alone to talk. No one talks to Harry Styles until Zayn does.

When he steps back into the house, he averts his eyes from Destiny, for now. She's still a person, someone he's been assigned to bring justice to, but he needs to be clinical about it first. He needs to pick up the details, the small kinks in the chain, to be able to do right by her. He needs to assess her, her life, her surroundings.

It's like he's been transported back in time as he climbs the stairs, pulling on a pair of gloves. The wood is the same, the stairs make all the same sounds. The only difference is the lack of pictures lining the stairwell, the black and white 5x10s that featured the five Klein children.

Mike and Marcy were young parents, inexperienced and often overwhelmed. They forgot to lock doors, they never signed a school form on time, and their kids singlehandedly kept up the lice population throughout the greater Omaha metro at any given time. They were hurried, rushing a kid to practice or a doctor's appointment, without remembering to bring the others, who were then left to their own devices, running around the neighborhood like it was 1958.

Often times, Marcy got caught up at the small paper company she and her husband bought out from her dad. They worked hard to keep that business afloat, to make her parents proud. Sometimes they didn’t have the time needed to take care of five babies. So Jesse made dinner for his siblings some nights. Zayn thinks about Jesse’s "gumbo" as he climbs the last few steps, the pot of ground beef, noodles, and ketchup that could feed the Kleins, and Zayn, for days on end. He can't help but smile at the memory. That gumbo, like so many of Zayn’s experiences with the Kleins, had a duality to it: the slop was both revolting and fucking delicious all at once.

But Mike and Marcy loved their kids fiercely. Marcy had a massive camera, some big expensive one not unlike what Shayla downstairs uses to capture the minute details of Destiny's hardening body. Marcy brought it everywhere, tucked it inside the 10-passenger family van the Kleins rolled around in, took pictures of her kids constantly. She had photos all over the house, nice looking ones in black frames.

The walls in this house are empty now, Zayn notes. This is no longer a family residence, a place full of children's laughter and sticky hand prints near the kitchen phone. It's bare, a place early-twenty-somethings rent when they move away from their parents in West O and the surrounding towns made up of pure suburb.

Thankfully, Destiny didn't rent Jesse's old room. Zayn isn't sure he can face Jesse's bedroom, to see if the cracks in the ceiling were still there, the ones they stared at when they dreamed about being in the Army someday. As he steps fully to the second floor, he realizes the only open door is to his right, Cassie's old room. One of the techs has already made his way around the room, snapping pictures of anything deemed relevant, giving Zayn a quick nod as they pass.

The first thing Zayn takes note of, his pen clicking in his hand a little too quickly, is the tone of the room itself. Young. Childish. Adolescent. Thin, frilly pink curtains over the windows. A worn in light pink bedspread, bed unmade, sheets a mess. Slept in. Makeup and perfume on an old wide dresser, something from a yard sale or Goodwill, most likely. Magazines, used tissues, a laptop, some chocolate on the nightstand. A vase with days-old pink roses, their petals wilting slightly. If Zayn didn't know any better, this was still Cassie's room, the room of a pre-teen girl trying to memorize Cosmo tips, practicing with lipstick to try and keep it off her teeth.

CJ comes in about then, as Zayn carefully side-steps around the piles of clothes on the wood floor. Not much furniture besides the bed and dresser, just the nightstand and one chair in the corner, a few boxes not unpacked after a move.

"Young," CJ frowns, eyes bouncing around the drafty room.

"Very," Zayn nods back, agreeing.

"She's from Valentine," CJ pulls on gloves of his own. "I called her parents from the car, in case any of the news stations show up. Her mom and step-dad. Mom cried a bit."

"Just a bit?"

"She said they haven't spoken in awhile. Should be in town by tomorrow."

Zayn picks up a notebook from the floor, praying for a journal or address book. He flips a few pages to find it completely blank, so he tosses it back to the floor. So Destiny left home and hasn't spoken to her parents recently. Only nineteen, alone in Omaha, renting a random room in a house full of strangers.

He clicks his pen to make a note. Alone. Lonely. Childish. Easily manipulated, trusting, sweet?

"Roommate 1 says she was nice. A good person who kept her work separate from home," Zayn mutters to himself. He uses his pen to shift a curtain, looks out the window towards the backyard. The shitty swing set is gone, the plastic playhouse he had his first kiss in long gone as well. "Now that I've done my own sweep, let's have CSU take her phone and laptop in, see if she's been talking to anyone."

"Done. The other roommate is on the porch for you, when you're ready."

"I want to go to the strip club today," Zayn makes his way back to the door, eyes on the warped wood beneath his feet so he won't be tempted to look at Jesse's door.

He only looks up to see how the bedroom doors have changed, no longer wide open and bursting with childhood mementos and toys, but locked tight. They each have new door handles, silver ones that don't match the original wood, that open with individual keys.

Jesse had a lock on his door from the inside, something he rigged together that summer. Zayn knew Jesse had a hard time with privacy, in the Klein house. He had his own wooden chest at the end of his bed; his dad got him a padlock for it and everything, to store all of his precious goods. His siblings were nosy, always in his room poking around because they thought everything he had should be theirs too. So Jesse put a slide lock on the inside of the door. Zayn biked with him to the hardware store just up on Center and then watched as Jesse screwed it into the wood, tears in his eyes, after Mikey tore through his room that morning and ripped up his favorite poster. Jesse was a good older brother, the best, but even he had his limits. Zayn loved the Klein house for its noise and chaotic energy, whereas Jesse couldn't wait to get away from it, into his quiet oasis.

The door stares at him, but he doesn't want CJ to see him get upset.

Zayn shakes his head and stomps back down the stairs.

---

 

August 14, 2002
7:29 am

Zayn’s first time in a police station is a blur.

His baba holds his hand so firmly as they wait in an interrogation room, the tips of his fingers have started to turn red. Angry red. Blood red, the blood pumping in vain to his tiny extremities, the circulation getting cut off. He has to shake his hand away, frantically, his first panic attack washing over him before he ever even knew what one was.

His mom tries to hold him close soon after, to calm him down against her chest, but then he envisions his blood supply getting cut off from his lungs, or maybe even his brain if she holds him by the neck tight enough. He could choke, someone could choke him on accident. Zayn’s mom always holds too tight, even when he was a baby and her own mother told her she swaddled him too tightly in a blanket.

Zayn pushes at both of them, afraid of what their hands could do if they squeeze him too much. He doesn’t want his blood to stop running the right way, the way it’s supposed to. What if one of them scratch him on accident and it starts to flow out, down his arm, onto the linoleum floor?

What if someone steps in it?

The detectives try to get him to talk that morning, but his mom insists he needs a little more time. He sits in the corner, on the floor in a little ball like he did in the Klein living room, and holds his hands over his eyes.

---

 

March 19, 2019
8:20 am

Roommate 2, Harry Styles, sits on the bench on the front porch. Zayn wants to survey him a bit before stepping out there himself, so he purposefully peers at him through the front window.

Zayn will run his name soon enough, to get his background. But he wants to hear from him first, this tall young man with disgusting hair and ringed fingers. He’s a musician or bartender, Zayn’s sure of it. He even nods to himself. He’s good at seeing career choices, or lack thereof, in the people he questions. Most likely, Roommate 2 is well known on some Omaha circuit, either for his music, or bar skills, or cock. He seems the type, to be known for his dick. Maybe he’s been sleeping with Destiny. Maybe he’s the jealous type, or the complacent type to get depressed when dumped. Maybe he dumped Destiny and she was heartbroken.

Maybe Destiny was pregnant. Zayn frowns. It’s a terrible thought to have, hoping for a dead girl to now be a dead girl with child. But it would be convenient, to have a fetus to test. Whoever knocked her up would be lead suspect number one in her death.

Zayn clicks his pen, itching to make notes, but decides he’s getting entirely too ahead of himself. He’s being unfair. He needs to shake Harry Styles’ hand before he decides if he’s guilty.

Someone taps Zayn’s shoulder, to get his attention. He turns and stares down at Destiny’s body, now more firm and rigored. They’ll need to put her in a body bag soon.

“The blood is contained,” Dalton nods to Zayn. “No major splatter on any surface or wall.”

“So how do we think it happened?” Zayn hears himself ask, even though he already knows the answer.

“No signs of forced entry. The door was either unlocked and someone came in, or she opened it for someone she knew.”

Or it was her roommate from just upstairs, the man sitting on the porch. Maybe he made it look like someone from outside did it.

Zayn’s head starts to ache, already trying to piece together how this is happening, how someone knows about Jesse and is now recreating it. And why.

CJ sidles up to Zayn’s right, nodding along. He removes his gloves with two sharp snaps, and Zayn almost tells him off for it. The sound hurts his ears for some reason, the harshness of it, the lights too bright around them. All of his senses feel like they’re in overdrive, like the first time he stepped foot in Times Square. Sensory overload. But he needs to follow along, he needs to keep this all in his head.

“The marks on her hand and cheek indicate a struggle. She tried to fight him off. But the wounds to her chest and abdomen were deep. She bled out.”

One of the girls on the floor inspecting the underside of Destiny’s head can’t help but click her tongue at that. The coroner, Dr. Knight pushes his glasses up his nose and chimes in.

“Two knife wounds in two very painful spots,” he sighs sadly, closing a file folder. “Destiny bled out slowly. I’ll do a full report after the autopsy, maybe she was struck over the head, but the blood doesn’t indicate that… I’ll see if she had drugs in her system, anything out of the ordinary and let you know. But cause of death seems to be from a clean stabbing. A slow one, right here on the floor.”

“An agonizing death,” Zayn mutters under his breath. That’s what they said about Jesse, too. The trial lawyers made sure to emphasize that: it was slow and painful, his lung pierced straight through, his lower intestine torn into pieces. It was a cruel death. Agonizingly slow. Both of their bodies gave out the same way: gradually, in a trickle, surrounded by their own blood.

They both died here, gasping for air, crying, probably begging God to make it stop. Zayn wonders that sometimes, what Jesse thought about as death overtook him and became imminent. He wonders if he tried to call out Zayn’s name, just a few feet away, as the man who murdered him stood over him, waiting for his last breath.

Zayn didn’t know Destiny, but now he’ll have her to wonder about, too. Maybe she prayed. Or called out for her mom, as her own killer watched her drown in her own blood.

He realizes he’s been standing still for too long, that the eyes around the room have all landed on him. He blinks and tries to focus.

“What?”

“I just said we’re about to move her,” Knight pats his arm, worried. “Unless you wanted us to keep her here for a few minutes longer.”

Zayn sniffs and gestures towards Roommate 2 on the porch, readying himself.

“Yeah, give me a few. I want to see how he reacts as you wheel her out,” Zayn says on an exhale.

“And us?” Dalton questions, nodding to his team.

“We’ve documented the scene and bedroom, right? Everything?”

“Yes,” Shayla nods, holding up her camera.

“Good,” Zayn unzips his folio, finally ready for Harry. “Bag up the sheets on the bed. Looks slept in. Maybe someone was over with her last night. Swab her room, see if we get any fluids.”

The look he gives Dr. Knight doesn’t go unnoticed, the one that says they’ll need an extensive rape kit and pelvic exam. That’s the one difference between Jesse and Destiny, besides their age. Destiny is a woman. And she’ll need to be investigated as such.

“Good call,” CJ adds, pointing to Dalton. “Show him, D.”

And then there it is, the other glaring difference between the bodies of Jesse Klein and Destiny Houthakker, since Jesse was a child and didn’t have anything on him when he died. Dalton holds up a clear evidence bag. Inside is an unopened condom.

“It was in her back pocket,” he shakes it slightly. “Maybe she was going to meet someone?”

Zayn makes a quick note of it. Boyfriend. Male. Meeting up? Letting him in? Barefoot, shoes kicked off near the door, wasn’t going far.

When Zayn looks towards the front window, to glance at Harry Styles’ wide shoulders through the glass, he instead finds Harry staring back at him. He’s fully turned around on the bench now, fingers digging into the wood of it, eyes wide as he realizes he can see the whole scene from this vantage point.

CJ shifts slightly, purposefully, so that Destiny’s body is in full view of the window. Harry doesn’t even blink, as his eyes bounce from Destiny to Zayn, over and over. Zayn clicks his pen and pats CJ’s arm. He thinks CJ deserves a raise for that alone.

 

---

March 19, 2019
8:22 am

Harry Styles could crack a walnut with his thighs, Zayn decides as he sits next to him on the porch. He’s the deceptively strong type, muscular in all the right places, broad but still thin. He surveys Zayn right back, his eyes still so wide and pleading. He’s sad, Zayn can tell, but nervous. Maybe he’s already figured out how fucked he is.

“I’m Detective Malik,” Zayn holds out his hand, ready to assess a handshake. He can’t let his earlier freak out panic attack get in the way of this. He has to focus. He has to shake Harry’s hand.

“Harry,” he says quietly, and then to clarify, “Styles.”

Zayn grips Harry’s hand. Strong, but not too strong. No limp wrist. Firm, clammy palm. Zayn wants to make a note of it, the way it makes him feel on guard and yet open to the conversation. Zayn can gauge a lot from a simple handshake, and he can tell that Harry can make or break this right now. What he can’t tell is if Harry really did it, if he killed the sweet girl on the other side of the door, if he knows about Jesse. If he knows about me.

There’s no way this is all a coincidence and if Zayn thought about it harder at the present moment, there’s a fair chance he’d be curled up in a ball in their car across the street. So he can’t think about that just yet, and instead needs to figure Harry Styles out.

"Mr. Styles," Zayn clicks his pen menacingly, ready for his notes. "Can you tell me what happened this morning?"

Zayn knows Harry didn’t discover Destiny. He knows how Harry should answer this, as someone who was in the house at the time of the murder. Now it’s all up to Harry, to either dig his own grave, or get himself out of one. Zayn nods, to tell him to get a move on. Harry bites his lip, the tremble of it probably visible from space.

“You already talked to Niall, yeah? So like… she was stabbed inside.”

Zayn blinks at him.

“I was in my room,” Harry wipes at his mouth. “I was in my room all night.”

“All night?”

“I had a gig downtown last night, at Mr. Toad’s,” Harry nods. “I got home at like midnight. And then I went into my room, locked the door, and fell asleep.”

So a musician, Zayn almost chuckles to himself, even though it’d be highly inappropriate. He makes a note though, so Harry can see. He’ll have to check that fact, to ask around.

“Mr. Toad’s.”

“Uh, yeah right by Barry O’s?”

“I know where it is.”

“Right.”

Zayn narrows his eyes and cocks his head. He wants Harry to know he’s assessing him. He needs to make him nervous, before he can lawyer up and ask to do this at the station. If Harry was smart at all, he already would have.

“And then you came home,” Zayn jots it down. Midnight. Roommate 2 was in the house as of midnight, after Roommate 1 had already left. When he arrived home, he was officially the last person to be near Destiny before her death, aside from the killer.

“Yes.”

“Alone.”

“Yes.”

“And then you went to sleep,” Zayn looks up at him, eyes inquiring.

“I was tired.”

“Okay, let’s back up,” Zayn turns his body to face Harry more.

It tends to go either one of two ways. Zayn’s movement to shift and get closer can put people at ease, his own brand of Zayn Malik body language, with his pretty face and eyes doing all the work for him. Or, for other people, to the guilty ones, the ones who know something they haven’t yet divulged, it’s an act of aggression. It’s in-your-face Zayn Malik, with his sturdy jaw and angry eyes doing a cop’s work.

Surprisingly, Harry nods and responds to it. He turns towards Zayn, his hands in his lap, ready. He wants to get to the bottom of it, too. Zayn has to take a beat, thrown off. So you think I’m pretty. Odd.

“When you came home at midnight, did you see Destiny?”

“She was in her room, I could tell. She must not have had a shift. The lights were on.”

“But you didn’t speak?”

“No, I went straight to my room.”

“Did you hear her? Did you hear anything at all?”

“No,” Harry frowns, eyes drifting up and over Zayn’s shoulder, like he’s trying to remember. “I had a record playing for a while, before I fell asleep, which helps drown out the other boarders.”

“Are your neighbors particularly loud? Was Destiny?”

Harry’s cheeks flame red at that and he looks down at his fingernails. Zayn doesn’t let it go, and instead leans in further. He’s hit a nerve.

“Was Destiny a loud person?”

“No,” Harry looks up and away, nervous.

Zayn doesn’t know what to do with it just yet, so he jots it down. Loud?

“So you were asleep all night.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t hear a thing.”

“No.”

Zayn doesn’t believe him, because he’s been Harry, just like he’s been Niall. He was right there when Jesse was murdered, so fucking close. He heard sounds all right. He heard the fight, the movements Jesse made that got his hands all cut up, as he tried to fight back. He heard the slash of the knife through the air. Harry doesn’t look innocent here. Zayn moves closer.

“Harry, you can tell me,” he tries to sound complacent. “I just want to make sure Destiny gets justice. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Harry nods, his breath on Zayn’s jaw. “I just… I didn’t hear anything, I swear.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Zayn changes his tactic slightly, clicking his pen and placing it on the paper. It’s more casual that way.

“Did Destiny have a boyfriend? Anyone she may have been talking to? Anyone from work?”

“I don’t know,” Harry shrugs, at a loss. “She didn’t tell me much. She never said.”

Zayn eyes him, unblinking. Niall also said that Destiny didn’t divulge many details, at least when it came to her job. Harry’s just basically reiterated the same story from Niall, who Zayn believes to be completely innocent and removed from the situation. But something about Harry doesn’t feel right. Zayn feels an itch beneath his skin, that tells him to scratch at Harry’s, to dig his claws in, to latch to Harry Styles like a leech.

Just then, Zayn hears the telltale sound of stretcher wheels bouncing up over a weather strip. A tech backs out of the door first, as both Zayn and Harry turn to watch. They wheel the black body bag out and lift it down the stairs, to take Destiny away. She's officially cleared for transport, no longer a resident of the Klein household. She's now just a corpse wrapped in plastic. Zayn shakes his head. He never saw them take Jesse away.

When they finally turn back to one another, Zayn ready to continue his questioning, Harry blinks at him and then shatters into pieces.

“I didn’t do it,” he rushes out, bringing his palms to his wet eyes, pressing down. “I knew it the second I walked down the stairs, when I saw her and Niall yelling on the phone to the cops. I knew. I knew you’d think I did something, because I was the only one home, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t. It wasn’t me.”

Zayn leans back then, thrown off yet again. Harry Styles is good, he’ll give him that. He really does seem upset. But Zayn was guilty that night in 2002, and Harry is guilty now. Either Harry did it, or he knows who did it, or at the very least, he’s just like Zayn: he heard something go bump in the night and didn’t call for help. Guilty by association. They could never charge Zayn with his crime, but it’s something he should’ve been punished for. He’s spent the rest of his life punishing himself, he supposes.

But Zayn decides to ask the question anyways, the one he never needed to ask Niall Horan, the one that will tell Zayn everything he needs to know. Even as Harry cries with the admission, Zayn needs to explicitly ask it.

“Harry, did you hurt Destiny?”

Zayn is met with Harry’s wide, green eyes, as he takes his hands away from his face. He sniffs and pleads with everything he has, his body practically radiating with ache. He radiates with something else, Zayn can see it.

“No,” he shakes his head, eyes innocent, finally crying.

And then Zayn knows for sure, as they stare at each other. Zayn sees him and knows.

Harry Styles is a liar.

---

 

March 19, 2019
5:58 pm

The station’s harsh halogen lights force Zayn to hunch over his desk some days. That’s what he tells himself, when his entire body curls up and he wants to lay his head down on the wood near his computer. It’s the light bulbs, they’re too harsh for his eyes, he’s fine. But it’s more than that, like most things in Zayn’s life, further under the surface. He hasn’t slept more than four hours at a time since he was thirteen. His body must know, must shut down like some sort of android robot in a science fiction movie; even when he can’t sleep, his skeletal frame and major muscle groups take a breather to find some form of relief from the incessant waking hours. He hunches, curls, relaxes, when he physically can’t take it anymore.

It just tends to happen at the worst moments, like when he’s supposed to be filling out reports or listen to CJ talk about his weekend plans.

CJ nudges at Zayn’s shin, as his head lulls, his chin bumping against his chest. He’s not asleep, he’s never asleep in these moments, but he jerks from the movement. He has to blink to refocus his eyes on the file folder on his L desk in the corner of the large, open bullpen. It’s the hazard of having his desk at official headquarters, instead of at one of the smaller precincts throughout the city. There’s always someone near him, a lieutenant peeking from an office, a sergeant with a clipboard to see if he’s turned in his files, young hot shot "leaders" set to prove something since so many of the older detectives have retired in the last five years.

Thankfully CJ sleeps a solid eight hours every night, and can keep Zayn from falling too far forward.

Zayn has to get his notes out and into some sort of order, before he can think further about the situation before him. He has to get it into a file, the observations of his, the crime report, the statements, and official alibis of those involved.

CJ’s printed some of the crime photos for him, so he has those to look at as well, when he can take the time to breathe and assess better. He’ll have to pull Jesse’s file, wherever it is, to compare the two scenes. That will have to be done at home, for now, until he’s ready to tell CJ or anyone else what it all means.

He also realizes, as he rubs at his poor, tired eyes, that he’ll have to talk to Harry Styles again. Soon. He’s not satisfied with their conversation. Something tells him to dig deeper, to figure out what Harry is lying about.

Their trip to the Spearmint Rhino opened up more questions than answers, unfortunately. After Zayn told Harry to stay somewhere besides the house, without leaving the city, he grabbed CJ. They made the drive towards East Omaha, down Cumming to get to the airport. Most cities only have hotels and restaurants near their airports, but only the seediest and most blatant keep their biggest and brightest strip clubs along the way.

Destiny had been working at the club for only five months before her death. She was relatively new to the city, so said her manager. Mr. Dorofei Kozel showed Zayn and CJ around, with zero shame as to the condition of the place. It seemed the club had nothing to prove, nothing to lose, since they followed city laws and paid their taxes. It wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t the worst place Zayn’s ever seen while investigating a case. Dark, too dark, red velvet curtains lining the walls, women with fake tits at every turn.

The girls on various poles only gave them passing glances, assessing eyes to see if the two young men would be sticking around to pay them, which of the two they could pluck to the side for a private show. They’d go for CJ, of course, not that CJ knew that. He wandered around with wide eyes and blushing cheeks, the picture of innocence, a man who had never stepped foot in a place like it before. They would’ve eaten him alive, Zayn knew. They’d have his wallet out and on the cocktail table before he even ordered his first drink. These girls, so good at the game, serpents who needed cash to survive, the smart ones. Some of the smartest women Zayn’s ever met were strippers.

Zayn made a note at that point, to remind himself. Was Destiny good at the game?

Kozel said Destiny wasn’t on the night before. It’d been a day since she last worked, a double shift. She was still new so she had to take afternoon shifts if she wanted good nights, the sort of shifts the veterans would scoff at. Only one kind of man goes to a strip club when the sun is up, and the smart girls don’t fuck with them. They could afford not to. Destiny didn’t have that luxury. She needed the money, but she needed to earn her stripes even more so.

Kozel hadn’t seen anyone in particular around her, no vultures circling a young, pretty blonde new to the city. But Zayn didn’t much care for what Kozel did or did not see, because he was an unreliable source. Managers and owners always are. So he found a few girls who knew Destiny well, other afternoon shift girls, with smeared mascara and acrylic nails a few days past their fill point.

“She was real sweet,” Monica cried into a tissue handed over by CJ. “She was so nice.”

She was older than Destiny, but not by much, and just the right side of pretty. Her boyfriend probably tells her so every night he comes in to get dances. Zayn hopes he does.

“Some girls aren’t nice,” Rayna agreed. “Some girls come in here and just focus on their work. They have bills and kids and school. They have other shit outside of here, like me, I’m going to be a dental assistant.”

Zayn nodded and clicked his pen.

“But Destiny was nice. So nice. She asked about me, and wished me well every night before she left. People don’t do that now, you know?” Rayna cried then as well, another tissue handed over by CJ, his eyes sad.

Rayna, a little older and wiser, had that mother hen edge to her, a girl who takes care of other girls. She’s the type to appreciate that trait in others. So Zayn made a note. Destiny: young but thoughtful. Takes care of people. Who was she taking care of after work?

“Did anyone pay close attention to Destiny? Did she have any regulars?” Zayn pressed forward.

“I didn’t see,” Monica sniffed, eyes screwed up. “I’m not sure.”

“There was a guy who sometimes came in, on Wednesdays and Thursdays,” Rayna gripped for Zayn’s arm, fingers tight. “You should find him.”

“Do you know his name? What did he look like?”

“You should find that guy,” Rayna ramped up, sitting up straighter, on a roll now that she’s made herself useful. “He was creepy, always wanted her, just her. Find him, find that guy. I bet he did it.”

She became slightly hysterical after that, so sure that she knew the man who murdered Destiny Houthakker. Zayn tried to see through it, to see if she only remembered a detail she wanted to remember, to find a face in a sea of horny men, to pin it on someone. People like to think they can find control in the situation, imagine that they can find a truth within the chaos. It only sometimes paid off. People see what they want to see.

But Rayna was so sure, Zayn could tell. She had a burst of knowledge, a tucked-away bit of information she never thought she’d need. A man, white, not too old, but not young. Cute, but not too cute, always wore a hat over his eyes, black clothing. He was someone she’d recognize if she saw him again, but completely void of actual facial characteristics. He was a stranger. A phantom.

As Zayn flips through the crime scene photos at his desk, taking a break from filling out the mound of paperwork before him, he tries to picture Rayna’s stranger. He tries to see him right inside the Klein front door, hovering over Destiny’s bleeding body. Did he enjoy it? Was it a mistake? Did he watch from somewhere close by, to see when Zayn would show up? Is he Harry Styles?

Zayn can’t go there, not now. He shakes his head. This isn’t about him yet, or his connection. It’s about getting the facts down first. It’s about getting it all out quickly, before he loses the details. The local news stations have picked up the story, but have only said an unnamed female died in a residence that morning. He needs to start getting the case together and solved before anyone can delve into the story deeper. He needs to show Harry Styles’ face to Rayna and the other dancers at the club, to see if he’s ever gone in there.

He needs to finish his fucking paperwork.

---

 

August 14, 2002
8:11 am

The fear subsided soon after the panic attack, luckily. The adrenaline coursing through him immediately after finding Jesse’s body, the chemicals bashing against his brain in the few hours afterward eventually dissipated. He feels the crash as he leans against his dad’s shoulder in the interrogation room.

He had to tell them about the night before, when Jesse showed him how to smoke a cigarette. He hated to do it, to sell Jesse out and make him look like a bad kid, but they asked. Zayn’s good at telling the truth when he’s asked straight and clear questions.

They went to sleep in the sunroom. Jesse first, then Zayn, like always. He heard the ghosts in the middle of the night, in the halfway-sleep he’s come to expect from the Klein house. He admits his fear of the windows and feels the shame spread through across his face. It’s dumb to be afraid of people watching you.

After the initial round of questions with the older detectives, a nice woman comes in and asks him some different questions. She speaks slowly, in a quiet voice. He likes it. He’s so tired. She has him close his eyes, to picture himself back on the lounger. He tells her that he’s there. He can feel the blanket. He says it smells like laundry detergent. She seems happy to hear it.

The sounds right outside the glass doors, the puppies playing on the floor, the ghosts whispering, the dream he had about the man in the yard, his broken backpack. He tells her all of it. She seems so happy, she says he’s doing so well. She has a nice soothing voice, and Zayn can’t help himself. His head starts to fall forward, his chin towards his chest, spent.

Yaser carries him to the car afterwards, like he did when Zayn was a toddler. Zayn can hear his mom crying as she rushes behind them through the parking lot. Zayn wraps his body around his father and closes his eyes, even though he’s not asleep.

---

 

March 19, 2019
10:17 pm

Zayn hasn’t stared at Jesse’s face in a long time. He doesn’t have any pictures of him and he definitely hasn’t looked at his file since he became a detective. But there he is, laid out in a photograph right next to Destiny. Their eyes are different colors, Jesse’s a warm brown, Destiny’s a light blue. All four irises are empty, dead, lifeless. Identical cuts on their left cheeks.

Zayn brought home both cases for the night, to sift through and make sense of. And it’s even more obvious how similar the two are. The two of them could be brother and sister, with their light hair and tanned skin. Jesse used to bask in the sun every summer; Destiny got a free tanning membership at a place near the club.

The heat in Zayn’s apartment is shitty even on a good day, so he pulls a sweatshirt on as he sits back on his couch. He’s alone now, finally, after a long and rigorous day. He stills feels uneven, like his equilibrium is off, the spinal fluid around his brain sloshing around like a long forgotten bottle in the backseat of a car. But he won’t sleep anytime soon, he’s not hungry, and the ghosts have started to play.

He wonders if Jesse is around tonight, if he’s knocking his knuckles against the wood inside the kitchen cabinets. Zayn sometimes isn’t sure which ghost makes which sound, but he guesses that one is Jesse. When they were little, Jesse used to climb up onto the kitchen counter at his house, his sticky feet all over the chipped yellow laminate, to reach for hidden food on the top shelf. His dad sometimes put Pop-Tarts up there, to eat after his long business meetings, the stress lines deepening in his forehead as he shooed his children up to their bedrooms. Jesse didn’t see his father often, especially during the work week, so he’d shove the kids away angrily, any time they bothered their dad during his Pop-Tart time. Zayn knew Jesse hated to take his dad’s food, so they’d only ever split one pack for a late night snack.

Zayn hears the wind howl through the crack in the kitchen window, the only one he'll leave open, in his old Midtown apartment. The telltale knock from inside the kitchen behind the cupboard doors. Zayn smiles, like it’s Jesse saying hi.

Maybe Destiny’s here, he thinks as he shuts his eyes. Maybe she’ll be here from now on, even though they’ve never met.

Zayn spreads out the photos side by side now, sifting further back. The first few photos are of the bodies: floor placement, close ups of each wound, shots from certain vantage points from around the room. He needs to focus on Jesse first, to make himself relive it. He touches a finger to the photos of Jesse’s bedroom, the sunroom, blood spatter from a photo frame to the right of Jesse’s body. He was stabbed in the stomach first, during the initial struggle, when Jesse was still on his feet. He tried to fight further, even as his intestines were ripped open inside his torso and his hands were sliced from grabbing for the knife. He ended up on his back and was stabbed a second time, harder, cleaner, a straight downward motion right into his chest.

He fought hard, Zayn nods to himself with a sniff. His lung was punctured past the point of repair, so says the M.E. report, and he bled out from his wounds in addition to suffocating on his own breath. To this day, Zayn sometimes dreams of the rattling sounds he must’ve made, as he slowly drifted away.

Judging from the identical wounds, Destiny died the same way: on her back, in her own house, eyes wide open. Zayn shivers, a breath ghosting through his hair, fingertips dancing along his forearm. You’ll figure it out, Zayn. You got this. Jesse doesn’t ever speak to him, but Zayn can sometimes feel the words, perhaps. He can sense those words under his skin, the goose bumps lighting up down his legs.

These cases are connected. But they’re not connected by anyone other than Zayn Malik. This isn’t the work of a serial killer, Jesse’s case isn’t cold, no one has “struck again” in the same house.

Zayn bites his lip and moves the initial pictures from Jesse’s file to the couch. He picks up the photos of himself, thirteen, lanky, horrified, staring at the camera from the police station with vacant eyes. They took pictures of him, in case it came out that Zayn had been sexually assaulted. They worried someone broke into the house and assaulted both boys, before killing Jesse, Zayn too traumatized to admit what happened. He didn’t understand it until a few years later, when he was in high school, depressed and alone in his bedroom. Out of nowhere, he suddenly remembered the “check up” at the hospital immediately after the police station, when they told him to take off his clothes so they could take more pictures. He cursed himself for not getting it then. He was young when it happened, too young to process that they all figured he’d been hurt too, in his own way. Jesse’s autopsy proved that he wasn’t abused before his death, and neither was Zayn. It’s the one thing anyone ever took comfort in, sadly.

He doesn’t want to look at himself in those pictures, white as a sheet, so he shoves them under the file folders.

The last photos are the ones Zayn needs to see most, the ones added to the file only a few days after the murder itself. The final piece to Jesse Klein’s puzzle. The photos of his killer.

Timothy Bates, age 28, from Omaha, Nebraska. Convicted of the murder of Jesse Klein in the first degree, on May 19^th, 2003. The defendant, who lived with his elderly mother only four blocks away from 2420 South 32^nd Ave, got drunk and then came through the Klein front door at 3:03 am on August 14^th, 2002 with the intent to rob them. He told the police that he used to work for Mike and Marcy Klein’s company, and knew that Mike kept money and family valuables in the buffet chest in the dining room. On him, he had a backpack and a hunting knife tucked in his boot. Right as he entered the home, he was surprised when a young boy came down the stairs. Jesse tried to yell at him, to get out of his house. There was a struggle.

Timothy Bates had nothing to live for and didn’t care about much beyond his own wants and needs. He was caught off guard by the boy, and said in his statement that the boy called him a pussy. He then fought with and stabbed a thirteen-year-old child, before he watched that child die a slow and painful death. He never said why he placed Jesse’s arms over his chest. A witness, friend of the deceased, saw a man matching his description fleeing the scene of the crime. When he was arrested, he still had the hunting knife in his boot.

Timothy Bates, now age 45, still resides in maximum-security prison just outside of Lincoln. Zayn knows this, because he stepped outside for a cigarette after getting to the station earlier, and called to check in for himself. Jesse’s killer was still there, behind bars, sharing a cell with a guy who smothered his grandmother to death with a pillow.

Timothy Bates did not kill Destiny Houthakker. It was impossible for the same person to have killed both Jesse and Destiny. Someone else stabbed Destiny, twice, right there where Jesse died, and it was for a very specific reason: for Zayn to see it. For Zayn to be in the present position he’s in, hands in his hair, tears in his eyes, wondering if it was all his fault. Again.

Someone wanted Zayn to find Destiny, in matching clothes, with her eyes wide and arms crossed over herself after a struggle. Someone wanted Zayn to suffer.

It’s working. He is.

Zayn slaps the file folders shut, side by side, and stands up to grab his car keys.

---

 

March 19, 2019
10:58 pm

To the naked eye, he’s a prowler. Or maybe he’s the ghost of one. He’s a lone man in a grey hoodie, briskly walking towards a darkened house that only that morning was swarmed with police. But Zayn’s not stupid, so he at least has his badge on the chain around his neck and his gun tucked in his jeans, if anyone asks.

Determined, he hops the stairs to the porch on 32nd Ave and gently lifts the tape over the slit in the door, to let himself in. The crime scene is no longer live, but the clean up crew won’t arrive until the next morning. Zayn called the owner of the building, some slick couple in Texas who own a few buildings across the Midwest. One of them berated Zayn long enough to say he needs to make sure the crew takes photos for insurance purposes since two of the boarders have already called to say they’re vacating. The owners didn’t ask about Destiny at all.

The house sits completely silent and dark, a ghost town creaking slightly in the wind. The only light to illuminate Zayn’s way into the main room is from the moon, giving the place an eerie glow. It’s not unfamiliar, the hair on the back of Zayn’s neck standing up, as he looks down at where Jesse and Destiny both died. It’s old and familiar, how he feels odd, on edge, scared, when in this house.

Destiny’s blood has dried on the wood floor to the point that it looks like paint. It always ends up looking like paint, once it’s seeped into cracks and crevices. It’s almost a perfect circle, except smeared in spots from investigator boots and swabbed cotton. Zayn stares at it, his hands in his pockets, the last bits of Destiny left behind.

Like Jesse, her death wasn’t as violent as any of them have seen in the past. She didn’t have her brains blown out by a shotgun, which makes the scene especially red. Brain matter on the ceiling, pieces of skull lodged into the staircase, blood sprayed onto each wall like she was a sprinkler system on a golf course. Stab wounds like the ones from Jesse and Destiny are cleaner, when it comes to blood. Especially since she must’ve laid there, hardly moving, in too much pain to try, it seeping around her like an almost perfect oval.

Zayn can’t help but stare at it, the maroon red blood cells dried into the wood. He feels his foot twitch in his Nike, that phantom itch of Jesse’s blood between his toes. He can feel the emotions finally taking over, the prickling behind his eyeballs, the flutter in his chest. It was his fault back then, and it’s his fault now. He’s now responsible for two people, two ghosts, two mourning families.

He’ll have to talk to Destiny’s mother once the sun rises, explain to her what happened, see the whites of her eyes turn pink from trying not to cry. He’ll have to shake her father’s hand and give him words of wisdom, how he’ll get justice for their daughter, if it’s the last thing he does.

But Jesse’s detective had a lead. Mere hours after he was found dead, a witness from Mitch Klein’s company came forward and said to look at neighborhood lowlife Tim Bates, the drunk with defaulted loans and a dead car battery on his front porch. He confessed after only a day’s worth of interrogation. He was caught, handcuffed, and awaiting trial only a few days after Jesse’s funeral. For Destiny, Zayn has nothing. He doesn’t have any gut feelings, no immediate evidence in a photograph, no names to go off of, just a stripper who swears she’d recognize a face if she ever saw it again. It’s nothing.

As Zayn brings his hands to his face, to scratch at the hair lining his cheeks, he sends up a silent prayer. Hopefully the autopsy gives a clue. Maybe a girl from the club will call with something better. Maybe whoever wants to punish Zayn will make it quick, and come forward to rub it in his face. Maybe he’ll figure out what he did to deserve it in the first place, aside from the obvious. You killed your best friend, the voice in his head says, you deserve this enough just fine. Maybe his own knife wounds will be swift, when it’s his time. Maybe he’ll see Jesse again.

He takes a minute to stand still, to keep his eyes closed, to force himself to feel thirteen and scared in his house. He needs to feel, to think, to remember. But the small inhale from the chair in the corner startles Zayn half to death. His reflexes take over, almost like he’s back on the streets of North O when he was in uniform years ago, and his gun is out of his jeans. He whips his entire body towards the fireplace, gun held high, safety off, heaving.

Harry Styles throws his hands up, terrified and caught, before slamming his eyes shut.

“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me,” he cries.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Zayn hisses, without lowering his gun.

“I live here!”

“I told all of you to stay somewhere else,” Zayn heaves.

After a few seconds, he finally clips the safety back into place, breath still uneven in his chest. He doesn’t like to feel startled at all, let alone here again, but reminds himself it’s against policy to hold a weapon on someone sitting inside their own house, and that technically, Zayn’s the one trespassing in a place he doesn’t belong.

“I know,” Harry winces.

Harry finally opens his eyes and brings his hands to his lap, his face red and puffy. He’s a mess of limbs as he sits in one of the plush armchairs flanking the fireplace, facing the main room and couch, just how the Kleins had it decorated. He’s dirty, his jeans and tshirt ruffled, his greasy hair in a bun.

“How did you even get in here?”

“My key. The back door.”

Zayn taps his finger on the gun in his hand and exhales, too overwhelmed to berate Harry as a suspect at the moment. He should leave. He doesn’t know why he came in the first place.

“You need to sleep somewhere else, I told you,” Zayn blinks slowly, his entire body starting to curl into itself from exhaustion.

“I don’t think I could sleep even if I tried,” Harry’s sad eyes drift towards the dried blood on the floor. “Could you?”

Zayn shouldn’t answer that. Harry is a suspect, the main fucking suspect in the entire investigation, and Zayn should leave. Harry is a liar, a good one too, if his body language is anything to go by. He might know all of Zayn’s deepest fears, this house being the top of the list, and Zayn should definitely leave.

“No,” he ends up admitting, his own eyes landing back to Destiny’s blood. “Don’t think I could either.” I never did. I still can’t.

They continue to stare at the floor together, neither saying anything, both lost in their thoughts. Zayn feels himself falling backwards in time, no longer present and in charge of the situation. He almost tells Harry that he’ll never sleep well again, his body will never relax enough to let him, so he might as well get used to it. He almost pities Harry. But then he’s fighting with himself to remember that for all he knows, Harry killed Destiny right here. Harry may know Zayn’s past, and for whatever reason, wanted this all to unfold.

Zayn turns his head to stare at Harry, already slipping back towards Detective Malik. Destiny’s blood has barely dried on the floor and Harry’s sitting in the dark staring at it. Are you guilty? Did you do this? Why? Was it to punish me? Did I hurt you first? How?

Harry blinks at him, eyes pleading, toes curling.

You’re a liar. Stop trying to convince me otherwise.

“I know you want to talk to me more,” Harry finally offers, his arms wrapping around his legs. “I know that. And I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But just… I didn’t kill her.”

Zayn stares at him harder, to assess him like a detective instead of as a bystander in his best friend’s old house. He tries to remove himself from the living room, from his terrified state and upset mind, to be Zayn Malik. He looks through Harry. He needs his gut to kick in, to give him direction, to tell him what to do. He needs to know if Harry knows who he is. He needs an answer.

“I didn’t kill her,” Harry whispers a second time, lip shaking. “I swear.”

Zayn doesn’t respond or question him further, as a detective. Something still nags at him, something very off about Harry, but he doesn’t want to think about it tonight. Not now.

Something in him shifts. He’s not staring at Harry anymore, and instead his mind clicks on like a film reel. Instead, he’s thirteen and shaking, his hands aching from holding them in fists for too long. He’s sixteen and crying on the floor of his closet, after a house party when a sweet, smiling boy whispered in his ear and tried to touch him. He’s in college, hung over, pulling at his hair until a chunk falls out, when he vowed to quit partying, when he needed to find purpose, something where he can help people. He’s torn, a young detective working on his very first case as the lead, standing over the body of a dead girl along the Missouri River. A young, blonde girl, OD’d in the dirt, with blue skin, a fist held to his mouth so he won’t grieve for a stranger while in the midst of internally cheering for himself, for finding his path after all. He’s telling that girl’s family, as her brother cries all over him that she couldn't have died from drugs, it was impossible, someone hurt her, to look again. He's patting the brother's arm, apologizing for his loss, and that now she can finally know peace. He's thinking maybe I'll know peace now too.

He’s so many things, different versions of himself in that moment, as he zones back in to the present day, as they stare at each other. He’s a child and a lost teenager and a man with a purpose. And yet none of them feel like him at all, as the scents of iron and plastic police tape slam into him.

Zayn gives Harry one last look, laced with pity and sadness and guilt of his own. He’s angry and bursting with some emotion he can’t place, like all he can do is stop himself from throwing Harry to the floor. To knock Harry’s skull against the wood, over and over, to demand an answer. Do you know what I did? What I didn’t do? Did I hurt you first? How?

Harry blinks at him, nods to the couch even, to invite Zayn to join him in his late night solitude. The main murder suspect in Destiny’s case invites Zayn to sit down, like they’re old friends.

It’s all wrong. Zayn’s mind won’t stop racing and his heart can’t keep up.

So he grips his gun tighter and heads back to the front door. He has to leave. He slips out quietly and replaces the police seal with sore fingers.

 

---

May 19, 2003
10:29 am

Zayn very purposefully focuses on his shoelaces as the judge finishes up her speech. It’s all about Jesse and how justice has been served. Tim Bates hasn’t blinked in what seems like hours and all Zayn can hear is Jesse’s mom’s sobs from up front.

His dad tries to hold his hand as they walk back to the car, but Zayn needs the tie around his neck off as soon as possible. It’s constricting his airway and he’s afraid his lips might turn blue if he doesn’t get enough oxygen.

They say Zayn is “safe” now. That Jesse is “free.” They keep saying that it’s over, that they’ll all be able to heal, now that the trial is done.

Zayn’s not so sure.

He focuses on his shoelaces in the car too. It’s easier to look down at them than to look up towards the sky.

 

---

 

March 20, 2019
2:16 am

This cigarette, like most late night cigarettes, is a futile attempt at tranquility. The up-down motion can technically be soothing on its own, the acrid taste of nicotine and rat poison does lace the lungs with something calming and still, Zayn knows. It’s the reason so many people smoke in the first place: a specific time, place, and action that are all the same, no matter who you are or where you live in the world. Zayn’s cigarette is the same cigarette as the guy in Australia, sitting on his own front steps, worrying over a late bill, or the woman in Brussels smoking just because, like she has since she was in university studying philosophy with her best friends, before they all moved away.

But it’s no use, because smoking kills, sooner or later. It doesn’t actually help or soothe old wounds. Zayn’s cigarettes certainly never do. To smoke a cigarette is to believe in a pipe dream, something fake and gross and pathetic. Jesse never intended for Zayn to feel pathetic. But as he sits there on his front steps in his sweats, ignoring the case files inside, sucking on a lit filter, that’s all there is.

He takes another drag as a car drives past. It’s too late in his neighborhood, not far from the Midtown bars, but not close enough to warrant 2 a.m. traffic. Maybe it’s someone on the way to the airport. Or heading to an emergency room. Or some lonely fuck like Zayn, out driving around because they don’t like the taste of smoke. Lucky bastard.

Zayn’s block is quiet most nights, one side of it lined with the duplexes Zayn lives in and the other side lined with identical houses: small, “quaint,” with minuscule lawns, pruned hedges, flower boxes exploding full of all different colored roses and Morning Glories. The opposite side of Zayn’s street, of his life, is full of mostly old retired couples and young families in their first starter houses, swapping recipes and holiday cards. But Zayn doesn’t know much more than that. He never talks to any of them, chooses to keep to himself, or so goes the lie he repeats if someone asks. He can almost hear Jesse laughing at him now, sure Zayn, whatever you say, don’t talk to your neighbors huh? Sure sounds like you talk to one of them quite a bit, when she’s screaming your name every other night.

As if on cue, he hears her door snap shut to his right, as he stubs out his cigarette. She’s so quiet with it now, so careful not to make noise this time of night. Zayn isn’t surprised that he only hears her coming when the door closes. She’s like a cat, quick feet and hunched slightly, gripping the sweatshirt around her torso.

“Can’t sleep?” Lexi bites her lip with a small smile, coming to stand right in front of him. Her long black hair sweeps across her cheeks tonight, over the fresh blush she must’ve applied before leaving her living room. She obscures his view of the odd shaped grey house across the street, the one with the crooked shutters and overgrown rose beds. Sometimes Zayn thinks Lexi obscures everything.

“Never,” he admits, scratching his head.

“Can I make you feel better?”

“Lex…” he tries to warn her, with a sigh.

“Zayn.”

“Lex, we shouldn’t,” Zayn shakes his head, exhausted and spent. He briefly wonders if he should make coffee, to jolt himself with something, since the cigarette couldn’t.

Lexi reaches for his shoulders to knead them, the tension releasing from his muscles almost immediately. Zayn feels his body falling forward, curling into itself before he can help it, his forehead resting against her stomach. He forgets for a few minutes, Jesse and Destiny and Harry and that house. He lets himself drift, his breath blowing hot into Lexi’s sweatshirt, her fingernails along his shoulders and in his hair. He can feel her wedding ring.

“Come on, babe,” she steps back to kiss his forehead. “I’ll take care of you.”

Zayn gets led into his own house, Lexi’s fingers gripping him hard, her ass swaying. She does that sometimes, even when she’s in nothing but a pair of ratty pajama bottoms and her husband’s Husker sweatshirt. It’s genuinely sexy in a way Zayn never understands, this stranger from four doors down who kissed him first all those months ago, on his front steps.

Zayn slips under after coming in her mouth, out like a light before she’s even dressed again. He only gets about an hour and a half worth of sleep though, since soon after one of his ghosts pulls at his hair and wakes him with a gasp.