ANGEL BLUE [1]

LEAD 3: recipe for murder

      On my small stack of sticky notes that I brought to the diner, I continuously scribble the riddle. I cross words out and fill some in to make sense of it, but with Banks talking about how boring her desk job is without me―it’s rather hard to concentrate.

     “Banks shut up for a second,” I say.

      I tap the lid of my pen against our metal table by the open French windows. Banks and I always get the same one in the shade of the awning to look at the precinct across from us. Banks follows my gaze to see Sam with his expensive latte imported from Brazil or the shore of a deserted island, speaking on the phone.

      I never was; am always to be. No one ever saw me; nor ever will. And yet I am the confidence of all who live and breathe on the Earth’s ball, I write three more times and peel the leaflets off the stack and put them onto the surface of the table.

      “The sun?” Banks comments, turning one of the sticky notes towards her.

      “No one ever saw me; nor ever will. That suggests that this object couldn’t be seen, we can see the sun,” I say and then mutter the lines of the riddle over and over.

     I hadn’t slept all night since Sam drove me back from the lab, the riddle bugged me enough to keep me awake. I scowl at the second sticky note and cross out the first line, living and yet I am the confidence of all who live and breathe on the Earth’s ball. I underline the word ‘confidence’ and lean back in my seat.

      “I’m either really blind or just really dumb,” Banks lifts her cap and scratches her cropped afro. “Confidence shouldn’t be there, I think another word should’ve been there.”  

      She raps her ‘mocha’ painted nail against the underlined word and tries to see what I can―but I know that Banks isn’t like me, she doesn’t know about the Baines or the case. I don’t want her to know, I want to stop her from becoming collateral damage.

      The whispers echo in my mind, warning, telling me something. Banks is right, another word would fit better in place of confidence but the word itself is the clue in its own right. I grip the pen with my left hand and scribble down all the meanings of the word that I can think of.

      Confidence can mean full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness or reliability of a person―in the killer’s mind, he has obvious confidence in himself that the secrets surrounding Angel Blue will be enough to corrupt the cases so he can continue to get away with what he does.

      That being said, the killer could mean that confidence is assurance about the situation; as if he’s giving us confidence that another body will show up. On the other hand, a secret might’ve been exchanged to give reason that the killer had confidences over a period of time leading to a possible paper trail.

      No, those were too obvious. The killer wants to make me think, he wants me to question myself and the motives. The sneaky bastard wants me to figure things out and then be powerless to the events to come. He wants to feel in control while he watches my mind devour me.

      That brings me to my final thought of confidence, the wish to retain and incumbent government through a vote of confidence. The killer knows of the FBI’s influence, he knows that only a handful of people are familiar with the Angel Blue file. But then why doesn’t he pick those people off? No, he wants to make a statement; he wants those that know to live in constant fear.

      Political power. Politics. Government. The killer knows that a handful of NYPD officers were selected to bypass the academy and get straight onto the desk job. Banks, Blake, me and evidently―Sam. A lot of money was put into keeping things hush-hush, a lot of secrets were kept. Legally, I’m too young to work in the force and carry a gun―but nobody asks questions, why? Because of political leverage. The killer wants to usurp this.