The Winner of the
Perfect Crime Writing Contest
for a Hawaiian Vacation for Two

...is...

Property room auction item # 5049-W306016
Rosdebor $5,850 14K two tone gold Gent's Link Bracelet

The Bracelet
by Victor J. Banis

 She might have been as young as fourteen; surely no older than sixteen. They had not been happy ones, those all-too-few years. Certainly the more recent ones had not been pretty. Neither had her death.

She had been, though. You could still see that, despite the bruises and the distortion of her features, despite the track marks up and down her arms, in her legs, even between her toes. Her hair was pale brown, ash colored, under the neon orange dye job, her eyes hazel, wide with the terror of looking into the face of death, her mascara tear streaked, her full mouth stretched in a grimace of pain and horror.

Death wasn't pretty. Especially not this kind of death.

"Had to be a john," Macintyre said. "Strangled her. After he did her, looks like. There's a condom there, by the bed, just used. The bastard."

This was the third prostitute murdered in as many months, all of them brutally, all of them too young for the life they had lived. Too young, especially, for the death that snatched them from it.

Homicide detective Della Rivera had to fight down, as she always did, her sense of nausea. A homicide detective, particularly a woman homicide detective, couldn't afford to show that kind of sensitivity. The men tried less to bust her chops than they had when she first made the grade, but she was all too aware that they still watched her, in ways both blatant and subtle, for any sign of weakness.

The day had started out badly. A quarrel she wanted to have with her husband, and didn't. He had come in late, she didn't even know how late. She had waited up till three, had fallen asleep in the big recliner—so, sometime after three, but he had lied about that.

"I don't know," he said when she questioned him, gulping down black coffee to try to get herself jump-started. "One o'clock, maybe one thirty. You know what it's like. The boys finish bowling and then everyone wants to sit around and drink beer, shoot the shit. I forget all about the time."

She had overslept, was running late, had to bite off the caustic reply she wanted to make. Never start a quarrel, she told herself, when you're in a hurry and your head is pounding.

It had left a bad taste in her mouth, though, and the words she hadn't had with him were all still there in her head, banging around frantically and bumping into one another, and by the time she got home, by the time she could set them loose, they would be all worn out, and he would, as he usually did, fend them off with ease.

Macintyre had lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted upward into her face. She wanted a smoke—God, how she wanted a smoke. She fought down the urge to snatch the cigarette from his hand, puff it down till it burned her fingers, fill her lungs with the noxious poison of nicotine and tar.

She realized he had spoken to her, and she shook her head, trying to jar those thoughts loose, and focused her attention on him. He was holding something out to her. She took it from him and looked at it.

"It was clenched in her fingers," he said. "You can see, there, the clasp was weak. It must have just come off his wrist when they were struggling. He probably didn't even know he had lost it."

It was a man's bracelet, yellow and white gold, encrusted with diamonds, obviously an expensive piece. Common sense said it could not be something of the victim's. She would have pawned it long ago for drug money.

"It's got a little ding, on the first link," Macintyre said.

She went to the uncurtained window, examined it carefully in the dirt filtered light. "Not a ding," she said. "It's an initial, A. Etched into the gold for identification, in case it was ever lost or stolen."

"He won't be so happy this time to have it identified," Macintyre said. "It shouldn't be that hard to trace. Couldn't be too many floating around like that."

"No, probably not," she agreed. She weighed it in her hand and dangled it between two fingers. It was a big piece, eight inches long, probably half an inch wide.

"A big wrist," Macintyre said, looking over her shoulder.

She nodded her agreement. "Yes, he's a big man," she said. But the circumstances of the girl's death would have told them that. Young and drug addicted as she was, she had been strong enough to struggle mightily. He had been stronger.

Her cell phone rang. "Damn," she swore under her breath at the interruption, and flipped it open. "Yes?"

It was her husband. "Listen, honey," he said, "I'm sorry about this morning. I could see you were pissed."

"Mmm," she said, noncommittally. She hated sharing personal conversations with outsiders.

"I understand," he said. "You can't talk, right?"

"Exactly," she said.

"No problemo," he said. He lowered his voice, chuckling softly—the kind of laugh that used to make her knees weak. When things had been better. When she still believed in him, believed what he told her.

"Tell you what," he said, "I'll make it up to you when you get home, okay. You know what I mean. I'll even fix dinner after. It'll be your special night. How's that sound, baby?"

"Excellent," she said, her voice carefully free of inflection. Macintyre looked tactfully away, pretended he'd been stricken deaf.

"I love you," he said.

"Uh huh," she said, unimpressed. If you couldn't believe anything else a man told you, how could you believe that? Which only made her wonder: why had she believed it for so long? It was amazing, the way love put your brain, your thinking faculties, to sleep.

He laughed again, waited, as if expecting her to say more. When she didn't, he asked, "What time will you get home? The usual?"

"I should be there in about twenty minutes."

"Early? That's even better. More time for play," he said.

"Right," she said, already headed for the stairs, signaling Macintyre to follow. "Oh, and Andy," she added as if it were an afterthought, "By the way, I found your bracelet."