The drive through the city made me feel like a rat in a maze. I knew the maze well but there was still every chance I would get lost looking for the cheese; the cheese in this case being the girl. I wondered if I should go to the police station before going to my office, but knowing Kendra, she would call Fraza into a frenzy. Since solving the case that would have spiraled the city into a civil war, business was booming. I had become something of a brand name, a bragging chip. Clients would boast, “You know who I hired? Tara Duluc. Yes, the Tara Duluc!” Hiring me became like a status symbol; not that I was expensive to hire, but that didn’t matter to them. I was just the person to get if you wanted to get things done. Several people had even tried to apply for jobs with me. if I had wanted I could have set up a large detective agency; not that I wanted that, and most of the people coming in for a job only did that so they’d be able to tell others they were working for me. Most of them were dumb to boot, probably send over by their parents after being told, “Go see if she has work for you.”

Kendra was different. It might have been due to her being a damphire; commonly known as daywalker vampires. She had shown herself to have a lot of potential; she had managed to pinpoint something in one of my old files, a case I had already solved, but she had seen a flaw in one of the testimonies. I decided to hire her and put her on some of the small cases, like missing pets or cheating husbands. She seemed to enjoy doing them, and it had given me an opportunity to concentrate on the bigger stuff.

As I reached the front of my office I parked my car and got out. Stepping through the door into my office felt nice for a change. Kendra had a small cigar between her fingers and by her unruly hair I could see she was nervous.

“Morning, sunshine,” I said to greet her. She looked up at me and her blue eyes, normally deep and sparkling, looked a little dull.

“I might have made a mistake on one of the cases,” she said as she inhaled deeply from the cigar. The ashtray on her desk was littered with cigar butts and pencil shavings.

“Why do you think you made a mistake,” I asked her as I sat down. There was a large brown envelope on my desk. “When did this arrive?”

“This morning, but that’s not the point. I made a mistake.”

I lit a small amount of pepper leaf and looked at her. “It’s okay, Kendra, it happens. Hell, I made some mistakes back in the day when I first started this.”

She seemed to ignore what I had said as she let out a small, insane-sounding giggle. “It was two sets of twins.”
I got up and walked over to her. “Who were two sets of twins?” I asked.

She looked up and turned the file around. “We were hired by this man who wanted to know if his wife was sleeping around with someone else. Well, when I shadowed her for some time all I could find was that she was sleeping with her own husband. It made me think we were being led on, that they were a kinky couple just wanting pictures of them making love.” She looked thoughtful. “Why exactly do we take pictures of them doing it? Anyway, that doesn’t matter. So I told the husband that he had nothing to worry about.” She flipped through the folder.

“So what is the problem that?” I asked her. “You found out she actually did cheat on him?”
She nodded. “Well, yes; you see it all was more complex than I had thought.”
I laughed. “Kendra, this is New Billingham. Simple doesn’t happen very often.”

She nodded again. “Yes, yes, you told me that; but this is just too weird. You see, the wife actually was sleeping with another man: his own brother, his freaking twin brother, who was married to his wife’s twin sister, who turns out to be sleeping with her husband’s twin brother – the client who hired us to show his wife was unfaithful so he could get a cheap divorce and marry his brother’s wife.”

“That’s nothing to worry about,” I reassured her. “It’s happened to me too. Just send it to the police as a case of fraud and the case will be dealt with.”

She looked at me and inhaled from the cigar deeply, blowing out smoke as she spoke. “I wish it was that simple. The client’s wife’s sister – the one he was sleeping with – told her sister everything. The plan, the sex, everything. So the wife of the client thought up an idea to confront her lover with it; the next time she was seeing him she pretended to be her sister, his wife. By doing that she let him know she knew of his brother’s plan, but the brother didn’t realize he was fucking not his own wife so he shot her—”

I lifted my hands. “Hold it, Kendra. Look, whatever has happened, don’t worry; just hand it over to the police and let them sort it out.”

She sat down in her chair, and I could see she was struggling with it all, “Tara, I can’t do this. I am not like you, I can’t deal with all this shit,” she said as her eyes teared up.

I sat down on the edge of her desk and smiled. “Don’t worry, Kendra, this was just a horrid case. I’m going to the police station today and I will hand the case over to them, and I’ll them I fucked it up.”

She seemed to calm down somewhat. “How do you deal with all this crap?” she asked, as I walked back to my own desk and opened the brown envelope.

“For me it helped to have been a cop before all this; but back then I tried not to get too attached to the cases I worked on,” I replied, reaching into the envelope. My hand emerged holding a piece of rib.

Next Chapter: What am I?