Karin Schaeffer Story 01 - The Domino Killer

her pajamas, too preoccupied to catch the kiss I’d tossed her or even notice it. I’d resend the kiss now. Now. Now. Because the life in this house, having stopped moments after I’d walked out, having left Jackson midway through preparing toast in the kitchen, would have left Cece somewhere upstairs.
    Yes. She’d heard her father falling. And hidden here all day, waiting for me. Waiting.
    Shaking – filled with the white sound of wind crashing, horizons burning, skies falling, earthquakes ripping apart what had been land and now was rubble – I ran a tangle of red footprints, calling, “Cece, Cece, it’s Mommy, I’m home, Cece, it’s okay, I’m home,” until I came to her open bedroom door. An early evening shadow spilled into the hall at a sharp angle. The malevolent odor of metal blistered and burned and blossomed. I waited for her answer in the quiet and stillness of her door.
    A sickening wave rolled in from the ground up, starting somewhere around my knees and reaching its crest in my stomach. I flew to the hall bathroom as the wave moved up my throat, and grabbed the edges of the sink to stop myself from fainting. My brain, my entire being, was shattering inside my skin and I couldn’t stop it. I was falling. Falling. My eyes catching three words finger-painted on the mirror, dripping blood onto the white porcelain sink.
    JPP’s message to me, that monster who felled families one by one by one.
    You are next .

Read an excerpt from
YOU ARE NEXT
    a Karin Schaeffer novel by Katia Lief
1
    There was something intensely satisfying about digging bare-handed in the dirt. My gardening gloves were soggy so I’d abandoned them on the cracked cement next to the barrel planter I was filling with orange begonias. By late summer these six plants would be triple in size and the pot would overflow with clusters of bright waxy petals. Waiting patiently as they grew and enjoying their beauty was one in a million facets of my therapy, but then everything I did these days was an aspect of recovery. So sayeth “Once-A-Week” Joyce, as I had secretly dubbed my therapist, recalling as I had a hundred times and with the usual inner tickle how at my initial appointment she had made sure to point out that the word joy was embedded in her name. I had smiled for the first time in months, which had been exactly her goal.
    I’d been outside doing the back garden all morning and these front pots would take the last of the dozen trays of spring flowers I’d carted home from the nursery yesterday afternoon. One of the planks on the barrel had rotted over the winter and was sagging out. I wouldn’t bother my new landlord with it; next spring, I would use my own money to buy another one. I patted down the soil, noticed that every one of my short-bitten fingernails was crusted with black dirt, and wiped my hands on the front of my jeans. It was hot out. I was suddenly thirsty and my mind conjured a tempting image of sweet ice tea over a stack of ice cubes. The cool, shadowy inside of my ground floor one-bedroom apartment beckoned. I bent down to collect my gloves.
    A dented gray sedan stopped in front of the brownstone.
    A black guy wearing a red baseball cap turned off a Willie Nelson song and leaned partway out of the driver’s window. That was when I saw the police radio on his dashboard and knew he was a cop.
    “I’m looking for Detective Karin Schaeffer.”
    “I’m no longer with the police force.”
    He left the motor running and got out slowly. Smiled. All I wanted to think about was that I liked his perfect white teeth.
    “Billy Staples, detective first class.”
    I stood there. It wasn’t nice to meet him and I wouldn’t lie by saying it was. I didn’t want him to be here because they didn’t show up in person to deliver paperwork, and anyway, my medical discharge had already been signed, sealed and delivered. They only came in person with bad news.
    “I’m kind of busy,” I said. Standing there in my dirty jeans. Holding limp gardening gloves and a muddy spade. Looking like a retired old lady with nothing but time on her hands, though I was only thirty-three.
    “Listen, Karin, I know you don’t want to hear anything from us. I got that. But there’s something you have to know.”
    “How did you find me?” Phone book, Internet white pages...I had made an effort to unlist myself in every directory.
    “Well, for one thing, you sent the benefits department a change of address.”
    Of course I had; I