Page 29 of Jar of Hearts
He follows her down the hall and around the corner. Despite the early hour, everyone is dressed in business attire and moving with an air of harried importance. They look at Kaiser curiously as they pass, but Julia Chan doesn’t break stride, her taupe-colored pumps tapping soundlessly on the carpet in machinelike precision. She’s dressed in a pleated, black knee-length skirt and crisp white blouse, her hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. They enter the first conference room, and she closes the door.
Only when they’re alone does he see the stress on her pretty face.
“I’ve been covering for her here since last Thursday,” Julia says, sitting down at the table and gesturing for him to do the same. “This isn’t the first time she’s done this. I swear to god, if she’s not dead, I’m going to kill her. I knew it was a bad idea for us to take the same internship.”
“Done what?” Kaiser asks.
“Disappeared. It happened once before. She met a guy, spent the entire weekend at his house, forgot to tell people. Smartest but flakiestgirl you’ll ever meet. She came back three days later, but I was furious. Now her phone is going straight to voicemail. Which means the battery is dead, or she’s turned it off.”
Julia obviously hasn’t spoken to Claire’s parents yet. She puts her hand to her mouth and chews on a fingernail. Kaiser checks out her other hand, which rests on the table. The nails are ragged, worn down to little stumps. She notices him noticing and puts her hands in her lap.
“Strathroy, Oakwood and Strauss has a one-hundred percent attendance policy here for interns,” Julia says. “You have to be gravely ill to call in sick, and you’d better have a doctor’s note to back it up. When she didn’t show up for work last Thursday, I told our boss that a member of her family died and that she asked me to relay the news. They weren’t happy about it, but I couldn’t let her get fired. I hope they don’t ask her for a death certificate when she gets back. So? Is she dead?”
The next word he says will change this young woman’s life forever, and as gently as possible, he says, “Yes.”
Julia blinks. She searches Kaiser’s face for any sign that he’s joking, and when none appears, she freezes. A full thirty seconds pass before she slumps into her chair. “Fuck.” Her eyes well up with tears, but she blinks them away. The fingers are back in her mouth. “Fuck,” she says again. “How?”
“She was killed. We’re still figuring the rest out.”
“She was murdered?” Her gaze flickers to his badge. “This is a homicide?”
“Yes.”
“How?” Julia asks again, more forcefully this time, and a tear slips down her cheek. She swipes at it, almost angrily, as if it’s a nuisance, as if there’s no place in this conversation for crying.
“It’s not important for you to know—”
“You can either tell me or I’ll be googling the shit out of it later.” Julia’s dark eyes are full of sorrow. But behind it, there’s determination. She’s a strong young woman, and she wants answers. “And I’m sure it will be less traumatic hearing about it from you. Please tell me. She’s my friend. I need to know.”
So Kaiser lays out what he knows. As gently as possible, he tells the young woman how her friend was strangled, dismembered, and then buried in the woods.
He doesn’t tell her about Henry. He doesn’t know if she’s aware that Claire gave up a baby for adoption, and it’s not his place to reveal it.
Julia Chan listens without interrupting. When he finishes, she stands up, smooths her skirt, and says, “Excuse me a moment,” and leaves him alone in the conference room.
He half expected it. Death notifications are always hard, and though he’s tried not to think about Kim this morning, he finds himself wishing she were here. She’s better at this kind of thing than he is. He uses the time to check his messages, and he’s just putting his phone back in his pocket when Julia comes back into the conference room. She was gone a full ten minutes.
She sits beside him once again, rolling her chair a bit farther away this time, but she’s composed, ready to talk. The shakiness is gone. The only noticeable difference is her eyes. They’re red and puffy from the tears she’s cried. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse and there’s a slight disconnect to it. Kaiser recognizes what she’s doing, because it’s something he does himself, every day. Julia Chan is compartmentalizing. She’ll make a hell of a lawyer someday.
“I hope the next thing you tell me is that you’re going to find the sonofabitch who did it,” she says. “And I hope you rip him to pieces the way he did her.”
“I’m going to find the sonofabitch who did it,” Kaiser says, and he means it. That much he feels comfortable promising. “Claire’s parents said you were her roommate.”
“Since freshman year of undergrad. We were more than roommates; we were really good friends. We’re both only children, so we were probably the closest thing to having a sister—” Julia’s face crumples, but she fights it.
“I’m trying to trace her whereabouts in the days before she was killed,” Kaiser says. “Her parents hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks.”
“Well, she’s busy.Wasbusy,” Julia corrected, and then her face falls again. “She works—worked,shit—part-time at a coffee shop in the U-District. The Green Bean. Last I saw her, which I think was Wednesday of last week, that’s where she was. I’m taking a night course on top of this internship and usually pop in to study if she’s working because she gives me free lattes. Anyway, she didn’t come back to the apartment that night.”
“And that’s typical?”
“Yeah.Yes. But usually she’ll text and she didn’t, so I figured she was hooking up with the guy I saw her talking to.”
Kaiser straightens up. “Which guy?”
“Some guy. I didn’t get a good look. He was sitting in the corner.”
“Age? Height? Hair color?”
