(featured image by Daniel Chekalov)
Hooked noses. Those were the most common. Not because they were more common amongst criminals, but because witnesses don’t actually know what hooked noses look like. So she’d shorten and straighten them out until they resembled long spoon heads.
Being a police sketch artist meant taking what the traumatized, unconcerned, and liars supposedly remember of the perpetrator’s appearance and construct a picture that looks like a human. The amount of times she had to bite down a comment when a woman told her the man who broke into her home had a double hunchback; when a child described the stranger who wanted help finding his puppy was ten feet tall; when the racist store owner swore up and down that the pale kid on camera who stole was black was astronomical.
But those exaggerated features were what stuck in people’s minds. And that’s what they needed, especially when people only briefly saw the wanted posters on lamp posts and subway walls. While she may feel a bit silly drawing an elderly man with a wide, maniacal smile that showcased several broken teeth and chapped lips, if it made a schoolteacher recognize him as her neighbor with chipped and silver teeth as the rapist then so be it.
So Elizabeth grinned and bared it every day. Going from location to location to police station to crime scene to location. The faces really started to blend together a couple years in and after her 10th anniversary of ‘joining the force’, it was a rarity if she remembered what crime her sketches were accused of once she left the building.
Her day was ending, but most people’s were just beginning. Sunrise just broke through the windows of the cafe shop, effectively blinding her over the top of her mug. Hot chocolate with no coffee. Just enough caffeine to get her home before she passed out on the pull out couch.
Blinking through the sharp light, Elizabeth took a deep breath as she stared at the faces that passed. Blurred shading for eyes and thick pencil lines for mouths. Large eyebrows that crawled like caterpillars.
Tap tap. The woman beside her drummed her fingers against her own mug. Long pink nails against the ceramic, bending just slightly. Nails were not supposed to bend.
Elizabeth’s eyes traveled up the woman’s arm to her face. As if sensing her gaze, the woman turned to look at her with a smile, head tilted just a bit too far for Elizabeth’s liking. The smile grew to a grin and there were just a few too many teeth than average.
Dentures. Just like the patient who killed her dentist over being sent to collections. Did she have long nails too? Scratching at the paper to escape her sketch pad?
“Are you alright, ma’am?”
Elizabeth startled, her half-full mug threatening to spill onto the white tiled floor. A teenager who was probably not paid nearly enough to be up this early or deal with people like her was leaning over the table. An apron stained with red spots. Still bright red. Still fresh.
“Ma’am?” The employee asked. “I can get you a refill if you’d like.”
“Oh. Oh no, that’s fine! I’m alright, thank you. I was just leaving.” A refill meant taking her mug away. Away to the back. Out of sight.
The employee looked at her strangely, but just nodded. Teenagers were always a bit judgemental, Elizabeth found. So many throwing in snide comments while giving their descriptions. She cared only how thick the criminal’s eyebrows were, not how out of season his sneakers were. Judgemental indeed.
Something she always remembered when going through her stack of sketches of teenage-aged suspects. The larger file of missing persons had to be shoved into a different filing cabinet.
Throwing a couple dollars on the table for the girl’s trouble, Elizabeth rushed out into the slowly warming air. Keyword slowly. She wrapped her sweater tighter around her midsection. A breeze caused by a departing bus chilled her ribs through and she shivered.
She stepped up to the edge of the sidewalk and turned her face to the risen sun. Closed eyes and a soft sigh. No heat, as to be expected in Fall, but the minimal warmth from the obstructed ball of shine was enough as a temporary distraction.
“Screeeech!”
The next bus pulled up to the stop across the road. A myriad of people were already waiting: parents holding infants either crying or playing with sweatshirt drawstrings, elderly citizens on their way to the senior center for their daily activities, various aged kids with clear backpacks.
Parents with toddlers that made no sound, simply stared at the rising sun. Elderly citizens with deep, dark eye sockets. Kids with clear empty backpacks.
Wide faces of a kidnapper. Button noses of a perjurer. Long necks of an embezzler. Square chipped chins of a serial killer. Nimble gnarled fingers of a pickpocketer.
The bus doors opened and no one used the rail as they stepped up and inside. Elizabeth massaged the bridge of her nose and walked briskly along the crosswalk. Pointedly not looking in any other direction.
It was still early out according to the sun when she got home. Climbing the rickety metal stairs up to her apartment door. The stairwell was barely that: it was a cinder block tower just shoved up against the building with the apartment blocks. She had to step up a concrete slab to reach her front door.
As Elizabeth struggled to fit her key into the uneven lock, the door three feet down opened. She paused and waited. And waited. The door closed. She sighed. Almost two years living there and she’d never seen her neighbors. She hadn’t figured out if she should be thankful or not.
Inside was more of a mess than any station she’d worked at. Moving boxes that were unpacked and repacked with disregard to the original labeling. What once held kitchenware packed neatly with bubble wrap was now overflowing with cardstock. A long rectangle meant for pictures and curtains used as cushioning was set upright to catch loose desk-debri she swept off. Once her filing cabinets were stuffed full, she started to use grocery store milk boxes they’d given her, then Ikea boxes after that.
Kicking a kallax cardboard to the side, she made circles around the studio apartment. Checking that blinds were fully shut and curtains drawn and clothespinned. Touching the back of her hand to door cracks to feel for spikes in temperature. Flipping around police sketches she’d brought home so they couldn’t look at her.
Ambient noise faded into white as Elizabeth wandered over to her police file boxes stacked next to her dining table. Some were from her past jobs, come current. As far her co workers were concerned, only one or two were missing,
Flipping open her sketchbook, she pulled the top box closer to her and began working. Redone and more concrete drawings, over and over until she had them memorized before going to the next. Black and white scritch scratches echoed in the apartment with the unsettling melody of the water dripping from the sink.
Drip.
Drip.
Plink.
Drip.
Plink.
Drop.
Elizabeth slammed down her pencil and snapped her head towards her kitchenette. The sink wasn’t leaking. It hadn’t been on in days. She scrambled to her feet, knocking over one of the box towers in her haste. Manilla envelopes broke free, shoe scuff marks covering both sides, across the tearing linoleum.
“No, no, no!” She fell to her knees and started scooping them up to toss them haphazardly into the boxes. There was no longer any organization, but she still knew each paper, every criminal, all the sketches and files she’d accumulated. Faded ink with freshly typed labels.
Scattering the papers every which way, some crumpling up in her hands before being thrown to the carpet, a couple tearing from her nails. Claw marks appeared across cheeks and bullet holes in foreheads.
Where was it? The woman with one eye bigger than the other? The woman she saw in the shop. The woman who was seen sneaking into the oil plant after hours.
Or the teenager with a sunken face? The teenager she’d seen waiting for the bus. The teenager reported to have stolen multiple bikes from the middle school.
Missing. Papers were missing. There were so many stored in various places, she couldn’t tell right away but that must be it. Where did they go? Who took them? Who was in her apartment?!
Crawling across the floor, she tore through the stuffed filing cabinet. Elizabeth grabbed every piece of evidence she could and dropped them into a pile. Not just sketches that striked icy fear into her chest, but closed case files from the beginning of her career. That’s how far back this went. Surely. Was there any other explanation?
Explanation for what though? What was she doing? Elizabeth was on her knees by that point and she rolled back onto her heels. Raising her hands to her face, she could see nothing yet everything wrong with them. Her skin was smooth and wrinkle-free and too in place. All her clothes were just exactly the perfect fit. The fabric was touching her skin wall over yet she felt none of it.
The answer must be in the papers somewhere. She needed help from someone who wouldn’t think of her as crazy. Someone who would understand that these people were out there, getting away with petty theft, murder, and everything in between. And all they did was lock them up.
Only jail for what they are.
After shoving every paper she touched into her arms and jacket pockets, she ran out the front door, pausing only to lock it. She couldn’t risk not doing so with her nosy neighbors. The metal stairway shook under her thundering steps and she was out the door and down the street.
The bus was loading up another group of people. People and blurs. People and blurs and humanoids. Loading up onto a prison bus with bars and no way off.
The police department was bustling and she threw open the front door to no reaction. Elizabeth slammed the disheveled papers on the first desk she saw. “I need to see the captain.”
Sergeant James raised an eyebrow up at her, donut poised to be eaten. “What for? What are all these?”
“It’s a long, long story. Where is he? He needs to see what I’ve found.”
“I think he’s in a meeting.” James leaned closer. “Are you okay? Have you slept?”
“I’m fine! Look, it’s important just-” An approaching figure made her snap her trap. They looked like the First Deputy Reigns, but didn’t. An absence of any blemishes except those dotting her nose. Her eyes were wide and Elizabeth could see where mascara was applied to cover wig cap edges and darken her eyebrow color. Reigns’ skin appeared stretched to cover her skull, thin lines where aging wrinkles should be but Elizabeth knew better.
Reigns reached a hand towards her and she stumbled back, jabbing her spine into the corner of the desk. “Are you okay, Liz? You know you, you’ve been staying here pretty late the past few months. Maybe you should take a trip. Go somewhere.”
“Yeah,” James agreed, “use up those vacation days you’ve been saving up.”
Leave. For days. That’s exactly what they’d want her to do. Reigns was obviously one of them, and now James. He wouldn’t be agreeing otherwise. When had they ever noticed how late she stayed?
She will admit, internally only to herself, that her late nights had gotten longer and more frequent as of a half year ago. Originally strict on her work hours, need for her services and overtime won over her resolve gradually until she was going in in the afternoons and not leaving until the next mornings.
But when her friendly and soft demeanor was the only one witnesses and victims would talk to and only her hands could capture the exaggerated features they remembered and would stick in people’s memories.
It was a necessary give and take.
Elizabeth took multiple steps back until she knocked into someone else. Murmuring an apology, she ignored the questioning looks of her peers and shouts of fake concern as she rushed out of the precinct.
The sun was directly above her in the sky. It was already so late. She wrapped her coat tighter around her then froze, feeling the pockets. She’d left all the papers inside. Maybe James would hand them over to the captain. Or more likely, he’d see the sketches and shake his head mournfully while throwing them into the trash.
The blue hue of the sky seeped into the tops of the buildings around her. The lines between the graying white sidewalks and the black coarse street were blurred into smears. The humanoids around her stretched and thinned until they were mere colorful brush strokes. Like melting crayons on a dull poster board.
She stumbled over her own feet until she felt a lamppost under her hands. Leaning against it, desperate for any kind of feeling from an outside force against her. But despite it keeping her upright, she could not feel the post.
She could not feel the ground under her shoes. It was like she was floating. Yet all her bones were filled with lead, heavy and dragging her to the ground. Knees weak. Elbows too heavy to raise her hand. Movement so, so still.
Across the street, one figure was still solid. In view and watching her. Dark, heavy-lidded eyes that sunk into her skull. Intentional wrinkles and low set nose and mouth. Scraggly white hair pulled back into a tight, tight bun that stretched every hair into its hold with a rubber band.
Flashes of pictures flickered through her mind and Elizabeth knew she recognised her. A serial killer from her previous precinct, hundreds of miles away.
Step. Step. Slip. Step.
Screams later broke out through the block and several police officers came rushing out, guns blazing, from the station. Elizabeth was said to have been dragged away from the crying and shaking old lady in the middle of the road. A lady who was on her way to bingo night with her grandkids. Now curled into a fetal position on the asphalt with the children begging for help.
Elizabeth was taken kicking and screaming into a cell, yelling for the captain to look at the papers. To scrutinize the sketches. To inspect the files. “It’s in there,” she croaked through her hoarse throat as the officers looked on with sympathy. “It’s all in there! You have to believe me, please!”
The cell door was locked and she was left in the holding. Elizabeth wobbled on her aching knees across the cement. She threw herself against the bars, producing a sizable gash in her temple. “They’re coming! Please! Believe me!”