Red Star

Before The Fire Part 5

You have got to be kidding me.

"Hear me out, okay?" Rosa sighs in exasperation, gesturing to him to proceed.

"The blood is fake and so are the wounds," Ralph begins, saying all the words at once in case she interrupted. "It's corn syrup and red dye."

Rosa doesn't even try to challenge him on this, so presses her lips together and waits for him to explain. 

"Well, first of all, there's arsenic in the glasses." He smiles, almost as if he isn't trying to show off about the fact that he has done an excellent job. 

Rosa looks up, and sees Ralph Castano for the first time since she met him in the dingy bar opposite her apartment building. All he wants to do is succeed, and he has been until he was transferred to the New York division - the big guns. He's intimidated by the skill level here and just wants to fit in, but can't because she's making his life hell. 

Maybe she should loosen the reins a bit. 

"And I found a bottle of fake blood under a chair." He says, lifting said bottle into the air, looking far too proud of himself.

Screw that. He's just lucky. 

"Why would they do that?"

"Well, we heard they liked to show off, didn't we?"

Brandon comes back into the room before Rosa can reply, tapping and swiping away at the iPad he retrieved. Lifts his head and smirks at Rosa during the time that Ralph rattles on about how the wounds are fake relates to their showmanship. Bows his head and hisses in triumph when he cracks the passcode. 

Rosa all but leaps across the room to see what Brandon can find. 

"Fuck yeah," Brandon smirks, opening up an app Ros doesn't recognise. "It's this new app I was looking into for my apartment. It connects to any cameras you have in the rooms of your house, and you can review them twenty-four-seven." 

It almost seems too good to be true.

"Well, what are you waiting for, Brandon?" Ralph grins, coming across the room too to see what the fuss is all about. "It's all we need!" 

Brandon swipes at the screen a few times, presses his fingers to different spaces on the screen, and before they know it, the three of them are watching security footage of the murders. All in black, but not wearing any kind of garment to cover his identity, a man walks through the rooms while the family is out and lines their glass rims with arsenic. Hours later, he returns and makes the scene look like a massacre, shoots a few times out of the window to hail the police to the scene, and makes a swift getaway. 

Ralph's the first to say it, of course.

"That's the mayor of Chicago." He breathes, looking at Ros for confirmation.

"Yup," She nods and swallows thickly, knowing exactly what this means. "I need you to pull apart the footage for me Brandon, frame by frame."

"It's not my job, Ros, I'm a forensic analyst, not a techie." Frowning, Brandon looks at earlier footage of other rooms while Ros runs her fingers through her hair in exasperation.

"Well figure something out because no one there wants to work with me beca-"

"Hey, look at this," Brandon says, bringing her back to the case at hand. "This is from the upstairs bathroom."

The mayor of Chicago sprays, in red paint, a shoddy star on the window and turns to camera and smiles right at them, but not before he sticks a post-it note to the window as well. 

Rosa is up there before the man has even smiled.  

If it's another note of this fucking goose chase, I want to find it first. 

And she does. Amid the red paint is the yellow post-it note they saw in the footage. She wishes she hadn't found it.

Hello, Ivy. 

We're here to destroy you.

Yours faithfully,

Red Star 

"Anything interesting?" Ralph asks, breaking her away from her train of thought. 

"Wasn't there," Rosa lies, the post-it in her back pocket burning a hole through to her core. "I'm done here now." 

"Rosa, you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine. I just want to get out of here."

"Did you want me to drive you back to your apartment? It's really late." Ralph asks as they come down the stairs of the dead family's home and Rosa mock-salutes to Douglas to tell him she's finished and that the report will be on his desk tomorrow.

And as they stand in the cold of November, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, with a post-it note promising her demise, Rosa Waters looks Ralph Castano right in the eyes before she takes his face into her palms and kisses him.

"I'd rather be anywhere else." She whispers, before the lines between self-preservation and desperation become blurred again.  

~

The song of the chapter is "Let it all go" By Birdy and Rhodes.