His stomach turned, and he managed to step back a few more feet before he vomited all over a snowbank.
Another police officer approached him then, a tall woman with curly brown hair. The other officers seemed to defer to her, so he assumed she must be the one in charge of the scene. She gave Drew a moment for his stomach to settle down, holding a finger up to the two paramedics so they wouldn’t yet load the body into the ambulance. When Drew finally straightened up, she introduced herself.
“I’m Constable McKinley. You live here, you said?” She had a British accent and spoke kindly, though there was no mistaking the authority in her voice.
“I did live here,” he said. “With Joey. I need to know if that’s her. Joelle Reyes.” Just saying her name made Drew want to throw up again. “Please.”
The police officer looked at him closely. “Her body is badly—”
“Please,” he repeated. He was usually more articulate than this, but it was all he could think to say.
“I can show you a part of the body that isn’t so damaged.” The officer spoke gently. “But first, can you tell me if she has any tattoos?”
“No, none,” Drew said automatically.
And then he remembered. Joey did have a tattoo, because he’d just seen it at the Golden Cherry. Jesus, had that only been a few hours ago?
“Wait,” he said. “She does have one tattoo. A butterfly. On her thigh.”
“Let’s look,” the officer said, and walked him back to the ambulance. She pulled out her flashlight and then lifted the tarp, from the middle this time. He braced himself.
And there it was, in a spot where the skin wasn’t as badly burned. A butterfly, midflight, the colors still vibrant though the surrounding skin was bright red.
“It’s her,” he gasped. “It’s Joey.”
He sank to his knees on the ice-cold sidewalk, his breath coming out in shallow bursts of white steam in the freezing, smoke-scented air.
Joey was dead. And it would forever be Drew’s fault. Because he’d left her.
Again.
* * *
If Cherry notices that Drew looks emotional when she gets up to her office, she doesn’t say anything.
She has an entire row of photo albums lined up neatly on the bookcase behind her desk, and she runs a long red fingernail along the spines until she gets to a faded pink album labeled 1998. She pulls it off the shelf and reaches for her reading glasses. Flipping through the pages, she smiles at some of the memories until she finds what she’s looking for. She turns the album around to face Drew.
“There’s your girl.”
Drew examines the photo behind the protective plastic sheet. It’s surreal looking at Joey’s face after all this time. But this is not the girl he remembers, the one who wore jeans and baggy T-shirts every day. This is Joey dressed as Ruby, her mother, with the eyelashes and red lipstick and a skimpy gold dress that shows off the tattoo on her thigh. She’s relaxing in the dressing room with her feet up on the vanity table, stilettos discarded on the floor beside her chair, reading a book.
Drew’s heart pangs. Despite looking like Ruby, the photo captured the essence of who Joey was perfectly. She always had her nose in a book wherever she went.
“There might be another picture of her in there somewhere,” Cherry says. “You’re welcome to look.”
He turns the pages slowly, scanning through photo after photo of women in various stages of undress. Finally, on the last page, he sees a picture of Joey with two other dancers, the three of them posing like Charlie’s Angels. Joey is wearing her gold dress, and the young Black woman in the middle is wearing a silver dress—if it can even be considered clothing—that appears to be made entirely of strings. The woman on the right must be the other Filipino dancer, Betty Savage. She’s wearing a traditional green Chinese qipao, and while the skirt ends at midcalf, the dress is extremely tight, with a high slit on one side only.
“Betty never had a problem catering to the customers’ Asian fetishes. For Halloween, she dressed as a geisha.” Cherry is looking at the photo upside down. “You can’t do that kind of thing now, but back in the nineties, in a strip club? It made her a lot of money.”
Drew stares at the picture. “Did Joey do that, too?”
“I would say so, but it was less obvious,” Cherry says. “Ruby knew what she had that made her different from the other girls, and she worked it well. Those two looked so much alike, don’t you think?”