Chapter Text
The woman they discovered on Thursday night couldn’t have been older than nineteen, twenty at the most. She hadn’t been in the water long—just long enough for her skin to wash out into a dusty gray and her lips to turn blue and plump up. Her clothes were gone, her hair a tangled mess of leaves and garbage found in the East river. She had thin wrists that bore angry red marks with purple bruises on her knees and legs.
It wasn’t until they turned her over to fish her out of the river that they saw it. The long scratches down her back. They were deep and started between her shoulder blades, the soft flesh dug out in five, uniform claw marks that trailed all the way down to the base of her spine.
The officer on scene exchanged a look with the medical examiner. “How many does this one make it?” he asked with a frown that deepened the lines on his face.
The medical examiner shook her head and waved the investigators over to photograph. “Three,” she said with a contemplative hum. “Three in two weeks.”
“All with those claw marks?” the officer asked for clarification.
She nodded. “All the same.”
“Three in two weeks…”the cop shook his head.
“Yeah,” his companion exhaled and pushed back her bangs with her wrist. “I’m afraid he’s just getting started.”
***
“Three, Jane,” Darcy said as she tucked her phone between her shoulder and her ear and entered her username and password on her work computer. “Do you know what that means?”
On the other end of the line, she heard Jane take what sounded like the last sip of something with ice cubes. “I hope it has nothing to do with how excited you are.”
“It means there’s a serial killer in Brooklyn,” Darcy said, ignoring her friend’s wary tone. “Two points make a line, not a pattern,” she paused and peered around bullpen furtively, pleased to see it still buzzing with police officers and civilians who didn’t care what she was saying on her cell phone. “You taught me that. But three? Three is a pattern. Or at least the beginning of a pattern.”
“Three could also be a coincidence,” Jane reminded her. “And I’m not sure why you’re so excited about this anyway. It’s a little unsettling.”
“I’m excited because of who the victims are,” she dropped her voice needlessly under the din of the office. “Or rather, what they did for a living.”
“And what is it they did, Darcy?” Jane asked in a remarkably patient tone.
“They were hookers,” she said triumphantly, running a quick search to see if anything new had been reported in the last few hours.
“Okay…?”
“And what am I?”
Jane let out a sound of uncertainty. “You’re a police officer, Darcy.” There was a pause. “You are still a police officer, aren’t you?”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, a police officer who has been getting the shaft and stuck doing nothing but skeezy undercover prost round-ups for months.”
“Ah,” her companion finally nodded with understanding. “But now, you want to stay undercover as a hooker so you can catch the killer before the detectives do and...”
“Finally get out of vice and into homicide where I belong.” She stopped and glanced at her watch. “Ooh, speaking of, I’ve gotta go. Afternoon debrief starts in five.”
There was another long pause from Jane’s end of the line. “Y’know, there’s a ton of things you could do, working for Stark.”
“Jane…”
“More fun, more money, considerably less dangerous than trying to catch a murderer on your own…”
“Um, I recall almost getting killed at least three different times while I was working for you without ever collecting a paycheck,” she reminded with an affectionate roll of her eyes.
Jane sighed. “Just please be careful. I really don’t want to read about you washing up along the East River.”
“I’m always careful,” she said with a shrug as Eddie walked past and motioned to the conference room where the rest of the team was gathering. “Don’t worry so much and say hi to Thor for me.”
Jane’s warning was all but forgotten by the time Darcy took her seat in the front of the room.
***
It wasn’t the assignment she wanted. If she was going to catch the guy killing hookers on her own, she was going to have to pretend to be one. Whoever was dumping girls by Pier 6 wasn’t looking to pick them up in a hotel bar with a doorman.
At least, she didn’t think he was. His victims so far were definitely from the darker corners of the borough. And she had to imagine they hadn’t started out their night shifts in dresses that fit this well.
Darcy looked at herself once more in the mirror and put the finishing touches on her dark red lips. She smoothed her hands over the crisp fabric of her dark blue dress and wondered what it said about her that she was more annoyed than nervous.
“It says you’re a goddamn professional,” Eddie had said that afternoon as they’d shoved burgers in their faces on the edge of her desk. “Just try and class it up this time,” he’d added with a grin full of lettuce and onions. “Since they’re finally upgrading you from hooker to call-girl.”
And they had. She’d traded up from her pleather skirts and tube tops to this navy chiffon number and a room at the Hilton. A room that was wired and tapped and ready for the monthly round up of Brooklyn’s bottom-feeders who were unlucky enough to try to pay a police officer for the pleasure of her company.
“Looks like your little one-woman investigation is going to have to wait, Lewis,” Eddie had said with sympathetic pat of her shoulder while he’d selected and packed his surveillance gear for the night. “Sarge is looking for some big fish tonight.”
But the problem was that Darcy wasn’t really supposed to be the one fishing…she was the bait. If she went looking for a mark there were only so many ways it could blow up in her face. She had to wait and be patient and see if anyone came to her.
And just like clockwork, one did. She knew he knew what she was doing there—their plant behind the bar was always a good sport about subtly pointing the girls out to anyone inquiring—but she almost appreciated the way he stumbled through the introductions, like it mattered what their names were. He was Steve. She was Darla.
If she were honest with herself, she would have admitted she was a little surprised when he turned out to be her first catch of the night. Men like him weren’t normally in need of a professional. Tall, blonde, built, handsome. It seemed unlikely to Darcy that he’d have any trouble getting laid for free.
But, she reminded herself with a voice in her head that was much too cynical for her twenty-six years, it didn’t matter what kind of guy he looked like or acted like or seemed like. He was the kind of guy she was going to arrest that night. And those kinds of guys were really all the same when you got down to it.
Even if this one did look kind of familiar, she conceded as she opened her hotel room door and ushered him inside with a smile she hoped was seductive. Familiar, and with the kind of sad eyes and thoughtful expression that—under different circumstances—would have made her want to make him a cup of tea and ask what was wrong.
But that doesn’t matter because you’re a goddamn professional, she reminded herself and shoved her feelings of sympathy out of her mind.
“Make yourself at home, handsome,” she said with the light Brooklyn accent she’d finally perfected enough to use in the field as she motioned toward the neatly made king-sized bed.
Predictably, he sat on the edge, right in the middle where, if he would just turn his face to the right, one of the department’s hidden cameras could get a full capture of his face. But he didn’t look right. He looked down at his hands and fidgeted, looking so uncomfortable and out of his element that Darcy almost felt bad for him.
“So, are you looking for anything in particular? Or just…” she turned away coyly from adjusting her appearance in the mirror and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
He looked up, surprised at the question. “Oh, um…” he frowned and glanced down again. “I just…I’m just trying to distract myself for a while.”
She forced herself to smile, trying not to feel guilty for making this guy’s night even worse. “Well, distraction is my middle name, sweetheart. But I do like to settle first,” she said, loud enough so her cameras would hear her and batted her eyelashes. “Business before pleasure.”
“Oh, right.” Distracted, he reached into his pocket and removed his wallet. “Of course.” He looked up, looking lost. “I don’t know…” he appeared flustered for a moment before he finally just offered her the wallet. “How much?”
It only took a second for Darcy to see it. The interior of his wallet was home to a Stark Industries ID badge on one side and a New York state driver’s license issued to a Steven Rogers on the other.
Steven Rogers.
Stark Industries.
Darcy felt her eyes widen and her heart stop. She reached out and put a hand over his wallet and crossed the few feet between them, bending down to put her lips close to his ear. “I think you should go home, Captain Rogers,” she exhaled, hoping the hair tumbling over her shoulder would obscure his face.
Steve looked up in confusion. “I’m not…I mean…you’re not going to get into trouble...if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She inched closer and dipped a knee into the mattress, leaning in close enough to smell his cologne. Darcy took a hold of his hand and slid it under her dress, carefully keeping it to the outside of her leg, made sure he could feel the gun that was strapped to her thigh as she reached into her cleavage with the other hand and flashed her badge for one brief moment. “That’s not what I’m worried about, sir.”
His eyes went wide as he pulled his hand back. “You’re a cop?”
She felt his whole body tense; she could almost see his heart pounding through his shirt and felt her own heart sink. Dedication to the job only went so far.
“Calm down,” she said, keeping her voice low, her lips by his ear. “I’m going to get you out of this.”
“How are you—?”
“There’s a camera to your right, just above the picture frame,” she cut him off. “And one on the dresser, beside the TV. Just keep your face away from them and no one’s going to be able to tell that it’s you.” She took a deep breath. “Just follow my lead.”
“Follow your—?”
Darcy pushed away from him and worked her face into one of disgust. “You’re joking right?” she asked, raising her voice back to a volume where she’d be picked up. “Nobody rides for free, pal.” She grabbed a handful of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “I don’t give a shit how pretty you are.” She dragged him to the door and yanked it open, throwing him unmercifully into the hallway. “Come back when you can afford me!” she added for effect before she slammed the door in his confused face.
She dropped her forehead against the door and waited to exhale until she heard him retreat down the hall. “False alarm, guys,” she told anyone who might be watching the footage. “No dime, no crime.”
It took the rest of the night for her heart to stop pounding.
***
By three-thirty her shift was over and there were three unlucky gentlemen awaiting bail in the basement of the precinct. Darcy’s eyelids were drooping as she climbed the four flights of stairs to her apartment, her make-up long gone and her hair had long since lost its glossy curl. She dropped onto her bed, thrilled that her roommate was nowhere to be found.
If someone had been home, she might have been tempted to dissect out loud the fact that she’d almost busted Captain-fucking-America for soliciting a prostitute.
But she pushed the idea out of her head almost as soon as it arrived. She had gotten him out of her hotel room undetected, after all, she reminded herself. She had kept her mouth shut at the station. If her discretion meant that people had one less thing to talk about, then so be it. After everything he’d been through, he deserved at least that much.
But by the time she woke up, anyone from the night before was shoved to the very back of her mind. The police had found another body and the only thing people were talking about was that Brooklyn had a real-life serial killer on their hands.