The Scrapped Frame
The Scrapped Frame
Aiden's POV.
The city is a chorus of sirens now and I am the conductor of the racket. Panic, they call it, what I did to Chacha Remirez.
They don’t know what they are talking about. It was not panic, it was a necessity. I need to interrupt the pattern of the 13th because they are drawing near, squeezing the air surrounding my art. Chacha, the smug little lawyer with her bridal glow, she deserved the acceleration. She was the embodiment of the establishment that had tried to smother my brilliance. She was the enemy, and I dispatched the obliteration of her absurd life with a certain panache—a public spectacle-for a now set to it.Now, I am invisible again.
My former apartment is bleached, scrubbed clean. The cops think they’re zooming in on a scared beast, but all I’m doing is evolving, shedding my old self. They have my face, yes, but they do not have my motive, my symmetry, or my next location. I can smell their heat, like the smoke from a racing car, but they are still a few turns behind. The time for slow deliberate ritual is gone . Now I do the clean - up.Ruthie is the next variable to be tamed. My surveillance tells me she is weak, easily
I observe her apartment from a prudent distance, She believes a high-rise at East 89th Street will protect her. It’s only the scenery that changes.I scan my notes on her schedule. She stops by the Daily Grind café on 74th and Madison every Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 AM on the dot. She’s the same mocha order, the same corner seat by the window, a softcover book in hand. And that’s the New York sequence. Not in a dark alley or a blood-stained kitchen, but in the day, surrounded by theordinary banging of coffee cups. It is a grand final irony.
The difficulty now is not the killing; it is getting away and getting away with it. With the Chacha show, I’m officially a spectacle, and every cop in the city is hunting for the mild-mannered professor from NYU. I must leave them a decoy, a poisoned bone to gnaw on as I conclude my engagement.I think about the Frame. I could put in something -- a shred of evidence that points in a particular direction but that ultimately misleads -- in the biography of one of my nameless ex students.
Maybe the one who had the unreciprocated crush on Chacha. It would be easy to plant a little specific item on his desk or in his flat. I even retrieve a lock of Chacha’s hair from my hoard of personal effects, a hideous, flawless trophy for a false murderer.
Those cops.
In their tiny, dirty stupid minds they think it's Lewis. Ho,ho,ho
Lewis is fucking dead. I finished him, stole his masterpiece. Killer killing killer.
Love it.
But I have my doubts. The beauty of the work is that it’s all intentional. Carving, every missing earring, every date
was for me . Seeding a false flag narrative contaminates the narrative purity. It provides a vulgar layer of chaos that competes with the EE and T signature. It makes my masterwork a routine police-work dunnit. No. I won’t spoil my signature for a moment’s comfort.
Let me just say, let them chase the real me. They will not get me before I finish.The logic of the sequence is: lawyers—who twist the language I teach—must pay. Ruthie, the wife of a lawyer-cum-executive-member of the system, makes for the perfect final ethos-buster before the hiatus. Her terror is clean Her despair is pure.
I won't muddle the last hours with fumbling diversions. The only focus now is the meeting at The Daily Grind.
I need to hurry up and the wait rushes the visual pleasures of the 13th. Ritual is important, but a promise is absolute. I owe Ronnie. I owe him the silence, the distance, and the absolute certainty that the past will never rise again. Ronnie is the shadow of my youth, the only person who deeply comprehended the blueprint of my mind before I built the walls so high. We had an understanding, a pact baked in the sun of New York years ago.
Ronnie was my confidante, my enabler, the holder of secrets that could shatter the life I’d created.
I'm doing it all for Ronnie. Damn, those cops won't understand.
The appeal was clear: When the sequence is done, when the “clean up” of the New York variables is finished, I vanish completely, and those early secrets are buried forever. The Chacha murder, the speed, the double 'T’—it signals the close of this chapter. Ruthie is the last loose end. I have to do this for Ronnie, not simply to win my freedom, but because he continues to believe that I can keep the silence.
He is watching, I know it. And I cannot disappoint him.This newfound urgency requires a new target immediately after Ruthie. I can’t afford to be wasting time stalking new prey when I have to disappear. I must already be observing the next lawyer, the one who will fill the vacuum left by Chacha's televised departure.
I find her easily. The legal profession is niche, predictable and smug. This one, Paige Lang , is a prosecutor, who is young, bright, and ruthless. I am sitting across the street from the DA now, beneath the canopy of a small literary bookstore, dashing. I watch her through the glass.She is the very clinical justice I hate. She moves with the confidence of someone who’s never been truly vulnerable.”
She’s currently hunched over a desk, arguing passionately on the phone, her tailored blazer a little off-center. She is a monument to ambition, precisely the sort of impeccable professional who must get her identity taken away in carved perfection.She isn’t essential to the sequence itself she’s required as a final, stunning proof of my promise to Ronnie. It’s a demonstration of dominance before I disappear completely.
I want one last grand, dramatic signature for the cops to track down, telling them that the “manic killer” is alive and well in their city, even though I’m not. It’s the last line of defense, the gift of continued confusion for the detectives so desperately trying to track me down.I’m timing it. I love having a schedule.
Bellweather is... Wednesday evening or Thursday morning?
It'll be crisp, it’ll be a glorious, terrific danger. Two deaths in less than two days. The city, meanwhile, will spiral into gorgeous, frightened madness. And by Thursday morning, I’ll be gone — bound for the real work.
I know that exquisite tension rising up in my chest that I have come to expect. It’s the most authorial sensation in the world: realizing that I’m the only director in this play.I have it figured out with the police: they think they know what I am, but they do not. Now I am writing these final chapters with an open hand.I doublecheck the plan, just to be sure.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, 7:30 AM. The Daily Grind. Ruthie’s favorite table.
I should do the killing there maybe, at Ruthie's favorite càfe
I've got the delivery uniform the same blue, a little cleaner this time. I have the box, the lovely ivory ribbon, the one perfect, polished earring.
It is an ideal finishing piece for this local installment.I have one more look at Paige Lang . She rises, at last finishing her call and collecting her briefcases. She looks strong. She looks invincible. I smile faintly behind the bookstore window. Invincibility is always an illusion. It is to be peeled away, layer by layer, until the fragile, lovely truth is lay bare.I check my watch.
My preparation is complete. The stage is set. Soon the old, stupid me will be dead. And the real artist — the one Ronnie always knew I could be and cringingly reminded
me to become — will be free. I am ready to carve.I am ready to go.