The Last Echo

It’s been fifteen years, but I still hear the click of her heels echoing in the alleyway. Such pretty red shoes, expensive and classy. The sound was caught on a surveillance tape, grainy footage from a camera that barely functioned, yet somehow, it outlived her.

Her name was Danielle Marks. She was twenty-six, a junior paralegal with a reputation for never leaving work early. And even then, she went straight home, no social life. That was why her disappearance in broad daylight made no sense.

I was a rookie detective back then, my tie too tight and my nerves sharper than they should have been. I didn’t lead the case, but I lived it. I knew the scent of the wet pavement where we found her shoe, the torn fabric caught on the chain-link fence, the way her lipstick had smeared inside her abandoned purse. I still have nightmares about that purse.

It took a week before we found her body—stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car behind a derelict strip mall. Not the sort of place you walk alone. The crime scene was rushed, poorly preserved. Too many hands, too many mistakes.

It was strangulation, that much was clear. But the ligature mark was peculiar—uneven, jagged. Not rope, not wire. Something unusual. Something that was never found.

The case went cold for years.

I moved up the ranks, got used to seeing death, but Danielle stuck with me. Maybe it was the way her mother used to call the station every Christmas to ask if we had anything. Maybe it was the case file that never quite made it to the archives because I kept pulling it out.

And then, a miracle—DNA.

It was pure luck. A petty thief in a different state, booked for an unrelated crime. The system flagged a match. His name was Peter Calloway. He was fifty-seven, worked odd jobs, had no real record—just a couple of trespassing charges, nothing violent.

But his DNA was under Danielle’s fingernails.

We arrested him. He never denied knowing her. Said they “ran into each other” sometimes, that she was “nice.” That was all he ever said.

The trial was clean. The evidence held. Calloway was convicted. Case closed.

And yet… it wasn’t.

Because some things never lined up.

For one, the ligature mark. We never identified what caused it. Calloway had no history of using tools, ropes, or restraints. Nothing in his past suggested he knew how to control a victim like that.

Then there was the trunk. It had been wiped down, but not well enough. There was a second set of prints—unidentified, partial, and useless in court. Calloway’s prints weren’t in the car at all.

And there was something else, something small, but it gnawed at me.

Danielle’s watch.

She wore it every day, a gold band, monogrammed on the back. We never found it.

That shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. Because Calloway had no connection to stolen goods. No history of pawning. No financial motive.

Which meant either he took the watch as a keepsake—something killers sometimes do—or someone else did.

I tried to push for a reexamination of the case, but the conviction was solid. I got the usual speeches about how no case is perfect. About how some details never get resolved.

But I knew.

I knew there was someone else.

Someone who had been with Calloway that night. Someone who helped, or watched, or at the very least, walked away with a trophy.

Calloway’s dead now—died in prison last year. He never confessed, never gave a name, never cracked.

And maybe he was the only killer.

But I still think about the second set of prints. About the missing watch. About the click of Danielle’s heels, caught on a broken security camera, the last sound she ever made.

Someone else heard it too.

And that person is still out there.