Disclaimer: I don't own Carmen, I'm just borrowing her for awhile.

Author's Note: The final installment. Thank you for reading! And if you enjoy my stories, please review. It's the fuel that keeps me going!

It was the evening before big gallery show. I had been looking forward to putting on the last of the finishing touches, calling it a night and going to bed early. Instead, as the clock inched toward eleven, I was stuck at the gallery with a score of NYPD and two familiar and disgruntled ACME detectives. Ivy and Zack were convinced Carmen was going to hit Enzo's gallery tonight and make off with one of my paintings. The only person excited about this prospect was Enzo, who was convinced that if Carmen stole one of my paintings, it would make my career.

"Carmen's been on real artistic kick lately. Exclusively female artists. Artemisia Gentileschi, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frieda Kahlo. She just snagged Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party this morning," Zack explained.

I shook my head. "I don't understand. Those things she stole are masterpieces. I'm a nobody… my paintings are worth nothing."

"Well, they're worth something to Carmen. Which is the only thing that matters," Ivy muttered.

Zack took out a small figurine of an elephant. It looked like Dumbo from the Disney cartoon and had the Latin word caritas inscribed on a collar around its neck. "This is the clue she left for us."

"A ceramic elephant led you here? Are you sure you have the right place?" I asked, incredulous.

"Elementary," Zack puffed up. I could tell he was quite proud at cracking this clue. "We were stuck until I remembered that Dumbo is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a neighborhood in New York. And caritas is Latin for "charity." He looked at me. "That's your real name, isn't it? Charity Winthrop."

"Yes." Charity Winthrop sounded like someone who might have turned tricks on the Mayflower. "I changed it- It wasn't a very good name for an escort."

"It's not a bad name for an artist," Ivy told me strangely. "And I remembered from the surveillance reports I had read that you were planning an exhibition."

"Put it all together- Charity Winthrop in DUMBO, a budding female artist that Carmen has taken quite an interest in," Zack finished.

I shrugged. "If you say so." I wandered away to adjust the height of one of my paintings. Ivy and Zack's presence made me nervous. I had never told ACME about my most recent run-in with Carmen and I feared that Ivy with her sharp green eyes and finely tuned bullshit detector would somehow be able to see right through me. I regretted my decision now. At the time, I hadn't relished being used by ACME to bait the hook to catch Carmen Sandiego. Mostly because I wasn't entirely sure that if I encountered the thief again, I would be able to withstand the pull of her gravity a second time.

I still have her gloves and scarf in a box under my bed. I know I should throw them away, give them to Goodwill or something, instead of holding onto them like some kind of unholy relic.

Zack followed me as I gave every last painting in the gallery a once over. When we stopped in front of one of the largest paintings I had done- a nude, oil on canvas, of a woman we both knew quite well, he blushed. "Um, is this one from life or from memory?"

"From memory."

"It's…uh…very striking." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "I'm going to go…check the exits. Over there."

I tried not to take pleasure in his discomfort, but couldn't help smiling a little. I wondered then if this was the painting Carmen wanted. I had learned that beneath the flashy red trenchcoat lay a very private woman. And I doubted she would appreciate being put on display…literally naked…for all the world to see. Or was there another she planned to take?

I found Ivy standing before a scene I'm sure she remembered: two redheads mirroring each other on either side of an interrogation room. The detective looked haggard and I watched as she drained a can of soda and crushed it in her fist. I don't know what made me say it, but I felt she needed to know. "She really loves you, you know."

The young woman shook her head and snorted in derision.

"Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't true," I told her.

The detective ran a hand through her short red hair and turned to me, heartache and disappointment written all over her face. "This," she gestured widely, encompassing the robbery about to happen and years of a chase that never ended, "is not the behavior of someone who loves me." My double paused. "It's not the behavior of someone who loves you either," she said quietly.

Strange, how two things that were so opposite, could both be true.

I never got a chance to say any more, for in that moment all the lights in the entire block went out. The gallery and the street outside were pitch black. "Stay here," Ivy whispered. The next few minutes were pure chaos; detectives and police ran about with flashlights in confusion. I could hear the sounds of a helicopter rotor beating above us. A smoke grenade went off somewhere near the back door. And in the darkness I felt an arm wrap around my waist and the warmth of a body press into my back. "Well done. Very well done," a husky female voice breathed in my ear. And I half-feared and half-prayed in that fraction of a second that she had come to steal me away as well.

I spun to face her, but she had vanished.

When the power came back on, we discovered that one of my paintings had disappeared and Carmen along with it. Ironically, it was my favorite, the one entitled "Thaw." Two women on the steps of a museum in early spring; the promise of new life after the winter's cold. That perfect moment when the story had yet to unfold, when a happy ending was still possible.

For Zack and Ivy, Carmen left a clue, which sent them sprinting on the next leg of her merry chase. For me she left a rose, petals as deep and as red as blood, thorns sharper than a knife.