Laurel Heights 3

by Lisa Worrall

  “Yes.” Scott nodded. “Sweet girl, cute kid. She had no idea she wasn’t the only Mrs. Petersen, and now she has nothing.”

  “The son of a bitch obviously didn’t think past getting what he wanted,” Ethan said angrily. “And he doesn’t even have to clear up the shit he’s left behind.” He sighed. “That poor kid is going to be in therapy for the rest of his life.”

  Scott stood up. “I think I’ll go and make sure Lieberman hasn’t bored the kid to tears.” He headed down the corridor to the main room. In truth, Lieberman’s babysitting skills were not his main concern, Christopher was. They’d sat him down in a police station and led his mother off to be questioned for—he looked at his watch—nearly four hours. The poor kid must be going insane. Laughter hit him as he opened the door to find Christopher at Noah’s desk, stuffing his face with one of the largest slices of pizza he’d ever seen. “Wow,” he drawled, sitting down next to Christopher. “That’s bigger than you.”

  “Noah got it,” Christopher mumbled around a mouthful of cheese.

  “Cool.” Scott unhooked his badge from his belt and put it on the table in front of Christopher, who frowned up at him.

  “What’s that for?” It was almost unintelligible, but Scott understood him, being fully trained in the art of eating with your mouth full.

  “I thought you’d want to check it,” Scott replied. “Like before.” He nearly snorted at the look on Christopher’s face—nearly—as the boy said.

  “We’re in a police station.” The words were said slowly as if Scott were an uneducated five-year-old. “They wouldn’t let you in if you weren’t legit.”

  “Legit, huh?”

  “It means real.”

  “Ah.” Scott nodded in understanding. “Noah been treatin’ you okay?” he asked. “’Cause I can arrest him if you want me to.”

  “Duh, he’s the police,” Christopher replied. “And he’s nice. He got me pizza.”

  “Good thing you’ve got the kid on your side, Noah.” Scott tipped him a wink across the desk.

  “Thanks, Chris,” Noah said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “I knew you’d have my back.”

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “She’s still talking to Will,” Scott said, keeping his tone conversational.

  “She’s been talking to him for-ev-er,” Chris grumbled.

  “I know, buddy, but it won’t be too much longer before the two of you can go home.”

  “You promise?” Christopher’s worried gaze met his and Scott swallowed, hard.

  “I promise.” Scott drew a cross over his heart with his finger to make his point. The boy hung his head and Scott laid his hand on his small forearm, asking softly. “What is it?” Christopher’s response was so quiet, Scott had to strain to hear it. “Sorry, buddy, what was that?”

  “Am I going to jail?” Tear-filled eyes looked into Scott’s.

  “Of course, not.” Scott tilted his head. “Why would you think that?”

  “’Cause I hurt my dad.”

  Scott thought his heart was going to shatter into a thousand pieces at the fear and sorrow in the little boy’s voice. Whether it was because he felt like some kind of kindred spirit, or because he’d laid awake night after night wondering why his daddy didn’t love him, he didn’t know—but something drove Scott to his knees in front of Christopher’s chair and had him taking his tiny hands in his bigger ones.

  “Listen to me, Chris,” he said firmly. “You are not going to jail, and neither is your mom. Some people get the nice dads, the kind that take them to little league and throw ball with them at the weekends. But some people get the kind of dads you had, the not so nice ones. But that wasn’t your fault, and neither was what you did.

  “You saved your mom, and that makes you one of the bravest kids I’ve ever known. None of this was your fault. None of it. Do you understand me?” Scott’s breath caught in his throat as Christopher nodded, then launched himself off the chair and into his arms. He wrapped his arms around Christopher and, as the little boy sobbed into his neck, Scott held him tightly and promised him over and over that everything was going to be okay.

  By the time Scott finally pulled the car onto their drive, it was about ten after seven. They hadn’t finished the paperwork associated with Audrey’s case until long after she and Chris had gone home, and he was exhausted. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Will look over his shoulder out of the rear window—again.

  “What’re you looking for?” he asked, turning around himself.

  “Nothing,” Will said quickly, a little too quickly for Scott’s liking, and opened the passenger door. “C’mon, I’m starvin’. Lasagna?” He was out of the car before Scott reply, leaving Scott to stare after him, open-mouthed and confused.

  “I’m gonna start rationing his coffee,” Scott mumbled under his breath as he got out of the car then locked it behind him. He strolled up the path to the front door where Will waited for him, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “What’re you waiting for?” he asked.

  “You’ve got the keys.” Will clapped his hands together. “C’mon, I want to get inside.”

  “Seriously,” Scott said, arching an eyebrow. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Noth—”

  An arc of light as another car pulled onto their drive lit up Will’s face, cutting him off mid-word. Scott’s gaze narrowed as Will’s nervousness turned into a full body shudder—as well it should—as Scott watched Matt and Ally get out of the car and walk slowly toward them. He turned to Will when they reached them and snapped, “What the fuck are they doing here?”

  “I invited them,” Will replied with a defiant lift of his chin.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Scott shook his head. “Why?” He flinched slightly at the sudden darkening of Will’s usually soft brown eyes.

  “’Cause I knew the only way I’d get the truth was with the two of you in the same room,” Will ground out. He grabbed the keys out of Scott’s hand, opened the front door and all but dragged Scott inside, while motioning for Matt and Ally to do the same. “And I’d rather not hear it on the doorstep.” He slammed the door behind them.

  “What truth?” Scott was confused. “I’ve told you the truth.”

  “No, you haven’t.” Will threw his arms up. “You sat in the kitchen this morning and lied to my face!”

  “No, I did not!”

  “Okay,” Will said, crossing his arms, his gaze flitting between Scott and Ally. “Then I’ll ask the question again, and I want the truth—from both of you.”

  “What question?” Scott snapped.

  “Who’s Jenny Boul?”

  Chapter ten

  Ally’s gasp of surprise and the look the three of them exchanged, told Will more than a thousand words ever could. The faint knot he’d had in the pit of his stomach all day tightened painfully as he waited for someone to speak. He didn’t expect it to be Matt.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” he said. “Which way’s the kitchen?”

  “At the end of the hall,” Scott replied. “You’ll find everything you need in the cupboards.”

  Will watched, open-mouthed, while Matt strolled down the hall to the kitchen, as if it was an everyday occurrence. “Wha—?”

  “Let’s sit down,” Scott said, holding out his hand.

  Will stared at it for a moment or two, then slipped his fingers into Scott’s and allowed him to lead him into the living-room. Scott motioned for Will to sit beside him on the couch, but he chose the armchair, forcing Scott and Ally to sit together. He wanted to be able to see them.

  “Okay,” Will said, settling back against the cushions. “I’m listening.”

  “We should wait for Matt,” Ally said, her expression one of nervous panic. “This involves him, too.”

  The knot in Will’s stomach tightened even more. Whoever this Jenny Boul was, he was beginning to wish he’d never mentioned her name, for the tension that rolled off Scott and Ally was palpable. The air pra
ctically crackled with it, lifting the hairs on the nape of Will’s neck and causing goosebumps to break out on his skin. If this was what her name did, he wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to hear what they were going to say.

  It wasn’t long before Matt joined them, carrying four mugs of coffee, two in each hand. He apologized as he handed one to Will. “Sorry, Will, I don’t know how you take yours, so I just did it black.”

  “That’s fine,” Will said with a smile, curling his fingers around the mug. “Thank you.”

  Matt held out one of the others to Scott. “I just assumed you still have yours like treacle.”

  Scott didn’t reply, Will noted, just took the mug and put it on the coffee table in front of him. Although he imagined it had more to do with the situation than the fact that Matt had remembered how he liked his coffee.

  After Matt gave Ally her drink and sat down—in between her and Scott which Will thought was probably a good idea—there were a few more minutes of pregnant silence until someone spoke. This time it was Scott.

  “Before we start,” he said, looking directly at Will. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry—again. I know that’s all I’ve said over the last few days, but I really am sorry. Sorry for lying to you when you asked me this morning if I knew Jenny. I should have told you straight away, but I hadn’t heard that name in so long it kind of threw me, and I didn’t know what to say.”

  “So, who is she?” Will asked, shifting his gaze between all three of them. For a split second the phrase, “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” flashed behind his eyes like a neon sign but he quickly brushed the image aside and waited for an answer.

  “She was my best friend,” Ally replied with a wistful smile. “Rachael, Jenny and I were inseparable right from kindergarten, we did everything together. Rachael’s mom called us The Mini Musketeers.”

  “But they were more like The Three Stooges,” Matt interjected, drawing a chuckle from Scott and Ally.

  “You said was,” Will prompted. “What happened?”

  “She died when we were eighteen,” Ally replied, reaching for and finding Matt’s hand.

  Will could see in her eyes how much the loss weighed on her still, and he shot her a looked of sympathetic understanding before asking the inevitable, “How did she die?”

  “We’d had our senior prom and high school was over,” Ally recounted. “Jenny was headed to UCLA to study fashion and Ellis, Jenny’s boyfriend, was going to work for his dad at the garage in town. Rachael and Jack were taking business courses at Columbia and Matt had gotten a scholarship at NYU.” She looked at her husband. “He wanted me to go with him and we’d talked about getting a little place off campus just the two of us.”

  “But talk was all it was,” Matt added. “I knew she’d never leave Sc—”

  “Anyway,” Ally continued. “Like I said, we were all going our separate ways for a while and we wanted to be together one more time before everything changed.”

  “Where did you go?” Will asked, the glare Scott shot his sister when Matt said she’d never leave him, not going unnoticed.

  “We went camping,” Matt replied, taking up the story. Will could tell by the way he clung to Ally, that he didn’t want her to re-live this alone. “Took a few tents and drove up into the woods. We made camp in a clearing not too far from Jackson Creek. We were just going to play some music, get a little high, drink some beer and tell ghost stories.” He shrugged. “We didn’t think it would be any different from the million other times we’d done it.”

  “Different?” Will raised his eyebrow. “What do you mean, different?”

  “Everything was fine,” Matt said. “We ate, we talked, we drank, we got high, then went to bed. We couldn’t have been asleep very long when we heard Ellis scream.” He frowned; his gaze fixed on the coffee table as if he wasn’t really seeing it. “We scrambled out of the tents and Jenny was on the ground by the dying fire, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Ellis, he was holding her down, just screaming her name over and over.” He shook his head. “We froze. God, we were kids, we had no idea what to do. Ally was the first one to move. She all but threw Ellis off Jenny and tried to do CPR but as fast as she was clearing her mouth, more foam was spilling out of it. After a few minutes the convulsing stopped and she didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes wide open, staring at the sky.” His voice caught. “That’s what still wakes me up at night… the way she was staring at the sky.”

  “Was it some kind of fit?” Will stared at him in disbelief, unable to comprehend how terrifying it must have been for them to watch their friend die in front of them. “Was she sick?”

  Matt shook his head again. “No,” he replied. “We eventually managed to get Ellis calm enough to tell us what happened. He’d stolen some of his brother’s stash. Said his brother told him it was better than anything he’d ever tried. He’d talked Jenny into taking some with him and they’d gone back outside by the fire. He said he cut a couple of lines and she’d snorted hers hard and fast. He was about to do his when she started spasming.”

  “What happened then?”

  “We called the police,” Ally said, unheeded tears rolling down her cheeks. “Jack was freaked, said we should just grab our stuff and go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t have left her up there like that, not in the cold and dark, not all alone. She… hated the dark.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw, for the first time, Scott look at his sister with something other than condescension. Was that sympathy? “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. He hated having to ask the next question, but the cogs in his brain were turning, slotting things into place and he needed to know. “Was there an autopsy?”

  Matt nodded. “The police said it was an overdose of cocaine and heroin. They called it a—”

  “Speedball.” Will finished the sentence for him. Were they kidding? They had to be kidding, right? He shook his head in disbelief. They weren’t kidding. “Are you kidding me?” The words in his head had to come out.

  “What do you mean?” Matt looked confused.

  “I mean,” Will leaned heavily on the word. “Did nobody think it was pertinent to inform me that you had a friend who died of a speedball overdose? A friend that connected both of our current victims, who just happened to die of speedball overdoses!”

  “You think they’re related?” Ally said, looking from Will to Scott and back again.

  “No,” Will said sarcastically. “Totally random acts, nothing to do with each other at all! Seriously, Scott?” Scott stared at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and Will had to tamp down the urge to slap him hard enough to wake up the detective part of his brain. He ran a hand through his hair, the movement jerky and frustrated, as he leaned forward in his chair and asked, “What happened to Ellis?”

  “He killed himself the day of Jenny’s funeral,” Ally replied. “He never forgave himself.”

  Shit! That pretty much eliminates him then. “Was Jenny an only child? Are her parents’ still living?” Will tossed the questions at them quickfire.

  “Yes, she was an only child and her mom is living in Florida, but her dad died about five years ago, throat cancer.” Ally frowned, confused. “Why?”

  “Okay, these are the facts,” Will said. “Although, if I’d had a little more information, I might have come to them a bit sooner.” He held his hand up and counted them off on his fingers. “The connection between Rachael and Jack, is Jenny, who died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin, a.k.a. a speedball, given to her by someone else. Rachael and Jack died from overdoses of cocaine and heroin, a.k.a. a speedball, given to them by someone else.

  “Which now leads me to wonder if there’s somebody out there who wanted revenge on the one who caused Jenny’s death? But they can’t have it because Ellis gave her the speedball and he’s already dead. So, what if that somebody then decides that taking revenge on the others who were present when Jenny died was good enough—fuck!” Will threw himself back against the cushions in frustrati
on.

  “What?” Matt shuffled until he was on the edge of his seat.

  “But if I’m right, why would they go after Kimberly?” Will shook his head. In one swift move he blew his own theory out of the water. How could he have been so stupid?

  “Because she was there, too,” Scott said soberly, his gaze settling on Will.

  “She was?” Will asked the question, already knowing what the answer was going to be. The knot in his stomach tightened and his heartbeat began to pound in his ears.

  “Yeah.” Scott nodded. “She was with me.”

  “She was with you?” Will echoed. Scott nodded again. “You were there the night Jenny died?” Another nod. “You were there? You were—?”

  “It doesn’t matter how many times you say it, Will,” Scott grumbled. “It won’t stop being true.”

  “Really?” Will snapped. “Quoting Friends? You’re quoting Friends, now?”

  “Sorry,” Scott held out his hands in surrender or supplication, Will didn’t particularly care which. “Just tryin’ to lighten the mood.”

  “We just figure out someone is picking off your high school friends one by one like in a bad 80’s horror movie, and you think it’s a good time to lighten the mood?” Will shook his head. “I have never wanted to hit you in your stupid face more.”

  “Wait,” Matt said. “Are you saying that whoever killed Rachael and Jack is going to come after us?” He waved his hand in between him and Ally. “Us, us?”

  “All three of you,” Will ground out. He turned on Ally. “Did it not occur to you to mention the manner in which Jenny died to the detectives in Rachael and Jack’s cases?” He was angry. If they had known, at least one of them would still be alive.

  “No!” Ally exclaimed. “Why would it? It was sixteen years ago!”

  “Well if it didn’t occur to you,” Will charged. “Why the hell didn’t it occur to you, Detective?”

  “I was fifteen when it happened, Will!” Scott yelled back, his voice rising. “I’d pretty much blocked out most of my life in Tivoli. Jenny had only been in the ground a couple of weeks before she ran out on me!”