The First Time I Fell

by Joanne Macgregor

  I walked to my front door, from where I watched Ryan and Singh talking animatedly by the fed’s car. At a movement in my peripheral vision, I turned my head just in time to see my neighbor’s curtain twitch. No doubt Nosy Ned would be popping by soon to get the scoop on Chief Jackson’s latest visit. I took several deep breaths, calming myself, and crouched down to hug Lizzie for comfort.

  Ronil Singh’s car started and pulled away, and the dogs — released from his inexplicable control — left me and bounded down the path to greet Ryan’s return to the house. He studied my face as he approached.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t.

  “Grab your coat,” he replied. “We’re going for a drive.”

  – 21 –

  “Where are we going?” I asked Ryan as we climbed into his police cruiser.

  “The quarry. I want to see if you can pick up anything else. You okay with that?”

  “I guess.”

  I wasn’t exactly keen to return there, but I was curious.

  We pulled out of the Andersens’ driveway, and Ryan drove slowly through the roads of the estate toward the entrance.

  “Did you really see Singh getting a lap dance at a strip joint?” Ryan asked, breaking the silence.

  “I really did. He was getting into it, too.”

  “Man, he looks like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Goes to show — you never can tell,” Ryan said, flashing me a grin.

  It was a very cute grin, especially with that single dimple on the right side of his mouth. It was the kind of grin that you couldn’t help returning. It was the kind of grin that sparked a little flip in a girl’s stomach and put her in danger of falling for a guy.

  At the entrance to the estate, Doug the guard peered into the car and shot me a reproachful look before opening the gates.

  As we turned left onto the route that headed away from town, I asked Ryan, “So, did I make things better or worse for you with the feds?”

  “Singh wasn’t happy, but judging by how rattled he was, I’m guessing you got more than a few things right. He might be back.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I muttered.

  I’d be happy never to cross paths with Agent Singh again, but I did want to know more about that killer, the man with the buttons. And at the same time, I also wanted, at a visceral level, to have nothing more to do with it ever again. But just in case, I fished his card out of my pocket and captured his number into my phone. Still irritated with his disbelieving attitude and his inexplicable authority over the dogs, I made his first name Skeptical and listed his company as G-Man. I doubted I’d ever hear from him again.

  “It must have been hard for you — seeing that stuff,” Ryan said, casting me a sideways glance.

  “Yeah.”

  I stared out at the bleak winter scenery, seeing bruises and fondling and blood and a garrote. Seeing lips being sewn together, with a button in the middle. Buttoned up.

  I pushed the disturbing images from my mind. “I was at the syrup factory yesterday, with Kennick Carter.”

  “You were? Why?”

  “I’m kind of working for him now.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I, uh, I’m helping him investigate his sister’s death.”

  “Garnet.” Ryan’s tone was equal parts exasperation and warning.

  “There’s no law against that, is there?”

  His brow furrowed, as if he was trying to think of one.

  “My mother kind of strong-armed me into it,” I confessed. “I don’t know if I can really help — and I did tell him that in case you think I’m ripping him off — but I’m nosy enough to want to try. Besides …”

  “What?”

  “It’s wrong. If she was murdered, then that’s just wrong. And the person who did it shouldn’t get away with it.”

  “You have a real thing for justice, huh?”

  Did I? I wouldn’t have said it about myself. Colby had always been the one who was hot for law and order. He was the one who’d planned to become a cop. But, thinking back over the last week, I realized that I was feeling a slow, relentless burn to see justice done. Maybe this was another aspect of him that had now merged with me.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Got any suspects?”

  “Well, reluctant as I am to pile suspicion on my own client, I reckon you should probably investigate Carter’s finances because I think he inherits everything.”

  “Follow the money trail — now there’s a thought! They should’ve taught us cops that back in training.”

  “Sarcasm,” I said pertly, “doesn’t become you.”

  “Hmm.”

  I stared out at the road that arched and bowed through the forests outside of Pitchford. “He’s a gambler, too.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And not a very good one.”

  “I’ll check it out,” he promised. “Why were you at the syrup works?”

  “I wanted to speak to Bethany Ford. Carl Mendez, too, when I saw he was there. But he skedaddled as soon as he met me, and she will only see me by appointment. And,” I added, grumpily, “only next Friday.”

  A week was too long to wait; I needed to come up with a plan to see her sooner.

  “What did you think of them? Get any …?” Ryan waved a hand between his temple and field of vision.

  I opened my mouth to tell him about the vision I’d had of Laini confronting Denise, but instead I heard myself saying only, “No, I saw nothing about Mendez or Bethany.”

  It was the truth, and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. I knew I should tell him about Denise — as he’d said, follow the money — but that photograph of her cerebral palsied son had upset me. For now, I’d keep my suspicions to myself.

  Just before the Brookford turnoff, Ryan pulled off into a dirt lane that curved behind a wall of hedges.

  “How’s your investigation going?” I asked. “Did you find out anything more?”

  He said nothing as he parked the car near the trail that led up to the decommissioned stone works and killed the engine. On this cold winter afternoon, we were the only car in the lot.

  “Come on, Ryan, I’ve given you a great lead. It’s your turn to dish.”

  He turned in his seat to face me. “If I tell you this, it’s off the record. I don’t want you telling anyone. And that includes your client.”

  “Please, I’m a professional secret-keeper! Your confidences are safe with me,” I said.

  “Alright then, someone was sexually harassing Laini, sending dick pics to her phone from an unknown number. They tried to trace it, but it’s an old burner not registered to anyone.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “That mean something to you?”

  “I might have an idea who the dick belongs to.”

  “Who?”

  “Jim Lundy, the custodian at the syrup factory.”

  “And you know this because … you’ve had a vision of his dick?”

  “God forbid! No, I just– I happened to find myself in his office in the sugar shack, and his locker just happened to be open.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “And I couldn’t help seeing what was at the back of it, hiding behind some coats.”

  “The coats just happened to part themselves so you could see, I suppose?”

  “Exactly!”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I guess the best word for it would be a collage. Of photographs of Laini Carter.”

  He raised his eyebrows at that.

  “Yeah, dozens and dozens of photographs stuck overlapping each other so there isn’t a clear inch at the back of that locker. All kinds of pics, too — long-distance shots and grainy close-ups that I guess he’d enlarged. Taken at the factory, the syrup shop, in town, in her car and lying on a lounger beside a swimming pool. He must have been stalking her for ages. He was clearly obsessed.” />
  Ryan gave a low whistle.

  “Plus, he’d stuck cut-outs of her head and face over the naked bodies of other women — porn magazine pull-outs, by the look of them.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “And there was something else.” I made a throaty sound of deep revulsion. “There was a dirty piece of string hanging from the coat rail inside the locker.”

  He cocked his head quizzically at me. “A piece of string?”

  “And at the end of that piece of string,” I continued, “was a lock of hair. Black hair.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Right? And it was exactly long enough and hung at precisely the right spot so that if you stood outside and looked in, the hair hung where Laini’s hair was in the biggest picture stuck directly behind it.”

  And at the exact point where it would touch the face and tickle the lips of a person of my height hiding crouched inside the locker. The thought of that still turned my stomach.

  “I’ll try to get a search warrant, though I don’t know what I’ll say to the judge as a basis. Or maybe the locker belongs to the business, rather than to Lundy, and I can get permission from Bethany. We’ll have to check his employment contract and the company policies.”

  Ryan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The thing is, if he’s such a creep —”

  “Oh, he’s that alright.”

  “— then why would Laini have gone up to the quarry with him?”

  I considered. “Good point. You wouldn’t catch me going anywhere with him voluntarily.”

  “Is he a big strong guy?” Ryan asked.

  “Nah, he’s a runty little thing. Definitely not strong enough to carry an unconscious woman up that hill” — I pointed out of the window — “if that’s what you’re asking. In fact, Laini could probably have taken him in a fight.”

  Besides, in my vision of Laini at the top of the quarry, she’d been conscious.

  “Hmmm,” said Ryan.

  “Was there anything else interesting on Laini’s phone?”

  When he didn’t reply, I held the silence and his gaze. I’d done enough therapy role plays to learn the value of waiting until the pressure to respond made the other person speak.

  Eventually Ryan broke eye contact and said, “Seventeen calls and thirty-one messages from Carl Mendez in the twenty-four hours preceding her death.”

  My jaw dropped. “What kind of calls and messages?”

  “Angry, sad, humiliating. She’d ended their relationship on Saturday morning. In the messages he raged that she had no right to leave him like that, begged her to come back and give it another go. He promised that things would be better, that he’d try harder, give her anything she wanted.”

  “And her replies?”

  “She begged him to stop contacting her and refused to meet him — said it would do no good because her mind was made up. Then from nine o’clock on Sunday morning, radio silence.”

  “So, she broke up with a man who was jealous, controlling, angry and humiliated? He’s suddenly looking like my top suspect.”

  “We still don’t know that she was murdered, Garnet.”

  “You might not, but I do.”

  “Come on,” he said, opening his door. “Let’s go up to the quarry.”

  – 22 –

  Ryan led the way up the path to the old stone works.

  “Did you know that Laini was interested in taking a self-defense class?” I asked.

  He glanced back at me, surprised. “How do you know that?”

  “Hugo told me she took a flyer from his shop counter.” My feet slipped on the mulchy pulp of leaves underfoot, and I grabbed a branch to steady myself. “I think you should check Carl Mendez out — see if he has a history of violence.” Seeing the slight tightening of Ryan’s shoulders, I said, “You already have, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “Does he have a criminal record?”

  “No comment.”

  “I’ll bet he has. And, psychologically speaking, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “And I’m sure I don’t have to tell a police officer that almost sixty percent of murders on women are committed by their intimate partners.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You could check at local doctors and hospitals to see if Laini was ever treated for injuries following an assault.”

  “You teach your grandmother to suck eggs, too?”

  “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I need to speak to him. Mendez, I mean. Can you get me in there?”

  “In case I never made it plain before, you’re a civilian, Garnet.”

  “Kennick Carter told Mendez I was a ‘special consultant in victim analysis’ who was assisting with the investigation.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Special consultant — I thought it had a nice ring to it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mendez seemed to buy it, too. Didn’t ask any inconvenient questions. I reckon I could just tag along with you.”

  “If you stop nagging me, I’ll see what I can do. Just don’t, for God’s sake, let Ronnie find out.”

  We were nearing the quarry. In one narrow section of the trail, a tree had fallen across the path. Ryan lent me a hand to clamber over it. It was a nice hand, too — firm, warm, despite the chill of the air, and steady as I leaned down on it.

  No!

  The word inside my head felt like it hadn’t originated there, but it could just as well have been a message from me to myself. Because I wasn’t there to notice Ryan’s warm hand or his charming grin or his fascinating dimple. I was supposed to be focusing on picking up messages and images from the site of at least one murder.

  I followed Ryan to the spot by the big boulder where Jacob Wertheimer’s body had been dumped almost a decade ago. A few strips of yellow police tape still dangled limply from trees around the wide area that had been excavated to a depth of about four feet. Beyond that, the brush had been cut back and tufted grass trampled flat.

  Ryan paced the perimeter of the scene, pulling off the cordon tape and rolling it around his hand, while I slowly explored the area, touching the boulder, the tree, the dirt; standing beside the freshly turned earth; listening with my heart and my mind, and getting …

  “Nothing,” I told Ryan. “Sorry.”

  His shoulders dropped in disappointment, but my chest lightened a little — I’d been dreading falling into that darkness again.

  “I felt nothing here the first time, either,” I said. “Maybe because it happened so long ago?”

  “Can you try with this again?” From a jacket pocket, he pulled out the plastic evidence bag containing Laini’s note. The blue paper was now covered in smudges of black powder.

  “Did they get any prints off it?” I hadn’t known that you could get fingerprints off non-glossy paper.

  He shook his head. “Nothing usable. It was all too smudged.”

  As I opened the bag, he said, “Please touch just the tiniest bit.”

  I wasn’t sure that would work. “You let me hold the necklace and driver’s license,” I pointed out.

  “Those were just belongings at the scene. This is evidence of suicidal intention, and we may want to run more tests on it.”

  I touched a fingertip to the edge of a corner of the note and closed my eyes to concentrate.

  A trembling hand holds a piece of paper scrawled with loopy handwriting. The paper is pale blue, the background a blur of pink and green.

  It was the same image I’d seen before, but now I could see the hand was female and tell the person was distraught. I took a deep breath and pushed my mind down through my fingertip, into the point of contact with the paper.

  Her hand is steadier, now. She folds the paper once and then again. Tucks it into the pocket of black denims. She’s calmer, dec
ided, determined.

  The image swam out of focus and I blinked my eyes open. I hadn’t seen much, but still, I’d seen more than I had the first time I got a flash of the note. Was this a skill I could develop and improve?

  “Well?” Ryan asked.

  “I saw Laini’s hand holding the note, then folding it and putting it in her pocket.”

  From his expression, Ryan had clearly expected more.

  “That’s all I saw. Do you want to hear what I felt?”

  “Of course.”

  “She was very upset at first, and then she felt resolute, like she’d made her mind up about something.”

  “That would fit with suicide.”

  “I guess. I’d like to try at the top of the quarry again. That’s where I got the first sensations the day I found her.”

  Excited at the possibility that I might see more of Laini’s death, possibly even the identity of her killer, I strode back up the path, climbed over the remains of the fence, walked to the lip of the quarry and peered over the edge.

  “There’s something on the ledge.” I squinted my eyes to see better. “Flowers, I think. All different colors.”

  “Are you sensing anything?” Ryan asked from where he stood a few feet back.

  “Give me a minute.”

  I closed my eyes and focused my attention. There was something there, prickling at the edge of my awareness, but it was elusive, and fading fast.

  “Just faint words,” I said. “Crisis … eat … love.” They were slipping away even as I tried to hear them. “Clee-something. Cliché, maybe, or clingy?”

  “Feeling anything?”

  I dropped my head on my chest, tried to tune in to any lingering emotions. “Anger. Contempt?” I held my breath, reaching with my mind into the fading sensations, but all I felt now was myself, swaying a little.

  “Garnet?”

  I opened my eyes to see Ryan staring at me, his face tight with concern.

  “I’m feeling something now,” he said.

  “Really?” This was amazing. “What do you feel?”