by Sara Rosett
Ben nodded. “Okay, I can understand that. You sure you don’t want to leave it on the porch? Isn’t that what she said you should do?”
“With Honey as a neighbor? No, I’ll come by tomorrow. Let’s go back to the hotel. I need a few minutes to . . . I don’t know . . . decompress, I guess, before I pick up the kids.”
“Animal cracker?” I asked, offering the box to Ben.
He was slumped in the club chair in the living area of our hotel room with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his clasped hands. His room was on the same floor as ours, but we’d both walked by his door without a word, to my room.
I pulled out the rolling desk chair and sat down, propping my feet on the coffee table. I crunched through an elephant, tiger, and some unidentified headless animal, waiting to see if Ben would say anything. He didn’t.
We sat like that for a few minutes. I couldn’t get the image of Angela’s limp and wet body sprawled on the side of the pool out of my mind. “I almost can’t believe it was her. Probably because I never met her in person. It’s hard to believe I won’t get an e-mail from her in a day or two—I can’t quite grasp that, even though we saw her . . . ,” I trailed off, not wanting to complete the sentence. Instead, I finished off another handful of crackers and downed some Diet Coke while Ben stared at the soles of my feet. The imitation Leah Marshall bag sat on the coffee table between us.
I fished a Hershey’s kiss from the bag I’d brought with me and ate it. When all the chocolate goodness had melted in my mouth, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, I said, “Ben, are you okay?”
No reply.
“Chocolate?” I offered.
“Contrary to what you might think, chocolate is not going to help me feel better,” Ben said without moving.
“I didn’t say it would help you feel better. I asked if you wanted some.”
He lifted the fingers of his right hand, signaling he’d pass. I looked at him closely. I didn’t think, technically, he was in shock. He wasn’t shivering or disoriented or dizzy, but he was dealing with the death of a friend.
“Do you want to change your clothes?” I asked, noting that they were wrinkled, but completely dry now.
“Enough with the mom stuff. I’m fine,” he said, then sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Sorry.” He ran his hands over his face. “I’m not fine. I can’t believe it, either. I talked to her two days ago. Of course, that’s all the detective wanted to talk about. What she sounded like.” Ben shifted in the chair, rearranging his long legs. They didn’t seem to fit under the coffee table. He stood and walked restlessly around the room.
“He asked me that, too,” I said.
“Yeah, but you didn’t just break up with her.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “You broke up with her?”
“Yes and now she’s dead. Apparently, Detective Jenson thinks she may have committed suicide because she was depressed over the breakup. Wanted to know if she was moody, stuff like that.”
“But that’s—that doesn’t sound like Angela.”
“I know, but . . . I wonder . . .”
“Ben, I talked to her yesterday. Last night she sounded fine. Happy, even. She didn’t sound depressed at all. This morning, she was different—scared, but she wasn’t depressed. Besides, she had an upbeat personality. At least, she seemed that way to me. I would have described her as sunny, not moody.”
Ben watched me for a moment, then sat down in the chair abruptly. “She was upbeat—happy and fun and always excited about whatever was coming up, even if it was only a movie or going to a new club. She was almost like, well, I was going to say Livvy, but Livvy is a lot more restrained than Angela ever was,” Ben said, cracking a bit of a smile. “Moody doesn’t sound like her, but I have to wonder . . . you know what they say about manic-depressive-type personalities. High one minute, then bottomed out the next. Maybe she was like that, and I just didn’t know it. Maybe I’d never seen her at a low point. Maybe today was a low point for her, and she couldn’t stand it.”
“Ben, she was getting a puppy. I don’t think that’s the hallmark of someone who’s . . .” I let my voice trail off, not wanting to finish the sentence.
“Considering suicide?” Ben said, his eyebrows raised. “You’re right,” he murmured more to himself than to me. “She wouldn’t do something like that,” he said, his voice firmer. “She wouldn’t. All that about why she was sorry had me wondering. The detective was really fixated on that, too.”
I shrugged. “It was what she said. I told him her words as closely as I could remember them. She said she was sorry and, specifically, to tell you she was sorry.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I have no idea why she’d say that. I broke up with her. She didn’t have anything to be sorry about.”
“Um, maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but why did you break up with her?”
“Because we lived an hour apart. With my work schedule, I hardly ever saw her. And,” Ben said, his voice quieter—I thought, here it comes, the real reason —“we didn’t have that much in common. I like to have fun on the weekend as much as the next guy, but I’m more into hanging out with my friends, relaxing, watching the game. I’m not into clubs and staying out until three in the morning.” He looked rueful and said, “I didn’t tell the detective that last part, just that I broke it off because we lived too far apart.”
“There’s no other girl on the scene?” I asked as I put the bag of Hershey’s kisses on the coffee table.
“What did you do, read that guy’s notes? That’s exactly what he asked.”
“Well, thinking like him—like a detective—if you break it off with a girl, and then she found out there’s another girl in the picture . . . if the first girl is emotionally fragile, then I could see how Detective Jenson would come up with that question.”
“Wow,” Ben said, backing off. “You do watch too many cop shows, don’t you?” Before I could answer, he said, “No, there is no other girl. None. And, now that I’ve thought about it, I don’t think Angela was fragile.”
“I don’t think so, either—I said that’s what Detective Jenson was probably thinking.” There was a thought circling in my mind, and I knew I needed to ask Ben about it, but I didn’t want to. I leaned forward and said gently, “Don’t take this the wrong way—I didn’t know her as well as you—but could it have happened accidently?”
“No.” He said it flatly, emphatically, not in that knee-jerk quick way that sometimes indicates you’ve hit a sore spot. “She wasn’t into drugs. Steered clear of them. She was fun and she did like to have those girly drinks at clubs—what are they? Appletini or something like that—but that was it. She didn’t do drugs. I don’t know the whole story on it, but she wouldn’t go near anything like that. Once when we were out, someone make a joke about oxycodone, and she came down really hard on the guy, said it wasn’t funny. She went to the bathroom right after that, and her friend made some comment to the guy, saying he knew about Angela’s mom, and he should know better than to bring up oxycodone, so I figured it had something to do with her mom.”
I leaned back in the chair, my head tilted to the side. “Well, if it wasn’t an accident, if she wasn’t depressed, and she didn’t accidently overdose . . .”
“Then it means it was on purpose. She was murdered.”
I swiveled my chair around, knocking it against the desk. “Ben, that’s quite a statement.” A faint chime sounded, and I turned to my laptop, which was open on the desk. I must have jiggled the mouse when I bumped the desk because now the screen was bright. I had a new message in my mail folder. The sender was Angela495.
Chapter Six
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“What is it?” Ben asked.
“I have an e-mail from Angela in my inbox. The time stamp on it is a few minutes ago. Could it be a crank e-mail?”
I opened the e-mail as he moved across the room to look over my shoulder. It was only one line long an
d read, Sorry I missed you yesterday. I’ll be in the lobby in fifteen minutes. Can you meet me to switch purses?
“That’s not a crank e-mail,” Ben said, meeting my gaze. We both looked toward the purse on the coffee table.
“Why would someone want that?” I asked.
“Her account must have been hacked,” Ben said at almost the same time.
“But why ask for the purse?” I picked it up and ran my hands over it much like Honey had. It still had the same wobbly stitching and dry, fake leather. “We need to call Detective Jenson,” I said, moving back to the desk. “Why don’t you do that, while I look up something.”
I opened a new window on the computer and typed in the name of the purse, then scrolled through the list of hits. “There has to be something about this purse that’s important. Something that would make someone hack into Angela’s account and try to get us to give it to them. I have Detective Jenson’s card, if you need his number. It’s on the coffee table,” I said, but saw that Ben already had one in his hand. He was dialing on his cell phone. I gestured to the phone on the desk. “You can use the room phone.”
“I’m fine.”
“You must have a different carrier, because I don’t even get a line in here, much less a bar.”
I scanned the results as I spoke, clicking on a few. They were all store sites or blogs about purses. I recognized some of them because I was a more than frequent visitor. My motto was that it never hurt to look, especially since I was keeping an eye out for bargains. I paged through a few more search results until the lists trailed off into sites that didn’t relate to the purse. I typed in “fake Leah Marshall purse” and got another set of hits that didn’t show me anything, except that there were plenty of fakes out there, some even worse than the knockoff sitting on the desk beside me.
Ben clicked his phone and moved to my side. “Not in,” he said shortly, his gaze on the screen.
“You didn’t leave him a message?”
“What was I going to say? Get down to my hotel right now because someone hacked into Angela’s e-mail and wants the purse that you didn’t want?” He shook his head. “I don’t think I can leave a voice mail message that adequately explains the situation. I’ll try him again in a minute.”
I looked at the clock on the screen. Five minutes had already gone by.
“Maybe it’s not the purse itself. Maybe it’s something in the purse,” Ben said.
“It’s empty.” I picked it up anyway and looked through the main compartment and the two small zippered pockets. “Nothing.” I gripped the purse by the mouth and turned it upside down to illustrate. The lining shifted against my fingertips, and I frowned. I righted the purse, and the slight bulge shifted to the bottom of the bag.
“I think there’s something in the lining.” I put the purse down on the desk so I could run my fingers over the inside. “Here, in the corner,” I said as my fingers traced around a flat shape about an inch square. “How did it get in there? I wonder if it was sewn in,” I said, more to myself than to Ben. He was on his phone again.
I clicked on the desk lamp and moved it so that it shined into the empty purse, then I checked all the seams again until my finger slipped into a gap deep in the corner of one of the inner pockets. Several of the stitches were missing and I could just work the tip of my index finger into the opening. I tilted the purse and felt the object in the liner glance against my finger as it slipped from one end to the other. I twisted the purse the other way more slowly, letting the weight of whatever was in there move gradually along the lining to the hole.
“No answer,” Ben said shortly, and turned back to me. “We’ve got to take care of this ourselves.”
I paused and looked at him, the purse suspended upside down in midair. “What do you mean, take care of this ourselves?”
“There’s no way Detective Jenson will be able to get here in under five minutes. That’s all the time we have left. We have to get down there to the lobby and see who shows up,” Ben said, reaching for the purse.
I moved it away from him, putting it on the other side of my body from him, like I used to do with candy when we were kids, and he tried to swipe some of my M&Ms. “Whoever hacked Angela’s e-mail and sent that message might have had something to do with her death.”
“I know. That’s why we have to get down there and see who it is before they’re gone.”
“That’s not smart, Ben,” I said, jiggling the purse.
“So we should just let this person . . . or people . . . whoever it is . . . go? We shouldn’t make any effort to see who it is?”
“Just a second. I think I almost have it,” I said, seeing an edge of plastic emerge from the opening in the seam as I hit the correct angle. “See if you can get it out.” I turned back toward Ben. I had my hands full holding the purse and the lining, to make sure the object didn’t slip away again.
Ben worked it lose. “A memory card,” he said. We exchanged a glance before Ben plugged it into the drive on my laptop. I dropped the purse on the coffee table and leaned on the desk beside Ben as the files loaded. He clicked on the first one.
It was a photo of three smiling young women standing shoulder to shoulder with their arms linked loosely around each other’s waists. “That’s Angela,” Ben said, pointing to the blond girl on the far right. “These are recent. The date on the time stamp is three days ago.”
“There’s the girl from the store, the one she worked with. Cara,” I said, tapping the screen. “Who is the third girl?”
“I don’t know her,” Ben said.
It was obviously a girls’ night out. Angela wore a sparkly spaghetti strap dress with three-inch heels and the latest Belen Echandia bag. Cara had on a print sundress. The other girl was the odd man out. She had short brown hair, a round face, and wore a jean jacket over a black T-shirt and cargo pants. She flashed a peace sign at the camera, showing off a sunburst tattoo on the inside of her wrist.
“Wait.” I leaned toward the picture, noticing the tattoo. “That’s the woman who was pushed.”
“The one who went over the balcony?” Ben asked, his tone disbelieving.
“Yes, that’s her. I saw her tattoo when she was on the ground with her arm stretched out. I noticed it because it stood out against her pale skin. Where are they?” The background was dim and filled with people dancing. The camera had been angled slightly upward, so there was quite a bit of the ceiling in the photo. It was draped with swags of white, purple, and blue cloth. There was also a loft area that overlooked the dance floor where the girls were posing.
“Club Fifty-two. It’s—I mean, it was—one of Angela’s favorite clubs,” Ben said, pointing to the neon logo on the wall, the number fifty-two sitting in the curve of the letter C.
Ben clicked on the next file. More mugging for the camera. Ben opened several photos. They all were along the same lines, some with the same three girls, others with only Angela and another person. It looked as if she had made her way around the room, snapping photographs or asking people to take her picture.
“This isn’t doing us any good,” Ben said as he checked the time on his phone. “I’ll go down there and see if I can find the person who sent the e-mail.” He reached for the purse. “I can at least get a picture of them on my cell phone to show to the detective.”
“Wait,” I said, slipping into the seat. I selected the rest of the files as a group and opened them all. They popped up one after another, rapid fire. “There’s got to be something here . . . hey, that looks like Suzie Quinn,” I said, clicking like mad to get back to the familiar face. I recognized her tan body, her strong shoulders, and her freckle-dotted face under dark curls.
Ben paused, looked closer. “It is her. And she’s at the club. That picture was taken up in the loft area, near the back corner.”
Angela wasn’t in the picture or any of the next few, which were all of Suzie. The way Suzie wasn’t smiling at the camera—she was absorbed in talking with the people at her table�
��made me think that Suzie Quinn hadn’t known she was being photographed. I clicked through to the last few photos, which had a bright yellow glow and seemed to be taken in a different area. A row of stall doors was visible on one side of the photo.
“That must be the restroom in Club Fifty-two,” I said, moving the curser over another neon club logo on the wall, then switched to the next photo.
Suzie was in the next picture, too. She was seated on a flowered couch, hunched over a thin line of powder on a glass-topped table, snorting the powder into her nose through a straw.
I sat back, stunned. “Suzie Quinn, doing drugs? That’s . . . that’s . . .” I let my voice trail off. I didn’t want to think that America’s swimming sweetheart was throwing her life away.
Ben reached around me and clicked on the next few photos. They were more of the same.
“Those photos could be worth a lot of money,” Ben said quietly.
“I know.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “You better call Detective Jenson again. These could be why Angela was killed.”
Ben shot me a long look, and I shrugged my shoulders. “We both agree suicide wasn’t something she would do. Detective Jenson didn’t think she accidentally fell. That pretty much leaves murder, as you’ve already said.”
I switched back to the e-mail to read it again. No wonder someone wanted the purse. “How could someone get into her e-mail so quickly?” I looked at my watch. “She’s only been dead a short time. Could her account be hacked that quickly?”
Ben dialed again, listened, then shook his head. “Not in.” He pointed his phone at the computer screen. “I suppose it doesn’t take long, if you know what you’re doing. But you’re right, there probably aren’t that many people with great hacking skills who already know what happened to her. So, it’s probably someone who was there today at the apartment.”
My mind skipped through the possibilities. I thought of Honey, but discarded her. Unless I was very mistaken about her, I didn’t think her computer skills would go much beyond typing and Internet searches. But how would she even know I was supposed to switch the purses? We hadn’t told her that detail, which only left one person. “Chase?”