Expecting to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  Regan smiled. “Yeah.” She touched her child’s forehead. “But I’ll still want to know.”

  “You got it,” Alvarez said and held up a hand as a silent good-bye to Santana before walking into the hallway and through the main lobby.

  Her mind was turning with questions for the two men who were being brought into the station, the first being: Where’s your brother? To each of them. Why had the two older boys been found, but not Emmett Tufts or Kywin Bell, the two she really wanted to grill? If the deputies had gone to the shoot for Big Foot Territory: Montana! to round up the potential suspects, as Blackwater promised, why hadn’t they come back with the younger brothers?

  “Emmett Tufts and Kywin Bell weren’t at the location,” Watershed explained when she returned to the station. He and Kayan Rule were standing near the doorway to the lunchroom. They were the deputies who’d been charged with the task of finding the “witnesses,” as Alvarez was calling them, even though, deep in her heart, she thought them likely suspects. For now, she’d not label them as such—they were just “persons of interest.”

  Hooking a thumb toward the hall leading to the interview rooms, Watershed said, “We found each of these yahoos at home. The Bell kid tried to convince us he wasn’t smoking dope while he was listening to music, plugged into his earphones. Preston Tufts had just gotten out of his car at his father’s house after making a run for pizza. So they weren’t at the filming.”

  “They know about Marjory Tufts, right?”

  “Yeah.” Both nodded.

  “They’d heard, one way or another,” Rule said. “But the others—their brothers are definitely MIA. We’d gone up to Reservoir Point looking for all of them, but they weren’t there. We asked about them all, talked to the woman in charge of the shoot, Melanie Kline. She was none too happy that we were there, looking for kids who, she insisted, weren’t scheduled for filming tonight.”

  “You accepted that?”

  “Nope.” Rule had shaken his head. “We double-checked with the producer, Barclay Sphinx, and he confirmed that due to some last-minute changes in the script, those two kids and a couple of others weren’t on the roster to show up tonight. He even showed us the casting list. All true.”

  “So find them,” she said, irritated, then went to the lunchroom, grabbed a cup of coffee from the quarter-full pot warming on a hot plate. She drank a couple of swallows of the bitter, overcooked brew, then mentally steeled herself for the upcoming interviews. She couldn’t wait to hear what the older Bell and Tufts kids had to say for themselves, for their brothers. Pausing to check that the audio/video equipment was working and that Blackwater and Zoller were in the viewing area to watch the interviews, she took a look at the “persons of interest” before heading into the rooms.

  Through the two-way glass she saw Kip Bell. His face was grizzled from lack of a razor. He sat in his chair, looking around, glaring at the camera he spotted mounted on the wall. His arms were crossed over his massive chest and he glowered, throwing off the vibes that he’d like to tear the next person he saw limb from limb.

  In the room next door, viewed through a separate windowed mirror, Preston Tufts was on the move. Nervous. Up on his feet. Back in his chair, knee bouncing uncontrollably as he waited. Chewing on a fingernail. Then standing and pacing again. Ready to crack.

  Both of them looked guilty as sin.

  And Alvarez, loaded for bear, was hell-bent on finding out why.

  “Let’s have some fun,” she said to Blackwater and Zoller when she left the viewing room and her cell phone beeped with a message from Pete Watershed. He’d heard from another road deputy that Marjory Tufts’s dusty rose classic T-Bird had just been located on an abandoned mining road about a mile from the area where the body had been discovered. And it was no longer in pristine shape. Zoller forwarded a picture of the car, vanity license plate MADGE visible, to Alvarez. The bumper was crumpled, huge gouges visible in the pink paint, a large dent over the front driver’s side tire.

  Alvarez didn’t bother with a text, but after giving Zoller and Blackwater the word that these interviews might have to be delayed, Kip and Preston kept “on ice,” she rang up Zoller instead. “Tell me where the car is,” she said.

  “Better yet, I’ll show you. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

  “I’ll drive,” Alvarez said.

  The crime scene unit was already at the site, flashlights lighting the forest, a larger light focused on Marjory Tufts’s once-beautiful car. The T-Bird was destroyed, its body crumpled in spots, the paint gashed, one white wall blown. Obviously, whoever had driven it along an unused mining road and down this near-forgotten spur had bounced the classic vehicle across a creek, over boulders, and through a too-narrow passage that had allowed berry vines and branches to scrape and gouge its once-sleek sides.

  Alvarez had parked at the end of the spur. She and Zoller had hiked up the overgrown road. Undergrowth nearly covered the twin ruts of gravel that had been laid half a century earlier and now had eroded into the forest floor.

  Two deputies were guarding the area, the crime tech already going over the car that was half in, half out of a dry creek bed, driven as far into the woods as possible, then abandoned.

  No one was inside but a tech. Lex Farnsby was carefully combing the interior, which held nothing but a designer overnight bag filled with a woman’s change of clothes and toiletries. Marjory’s things for her night away from her husband.

  “Nothing unusual inside,” Farnsby said, “but the driver’s seat is set back to allow a lot of leg room.”

  “A man,” Alvarez said.

  “Or very tall woman.”

  Like Terri Tufts. Ex-wife.

  Farnsby went to work on the trunk, unlocking it with a pick and shining the beam of his flashlight over the empty, pristine interior.

  “Hey! Got something over here,” another tech, a large woman, called as she took a picture of the sparse gravel and dirt of the once-upon-a-time road. “Cigarette butt. Looks like it’s fresh.” With gloved fingers, she picked it up and held it to her nose. “Yeah. Camel filter.” She dropped it into an evidence bag. Alvarez remembered that one of the Bell boys smoked Camels, but he probably wasn’t the only one in the crowd of kids who’d know Marjory. Hadn’t she seen Preston Tufts slide a pack into his pocket after having a smoke with Donny Justison on the steps of the Sons of Grizzly Falls Building at the end of the Big Foot Believers’ meeting?

  And wasn’t this spur in the forest about half a mile from where the body of Marjory Tufts had been found and less than two miles from the Tufts’s home? For a strong athlete, covering the distance on foot would take little time. Kill the stepmom, dump her body, drive here and sprint home to catch the end of a ball game on ESPN. The gears inside Alvarez’s brain began to turn, and for the first time in this investigation, she felt a sizzle of anticipation, the inkling that things were finally falling into place. She was getting close to solving this crime.

  Maybe.

  “Bingo!” Farnsby said as he slid open a panel in the trunk of the T-Bird. Once the covering was removed, a hidden compartment, meant for more luggage storage, possibly a custom feature, was exposed and it wasn’t empty. Haphazardly jammed within that secret space was a very lifelike ape suit, mask and foot coverings included.

  “The mother lode,” Farnsby said under his breath, and Alvarez couldn’t agree more.

  Size-thirteen tennis shoes were still tucked into the feet of the suit. All a tall person had to do was don the costume, slide into the shoes, adjust the headpiece and voila: Big Foot, alive and well in Grizzly Falls, Montana.

  Alvarez and Zoller hung out less than fifteen minutes, then headed back to the station. Once back in the offices, she decided to let the Tufts kid sweat a little longer, let him feel what lock-up was all about. Though he wasn’t Marjory Tufts’s baby daddy, he probably knew all about it, that his brother had been sleeping with his stepmom. Let him think about it.

  So she started with Kip Bell.

/>   He didn’t so much as glance her way as she entered the room and introduced herself. Again. For the record. For the camera and recording. “We need to find your brother,” she said, laying a slim file folder on the small table between them.

  His eyes barely moved, but he glanced at the folder with its white pages showing a bit. “Don’t know where he is.”

  “I think you do.”

  Still no eye contact.

  “We located an ape suit. Probably the one that was stolen from the Big Foot Believers.”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re a member of the club.”

  Sneering, he said, “Me and like a couple hundred others.”

  “But you knew Destiny. And Bianca.”

  Kip sent a bored expression her way. “Your point?”

  She tried a different tack. “We know Kywin’s the father of Destiny Rose Montclaire’s baby. We know he was in contact with both Destiny Rose Montclaire and Lindsay Cronin on the day each girl disappeared. He was one of the last people to communicate with them.”

  “You don’t know shit,” he said.

  She smiled. “I think we do.” She kept calm. Stared at him, and though she wanted to shake the answers from his lying lips, she played it cool. “Both Lindsay and Destiny texted him.”

  “He never got the texts.” He looked up then, his eyes harboring a secret, and she saw that he was silently laughing at her, that he seemed to think he had one up on her, on the police in general.

  But she knew better. She slid the file folder in his direction.

  “How do you know he didn’t get the texts?” she asked.

  Again the silent mockery. “Because he said he never got ’em.”

  “He could have lied. The phone company records say otherwise.”

  “So what? Kywin says he never saw ’em.” A lift of one massive shoulder. “I believe him.”

  “He’s lied about a lot of things. Including being involved with Destiny.”

  A roll of one big shoulder. Defiance in the set of his jaw, and throughout the rest of the questioning, the attitude that he knew more than she and he wasn’t going to tell her a thing.

  “So, let’s talk about Lindsay Cronin.”

  He flinched slightly. Not much, but a little twitch near his eye that told Alvarez he was listening. Worried.

  “We have phone records,” she said, nudging the file folder closer to him. “And the interesting thing, Kip? Not only did Lindsay text Kywin, but she also called you.”

  “What?”

  “On your cell. What appears to be a pocket-dial or butt-dial.” She leaned back in her chair and eyed him. “Go ahead, take a look. It’s almost as if Lindsay was warning you. Kind of like Destiny. She did it too. Why? So that you could . . . what? Tell Kywin that she wanted to talk to him, to make certain he got the call?”

  He didn’t respond. Just froze and stared at the folder.

  “I think the short calls were a signal. I’m not talking about the longer conversations she had with you, just those that coincided with the texts to Kywin. I figure the signal told you to pick up your brother’s phone, so that no one, not even Kywin, knew how close you and Lindsay were.”

  “What?” he snarled. “That’s crazy.”

  “I think you knew where Lindsay Cronin was heading that night and you knew exactly when she’d be on Horsebrier Ridge. That somehow, some way, you caused her death.”

  His eyes, deep in his sockets, glowed with a dark, horrifying rage. “You know nothing,” he said through tight lips.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Kip. I—we—know a lot,” she assured him. “And one thing’s for sure. You’re up to your eyeballs in this. So you have a choice: Come clean, tell us everything you know, and I’ll talk to the DA, try to get you a deal. Or you can clam up and it might take a little longer, but we’ll get to the truth and when we do?” She paused for effect, arching her eyebrows, then said, “Your ass, my friend, is grass.”

  “You’re no friend of mine!” he bit out.

  “That’s right. I’m not.” She managed an icy smile. “And that is the first time you’ve ever told me the truth. So think about it.” She climbed off her chair and left him alone to stew.

  Then, she headed for the next interview room.

  * * *

  At the location of the filming of Big Foot Territory: Montana! Bianca watched the action from the sidelines. Her part, after the discovery of the body, and the scene with her “mother,” Michelle, was minimal, so she waited around a lot, observing the other actors on the set, seeing how some of the previous scenes were reshot to highlight Lara.

  It kinda made her sick.

  Maddie grabbed a Diet Coke from the drink cart, and while Teej was in a scene with just boys, she sidled up to Bianca. “Can you believe it?” she said as Lara was positioned on one of the rocks, a guitar at her side, her blouse undone a few buttons, her remarkable cleavage visible. “They’re going to make her this orphaned girl with dreams of a singing career or something.” She opened her drink, took a swallow, and glanced at Bianca out of the corner of her eye. As she brought the bottle down, she said, “I think she faked it. The attack.”

  Bianca knew it! Her dad was right. “Did she say so?”

  “Nu-uh, she’s not that stupid. But Alex did. To Teej. Just kind of bragging about it. See—” Still holding the plastic bottle, she pointed at TJ’s brother. “He’s in the scenes, too.” Maddie’s lips curled in disgust. “It worked out for him.”

  “I thought that might be because Kywin and Emmett are MIA,” Bianca said. “Where are they anyway?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. They’re both just big bullies.” She was eyeing a makeup artist running into the scene to brush some kind of powder on Lara’s face. “But trust me, these scenes were changed on purpose because Lara asked them to be. She’s kind of in charge now, because of ‘the attack.’” Maddie let out a huff of disapproval. Or was it jealousy? “Have you seen how Barclay is around her? As bad as the rest of the boys, practically drooling. Men. All the same.”

  Somewhere overhead, hidden in the darkness over the lights illuminating the set, an owl hooted softly.

  “You heard about Marjory, right?”

  “No.” Bianca was still watching as the makeup artist backed away from the campsite. “What about her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Bianca said a little too loudly and was rewarded with a warning look from Mel. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “What do you mean ‘dead’?”

  “What do you think I mean? They found her body in the forest and I think it was like Destiny’s, y’know. She was strangled, I guess. It’s all over Facebook and Twitter. My phone’s been blowing up. How could you not know?”

  “I left my phone at home.”

  Maddie shot her an are-you-out-of-your-mind look. “What?”

  “It was crazy there—when I left. Mom was in labor, Dad was there freaking out about the show, and we all just took off because the baby was coming and fast.” Maddie was nodding; she’d heard all the details about Tucker’s birth before, when Bianca had first arrived a few hours earlier. Now, it was after midnight, the temperature dropping, the night closing in.

  The production crew was wrapping up the final scenes and Bianca couldn’t help but wonder why she’d even come in the first place, as she’d been little more than window dressing in a couple of scenes, part of the crowd in the background, her luster, the girl who’d been chased by a Big Foot in real life, dimmed.

  Her dad had been right. Her chance at stardom, if there ever had been one, was over. As she watched Lara, the glow from the fake campfire gilding her skin and catching in the blond strands of her hair, Bianca felt something akin to hatred for the girl. Lara had manipulated everything, just as Dad had said. Maddie had confirmed it and it pissed Bianca off.

  What was fair about this? Bianca had been scared out of her mind the night the beast had chased her through the woods, scared to death. Of course, now, she wasn
’t certain a real Sasquatch had been running after her. But something had been careening down the hillside, crashing after her, breathing hard, smelling fetid, and clawing at her. Her fear had been real. Real. Something, she’d been certain, had been hell-bent on killing her.

  And Lara fakes it?

  She eyed the kids at the shoot. Could it all have been a wild prank, one that had been blown out of proportion? But why? And who would have been behind it? And how did it connect with Destiny Rose’s death? That was the really disturbing part, that Destiny had been killed, and now Marjory. Lindsay Cronin, too, if Bianca’s mom was right. Regan was convinced that the deaths were somehow connected.

  Standing between a crane and the path to the Porta Potties, Bianca stared at her friends with new eyes, her vision changed by the tragedies that had occurred. Despite the warm night, Bianca shivered and rubbed her arms with her hands. As the campfire scene was filmed, then over, the crew switched to the second location in the parking lot, where two pickups and Austin Reece’s BMW were parked.

  Lara and Austin were to be making out inside the sports car. According to the script, there was to be a dark shadow looming and moving ever closer behind the back of the BMW. As Barclay had described the scene: “It’s going to look like all those ghost stories we all grew up with where the teenagers are really going at it, the girl’s blouse is coming off and she’s in her bra, but there’s a deadly killer outside and we, as the viewers, see it. Know that death is nearby. Bill,” he’d called to one of the cameramen, “I’ll want the camera to come in from the Big Foot’s perspective, at the rear of the car, of course—make sure we don’t see the license plate, just the rear window, which will be foggy as things are really heating up inside, okay? Everyone else, back, we want this to look like Lara and Austin are all alone.”

  How this new scene would fit into the original story line, Bianca wasn’t certain, since the scenes were filmed out of order rather than sequentially, then patched together. She didn’t know if the make-out scene in the car would be cut in before the guitar scene at the campfire or Bianca’s already filmed action scene where she ended up in the creek.