* * *
As Brett was finishing her reports for the Andress case, Officer Nancy Fellowes appeared at the corner of her desk.
“Don’t you look nice today?” Nancy smiled and plucked the sleeve of Brett’s blazer.
Nancy Fellowes held the distinct honor of being the first female officer hired by the Crestwood PD. She’d started working Parking and Code Enforcement as a young recruit in the early 1970s and was still working Parking and Code Enforcement over ten years later. She wore pressed skirts and black nylons to the precinct every day, along with high-heeled, pointy-toed boots and a uniform shirt that strained around her large breasts. She wore her long blond hair pulled back in a prim bun and smelled faintly of lavender. She kept pictures of her husband and three teenage children on her desk. Her lipstick was never smudged. Nancy was the kind of female officer the men liked to have around—pretty and smiling, a hard worker who never asked for a promotion. She knew her place and was quite happy to stay there.
“The chief wants to see you in his office,” she said, still smiling.
Her heels clopped loudly across the tile as she walked away.
Chief Henry Bascom was a man who wore his baldness with pride. He shaved what little hair he had growing on the sides and kept the dome slick and shined. He ran his hand over it as Brett entered his office, then gestured for her to have a seat. As if to make up for his lack of hair on top, he had grown a mustache, thick like Tom Selleck’s, except Henry’s was stark white and neatly trimmed at the edges.
“How are you settling in?” he asked.
“A few speed bumps,” she said, “but nothing I can’t handle.”
“Good.” He leaned his arms on his desk and folded his hands together. “And your grandmother? How is she?”
“We’re still getting used to each other,” Brett said.
Henry studied her a moment, then said, “I talked to her this morning.”
“Oh yeah?” Even though Henry was her grandmother’s friend, Brett didn’t feel right telling him everything that was going on. Amma was a private person. If she wanted Henry to know her business, she could tell Henry herself.
“I called her up to find out if she wanted to have dinner with me next week.” He paused, lifting one hand to tug on the end of his mustache. “She told me you’re thinking of selling the cannery?”
“It’s time,” Brett said. “And we could use the extra money.”
“No, that’s good, that’s good.” He studied her a moment, then asked, “I think having you around is really going to be good for her. Already I’m noticing a difference. She’s much more herself these days. And I think it’ll be good for you, too, if you want my honest opinion. People need people, isn’t that what they say?”
Brett shifted in the chair, uncomfortable with this kind of familiarity from a boss.
If you need anything from me, he’d said on her first day, anything at all, you just come let me know.
But Brett doubted she would ever take Henry up on the offer. The other men on the squad already thought she was here not by her own merit but as a favor to the chief. She didn’t want to be labeled a kiss-ass, too.
Henry cleared his throat and rearranged some papers on his desk. “Listen, the real reason I called you in here is because we had a new case come in this morning that I want you to handle.” He lifted a thin manila folder from the stack. “A young woman believes she may have been sexually assaulted at a party.”
He slid the folder across the desk. Brett took it and flipped it open. There wasn’t much. A report taken by an Officer Harmon listed the girl’s first and last name, age, and a brief summary of the complaint. The surname was familiar. Brett realized it was the same as her realtor’s and vaguely recalled him mentioning he had a daughter. But the thing that stuck out most about the report was the girl’s age. “Christ, Henry,” Brett said, closing the folder. “She’s only fourteen.”
“Yes, it’s a bit of a delicate situation, which is why I want you handling it.” He rocked back in his chair, settling his hands over his stomach. “Plus, it won’t be nearly as time-consuming as the homicide case you’ve been working with Irving.”
She took a breath to tell Henry she’d been taken off the Andress case, but he spoke over her. “You’ll be able to be home at a reasonable time with this one. No staying late or working weekends. Just work it when you can during your regular shift.”
“I can handle difficult cases.”
“I know you can, or I wouldn’t have hired you.” He flashed her a smile. “I don’t want you taking on too much too soon, that’s all. Besides, this one will do better with a feminine touch. She’s still here. She’s in room two, waiting for you to take a more detailed statement.”
He rose from his desk and walked Brett out, patting her on the shoulder as they reached the door. “I raised two teenage girls myself. I know how they can be with their drama. Most likely, this will turn out to be nothing, and you’ll have the paperwork finished and back on my desk by the end of shift. Just do your best.”
As if Brett had ever done anything else.
Chapter 12
Interview Room Two was the nicest of the three options. The chairs had cushions. The lights didn’t flicker. The heater worked. It smelled like Lysol, and the walls were decorated with ocean-themed watercolor paintings. A small window let in bright daylight and could be cracked open in the summer if it got too hot. It was the room detectives used to talk to family, witnesses, anyone they weren’t looking to make squirm. Sometimes officers would eat their lunch in there, just for the peace and quiet of it.
When Brett pushed open the door, she found two girls huddled together on one side of the honey-oak table. One had long brown hair that swung loosely around her face. The other wore her white-blond hair in a short bob pinned behind her ears with pink barrettes. They stopped whispering when Brett entered the room.
“Elizabeth?” Brett sat in the chair across from them and laid a tape recorder and the folder holding the initial report on the table.
The girl with the longer, darker hair looked up. Her eyes were jewel-toned blue and rimmed with thick lashes. She looked nervous but not particularly distressed.
Brett smiled at her. “I’m Detective Buchanan. I’ve been assigned to take a closer look at your complaint. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to record our conversation?”
Elizabeth nodded. Brett pressed record, and the tape whirred to life.
The blonde clutched at Elizabeth’s hand. “She didn’t want to come in, but I made her. I told her we had to tell someone. She can’t pretend it never happened.”
“And what’s your name?” Brett offered a gentle smile to this girl too.
“June. We’re best friends.” She gave Elizabeth’s hand another squeeze.
“Were you at the party with Elizabeth?”
June nodded. “It was our first high school party.”
“Did you see what happened?”
Elizabeth dipped her head to scowl at her lap. June’s lower lip trembled, and she shook her head. “No, we…I was talking to some other friends. And Lizzie went to go get something to drink in the kitchen. I didn’t see her after that for a long time until she came running down the stairs holding her shoes. She was crying, and I asked her what happened, but she just said she wanted to leave. So we did.”
June’s words spilled from her in a rush. Her leg bounced as she talked. Elizabeth held herself perfectly still with her eyes fixed on her lap.
“Okay, why don’t we start from the beginning. Elizabeth, can you tell me what happened?”
“I already told that other officer everything,” she said, her tone aloof, almost bored.
After leaving the chief’s office, Brett had skimmed through Officer Harmon’s bare-bones notes a second time. On Saturday night, mere hours after Nathan’s body had been found on the beach, Elizabeth Trudeau, age fourteen, attended a party. She got drunk. She blacked out. She woke up in
a dark room with her underwear missing and her shirt torn a little at the collar. She found her friend and left the party without talking to anyone else or calling the police. Brett had flipped the report over, but there was nothing written on the back, no other details about what happened after June and Elizabeth left the party.
She slipped the report from the folder now and pretended to skim it, then smiled at Elizabeth across the table. “Tell me about the party.”
Elizabeth shrugged and rolled her eyes. “It was a party.”
“So where did it take place? A friend’s house?” She looked back and forth between the two girls, keeping her smile easy, her shoulders relaxed.
When neither girl responded, Brett shifted in her chair, tucking the report back into the folder and sliding it out of the way. She leaned her elbows on the table casually. “Listen, I don’t care about the party, okay? So you went to a party, big deal. I went to parties when I was in high school too. Everyone does. They’re supposed to be fun, right? You dance. You play spin the bottle. Eat some chips. Maybe you drink a little. So what? You’re teenagers. It’s the kind of stuff you’re supposed to do at this age.”
She kept smiling at them, hoping to break through their mistrust of her. She needed them to think of her as a friend, not an adult who’d get them in trouble for underage drinking. “I don’t care about what happened at the party except for the part you already told Officer Harmon. About waking up in a dark room without your underwear? That’s what I care about, okay, Elizabeth? Do you think you can help me out with that? Can you retrace your steps that night and help me figure out who might have hurt you?”
Elizabeth slouched lower in the chair and dropped her gaze to the floor. She seemed to be working over the words she wanted to say, but June broke the silence first. “The party was at the Whitmore Mansion. It’s this old abandoned house out on Mountain View Road that my dad bought a few years ago. He keeps saying he’s going to fix it up, but I don’t know. There’s always something wrong with the permits or whatever. Anyway, no one lives there. It’s all fenced off and boarded up, but there’s a hole around back where you can get through.” She leaned over the table and, in a hushed voice, said, “It’s haunted. Like with ghosts and stuff.”
Brett took a notepad and a pencil from her pocket. Elizabeth stiffened at the sight of them, so she tucked the items away again and refocused her attention on June. “A haunted mansion, huh? That’s pretty cool. Were you the one who invited people to come out?”
June shook her head. “My sister Marcie, she’s a senior. She planned everything, and she’s the one who invited us.”
At the same time, Elizabeth answered, “We just heard about it through some kids at school.”
The two girls exchanged a look, and Elizabeth added, “Her sister goes to our school. We overheard her talking about it with her friends, and we decided to go.”
“We sort of invited ourselves,” June said. Then with a grin that made her seem years younger, she added, “We were the only freshmen there.”
Her grin faltered when she glanced at Elizabeth, who was scowling at her hands again.
Brett smiled back at her to keep her talking. “So, freshmen at a senior party. I bet all your other friends were jealous when they heard about that. Did you know everyone at the party, then? Were they all kids from school?”
“Mostly,” Elizabeth muttered.
“But there were some we didn’t know, too,” June rushed in. “A lot of like, older kids? College-age? And some from Burlington High, I think.”
“Did you talk to anyone you didn’t know?” Brett asked.
Elizabeth shrugged. “I talked to a lot of people, yeah. I mean, it was a party. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
“Did anyone seem to be paying special attention to you? Like did you notice anyone following you around the house? Or butting in when you were trying to talk to someone else?”
June started to say something but shrank from Elizabeth’s angry glare.
“There wasn’t anyone like that, no,” Elizabeth said, scratching her thumbnail over a pen mark on the tabletop.
Brett studied the girl a moment. If she was lying, she was doing a damn good job at it.
Up to this point, Brett had asked simple questions, easing the girls into the conversation, trying to make them comfortable. Nothing accusatory, nothing about the upstairs room or what happened there in the dark. June was relaxed now, her eyes watching Brett closely, mimicking her body language. She smiled when Brett smiled, leaned forward when Brett leaned forward. She wanted to be helpful; that much was obvious. Elizabeth was still tense and defensive, but at least she was sitting back in her chair now, no longer looking for any opportunity to bolt.
As gently as she could, Brett moved the interview into more dangerous territory. “So you were drinking at this party, yes?”
Elizabeth’s gaze snapped to Brett’s. Panicked, wary. “I had one beer,” she said. “That’s it. I swear to God. One beer, and I didn’t even finish it because it tasted like vomit.”
“Someone put something in her drink,” June said, rushing to defend her friend.
“You saw someone mess with her drink?”
June’s lips twisted into a frown. “Well, no, but that’s the only thing that makes sense. Because she doesn’t remember what happened, and if she wasn’t drugged, she would have remembered, wouldn’t she? And when she came downstairs, she was acting so weird. Like slurring her speech and garbling her words all together so I couldn’t make any sense of what she was trying to tell me. She could barely walk. I had to practically carry her home.”
“I wasn’t drunk.” Elizabeth’s voice pitched to a frenzy. “I mean not on purpose. I had one drink. Not even one. You can’t get wasted from half a beer, can you?”
Her eyes darted between Brett and June. She wanted someone to reassure her, someone to tell her that what happened hadn’t been her fault, that she hadn’t done this to herself.
Brett leaned over the table, reaching her hand halfway. “Elizabeth.” She waited until the girl was looking at her before continuing, “If you’re telling me you had only half a beer, then I believe you.”
She exhaled, and her shoulders slumped. She folded her arms around her stomach, fixing her gaze on the table again, frowning at some crack or smudge only she could see.
“Let’s come back to that,” Brett said, turning her attention once more to June, letting Elizabeth have a moment to collect herself again. “So you left the party, and then what happened?”
“We walked home,” June said.
“How far is that?”
She shrugged. “Not far. A mile maybe.”
“And Elizabeth stayed with you that night? She slept at your house?”
June nodded again. “My parents were in Seattle for the weekend.”
“Have you told them? About the party? About what happened?”
June stared at her hands.
“What about you, Elizabeth? Have you told your parents anything?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want them to get mad.”
Brett spoke gently to her, with patience, “I’m sure once we tell them what happened—”
“Please, don’t tell them,” Elizabeth said. Then she scooted the chair back as if to leave. “You know what, never mind. This was a mistake. We shouldn’t have come. Nothing happened at the party. I made it all up, okay? I’m sorry we wasted your time.”
“Elizabeth…”
“Lizzie, don’t.” June tugged on her friend’s arm, keeping her in the chair. “She won’t tell your mom.” She flicked her eyes to Brett. “You don’t have to tell them, right?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” Brett said. Eventually, the parents would need to be told what had happened to their daughter. Of course, they would. Right now, though, Brett just needed the truth. Even if that meant making promises she couldn’t keep. “I just want to try and find out who hurt you, ok
ay? I know this is difficult to talk about, but do your best. There’s no rush. Just take your time and tell me what happened. Your parents don’t have to know anything until you’re ready for them to know. Why don’t we go back to the party, okay? You had some beer that might have been drugged, and then what? Is that when you went upstairs?”
Elizabeth chewed on her lower lip for a second. She was still perched on the edge of the chair, tensed to run. June still gripped her arm, holding her down. She tenderly brushed a lock of hair from her friend’s face. “Lizzie, please, she’s just trying to help. Tell her what happened. Tell her what you told me.”
A minute passed, and then Elizabeth nodded once, sharply, like she’d made up her mind. She breathed in deep, lifted her gaze once more to Brett, resolute this time. Beneath her fear, there was strength.
“I don’t remember everything, just like, flashes. Like a flickering movie or something. There are all these jumps in time. I remember being on the staircase and looking down at everyone dancing. And then I remember opening a bunch of doors like I was looking for something, but I don’t remember what I was looking for. Then there were hands, pushing against my mouth. And I couldn’t breathe. I said, stop. I think I said stop or no or leave or something. I said something. And then there was this wolf, and he was clawing at me, tearing my clothes. And I just closed my eyes, I guess. Like if I couldn’t see him, he would go away? The next thing I remember, I’m walking on the side of the road with June, and she’s humming a Madonna song. What was it, June? What was the song?”
But Brett didn’t give her a chance to answer. She held up one hand. “Wait, back up. A wolf?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I think it was a mask.”
“Okay, do you remember anything else about this wolf? Can you tell me what else he was wearing?”
“I don’t know. Black clothes, I guess. It was dark.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
On a Dark Tide Page 10