by Lisa Jackson
He scraped back his chair to get to his feet. “This isn’t good, Cass.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He slung an arm over her shoulder. “But it’s worse that you blacked out last night, considering that you were in Portland when Brandi Potts was killed.”
Horrified, she whispered, “You don’t believe me!”
“I do,” he said with conviction, “I do. But it’s not me you have to worry about.”
She shook her head and felt her anger ramping up again. “The police are going to think I had something to do with the poor woman’s death, aren’t they? I didn’t know Brandi Potts. Why in heaven’s name would I want to kill her or Holly or anyone!”
“Cass, I’m just telling you—”
“I get it, Trent. Truly,” she cut in bitterly. “You’re just trying to make sure I understand what’s going on here, what the cops will think, what some of the supposed circumstantial evidence suggests. They probably think I’ve got Allie stashed away somewhere. Maybe I stuffed her body in a closet . . . maybe one of yours. We’d better check.”
“You’re forgetting I’m on your side.”
“Are you?” she threw back at him. “Sometimes I wonder!” She tossed her hair over her shoulder, glared at him a second, then suddenly felt suffocated. Squeezed. Like she was in a room with no doors and the walls were slowly moving closer. “I need some air.” Without further explanation she stormed out of the kitchen, out the back door, and down the steps.
Hud was right on her heels, sneaking through the open door before it banged shut. Even the shepherd’s enthusiasm, as he bounded in front of her, did nothing to quell the storm of emotions raging inside. She stalked to the fence, her boots sinking into the soggy grass, and felt the cool air against her skin. The horses were scattered in the fields, mares with heavy bellies, tails and manes caught in the breeze as they grazed. Without a care in the world. The frigid air smelled fresh and if she closed her eyes maybe she could pretend that all this trauma would go away.
Fat chance.
She heard the door of the house open and close, then the sound of steady footsteps on the gravel.
She set her jaw. She didn’t want to talk to Trent until she calmed down, until she could make some sense of what was going on. Deep down, she understood he was just trying to help, but damn it, she knew the cops had her at the top of their suspect list. She knew that oh-so-calm Detective Nash considered Cassie a prime suspect in her sister’s disappearance and probably the murders. She knew things looked bad, and in the back of her mind she wondered again if she was being used, a pawn in some macabre chess game, easily sacrificed, but for what? Why would anyone do that? And who would know where she would be at any given minute? For the love of God, even she didn’t have a clue sometimes when the blackouts happened.
When the blackouts happened.
The words rang in her brain and she blinked.
When they happened . . . the timing . . . could someone know?
Her mind started spinning. No. That was crazy, wasn’t it? Or could someone know about the blackouts? Someone who could use them to his or her advantage? How? She bit her lip. Of course people did know of her condition. It was documented in the hospital. But that was the very hospital where she’d thought she’d seen the nurse in the cape, the nurse who’d told her Allie was alive.
Cassie shook her head. Was this too far-fetched? But it felt so right.
Her mental state wasn’t exactly a secret. While she hadn’t announced the fact that she’d checked herself into the psych ward at Mercy Hospital, the press had gotten wind of it and the story, along with the mystery of Allie’s disappearance, had been tabloid fodder for weeks. How many times had she spied her own face squared off with Allie’s, the two pictures photoshopped together and superimposed over the shadowy image of a creepy old hospital in the background? Anyone who walked through a checkout line at most stores in America could learn about the time she’d spent under a psychiatrist’s care in a Portland hospital.
But who?
And why?
If someone realized she could lose track of time, then ostensibly she could be made to appear culpable because of her own weakness. Really? Could that be done? It would have to be someone very close. Someone she knew or someone just a little further away, in the fringes of her acquaintances, someone hiding in the perimeter, watching her, someone who lurked nearer than she imagined?
A shiver ran down her spine.
Or was she just making excuses? Letting her paranoia run wild? She needed to pull herself together. Before her damned meeting with Detective Nash.
She heard Trent approach, felt his touch on her shoulder as he stood next to her. “Hey.”
From the corner of her eye, she noticed the concern on his features, the shadows under his eyes. He, too, was suffering.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, but you needed to be forearmed. I don’t want you to be blindsided. Okay? You need to be ready.”
She wanted to sink against him, but resisted. “This isn’t just an interview, is it? The cops are going to arrest me.”
“Nah.” He shook his head, his eyes narrowing a bit, the first signs of crow’s-feet gathering near the corners of his eyes. “Don’t think so. Neither does Carter.”
She stared. “You discussed it with him?” For years her husband and stepfather couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other. Now they were allies? In cahoots? Talking behind her back?
“No, but I’m pretty sure he would have advised you not to talk without a lawyer present if he thought there was any threat of you being arrested.”
“I don’t know how many ways to say it, but I’m innocent. I don’t need a damned lawyer.”
He didn’t reply. And the silence stretched between them, only the sigh of the wind and rustle of leaves in the trees audible. The hand on her shoulder gripped a little tighter as he finally said, “We’ll get through this.”
“Will we?” She sounded bitter and told herself he was only trying to help.
“Come on, Cass. You know it.” He hugged her, rotating her so that he could brush a kiss across her forehead.
Her heart nearly broke.
“You ready to come into the house now or do you want to stand out here and freeze?”
“I’ll be in. Just a sec, though. I need to grab a change of clothes—these are yesterday’s—from the car. Oh, and my cell. And a damned charger if I brought one.”
“If you didn’t, I’m pretty sure I’ve got one you can borrow.”
“Great.”
Together they walked to her car. Her phone was where she’d left it on the passenger seat. “It’s probably dead,” she said, opening the door, “and filled with a kabillion messages from Whitney Stone. She still wants more information for upcoming episodes.”
“It’s hell to be popular,” he said, and she shot him a look that could cut through granite. He held up his hands, palms out, as if surrendering. “Hey, just trying to lighten the mood.”
“It didn’t help.” But she smiled and the icy wind blowing down the Columbia Gorge didn’t seem quite so cold. Scooping up the phone, she noticed that the cell’s battery life was hovering at two percent. She had four text messages. As predicted, three were from Whitney Stone. The fourth text had no name attached to it, but Cassie recognized the number, and she nearly dropped the damned phone. The number listed was composed of the same digits as the call on Brandon McNary’s phone. The hairs on the back of her neck rose as she read the simple message:
Help me.
CHAPTER 29
Trent took Cassie’s phone. “Don’t buy into it,” he warned, reading the text message and seeing the horror on his wife’s face. “This isn’t from Allie.”
“How do you know?” Cassie’s eyes were round, her face white, her hands shaking. She looked as if she might collapse against her Honda at any second.
She tried to grab the phone back, but he didn’t release it. “Let me text back.”
>
“To this number?”
“Yes!”
He hesitated. Felt a blast of wind against the back of his neck. What would sending a message back hurt? Or who would it hurt? Cassie? Even more than she was wounded now? Already she was embroiled eyeball deep in whatever this deadly mess was.
“I just want to ask who it is,” she said.
He glanced at the screen. “ ‘Help me’?” he read aloud. “Come on, Cass. Does that sound like her? You know better. When has Allie ever asked for help?”
“This is different.”
“We don’t know that.”
She rubbed her arms as if chilled to the bone. “Why not?”
“I don’t like you engaging with whoever sent it.”
“I have to know.”
“Oh, hell.” He handed her the phone and while the battery life indicator glowed red, she typed: who is this?
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go charge it. And see what happens. But no matter what, when you go meet with Detective Nash today, you hand over this phone. Maybe the cops can trace the calls somehow. They’ve got all kinds of sophisticated equipment and techies and computer experts. Let them deal with it.”
“After we get a response.”
“No matter what. Or we can take it to Carter right now, if you like that option better. He’s a damned PI with connections with the sheriff’s department.”
“But she contacted me.”
“Someone contacted you. And I’d bet my best horse, the gray gelding over there”—he pointed to a small herd and the dappled horse kicking up his hooves and running, black tail aloft across the field—“that someone other than Allie sent that text, that someone’s playing you.”
“Why?”
“Good question. God, I don’t know.” He grabbed her hand and linked her smaller chilled fingers through his. “But let’s find out.” He shot her a look as he tugged on her hand. “I think we should start with Brandon McNary. He got a message, too, right? Something equally mysterious?”
“His said, ‘I’m okay.’ ”
“What kind of message is that? Huh? Last night she was ‘okay’ and now she’s not? She needs ‘help’? From you? Does that even make sense?”
She didn’t answer.
“Of course it doesn’t. Come on.” He started striding to the house, pulling Cassie along the path, the dog galloping ahead.
“So what does?”
“Good point.” That was the problem. Nothing about Allie Kramer’s disappearance and the murders of the other women and the damned text messages meant anything. At least not to him.
As they reached the porch, she said, “We’re not giving Carter my phone.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll just upset Jenna. Let’s . . . let’s wait. I’ll hand it over to the police when I go there this afternoon.”
He sent her a disbelieving glance.
“Swear to God,” she said, lifting a hand as if she were testifying on a Bible. At least for now she appeared less shaken. “Maybe before then, we’ll get a response.”
“Maybe,” he hedged, opening the door and feeling as if by answering the text, engaging with whoever was on the other end of the wireless connection, they were walking into a trap.
Leaning back in her chair, Nash squeezed her eyes shut, then whipped her head around, cracking her neck. After eight or nine hours at her desk all of her muscles were tight, a headache beginning to pound at the base of her skull. She felt a second’s relief before her muscles clenched again.
Her eyes burned from hours reading through files and notes, doing research on the computer, and just plain lack of sleep. In the early morning hours, once she and Double T were finished at the crime scene, she’d known she was too keyed up to go home and try to get a few more hours of shut-eye, so she’d driven directly to the office. The predawn hours had been quiet, the department nearly empty, so she’d taken the time to compare every detail of the murders of Holly Dennison in LA and Brandi Potts here, in Portland.
So many similarities.
So many loose ends.
With only the weakest of connections.
Her headache was starting to throb.
It didn’t help that over the last few hours the office had become a madhouse with officers, suspects, and witnesses coming and going, the shuffle of footsteps and buzz of conversation accompanying them. Telephones jangled or blipped out messages, a printer or fax machine was endlessly chunking out pages near the reception area, and from every direction the frenetic click of keyboards could be heard. Despite the soundproofing of the movable walls, the department as a whole was a cacophony of sounds, all of which, today, permeated the insulation to reverberate in Nash’s skull.
She found a bottle of ibuprofen and washed down two capsules with the dregs of her cold coffee. Her damned phone hadn’t stopped ringing since seven this morning and as the day had worn on and news of the latest homicide had hit the Internet, the phone calls had only gotten more frequent.
For her part, she was pushing the lab for immediate results, asking for a priority on Brandi Potts’s autopsy, wanting comparisons of the bullets found in each of the victims, needing to know if there were any fingerprints or DNA left on the masks. The ME had complied, the bullet that had buried deep in Brandi Potts already retrieved.
So far today Nash had been contacted by five different reporters, all of whom she’d referred to the Public Information Officer. A few tips were coming in as well, some about the shooting, and, of course, the usual Allie Kramer sightings.
If I had a dollar for every time someone thought they’d seen the missing actress, I’d be rich, she thought, and knew it would only get worse. As the release date of Dead Heat got closer, the number of calls from people who claimed to have caught a glimpse of the missing star had seemed to increase exponentially. The press had gotten wind of that little detail too, all of which had created some weird macabre buzz about the film.
Allie Kramer.
Her disappearance was at the heart of this, Nash was certain, she just didn’t know how. But a prime opportunity to question witnesses was at hand. Tomorrow night. The all-star bash for the movie’s premiere. People involved with the movie and the party had been flying up and down the coast. Los Angeles to Portland and back again. Nash had checked.
So it wasn’t as if Cassie Kramer were the only suspect, just the most visible at this point in time.
Nash stood and stretched, loosening her muscles, but her mind was still on the case. She could believe that Cassie might have been involved in the disappearance of her sister, they had a documented volatile relationship, but why kill the other women? Was she really that far around the bend? Is that why they were decorated with distorted visages of the women closest to Cassie? Did she have to mock their relationships by scribbling them on the back of the mask? Did she need to kill Jenna and Allie over and over again and use other women even slightly associated with them as her victims? What kind of psychosis was that?
It just didn’t quite fit. Not in Nash’s mind.
At first Nash had thought Brandi Potts had no connection to the other women and the filming of Dead Heat, but that wasn’t exactly true. As it turned out, when Potts’s boyfriend, Jeffrey Conger, was interviewed and asked, he’d said that Brandi had been an extra in the movie, in fact she’d been on the set the day that Lucinda Rinaldi had been shot, but, no, he didn’t think she knew either of the Kramer sisters. Of course he’d been broken up at the time, woken from a deep sleep, to find out that his live-in girlfriend wasn’t just not in their shared condo, but that she was dead, killed by an unknown assassin.
He, who worked for a day-trading company, had been devastated by the news and had seemed genuinely shell-shocked. He’d even called Nash this morning, just after seven, wanting information and offering any help, but when Nash had asked him questions on the phone, he hadn’t been able to come up with any new information to aid the investigation. According to Jeffrey, Brandi, who worked in a local bank in t
he trust department, didn’t have an enemy in the world. Originally from Seattle, she was sweet and kind and made friends easily. They’d been college sweethearts and Brandi had followed him to Portland when he’d taken a job in a trading company downtown. They’d had plans to marry, though he hadn’t yet gotten down on one knee and made it official. He had, though, put the ring she’d shown him in a local jewelry store on some kind of layaway plan and was making payments on it. He’d planned to propose at the first University of Washington home football game this fall, had hoped to get her sorority sisters on board, maybe pop the question while captured on the Jumbotron or whatever it was that filmed the game. He’d started choking up and had to end the conversation.
Jeffrey Albright Conger was a mess.
Or a very good actor.
As she dropped into her desk chair again, she made a note to meet him personally and check to see if anyone had a life insurance policy on Brandi Potts. Just in case. Though it seemed from outward signs that Brandi’s murder was more likely related to the other women who were a part of Dead Heat than a kill-for-a-quick-payoff scheme, you never knew. Nash had already decided to look into Conger’s finances and to check just in case girlfriend number two was stashed away somewhere.
Besides, Brandi Potts’s connection was a thin thread as she was only an extra.
Nonetheless, Nash kept coming back to the film and the fact that Dead Heat’s female lead was still missing.
Where the hell was Allie Kramer?
Nash wrote the question down and circled it. The timing of the star of Dead Heat’s disappearance had to be significant. Had she been killed, an earlier victim of the same killer? Then why hadn’t her body been left and displayed in plain view like the others? If the killer’s MO was to leave the dead bodies at the killing ground and decorate them with a bizarre mask, then why hadn’t he done the same to Allie? Or had she somehow escaped? Had she been warned of the attack that would happen on the set? If so, how? Who had tipped her off? Was she involved? If so, how had she vanished off the face of the damned earth?