by Caitlin Sara
Her cell phone buzzed in her purse, startling her. Arabelle’s name flashed across the screen. Lately the only reason she called was Ara, the last person that Raina wanted to think about right now.
Raina knocked quietly, then moved the door handle. She could tell the door was unlocked, so she showed herself in.
Other than the classic rock that purred quietly from the doctor’s bluetooth speaker, the apartment was still. Raina briefly glanced in each of the rooms, calling Dan’s name. He couldn’t be too far or else the speaker would lose its connection to his phone. Back in the bedroom, light splintered from the crack of the bathroom door, and she could hear water running.
Raina removed her coat and adjusted her breasts until her cleavage sat full and plump in the center of her plunging neckline. Opting to leave her high heels on, she got comfortable on the bed, propping herself up onto her right side, brushing her hair over one shoulder.
Moments later, the water clicked off and the door opened.
“What the hell?” Raina yelled, sitting up on the bed as a young woman exited the bathroom, tightening the doctor’s bathrobe around her. “Who are you?”
“I’m Harley, Dr. DaVedere’s executive assistant.”
Raina lowered her doubtful stare, focusing on Harley’s lack of clothing and obvious level of comfort in the doctor’s apartment.
“What does he want, a three-way or something?” Raina swung her legs to stand up from the bed. “He could have told me that before I came over.” She walked to a corner table with a crystal scotch decanter sitting in the middle and gave herself a large pour before taking it down like a shooter. That was one thing about the doctor, you could always find a drink in every room of his apartment. “I’m not totally against it, just like to know in advance if I’m going to have to bend that way, you know?”
“That’s not why I called you here tonight,” Harley said. “I called you because I wanted to see you in person. See what you had, what it was about you that enamored him so.”
“Excuse me? I’m not sure who you’re talking about, but I can sure as hell tell you he didn’t think of me that way.” Raina poured herself a second drink.
“I needed to see why he picked you over me. He was like a little school boy. Obsessed and love sick. Desperately devoted, until I stabbed him, of course. I needed to get you here to see you in person. See what he loved about you over me.”
Raina’s internal antenna quivered, a sudden sense of danger quickening her pulse. She bolted toward her cell phone, the glass she was holding falling to the floor. Harley rushed toward her as she fumbled with the phone, stripping it from Raina’s hand and pushing her back up against the wall. The phone ricocheted across the room.
Holding Raina, Harley said through her teeth, “I just want to talk. I just need to know. Please.”
Raina pushed back against Harley’s shoulders and blindly pulled down on her hair, sending Harley flailing into an awkward arched position. Raina cracked her in the face with her fist, then shifted sideways, still gripping a handful of hair. She reached for a decorative iron sconce on the nightstand. Harley tried to swing out from under Raina’s arm to break loose but was no match due to the incapacitating position.
“Don’t do this, Ara, please!” Harley yelled.
Before Raina could even register that name, she swung the solid sconce, meeting Harley’s skull with a disorienting crack and sending a splatter of red across Dan’s ivory bedding. With Harley now on the floor, knocked unconscious by the hit, she grabbed her phone off the floor and started to dial 911 before deciding against it.
Raina let out a scream dropping the decorative piece, still in her right hand, to the ground. What exactly just happened, and how did it escalate so quickly? What did Ara have to do with the doctor? Had she heard this clearly sick, sick woman correctly? Or was she really losing her mind?
Kneeling beside the crumpled woman, Raina reached into the bathrobe’s pocket, looking for any indication of who this woman was. Finding another cell phone, she quickly accessed the phone’s recent messages, horrified to see that the only two saved phone numbers were both under a single letter named contact.
Had the woman, now unconscious on the floor, just been trying to warn her? How was everyone in New York entwined with Ara?
If there was ever a time Raina wished she had not been drinking, it was now. With more questions than answers, there was only one thing that seemed crystal clear. She desperately needed to speak with Ara. Tossing the phone to the ground, she bolted from the apartment.
CHAPTER 49
Ameno and Maro weaved through the West Side Highway’s evening traffic, turning the undercover car’s flashers on when needed.
The doctor had creeped Maro out from the get-go. He couldn’t fathom a situation where he would spend money to send a teenage daughter for quality time with that quack; then again, he couldn’t fathom much about raising a teenage daughter. But now the quack wasn’t just some overpriced perv looking to get his dick touched by young girls—he was a murder victim, and under Maro’s professional code that meant he had to think of him as a vic, not a criminal.
Maro shook his head. “Can’t be a coincidence. Two guys involved with the same woman, ending up dead? There’s gotta be a connection there.” Maro whizzed past a town car moving too slow for the left lane. “Doesn’t mean Ara did it. Someone in her circle though . . .”
“Think we’re working with the whole line-up? Someone could have gotten called up to handle the job.” Maro hated when Ameno used sports references to refer to real life situations; they weren’t picking their starters for a fantasy football team off a bench here. They were trying to solve a murder case.
“Not sure.” One day he’d get his kid partner to realize less is often more. And silence was freakin’ golden. Maro pulled back into the right lane and clicked on his turn signal.
“Where we headed?”
Maro seesawed between considering his partner was super naive or just a dumbass. “By the doc’s apartment.”
“But it’s not our case.”
Do I have to spell everything out for you? “Maybe not, but he was the suspect in our case. There may be something there, and we need to find out about it before it gets locked away in a box with NYPD.”
The building’s security guard didn’t take much convincing and escorted them to the doctor’s front door. They found it wide open, providing more than enough probable cause to enter. Ameno nodded to the guard, who stayed behind them. Maro and Ameno raised their guns as they cleared the front rooms and kitchen.
When they reached the bedroom, the guard jumped back at the sight of a woman’s bludgeoned body.
“Looks like we found our assistant,” Maro said. Harley laid bloody on the floor. He never got used to finding a body. It repulsed him when a life, whether promising or not, was snuffed out too soon. Not at the hands of God, but self-serving counterfeits playing the role. Unlike the scene at the office, signs of a struggle were strewn across the bedroom. Her eyes, suddenly opened wide, showed the kind of fear one could only feel when fearing their life was going to end. Maro kneeled down and pressed his hand to her neck. “She’s alive!”
Ameno yelled out to the guard to call 911 before kneeling next to the victim. Harley, coming to, nervously shifted her stare between the detectives.
“My name is Detective Maro and this is my partner Detective Ameno. We are here to help you. We’ve met before, remember, at Dr. Dan’s office.” He took out a handkerchief from his pocket and placed it over her gaping head wound. “Do you remember what happened here, who attacked you?”
Before Harley could answer, the guard rushed back in the room. “Cops are on their way.” After a disapproving look from Maro, he corrected, “You know, NYPD.”
If not for the injured woman at his feet, Maro would have physically removed him from the scene. Ameno, for once picking up on his signals, stood to force the guard out and search the rest of the apartment before others arrived to the scene.<
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“We got a knife in here. Next to the tub,” he called from the bathroom. “Tub’s full.”
At the mention of the knife, Harley broke down, “I’m so sorry,” she wailed, bringing both hands up to cover her face.
“Calm down, you’re going to be OK.”
“No I won’t, I will never be OK because of her. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to.” She sobbed, beginning to become hysterical.
Maro gestured toward Ameno to look down, laying in the center of the room was a pay-as-you-go smartphone. Ameno took two latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. He scrolled through the messages, with only two contacts, one listed as A and one R. Clicking out of the recent conversations he pressed the photo icon. A phone’s photo often held valuable evidence, sometimes in the happy moments captured before a tragic event, where the owner clearly didn’t know what was coming, and others in a brave effort to expose an attacker for what they were.
This photo stream revealed something even stranger. First there were seductive photos of Raina, but if you scrolled further into the stream there were hundreds of photos of Ara Hopkins dating back months, years maybe. Images of her both alone and with others, with Brad and more recently her with Lane.
“You gotta be shitting me,” Ameno said, scrolling further and further back in time.
Maro stood, excited by what Ameno had found.
“Is that Ara?”
“You betcha. Ara, Raina, Lane. Brad. The gang’s all here in high res.”
“Jesus Christ. Is this the doc’s phone?” It certainly looked like it.
Turning his attention back to Harley, who was now struggling to sit up against the bed, he said, “Do you know whose phone this is?” He rolled latex gloves onto his hands and snatched the phone from his partner.
“Of course I do. It’s his, Dr. Dan’s. I took it with me from the office after I killed him.” Her candor caught him off guard.
“You killed the doctor?”
“Yes, then I took the phone and asked her to meet me here. I just wanted to meet her. See her face to face. But she freaked out and attacked me.”
Maro frantically scrolled through the stream, finding a picture of Ara, then held it out in front of Harley’s face, “Is this her, the girl you wanted to meet?”
On cue, paramedics and two NYPD officers entered the apartment with the security guard, rushing over to Harley. Maro, placing one hand up for them to pause repeated his question, “Is this the girl that did this to you?”
Harley defeated, shook her head back and forth. “No.”
Rattled that the doctor’s receptionist did not recognize Ara, he scrolled back through the photos, wondering who else could have done this to Harley.
“That’s enough, Detective, she’s injured,” the New York officer said.
Stopping on one of the more recent photos, Raina Martin posing seductively in front of a mirror, he turned the phone back toward Harley. “Just one more. Is this who attacked you?”
Dissolving into tears, Harley shook her head yes.
Standing back, his mind rushed with the evidence now in front of him.
Going back in the photo stream until last February, there, right in front of him, were photos of Brad Bugia’s last night alive. He searched each image before moving on to the next. The final thumbnail from that night was not a photo, but a video of what looked like the street in front of Brad and Ara’s apartment building.
“Well, what do we have here?” he said, pressing the play button. The scene unraveled in front of him. Ara getting out of the Uber, pausing on the street corner, taking a few moments before entering through the doors, disappearing into the black space of time they had desperately been trying to fill. The video, still recording, flip flopped to face downwards as the person filming fumbled around the car. Seconds later, the camera was jarred back up, focusing on the door.
“Shit.” Maro dragged the video back, replaying it for Ameno. “Get Bene on the phone.”
The two detectives looked at each other, eyes wide. “We’ve been going after the wrong sister.”
CHAPTER 50
Lane, sitting in his squad car, tried to process what he just heard. Ara’s doctor had been following her almost nightly to work events and social outings both before and after Brad’s death, even capturing intimate moments he had thought were shared between just him and her? NYPD was in the process of tearing through years of files at the doc’s uptown office, while a separate crew processed the assault that had taken place in the doctor’s bedroom on his executive assistant and lover, Harley Petit.
The catch? It was not an attempted murder-suicide. Couldn’t have been. Each were targets in what seemed to be separate, surprise attacks. The even bigger surprise, photos of Raina were found on the doctor’s pay as you go phone.
“We need you to get in contact with Ms. Hopkins and bring her down to the station. She may be in danger, Bene,” Maro told him.
A sudden wave of guilt crushed his chest. He had left her all alone, abandoned her over something insignificant, and now she could be in trouble. How could he have been so selfish?
Maro continued, “There’s evidence on the phone, but we can talk more later. I can’t have another victim here, and she wasn’t in the best shape when we left her. Ara trusts you. Please. Get her to meet us at the station in Jersey, we can explain later.”
“What do you mean? What kind of shape was she in when you left her? When did you see Ara last?” The heaviness on Lane’s chest intensified into a violent panic.
Ameno came on the line. “Just get your girl, Bene. We’ll meet you at the station.”
“Damnit!” Lane slammed both hands against the dashboard. Nervously tapping the steering wheel, he flipped on his squad car lights and raced through the intersection. His rear right side barely escaped a blow by an oncoming mini-van that screeched to a halt in the road’s shoulder.
No matter how he dissected the brief conversation with the New Jersey detectives, Lane couldn’t figure out what he was about to walk into. All he did know was that Ameno and Maro were concerned for Ara, for once. Of course, there was the possibility that they were pulling a fast one, having him hand deliver her for an arrest on a silver platter, but he pushed that thought from his mind, hoping they finally had the evidence to eliminate her as a suspect.
A toxic combination of rage and fear was brewing. He needed to get to Ara, and fast.
CHAPTER 51
When push came to shove, people always chose themselves.
Despite their obvious differences, Raina and Ara had always balanced one another, Raina’s booming personality compensated for Ara’s understated demeanor. Together at college, the pair demanded the attention from every room they entered, resulting in full social calendars and the hottest hook ups, followed up with fast food splurges and Laguna Beach marathons. At that time, it was enough to concoct the perfect relationship for two girls forced together by their parents.
As they grew into women, the bond solidified to a dependence allowing Ara to let her guard down. Making her foolish enough to think their bond was unbreakable. She should have known Raina would always choose Raina first.
The first time Ara heard the voicemail, it stopped her dead in her tracks. Sucked the air out of her so fast that she nearly collapsed right then and there. But it was amazing what you could make yourself immune to if you forced yourself to endure it. Over and over and over, for a year. Now, she could practically recite it word for word.
She says she loves you. But does she show it? I love you, Brad Bugia, and will show you that every day of your life. I won’t go on how we are now, especially now that you know she’s pregnant. Do you want to be stuck in a family with her? We both know we didn’t mean for this to happen between you and me, but it did, and you are everything to me now. Please be smart, think about what you want and who you want in your future, not just the next few days but forever. You’re bored with her; I promise you a lifetime of adventure. Free yourself. I love you
. Follow the plan and do the right thing.
As she’d walked up the cold stairs of her apartment building that night, Ara lost a little more confidence with every step she took, leaving her hesitant and unstable by the time she reached the top. At the start of the hike up, she’d known exactly what she needed to do. But step by step, she’d left a tiny piece of certainty on each landing.
Reaching into her clutch, Ara had pulled out her cell phone, clicking into her voice recordings. She had felt so guilty the day she recorded it. It was after a decent session between the sheets, when Brad was showering, that Ara’s world was destroyed. The name, flashing brightly across his phone’s screen, taunted her with its cruelty. It was a rare occasion that Brad’s phone was not tucked in his pocket or pushed off somewhere out of her sight. It was only after she decided to snoop that she realized how inaccessible it really was, practically glued to him at all times. He’d answer or ignore calls swiftly, swiping away call and text alerts like a grand pianist. Shrouding his life, and his lies, with short easy actions.
Not that night. Ding. Voicemail. It was 2 a.m. on Friday night. Even work colleagues resorted to email or text at this hour. With only a few tries, Ara gained access into the phone. Why had she never tried to guess his password before?