by Bush, Nancy
Stefan’s portrait had been removed upon Braden’s marriage to his third and current wife, Rosamund, who’d replaced it with one of herself when she was in her early stages of pregnancy. Rosamund’s baby girl was due in January. While Rosamund insisted the child’s name would be Gilda, all of the other Rafferty children were named after the month in which they were born, so September and her brothers, March and Auggie, and her sister, July, expected she would be named January, no matter what Rosamund wanted.
“Someone tied you to a basketball pole at Twin Oaks?” September asked Stefan when he subsided into silence. She felt rather than saw Wes come up beside her.
Stefan’s beard stubble was just coming through. He was younger than September by two years but he seemed even younger now. He’d always been socially inept, kind of sneaky and hovering, and she’d stayed away from him as much as possible.
“Bastard drugged me so I couldn’t fight him and stole my wallet and phone. Left me there damn near naked,” he bit out, his face a dark glower.
“He drugged you in order to take your wallet and phone?”
His gaze flew to hers defiantly, apparently taking objection to her careful tone. “That’s what I said. He drugged me and then robbed me.”
“After he used a stun gun on you.” September, too, could see the small marks. Several of them. Wes was right. Whoever had zapped Stefan had done it more than once.
“Jesus.” Stefan’s face was dark red. “Yes! Used a fucking stun gun, drugged me, and tied me up!”
In the Ballonni case, the man had been drugged as well, but there had been no stun gun marks. And though Ballonni’s clothes and wallet were nowhere to be found, it hadn’t really felt like a robbery, especially because the body had been staged with a placard around his neck that read: I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE. This didn’t feel quite like a robbery, either.
“This thief left a placard around your neck?” September asked.
Wes said, “Crime techs have it now.”
“Fucker thought he was funny,” Stefan muttered.
“So, it wasn’t a prank. It was a robbery,” September said.
“It was both. Clearly!” Stefan snapped.
“Did he make you write it out himself ?” September asked.
The color that had turned his face red now seemed to leach right out of his face. “What did it say?” she prodded when he didn’t answer.
“I WANT WHAT I CAN’T HAVE,” Wes told her when Stefan’s silence continued.
“It doesn’t mean anything!” Stefan’s nostrils flared. “God! It’s all just so fucked up!”
“What were you doing when he attacked you?” September asked.
“What do you mean?” Stefan folded his arms over his chest and glowered down at them, refusing to meet her gaze.
“Was it at the school? It must have been fairly early this morning that the robber found you,” September prompted.
“Yeah, it was.”
“What were you doing there so early?” she asked.
“What the fuck, Nine.” He glared at her. “I was . . . I like to get to work early, and I was going to jog around the track.”
“And he Tased you while you were . . . jogging?” Wes asked.
“Well, I stopped for a moment.”
“So, he came up to you on the track, Tased you, then dragged you to the pole and tied you up,” September said.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything to you?” she pressed.
“No.”
“Do you jog often?” she asked. “So that he might know your routine?”
“No. I don’t. . . . Jesus. You people—”
“Stefan?” a high-pitched voice called from beyond the curtain.
Stefan cut himself off short. Wes looked at September, then pushed back the curtain. Standing just beyond, her face taut with concern, was Verna Rafferty, Stefan’s mother and September’s one-time stepmother. Her blond hair was swept into a French roll and she wore a brown pantsuit with a white shirt, the collar of which was unbuttoned as if it had been hastily donned. She carried a gray duffel bag in one hand and when she saw Stefan in the bed, she dropped the bag as if her fingers had given way.
“Oh, darling . . .” She moved in quickly, arms outstretched, brushing past September without really seeing her, and then stopped short before giving Stefan the bear hug September had expected. Her arms dropped to her sides and it looked like she might cry. “What happened?”
“The clothes,” he said through his teeth.
“What happened to yours?” she asked, half turning to the abandoned duffel that Wes had picked up and was holding out to her.
“They were taken by the bastard who drugged me and tied me up and stole my wallet,” Stefan answered.
“Oh, baby.” Ignoring Wes, she threw her arms around her son, who accepted the embrace in silence, his body language screaming his discomfort at the display of affection. “I’ve got your things right here.” Now she accepted the duffel from Wes and placed it on Stefan’s chest. It was at that point she noticed September and her mouth began quivering.
Drawing herself up straight and looking down her nose in that haughty way that was pure Verna, she demanded, “What are you doing here?”
Chapter Two
“I was called to the case,” September told her ex-stepmother tightly. She’d recently learned that Verna and Braden’s affair had begun while her mother was still alive, and that Kathryn Rafferty had intercepted a note from Verna that had subsequently led to the auto accident that caused her death. Was Verna responsible? No. Not really. But had circumstances been different September might still have her mother. And the truth was she’d never liked Verna all that much anyway.
“Leave me alone. All of you,” Stefan said, ignoring the tension between the two women. “I want to get dressed.”
September and Wes acquiesced by stepping outside the curtain, but Verna got barked at by her son when she apparently thought she would stay. By the time she flung the curtain aside, her cheeks were flushed with repressed anger—which she immediately took out on September.
“Who did this to him?” she demanded. “What kind of a sick person would leave my son out nearly naked in this weather?”
“This weather” was midforties, and though it wasn’t exactly red hot, Stefan wouldn’t have died from the elements like Christopher Ballonni had. “We don’t know yet,” September told her.
“I thought you were a detective, or something. Going after real crime.”
“This is a real crime, ma’am,” Wes pointed out.
Verna shot him a scorching look, then eyed him from head to toe. There was something inherently sexy about Wes that must have registered, because Verna turned back to September a little more distracted than before but still rattling down her own path. “Don’t try to tell me you came here to help Stefan. I know how all of you think. You’ve never accepted Stefan like you should.”
This was the song Verna had sung from the moment she’d married Braden. And though there was some truth to it, it was more that Stefan was just someone none of them wanted to know. It wasn’t because he wasn’t a Rafferty. It was because he was odd and remote and sullen.
Briefly, September thought about bringing up the Christopher Ballonni case; the story had been all over the news when it occurred and Stefan’s placard suggested the crimes were by the same doer, as the MO was the same. But, as Wes had pointed out, Stefan was “family” in the loosest sense of the word, and as soon as her lieutenant learned of her connection to him, September might be yanked off the case.
Until that happened, she wanted to garner as much information as possible.
And, really, she didn’t feel like offering any information to Verna anyway.
Stefan stepped from behind the curtain, dressed in dark slacks and a white dress shirt. “God, Mom,” he muttered. “Couldn’t you have found me a T-shirt?”
Verna turned her attention on him, her rigidity melting a little. “I brought your
work clothes.”
“You think I’m going to work after this?” he demanded.
“I didn’t think.... You look so nice dressed up.”
September assessed Stefan’s white pallor and the flat line of his mouth and decided Verna must see something that clearly wasn’t there.
“Jesus, Mom,” he muttered, attempting to brush by September.
Verna said, “We’ll just go home, then.”
“Are the two of you living together?” September asked. The last she’d heard Stefan had his own apartment.
He turned bitter eyes on her. “Just for a while.”
“Stefan’s going back to school,” Verna volunteered stiffly.
“You work at Twin Oaks as a teaching assistant,” September said.
“You know I do,” he retorted.
Verna added quickly, “He wants to be a teacher. He’s good with children, aren’t you, Stefan?”
Stefan just gazed at his mother with burning eyes.
“You were on your way to work early, and then this robber came upon you while you were jogging,” September pressed on.
“That’s what I said.”
“Jogging?” Verna stared hard at her son.
“Yeah, jogging, Mom. I know you don’t think I do anything right, but I’m working on my body.”
Verna frowned, opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again without speaking.
“I’d . . . walked to the school. We don’t live that far. And he jumped me. Held a gun on me and made me drink that vile drink.”
“A stun gun,” September corrected him. Stefan looked as if he was going to deny it, then must have seen something in her expression that changed his mind, because he subsided into silence. “We can see the burn marks,” she told him.
“Okay, fine. He zapped me. Hurt like hell!”
“While you were on the track, he ordered you to drink the drug and when you refused, he hit you with the stun gun, several times,” she added, just in case he felt like lying some more. “Then he robbed you.”
“Do I have to talk to you?” Stefan demanded. “I don’t think so. You want to make a federal case out of it, go ahead. I drank the stuff because he was going to keep on zapping me, and the next thing I knew I was tied to the pole and it was damn cold!”
“I’m just trying to get the sequence of events straight,” September explained.
“Well, now you know.”
“You were going to say something?” September turned to Verna.
“I just don’t see why you have to interrogate Stefan. He’s the victim here,” she reminded her.
Wes’s gaze was on Stefan. “What did he look like?”
“He was, umm, wiry. Wore a baseball cap. Jeans and a jacket.”
“Was he black, white?” Wes asked.
Stefan looked into Wes’s dark eyes and then he glanced away, as if he were thinking hard. “White . . .”
“You don’t sound too sure,” Wes pointed out.
“It was dark. I couldn’t really see. But shh . . . No, I’m certain he was white.” He jerked away from them as if he couldn’t stand in such close proximity to the police.
“Did you notice anything unusual about this guy? Some identifying mark?” Wes asked.
“No.”
“Did he come from the parking lot?” Wes asked.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Were there any cars in the lot?” September put in.
“I don’t know! How many times do I have to say it? I don’t know.”
“Was he carrying the drink in a cup, or a glass, or what?” Wes asked, ignoring the outburst.
“I don’t think you should be harassing him like this,” Verna said tightly.
“It was like a small thermos,” Stefan said. “He just said, ‘Drink it,’ and he was the one with the weapon, so I did.”
That’s about the first thing he’s said that really rang true, September thought.
“Are we done now?” Stefan demanded when both September and Wes went silent.
“Almost,” she said. “It’s just unusual, the way this went down. Most robberies at gunpoint are simply that: the doer points a gun at you and says something like, ‘Give me all your money,’ and faced with serious injury or death, most people comply. Using a stun gun on you, then forcing you to drink something and write out this message—all of that takes a lot of extra time and says something else about the crime.”
“Maybe he’s just screwed up and likes to drug people,” Stefan muttered, his jaw working.
“Or, maybe he wanted you unconscious for some reason. To make sure you were found after school started?” September posed, figuring Christopher Ballonni must have suffered a similar fate at the hands of whoever had tied him to the flagpole. A complete autopsy had been performed and there were traces of Rohypnol in the man’s system. She’d bet Stefan Harmak had been drugged with roofies, too.
“He just wanted to keep me down,” Stefan said. “He didn’t want me overpowering him, so he took care of that first.”
“It looks like he wanted to humiliate you,” September suggested.
September might have bought Stefan’s theory more if her stepbrother was the kind of man who could physically scare someone, but he just didn’t come off that way. He undoubtedly had some strength, but there was something so Jack Sprat about him that she doubted any adult male armed with a stun gun would consider him such a threat as to drug him.
There was definitely something else at play, and she also suspected Stefan was deliberately keeping whatever it was from her. Maybe he was embarrassed, or maybe he was just being his usual asshole self, but he knew something.
She wanted to get a good look at the placard that had hung around Stefan’s neck when the crime techs were through with it. Since Ballonni’s placard read I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE, initially she and Gretchen had believed Ballonni must have been involved in a crime. They hadn’t discovered anything in the man’s past, however; Ballonni was a man who’d apparently been loved by his family and friends. The idea of suicide had been bandied about—an assisted suicide, given the zip-ties—but no one could believe Ballonni had been suicidal. He had a good job, a loving wife, a teenaged son who went hunting and fishing with him, a nice house with a low mortgage, credit card debt that was under control, and a social group with some good buddies.
September realized she knew next to nothing about her stepbrother’s social life. “This attack seems personal.”
“Bastard singled me out,” Stefan muttered.
“He waited for you.” She thought that over. “I’d like to talk to someone you work with.”
“No!” Stefan practically gasped. “They can’t know. It’s too embarrassing.”
“It’s going to hit the news,” September pointed out.
“Oh, God.” Stefan raked his fingers through his hair and Verna looked stricken.
“Who do you hang out with at the school? Maybe I can start with them,” September suggested.
“Nobody. They’re all married, old women.” Stefan glared at her as if it were her fault. “It’s just a job.”
“I’ll give Amy Lazenby a call,” September said. She’d met the principal of Twin Oaks earlier in the fall.
“You know her?” Stefan burst out, as if he couldn’t bear the thought. “Don’t talk to her. She’s a bitch.”
September pointed out, “She’s going to hear about this, so I can give her a heads-up before it hits the news.”
“The news . . .” Stefan closed his eyes.
“It happened on school grounds,” September said patiently. Stefan acted like the whole incident could just be swept under the rug, but that wasn’t how these things worked.
Wes asked him, “Who should we talk to?”
“I don’t know. No one.” His chin dropped to his chest as if he were collapsing.
“Aren’t you people the ones who figure that out?” Verna demanded, looking Wes over.
There wasn’t much more they w
ere going to get out of him now, September determined, so she said, “All right, Stefan. I’ll give you a call later.”
She and Wes left the hospital together and as they walked to the parking lot outside Emergency, she asked him, “So, how do you like my stepfamily?”
“Love ’em. Lucky you.”
September smiled faintly. “You haven’t met Rosamund yet.”
“Do I want to know Rosamund?” Wes asked.
“Doubtful. She took Verna’s place as my current stepmother. She’s younger than I am, and she’s pregnant, due in January. You know the whole deal with my family and the names.”
“You’re all months.”
“My father’s idea,” September said. “My oldest brother’s March, then my sister, July, then May, then Auggie and me. We do have a half brother who escaped the craziness, and although Rosamund thinks she’s going to name her little girl Gilda, we’re all betting on January.”
“I thought my family had its issues,” he observed, “but you Raffertys beat us all to hell.”
“We beat everybody,” September said on a sigh as she reached her silver Honda Pilot. “You know the fire at my father’s house—the one that was done with gasoline and a match?”
“Have you got a suspect?” he asked with sudden interest.
“No, no. Not really. My father and half brother saw someone running away but they couldn’t see who it was. My sister July wants to believe it was Stefan.”
Wes had been peeling off toward his Range Rover, but now he stopped short. “Why?”
“Why does she think that? Because she doesn’t like him. Or, why would he do it?”
“Why would he do it?”
September shook her head. “Why did someone make him write I WANT WHAT I CAN’T HAVE under the threat of being Tased by a stun gun, drug him, and tie him half naked to a pole outside the school where he worked?”
Wes shook his head slowly, then mused, “What does he want that he can’t have?”
“What did Christopher Ballonni, professed all around great guy, do that someone made him write I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE?”
“I was waiting for you to tell Harmak about Ballonni,” Wes said.