They were colleagues at the university, and a dinner party with a few of the other professors ended late. Brody had too much to drink. One thing led to another and another and another.
For ten weeks.
Before the affair, I’d never thought of myself as a jealous person.
But after?
Until you’ve lived through a betrayal like that, you don’t get it. You don’t understand how quickly trust can be gone. How slowly it can come back. Your confidence shatters, and if you’re tough enough to put the pieces back together, you find you’ve become fragile.
Brittle.
Breakable.
I slammed the photo album shut. Downstairs, I scanned the contents of the liquor cabinet and settled on a plum brandy. Seamus whined at the back door, and I let him out, opening the door wide, inhaling the cold night air. Then I curled up on the couch and sipped the brandy and waited for Brody to let me know he had arrived safely in Denver, my thoughts as jumbled and mixed up as an overturned box of puzzle pieces.
Chapter Twenty-nine
In the early morning hours on Friday, I sat in my car outside Sari Chesney’s apartment waiting for Finn. The first time I’d been here, with Mac Stephens on the day Chesney disappeared, we’d been hopeful she would return. I’d taken a cursory glance around her home, nothing more. Now that her body had been found and her death determined to be a homicide, a proper search of her apartment was in order.
I passed the time sipping from a cup of coffee and reading an article by Bryce Ventura in the day’s edition of The Valley Voice. It was a few short but potent paragraphs that criticized the lack of progress on the Betty Starbuck case and, to my shock and horror, posed the question of why Kent Starbuck was not being investigated as a suspect.
The article listed Starbuck’s transgressions, including his time in prison and a photograph of him from his trial twenty-some years ago. The story went on to say that while Starbuck had been questioned, it was clear the Cedar Valley Police Department was treating him with kid gloves and being over-cautious with his rights due to fear of a lawsuit.
I threw the paper in the backseat of my car, fuming. Not only had the leaker struck again, but the whole article was written in a way to stir up emotions and not in a way that shared truths. We had no hard evidence tying Kent Starbuck to his mother’s homicide; all we had was a collective gut feeling that he may have been involved, a strong motive, and the fact that he’d been observed outside the museum.
Enough was enough. As soon as I was back at the station, I’d go through the list of people who were there when I’d posted the fake report on the Red Board. And somehow, I’d figure out a way to whittle away at the list until I had the leaker in my crosshairs.
Finn pulled up next to me, and I lowered my window, asking, “Did you see the paper today?”
“It’s bullshit. Let it go.”
He slid into the empty spot ahead of me and parked. As we walked to Chesney’s apartment, he was quiet. I shared with him my strange evening at the River Street Methodist Church and Ruby Cellars’s theories. As I’d suspected he would be, Finn was dismissive.
“Sari Chesney’s death was a homicide, plain and simple. The lake’s just a lake, it’s not triggering murderous rages in people.”
“I know it sounds nuts. But you have to admit it’s odd that every sixty years, there is violent death at Lost Lake. What if there is a family, some kind of tribe, living in the woods? And part of their tradition is a sacrifice to the waters?”
Finn groaned. “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Yes.”
We arrived at Chesney’s apartment, and the manager greeted us. After he unlocked the door, I withdrew a penknife from my bag and sliced through the yellow tape that secured the premises. The manager was a timid man with scarred olive skin, deeply disturbed by Chesney’s killing. He told us he was praying for her soul, and Finn thanked him, not sure what else there was to say.
Inside the apartment, the air was still.
While Finn stood at the kitchen counter and rifled through a stack of old bills, I spent several minutes in the living room, staring at the photographs on the wall.
Once again, I was struck by how closely Chesney and Ally Chang resembled each other. I wondered, too, who had the grim job of explaining to the girls that Chesney had mentored why she would no longer be in their lives.
I peeked out onto the narrow patio and saw a mountain bike chained to the railing. Two rusty lawn chairs and a small table with a few dying potted herbs took up most of the space.
We didn’t find anything of note in the living room or kitchen, so we moved on to the bedroom. The drawers in her dresser were filled with designer clothes, many with the tags still on. I recognized a few of the labels and couldn’t understand how she could afford these on her museum salary.
A few minutes later, Finn found a stack of credit card bills. “She was living high on the hog. Chesney was in debt to the tune of thousands of dollars.”
“I’m guess I’m not surprised. She had gambling debts … why not credit card debt, too? In fact, it’s probably one and the same. A lot of cards allow you to withdraw a cash advance. I bet that’s what she was doing: withdrawing cash against her balance, then blowing it at the casinos.”
Finn read through the bills. “That’s exactly what she was doing.”
I opened the closet door and found more designer clothes, along with an impressive number of shoes. The closet had a single high shelf with a leather suitcase and a cardboard hat box. I stood on my tiptoes and was just barely able to reach them.
Inside the hat box was a delicate black crushed velvet hat, adorned with flowers and ribbons. I admired the handiwork for a moment, then put it aside and opened the leather suitcase.
Jackpot.
Inside the suitcase were five journals, along with a stack of photographs, concert ticket stubs, and other memorabilia. It was the sort of stuff that a person collects over the course of a lifetime.
Chesney’s suitcase would forever remain half-filled.
She was a dedicated diarist; each notebook covered a year—no more, no less—and she appeared to have started the journals six years ago. Before diving into them, I scrutinized the dates and realized that the most current volume was missing. The fifth journal in the set ended at Christmas of last year.
Mac had told me that Chesney was obsessed with her diary, writing in it every evening.
So where was this year’s journal?
Finn joined me at the kitchen table, and we split the diaries; he took the oldest, while I started with the second most current.
Sari wrote prolifically, in a kind of shorthand that made more sense the more I read.
A typical diary entry: November 2, mild fifty degrees. Snow on the horizon. Slept undisturbed—no dreams! Movies tonight with Ally Cat. Hope to discuss My Sweet with A. My Sweet is getting fat—work stress? I’m losing the attraction. He struggles to get it up sometimes. Sigh. We can’t all be hot all the time. Oh wait, yes we can! It’s called “get off your lazy ass, dude.”
Ally Cat … Ally Chang? And My Sweet … MS … Mac Stephens?
I read through the diary, fervently wishing I had the most current one. The year started off well enough; Mac and Sari seemed to be enjoying a particularly blissful time together. The two of them spent a lot of time traveling on the weekends, cheap camping trips and road trips to Vegas and Arizona. Sari spoke of needing more money but sounded content with her current situation. Ally accompanied them for a lot of the trips, and I got the sense that Mac thought she was a third wheel; or rather, Sari got that sense based on things Mac said.
In the summer, the couple hit a rough patch and decided to separate. They discussed seeing other people, but Mac wasn’t keen on the idea. Sari pursued it. In numerous entries for August, she referenced seeing someone new in town, someone she nicknamed Blue Bird or BB.
Blue Bird.
Sari’s cop, the one Ally Chang had told me about on the ph
one.
BB and Sari dated for a few weeks, then she broke things off when she decided to get back together with Mac. Blue Bird wasn’t happy. Sari wrote that she was finally so fed up with BB she threatened him, promising to call his boss and report him for harassment and stalking.
My blood went cold when I read the next few lines in her journal.
Little BB isn’t happy with me. I told him I’d call Chavez personally and tell him that the newest bird in the nest couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Blue Bird squawked but I know he’ll leave me alone now. He won’t risk his career.
Blue Bird … Sam Birdshead. He’d been the only recruit to join our force last summer, wearing the blue uniform of a patrol officer for just a few short months before the hit-and-run accident derailed his career and left him disabled.
Sari and Sam?
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
Finn jerked his head up. His eyes were glazed, and it was obvious that reading the diary of a twenty-something woman was hardly his cup of tea. “Got something?”
I read out loud what Sari had written. A muscle in his jaw began to twitch. When I finished, he sat back and rubbed his eyes.
“We have to drag Sam into this now, too?”
“Yes.” I realized I hadn’t seen Sam in a couple of months. After his accident, he’d left the force and joined Alistair Campbell’s Black Hound Construction. Sam ran with a different pack now, one I didn’t trust. Was it possible that Sam was more like the Black Hounds than I could have known?
Could he have been harboring a jealous, murderous streak for the last eight months?
Did he stalk Sari and her friends to Lost Lake, and then kill her?
The Sam Birdshead I knew couldn’t hurt a fly.
But how well did I really know him?
* * *
Before we left the apartment complex, we stopped at the small storage unit assigned to Chesney in the underground parking garage. About the size of a walk-in closet, the unit was locked with a rusty padlock, and Panetta, the property manager, didn’t have a spare key for it. He did have a bolt cutter strapped to his utility belt, though, and in a few minutes, Finn had the padlock cut and the door to the unit open.
An atrocious smell hit us, and we all took a step back.
“Good lord,” I said, and covered my mouth and nose.
The landlord waved a hand in front of his face and puckered his lips. “We had a rat problem a few months back. Smells like one of the critters got in there and died.”
Finn shone his flashlight into the dark unit, moving the beam over a bicycle wheel, a spare tire for her Honda, a vacuum with a cracked canister, and five-gallon jugs of paint. A thin layer of dust covered all of it, including the desiccated rat nestled in between the paint and the spare tire.
“Chesney hasn’t opened this unit in months,” Finn said.
The landlord coughed. “You guys still need me? I’ll call our maintenance guy, get this rat cleaned out.”
“Please leave it for the time being, Mr. Panetta. Don’t touch a thing until we give you the green light, okay?”
Panetta looked at me like I was crazy, then shrugged and said, “You’re the boss.”
Finn and I split up in the parking lot. He had a court appearance on an unrelated case. As he drove away, I called Sam Birdshead. He was free, and we agreed to meet at the Silver Creek trailhead in twenty minutes.
I parked on Main Street and walked to the trailhead, arriving first. I took a minute to admire the view. The creek was an arm of the Arkansas River that meandered through town at a gentle pace, and the trail that paralleled it was shaded and popular. A few cyclists sped past me, their faces shielded by helmets and sunglasses, their bodies lean and hunched.
“Hey.”
I turned around and smiled at Sam. From a distance, his denim-blue eyes and tousled blond hair made him look hardly older than a teenager. Up close, though, those eyes were haunted and the hair shot through with gray.
“Hey yourself. Been a while.”
“Sure has.”
Our hug was awkward and reserved. I hadn’t told Sam why I wanted to meet with him, but the grim set of his jaw told me he might have an inkling.
We walked the trail, Sam’s gait slow and steady. He wore a prosthetic leg, and I was happy to note he moved better with it than he had with the crutches I’d seen him use in the past. Sam’s leg had been amputated below the knee the previous September, after a hit-and-run accident during a case we were investigating. He’d had a long road of healing, one that he was still on.
“This is about Sari, isn’t it? I saw the news in the paper this morning,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s dead. The article didn’t give many details. Was it an accident?”
“We’re still investigating.”
Sam nodded. “Of course. Since you’re talking to me, though, I’m going to assume this wasn’t a natural death.”
I tipped my head slightly. “Your name came up in a journal Chesney kept. It wasn’t exactly flattering.”
Sam picked up an empty Coke can and crushed it in his hand, looking around for a trash bin. “I hate people who litter. Selfish pricks. Sari and I went out a few times last summer. Before my accident. She wanted more than I was willing to give, so we broke it off. She was looking for marriage, a family. I wasn’t ready.”
He stopped walking and aimed the crushed can at a recycling bin six feet ahead of us, then tossed it. He missed, and the can landed on the ground with a clatter. As we passed by, he sighed, picked up the can again, and placed it in the bin.
I chose my words carefully, knowing Sam was no longer a cop. In fact, based on Sari’s journal, he could almost be a suspect.
Almost.
But he wasn’t. Not yet.
“Sari recorded a slightly different version of events. She said it was her idea to break things off and you resisted. She wrote that you only left her alone after she threatened you, promised to go to Chavez.”
Behind us, a bell rang, and we both moved to the right to allow a pair of cyclists to speed past. Sam started laughing, but it wasn’t a humorous laugh. There was disdain there.
“This is going to be a fun game of ‘she said, he said,’ isn’t it? Only I’m automatically guilty because I’m alive. I’m alive, and she’s dead.”
“You know that’s not how I work, Sam. I know you. I’m doing my damnedest to keep an open mind here.”
He stopped walking and took a step back. There was coldness in his eyes. “Why do you think you know me? Huh? We worked together, what, a few weeks. You don’t know me, you don’t know what I believe, how I think. You have no idea what I’m capable of. So stop making assumptions based on a handful of interactions.”
The vehemence in Sam’s voice took me aback. After a few deep breaths, he pushed the blond hair off his forehead and started walking again. I joined him, and he continued talking.
“Like I said, Sari wanted more of a relationship than I was willing to give her. I don’t remember her taking it particularly badly. Seems like we talked things over one night at dinner and agreed to go our separate ways. If I remember right, there was an ex-boyfriend in the shadows, Matt or Mike or something like that. I can’t imagine she stayed single for too long after we ended things.”
“Mac,” I said absentmindedly. I couldn’t reconcile Sam’s version of events with what Sari had written in her journal. I assumed Sam was telling the truth but if he was, it only created more questions. What reason would Sari have to lie in her own personal journal? Was she a pathological liar? Did she do it to make herself feel better?
Could I trust anything she wrote?
Perhaps she wrote her diaries for someone else’s reading pleasure, someone else’s benefit.
More chilling was the thought that perhaps Sam wasn’t telling me the truth.
He was still talking. “That’s right, Mac. He’s a nurse at the hospital. Big Mac, she used to call him. I couldn’t tell if that was meant to be derogatory or not. Knowing her
, it was probably an insult.” He puffed out his cheeks and then exhaled. “Anyway, I’m not sure what else I can tell you. Although…”
“What?”
“Well, she mentioned this guy a couple of times. She called him the Bookkeeper.”
“The bookkeeper? Like an accountant? Or a bookie?”
Sam nodded. “She only talked about him when she was drunk, and honestly, it was just two or three times. I only remember because I asked her what kind of a name that was, and she laughed and said it was her pet name for him. She said something about how if anyone was going to help make her dreams come true, it was him.”
“Do you remember anything else about him? Was he someone she knew through work, or friends?”
Sam shook his head, looking genuinely sorry. “No, I’m telling you, she talked about him in passing. She could be guarded that way. I remember she never let me come to her apartment. We always met up at bars.”
“Was she scared of this man?”
Sam thought a moment. “No, it didn’t seem that way. She was … smug when she talked about him. Like the cat that swallowed the canary.”
I tried to reconcile Chesney’s debts, the mentoring she did of young women, her work at the history museum, her often cruel journal entries. She presented a complex personality, on the one hand generous and fun loving, on the other hand struggling with addictions and demonstrating a mean, closed-off streak.
“Sam, there are elements of Chesney’s life, her personality, that don’t add up. What was your take on her?”
We neared a fork in the trail. A fire truck screamed past us on the nearby road, its sirens and lights running. Sam gazed after it with an unreadable glint in his eye, then checked his watch. “I’ve got to be back soon. Let’s turn around up here. Look, obviously she was beautiful. Beautiful, attractive. There was this sort of … passion about her, you know? But like I said, we only dated a few weeks. I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, so why invest the energy? Anyway, it was clear her long-term plans didn’t involve Cedar Valley. She was going places, and this is my home.”
Lost Lake Page 20