“Watch your mouth, woman.” He tucked the wallet back into his back pocket. “Stay here.”
“We’ve talked about that before. You can’t tell me to stay and expect me to be in the same spot when you come back. I’m not a dog.” Or a houseplant.
“Sometimes...” Rafe began, and thought better of it. “Would it help if I said please?”
“It might.” But it probably wouldn’t. “It doesn’t make sense for me to stay outside. It’s more likely that someone will notice us that way. One of the neighbors, or someone driving by. It’s better if I come inside. I’ll stay out of your way.”
He sighed. “And here I was counting on you to pay my bail if I got caught.”
“You said you had a license to pick locks!”
“I lied,” Rafe said. “C’mon. But stay behind me.”
No problem. I was so close I stepped on his heels when we made our way into the house.
Chapter Thirteen
The interior looked just as one would expect from the outside. A rambling Craftsman bungalow with tall ceilings, big windows, and oak floors. We entered into the laundry room, and walked through to the kitchen. Someone had updated both within the past twenty or so years, but before granite became all the rage. The cabinets were plain white and the counters laminate, in a cheerful, speckled pattern. Probably not something Matt would have chosen for himself. I imagined this was his mother’s doing.
There was no sign of anyone, but there were dishes in the drain pan: a couple of plates of various sizes, silverware, and an upside-down wine glass—a match to the one sitting on the counter with dregs of red wine in the bottom.
Rafe went to the door to the dining room and raised his voice. “Matt?”
His voice echoed through the high-ceilinged rooms.
“Matt Perkins! This is the TBI. Are you here?”
A handful of photos were stuck to the front of the fridge with small vegetable-shaped magnets. I stepped closer to take a look. One was of an older couple on a beach somewhere, maybe Florida, beneath a fat ceramic eggplant. One was of a family grouped in front of a Christmas tree, with presents and lights behind them, held in place by a bright tomato. One was a cartoon of a dirty nature, that made me blush when I read it.
Meanwhile, Matt didn’t answer, and there were no sounds from elsewhere in the house to indicate that we weren’t alone. Rafe came back to stand next to me, and shook his head over the cartoon.
The last photograph on the fridge was of three guys toasting the camera with bottles of beer. It looked as if they were on a boat, because there was water and sky behind them.
“There’s Matt,” Rafe said, putting his finger on one of the faces, “and that’s Ethan. This last guy looks familiar, too, but I can’t place him.”
I leaned a little closer. A beefy blond with overlarge eyebrows. He rang a faint bell with me, as well, but like Rafe, I had no idea who he was. “I don’t know him. And if he was at the reunion last night, I didn’t see him. I think I saw Mary Kelly dancing with Matt, though.” At least the guy Rafe identified looked a lot like the guy I’d seen stroking Mary Kelly’s arm.
“Sounds like Mary Kelly danced with a lot of people last night,” Rafe said.
I grinned. “You make it sound dirty.”
“Or maybe you just have a dirty mind.”
He waggled his eyebrows and made me giggle. A second too late I remembered where we were—in someone else’s house—and put my hand over my mouth.
“We should go. Before he comes home and finds us.”
“You go ahead.”
“You don’t want to go?”
“I wanna quick look around first. Just go outside and wait for me. I’ll only be a minute.”
He was still talking as he walked away. I watched him pass through the doorway into the dining room, before I turned to the laundry room and the back door. But instead of going out, I scurried after Rafe instead. If he found the knife that had been used to murder Ethan on the coffee table, I wanted to be there.
And anyway, I deal better with adversity when I’m next to him. I’d rather be inside the house with Rafe than outside on my own.
The front of the Craftsman looked like your standard 1930s bungalow. Tall ceilings, plaster walls, big rooms. At some point, someone had painted all the woodwork white, so there was nothing left of what would have been original dark-stained trim, but there was still a set of fifteen-light French doors separating the dining room from the formal living room, which also had built-in cabinets on either side of the stone fireplace.
There was no bloody knife on either dining room or coffee table.
Beyond the dining room was a short hallway. On the opposite side of the house was a bathroom with white hexagonal tiles on the floor and an old-fashioned cast-iron tub of the kind that weighs a ton. We have a few of those at the mansion, too. The room had been updated with beadboard paneling below the chair rail, and pale blue paint. The sink was new, gleaming a few shades whiter than the tub.
While I was looking at it, Rafe continued to the end of the hallway and pushed open the door to the room on the left. I saw his shoulders square.
I think I knew before I got there what he had found. I was having flashbacks to last August, and Rafe walking through the rooms in Mrs. Jenkins’s house, until he came to an abrupt stop in the doorway to the library. He’d looked like this then too. Stiff and somehow brittle.
I peered around his shoulder. It was a bedroom, as expected. Tall ceilings, papered walls. The curtains were closed, but the sun was bright enough even through the fabric that I could see everything quite clearly. More clearly than I wanted to. A big bed sat in the middle of the room, on a worn Persian rug. The sheets were rumpled, and used to be white. Now they were largely red. And that was all I saw before my stomach revolted.
“Oh, God!”
I ran for the bathroom, hand over my mouth, praying I’d get there before the meatloaf and three made a reappearance.
Rafe was sensitive enough to let me empty my stomach in private. I had stopped heaving and was on my feet and blotting my wet face with toilet paper when he appeared in the doorway with a searching glance.
“You OK?”
“As OK as I can be.” I wadded up the paper and dropped it in the toilet. For reasons I didn’t want to examine, using the towels had felt like an imposition. “Is it Matt?”
Rafe nodded.
“Is he dead?”
He nodded again.
“You checked?”
“Not much doubt about it, but yeah. I checked.”
I nodded. We stood in silence a few moments before Rafe glanced at the window. “We should get outta here.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Yeah. But it’s gonna look better if we’re outside when they get here. It don’t look so good to be standing over the body.”
No. And the body didn’t look so good either, so I didn’t want anything more to do with it.
I moved the couple of steps toward the door, where he put an arm around my waist to steady me.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He steered me through the dining room and kitchen to the back door. “I think you should prob’ly sit down. All this extra throwing up can’t be good for the baby.”
No. Or if nothing else, it wasn’t good for me. “He was stabbed, right?”
He supported me down the steps. As we rounded the corner of the house, he said, “Oh, yeah.”
My stomach did a slow roll. “Same as Ethan.”
Rafe nodded.
“Same person, you think?”
“Hard to imagine there’d be two crazies with knives running around hacking people up this weekend, so that’d be my guess.”
“God.”
He nodded.
We didn’t speak again until we reached the Volvo, and he opened the door and helped me inside. “Lean back and close your eyes, darlin’. You’re as pale as a ghost.”
I wanted to argue, but fo
und I didn’t have it in me. Leaning back and closing my eyes sounded good.
“You want I should start the car and get the air conditioning going?”
I shook my head, but without opening my eyes. “That isn’t necessary.”
“You need anything to eat or drink?”
My stomach gurgled unpleasantly at the suggestion. “No. Thank you.”
“We’ll get you some ginger ale when we’re through here,” Rafe said, leaning on the door and peering down at me, worriedly. “We have to stop for clothes anyway.”
“That sounds good.”
“I’ll just leave you alone to rest.”
He moved off, leaving the car door open. I watched in the mirror as he wandered down the driveway, eyes on the ground.
If he was looking for something, I don’t think he had time to find it. It was just a couple minutes before a squad car pulled into the driveway behind the Volvo. It might have been a good idea to move out of the way before they got here, I realized. Now we were trapped until they agreed to let us go.
Not that I’d really consider trying to run away from the police, of course.
Not that we had a reason to.
Just how dead had Matt been, anyway? Freshly dead, or less recently dead? Was there a chance they might think we had done it?
The squad car’s doors opened, and Officers Vasquez and Nolan got out. I did the same.
“You again.” Nolan scowled when he saw me, while Vasquez shot a dark look down the driveway to where Rafe was making his way back toward us. She murmured a couple words to Nolan, who abandoned me to turn the scowl on Rafe. Not hard to imagine what information had passed between them.
“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t mean to.”
They both perked up immediately, of course. “Didn’t mean to do what, Ms. Martin?” Vasquez asked.
“Find another victim. We just came to talk to him.”
She glanced at the house. “Talk to who?”
“Matt Perkins. This is his house.”
It took a second, but then her eyes widened. “Another guest at the reunion yesterday?”
I nodded.
“And what were you going to do with Mr. Perkins?” Nolan wanted to know, his voice faintly belligerent.
“Talk to him,” Rafe said, shifting his weight slightly.
I added, “We went to school with these people, Officer. We wanted to be supportive to a man who’d just lost his best friend.”
Vasquez took over the questioning, probably because she could tell that Nolan was putting both of our backs up. “Tell me what happened.”
“Someone mentioned how Ethan and Matt were still friends. So we decided to see how he was doing, what with Ethan being dead and all.”
“Did he know you were coming?”
I shook my head. “We just came from lunch and thought we’d stop by. He wasn’t expecting us. And he didn’t answer when we rang the bell.”
She had pulled out her little notebook and was jotting down information. “Go on.”
“We went around to the back,” Rafe said, “and found the back door open.”
The way he said it, so glibly, I almost believed him myself, even though I knew he was lying.
“So you went inside?”
I nodded. “We wanted to make sure everything was all right. After last night.”
“And what did you find?”
“He’s in the bedroom,” Rafe said, and I could hear that his voice grow tighter. It was the only sign of distress that he showed; his expression didn’t change at all. “Right rear of the house. Naked. Dead, obviously. Multiple stab wounds. No sign of a murder weapon that I could see. Body’s cold. It probably happened overnight.”
Nolan was already on his way around the corner. Vasquez glanced longingly after him.
“Go ahead,” Rafe said obligingly. “We’ll wait.”
She looked torn, small white teeth sinking into her bottom lip. It was obvious that she wanted to see for herself what was going on, but at the same time, she didn’t want to leave us here.
“You’ve parked us in,” I pointed out. “If we wanted to leave, we’d have to go across the lawn and through the fence. And besides, you know who we are.”
She hesitated for another second, but then she nodded. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Rafe said, and we watched her disappear around the corner of the house in pursuit of her partner.
I opened my mouth to call him on the fact that he’d just lied, but he shook his head. “Feeling better?”
“A little, thank you. I’ll take you up on that ginger ale once we get out of here, though.”
“It shouldn’t be long,” Rafe said, leaning back against the side of the Volvo and folding his arms across his chest. Nice arms. Nice chest. “All we did was find him. I dunno about you, but I ain’t seen Matt Perkins alive in thirteen years. I had no reason to wanna do away with him.”
“As far as I know, I haven’t seen in him in at least ten. He wasn’t someone my mother invited to my wedding, and other than those kinds of occasions, I haven’t been down here much since high school.”
“Then I don’t think we have to worry.”
Good to know. “What’s going on, Rafe?”
I didn’t have to explain what I was talking about. He shook his head. “Could be a couple different things. Maybe someone’s back in town for the reunion and decided now’s a good time to take care of some old business. You gotta figure there’s plenty of people in town right now who had some sort of beef with Ethan or Matt in high school.”
“Sure, but... to stab somebody so viciously, so many times—it would have to be something more than just a high school beef, don’t you think? I mean, people don’t kill each other—not like that—over silly stuff like someone stealing someone else’s girlfriend ten or eleven years ago.”
“You never know what someone else might think’s a good reason for murder,” Rafe said. “I’ve seen people killed for the change in their pocket. Whoever did this feels strongly about the need to do it. Don’t matter if the rest of us don’t understand why.”
“I suppose.” Scary thought. If it was impossible for the rest of us to comprehend why someone would commit murder, it was equally impossible to guess whether they might want to murder us, too. Just because I thought I hadn’t done anything to hurt anyone, didn’t mean someone might not feel hurt.
I shivered. “I’m scared.”
He nodded. “I don’t blame you.”
That wasn’t terribly encouraging. Although it was good to know. There’s nothing worse than a man who brushes off your feelings as invalid and ridiculous. Especially if he treats you like a china doll while he does it.
I don’t have to worry about that with Rafe. He has no problem with protecting me, but he doesn’t make me feel invalidated while he does it.
“I don’t think you need to worry, though,” he added. “Looks like whoever’s doing this is focused on men.”
And not just that, but men I didn’t know, or hadn’t known well. I couldn’t remember ever having had anything to do with either Ethan or Matt. “Does that mean it’s a woman?”
He shrugged. “Could. Doesn’t have to. Men kill other men all the time.”
“Not usually naked in bed, though.”
“Not unless Ethan and Matt have turned gay in the past ten years.”
“It didn’t sound like Ethan had.” Not if he was seducing high school cheerleaders. “What’s the other possibility?” I asked.
“Scuse me?”
“You said one possibility was that one of us—someone we went to school with—had a beef, and decided to take care of business this weekend. What’s the other possibility?”
“Could be someone local taking advantage of us all being here. Figuring he’ll get lost in all the other beefs.”
That made a certain amount of sense, and I was about to pursue it when there was a sound from behind the house. We both looked up
as Vasquez and Nolan came around the corner. Nolan was on the phone, his face grim.
“Anything you haven’t told us?” Vasquez asked, while in the background, Nolan arranged for a van from the morgue and a crime scene crew to arrive ASAP.
“Not about this,” Rafe said.
“About something else?”
I glanced at him and got an almost imperceptible nod to go ahead.
I turned back to Vasquez. “Someone mentioned that Ethan slept with one of the high school cheerleaders recently. You may already know that.”
“A student?”
I nodded.
“No,” Vasquez said, teeth snapping together audibly, “I didn’t know that.”
“We don’t know whether it’s true or not. That’s part of what we were going to ask Matt about.”
“Who told you?”
“A friend,” Rafe said. “She don’t know who the girl is, or she’d a told me.”
Vasquez didn’t question the certainty in his voice, nor did she ask for Yvonne’s contact information to talk to Yvonne herself. Maybe Rafe’s tone of voice made it plain he wasn’t ready to share that information, or maybe she just planned to pass what we’d told her on to the detective in charge of the case and let him put the pressure on.
“Take my number,” she said instead, handing us a card. “If you learn anything more, call me.”
I stuck it in my purse.
“If Detective Murphy has any more questions, he’ll be in touch. I’ll move the car and let you get out.”
She was a bit pale under the olive skin. “Are you OK?” I asked impulsively.
She squared her shoulders, but couldn’t bring much conviction into her voice. “Of course.”
“How long’ve you been on the job?” Rafe wanted to know.
She looked like she was thinking of objecting to the question, but in the end she simply told him, “Two years.”
He nodded. “This job ain’t supposed to be easy, Officer. If it is, there’s something wrong with you. If you ever get to a point where you see something like that—” he glanced at the house, “and it don’t bother you, it’s time to quit.”
She looked surprised, and then looked like she had to swallow a lump in her throat. “Thanks.”
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