I narrowed my eyes, my anxiety converting to determination. “Let’s go around back.”
I crossed the lawn to the wooden side gate, reaching around the top, and popping the latch.
“Back door?” Sam asked, struggling to keep up with my purposeful march.
I nodded, reaching the sliding glass doors that led into Josh’s family room. Only, as I tugged on the handle, it became clear those were locked, too.
“Looks like we’re not getting in,” Sam said.
I surveyed the backyard. Thick green grass covered the lawn, and fruit trees stood along the fence shielding the yard for privacy. To the right was a covered patio with a barbecue large enough to roast a small elephant. To the left, a portable storage shed sat flush against the stuccoed wall of the house. I looked up. The shed’s roof ended only a few feet shy of the second story.
Just under Josh’s bedroom window.
Sam followed my gaze. Then bugged her eyes at me. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“If we can get on the roof, it’ll be easy to climb in the window.”
“What are you, ten? Who climbs on roofs?”
I turned on her. “Look, I’ve got two choices here, Sam. I can either climb onto the shed, go in the window, and make Josh explain why a condom wrapper was in his locker, or I can go home, text him twenty more times, and wait by the phone like some pathetic sap while I imagine him swapping God knows what bodily fluids with Courtney Cline.”
Sam bit the inside of her cheek, her gaze going to the roof again. “Effing hell. I hate heights.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not that high,” I assured her. Even though I wasn’t totally keen on high places myself. While mandatory PE and the occasional trip to the gym kept me in single digit sizes, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call athletic. And that shed looked like it was made out of recycled cans.
But no way was I playing the text-waiting game any longer.
I cracked my knuckles, then dug the toes of my Skechers into the corrugated metal side of the shed, grasping at the edge of the roof with my fingertips. “Give me a boost,” I instructed Sam.
A second later I felt her hands on the seat of my jeans, shoving me upward with a grunt.
“One crack about the size of my butt, and I’ll disown you,” I warned, my triceps straining as my feet slipped, doing a jogging-in-the-air thing. Finally they found their grip again, scrambling up the side as I hoisted myself onto the roof belly first.
The shed gave a low groan under my weight, and I lay perfectly still, half expecting the entire thing to collapse under me.
It didn’t. Which I took as a good sign.
I scrambled to my hands and knees, leaning down to help Sam. She kicked off her flip-flops to get better traction, threw them to me first, then grabbed my hand and crawled up the side of the shed to join me.
Again the structure groaned as Sam flopped onto the roof beside me, both of us pausing to catch our breath.
“Now what?” she asked, eyeing Josh’s bedroom window as she slipped her shoes back on.
I stood on tiptoe, trying to get a good look inside. The curtains were shut, so I couldn’t make out much. Just a flash of color between the panels that could have been someone’s shoulder or just as easily a lampshade.
“I’m going in,” I decided.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Sam hedged.
No, I wasn’t. But since it was the only idea I had, I slipped my fingers between the frame and the windowsill, slowly lifting the window until I had a good three feet of clearance. I paused, listening for any sounds from within.
Nothing.
I took a deep breath, parted the curtains, hoisted myself up and over the sill, and then lowered myself into Josh’s room, Sam a step behind me.
Most of the room was in shadow, the only light source the window we’d just crawled through. My eyes glanced over Josh’s bed, unmade, covered in the same solar-system-themed sheets he’d had since fifth grade. Beside it sat his desk, with his laptop and a collection of textbooks strewn on top. A shelf above held his sports trophies—cross-country, baseball, soccer. Lots of little chrome guys holding balls, contorted in uncomfortable positions. On the opposite side of the room was a wooden dresser and a pile of dirty clothes that I blamed for the slightly sour smell in the room. And next to that was Josh’s closet.
Where my eyes froze.
In the crack between the wall and closet door, the purple, shimmery, spandex fabric of an HHH Color Guard uniform stared back at me.
Gotcha.
I poked Sam in the arm, gesturing to the closet. Her eyes went big as she mouthed the words, “Oh my God!”
I slowly tiptoed toward the closet, sure the sound of my heart pounding was loud enough for Sam to hear. I reached a hand out and quickly slid the door back . . .
To reveal Courtney Cline, cowering on the floor of my boyfriend’s closet.
“I knew it!” I shouted.
Only Courtney didn’t move. Her head was bent downward, her hair covering her face as if pretending she couldn’t see me would make her invisible, too.
“I see you, Courtney. Get up,” I commanded, towering over her, hands on hips in what I hoped was a very intimidating pose.
Only she still didn’t move.
Okay, now she was really starting to piss me off.
“Hart—” Sam started.
But I held up a hand to stop her. Whatever she had to say could wait. At the sight of Miss Chastity, the fear that had been growing in my gut all day was suddenly confirmed in the flesh. And the resulting adrenaline pumping through my system was too good to waste. Courtney and I were going to have this out here and now.
“I said get up!” I repeated, then punctuated my command by grabbing her scrawny arm and yanking her forward.
But as Courtney’s head dropped back like a rag doll’s, I realized there was no way she was getting up. Her hair fell away to reveal her porcelain pale face. Her big, blue eyes were open, staring straight ahead. Her mouth was fixed in a surprised little O. And the smooth, blemish-free skin of her long, dancer’s neck was bruised purple beneath the cord of her white iPod earbuds, wrapped in a deadly stranglehold around her throat.
THREE
MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME IS BORAT. AND THE absolute best scene in the movie is when Borat catches his totally fat (we’re talking his rolls have rolls) friend, Azamat, in a hotel room, defiling a picture of Borat’s beloved Pamela Anderson. Borat freaks, charges at Azamat, and the two of them start wrestling, buck naked, throughout the entire hotel. The scene is hilarious. But two hairy, old, naked guys wrestling? The single most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life.
Until now.
I dropped Courtney’s arm as if it was on fire, quickly shaking my hands up and down to get rid of the dead person cooties. Then I screamed. Long, loud, until my throat hurt. I vaguely registered Sam doing the same thing, then shoving past me toward the hall. I followed her, the two of us screeching like banshees and running for the front door like Olympic sprinters.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!” Sam chanted, as we pushed and shoved each other toward the stairs. We took them two at a time, half sliding, half falling down the last few in our mad dash for the door. Sam hit it first, fumbling with the lock before finally throwing it open and running down the front steps, arms flailing.
I collapsed onto the curb. My legs felt wobbly, my heart was pounding too fast, and my breath came out in irregular little chokes as I blinked at Josh’s house, trying to process what we’d just seen.
“Shewasdeadright?” Sam said, her words slurring together with urgency. “I mean, really, really dead.”
I nodded.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod!” Sam plunked down on the curb next to me. “We saw a dead body. A real dead body. You touched a dead body!”
My stomach clenched, and I wiped my palm against my thigh. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Josh has a dead body in his room. Ohmigod, your boyfriend c
heated on you with a dead body!”
“Would you stop saying ‘dead body’!” I shouted. “And I’m sure she was alive when . . . you know . . .” I wiped my palm on my jeans again.
“Ohmigod, what are we going to do?” Sam asked, her voice rising into hysterics territory.
“What’s going on?”
I whipped my head around to find Camaro Guy standing over us, camera dangling from his right hand.
I thought I vaguely recognized him from school, though he wasn’t in any of my classes. His hair was dark, cropped close and a little spiky on top. He wore unrelieved black from head to toe—black pants, black T-shirt, jet-black hair—and I wasn’t sure, but it looked like he was even wearing black eyeliner. The whole effect gave him a dark, dangerous vibe, intensified by the way he was towering over us.
“What’s the screaming about?” he asked again, his gaze jumping from us, crumpled in a heap on the sidewalk, to Josh’s front door.
I opened my mouth to speak, but only a strangled sort of cry in the back of my throat came out. I took a deep breath and tried again, this time finding my voice, albeit a shaky one. “In there,” I said, pointing to the house. “Courtney.”
The guy raised an eyebrow in my direction, clearly not getting it. “You two okay?”
I shook my head back and forth so violently that my hair whipped at my cheeks, stinging them. “No. Not okay. Dead. Courtney’s dead.”
This time both his eyebrows went north. “Dead?”
Beside me Sam nodded. “Upstairs. In the closet.” She turned to me. “Hartley found her. She touched her.”
I elbowed her in the ribs. Did she have to keep reminding me? My palm was getting raw from rubbing it against my thigh.
The guy in black looked from Sam to me, then at the house, no doubt trying to figure out if this was part of some elaborate joke at his expense. But the fact that neither of us could stop shaking must have convinced him, because he finally said, “Wait here,” then walked up the front path to Josh’s and disappeared inside.
Sam grabbed my hand. I squeezed back. And we waited in silence for him to come out.
Two minutes later, he did, his face a shade of pale that even a Twilight actor couldn’t achieve.
“Give me your cell,” he barked at me.
I complied, extracting it from my pocket. “Who are you calling?”
He gave me a hard look, his jaw clenched at a tight angle. Then he answered, “The police.”
“Name?”
“Hartley Grace Featherstone.
“Age?”
“Sixteen.”
“Address?”
“One seventeen Orange Grove, San José.”
“School?”
“Herbert Hoover High. Um, Detective Raley?”
“Yes?”
“I think I need to throw up again.”
The big, redheaded guy, whose suit looked like it had shrunk two sizes in the wash, took one giant step back as I shoved my head between my knees to keep the world from spinning.
As soon as the guy in black had called 911, the air seemed to fill with the sound of sirens. An ambulance was soon on the scene, paramedics rushing into Josh’s house with first-aid kits. Once it became as obvious to them as it was to Sam and me that Courtney was beyond help, the uniformed police arrived. That’s when the guy in black had quietly disappeared, leaving Sam and me to our own devices. Not surprising. From the look of Tall, Dark, and Dangerous I’d say he made a habit of avoiding authority like most people avoid Brussels sprouts.
Once the police had gotten a look at Josh’s room, they’d called in Detective Raley from homicide, who had then sent for the guy from the crime scene unit (who, by the way, looked nothing like the hot guy on CBS). But it was when the black coroner’s van finally arrived that I’d lost it and tossed my partially digested pizza sticks into Mrs. DuPont’s azalea bushes. Up until then, it had all been sort of surreal, almost like watching a scene unfold on TV. The uniformed officers fending off a growing crowd of curious stay-at-home moms, CSU dusting the front door for fingerprints; and blue and red lights from the squad cars bathing the entire neighborhood in hues that were half dance club, half kindergartner coloring book.
But seeing the coroner wheel a gurney from the back of his van up the front walkway to Josh’s house made me realize just how dead Courtney was and just what kind of trouble Sam and I were in.
“Doing okay?” Raley asked, laying a tentative hand on my back.
I took a few more deep breaths from the curb, inhaling the scents of rainwater, someone’s nearby barbecue, and the rubber from my shoes. Then I lifted my head and slowly nodded. “I think so.”
At which the detective looked immensely relieved. I’d venture to say vomiting teens hadn’t been in his job description. He looked old enough to be someone’s dad, but maybe not quite to grandpa stage yet. Red hair, round belly, lots of freckles, and a generous helping of wrinkles that said he was too tough for sunscreen.
“I just have a few more questions, then you can go home, okay?”
I nodded again. Then stole a glance across the street, where Sam was on her cell, talking faster than a chipmunk on Starbucks to her boyfriend about our gruesome discovery. Knowing Kyle, it would be all over school in a matter of minutes. I willed my queasy stomach not to think about it.
“You said your boyfriend lives here?”
“Yeah. Josh. Josh DuPont.”
“And the victim . . .” He looked down, consulting his notes.
“Courtney,” I supplied, finding myself feeling sorry for her despite all I’d learned that day.
“Right. Courtney Cline.” He looked up, his heavily lined face puckering in concern. “What was she doing here?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Most likely effing my boyfriend.”
“Effing?”
“It means—”
Raley held up a beefy hand. “Uh, I think I know what it means.” His cheeks tinged red, but he cleared his throat and continued. “So, Courtney was ‘seeing’ your boyfriend?” he asked, doing air quotes around the substitute verb.
I nodded.
“And you came here to confront her?”
“Well, no. I mean, I came to confront Josh, really, but we found her instead.”
“And things got out of hand?” he asked.
“Yeah. Wait—no!” I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean, ‘got out of hand’?”
He paused as if choosing his words very carefully. “Courtney was murdered, Hartley.”
And while I knew it was pretty unlikely that Courtney had accidentally strangled herself with her iPod earbuds, hearing the words out loud sent my stomach lurching again.
“We did not kill her,” I said. “We were just coming to talk to Josh. Only he chickened out and wasn’t here.”
“So, Josh knew you were coming to confront him?”
“That would be my guess.”
“And he got here first?” he asked, gesturing to Josh’s Jeep.
I shrugged. “Looks like it.”
“And made sure Courtney would keep his secret.”
“What? No. You think Josh . . . ? No. No way.”
“No?”
I shook my head again. “There is no way Josh could have done this.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. I know Josh.”
“You didn’t know he was sleeping with someone else.”
I bit my lip. Good point. “Look, he may not be perfect”—understatement alert—“but I know Josh isn’t a killer.”
“Okay,” Raley said, holding up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Let’s switch gears for a minute, then. Courtney. Tell me how you found her?”
“In the closet.” I swallowed, wiping my palm against the side of my jeans again as I relived the scene. I had a bad feeling I was never going to be able to cleanse my brain of those images.
“How did you get in the house?”
“What?” I asked, snapping back to the present.
“You said the front door was locked, correct? So how did you get in the house?”
“Oh. Right . . .” Compared to killing someone, I was pretty sure sneaking in an upstairs window was small potatoes. But, seeing as I was already starting to feel like a suspect, I didn’t want to chance it. “Uh, we sorta went around back.”
“Sorta?”
“Yeah. Sorta.”
“Hartley,” he said, leaning in close, his voice lowering an octave into that friendly slash fatherly thing that the cops on Law & Order did right before they arrested someone, “the CSU team is going over the entire house right now. Fingerprints, footprints, hair, clothing fibers. Why don’t you make things easy on yourself and tell me the truth?”
Why was it when someone told you to make things easier on yourself it was never by doing something easy?
“We went around back,” I repeated.
“And?” he prodded.
“Do you really need all the details?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I kind of do.”
“Fine.” I sighed, giving in. “We hopped onto the top of the storage shed and climbed in Josh’s window.”
He frowned. “You know that breaking into someone else’s house is illegal?”
“Not as illegal as killing someone. Which,” I said, making the point again, “we didn’t do.”
“All right, all right. I’ll let it go for now.”
I put a hand to my head where a migraine was brewing. “So, can I go home now?”
“I’ll have an officer drive you home in a minute. I just have one more question.”
I nodded. “Hit me.”
“Where is Josh DuPont?”
I bit my lip. Good one.
And I wished to God I had an answer.
When the police finally let Sam and me go, they took down our personal information, said they’d be in touch with our parents (joy), and told us both to stick around town. Which was so clichéd I almost laughed out loud. A sure sign I was going into some sort of shock because there was clearly nothing funny about this situation. Courtney was dead, I was a material witness, and Josh was MIA.
While Raley assured me that all the questions he’d asked were routine, the way he kept frowning every time I mentioned Josh didn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence that he wasn’t writing the word “suspect” in big, bold letters next to his name. Courtney was found in his house; he was missing; and, as the detective had pointed out, he had a crap-ton of motive.
Deadly Cool Page 2