Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 03 - Saving Sasha Brown

by Rob Cornell

  I lifted an eyebrow. “A hundred times?”

  “A thousand.”

  I didn’t noticed any ticks or tells from any of them, but I still sensed something ‘off.’ I sat up straighter in my chair. “I don’t believe you.”

  Carrie’s lip curled. “Believe what you want.”

  “That’s how it works, right? You pick and choose what to believe. Alcohol’s a sin, only when it isn’t. Suicide is the ultimate sin, but slicing open a man’s chest or stabbing them with a fork is okay because they deserved it.”

  Rachel shook her head and said in the most innocent voice, “I never thought Mr. Brown deserved…that.”

  Carrie threw up her hands, exasperated. “I thought you were looking for Sasha’s dad? What’s with all this stuff now? More ‘war on Christians’ stuff?”

  “I’m not part of any war,” I said. “And all this stuff, as you call it, came up in the process of searching for Peter. Ever lose something, and when you go looking for it, you find all this other stuff you lost before? An investigation can kind of be like that. While looking for one thing, I found some other things.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes.

  Rachel kept straightening the best-ironed pair of pants I’d ever seen.

  Holden bowed his head, completing his prayer posture, and for all I knew he was praying. Praying they could keep a secret was my guess.

  I waggled the fingers on both hands in a come out with it gesture. “Time to play it straight with me, gang. What are you hiding?”

  This time, they didn’t share looks. They all had their gazes directed in different places, and none of them were looking at me.

  But Carrie spoke up. “While Sasha was singing, I went to move her coat. This baggie fell out of the pocket. It was full of orange pills. I showed it to the others. Holden…” She craned her neck around to give him a quick glance. “He said he recognized the pills. He’d seen them on the bathroom counter once at Sasha’s house. In a prescription bottle.”

  So much for Palmer’s search for pills in the house. Which meant…

  “For her dad,” I said.

  Holden nodded. He seemed to press his hands more tightly together. Maybe his prayer wasn’t getting through. Back when I had a little bit of religion, God never listened to mine, either.

  “What were the pills for?” I asked.

  The trio shook their heads in unison.

  “I only noticed the pills,” Holden said, “because I know Mrs. Brown is pretty strict about that kind of thing.”

  “She doesn’t allow medicine in the house?”

  “Only homeopathic things,” Rachel said, her voice meek. “Herbs, oils, that kind of thing.”

  I’ve know a lot of Christians in my life, but never anything like this. Mrs. Brown sounded like one of those zealots you hear about on the news, the kind that refuses her toddler a major surgery because ‘God will provide’ or it’s “God’s will’ or what-have-you. I never would have imagined Hawthorne had one of those. But the more I learned about Mrs. Brown, the more I had to agree with Matt Brown on this one.

  She was a few marbles short of a set.

  “What did you do when you found the baggie?”

  All three of them sagged where they sat, like a trio of wilting flowers.

  Carrie opened her mouth, but she couldn’t seem to come out and say it.

  Holden chewed on his lower lip. He let his hands fall apart and rest on his lap.

  Rachel tugged at an hear as if she had an itch.

  I waited, but no one seemed to want to field this question. I had a feeling I knew why.

  Still, I asked again. “What did you do when you found the pills.”

  Carrie looked up at me, eyes full of tears. “I thought they might be something she needed, but was hiding from her mom because she wouldn’t approve.” She wiped at her eye and smeared tears across her freckled cheek. “So I put them back. I put them back in her pocket…and now she’s dead because of me.”

  Chapter 10

  “You didn’t ask her about them?”

  Carrie shook her head and wiped more tears from her eyes. She shifted in her chair as if she couldn’t get comfortable.

  I looked from one kid to the other. “None of you said anything to her about the baggie?”

  “It was none of our business,” Rachel said. “At least, that’s what I thought at the time.”

  “You have to understand,” Holden said. “I saw the prescription for her dad. For all we knew they were antibiotics or something.”

  “You thought she was sharing with her dad?”

  Carrie snuffled, nodded. “We had a quick talk. Here we were, totally sinning with the drinks. The only one who didn’t order alcohol was Sasha. She’s always been the best of us. We figured she knew what she was doing. We didn’t want to come across like we were accusing her of something while we’re there drinking.”

  I almost slapped my forehead. “You guys are out of high school. When does that petty shit stop?”

  They all looked at me like I had two heads and had just ripped one off, their stares a mix of disgust and surprise.

  I smacked my desk instead of my forehead, then pinched the bridge of my nose. “Do you know you have all three implicated yourself in her death because of this?”

  They exchanged another hive glance. Carrie said, “We had no idea what she planned to do with those pills. We didn’t even know what they were.”

  “A good DA could get pretty creative.”

  Rachel opened her mouth, closed it, opened it. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You don’t watch cop shows?”

  “On TV?” She shook her head so hard I thought it might twist right off. “Too much anti-Christian propaganda. We don’t even own televisions.”

  The way she said that struck me. Something I had taken for granted, but shouldn’t have. “Do you all still live with your parents?”

  The question earned a unanimous nod.

  “How many of you are in college?”

  That, however, got nothing. I could have had a threesome of mannequins sitting before me.

  I wondered what they did with all their free time, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. Still, I had to ask.

  “We do charity work, mostly. I know Sasha was planning on a mission. I’ve been thinking of college, but I haven’t found one that…fits.”

  “Hold it a sec. ‘Sasha was planning on a mission.’ What does that mean?”

  “Through our church, you can go overseas, like, to Africa, and work as a missionary, spreading the word of God.”

  Seemed like the Brown family had a bad case of wanderlust. Dad takes off without a word. Sasha considers moving to the other side of the planet. Did Collin have thoughts of getting the hell out of Dodge, too? If Debra Brown were my mother, I could see it. Did that make her the center of this family’s explosion.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Holden asked. “Are we going to get arrested?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not a cop. I’m not going to arrest you. But if I were you I would…well, never mind what I would do. You should go to the police and tell them, just like with the video.”

  I could tell by the sour expression on his face, Holden didn’t like that idea. I’d seen people suck a lemon after a double shot of tequila with straighter faces.

  This was also exactly the kind of info Palmer wanted from me. I had promised him a quid pro quo, and I could deliver. I didn’t know how he would treat the trio with this knowledge, but he was a good cop, no matter how crabby he could get. He would treat them fairly.

  Besides, I had to remember that the Sasha side of this case wasn’t what I’d been hired to explore. I needed to get a lead on her dad. Which meant somehow getting a sit down with the crazy Mrs. Brown herself.

  I leaned forward to play it straight. “Look, if you don’t go to the cops yourself, I’ll have to. I promised a friend on the force I’d give him a line on anything to do with the drug
s. From the sounds of it, you guys know where they came from. That will help a lot.”

  “But we’ll get in trouble,” Carrie said.

  “Isn’t lying a sin?”

  Her lips turned to a line and that flush to her skin brought out the freckles. “You don’t have to mock us.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather the info come from you instead of me? That way it appears you’re sharing instead of hiding it?”

  Rachel and Holden exchanged looks, then nodded.

  Carrie kept herself out of it, She tried staring a hole through my face. That’s what it felt like, anyway. “We’re your clients,” she said. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”

  “It might get a little squishy if you’d hired to me investigate Sasha’s death. But my case involved finding Peter Brown, and has nothing to do with the pills in Sasha’s pocket.” I lifted my chin an inch “What’s the matter, Carrie? Your friends are on board for going to police. Is there something more we need to know?”

  Her face-burn stare quickly extinguished, she dropped her gaze to her hands. She picked at one of her nails. “I went to see Mrs. Brown yesterday.”

  Here we go again. I felt like I needed a white collar for all the confession going on in my office. “What did you do?”

  “Said I had to use the restroom. To see if I could find out what kind of pills they were.”

  “Did you find them?” A twirly buzz circled my gut. Carrie didn’t know it, but her answer could work as more than one clue to more than one case.

  Carrie nodded. “In the medicine cabinet.” She covered her face, but we could all hear her weeping against her palms.

  “They were prescribed for Peter?”

  She nodded, hands still on her face.

  “And they were left there.” This was less of a question than me thinking out loud, but Carrie muttered an affirmative sound and bobbed her head.

  “What were they?”

  She drew her hand down off her face. “I can’t believe I went in there. Snooped around behind Mrs. Brown’s back. Didn’t say anything to her.”

  “You were worried about a friend,” I said quickly, probably a little insensitively, but I wanted an answer to my question. “What was the name of the drug?” I drew my smart phone and pulled up the web browser.

  The other two had gone dead silent and stared at their friend as if they didn’t know her and she hand horns growing from her head.

  “I can’t…can’t believe you did that,” Holden said.

  I felt slightly insulted. All Carrie did was a little of what I do for a living—peek into the places that hold the darkest shadows.

  “Please, Carrie. The name of the drug?”

  She shook herself, swallowed hard. “I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it right. Temazepam? Does that sound right?”

  It sounded close enough. I searched using the best spelling I could. The search engine, thankfully, corrected my spelling and I found info on the drug right off the bat. Looked like a sleep aid that a person could become severely dependent on. Definitely not something taken “as needed.” In other words, without weaning himself, he’d have a hell of a withdrawal period, including not getting any sleep.

  Not the kind of drug you leave behind if you’re planning on leaving. Maybe he had another bottle. Maybe he’d already weaned himself and there were leftovers. Maybe a lot of things. But it suggested a couple possibilities. Either Peter was in such a rush to leave, he didn’t think to take his sleep meds, or he hadn’t left at all, but had disappeared. Maybe there was another snow bank out there, one to match his daughter’s.

  Lots of maybes in there without any proof of anything.

  But there might be other, similar discrepancies, like the classic left-behind toothbrush, or other toiletries. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to the house like Carrie did. Fortunately, I had to go back there to talk with Mrs. Brown anyway. If I could excuse myself to the bathroom, I might get a quick look around. However, as crazy as she sounded, I’d rather not get caught rummaging through her missing husband’s things. I didn’t need my own knife wound.

  There was another option.

  But it meant convincing one of three hardcore Christians to sin his or her ass off.

  Chapter 11

  Not surprisingly, when I laid out my idea, Carrie volunteered straight off. Holden tried to argue she’d done enough, but he didn’t fight her arguments for long or very strongly. He didn’t really want to come along, but wanted to do his part to look like he wanted to help. On the other hand, Rachel folded her hands in her lap and looked down and to one side. She looked like a meek old lady on a park bench, feeding the pigeons.

  She kept perfectly silent, which made her thoughts on the whole plan loud and clear.

  So Carrie was with me, which meant Holden and Rachel had to contact the cops and tell them about the drugs they found in Sasha’s coat that night she died. I gave them Palmer’s direct line.

  Once Carrie and I hit the road, we both got on our cell phones. Carrie called the Brown house and made sure Mrs. Brown was there and would still be by the time we reached them. She left out any mention of me. And while, from the corner of my eye as I made my own call, I could see her blush, her tone gave nothing away. If she could erase that blushing tell, she’d make a hell of a liar.

  I got an answer to my call on the fourth ring, almost to voicemail.

  “Palmer,” he answered with a growl.

  “Good afternoon my bald friend.” Palmer’s one of those guys that gave his receding hairline a big fuck you and shaves his whole head clean. It’s a good look with his dark, horn-rimmed glasses and his permanent scowl.

  “What now?” he groaned.

  “Good news,” I said. “A couple of Sasha’s friends are going to give you a call in a few. They have some information about the drugs that—”

  “Temazepam,” Palmer cut in. “Docs already got it to us. One of these kids sell it to her or something?”

  “Chill, okay? These are odd…”

  Carrie gave me a sidelong glance.

  “…but good kids. I’m giving you a head’s up so you can go easy on them. Don’t be your dickish self, if you can help it.”

  “Anything for you, highness.”

  “Anyway, there’s no selling or assistance involved here. Just listen and go easy, like I said.”

  Palmer grunted, but he didn’t tell me to shove some unusually large, inanimate object up my rear end, so I suppose I was doing okay. “Are we cool?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said and hung up.

  I thumbed off my phone and jammed it into my pocket. “Man’s got a heart of gold. Or is it fungus. I always forget.”

  Carrie had finished her call before mine, so had caught most of it. “He’s not going to lock us up for anything, is he?”

  “Unless the Hawthorne PD is really hungry for some blame on this, I doubt it. But I can’t guarantee anything. I don’t work for them.”

  She pulled off her stocking cap and ran her fingers through her hair.

  The snow had picked up with vigor and the car fishtailed a bit as we crossed the railroad tracks that, for as long as I remember, had worked as an artificial border between northern and southern Hawthorne. If you lived above the tracks, you counted as a person, often a very wealthy and powerful person. Anything south was either a now-defunct industrial park or middle- to lower-class tract housing. You served the meals. You tended the gas pumps. You cleaned the toilets. You worked a factory line for twelve hours a day. You did all the things most of those north of the tracks folks took for granted.

  And I’ll be honest. The only reason I had any idea what happened south of those tracks is because I lived in similar places before coming back to this city. Had I walked the path my parents had set out for me, I might have never known what went on “below.”

  Knowing didn’t make me a better person. It just made me aware. And I can tell you, sometimes i
gnorance is bliss.

  After the tracks, the Brown’s house wasn’t far. The bad news was, the street still hadn’t had a plow run down it and I wasn’t sure if I parked at the curb if I could get the traction to get out again. The good news was the TV vans had taken off.

  I parked in an indented square by the driveway where one of the vans had idled, hoping the slightly lower snow level would work to my advantage in getting out.

  Collin answered the door again when we knocked. Luckily, the front porch hand an overhang that kept much of the snow off. You could barely tell the driveway and approach had recently been shoveled. And all those footprints were gone.

  “Hey, Carrie,” Collin said. The skinny kid wore a pair of cut-off sweat pants and a tank top. I shivered just looking at him. But he held the door open as if it were another sunny August day. His face looked sunburnt, but I recognized a crush blush when I saw one. The kid had the hots for Carrie.

  He turned his gaze to me and the blush faded, along with the small smile. “My mom is piss…er…angry with you. You’re not supposed to interrogate minors without a parent present.”

  “I didn’t interrogate you, trust me.”

  “Whatever. I don’t have to say anything to you.”

  “You never did, Collin. I asked questions and you answered.” I waved a hand. “But never mind that. If you’re mom is concerned, I’d like to talk to her.”

  Collin’s eyes swung back to Carrie. “Are you with him?”

  “He gave me a lift. But I was hoping to talk to you some more.”

  I wanted to call out, Easy there, Carrie. I wanted her to sneak through the house looking at a list of things I’d given her to check, not get stuck seducing Sasha’s little brother. I hoped she knew what she was doing.

  “Me?” Collin asked with all the awe of a kid asked to man the first space flight to Mars.

  “For a bit, yeah. We’re trying to find your dad, you know.”

  His gaze snapped toward me for a second. “That’s what he says.”

  “It’s true. We hired him for it.” Carrie took a step beyond the threshold and into the house. Now she crowded the small square of tiling with a row of wet boots along one side.