by Rob Cornell
“Hang a sec.”
He put me on hold. Loud, ear-grinding Muzak blared through the phone, making my headache worse. I’d need a couple more doses of ibuprofen before the day ended, I supposed. Worse yet, I recognized the song. A holiday tune my parents had written for a young pop star of twenty years ago that no one remembers anymore.
I wandered back to my car, but stayed out on the curb. Despite the hammering wind and the snow blowing in tiny flakes that felt like ground glass in my face, I couldn’t stand sitting until I knew Peter was safe.
I shivered for what felt like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes.
Palmer came back on the line. “I don’t have names. Details are sketchy. It’s a little…odd.”
“Tell me.”
“Two bodies. An assisted suicide and a suicide. From the looks of things, one of the orderlies performed an assisted suicide using a plastic shopping bag to suffocate the first guy. Then someone caught him right after and this orderly pulls a pistol, sticks it in his mouth, and blows off the top of his head.”
Palmer didn’t have names, but I knew them.
“How do they know the first is an assisted suicide?”
“Guy left a note. But don’t fucking asking what it says. I don’t know.”
Damnit, you ass. How could you not have seen this coming?
Unlike me, CYAN didn’t need to send someone into the hospital. They had a guy there already. He obviously didn’t know Peter from any other patient, but when his higher ups found out Peter was staying at Sunnygale, one phone call to Billie with a description of Peter would have been all it took.
“Brone, what’s the deal here?”
I’d reached a point where I couldn’t go this alone. Billie had murdered Peter because I had given his hiding spot away. It explained a lot about Billie’s strange behavior. I wondered if he had received his kill order before I’d left the hospital, just waiting for my departure so he could give his cult what they wanted.
It made perfect sense to have Billie planted in an addiction and mental hospital, though. It must have proved a lucrative recruiting ground. Plenty of people in delicate emotional states to take advantage of.
Where else did CYAN have members planted?
My skin prickled at the possibilities. Churches, for sure. Schools. Doctors’ offices. Political offices, even.
“Brone, talk to me.”
“Sorry. This…this is bad. We need to meet.”
“Come to the station.” His voice turned serious. None of the gruff sarcasm, which worried me. It meant I must have sounded more freaked-out than I felt.
His suggested meet location doubled that feeling. What if CYAN had members working at the damned police station? I felt like a spy in Cold War Russia. Where could I go where they couldn’t see me? Hear me? Maybe even attack me.
“No,” I said. “Meet me at the bar. It’s the safest place I know.”
“You sound paranoid. Can you give me a hint?”
“Remember Waco?”
“Of course.”
“Picture that—with the Godfather leading the crazies.”
* * *
Palmer sat in his sedan in the High Note’s lot, his engine running, exhaust pluming from the tailpipe in the cold air. Some of the drifts created by the high wind reached a good six feet against the face of the building. Luckily, none of them covered the entrance.
Palmer got out of his car when I pulled up next to him. We walked in silence, necks hunched as low into our coats as possible. I felt my hair getting tugged into a tangled mess by the wind. I’d been so distracted, I had left my hat in my car.
Palmer either forgot his or didn’t bother wearing one. But he didn’t have any trouble with his hair since he kept it shorn to the skin. His scalp looked red and irritated from the cold.
Once inside, we made our way to the bar as we stripped out of our coats. I directed him to sit in my regular booth while I got drinks; he asked for a Heineken. I stuck with my usual habits and poured myself a glass of gin, only without the tonic this time.
I set his beer in front of him on a paper coaster and sat down across from him.
“The suspense is killing me, Brone.” He sipped his beer. “But you look like you just dug yourself out of your grave, so maybe I don’t want to know.”
“I’m laying everything out as best I can without revealing my clients.”
“More than one,” Palmer said. “Then it has to be all three.”
I didn’t say anything. Denying it was pointless. I took a hearty swig of gin, draining my glass by half. Then I set the glass aside and started in on what I’d learned.
I told him about CYAN, about Peter’s suspicions that they were responsible for Sasha’s death, and why I was certain they had taken out Peter once I made it easy for them.
Palmer stopped me there. “Seems like a nice coincidence to have a man willing to kill planted in the hospital.”
“From how Peter described it, there’s a whole tier of followers willing to do anything. And with this hyper-recrution thing, a place like Sunnygale is ripe pickings.”
He seemed to mull that over, then made a face. “This is all a story from Peter Brown, though. He could have been bullshitting you the whole time. After all, he was in a mental hospital.”
“But his wife isn’t. Whether she ought to be is another question.”
“His wife corroborated this?”
“Yes. And she’s also a member.”
I summarized my conversation with her, drunk on scotch, which amused him slightly. Then I finished my story and leaned back, drink in hand, waiting for his response.
Palmer pulled off his horn-rimmed glasses and wiped them with a small cloth he pulled out of his pocket. He tucked away the cloth and put his glasses back on. Stared at me.
“If this CYAN shit is real, we’ve got a lot of work to do and a tiny police department to do it.”
“But there’s more a tiny police department can do than a single PI.”
“Are you honestly handing this off to me?”
“My case is done, Palmer. And these fanatics scare the shit out of me. Now that I know about them, I’m going to worry they’re everywhere.”
“It can’t be that big. We would have heard about it.”
“That’s the trick. They tell their members they have to go to church, but it doesn’t matter which one as long as it’s Christian. That keeps them spread out. But they gather for meetings at the community center, doing the whole ‘youth group thing,’ which is just another recruiting technique.”
Palmer nodded, getting it. “Then they all spread out again, but they’re networked enough to be called when needed. Like your guy in the hospital.”
“Those on the higher tiers, yeah.”
Palmer laughed and shook his head. “First time you hand something over willingly and I’d rather have you keep it.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that. I can’t always do your job for you.”
“Har, har.” Palmer raised his bottle in toast, then guzzled it empty. He slammed the bottle down on the table. “Another?”
“Aren’t you on duty.”
“I am actually off-shift in fifteen minutes. I think the department will understand. Especially when I drop the bomb you handed me on them.”
“They’ll want to deny it. There isn’t much proof.”
“There’s enough to make noise. If they try to brush it off, it won’t last for long. And I’ll make sure to keep bugging them.”
I went back to the bar, got him a second beer and topped off my gin. We made a toast.
“To Sasha,” I said. “She deserves justice.”
“Here, here.”
At some point the bar opened and we were still drinking. Paul must have sensed something, because he didn’t say a word, only kept the drinks coming at a measured rate that would keep our buzzes high without making us sloppy.
Every third drink or so, we would toast Sasha again.
Chapter
23
Something kept hitting me in the head, but instead of a metallic clang—which was how it felt like it should sound—each strike came with an electronic trilling. When I dared to open my eyes, the sunlight pouring into my bedroom singed my corneas.
I slapped a hand over my eyes and groaned.
My head pulsed as if I had a heart in my skull instead of a brain.
That strange noise came again from somewhere on the floor.
I parted my fingers and peeked through them at the blinding whiteness surrounding me, forcing myself to keep my eyes open so I could adjust to the light. Meanwhile, pieces from the night before dropped back into my slushy memory. I also shed enough of my sleep shroud for my brain to function and recognize the insistent noise as my phone.
I flopped out of bed, onto the floor, and crawled on my hands and knees in nothing but my boxers, searching for the phone and finding it in the side pocket of the jeans I wore yesterday. I squinted at the ID.
Carrie.
I almost let the call go to voicemail. I was in no mood to break the news about how royally screwed the case got, when it should have been so simple—although by now the news media might have spilled many of the details, at least about what happened at the hospital.
Still, I had dodged a lot of her calls and the message Paul left for me when she’d stopped by the High Note. She deserved an update the same as any client.
I hit TALK and put the phone to my ear. “Hey, Carrie.”
“Oh, my fucking God, where have you been?”
My tongue felt like a salted slug in my mouth. I stood up and staggered out of my room, down the hall, and into the main upstairs bathroom. “I’m sorry, Carrie, but you’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Did you get into Sunnygale?”
Maybe the news hadn’t hit yet, or the cops had somehow kept a lid on it so far.
I turned on the faucet and drank straight from it, holding my phone over my head to keep from splashing it. Once I had my fill of water, I stuck my throbbing head under the stream and soaked my long, wavy hair. When I stood straight, water ran down my face and trickled along my spine. Drops pattered onto the floor, but I didn’t care. I felt a little better now.
I put my phone back to my ear.
Carrie was shouting about something and I had to pull the phone away again until I caught her taking a breath.
“Hold on. Let me tell you what happened,” I said in the gap before she could start yelling again.
I filled her in on what happened with Sunnygale, how I found Peter, and then my suspicions—as yet unconfirmed, but pretty easy to guess—that the two dead men were Peter and Billie.
I got an earful of silence.
“Carrie?”
A heavy sigh. A sniffle.
“Carrie? Are you crying?”
“It’s too late, then,” she said.
“Too late for what?”
“To tell him the truth about Sasha.”
My headache from the hangover crackled down the back of my neck. I staggered to the toilet and sat on the closed lid. A drip of water rolled from my hairline down along the side of my nose and hung there like a tear.
“What truth?”
“I know what really happened to…” Her voice caved in on itself when she tried to say her friend’s name. “She didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered.”
My stomach turned. If I’d had a little more last night, I probably would have had to do an about-face with the toilet and hurl. I tasted bile at the back of my throat, but otherwise kept the contents of my stomach where they belonged.
“Are you certain?”
“I’ve always been certain.”
I cocked my head, which didn’t help much with the pounding inside of it. I picked at my next words carefully. “Are you saying you have always known how Sasha died?”
She sobbed. “Yes.”
I held back the questions wanting to pour out of me like a breached damn. “We should meet. Can you do that?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I grinded my teeth and counted back from ten. “Did you have something to do with it, Carrie?”
“No,” she said. “No way. Not me. It was…was…” She made that cough and sob noise again, louder this time.
“Did you actually witness the murder?”
Her crying overwhelmed her voice. She said something, but I couldn’t understand. I did think I heard a name, though.
“Can you say that again, Carrie? I’m sorry, hon, I need to be sure I heard what I thought I heard.”
“It was Rachel,” she said slowly, each word its own sentence and emphasized equally.
That’s the name I thought I’d heard, but hoped I hadn’t.
“Did you witness Rachel do this? Did she somehow force Sasha to take those pills?”
Carrie said something else, unintelligible through her tears. I decided right then we needed to meet.
“Can you come to my office? There’s no one there but me.”
“What if…what if they follow me?” I understood her better this time, possibly because I had the same question in mind. If Rachel had been taking orders from CYAN, they probably had a close eye on Sasha’s other friends. Carrie needed to meet me in a crowded place not in any way related to me.
“Meet me at the Hawthorne Mall,” I said. “There’s a cubby that has rental lockers. You know where I’m talking about.”
She made an affirmative hum.
“Meet me there.”
“But they could still follow me.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “If anyone’s following you, I’ll make sure you lose them.
* * *
Mid-day at the mall a couple weeks before Christmas on a Saturday? What was I thinking?
Just pushing through the crowds of people on the run to their next great deal took most of my energy. Searching for surveillance on Carrie seemed impossible with this many people. My small comfort was that anyone trying to follow her in here would have as much trouble.
I circled the wing of the mall that had the locker cubby I’d told Carrie to meet me in. I saw her in there on a couple of my passes, standing back deep in the cubby yet still visible from outside. She stood with her arms crossed, hugging herself while she leaned against a wall of lockers, the kind that take quarters and you get the key.
During my passes, I didn’t notice any other eyes consistently watching her. That didn’t guarantee anything, but I also didn’t notice the standard ticks that many doing surveillance suffered from. Quick movements. Excessive window shopping. Furtive glances. You had to pretend you weren’t looking while you were. Not an easy trick.
Still, I saw nothing of the sort. Either I was dealing with pros, or CYAN didn’t have anyone on Carrie and I was being paranoid.
I made one last circle around the wing, then slipped into the cubby and approached Carrie.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said and sprinted at me, threw her arms around me, nearly tackled me to the floor.
I went rigid in her embrace. I did not hug her in return, choosing to pat her on the back instead.
She buried her face in my chest, muffling her voice. “I didn’t think you were going to come.” She looked up at me. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her pallor was lighter, showing off her freckles. “Did you call the police?”
“You haven’t given me proof of anything,” I said. “They won’t be interested until we have something solid.”
She nodded quickly. “Good. Okay. We’ll get them something.”
I was glad she wasn’t crying anymore, but I didn’t like the cold steel in her voice either. It made her sound clinical, as if putting together the facts of Sasha’s death amounted to little more than a urgent puzzle.
“You need to give me more,” I said. “What makes you think Rachel killed Sasha? And if you’ve known this all along, why the hell didn’t you say something, instead of pretending this had to do with Peter?”
If she had come to me to look into Sasha’s death instead of Peter’s, Peter might still be alive. I hated games like this.
She slid her hands off of me while taking a step backward. Then she threaded her fingers together in a prayer position. She bowed her head and whispered something.
I heard the word sin several times.
When she looked up again, unlacing her hands, tears filled her eyes. “I suspected it was her, but I didn’t know for sure. And I worried about CYAN. Peter showed me the book he stole from them once. I couldn’t believe it at first, but there was the proof, right in front of me.”
A few sparks went off in my brain. “Wait a sec. Peter showed you it? You and her other friends.”
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. I could tell she knew this question was coming and she had prepped herself to answer it. “Just me.”
I stood there a moment, jaw wide. Then I shook off the shock. Of course, Peter Brown couldn’t keep it in his pants. He’d already cheated on his wife with Elizabeth Garaski. Why not one of his daughter’s friends? She was an adult. She could make her own bad decisions. And Carrie was the racy one in the group. So now that made two Brown family males to see Carrie’s boobs.
“It’s not what you think,” Carrie said.
Before she could give me the speech that he really loved her and was going to leave his wife soon for her, and all that bullshit, I held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“But—”
“It’s none of my business.”
“It was a one-time thing,” she shouted. Her voice echoed in the small cubby.
Thankfully, it was only the two of us in there, since people didn’t seem to rent lockers at the mall anymore.
“I’ve asked God everyday to forgive me for that night. I don’t need you judging me, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was way off-base.”
“The point is, I’ve seen the Book. I think that’s the only reason Peter slept with me. He wanted to show that book to someone who understood CYAN, who realized how…terrifying they were.”
Something tickled at my subconscious. I tried to pull it up out of the sludge of my mind, but it kept slipping out of my mental grip. I gave up and moved on. “How does Rachel fit into Sasha’s death?”