Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 03 - Saving Sasha Brown

by Rob Cornell

  “That night we found the pills in Sasha’s coat pocket, Rachel acted like she didn’t know anything about them. She must have forgot she already told me about the pills. Peter had to take them for sleep. Sasha had told Rachel—who told me later—that Peter was always afraid of taking too many, OD-ing, or getting addicted or something. So he asked Sasha to hide half his prescription until he needed it.”

  This was turning into one of those ‘he said, she said’ kind of deals. I tried to simplify. “Rachel knew Sasha did this for Peter. Fine. That doesn’t make her a killer.”

  “Why would she pretend she didn’t know about them?”

  “Holden was with you. Maybe she was being discreet.”

  “Rachel? Discreet?” She spat air that ruffled her red bangs. “Rachel couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. She’s a natural-born gossip.”

  To me, Rachel had seemed too quiet and reserved to be a gossip. But that was the trick about the human species—we had many faces, most of them invisible.

  “This isn’t enough for anything,” I told her. “Even my buddy, Palmer, won’t touch this. And he’s a generally nice guy.” See? I could be a good liar, too.

  “I don’t care. I know it was her. I know it.”

  My calves started to complain about standing there, a little shakiness left over from all the drinking the night before. My headache encroached, the effects of my morning Advil wearing off. But the break in our conversation came at the perfect time.

  A woman with four kids swarming her like hungry chickens walked into the cubby. She had a load of puffy, kid-sized coats in her arms. She glanced briefly at me and Carrie, then tried to put a couple quarters in one of the lockers. With her arms full like that, I didn’t see how she could manage, especially with her kids, all under nine from the looks of it, chattering and poking at her for attention.

  I stepped forward to offer to help, but the locker door swung open before I could say a word.

  She stuffed the coats into the locker, took off hers, folded it, and added it with the others. Then she slammed the door shut, took her key, and headed off.

  I turned back to Carrie who had a lopsided smile on her face.

  “You want to save the world, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind.” Her smile faded and her cheeks flushed. “So are you going to look into Rachel, or what?”

  I wrinkled my brow. That thing in my subconscious turned from a tickle to an itch. “You really want to investigate one of your friends?”

  “She’s not my friend if she killed Sasha.”

  True enough. But I had to throw down the big question, the one that defined many investigations into homicide. “Why?” I asked. “Why would Rachel want to kill Sasha?”

  “Oh, right,” Carrie said. “I forgot to tell you. Would have been last Saturday. When we all went to your karaoke bar. We ordered real drinks to celebrate. Rachel had just been promoted to the next tier.”

  Chapter 24

  I thought about calling Palmer.

  I should have called Palmer.

  But I couldn’t cool the hot wires burning through my body as I stared dumbly at Carrie after she told me about Rachel’s promotion. It clicked. The CYAN honchos knew Rachel and Sasha were close. They also knew Rachel was uber-loyal to the group. From the impression I got, she was the type of zealot who might sell out a friend for the cause.

  But kill?

  The cloying smell of the mall pushed itself into the cubby. Popcorn, corn dogs, pretzels, and the eclectic mix of cuisines from the food court, all layered on a base of whatever they used to polish the floors. The cubby itself had a smell, too. Like sweaty socks.

  I had to get out of there.

  I waved Carrie along. “Let’s go. I can’t stand it here anymore.”

  “You’re not worried about someone following me?” she asked.

  “No one was following you. I made sure.”

  We drove to my office.

  Today the sun was out, the sky clear, the snow all plowed. It would have been a beautiful day if not for how all that shiny stabbed me in the eyes like glass shards because of a stupid hangover.

  When we arrived, I closed the blinds and lit the room with only my desk lamp. That eased my headache a little, but I wished for more Advil. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any left at the office. I get a lot of headaches working cases. All in the name of clinging to my personal identity. I’m a PI, not just a bar owner.

  “Did you want to call Holden?” I asked while I added another couple magazines for my pistol into my coat pocket, giving me four spares and one in the gun itself.

  Instead of answering my question, Carrie stared at me as if she didn’t know who I was. “You’re packing?”

  I laughed at her term. “I’m carrying, yes. CYAN scares me, so I’m playing it safe. If I have to face them, I want to be ready.”

  She smiled, which looked awkward with her eyes still puffy from her earlier crying jag. “No, that’s good. Everyone in America should have a gun for self-protection. That’s what the Second Amendment is all about, right?”

  I kept my mouth shut. I try not to get political if I can help it. But there are a damn lot of people out there expressing their right to arms who really shouldn’t have so much as a book of matches in their pocket.

  I also assumed much of that talk came from CYAN’s indoctrination process. No point discussing it further. I asked her again, “Do you want to call Holden? Tell him what’s happening?”

  “I’d rather wait until we know for sure. I don’t want to upset him if we can help it.”

  I gave her a pointed look. “And after this? However it ends, you have to make a choice about CYAN, don’t you?”

  She turned away from me, pretending to admire the framed movie poster for Return of the Jedi. “I’ll have some thinking to do, I guess.”

  I wouldn’t need to think at all. I learned my club put up one of my best friends to kill another? I’d want to go on a killing spree of my own. Line up the group’s leaders and make sure I put a bullet in every one of their heads.

  Yeah, right. When the fuck did you turn into Don Corleone?

  “You sure you can handle this?” I asked.

  She still faced the poster, not me. “Of course.”

  “Stick to the plan, remember. Don’t let on that anything’s amiss, and when she asks why you’re taking her to my office, keep it simple. I want to update you on the case. You can say Holden’s riding separately.”

  “Then what?” She finally turned back to me. “You grill her?”

  “I interview her. If it gets heated, I’ll interrogate as much as I can. But she’ll have the choice to walk out of here at any time. This isn’t a police station.”

  “Thanks for that, by the way. I don’t want to ruin her reputation or anything if she’s innocent. But she isn’t. I know she isn’t.”

  * * *

  I got Carrie’s frantic phone call half an hour later.

  “There’s so much blood.”

  It was the first thing she screamed when I answered.

  “So much, I…”

  “Carrie?” My grip tightened on the phone and its plastic casing creaked. “Stick with me. What’s going on?”

  I sat behind my desk, my pistol on the desk calendar in plain sight. Before Carrie had called, I was toying with the idea of leaving the gun there as a prop, something to intimidate Rachel. At the mention of blood, I thought I might have to take it with me, though.

  “I’m at Rachel’s. She…she killed herself.”

  My stomach dropped. I gripped the edge of the desk to hold steady. Killed herself? Another suicide? I didn’t believe it. “How do you know it was suicide?”

  “I’m looking right at her,” Carrie screeched. “Are you coming here? You have to.”

  “You’re in her apartment right now?” Unlike the rest of their crew, Rachel was the only one not still living with her parents.

  “Ye
s.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “What difference does it make?” The volume of her voice forced me to jerk my phone away from my ear.

  When I returned the phone to within listening distance, I said, speaking slowly, “You’re at a crime scene, Carrie. It’ll look bad if you’re there when the police arrive. It’ll look even worse if you, say, forced your way in.”

  “The door was unlocked. And why are talking about the police coming?”

  “They’ll be coming because I’m going to call them. Now get out of there.”

  “I…I can’t leave her. And you can’t call the police. I know you think CYAN is some big, corrupt cult. Maybe some of it is. But they’ve done great things. You can’t let the media ruin all that just because Rachel felt guilty about what she did to Sasha. They’ll see all these deaths and twist CYAN’s image for ratings.”

  Personally, I didn’t see they’d have to twist much. I tried to look at it from Carrie’s perspective. But Carrie didn’t exactly have an unbiased view. Then I thought of Sasha. It always came back to her. “I have a friend on the force,” I said. “He can help keep a lid on this so the press doesn’t hear about it until we want them to.”

  “I won’t trust any police. I’d rather hide Rachel’s body.”

  I choked on the sudden knot in my throat. My voice went numb for a couple seconds. “Don’t you dare touch a thing.”

  “Will you come here first, then? Come and call the police from here if you have to. But stay here and make sure they don’t…defile her.”

  Defile?

  I sighed. “Fine. I’ll be there as fast as I can. But I’m serious. Do not touch a thing.”

  * * *

  I arrived to find Carrie in Rachel’s bathroom, Rachel dressed to go to a CYAN meeting in her plain slacks and button up shirt. She even wore her pin on her collar and her cross around her neck. Yet she floated in the full bathtub, the water cloudy with the blood that had poured from her sliced wrists. The porcelain tub formed a shallow shelf where it met the tiled wall. A wicked-looking kitchen knife rested on this shelf, watery blood on the edge and sides.

  I forced myself to take in the image of her like that, to burn it to my brain. While Sasha was found on a cold snow bank instead of a warm bath, I could extrapolate from the sight of Rachel what Sasha must have looked like on that winter evening.

  Carrie knelt beside the tub, holding Rachel’s dead hand under the water.

  “I told you not to touch anything,” I said, voice meek. I couldn’t blame her, seeing her friend like that. But I didn’t know what else to say, what else to do. Until I realized what I had to do.

  I drew my phone and walked out of the bathroom. I started to dial Palmer’s number as I walked to the living room window and looked out at the crust of snow covering everything except the roads. The sun shined off that snow, making me squint against the bluish light.

  Rachel had picked an apartment on the edge of town, close to the neighboring city’s university. Cheap housing meant mostly for students, though as far as I knew, Rachel had finished college already. She might have even graduated from the university.

  “Wait,” Carrie called out. I heard a soft splash, turned, found Carrie rushing out of the bathroom, her one had dripping red water. “Not yet.”

  “There’s no reason to wait.”

  She hung her head. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I sensed her struggling with some kind of decision. “I want to hire you.”

  “You already did that once.”

  “This time to look…at this. At Rachel. Look around and make your own decisions before the cops get here and trample all over Rachel’s life.”

  “You’re not making sense.” I stepped toward her and reached out a hand to reassure her. “I know you’re upset but—”

  “You have no idea. No idea.” Her face flushed. Her freckles darkened. A mix of pain and anger flashed in her eyes.

  I tried to view her reaction to this through a sympathetic lens. She had just learned that the religious youth group she was a part of ran itself like a mob and was responsible for her friends’ deaths. The first murdered. The second a suicide brought on by guilt for the first murder, which she’d committed by CYAN’s order.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. That thing stuck in my subconscious rose to the surface. This time I managed to pull it out far enough to recognize what it was.

  “What do you expect me to find, Carrie?”

  Tears ran down her face. She threw up her hands. Her red curls bounced like springs. “I don’t know. Proof of something.”

  “Of what? That Rachel killed Sasha?”

  “I don’t know any more.” She pointed at me. “You’re the fucking detective. I just don’t want her name dragged through the mud.”

  “The press will eventually find out about this. They’ll spread the word about Sasha, Rachel, CYAN…everything. There is no stopping that. And I’m not going to hide any evidence, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She turned her back to me, crossed her arms. “Why would God do this to us? After all we’ve sacrificed for him?”

  I knew it was a rhetorical question, but I knew the answer, at least a halfway decent answer. “You once said to me that temptation is the devil’s greatest tool. CYAN knows that and knows it well. The gifts, the promise of promotion, the buttons you get to wear showing off your ranks.”

  Could have been my imagination, but I think Carrie went suddenly stiff.

  “What’s happened has nothing to do with God. Just some corrupt assholes who know how to manipulate young people.” I watched her for a while, meanwhile sensing Rachel’s dead presence not far from where I stood.

  I swallowed. “I’m going to look around.”

  Carrie didn’t move.

  I shed my coat and felt the two extra magazines for my pistol clatter together as I dropped the coat on Rachel’s couch. I wore a suit jacket under my parka which held the other two mags in an inside pocket. I brushed a hand at the small of my back to feel the lump of my pistol itself snug in its clip-on holster on my belt.

  I walked into the bathroom, crouched by the tub. As I peered into the tub, my stomach turned. She should have looked horrible floating in there. But death had lightened her skin and her hair flowed out from her scalp as if weightless or blowing in a powerful breeze. Rachel looked beautiful in death.

  I forced myself to turn to stone, though. The professional had to step up and take over. So I did.

  I reached into the cold water.

  Movement at the bathroom entrance.

  I looked up. Carrie stood in the doorway. “I found this.” She held out a slip of standard printer paper.

  I saw the printed paragraph in the page’s center. I hesitated to reach for the note since it would qualify as evidence if it was what I thought it was. By this point, though, I’d broken so many rules, one more wouldn’t make a difference.

  I took the sheet.

  Read it.

  A suicide note. Pithy and straight forward. She had to die because she couldn’t get over what she had done to her best friend. If any suspicions arose, a forensics team could match the printout to Rachel’s printer, though I didn’t think they’d have to bother.

  I held a better piece of evidence in my fist.

  I stood and set the note on the counter. With that hand free, I used it to pull my gun and aim it at Carrie.

  She jerked as if electrocuted, skittering a few inches back on her heels. “What the fuck?”

  “It’s kind of like the military, I suppose.” I raised my clenched fist out as if I meant to give out a knuckle bump. Instead, I turned my fist and opened my hand.

  Rachel’s pin lay in my palm.

  Carrie stared at it, her freckles as clear as I’d yet seen them. Her hands hung loose at her sides and trembled. “What are you talking about?”

  “You guys get the pins to show off your ranks, right?”

  “Why are we talking about this? I thought y
ou wanted to call the police.”

  “Now that you handed me this bogus note meant just for me, you’re ready to call the boys in blue, huh?”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

  I glanced at the note. The counter must have been damp. The paper had soaked up a puddle, making the note’s words illegible. “When you guys first came to see me, you were all wearing your pins. Rachel and Holden had the same color and design. Yours was the one that was different.”

  “So?”

  “So you’re the one who got the promotion that night. Not Rachel.”

  “That’s stupid. You can’t prove that.”

  I raised my hand with the pin in my palm to eye level. “I’m sure we can find someone willing to decipher the details on this pin. Proving Rachel doesn’t belong to the killing rank of CYAN should be a snap.”

  “You’re so totally paranoid, you’ve…you’ve snapped.”

  “I get it now. When you asked me if I wanted to ‘save the world,’ you saw me as a bleeding heart. You thought I’d find this note, feel sorry for what CYAN made Rachel do, and then what? Help cover for CYAN on this one? Run interference with the cops so they wouldn’t look any further than the note. So they wouldn’t get a tech crew in here gathering evidence that you killed Rachel. Just like you killed Sasha?”

  Chapter 25

  Carrie’s gaze flicked to the note, to the pin in my hand, then to my gun. She brushed a curl of red hair off her face, tucking it behind her ear. “You can’t do anything to me, you know. CYAN has the best lawyers, political connections, people in places you don’t even know exist. They’ve been running Hawthorne for years and you didn’t even know it.”

  The sweat between my hand and my gun turned the handle slick. I slipped the pin into my jacket pocket and supported my pistol with both hands now. I readjusted my aim for Carrie’s center mass. I found it a little surreal to hold a gun on such an innocent-looking girl. But there wasn’t anything innocent about her.

  “I believe most of that,” I said. “But do you really think they’re going to risk their whole reputation and influence for a lackey like you. Odds are they won’t even let you make it to trial. They’ll have someone off you in jail.”