by Raven Snow
“Hey, Frank,” Benji called as they walked through the door. “Do you have a minute?”
Frank stopped spinning long enough to give everyone who had just come through the door a skeptical once over. “I have ten minutes,” he said. “Then I’m going home. It’s ridiculous I have to stay that long. This place punishes you for getting work done ahead of schedule. It’s nonsense. I should be free to go home when I’m finished.” It certainly didn’t seem like he cared that Rowen and company were there. He seemed more disillusioned with this job than Rowen would have guessed.
“Remember me?” asked Rowen.
“Of course.” Frank’s gaze strayed to Eric. “And you are…?”
“Eric Greensmith. Husband.”
“Ah.” Frank didn’t offer any greetings beyond that. “So, what’s up? Why are you trespassing again?”
“You went through Jerry’s footage, right?” Rowen asked.
Frank nodded. “Yep. And before you ask, no, I didn’t come across anything out of the ordinary before he died. The police already asked, and they already had me make copies of everything he filmed for, like, six months before he got murdered.”
Of course Ben had already covered this angle. Rowen wasn’t sure why that hadn’t occurred to her before now. “You’d notice if something was missing, wouldn’t you?” she asked, another possibility coming to mind.
“What do you mean?”
Rowen tried to think how best to word what she was trying to get at. She didn’t want to give anything away, but she didn’t really see any way around it. It wasn’t like she knew a whole lot anyway. “I mean would you know if there was footage missing? Like, if he shot something, took it off, and then deleted it from the camera, would you know?”
“I guess not.” Frank leaned back in his chair. “I’m not sure he would have done that, though. He had his own camera.”
“He did?” asked Rowen before realizing that was a stupid thing not to have assumed. “Of course he did. He was into all that stuff. Do you know what kind of camera it was?”
“He had a couple.” Frank spun his chair back to the desk. He took a pad of paper and a pen and jotted something down. “Here. Here’s the make and model of the cameras. You can ask Craig about them, but I’m betting the police got a hold of them already.”
If that was the case, there wasn’t anything on them anyway. “Thanks,” Rowen said anyway, taking the slip of paper.
“No problem,” said Frank. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. I want to catch the guy who did this, too. I don’t think it’ll help but, on the off chance it does, feel free to ask me anything.”
Rowen kept waffling back and forth on what she thought of this guy. Right now, she had a healthy level of respect for him. “Do you have a cell number I could reach you at?”
“I’m not offering that much help.” Frank stood. “Well, my shift is up. I’m heading home.”
Rowen was back to mostly just disliking him. “Hey.” It was Eric who caught Frank before he could make it out the door. “You worked with Jerry for a while, right?”
“Basically since I started here, yeah.”
“Was there any reason he would have been hard up for cash? Did he have a gambling problem? Student loans?”
Frank shook his head. “Not that I know of. This was like him, though. He was an optimist.” He smiled at the memory. The smile quickly turned sad. “He always had some sort of get rich quick scheme, you know? He didn’t have the best moral compass either. He could be kind of a jerk. He meant well, but unless you knew him, you’d be excused for thinking he hated you. He terrorized a lot of interns in his day. Right, Benji?”
Benji shrugged.
“I wouldn’t have put it past him to try and extort money from someone,” Frank continued. “I talked him down from some bad ideas he had in the past. Heck, once he wanted to sneak up to the Greensmith house and try to get footage of you guys sacrificing kids or something.”
Rowen laughed at that. She wasn’t sure how else to react. “What?” asked Willow, not sounding like she found it quite as humorous.
“Oh, sure.” Frank smirked when he noticed Willow’s reaction. “You lot are always big news around here. Small town and all. Very superstitious. Like I said, though, I talked him down from it. I told him the most he’d see is, maybe, you guys dancing around under the full moon naked or something… Actually, who knows whether I actually convinced him not to go or not. That might have talked him into it.”
“Hey.” Benji stood up a little taller, like he had someone’s honor to defend.
Rowen ignored him. “But you don’t have any idea what kind of footage he might have gotten a hold of?” she asked.
“Not a clue.” Frank had been edging toward the door this whole time. He finally hesitated now that he was at it. “How are you so sure it was video footage he got killed over.”
“We’re not,” said Rowen, which was the truth. They weren’t certain of a whole lot, though this did feel like a safe bet.
“Did he offer it to you?” asked Frank, paying no mind to what she had just said. “To your paper, I mean. Did he try to sell you a story?”
“Why?” asked Rowen, unwilling to commit to an answer one way or the other. She felt fairly certain she had shown her hand anyway.
“Because, if he offered it to you and not anyone I work with, then maybe it had something to do with this station.” Frank finally opened the door. “Anyway, I’m headed out. I’ll see you guys later. Or not. Whichever.”
Rowen looked at Eric to see what he thought. That was something that had already occurred to her. She had assumed it had occurred to her husband as well even though she hadn’t discussed it with him. She was afraid of jumping the gun and forming a theory that had no basis in reality. “What do you think?”
“I think we don’t know for a fact Jerry didn’t offer the story to anyone here,” said Eric. “We can’t know that. There are multiple people he could have gone to.”
Rowen nodded. That was a fair point. “Either way, if he did, and they didn’t come forward to the police…”
“What?” asked Willow, frowning at both of them. “What are you getting at?”
Eric knew what she was implying and picked her train of thought up for her. “She’s saying that the murderer was someone he worked with.”
“That seems to be the case, yes.” Rowen wasn’t sure of much, but she felt pretty confident about that.
Chapter Ten
The night of the gala there was something of a kerfuffle going on at Rowen’s house. She was in the middle of getting ready, carefully trying to apply some liquid liner around her lash line when someone started pounding on the door. Rowen knew who it was immediately. She had been avoiding her calls. “Don’t answer it,” Rowen whispered to Eric as he moved toward the stairs. “Maybe she’ll think we’re not home.”
“Our cars are here,” Eric pointed out. “And she’s not an idiot.”
He had her there. She probably wasn’t going to give up any time soon. Before too long, they would have to leave the house to head to the gala. That meant going outside and facing her no matter how you looked at it. Rowen’s phone rang again. It was her. No doubt about that. Rowen groaned. “Fine. Answer the door.”
Rowen finished up her eyeliner in a rush and headed for the stairs. Chester was barking. Eric was already telling him to stand down and unlocking the front door. Rowen was on the landing when it opened.
“Seriously?” Rose stepped into the house, looking frazzled and uncharacteristically angry. “You’re trying to just avoid me? Seriously?”
“Don’t involve me in this.” Eric held up his hands. “I suggested she just talk to you.”
“Traitor.” Rowen glared at her husband. “Ignoring people is a valid strategy,” she said to Rose. “Especially when they’re being very unrealistic and need to just sit and think for a minute so they can listen to their own common sense.”
“What do you think I’m going to do?” Rose demanded. “Y
ou think I’m going to go in there and pick a fight?”
“No,” Rowen said with a sigh, coming the rest of the way down the stairs. “But I think you’re going to make a scene whether you mean to or not. I think you’re going to be looking for an angle, some kind of story.”
“I’m not,” Rose insisted.
“I don’t believe that, and I don’t think you believe that. But, either way, the people at the gala definitely won’t believe that, and that’s all that matters.”
Rose finally fell silent. She frowned, like she still wasn’t so sure about any of it. She still wanted what she wanted. They had two tickets to the gala, and she felt like she deserved one of them. She needed to get in there and have a word with Darren, she said. Channel 2 was really turning this whole Ben business into a circus. Rowen wasn’t sure how her talking to Darren was going to change anything, but she seemed to think she could say the right combination of words to him or something. She wanted to confront him, at any rate.
“Look.” Rowen tried to appeal to Rose’s more thoughtful nature. “Darren Hawthorne said he would have dinner with me sometime. What if I set a date for that tonight? You can crash.”
Rose didn’t look convinced, but her anger did seem ever so slightly assuaged. “Fine,” she grumbled. “But I still don’t think Eric should go.”
“What?” Eric looked at Rose, startled. “Why not? I’m her husband. What’s weird about me going with her to a gala?”
“It looks suspicious,” Rose said without hesitation. “You’re going there to get into Darren’s computer, right? Because his wife paid you to, right?”
“So?” Rowen could see what she was getting at, but she didn’t think what they were doing was all that suspicious.
“I’m going,” said Eric, not leaving any of this up for argument.
“So, it’s going to raise questions,” Rose insisted. “It would look less suspicious if you went with someone you worked at the paper with. It would be misdirection. They would assume you were there to, I dunno, send a message or to sort of tease them after that story they ran on Ben. You can act like you got in just to prove you could. If Eric is there, they might suspect it’s on detective business. He’s the one you do that sort of thing with officially now, after all.”
“I’m still going,” Eric insisted, not swayed in the least. He looked at Rowen. “We need to finish getting ready.” The stubbornness in his expression fell a bit, and he frowned. “No, come on.” He groaned. “You’re not seriously considering going without me?”
“She does have a point.” Rowen bit at her bottom lip. She moved closer to her husband and took his hand into her own. She knew he was annoyed which was understandable. “The important thing here is that we get what we need from Darren’s computer, right? That’s what we were hired to accomplish, and that’s the number one priority.”
Eric shrugged, unwilling to commit to a straight answer. Yep, definitely annoyed. “You need my help.”
“I can do this without you.” Rowen looked back at Rose. She knew Rose wanted her to bring her along, but that made even less sense. If she brought Rose, all eyes were definitely going to be on them. They might even be asked to leave. That would be terrible. “I think I know who I should take.”
“Me,” Rose and Eric both said together, flatly.
“No.” Rowen pulled out her cell phone. “I’m sorry,” she added, flashing the two an apologetic smile.
The phone rang a couple of times before Willow answered. “Hey, Rowen. What’s up.”
“Hey, Willow.” Upon Rowen saying her name, Eric swore and Rose threw her hands up. Both trudged off into the living room, likely heading off to go commiserate together. Rowen directed her attention back to the phone. “What are you up to tonight?”
“Not much,” said Willow with a yawn. “Just kinda kicking around the house. Peony wants to dye her hair purple, so I might do that in a minute.”
“Purple?” Rowen repeated. She shook her head and focused. “Look, I was wondering if you wanted to come to a gala with me.”
“The one at Channel 2?” Willow’s tone of voice had immediately become more alert. “Benji is going to that. I told him I wanted to go too, but he’s an intern. He could only get one ticket. You’ve got tickets, though? Seriously? Hey! Peony!” Willow shouted. “Want to go to a gala?”
“No,” Rowen said quickly. “I only have one extra ticket. It would just be you and me.”
“Oh.” Willow shouted again, “Nevermind, Peony!”
“So?” prompted Rowen.
“Yeah, of course. When do we need to leave?” Willow asked over the sound of Peony complaining in the background. Rowen couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, but she sounded annoyed.
“In thirty minutes.”
Willow swore. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Okay. I think I can swing that. Pick me up here?”
“You got it. See ya then.” Rowen hung up and almost immediately wished she hadn’t agreed to that. “Eric,” she called. “Do you think you could give me a hand real quick?”
“Busy!” he answered back.
“Rose?” Rowen called next.
“Also busy!” she responded, which was no great surprise.
Rowen took a deep breath. This was fine, she told herself. She could do this.
Eric did come to help eventually. Of course, his ‘help’ was entirely him running her through the plan. “You get in there, socialize, and the first opportunity to slip away you get, you take it. There won’t be many shots at this.”
“I know,” Rowen said with a sigh, shimmying into her tight red dress. “We’ve been over this a dozen times.”
“Then let’s make it a baker’s dozen.” Eric pulled the flash drive from his pocket. “This has the program you’ll be installing on it. It’s easy. All you have to do is move the file onto his computer and extract it. Run the setup, and it’ll install itself from there.”
“Yes, Dear.” Rowen rolled her eyes at him, pointedly. “I know how files work. I’ve installed them before.” She slipped on her black kitten heels and spun to look at herself in the mirror. The dress brought out the red in her hair. It hugged her curves and made her look pretty darn nice if she did say so herself. She was no statuesque stunner, but she might turn a few heads tonight. “How do I look?” she asked her husband.
“Good,” said Eric, his eyes on her body. He didn’t sound thrilled about that either. “Didn’t you have a… plainer dress?”
“A plainer dress?” Rowen looked down at the little red number she was wearing. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you have something that won’t stand out as much?” he clarified. “Don’t you have something a little stealthier.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll just go on and get my camo dress out of my closet.” Rowen crossed the room to get the small camera and handbag she was going to take. She swatted her husband on the way back for being a moron. “I’m not going to stand out,” she assured him. “This is a fancy gala. There are going to be plenty of women there who stand out more than me.”
“I seriously doubt that.” Eric smiled at Rowen. He stood and pulled her into a hug. “Be careful, all right? Call me as soon as you’re on your way home. If you can manage some texts while you’re in there, try to keep me updated.”
Rowen slowed down long enough to hug her husband back. “I’m sorry you’re not coming along.”
“It’s cool. Rose ruined everything. I understand. Sorry I ever encouraged opening the door.”
Rowen playfully swatted at her husband again. “It’s not like that.” She hesitated. “Well, I guess it is like that. She has a point, though. This is the best way to go about this, I think.”
“I know.” Eric pressed a kiss to her forehead before letting her go. “That doesn’t mean I like it, but I know.”
Together, they headed downstairs. Rose was waiting near the door, her arms folded over her chest. “If you get a chance, give Julia Martinez a piece of your mind
.”
“Darren is probably more responsible for the Ben stuff than she is,” Rowen pointed out.
“I know that, but you’re already exposing him as a cheater so his wife can take him for a mint. I’m not going to get greedy.” Rose stayed behind on the doorstep with Eric. “Be careful.”
“I will,” Rowen assured them both one last time as she got into the car. She made sure to sound confident. Together with Eric, she had gone over what she needed to do plenty. It all seemed very simple… If only she felt half as confident as she was trying to make herself out to be.
Willow was in the house. Rowen had hoped she would be out on the front porch waiting. She wasn’t sure why she had even let herself entertain that as a fantasy. Of course she was going to have to go inside for her. She parked her car and hurried toward the front door of the Greensmith house, catching her heel on a rock once or twice in the dark as she went. Best case scenario, they were already going to be fashionably late for this thing. Rowen didn’t need to show up late and covered in dirt and grass stains.
The front door opened before Rowen could even get to it. Her mother squealed. “Oh, Honey! You look so pretty!” She took her daughter into her arms as soon as she was on the porch.
“Mom!” Rowen tried to pull away. “Please watch my hair… and makeup… and everything. This took ages, and we really need to go. Is Willow ready?”
Tiffany let up, allowing Rowen to step through the front door. Aunts Nadine and Lydia were both waiting downstairs. Both beamed when Rowen came in. Aunt Lydia went so far as to raise up a camera hanging around her neck and snap a few pictures. “You look so beautiful.”
“What are you all doing down here?” Rowen stiffened, not sure how to react to a camera in her face. “Where’s Willow? Is she still in her room? Willow!”
“She said you were going to a ball,” said Tiffany, her hands clasped together in front of her. “Oh, how fancy.”
“It’s a gala,” Rowen corrected. “A fund-raising gala that we’re going to for work related reasons.”
“Still,” said Tiffany, not to be deterred. “Fancy.”