Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Allison Brennan

  “So you went to this party in Brooklyn. At a vacant warehouse?”

  “Is that what this is about? The warehouse? It was just a party.”

  “Jessica is dead.” Panetta was blunt.

  Josh blanched. “What?”

  “Her body was found fifty yards from the main entrance to the warehouse,” Suzanne said.

  He shook his head. “But—I—don’t—” He stopped, confused, and stepped back.

  Suzanne took that as an invitation to enter, and Josh didn’t stop them.

  Panetta’s voice was harsh. “You went to a party with your good friend Jessica, didn’t leave with her, and didn’t bother to check in with her on Sunday? Or Monday morning?”

  “We weren’t dating—I don’t understand. She’s not dead.”

  “We have a positive ID,” Suzanne said, closing the door behind her.

  Josh sat down heavily on the couch. He lived in a large one-room apartment, about five hundred square feet in the corner of the building, with four, tall narrow windows looking out onto the street. The custom woodwork that may have been original to the building had been well maintained by tenants or landlord.

  “I’m just—stunned. Jess.”

  Panetta said, “We’re not here about the illegal party. We’re here about a murder.”

  “She was murdered?” Josh asked, as if that, too, was a revelation.

  Suzanne trusted her instincts, and she didn’t see Josh as a killer, though most killers didn’t look the part.

  “Mr. Haynes, we’re trying to catch Jessica’s killer. We want to talk to anyone she may have seen at the party. Our investigators tell us that at least five hundred people were at the Sunset Park warehouse. You’re telling us it was Saturday night, correct?”

  Josh nodded. “It was more like eight hundred people at the peak,” he added.

  “You and Jessica arrived at what time?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Right after we got there. Jess loved to dance. That’s why she went to the parties, for the great bands. Everyone can just be themselves. I was doing my own thing.”

  “Which was?”

  He shrugged. “Stuff.”

  “How did you find out about the party? Did you get an invitation? Read about it on the Internet? I’m a little rusty in this area.”

  Suzanne suppressed a smile. Vic Panetta knew more than most fifty-year-old detectives about how the college set operated.

  Josh was reticent, and Panetta gently pushed. “I understand you’re worried because that party was illegal, but I can tell you that unless you killed Jessica Bell, or are covering up for whoever did, I’m not going to arrest you for anything you did at the party. I’m a homicide detective, not a narc. But if you don’t help us, I will send your name to the detective in charge of narcotics and gangs and he’ll make your life hell.”

  Josh frowned. “I am kind of involved in organizing some of the parties. But I’m not the only one,” he quickly added.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “We have a website. We don’t post the location until two hours before. Only people we know have the password, and they get out the word in their circles, who pass it along. It’s mostly college kids and working types who need to blow off steam. Live music, a little drinking and drugs, just fun.”

  A little drinking and drugs? Suzanne refrained from climbing onto her soapbox again.

  “So you don’t know everyone who’s there?”

  “Personally, no, of course not.”

  Panetta slid over a piece of paper. “These are the other three party locations where a young woman was killed during a secret party. Were any of these your parties?”

  Josh looked at the paper. Then he sighed in what sounded like relief. “Only the party in the Bronx, at the factory. My group only has them in warehouses and factories.”

  “Do you know who organized the other two parties?”

  “Manhattanville—the one right near the university. I heard it was a frat party, not very big, maybe two hundred people. Broke up early. The one in Harlem, can’t say. But there’s one person who knows more about secret parties than anyone in the city. Wade Barnett.”

  Panetta leaned back, recognition crossing his expression. Suzanne didn’t know the guy.

  “Did Jessica tell you about any threats she may have received?” Suzanne asked. “Maybe a regular at the parties she attended who paid her too much attention?”

  “No. But—” He hesitated.

  “Go ahead,” Suzanne prompted.

  “She seemed kind of jumpy lately. I don’t know why, but she didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Would she have confided in her roommate?”

  “Lauren?” he asked. “No—Lauren didn’t approve of the parties, didn’t like it when Jess came back wasted.”

  “Was there anyone Jessica would have confided in? Maybe a friend, a co-worker, or someone at the college?”

  Josh said, “She was close to this girl who was from out of town. Ashleigh. I don’t know her last name, only met her once or twice. A month ago, maybe longer, she stayed at Jess’s place when Lauren went home to visit her parents.”

  “Do you know where Ashleigh lives? How we can reach her?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Was she in town on Saturday?”

  Josh thought about it. “Maybe. Jess didn’t say she was coming, but like I said, she was jumpy and weird.”

  Panetta said, “We may have additional questions, so we need your contact information.” He handed over his notepad.

  Josh wrote everything down and walked them to the door. “I’ll ask around to some people I know were there.”

  “Why don’t you give us their names?” Suzanne asked.

  “Because they won’t talk to you. They’ll deny they were there, and then shut me out completely. I want to help, really—Jess and I were good friends. I promise, if I find someone with information, I’ll send them to you, okay?”

  Suzanne reluctantly agreed. They could get a warrant for the names later if the evidence pointed in that direction.

  They left, and she said to Panetta, “We need a full background check on him.”

  “Consider it done.”

  She asked Panetta, “Who’s Barnett?”

  “Twenty years ago this summer, Douglas Barnett was killed in a horrific factory accident outside the city. Five men lost their lives. The company paid out a huge settlement to the families. The oldest Barnett son is a financial whiz kid. Turned a couple million into tens of millions, or more. Runs a foundation and donates a lot of money to charity. Wade is his younger brother. He’s always written up on the social pages. Real spoiled-rich-kid type.”

  “Are you putting him on the suspect list?”

  “For what reason? Spoiled nouveau riche kid planning raves? Doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “So let’s introduce ourselves.”

  “It might get messy.”

  “Scared?” she teased.

  He deadpanned her. “Politically messy. The Barnetts are connected. We’d better know what we’re doing.”

  “We do.”

  EIGHT

  Lucy didn’t talk to Sean the entire drive to Woodbridge.

  She was angry with him, but even angrier with herself. She’d wallowed in misery since getting the letter from the FBI, and that wasn’t like her. So she wasn’t FBI material. She had to accept it and move on. Deal with it. Grow up.

  But anger suppressed the sting of not being good enough.

  She had decisions to make, among them whether to stay in D.C. or move back to San Diego. Whether she should go back to school and get her law degree, which several of her professors had encouraged her to do. Or she could follow in Dillon’s footsteps and go to medical school to become a psychiatrist.

  She hadn’t exactly fit in at college, which
was why she’d focused so intently and had excelled in her studies. She hadn’t been the typical eighteen-year-old college freshman, and she didn’t want to return at twenty-five, even if the students in postgraduate school would be similar to her in age.

  She’d interned with the Arlington County Sheriff’s Department for a year and decided that she didn’t want to be a local cop. She was far more interested in the types of crime the FBI investigated than she was in being a beat officer. She’d interned in Congress as well, but she’d never go back there. And the morgue? That had been the most interesting of the three internships, but she didn’t want to work with the dead for the rest of her life.

  The FBI had been perfect, with a key priority in her area of expertise—cybercrime. She also had a master’s in criminal psychology, which would help her working in any of the FBI squads.

  If Lucy had been in limbo waiting for the FBI letter, she felt even more unsettled now.

  She was also ready to move out of her brother’s house.

  She’d lived with Dillon and his wife Kate for more than six years, ever since she’d moved to D.C. to attend Georgetown. She’d never lived on campus; that first year it had been difficult to just go out alone. The week she’d graduated high school, she’d been raped and grossly humiliated when her attack had been aired live on the Internet. Though she’d put on a brave face for her family, it had taken Lucy a lot longer to compartmentalize the pain than she’d let on. Moving in with Dillon and Kate had saved her from the watchful eye of her family, and the distance had helped her piece together her life and dreams.

  She didn’t honestly know whether she was still living with them because of her publicly stated reason that after Quantico she would go wherever the FBI sent her and get her own place then (so why spend the money now on her own apartment?) or because she was too scared to live on her own.

  The fact that her nightmares had returned five weeks ago had been weighing heavily on her. She’d been spending less time with Sean because she didn’t want him to know. She’d dealt with bad dreams before, on her own. She’d do it again.

  But everything was crashing down now, and it was easier to be angry with Sean for pushing her into helping than to address her future.

  And if she were really being honest, she wanted to feel sorry for herself. She replayed the FBI interview over and over in her head, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. Driving to the Virginia suburbs outside D.C. with Sean, focusing on another girl’s problems instead of her own, annoyed her, distracted her from her self-pity. Selfish? Yes. If she’d had the energy to argue with Sean, she would be home right now, in bed, trying to sleep, since it had eluded her all night. Yet she thought that she might make the difference in tracking the whereabouts of Kirsten Benton, she hadn’t tried to get out of it when Sean picked her up.

  Sean turned off I-95 into the Woodbridge suburb. With fifty thousand residents, planned developments, and strategically placed parks and schools, Woodbridge was a great place to raise kids, but Lucy could imagine how teenagers might easily go stir-crazy. Especially a teenager who had been transplanted three thousand miles from her friends and family by a mother who couldn’t see beyond her own pain and feelings of betrayal.

  Several houses in the Bentons’ neighborhood had “for sale” or “bank owned” signs posted in the yard, an all-too-familiar sight across the country, particularly in the halted growth of suburbia. Sean stopped in front of a split-level house more than twenty years old, standard fare for this part of Virginia. The neighborhood was pleasant but unremarkable, the houses on wide lots with bare trees including thinned-out pines separating them from their neighbors. Quiet, not particularly quaint, and now empty, which Lucy suspected had more to do with commuters than the foul weather.

  What kind of home did Kirsten have before her father betrayed her mother and her mother ran away with Kirsten? What did Kirsten see when she came home from school every day—or, more important, what didn’t she see? She was four months from graduating, her future bright, colleges wanting her, yet she sought something she couldn’t get from her family, couldn’t get from her new friends, something that took her away again and again …

  Lucy’s stomach clenched as she realized that it was four months before graduation when she first started talking to the man she believed was nineteen-year-old Georgetown freshman Trevor Conrad. Someone who seemed to know and understand her better than her friends did, better than her family did. What Lucy had not known until it was too late was that he’d researched her long before he contacted her. Knew her favorite bands. Her favorite movies. Her favorite books. All because of places she’d visited and made comments about on the World Wide Web. He knew she was the youngest of seven, came from a family of cops and military heroes. He understood—even though she never said it in so many words—that she wanted to get away from home because of the deep sadness that had permeated her family after the murder of her nephew Justin when she and Justin were only seven.

  “Trevor Conrad” had known more about her than anyone else, and she’d walked right into his trap.

  Had Kirsten made similar mistakes?

  “Lucy, what’s wrong?” Sean asked.

  She shook her head, realizing that she was staring into space and Sean had been trying to talk to her about Kirsten and her mother. “What isn’t wrong?” she countered, not able to discuss her thoughts right now. “I’m ready, though you hardly need me.”

  “We need to talk to Kirsten’s friends, and you’ve worked with teens. You know their in-speak, so to speak.” He smiled at his humor.

  “And you don’t?” she said. “I’m here, so let’s get on with it.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “You’re not really mad at me.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Yes, I am.” But she wasn’t, not at Sean. Not anymore.

  He reached out and lifted the amethyst daisy pendant off her chest. “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m not going to take my anger out on a beautiful piece of jewelry just because the gift-giver picked the lock on my bedroom door.”

  He kissed her. “I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “Try?”

  “I’m not going to make any promises I’m not sure I can keep.”

  Lucy supposed that honesty was better than false promises, but she cherished her privacy, and Sean was going to have to learn that sometimes she needed to be alone.

  They walked up to the front door. Sean had a key and let them in. “Evelyn had to work today, but that’s just as well because I work better without someone asking a million questions.”

  “She’s worried.”

  Sean closed the door behind them. “I don’t like that Kirsten hasn’t contacted anyone, not her mother or a friend.”

  “Unless one of her friends is keeping a secret.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” He walked down the hall to the kitchen. “First I’m going to check Kirsten’s cell phone records. Evelyn told me she left them on the kitchen table.”

  He motioned up the stairs. “Kirsten’s room is at the top on the right. Patrick and I searched it yesterday, didn’t notice anything odd other than what I told you. But maybe you’ll see something different.”

  “Because I’m a girl?”

  “Exactly.” He kissed her again. “I’m going to set up down here and go through the phone records.”

  Sean watched as Lucy went upstairs. He hadn’t been sure she’d like the daisy necklace because she rarely wore jewelry. He was pleased to see the pendant around her neck.

  Sean sat at the table and pulled out his spreadsheet of Kirsten’s friends and their phone numbers. He compared that list to the cell phone log. Nothing looked unusual. Next, he looked at the phone numbers on the log that didn’t match up to Kirsten’s known friends.

  There was one number in the 917 area code that kept coming up. Sean searched the prefix. It was retained for cell phones in New York City. Who did Kirsten know in New York? Sean looked at last Friday’s phone
calls and noted that the same number called Kirsten in the morning and they spoke for eight minutes.

  He dialed the number. It went straight to voice mail, a generic computer voice telling him to leave a message at the tone.

  He emailed Patrick to run a reverse telephone directory search on that number while he continued to go through the rest of the current calls.

  The last call Kirsten made was at 1:07 Sunday morning, to that same 917 number. It lasted one minute.

  The records didn’t identify where text messages were sent or at what time, and there was no way of getting those messages unless Sean had the physical phone.

  Kirsten called two 212 phone numbers on Saturday, in addition to short calls to the original number. Sean dialed them. One was a restaurant. He asked for their hours and location. Manhattan? He quickly pulled the address up on a map and noted that it was only three blocks from Penn Station.

  Amtrak had service from Union Station in D.C. to Penn Station in New York. If Kirsten paid cash, there was no way to trace it. That’s why she didn’t take her car when she left home; she had taken a train to New York. From Woodbridge, there was both train and bus service direct to Union Station.

  He called the second number.

  “Clover Motel, Brooklyn.”

  Brooklyn? That wasn’t near Penn Station. “I’m looking for a guest, Kirsten Benton.”

  “Room number?”

  “I don’t have it. She would have checked in Friday night.”

  “Just a sec.”

  Sean heard the phone placed on a desk and television noise in the background. He Googled the motel for the address. The motel didn’t look too bad, though it wasn’t a place Sean would stay. Had Kirsten reserved a room, or was she calling a guest?

  “Sorry,” the clerk came back on the line. “We have no guest by that name.”

  “What about Ashleigh Benton?”

  The clerk sighed. A moment later he said, “No. No Benton. No Kirsten. No Ashleigh. Anything else?” the clerk asked.

  “Did you work last Friday night?”

  “Who are you?”