Alibis Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  Oh shit. I didn’t have a story ready for this.

  “Oh, hey. I’m a friend of Clover’s. I need to ask her something real quick.”

  “No you’re not. It says the call is from Zayne. Who are you?”

  I had to let Clover see me, but I needed to be armed in case Ryan was.

  “Uh, my name’s Charlie. I think we met once. You’re Ryan, right?” I bent down and picked up a fallen tree branch, a chunk about four feet long. It was hefty enough to do some damage.

  “Clover’s gonna have to call you back later,” he said. The call went dead.

  I dropped the phone into my pocket and lifted the branch with both hands, wielding it like a sword. The bark was rough, and I had no idea if the thing had been deadfall for a long time. It might shatter into splinters at the first whack. With luck, I wouldn’t need any more than one shot.

  I caught a glimpse of pink through the trees. Clover’s tank top. My heart rate picked up as I approached with as much stealth as possible. Still, Ryan heard me a moment before I walked into the small clearing where they stood.

  He had a grip on Clover’s upper arm. When he saw me he spun her around and drew a knife from his belt. With a sharp click it switched open and he held it to her throat.

  “Get out of here,” he said. His handsome face was contorted with rage.

  “Ryan, calm down.” I scanned the area, looking for an easy escape path for the girl.

  “I said—get away!”

  That’s when I noticed they were standing at the edge of a precipice.

  Chapter 48

  I dropped my two-handed grip on the tree branch, holding it down at my right side.

  “Take it easy, Ryan. This isn’t what you want to do.”

  “How the hell do you know what I want?” He tightened his grip on the knife handle and Clover let out a small whimper.

  “Ryan, that helicopter overhead? The one that’s been keeping an eye on us. It’s the police. More officers are on the way.” I prayed that part was true.

  “Oh yeah?” He taunted me, but I saw him give a quick glance at the sky.

  “The police know everything that’s already happened, Ryan. The bullying, the nude photos, the name-calling online.”

  His sneer told me he didn’t care. What was the penalty for bullying someone into leaving town? Probably nothing at all. I took a different tactic.

  “Okay, it doesn’t matter to you. Tell me then, what do you want? What do you hope to gain from this?”

  I could tell he hadn’t thought that far ahead. His gaze went skyward for another split-second as he thought about it. I tightened my grip on the branch, down at my side.

  “Ryan, it will go easier if you let Clover go now. Harming her will only make the situation worse.”

  Drake … I sent all the telepathic signals I could toward the machine hovering four hundred feet above our heads. Send me some backup now.

  “Ryan, c’mon. Let her walk over here by me. We’ll leave you alone.”

  He gave a sharp laugh and pointed at me with the knife. “You’re crazy, lady.”

  It was exactly the chance I needed. I brought the branch up like a baseball bat, stepped in, took aim and swung. It hit his wrist with a sickening crack! The knife flew through the air.

  Clover screamed, frozen at the edge of the sheer drop.

  I followed up with a whack to Ryan’s kneecap and he went to the ground, doubled over in pain, shrieking.

  “Clover! Take this.” I yanked the cord from the hem of my windbreaker and handed her the end. “Pull ’til it rips, if you have to.”

  She acted quickly once she had instructions.

  “Tie his wrists. Tight.”

  His right wrist and hand were already swelling but, sorry, I had no pity. We couldn’t take a chance he would try to take control again. The moment he’d been secured, I let one hand off my weapon and picked up Ryan’s knife. A narrow line of blood rimmed the blade’s sharpened edge. I looked at Clover.

  Her neck showed a two-inch red mark that oozed a trickle of blood. An inch over, slightly deeper, he would have cut her carotid and there would have been no way to save her life this far from help. I felt a rage well up in me and it was all I could do not to kick the man while he was down.

  He’d begun screaming threats at me. His father was an important man in this town. He’d sue me. If anything happened to the use of his hand, I’d be paying, for life. I ignored him and turned to Clover.

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  She nodded mutely, but her body began to shake violently as she walked toward me.

  I pulled Zayne’s phone from my pocket and punched in Drake’s number. Thankfully, this time we had a connection.

  “Help’s on the way,” he said. “You all okay down there?”

  “Sort of. Get them here as fast as you can, if you have to lead them in.”

  “I can see lights just down the mountain, hon. They’ll be along soon. I won’t leave until I see they’ve reached you.”

  My own legs didn’t feel any too steady as I dropped my bat and embraced Clover, never taking my eyes off Ryan Subro. He continued to rant, upping the intensity of the words when she broke away from me and walked toward the drop off, pointing toward its depths.

  “Clover, get away from the edge. You’ll be okay, I promise.”

  She shook her head. I sprinted to her side and pulled her back.

  Ryan screamed her name and called her several choice words.

  “You—shut up!” I shouted at him. “Leave her alone.”

  My words seemed to ring through the air, but when I paused to listen it was actually the sound of sirens. Within a minute, they wound to a halt nearby. I heard voices as the officers got out of their cars.

  “We’re over here,” I called, still not trustful enough to turn my back on Ryan. He’d begun to writhe on the ground, trying to get to his feet, but his injured knee didn’t give him much success. Lucky for us.

  It seemed like a long time, but in reality only moments passed before four officers in Bernalillo County uniforms—three men and a woman—emerged from the forest with guns drawn. Clover and I held our hands up in plain sight.

  “What’s happened here?” the female officer asked.

  I quickly explained how I’d followed the pair after observing what seemed to be a kidnapping at knifepoint. Okay, that last bit might be a twist on the truth. I hadn’t actually seen the knife until I stood here.

  “My husband is the one who called from the helicopter.”

  “Got it. He didn’t give much detail. I’m afraid we’ll have a bunch of questions for you.” Her name badge said she was B. Ramirez.

  At that instant, Clover swooned against me. I reached out to steady her.

  Ryan, who’d remained quiet all of three minutes, began another rant. “Don’t listen to anything she says. I had nothing to do with it.”

  I had a hunch. “Clover? He’s talking about something other than today—this particular incident—isn’t he?”

  Two of the men dragged Ryan to his feet and forced him to limp away with them.

  “They’ll take him downtown,” Ramirez said. “He can’t get at you anymore.”

  “Clover, can you tell me what he was talking about?” I asked gently.

  She sobbed and fell to her knees, pointing toward the cliff where Ryan had a grip on her such a short time ago.

  Officer Ramirez and her partner stepped toward the edge. “Oh, shit,” the male officer said.

  Ramirez turned back toward us, wiping a hand across her face.

  Before anyone could stop me, I walked over to see what they were looking at. It took a minute to spot what they were focused on, but when I did, it took my breath away.

  Forty feet below, on a rock ledge lay a body. Leaves and boughs partially covered the badly decomposed remains, but one thing gave it away immediately. It was a young woman and she had long blonde hair identical to Clover’s. This is where Zayne Delaney had been for the past six mon
ths.

  Chapter 49

  Officer Ramirez treated Clover gently but, nevertheless, she was being considered a ‘person of interest’ until the full story of her sister’s death could be unraveled. A crime-scene unit arrived and the rest of us were quickly shooed out of the area. When Ramirez ushered Clover into the backseat of her cruiser, I got into my Jeep and followed.

  On the way to the downtown detention center, I phoned Donna Delaney.

  “I’m sure Rick and Jane will want her to have an attorney on hand,” she said. “I’ll find out who that is and make a call.”

  “She kept hanging onto me,” I said. “Do you want me to see if they’ll let me stick around until the attorney comes?”

  “If you could, Charlie. That would be wonderful. The family owes you extra for all this.”

  “It’s not about money, Donna. She’s so shaken up, my heart just goes out to her.”

  By the time I negotiated downtown traffic, parked and got into the county lockup, the miracle of overseas phone calls in the modern age had gone into effect. Ramirez came out from somewhere in the innards of the building and told me an attorney was on his way to meet with Clover Delaney.

  “She really wants you present,” Ramirez said. “Says she doesn’t know her parents’ attorney.”

  “Would I be allowed to?”

  “She’s not under arrest yet. As long as the attorney is present and doesn’t mind, I can’t stop you.”

  When the lawyer arrived, it turned out to be someone I knew. Ben Ortiz had represented my brother once, not that long ago.

  “What’s your relationship with the Delaney girl?” Ben asked as we stood near the elevators.

  I explained how I’d known the girls their entire lives, the scenario of babysitting at a young age, and how we’d recently been asked by the aunt to look into the whereabouts of the absent twin.

  “Seriously, I thought she’d either gone away to college as Clover stated, or she’d taken some other whim and left of her own accord.”

  “You think Clover will open up more readily with you around?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. We’ve been getting closer in recent weeks.”

  “Come along, then.” He held the elevator door for me and we went up to a room where he said the conversation would be private.

  When Clover came in she looked marginally better than out in the woods. At least she’d washed her face and hands. Someone had given her some sweats and a jacket, and she was no longer shivering like a flower petal in the wind.

  Ortiz advised Clover to tell him the full story, not to leave out details that could later come back to haunt them both if she were arrested and the case went to trial.

  Clover took a deep breath. “It started with Ryan and his friends hitting on us through our social media accounts.” She shifted in her chair. “Well, it goes back even further. We both started posting selfies when we were in ninth grade. You know, the glamour shots. All the girls do it. You want to look good. There’s a lot of pressure about that. Lots of girls get depressed over their looks and popularity.”

  Ortiz looked as if he wasn’t buying the seriousness of it, but I remembered enough of it to believe her. Girls, especially in middle school, could be so cruel. Remarks about weight, bad hair days, the wrong clothes and pimples really stung.

  “If a girl doesn’t photograph well, she’ll do exotic makeup and use Photoshop to make her picture look better. We’d spend hours on it, doing each other’s makeup. Everyone wanted to look like Kim Kardashian. Zayne even dyed her hair dark for awhile, but it just didn’t look right with her pale skin. She got called Zombie Zayne so she switched it back.”

  “So, girls were posting pictures that didn’t really look like themselves? To, what? Impress boys?” Ortiz quit making notes.

  “Yeah. You know, to look our best.”

  “Obviously, at some point it got a lot more serious than mere photo enhancement.”

  “So, yeah. Through high school we stuck with pictures that made us look our best. Dad gave us credit cards and never asked questions, so we could buy all the cool clothes we wanted. But still … you know, you fantasize about boys. What’s the first kiss going to be like? And other things … you know … well, sex. What will that be like?”

  I remembered those concerns, as well.

  “So, like, junior and senior year the pressure’s really getting intense. Nearly all our friends had hooked up, like, lots of times. Zayne was more, um, open about it. Flirted a lot. She said she hadn’t actually had sex yet, but I wasn’t sure. Some of the kids she’d go off with when I decided to hike or read a book … well, they were the wilder crowd. Kids had called her Zany Delaney, like, forever, and she got a kick out of it. She wanted to live up to the nickname.”

  The lawyer, clearly, was beginning to wonder where all this was leading.

  “So, it was prom of our senior year and Ryan Subro had transferred to our school from public school. In private school, it’s mostly kids of successful people like our parents. Big-name businessmen around town send their kids there, too, so it’s kind of clubby. You know. Anyway, Ryan started trailing around after Zayne like she was the prettiest girl ever. He asked for nudes and she sent a couple earlier in the year, but she was basically stringing him along, finding out if he was really into her or was just being a horn-dog.

  “I guess Ryan didn’t realize we were twins for awhile. He’d say things to me sometimes when he obviously thought he was talking to Zayne. I talked to her about it, about how she shouldn’t be so open with him unless she was serious. Anyway, it’s close to prom and he figures it out, and he’s, like, all wow, ‘I could have two prom dates’ and stuff. Then he starts hinting around about having us both in, uh, you know … in the bedroom.”

  She wiped her palms on her sweatpants leg and tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “Zayne actually suggested it to me, that we go along with him. I said hell no, no way. I always thought Ryan was way too full of himself. You know, thinking he’s all hot. And he isn’t.”

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “So, we get through prom and graduation and all, and I haven’t let anyone take a nude picture of me, but Zayne had sent Ryan a couple and then she’s shocked to find them popping up on Instagram and Whisper. And I say ‘why are you surprised?’ I mean, did she honestly think Ryan respected her privacy, and those photos were for his eyes only?”

  “Maybe she did think that.”

  “Yeah, that’s what she said, but she’s all depressed because he’s posting these pictures and saying she’s a slut. In the same breath, he’s calling me a prude because I wouldn’t go along with his little fantasy. And then his friends join in and they’re saying it too.” She took a shaky breath. “My folks always offered us a big trip each summer, so last summer we took it, went to Greece with them. Just got outta here for a few months, and it was good. It was all good. I figured by September Ryan would have been sent off to some east coast school and we’d never hear from him again. I mean, seriously, he had to grow up sometime, right?”

  I was guessing not.

  Ortiz spoke up. “Let’s talk about the day Zayne died. That’s what the police are going to question you about.”

  Clover reached over and took my hand.

  “We didn’t know what to do—Zayne and me. Every time we went out, Ryan was all over her, really putting the pressure on. So, last October, I told Zayne, we need to get him away from the crowd where his friends are, like, egging him on. Maybe, away from those other guys he would be more … more real, I guess. You know, where we could talk to him and let him know how we felt. I suggested the hike in the mountains. I knew the trails and all.”

  I squeezed her hand for encouragement.

  “So you three went up to the place where it happened?” Ortiz asked.

  “Yeah.” Clover’s voice grew quiet. “It was a mistake from the start. Ryan misread everything. He thought we three, up there in nature, it would be fun and kinky. Right away,
he pulled out his camera and wanted us to open our shirts and let him take pictures. Zayne tried to laugh it off, like she always did, but I yelled at him and told him to grow up.”

  Her pressure on my hand increased.

  “He got really ugly then, like, all in a rage. He started screaming all these filthy names at us both. It made me furious. I just felt this awful anger inside me and I wanted to push him off the edge of the cliff. He charged at me, and I swear I would have let him fall.” A deep breath. “He was pretty agile, though, and when he got right to the edge of the drop-off he, like, swerved to the side. He grabbed for Zayne—or maybe she grabbed for him. I don’t know for sure. It happened really fast. She went over the edge. We looked down and there she was—”

  A sob escaped.

  “I swear, it just happened so fast. I was stunned.” Her voice was ragged.

  “What did Ryan say?” Ortiz asked.

  “He was panting and looking scared for a minute, but then he stood up straight and looked right at me. ‘You pushed your sister,’ he said. And I said, ‘No. No way. You pushed her.’ But I didn’t know. It happened so fast. I had some scratches on my arm and he pointed to them and said, ‘See? The cops see those scratches and they’ll know it was you.’

  “He started to come toward me, and I could tell he was thinking about pushing me, too. I ran toward the car and he caught me and threw me on the ground. ‘You aren’t telling anyone,’ he said to me. ‘Not the police, not your parents. No one.’ He said if I told anyone at all, he would come back and kill me, and it wouldn’t be a quick death like Zayne got.”

  She’d nearly crushed the bones in my fingers by now, but I couldn’t ask her to let go. The poor girl was reliving the trauma she’d held inside for months.

  “Go through it with me now,” the lawyer said. “Tell me exactly what you did next.”

  “Ryan had his hand at my throat and he made me promise to go along with what he suggested. I was so close to blacking out, I just agreed with him. The first thing he did was … oh, god … he raped me. He was brutal and excited all at the same time. Afterward, I cried and the more I cried, the more he smiled. I felt dirty and cheap, and I was such a fool.”