The woman’s eyes flicked up to take in the two of us as we paused a respectful distance away. “Who’s asking?” she said.
Fletcher took her warrant card from her pocket and offered it to Bell. “Tara Fletcher. We spoke on the phone? May we sit?”
Bell took the badge and looked it over before she nodded for us to sit, scooting to the far end of the bench.
“This is my partner, DI MacBain,” Fletcher introduced me, and I inclined my head in greeting. “We’d like to talk to you about your husband, John, and what happened to him.”
“What would you like to know?” Bell asked bitterly. “I told that sergeant who arrested him that John was innocent, that he’d never had anything to do with heroin or the like. Sure, he dealt a little weed from time to time, but nothing huge. Then that man suddenly found heroin in his car after they’d already searched it once, and that was apparently enough evidence for him.” Bell’s voice shook as she spoke, fingers clenched over the top of her clutch.
“It’s not enough evidence for us,” Fletcher assured her. “We think Townsend took a bribe and framed your husband.”
“He’s the same man who murdered that poor boy, isn’t he?” Bell asked, and anger contorted her face.
Fletcher nodded. “Yes. He’s claiming self-defence. If we can prove he’s corrupt in other ways as well, we’ll have a much easier time getting him convicted for all his crimes.”
“And if we can clear your husband’s name in the process, even better,” I added. “Is there anything at all that you can think of that might help? Did John ever mention someone named Ariel Arktell?”
“I’ve never heard that name before. I’m sorry.” Bell’s shoulders slumped, her expression despondent. “I wish I knew something that could help, but his arrest just came out of nowhere…”
Fletcher lightly touched her hand and smiled. “That’s okay. Townsend’s obviously rather crafty if he’s gotten away with it for this long, but we’ll figure something out. You’ll see your husband soon, I promise.”
A tear slipped down Bell’s cheek as she nodded and smiled shakily. “Thank you. Please get the bastard.”
“That’s the plan.” Fletcher winked, and we stood up, leaving Bell Santan alone on the park bench. We took our time as we walked away, enjoying the sun as we made our way back to the car. “We’ll have to get a warrant to look at his bank records. Maybe there was a deposit from around that time.
“Here’s hoping he wasn’t smart enough to just take cash,” I agreed. “The heroin might still be in evidence lockup. Maybe there’s something on it.”
“When’s Skye’s roommate supposed to arrive?” Fletcher asked.
I checked my watch. “Twenty minutes. So we’d better hurry.”
Fletcher motioned towards the pavement. “Lead the way.”
Eleven
We got back to the station with three minutes to spare, but we found that we couldn’t even get into the car park. The crowd of protestors had swelled almost exponentially with more people arriving all the time. People carried candles or pictures of Cameron Houser, and they formed a ring around something in the centre, though I couldn’t make out what it was through all the bodies. It was almost completely silent as I stepped from the car, the only sound the gentle rustle of shoes over concrete.
I spotted Alana and Rayla approach from across the street, both dressed in dark colours and holding unlit candles. Rayla caught my eye as they drew closer and nodded before she and Alana merged into the rest of the gathering.
“Let’s take the long way round,” I whispered to Fletcher and started to swing in a wide arc towards the station’s back entrance, steering well clear of the vigil. At least for the rest of the afternoon, the car park was no longer our space to occupy.
Before we’d gone ten steps, I spotted a nervous young woman watching the proceedings in the car park and flicking her eyes towards the front door as if she had no idea what to do. Her blonde hair fell past her shoulders, curtaining half her face, and her thin frame was swallowed up by an overly-large jumper, making her look younger than she actually was. On a hunch, I turned and approached her. “Excuse me, are you Skye Arnott’s roommate?”
She looked startled that I had addressed her, brown eyes wide behind the protective shield of her hair. “Y-yes. Erin Young. I’m sorry, who are you?”
“DI Callum MacBain. I’m the senior investigating officer on Skye’s case. I’m the one who called you in.”
Recognition flashed across her red-rimmed eyes, and she nodded.
“We’ll take you in the back entrance if you want to follow us?” I suggested, tilting my shoulders back the way I came.
“What’s going on there?” she asked as she followed Fletcher and me, still looking towards the car park.
“It’s a vigil for Cameron Houser,” I explained. “We thought it best if we didn’t disturb them.”
We swung around to the back of the building, though the bare concrete hall leading to the station’s main room probably wasn’t the most comforting of introductions to the place. Erin stuck close to Fletcher’s back until we’d left the corridor behind.
The mood inside the station was sombre, matching that of the vigil outside. No one seemed to want to speak too loudly, and someone had even drawn the blinds just a little, leaving the room splashed with shadows.
“This way,” I said to Erin. We were only a few steps away from the interview room, and I held the door open for the others before allowing it to swing shut behind me. “Please, take a seat.”
The chairs around the table were all made of plain metal, uncushioned and unadorned, and Erin looked at one like it was about to bite her, her hands disappearing in the long sleeves of her jumper. Fletcher sat first, to prove that it was okay, and then Erin carefully eased herself into the chair.
“I understand you found Skye?” I began. It maybe wasn’t the most tactful place to start, but sometimes there was just no other way.
Erin immediately flinched, that image no doubt seared into her retinas. “Yes. I did.”
“Can you walk us through it?” I said though I knew that was a huge and painful ask.
Erin took several deep, shuddering breaths and then began to speak. “I spent the night at my boyfriend’s, and I thought Skye had already left for work. I mean, her shoes were still by the door, but she didn’t answer so I guess I thought she’d just worn a different pair or something. So I made myself something to eat, and I watched a little TV, and when I went upstairs to the bathroom, the door was closed. Which I thought was weird.” She stopped there and squeezed her eyes shut, though they sprung open again only a second later, the darkness marred by whatever she saw in the bathroom.
I slid the box of tissues across the table towards her. “It’s alright. Take your time.”
Erin blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Her face was pale and blotchy from crying, and there were red lines down one side of her neck like she’d scratched herself. “I’m sorry. I’ve never--nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
“Nor to most people,” Fletcher assured her. “We understand.”
It took her almost a full moment to regain enough control over her bobbing throat to continue, and when she did, the words poured out of her, tumbling over each other in their haste to be free. “I knocked first, even though I knew she wasn’t home, because that’s what you do when the bathroom door is closed, isn’t it? I opened the door, and I stepped inside, and I saw that the shower curtain was pulled shut, which I thought was weird, but it didn’t really matter, and it wasn’t until I sat down on the toilet that I--that I--” Her throat jumped and clicked and closed up tight, sealing the image inside of her. She coughed up what she was trying to say just as Fletcher reached for her hand. “That I saw the blood. There were three drops of it on the tile.” She arranged her fingertips on the tabletop, illustrating what she had seen. “I thought maybe Skye had cut herself shaving, though I wasn’t sure how it would have gotten outside the bath. It’s weir
d, don’t you think, the things our brains tell us to justify what we’ve seen?”
I nodded in agreement, but Erin wasn’t really paying attention to either of us. Her eyes had gone glassy, cast back in time. Her voice turned dreamy, almost indistinct as she continued. “I opened the shower curtain, and there she was. The water was pink. That’s what I noticed first. It was pink, and everything but her face and knees was submerged. Her eyes were open. They looked right at me. Her skin was all white and wrinkly.” Tears spilt down her cheeks as her voice shook, her entire body trembling with the force of trying to get each word out.
“You can stop now. It’s okay,” Fletcher said, but Erin didn’t seem to hear her.
“I screamed. I thought it was a joke somehow. Some prank she had set up for me, but she didn’t move, didn’t start to laugh, just floated there, in that horrible pink water. I don’t--I don’t understand why she would do that.” Some semblance of recognition came back into Erin’s eyes as she focused her gaze on me. “Why would she do something like that?”
“I don’t believe that she did,” I said. There was a certain type of comfort to knowing that her friend hadn’t killed herself, but it would only be replaced by the cold horror of knowing she’d been murdered.
It took Erin about ten seconds to grasp what I had said. Relief flooded her face, coursing down the crevices grief had carved into her skin, but then came that horror, creeping up over one shoulder like a creature from a low rate horror film.
“Murdered?” she whispered. The creature had its claws around her neck, but she still couldn’t fully fathom what it meant.
“We don’t have hard proof yet, but we believe both she and a man named Jacob Greene were killed because they found something out about New Wave Industries that they shouldn’t have,” I explained. I pulled up a picture of Jacob, careful to make sure it was one of him alive and smiling rather than a crime scene photo. “Do you recognize this man?”
Erin wiped her eyes so she could look at it with clear vision. “I don’t think so.”
“How did Skye seem this week?” Fletcher asked. “Was she acting oddly at all?”
“She wasn’t home much, I guess,” Erin said. “She’d stay out after work, and she was gone all of last weekend, too. I thought she was just off with her boyfriend. Do you think she was with this Jacob person instead?”
“Maybe, if they were digging deeper into Jacob’s discovery,” I said.
Erin sniffled. “What did they find?”
“That part we don’t know yet. Jacob wiped his own hard drive. Our tech guy is having trouble recovering anything from it, and Skye took her work laptop somewhere. We were hoping we could get permission to look for it in your house?” Without that laptop, our investigation was probably sunk.
“Sure,” Erin agreed, wiping at her nose with the sleeve of her jumper. “I'm staying with my boyfriend right now. I just… I can’t go back. Here.” She set her handbag on the table and began to root through it until she found a key ring. She pulled one off and held it out to me. “Take this.”
She dropped the key in my palm, and I closed my fingers around the cold metal. “Thank you. And thank you for coming in as well. I know this wasn’t easy. Would you like someone to escort you home?”
“That’s okay,” Erin said. “My car is outside.”
“We’ll walk you out.”
The three of us stood, the motion practically in sync, and then filed out of the small room. I glanced at Fletcher, and she nodded, confirming my decision to go directly to Skye’s house. We needed to know what was so important to kill for, and we needed to know if Jacob and Skye had included anyone else in the project. There could be more people in danger. The killer was spacing his strikes out, trying to make them seem unconnected, so hopefully, we still had time before he went after his next victim. But if there was another member of the Scooby Gang, why hadn’t they come forward once they realized the others were dead? We could protect them that way, but not if they remained anonymous.
We gave the vigil a wide berth once more, walking Erin right up to her car. Her hands shook as she took her keys out and clicked the button on the fob, the click of the lock loud in the silence. Fletcher put her hand lightly on Erin’s shoulder. “Try to get some sleep, yeah?”
Erin nodded, but I could tell from her face that sleep wasn’t going to happen for a long time. The only thing waiting for her behind her eyelids would be that image of Skye in the bath. We stood back and watched as she climbed into the car and drove off, wanting to make sure she was okay as she set out. Our own car was just across the street, the engine awfully loud against the calm of the vigil. Several people at the back of the crowd glanced at us as we went past but didn’t seem bothered by it.
“I feel bad for Erin,” Fletcher said, staring out the window with one hand tucked under her chin. “For all of them. Things will never be the same for them.”
I glanced at the GPS, making sure I was headed the right way. “You could say that about a lot of things that happen, but yeah, especially in this case.” There were some things that you simply never fully recovered from.
Ten minutes later, we were parked outside Skye and Erin’s house. Adams and her scene of the crime officers were back now that we knew it wasn’t just a suicide, using the new information to sweep the area for anything they might have missed the first time. Adams spotted my car as I turned the engine off, and she shoved her tablet at Farin’s chest then jogged over to meet us.
“What is it? Did you learn something new?” she asked, breathing a little heavily.
“We’re looking for Skye’s work laptop,” I answered, slamming my door. “Have you found it?”
Adams scratched at the back of her head. “I don’t think so.
“Do you mind if we take a look around the house?” I asked. Adams could get a little overprotective of her crime scenes sometimes. It was always best to ask permission first.
“Just wear gloves,” she said and handed us two pairs from the seemingly endless supply she kept about her person.
We let ourselves inside. The ground floor was quiet, but I could hear footsteps up above, people moving about the bathroom, looking it over again. “Split up?” I suggested.
Fletcher gave me a thumbs-up. “I’ll take the upstairs.”
We separated, Fletcher bounding up the stairs two at a time while I threaded my way towards the kitchen. There were dirty dishes still in the sink--Skye’s last meal, maybe. Photo strips, like the kind you took in an arcade booth, were stuck to the fridge by magnets, and I pulled one off to take a closer look. It had a dinosaur theme, and Erin had her arm thrown around the shoulders of a young black haired woman who could only be Skye. They grinned broadly, each frame a different pose or silly expression as their eyes laughed, colourful costume hats propped on their heads. I put the strip back, careful to make sure I left it exactly where I found it, and then turned my attention away from the fridge.
I hunted through the cupboards, trying to think like I was a nervous young woman trying to hide something incriminating. The cupboard under the sink was crammed with cleaning products, all the lids open and smeared with product, and there was a litter box in the tiny utility room, though the cat was nowhere to be seen. No doubt Erin had taken it with her to her boyfriend’s.
I passed Farin as I stepped into the living room, and he nodded at me, a large camera bundled in his arms. Magazines covered the coffee table, and ceramic mugs dotted every surface, each one containing several leftover mouthfuls of liquid. I looked behind the sofa, under the cushions, and even got down on the floor to peer underneath it and the armchair shoved in the corner. A desktop sat in the adjacent corner, its screen dark until I shook the mouse. The username read skye_22 and asked for a password. A Playstation 4 sat beside it, though it wasn’t currently plugged in. I wondered if Erin knew Skye’s password.
I left the computer for the moment, meaning to head upstairs to check in with Fletcher. A small door caught my eye. It was barely w
aist-high, set into the wall under the stairs, and it opened to reveal a tiny shoe cupboard. A wooden rack filled the space, bearing at least eight different pairs of jumbled shoes. I almost swung the door shut without another thought, but the dark space to the right of the rack caught my eye. I knelt and squeezed my head and shoulders into the cramped space, reaching an arm back to feel around in the shadows. My hand fell on a canvas bag, and I grunted as I drew it forth, neck bent so I didn’t whack my head on the doorframe as I pulled out of the wardrobe.
I held a small messenger bag by the strap, its buckles securely fastened. I undid them one by one and opened the bag. A silver laptop lay nestled inside, its top emblazoned with the Far Reach Industries logo.
“Fletcher!” I yelled as I took the bag to the kitchen table.
“What?” she called from upstairs, voice muffled.
“I found it!”
“Coming!”
She thundered down the steps and came into the kitchen. I set the laptop on the table and opened the lid, pressing the power button to wake it up. I plugged it into a nearby socket, just in case. The laptop sprang to life much faster than my father’s dinosaur had, and I typed in Walsh’s administrator username and password. The screen welcomed us, flashed black for a moment, and then the desktop sprang up, instantly ready to go.
The laptop was already connected to the flat’s internet, so I went right to Skye’s work email. She was still logged in there as well. Unlike Jacob, she hadn’t erased everything. But there were only the two messages between the two of them, whatever else they’d discussed done in person with no leftover record.
I scrolled through the subject lines of the other emails, but nothing stood out to me. They were mostly work-related, to and from Walsh or the clients she worked with. “Nothing,” I said, frustrated.
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