“Either his secret is already out . . . ,” Graham said.
“Or his note left the scene with whoever killed Tenley,” I finished on a sigh. Shit. I liked that kid. “But the print you got wasn’t his, or it would’ve hit in the DPS database. He’s a teenager.”
“Correct. I checked that by hand when his note was missing.” Graham raised one index finger. “All of this is predicated on a big if: if anyone killed her.”
“Oh, come on, Graham.” I rolled my eyes. “What else can you possibly need?”
“I need to know you’re not bent on making this something it’s not because of Charity.” Graham’s voice softened. “I know this is a hard day for you. And the similarities are weird. You’ve even got me wondering. But we have no evidence that anyone had anything against the family, or that the girl was out there under any coercion. Presents and rambling notes for her people could very well be parting gifts and advice from a girl planning to jump. I need you to find your objectivity.”
I flopped backward, my eyes roving the ceiling. “You might be right. But I just don’t see it: Only child, by all accounts lavished with love, brilliant student, star athlete. She was looking for an apartment in California. The new boyfriend is the only thing that sticks out as a red flag for me, and even then, why would a girl as beautiful as Tenley Andre swan dive off Mansfield Dam over any guy? There are a million more where he came from.”
“I don’t see the motive, either. Just telling you where the evidence is stacking up.”
“But why is it stacking up so damned easily?”
Graham tipped his head to one side and waved a Come out with it.
“If I were going to murder a bright young woman from a wealthy family, it wouldn’t be the dumbest thing in the world to make it look like a suicide.” I let my words hang as Graham’s head started bobbing.
“Maybe. Minimal cops, no fuss, no worries about getting caught. But why would someone want her dead? Motive is more important to a murder case than a suicide.”
“Right now, my money is on a secret. Maybe Tenley’s, maybe someone else’s. All the trails are still fresh. Something might jump at Jim in the morning.” I didn’t want to mention Stella Connolly until I knew a little more.
“Let’s wait for the postmortem and go from there,” Graham said. “I’ll pull the photos from the scene in the morning, too—if she didn’t jump, somebody either pushed her or planted her there.”
“Thank you, Graham.” Without really thinking about it, I reached for his hand, his big baseball player fist swallowing my icy fingers in warmth.
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m not convinced—I’m saying we’ll see. Pick you up in the morning on my way to the ME’s office?”
“I’ll bring the coffee.”
Shutting the door behind him, I felt lighter than I had in months.
A little more proof before morning, and I’d pull him right off the fence and squarely into my camp.
I reached for my laptop, plugged my phone in, and opened my browser. Tenley’s Instagram password loaded with nary a glitch—seemed that swiper app was worth the fifty bucks. I opened her recently tagged photos, inching them down the screen as I scanned for any teensy detail that might give me a clue which goose to chase.
Tenley dancing, eyes closed and head thrown back, arms in the air. I zoomed in on her face. Her lashes spilled down her cheeks nearly halfway to the tip of her nose, a small smile playing around her lips. Brows relaxed. Forehead smooth. She was in the moment.
Happy. Like Stella said.
Next.
Twenty shots later, I spotted the Davenport kid. Tenley was talking to a girl whose bright-purple hair matched her bright-purple crop top. Zayne stood behind Tenley, hands jammed into his pockets, muscles coiled. She didn’t see him, but he saw her. And if those daggers he was staring were real, she’d have been shredded like last month’s bank statement before she made it to the bottom of the dam. Ten more shots down was the image I’d seen earlier, his hand behind her and her angry sideways glare fixed on him.
Five more, someone had tagged Tenley in one corner of a video shot of a bunch of kids drinking straight out of a keg with a funnel. I zoomed again. She looked frightened, running for a set of French doors on the back wall of the large room packed with teenagers.
Next shot. Tenley and Nicky Richardson in profile, standing on a wide stone balcony. Tenley’s easy smile was back, her hand on Nicky’s shoulder.
So whatever she was scared of, it was in the middle of the beer-chugging jocks and Nicky’s appearance at her side. He said he’d “rescued her” from Davenport.
Good enough for now.
I clicked to the department’s log-in page, entered my DPS password, and punched Zayne Davenport’s plate number into the traffic-cam search. Last twenty-four hours. City and surrounding areas. “Go.” The dam was so far from any camera station, it’d take days to search every way to that road for cars belonging to people Tenley might’ve known, but an affidavit from Nicky about what he saw at the party would get us a warrant to pick Captain Football up if he’d so much as breathed in the vicinity of the lake Tuesday morning.
A little colored wheel spun on the screen as the data loaded. I tapped one finger on the edge of the keyboard and stared at the page like I could will the information to show up faster. There. I scrolled all the way back to the wee hours.
Nothing after he turned right on Rosebud, four blocks from his house, at 1:38.
Damn. What if Zayne was telling the truth? There are a lot of assholes in the world who aren’t murderers.
Next up, Simpson. I pulled the plates for the late-model Ram pickup registered to him and ran another search. It seemed like it took twice as long for the data to load that time, my fingers tapping faster until I had to get out of the chair and pace some more.
I leaned over the desk when the fields started to populate, waiting for the early-morning hits.
He passed through a tollbooth on Highway 45 at 1:12. Turned onto University Club Drive at 1:24. And then nothing until he ran a red light on FM 620 at 5:18.
I double-checked his home address. Pulled up a map and dropped pins, first at the dam, then at each traffic cam and Simpson’s home.
He lived between the city and the dam. The tollway could take him home, but University Club was past his house.
I went back to the images, checking his trunk against the rising sun in the third one. He was heading away from the school—and away from the dam, in a roundabout fashion—in a big hurry, right around sunrise.
I made a note on my map pin, my eyes jumping between the marked places. It didn’t look great for him, but it still wasn’t hard evidence. Dammit, why couldn’t there be a traffic cam right near the fucking dam? Watch the feed, get the answer, pick up the bad guy, and save or salvage what was left of the week.
It couldn’t ever be easy.
I shoved the computer away. Not exactly the ending note I’d choose for my first day on a real case in months, but the truth lurked somewhere, waiting for us to uncover it.
And Tenley needed me to keep digging.
Face scrubbed and lights out, I turned the covers back as my phone bleated a text alert.
Archie: Turn on your TV.
Shit.
Without having to ask, I clicked the set on and punched the buttons for channel two.
Sure enough, Skye Morrow’s faux-serious face filled half the screen, quickly replaced by a series of stills of what appeared to be naked women with strategic blurring as Skye’s voice droned in the background. “The internet pornography industry has a disturbing underbelly that’s closer to home than you’d imagine. Tonight, an exclusive News2 investigation leads to the man who puts these unsettling images into thousands of homes via the dark web. A warning to parents: this report is intended for mature audiences.”
I sat on the crisp sheets, my eyes glued to the screen. The images were fuzzy, but the women in them had one thing in common: wide-eyed terror.
“
Hundreds of videos, all apparently depicting violent sexual assault.” Skye’s words dropped slowly as more strategically grayed-out images flashed by.
“More troubling still? This site, where some of these videos get hundreds of thousands of views every day, originates from a server right here in Austin.” Skye’s tone was low and ominous. “More on what we found there right after this.”
I grabbed my phone and dialed Archie. “Holy shit,” I said when he picked up.
“We have three guys who’ve been tracking this operation for five months, trying to prove any of this is real and not staged,” Archie said. “Does she even goddamn care that she’s going to up their web traffic and ad revenue with this?”
“No. She cares about keeping her job. I’ve never seen so many filler injections in one face. And when you think about the people my mother surrounds herself with, that’s pretty serious.”
“I hate the press sometimes,” he grumbled.
“I hate Skye Morrow all the time,” I said. “But you know . . . she’s not wrong about this, Archie. Just in my time in uniform there’s been an uptick in the number of SAs that get reported, and we all know how many more go unreported. The more people there are who watch this bullshit, the more act it out. The link is there.”
“I know. I hate walking this damned tightrope between freedom and public safety.” He sighed.
“True story.”
The commercial faded to black and Skye was back, pacing in front of a giant channel two logo. “News2’s cyber investigations team tracked down the website’s owner. Ray Wooley operates the site these images came from through a server in this southeast Austin office building.” A ramshackle converted warehouse took over the screen. “We caught up with Mr. Wooley yesterday afternoon, but as you might have guessed, he wasn’t too happy to see us.”
Footage rolled. Skye: “Ray Wooley? Do you own the computer server upstairs that runs a pornography site specializing in videos of assault and torture?”
A middle-aged, middle-height, middle-sized man with an overgrown hipster beard and black plastic-framed glasses looked dead into the camera and told Skye something the station wouldn’t air, then turned away and pulled up his hood as he jogged down the street. Skye gave admirable chase in her four-inch heels, shouting more questions, but he slid into a dark late-model sedan and sped off.
Back in the studio, Skye told her audience to stay with News2 for more on this exclusive investigation. She vanished, replaced by a red-faced man in a Stetson brandishing an AR-15 in his left hand and pounding a podium with his right as he screamed Second Amendment talking points into a crowd of about thirty rifle-toting, camouflage-clad fans. “Authorities were on guard in Hyde Park near the UT campus today as student anti-gun protestors faced off with Senator Bobby Wayne Otis and members of his Guardians of the Second group. Otis has become the staunchest gun-rights activist in the Capitol in the past two sessions—”
I clicked the set off.
“Jesus,” I said to no one in particular. And about both reports.
“On the bright side, if anyone comes forward with an affidavit about one of those assaults being the real deal, the cyber guys get their warrant,” Archie said. “On the darker side, she just told every wannabe sicko in town where to get ideas over their broadband. Like we don’t have enough to do.”
“Good thing we’re smarter than your average sicko.”
“Jessa DuGray notwithstanding.”
“We’re smarter than that one, too. Haven’t you heard that the Rangers always get their man?”
“I wish I felt as sure as you sound.”
“I am sure,” I said, “because I have to be.”
17
I was already awake when Jim rang my phone at just past the ass crack of dawn Wednesday. “Morning, sunshine,” I said, putting it to my ear.
“I believe that’s the first time anyone has ever called me that.”
“What a travesty.”
“I have an email that says your victim’s father is due at the morgue in about an hour.”
“So I heard. I’m riding in with Graham.”
“Getting the whole band back together here, are we?”
“Going to be a heck of a reunion tour if I’m anywhere close on what happened to this girl.”
“Don’t tell me. Can’t have my conclusions compromised by knowing what you want to hear.”
“Check. See you in a bit.”
“Yep. I’ll leave your names at the desk, just come on back.”
“Captain Queasy is taking dad out while I come in with you,” I said.
“Oh good. I like Hardin, but mopping up after him twice was enough.”
I laughed around the goodbye and put the phone on the night table. Running one hand through my hair, I sat up and surveyed the knotted mess of blankets on the floor next to the bed.
Jake Simpson. The track coach had scared up fitful dreams all night. I didn’t like him. Hadn’t from the minute I set eyes on him, and not just because of his too-white teeth and too-perfect hair.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, the hotel-grade carpet rough on my feet as I padded to the bathroom and turned on the shower, replaying every word the guy had uttered as the hot water pounded my shoulders and back.
The thing that kept coming to mind was that he didn’t really seem sad. Charity’s gymnastics coaches had about lost their minds when she died. And this guy, who saw Tenley every day and had her to thank for his Coach of the Year award, didn’t shed a single tear. That should’ve registered with me immediately, but now that it had, it wouldn’t let go.
Tenley knew his secret. That had to be it. But because she was involved with him, or because she knew someone who was?
By the time I shut off the water and turbaned my hair up in a towel, I wasn’t closer to an answer.
I leaned toward the mirror, flicking a mascara wand over my long lashes. Not because Graham would be there; because my mother had a lot of things wrong, but she was right about appearances. Pretty gets more attention, opens more doors.
I nodded at my reflection. “Go with the gut, but know it’s not foolproof,” I said. God knew I’d heard Archie say that enough in my lifetime. When you got right down to it, it was good advice for more than just police work.
My gut leaned Simpson. Maybe it was him.
And maybe it was a coincidence. They were rare, in my experience, but they happened. My gut was rock solid on Tenley, though—the more we dug up, the deeper I dug in against the suicide theory.
Graham knocked on the door just as I pulled my second boot on. I swung it open and smiled when I saw the Starbucks cups cradled in his big left hand.
“Pike Place, no milk, two sugars.” He held one cup out.
“I thought coffee was my department.” I took it and pulled the little green stick out of the top, then closed my lips over the lid and took a sip.
Graham’s eyes stayed on my mouth until he averted them to the wall behind me, rocking up on the balls of his feet and clearing his throat. “I couldn’t sleep this morning. Or most of last night. Thinking about what you said. About someone trying to make us think she jumped.”
I swallowed the coffee, stepping into the hallway and turning for the elevators. “And?”
“If—I’m saying if—that’s what we’re seeing here, someone went to a lot of damned trouble.”
I sighed, opening my mouth before he put one hand up.
“I’m still here, aren’t I? But I pulled photos and reports up when I got home last night and . . . if somebody killed this girl, it was really well planned. The gifts. The notes. Someone went pretty far to make it look like she did herself in. Someone who had to know her pretty well, understand the relationships she had with everyone who mattered in her life. Someone she trusted with secrets. Why would someone who loved her want her dead?”
I punched the button for the elevator and took another sip of my coffee so I wouldn’t have to answer that. Because beyond what I’d already tol
d him about Simpson, I didn’t have the first fucking clue.
The doors whispered open and I stepped into the little box, feeling Graham’s stare on my jawline before I slid my eyes to him. “What if the presents weren’t what we’re seeing them as?” I mused. “What if she was just feeling generous, and we’re reading too much into it?”
“You think the fact that she had a bag full of well-thought-out gifts for everyone who was important to her isn’t an apology for offing herself? Remind me to talk to you about this bridge I’m trying to sell later.”
The doors opened to the lobby and we walked outside in silence. “You want to take my truck?” I pulled the keys from my pocket.
“Still can’t stand even letting someone else drive, huh? Gotta have control.” Graham smiled and stopped by my maroon F-150. “That’s okay. I’m man enough to ride shotgun.”
I steered through familiar streets, hitting the gas on the I-35 onramp. “If she was going to jump, why take presents out there with her?” I asked, turning to look at him.
“Good question. Maybe she wanted to make sure they were found?”
“But why not just leave them on her bed or something? Taking them to the dam if she knew she was going to jump, leaving them sitting there in a fifteen-hundred-dollar bag . . . that seems stupid. And she was by all accounts a pretty smart girl. Wouldn’t she be afraid somebody would steal them? Hell, I’m shocked nobody did.”
“That part of the lakeshore is pretty swanky.” Graham sounded less sure.
I pounced on the uncertainty. “But the bag wasn’t down on the sand. It was up at the top of the dam. Where anybody could’ve picked it up and taken off with it. That section of the road might be closed, but the park is popular with runners.”
“That is true.” Graham’s hands drummed on his knees.
“So why would she do that?” I put the blinker on and moved into the right lane to exit onto Twelfth Street.
“I’m not sure. Let’s go see what she’s got left to tell us.”
Score. Graham was about as black and white as a person could get, and stone set in his opinions. If I had him wondering what had happened to Tenley, I was onto something. I stayed quiet as we parked outside the ME’s office, then walked next to him to the door and shrugged out of my holster for the metal detectors inside.
Fear No Truth Page 11