by Lauren Carr
“She allowed you to drink her blood?” J.J. asked.
“She was cutting herself anyway,” Karrie said. “One day I saw that she was bleeding and asked if I could have a taste.” She paused to eye J.J. “That was how we got together.”
Noting the tone of Karrie’s voice, Cameron asked, “Were you two lovers?”
“Yes. We had a mutually beneficial relationship. She had to cut herself, and I needed blood to survive. Drinking someone’s blood can be such a passionate experience. One thing led to another—” She turned back to J.J. “I must say that you have the most delicious complexion. I bet you get a lot of protein. Protein makes blood rich with energy.”
Seemingly unfazed, J.J. said, “I’ve been told that my blood is very tasty.”
Cameron thought that Karrie was going to fly across the table and plant her fangs right into J.J.’s neck. “Tell us about Vendetta’s disappearance. Silas claims that some deranged fan kidnapped her—”
“That deranged fan was him,” Karrie said.
Cameron bit her tongue to keep from saying “And you should know all about deranged.” She glanced over at J.J. for his take on the interview. To her surprise, he was studying Karrie as though he were a scientist who had just encountered a new and amazing species.
Karrie continued. “Silas was very insecure, as he should have been. He knew full well that he’d convinced Vendetta to marry him when she was at a very vulnerable stage. She thought her brother had abandoned her, which Silas never let her forget.”
“Why didn’t he ever let her forget that?” J.J. asked.
“So that he could drum into her the idea that he was the only one who truly loved her and would always be there for her,” Cameron answered. “It’s a common ploy used by emotionally abusive spouses.”
“Exactly,” Karrie said. “And when you said that Dylan had been murdered, it made me think that Silas must have played a role in making it happen.”
“Did Vendetta ever tell you how she and Silas met?” Cameron asked. “I noticed that both of them had been raised in foster care.”
“Yes,” Karrie said. “That is exactly how they met. Silas was Dylan’s age. Now, Silas did have a grandmother, but she didn’t want anything to do with him. So when his mother went missing, he ended up in the same foster home as Vendetta.”
“Did Vendetta ever suspect Silas of killing her brother?” Cameron asked.
“No,” Karrie said, “but I did.”
“Why?” Cameron asked. “Did Silas say or do something that made you suspect him?”
“It was Vendetta,” Karrie said. “She told me that she could never understand why Dylan had abandoned her. She couldn’t believe it when Dylan drove away, saying he was going to get gas, and didn’t come back. But Silas stayed with her—and whispered in her ear that Dylan wasn’t coming back for her and urged her to leave with him. But she fully expected Dylan to return. She waited and waited, and sure enough, Dylan didn’t come back. All she had was Silas, who made damn sure that she knew that he was there for her and always would be. Since she had no one else, Vendetta went along with him, and a few months later, they were married.”
“Why was Silas so certain that Dylan wouldn’t be coming back?” Cameron asked. “Almost like he had planned for him to not return.”
“That boy was never right,” Karrie said. “Vendetta also told me that his own grandmother had predicted that he would one day do something horrendous.” Gazing at J.J., she added, “Silas claimed that it was love at first sight when he met Vendetta.”
“Was it for Vendetta?” Cameron asked. “Love at first sight?”
“Vendetta was never in love with Silas,” Karrie said. “As soon as Dylan was of legal age, he became Vendetta’s guardian, got her out of that group home where they had met Silas, and moved her across the state. Vendetta didn’t see Silas again until he showed up at a concert that she and Dylan were playing with that group—at which point he latched onto Vendetta and wouldn’t let go. He actually told me in an interview for my blog that as soon as he found Vendetta again, he decided that he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone come between them again.” She pointed a finger and a long black fingernail that resembled a dagger at them. “That’s why I know that he killed Vendetta’s brother.”
“Now,” Cameron said, “you sent me the recording of Vendetta’s last performance—the one right before her disappearance. She sang a song that she said she had written many years before. But according to witnesses who knew her when she was with Dylan’s group, she only knew how to play percussion—”
“The song was written for the piano,” J.J. said. “Do you know who wrote the last song she performed before her disappearance?”
“Silas,” Karrie said. “Silas wrote all of Vendetta’s songs. He was her ghostwriter. But it was more exciting for the fans to think that she wasn’t just a performer but a songwriter, , too.”
Cameron and J.J. exchanged glances.
“Vendetta was all Silas’ doing,” Karrie said. “The goth stuff? Yes, that was Vendetta. But Silas was the one behind the scenes who created her—”
“Where did ‘Vendetta’ come from? The name, I mean,” Cameron said.
“Success is the best revenge,” Karrie said. “Silas wanted Vendetta to become a star, and he wanted to be the one to make it happen so that he could get back at everyone who had rejected the two of them—Vendetta’s brother, his mother who took off, his grandmother who rejected him, and everyone else. It was the two of them against the world—at least that was how Silas saw it. So I just knew that if he found out that she was going to walk out on him, he would freak out and kill her.”
“Do you know for a fact that she was going to walk out on him?” J.J. asked.
“Of course,” Karrie said, “because I was the one who arranged it. I put everything together. We were going to run away together. That last song was a farewell performance. Vendetta was going to walk off that stage and into oblivion, and she was never going to perform again.”
“What was her plan to make that happen?” Cameron said. “How was she going to walk off that stage and disappear into oblivion without anyone stopping her?”
“There were always a bunch of fans who would try to get backstage to see her, so she would leave the stage, run out of the stage door, jump into the back of a limousine, and then leave to go to her hotel. That was always the way she did it. But that night, we hired a double—some teenage girl—and told her to wait backstage. As soon as Vendetta left the stage, this double was going to jump into the back of the limousine. Without even checking to see who had jumped in, the driver would take off. Then Vendetta was going to throw a coat on over her dress, run out of the back door on the other side of the stage, and jump into the back of my van, and then we would drive across town. Vendetta was going to change her clothes in the back of the van and put on a wig. On the other side of town, we were going to take a bus up to Canada and start a new life.”
“But something went wrong,” Cameron said.
Sadness appeared in Karrie’s red eyes. “Vendetta never came out of the back door. The decoy did jump into the back of the limousine, and she did go to the hotel. But somewhere between the stage and the other back door, Vendetta disappeared.”
“And not one of the people hanging out backstage at that concert saw what had happened to her?” J.J. asked.
“Not one,” Karrie said.
“Where was Silas?” Cameron asked.
“He told the police that he was at the hotel getting ready to go away on a romantic holiday in London with her. He said that Vendetta had been under a lot of stress. When she didn’t come back to the hotel, he assumed she had decided to go off to be alone and to think,” she said in a mocking tone. “She did that a lot. Bull! Vendetta never took off. Silas kept too tight of a leash on her. I know that he figured out what we were planning and that he intercept
ed her between the stage and that back door, killed her, and got rid of the body after everyone’d left.”
“Did anybody see him backstage?” Cameron asked.
Karrie frowned.
“It would have been easy for Silas to slip backstage during the concert without anyone noticing,” J.J. said. “There’re always a ton of people running around, and they all have jobs to do. As long as Silas looked like he knew what he was doing and knew the path that Vendetta was going to take, he could have slipped into a dark corner, grabbed her, and even smuggled her out in an equipment trunk. Those are big enough to hide a body in.”
“Sounds like you’ve done that before,” Karrie said.
“I’ve spent some time backstage at concerts,” he said.
“Have you interrogated Silas yet?” Karrie asked.
“Not about Vendetta’s disappearance,” Cameron said.
Signs of anger appeared behind Karrie’s red contact lenses. “Why not? I told you that he killed Vendetta and got rid of her body.”
“I’m not investigating Vendetta’s disappearance,” Cameron said. “It’s complicated. I’m investigating Dylan Matthews’ murder, and I think there’s a possibility that the two could be connected. Unfortunately, I have no jurisdiction over Vendetta’s case. It belongs to the detectives in Baltimore.”
“It wasn’t a disappearance,” Karrie said, “and I told those idiots that. But Silas acted like the grieving husband. Then, he cooked up that phony kidnapping for ransom story to throw suspicion away from him, and the fools bought it.” She tapped the tabletop with one of her dagger-shaped fingernails. “I know that he killed Vendetta’s brother because he was going to split the two of them up.”
“But you weren’t there,” J.J. said. “All you have to go by are your suspicions about Vendetta and Silas’ relationship, so your opinion isn’t exactly unbiased.”
“Would Vendetta’s account in her own words help?” Karrie asked.
J.J. and Cameron exchanged questioning expressions.
“I am a journalist,” Karrie said. “Vendetta had a growing following, and I shadowed her for eighteen months. I recorded interviews with her for over a year, and a couple of them were about her brother and what happened the night he disappeared. Could you use them to nail Silas?”
Chapter Sixteen
The Next Morning
After a restless night of tossing and turning in her too-comfortable bed in the hotel, Cameron gave up on trying to sleep, shrugged on her bathrobe, and stumbled into the great room.
“Try some tea with honey in it, hon,” a low voice that sounded like Joshua’s said when she opened the bedroom door. “It might settle your stomach.” She found J.J. on the sofa, talking on his cell phone. Dressed in his bathrobe, he had his feet propped up on the coffee table. Seeing Cameron, he dropped his feet to the floor and tugged the upper portion of his bathrobe closed to cover his bare chest. “No, Tad said you have to take those pills for your seizures. Why don’t you try eating some dry toast?”
Cameron went into the kitchenette and found that he had started a full pot of coffee that was still dripping into the carafe and set out two mugs. She poured coffee into both mugs and turned around to set his, along with a carton of cream and some sugar, on the counter, and then she prepared her own coffee with double cream and sugar.
“Is Poppy there?” J.J. asked Suellen as he got up to retrieve his coffee from the counter. “Can I talk to her?” He mouthed a thank-you to Cameron. “Hey, Poppy, listen, how is Suellen really doing? She doesn’t sound good.”
The look of concern on J.J.’s face broke Cameron’s heart. She could see that his head was really hours away with the woman he had never stopped loving.
“Well, can you do me a favor?” he said after he heard Poppy’s answer. “After you and Noah finish out in the barn, can you—what do you mean, Noah’s not there? Where is he?” He caught Cameron’s eye and then said, “Did you—never mind. Can you stick close to the house until I get back?”
After he finished telling Poppy that he would be home late that night, he hung up and found Cameron staring at him with her arms folded across her chest. “Good morning,” he said in a forced upbeat tone before taking a sip of his coffee.
“Good morning,” she said. “Where’s Noah?”
“He called in sick today,” J.J. said.
“The day after Clyde fingered him as the man who killed his wife, Noah suddenly got too sick to come into work?” Cameron went into the bedroom to retrieve her phone.
J.J. was directly behind her. “Maybe he really is sick.”
“Maybe he really is guilty of murder, and now he’s on the run.”
Joshua picked up his phone in time to hear the end of her statement. “Who’s on the run?”
“Noah,” Cameron said. “He called in sick this morning.”
Before she could say anything else, Joshua said that he would contact Tom and try to locate the missing farmhand. After she hung up, she found J.J. leaning in her bedroom doorway with his arms folded across his chest.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.” She pointed her cell phone at him. “And you know it.”
“Noah is not a suspect. Dad himself said that he couldn’t imagine Noah killing Monica Brady.”
“Then why isn’t he at the farm this morning to help Poppy?”
“Maybe he’s sick,” J.J. said. “People do get sick, you know.”
“If he is, your dad can take him some chicken soup,” she said. “If he’s on the run, your father can chase him down and sit on him until I get there.”
“Whatever.” With an eye roll, J.J. returned to the sitting room, where he picked up his coffee and plopped back down on the sofa.
Growling through her clenched teeth, Cameron went after him. “What is with you?” she asked as she stood over him. “You aren’t that naïve, J.J. You know I’m right, but because it’s me, you have to spin it into a story about the big bad stepmother wanting to throw the innocent waif into the burning oven.”
J.J. chuckled. “Have I ever said anything bad about you, Cameron?”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “You might have inherited your father’s poker face, but you forget that I know him. Therefore, I know you. I can see the disdain you have for me behind those baby blues when you look at me.”
As if to conceal the truth that she so clearly saw, J.J. directed his attention to the mug in his hand.
Refusing to let up, Cameron plopped down on the coffee table in front of him. “Listen, J.J., you’re not some little kid who’s afraid that I’m going to take your daddy away from you. You’re smart enough to know that that isn’t going to happen. So what’s your problem with me?”
He shook his head and laughed. “There’s no problem, Cameron. Everything is absolutely fine. You want to send Dad to hunt down Noah and to have him thrown in jail? That’s fine with me. I don’t think he has it in him to kill anyone, but hey—”
“I do think Noah’s a nice kid,” she said. “But when you’ve been at this for as long as your father and I have been, you get just a little bit—” She paused and searched for the right word.
“Pessimistic about society?”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Cameron said. “One of my first murder cases was a sixteen-year-old girl whose body had been found by a hiker in the Allegheny Mountains out on the other side of Pittsburgh. She’d been found at an abandoned campsite. She’d been stabbed repeatedly and buried under some leaves. Over the course of eight months, I repeatedly interviewed her two best friends, who were both heartbroken. According to the friends and to all three families, these three girls had been besties since the first grade. But I just couldn’t forget that the victim had told her mother that the three of them were going to go out that Saturday night. The two friends told me that the victim had lied to
her mother and that they had agreed to cover for her so that she could go out with a boy that she knew her mother would disapproved of. They claimed that after they’d picked up their friend at her home, they’d dropped her off at the mall so that she could meet this bad boy—a boy I was never able to locate.”
“Teenagers have been known to do that,” J.J. said.
Cameron shot a wicked grin at him. “Did you?”
“We aren’t talking about me. Go on.”
“I kept coming back to how close those three girls were supposed to be,” she said. “It bugged me. If they were the three musketeers, why didn’t the victim tell her best friends anything about this boy—or even just brag about him? They claimed that they knew nothing about him. Not what he looked like. Not where he lived. Not what he did. All they knew was that he was twenty-one and that the victim had met him online.”
“I know this case,” J.J. said. “It turned out that the two sweet girls—girls who were cheerleaders and honor students—killed their friend because she knew their secret. They were having a lesbian love affair, and they were afraid that she would out them.”
“My point is that to the outside world, they were the sweetest young ladies you could ever meet,” Cameron said. “But underneath—”
“No one ever knows what really goes on behind closed doors.” J.J. said as he stood up to refill his coffee. “One of my dad’s famous sayings.”
“Your instincts may be right, J.J.,” she said over the top of her mug before taking a sip of her coffee. “Noah may be the sweet-faced young lad that you think he is.”
“Or he could be a cold-blooded killer.”
“If he is, it’d be better to catch him now than after he’s killed again.”
“I know.” J.J. tightened the belt of his bathrobe. “I need to get dressed.”
As he passed her, Cameron said, “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
