Cassidy Kincaid Mysteries Box Set

by Amy Waeschle

  With dismay, Cassidy realized the form lacked a rule against reserving a hotel room. It had never occurred to her to add it. But the hotel was booked months in advance. How could Cody and William have scored a room at the last minute? A cancellation, maybe? Or had one of them reserved a room months ahead of time, planning for a night of comfort—or privacy?

  Cassidy shook her head. In her experience, young people had no capacity to plan ahead. No, this was done on the spur of the moment—possibly they’d lucked out with a cancellation.

  Suddenly, she thought about Preston Ford. Had he seen the video? “Oh no,” she gasped out loud. “Is there any way to get the video taken down?” she said, her lungs feeling wrung out. “Like, report it as slanderous, or something?”

  “I don’t know,” Franklin said, and Cassidy realized that she was on speaker. “Uh, it’s not like these sites have a customer service line or something.”

  “Who posted it?” Cassidy asked.

  “Uh,” Franklin said. She waited through a pause. “Looks like someone under the name Farley Bucker 699,” he added after a pause.

  “Well that’s a dead end,” Cassidy sighed.

  “Looks like it was posted two days ago.”

  Cassidy lowered herself to the curb so she was eye level with her tires, which smelled of rubber and something scorched, like an empty pot heating on the stove. She cradled her head with her free hand. A scandalous sex video featuring Izzy is posted on the same day that she decides to disappear. She could practically hear Bruce’s voice in her head: definitely not a coincidence.

  “Did she and William or Cody interact at all during the drive home?” Cassidy asked. She remembered the way William and Cody were glued to a screen as they hunkered down in the van that last morning at field camp. The thought that they could have been watching Izzy—watching themselves—made her feel sick.

  “Could they have made this using a phone?” she asked suddenly.

  “I guess,” Franklin replied. “Though I really wouldn’t know,” he added.

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” Alice said.

  Cassidy’s phone buzzed with another text. This one was from Martin. “Martin knows about the video,” she said after skimming his message.

  “I can’t believe Izzy would do this,” Alice said.

  “It’s not like she needs the money,” Franklin added.

  “How do you know she did anything?” Alice said, her voice harsh. “Those assholes.”

  “Wait, you mean Farley Bucker or whoever are getting paid to post this?”

  “Yeah,” Franklin answered.

  Cassidy frowned, thinking back to the night at the bar. Izzy had looked perfectly in control of the situation, dancing and flirting with Cody and William and probably whoever else was in her orbit.

  “Could they have posted this video without Izzy knowing?”

  “I wonder if she even knew they were making a video at all. Guys do shit like that.”

  Instantly, Cassidy wondered if any of her partners had ever done something like that. “Ugh!” she spat, standing suddenly as the skin on her arms and legs sizzled with a raw, burning heat. No, don’t think about it, she told herself.

  “I feel ya, Dr. Kincaid,” Alice said. “Something about this is seriously fucked up.”

  Cassidy began to pace alongside her car. “I need to call the resort,” she said. “And then I need to call Cody and William again,” she added.

  After locating a convenience store, Cassidy bought a six pack of a local microbrew and drove to the empty library parking lot, finding a corner with some shade. She cracked the lid off of the first bottle and sat back, savoring the cold. Her stomach rumbled, but before she hunted down dinner, she had to make sure the woman in the video was Izzy.

  She dug out her headphones, plugged them in, then tapped the link Franklin had sent her. It opened to a black screen that showed thumbnails of images with disgusting titles like “She likes it rough.”

  Cassidy closed her eyes, her finger hovering on the play button. I really, really don’t want to do this.

  The top thumbnail image showed a female and two males from the chest up. The female was sandwiched between the males, their shirts off. The image was dark, making the female’s skin glow. She was wearing a pair of lacy underwear and a strapless bra. Bracing herself, Cassidy completed her payment info to enter the site—wondering if in doing so, she would spend the rest of her life getting spam from sites like this. Uck, she thought, her stomach churning.

  The video started with kissing and undressing, but still didn’t show the actors’ faces. Cassidy recognized Cody’s tribal tattoo on the arm of one of the males when he tucked his hand into the woman’s panties. The other male lowered his mouth to the woman’s breasts, showing the side of his face: William. Then, the three moved to the bed and the camera view changed. Izzy’s face flashed into focus. Cassidy stopped the video and put her phone face down on the seat next to her. Her hands shook as she sipped from the beer, which tasted funny—too bitter, too warm all of a sudden. She put the beer in her console. Then, she got out of the car and threw up into the weeds.

  After, still shaking, she started walking, not sure of a destination, only that she needed to move. The images from the video tumbled through her mind. She heard Cody’s confident voice speaking to Izzy in a way that disturbed her—aggressive, dominant. Though Izzy seemed not to mind, the emotion that rose to the surface after she’d walked for some time was sadness. Why did Izzy feel the need to participate in behavior like this?

  Then, Cassidy zoomed out. Was she being judgmental? Maybe this was fun for them. Or they were acting. Who am I to criticize? she thought. As far as she could tell, everything looked consensual. In fact, if the sounds Izzy was making were any indication, Izzy was enjoying herself.

  But why?

  Seeing something so . . . taboo, dark . . . was it really all fun and games?

  She thought back to what Charlie had shared about Izzy’s freshman year. After someone hurts you like that, you’re never the same, she thought, as wounds from her past came out of their hiding place. After college, she had followed her boyfriend Luke into a life as a ski patroller, a life that slowly imploded around her when Luke became more and more aggressive and controlling, and then he blatantly slept with their boss. One of Cassidy’s coworkers had been kind enough to tell her but not before the whole squad knew.

  Had Izzy become involved with Cody and William looking for a casual night of fun, or was it part of a pattern driven by the trauma of her past?

  Cassidy understood what it was like to want to be loved, to want to fill a hole with the attention from someone new. And the attention from two young men . . . well, that might have been too hard to resist.

  Was Izzy looking for love, or some form of it, with William and Cody? Then in Biggs Junction, had something happened between the three of them? Something that made Izzy run?

  Those fuckers, Alice had said. Could they have made the video without Izzy knowing, and then Izzy found out during the drive?

  Cassidy put herself in Izzy’s shoes—I find out that Cody betrays me, so I hitch a ride to Bend and spend the night with my favorite professor.

  She let this sit for a moment, realizing that it was possible.

  Why then, after seeing Charlie, didn’t Izzy return to Eugene? She should have had enough money to get home. So why hadn’t she turned up there?

  Izzy had left Charlie’s sometime in the early morning hours, at least twelve hours ago, maybe as many as fifteen hours. Cassidy used the search engine on her phone to look up bus routes and times. She found a 7:30 a.m. bus and a 1:00 p.m. bus, the ticket costing thirty to seventy dollars. Even if Izzy had taken the later bus, which was more direct, she would have arrived home several hours ago.

  Where else would Izzy go besides back to Eugene? Her father lived in L.A. but Cassidy didn’t think that was her target. Cassidy wondered if seeing Charlie had been the destination or a stopover to somewhere else—like to see Dom
inique.

  Keep checking Izzy’s apartment, she texted Alice, and got a “thumbs up” reply almost immediately.

  Cassidy closed the browser window displaying the video, but not before the image of the three of them burned a memory into her brain. Then, she dialed Cody’s number. Those assholes, Alice had said.

  Thirteen

  With night approaching, Cassidy wondered where she would sleep. The department will pay for your expenses, Richard had said. She felt as if she’d milked all she could from Bend, Oregon. Izzy’s trail had turned cold. William and Cody were her only leads, though the idea of confronting them about the video made her wrung-out stomach feel sour.

  No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t muster the nerve to tell Richard about the video. She told herself that she needed to know more before sharing something so damaging. It may not even be relevant, she told herself, even though this felt like a lie.

  Both Cody and William did not answer their phones, making Cassidy more and more angry so that by the time she realized that she was driving west, she felt like her Subaru was being propelled by fury alone.

  Didn’t they know Izzy was missing? Surely they realized that everyone had seen the video by now.

  Of course, Cassidy realized, once again feeling stupid. “They’re ignoring me,” she said out loud.

  By the time Cassidy reached Eugene’s city limits, the sun blared low on the horizon. She had eaten an apple during the drive, and even though her insides still felt hollow, she didn’t have the courage to eat anything else. Using the map program on her phone, Cassidy followed the directions to Cody’s address from the printout Richard Gorman had given her to a few miles south of campus and parked across the street from a gray, one-story house. Giant oak trees lined the street’s planter strip, their full green leaves shiny under the streetlamps. Crumbling concrete steps led to a small unkempt yard and a narrow, arched entryway.

  Cassidy shut her car door but the sound was muffled, as if the night had swallowed it. She detected an odd smell from her car’s hood as she rounded the front end and made a mental note to check her radiator. A dog barked in the distance, rising over the sound of cars passing on the busier thoroughfare two blocks away. Dried leaves crunched under her feet as she crossed over the dry grass planter and up the steps. The house’s windows were dark. Cassidy checked her watch: almost ten o’clock. Her knuckles tapped on the thick wooden door. While waiting, she examined the entryway. The light fixture above her head gave off a pale glow, illuminating the collection of dead bugs inside the globe. The floor mat, a plain, straw-colored rectangle, was so threadbare Cassidy doubted it served its purpose.

  Cassidy heard shuffling behind the door. And then it opened, the jamb sticking so that it scraped loudly against the floor.

  A male face with freckles peered out at her. He looked vaguely familiar, though Cassidy couldn’t place him. Former student? Work-study grunt she’d hired to file research papers?

  “Dr. Kincaid,” he said as recognition took over his face. “Remember me, Eli Grayson?”

  Cassidy did—Eli had attended one of her lectures during her years as a post-doc. Sat in the front row. “Hi Eli,” she said. “Um, does Cody live here?”

  “Yeah,” Eli said, looking surprised.

  “Is he here?” Cassidy asked. “I need to talk to him.”

  “Oh, uh . . . well, he’s out.”

  Cassidy paused. Did Eli know about the video? “Do you know where he is?”

  Eli’s face scrunched into a look of concentration. “He left a few hours ago. He didn’t tell me where he was going.”

  “I’ve been trying to call him,” Cassidy said. “But he doesn’t answer.”

  Eli looked back at her blankly.

  “It’s important that I talk with him as soon as possible.”

  “Well, he could be at the Whit,” he said, looking pensive. “We played pinball at Blairalley last night. He talked about going back. There’s a tournament tonight.”

  “But you didn’t go?” she asked.

  Eli shook his head. “I had band practice.”

  Cassidy imagined Eli singing his heart out into a microphone. “What do you play?” she asked, unable to suppress her curiosity.

  “Mandolin.”

  “Oh,” Cassidy replied, a little surprised. She had imagined the drums, or keyboard maybe. Mandolin seemed too . . . peaceful for a young person, though she didn’t know why she felt this way.

  “Well, if he shows up, will you please tell him to call me back?”

  “Sure,” Eli agreed. She wrote down her number on the back of an unpaid bill Eli fetched from inside the house.

  Cassidy returned to her car, wondering if she should try the arcade—a place she had heard of but never visited. Video games were more Quinn’s thing than hers during their childhood. Reeve had been into them too, she remembered.

  She had a sudden thought—could Cody be with Izzy? Had he gone to pick her up?

  Though it felt irrational, Cassidy’s instincts told her that Izzy was nowhere near Cody or William now. But they hold the answers, she thought, and started her engine.

  Cassidy decided to visit William’s apartment, located in West Eugene, first because the arcade was a longshot—Cody could be anywhere.

  As she followed her phone’s navigation app through Eugene’s streets, she imagined Izzy searching for a place to sleep tonight. An old Nirvana song began to play in her head, rising slowly: My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night? Cassidy and her friends used to watch MTV unplugged, back in the day, and she remembered those haunting lyrics that spoke of sadness and secrets.

  Would Izzy stay in a hotel? Crash at a friend’s? Could she be at William’s right now? Or was she roaming the streets of Bend, searching for shelter. Cassidy imagined bright headlights and a shivering Izzy, cowering in some dirty back alley.

  Where would I go if I was Izzy? Cassidy thought, picturing herself stopping at every hotel in town until she found her.

  If only Izzy would use her ATM card again. That she hadn’t was beginning to feel purposeful. Either she knew people were looking for her, or the account was empty. If Izzy was out of money, where would she spend the night?

  In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines, tell me where did you sleep last night?

  Emily had told her a story once about how she’d stretched her money using her Eurail pass. Instead of paying for a bed in a hostel, she would hop on a night train and sleep on a bench, or sometimes she’d get lucky and find an empty sleeper compartment. “It makes for not much sleep, but then you wake up somewhere new,” Emily had said.

  Maybe Izzy purchased a bus ticket and was now curled up against the window, dozing as the miles ticked by. It was a nice image—nicer than most of the alternatives.

  But if Izzy paid for such a ticket with cash, Cassidy had no way to trace it.

  Cassidy had to park several blocks away from William’s apartment complex, and during her walk, her flip flops scraping the sidewalk, she checked her phone for updates, but there was nothing from Alice or Martin and only a few more missed calls from unknown numbers. If I don’t find Izzy, these reporters will have a field day, she thought. First Costa Rica, then this. Her skin prickled at the thought of what Izzy’s disappearance would do to her career. The media will be the least of my problems. She shoved her phone back into her pocket, then hugged herself. C’mon, Izzy, she begged. Show yourself.

  The exterior design of William’s apartment screamed 1980s with its diagonal woodwork and chocolate-brown paint. She climbed the open stairway, the freeway noise increasing with each step and a breeze sifting through the leaves of the oak-tree canopy lining the street.

  She checked the number again and found William’s apartment, unable to ignore the mash of anger and anxiety churning low in her belly. Her knock rattled the flimsy door. She took a full breath, forcing it into her stomach while she waited, listening for sounds. Finally, footsteps neared.
r />   The door opened and when William saw her face, his expression stiffened.

  “Dr. Kincaid,” he said, his voice thin. “Uh, hey,” he added.

  Cassidy thought of the many times she had interacted with him in the field. He was quiet, thoughtful, not brilliant by any means but meticulous and careful. Overall, a good student, a decent kid.

  “I’ve been calling you,” Cassidy said, barely able to keep the fury from her words. “Why haven’t you answered?”

  “Uh,” he said, his mouth open, like a fish, while his eyes wandered. “Just . . . busy.”

  “Let me in, please,” Cassidy said, stepping forward. “It’s about Izzy.”

  He stepped back, uttering something that was either “sure” or “shit.” A dim light over the range illuminated the kitchen. A single pot with dark brown drips down the side occupied the front burner and a few dishes were gathered by the sink. Cassidy noted the couch, TV, and coffee table which held several empty glasses and an apparatus that was most surely a bong. Cassidy had already detected the scent of marijuana and wondered how much William had already smoked.

  “Uh, pot?” he asked, seeing her notice the bong. He went to the table, slid a lighter from his pocket, and picked up the device. With a sheepish grin, he offered them to her.

  “No, thanks,” Cassidy said.

  To her surprise, William settled onto the couch, lit the bong, and inhaled.

  “Where’s Cody?” she asked.

  Still concentrating on the hit, he shrugged.

  Cassidy walked around the couch and settled on the edge of the coffee table. “William, I need your help.” The image of him undressing Izzy flashed through her brain. “I know about the video.”

  “You do?” William replied, pale smoke curling out of his mouth.

  “Izzy’s missing.”

  “She is?” William said, his eyes going wide.