Finally.
“I feel so guilty about everything, but I do love Chad more than anything.” She patted her belly. “Except for maybe these little ones.” She beamed a Madonna smile (not that Madonna) and burped again. “But now that I’ve met you, my happiness won’t be complete until I know you’ve found the right person.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” It was time to change the subject. “Let me show you the other reason I came in.” I handed her the petition, and she read it between slurps and burps of soup, while I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin to take home.
“Oh, wow, this is so awful,” she said, when she finished reading it. “I don’t even remember this.”
How could she? She was probably in preschool at the time.
“I’d like to leave a few petitions here at the counter. I need to gather as many signatures as possible before his parole date.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “This is so noble of you. Chad never told me what a nice person you are. In fact, he said—”
I held up my hand to stop her. “Heather. It’s okay.” The last thing I wanted to hear was what he’d said about me. He was her problem now.
“But you’re not at all what I expected. Gosh, I really feel totally bad now.”
I found myself liking this dimwit and that totally annoyed me. I hoped Chad would treat her better than he’d treated me.
I made a graceful exit and went back to the parking garage where Veronica waited. After I climbed in and buckled up, I sat a moment and thought about what had just transpired. It irritated me that I could no longer hate her.
“Dammit.” I smacked the steering wheel. And then I remembered I’d left my sandwich behind. “Double dammit.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
DEAD GIRLS DON’T BLOG
1996
Friday, May 10
In the deepening gloom of the eucalyptus grove, Lindsay pushed aside the layer of damp leaves she’d hidden under and sat up, only a few yards away from where the boys stood. “Please, I won’t tell. I promise. Just don’t hurt my mom.”
Erik’s lip curled into an ugly sneer. “Pinky swear?”
“When this is over,” said Jake. “I never want to see you again, got that?”
“Works for me.”
“Come on, Lindsay.” Jake approached her. “I’m sorry about Erik. He’s drunk and scared. We’re all scared. We never meant to hurt you and no one’s going to hurt you now, I promise.” He held out his hand to help her to her feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
She ignored his hand, trying to stand on her own, but her back seized, forcing her to accept his help. She glanced fearfully at Erik as Jake gently pulled her to her feet. As she staggered towards the edge of the grove, she flinched with each step, emitting involuntary grunts of pain.
Erik lost patience with her slow progress and grabbed her by the arm, nearly yanking it out of the socket. “Let’s move it!”
He hustled Lindsay out of the forest into the open meadow and shoved her ahead of him. She stumbled to her knees, nearly paralyzed by the excruciating cramp in her back. She didn’t think she would be able to stand up again.
Jake bent beside her and whispered in her ear as he helped her up. “Try hard, Lindsay. I don’t know if I can control Erik.”
His gentle words gave her courage and she forced herself forward, gritting her teeth against the agony. When they reached Phil, he was alert and sitting up against a rock. His scalp wound had stopped bleeding and congealing blood covered his face, neck, and shirt front.
“Are you okay?” Jake asked him. “You look terrible.”
“I’ll live.” Phil noted Lindsay’s dirty clothes, clenched jaw, mascara-streaked face, and bloody nose. “What’s going on?”
Lindsay broke into hiccupping sobs, barely able to enunciate her words. “Please. Please don’t let him kill my mother.”
Phil looked incredulously at Jake. “Did you say that to her?”
“Not him.” Lindsay pointed at Erik. “Him.”
Erik acknowledged her accusation like it was high praise. “What can I say, folks? She left me no choice.”
“You’re such a prick,” muttered Phil.
“Yes, I am. But I think me and Lindsay have finally agreed to a deal we can both live with. No college, no car, and no dead mama… if she keeps her mouth shut.” He turned to Lindsay. “Are we good, Lindsay?”
“Yes,” she mumbled, averting her eyes, terrified of him.
Erik leaned toward her, cupping his ear, causing her to shudder. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t quite catch that. Are we good, Lindsay?”
“God, leave her alone!” Jake clenched his fists, desperately wanting to pummel Erik’s smug face into a bloody pulp.
“Not until I can hear her answer,” said Erik. “Lindsay?”
“Yes!” She hugged her bone-chilled body, gasping for breath.
“I think you both owe me a big apology because I just saved your sorry asses.” Erik said, grinning at them in expectation. “What? No apologies. Oh, well.”
As the sun worked its way towards the horizon, the temperature dropped to the low sixties. Lindsay shivered in her damp summer clothes, crying inconsolably. Her face was grimy and splotchy, twigs and leaves were stuck in her long, tangled hair, and her swollen nose dribbled bloody snot into her chattering mouth. In her heightened state of panic, she didn’t feel the urine trickling down her legs.
Erik looked at the girl with revulsion. “I must have been really shit-faced, ’cause I can’t believe I actually wanted to screw you.” He shoved her towards the boulders where Phil sat. “Sit down and shut up while Jake and I figure out what to do.”
Erik’s hard slam into her shoulder knocked her off-balance, and she pitched forward against the rock. They all heard the ominous crack of her skull when it connected with the granite. She collapsed on Phil’s lap, convulsing.
“Why did you do that?” screamed Phil, trying to still her spasms by clamping his forearms over her shaking body and holding her head.
A split second passed and her convulsion stopped, leaving her deathly still. Jake dragged her away from Phil and laid her flat on the ground. “You really hurt her!”
“She’s all right.” Erik nudged her ribs with his shoe and she didn’t move. “She knocked herself out, that’s all.”
Jake crouched beside Lindsay and took her wrist. “I don’t feel a pulse.”
Phil leaned over Lindsay and felt the carotid artery on her neck. “I don’t feel anything, either.”
“You know CPR, right?” asked Jake, his voice loud and shrill.
Phil hoped he had the strength to do it. “Yeah. You need to move her away from these rocks first. I need room. Be careful with her neck.”
Jake pulled Lindsay’s limp body further away from the boulder. “Oh God. Oh God. Come on Lindsay. Please be okay.”
Phil had injured his head, neck, and left shoulder in the car crash and movement was torture as he bent over her motionless body and checked for breath from her nose. He tipped her head back, put his mouth over hers and blew in twice, then placed his hands on her chest and compressed it rapidly several times before moving back to her mouth.
Jake hovered over her still body, nervously shifting on his feet and wringing his hands. “Oh God, how did this happen? Please Lindsay, please don’t die.” He looked at Erik. “You could help. This is all your fault, you know.”
Erik held out his hands in a placating gesture, a look of innocence pasted on his face. “It was an accident and you know it, so what am I supposed to do?”
“You have your cell phone?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So call 911.”
Erik pulled his cell from his jeans pocket and flipped it open. He had no intention of calling anyone and would have faked it, but there was no cell coverage anyway. “Crap. No bars.” He strolled to the SUV and leaned against it, waiting for them to realize Lindsay was dead.
Phil continued to compr
ess her chest, although the effort was almost more than he could bear and he feared he might collapse at any moment. “Six, seven, eight, nine...”
Jake saw her twitch and crouched beside her. “I think she’s coming around.”
Erik rushed over and stood behind the boys. “Are you sure? Could just be those weird muscle spasms that can happen after death. I ran over a dog once, and it flopped all over the road. It was gnarly.”
Phil felt her artery again. “I think I feel something.” He bent close to her face. “Yes… she’s breathing.”
“Oh, thank God.” Jake went down on his knees and watched her face. “Should we keep doing CPR?”
“No. She’s breathing on her own,” said Phil, exhausted and overwhelmed with relief.
Erik squatted on the other side of Lindsay, opposite Jake and Phil. “You sure she’s breathing? She looks dead to me.”
Phil kept his eyes on Lindsay. “You are one lucky dude, Erik.”
“How’s that?”
“Because now you’re not a murderer,” said Jake.
“Whoa! Wait a minute. You know it was an accident. But it would’ve been a whole lot better for all of us if she had died, ‘cause now we’ll all go to prison for sure.”
“But not for murder,” said Phil. “It’s better this way, Erik.”
“God, you are such a fucking saint, you know that, Phil?”
Lindsay groaned softly and her eyelids fluttered spastically, revealing the whites of her eyes. Her hand jerked out and brushed Erik’s knee.
“Oh, no you don’t!” he screamed, and violently lunged forward over Lindsay.
Phil and Jake scuttled back to avoid contact and landed on their rear-ends. In the next instant, Erik’s hand smashed down on Lindsay’s forehead, crushing it with a stone.
“Problem solved,” muttered Erik, coldly staring down at Lindsay’s bludgeoned face. He leaned back on his heels and flipped the bloody stone between his hands. “Now no one’s going to prison.”
Jake howled an unearthly primal scream and hurtled himself over Lindsay’s body, slamming Erik to the ground. He wrestled the bloodied stone from Erik’s grasp and then unthinking, reared up to beat Erik with it when Phil shoved him off and straddled him to hold him down.
Jake struggled fiercely. “Please, please, let me kill him. Let me fucking kill him. Please.”
“I can’t let you do that. God knows, I wish I could.” Phil clamped down hard on Jake’s squirming body with his legs, his hand pressing Jake’s windpipe to control him, and then the fight went out of the boy and they both collapsed to the ground.
Finally Jake asked, “Why? Why did you kill her? We weren’t going to hurt her, remember? That wasn’t the plan. We were just going to talk to her, you know, convince her...”
Erik stood up, found the stone and flung it far into the ravine beyond the boulders and turned to Jake. “You actually believed that was the plan?”
Jake sat up and whispered in defeat, “Yes.”
“Wow. I thought you knew. I really did. I mean, come on. We abduct her and take her into the woods and then just let her go?” He snorted with a cruel laugh. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“Nothing left to do now but to turn ourselves in.” Phil pushed himself to a sitting position, feeling woozy. His wounds were seeping again and thick blood oozed down his face.
“Are you serious?” said Erik. “After all this, we’re just going to turn ourselves in?”
Jake and Phil gaped at Erik, each silently loathing him, their mutual fear of him making them vulnerable.
For a moment, Erik wondered if Jake and Phil might gang up on him. He knew he needed to maintain the upper hand. “Look. I get it. This is awful. Really bad. But nothing we do can change what’s happened.”
Phil said to Jake, “Every time we listen to him, we just dig ourselves in deeper and deeper.”
Erik hovered over them, his face unreadable, his tone dead calm. “And you’re both going to listen to me one more time.”
Jake slumped over, hugging his knees to avoid eye contact with Erik. “What?”
“I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t talk and look at her, so hold on a sec.” Erik’s tone became amiable, as he casually picked up Lindsay’s feet and dragged her body several yards away. “Guess I don’t have to worry about her neck now.” He dropped her limp legs to the ground and returned to Jake and Phil. “Like I said, our problem’s solved. Dead girls don’t talk, so we’re in the clear.” Erik paused, tilting his head impishly. “You can thank me anytime now.” He crossed his arms over his chest and waited, wearing a self-satisfied grin.
Phil, sickened by this person who had been his friend, said, “Don’t you even care what you’ve done?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do care,” he said. “I just saved our bacon.”
“What happens when they find her body?” asked Jake.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jake. They’re not going to find her because we’re going to get rid—”
Phil gasped. “NO. No way in hell. Don’t listen to him, Jake. This will get you and me in more trouble. We’re not the ones who committed murder.” He pointed at Erik. “He is. Let him burn.”
“We’ll all burn and you know it. Now we’re going to do the only sane thing left to do. Bury her and go home. End of story.” Erik chuckled with cold mirth. “And they all lived happily ever after.” He flicked a glance at Lindsay’s corpse. “Well, almost all.”
Jake exhaled a slow, defeated breath. “He’s probably right, Phil.”
“About living happily ever after? He’s a fucking psychopath, Jake.”
Erik laughed. “You may be right about that, but you might want to listen to Jake, because it’s your blood that’s all over her, not mine. How’re you going to explain that?”
“I was trying to save her and you know it.”
“Yeah, because you felt real bad after you bashed her head against the rock.” He put his hands on his hips and frowned with reproach. “I was shocked when you did that.”
“You bastard.” Phil struggled to stand and Erik put his hand on his shoulder and easily pressed him back down.
“I’ll tell the police you did it!” Jake screamed, scrambling to his feet.
Erik leaned into Jake and jabbed his index finger into his chest. “Now that I think about it, maybe it was you who did it, Jakey. I had no idea what a nasty temper you have. No wonder you got a wrestling scholarship.” He saw Jake’s fists balling and moved several steps away. “No matter what, we’ll all go to prison, but it’ll be one of you who’ll be the last to get out, if ever. Not me. My folks can get the best lawyers money can buy, and they’ll make sure you guys go down for this, not me. In fact, the more I think about it, I’ll probably get off scot-free. I’ll be the next O.J. while you two...” He shrugged with an angelic smile. “Think about it. Jake, your family owns a small dairy farm in the middle of nowhere and Phil, you’ve got an accountant for a daddy and your mommy’s a police dispatcher. Bottom line? Defending you will bankrupt your families. In all good conscience, how can you do that to them? They’re innocent in all of this. The knowledge that their darling boys could do anything this terrible will be enough to destroy them, but you want to bankrupt them, too? What kind of sons are you?”
Phil gaped at him for a few moments, trying to process the terrible scenario that Erik had painted, then hauled himself to his feet, stumbled to Lindsay’s body and crouched beside her.
“I am so, so sorry,” he whispered, tenderly stroking her matted blond hair back from her forehead, his tears mingling with the ones drying on her cheeks. “I promise you, I will make my life count for something good to help make up for taking yours. I will be the best person I can be. I promise.”
Erik and Jake watched, unable to hear Phil’s words, and then, while still gazing at Lindsay’s face, he said, “Okay, you win, Erik.” He wobbled back to the boulders and slumped down against them, completely spent. “There’s a blanket in the back of the car. You can
use it to wrap her body.”
While Erik went to the car to retrieve the blanket, Jake frantically whispered to Phil. “Are you sure about this, Phil? Everything’s happened so fast. Maybe we should turn ourselves in and be done with it.”
“You heard him. He’s crazy, but he’s right about this destroying our families. And I’m afraid he might harm them. You heard what he said to Lindsay about her mother. We have to protect them.”
Erik returned with the plaid blanket. “You two done talking about me?” He spread the blanket on the ground and roughly rolled Lindsay onto it. “A little help, please?”
Jake wrapped the blanket around Lindsay’s warm body and tucked it securely.
“Don’t suppose you got a shovel in your car?” Erik asked.
“No,” snapped Phil, looking away.
“Hey, you’re the Boy Scout, so I thought, you know… always prepared?”
“You’re lucky I’m not, or I’d use it to bash your head in right now.”
“You need to watch that temper of yours,” said Erik. “Someone might take it the wrong way and get their feelings hurt, and who knows what might happen.”
Erik and Jake carried Lindsay’s shrouded corpse to the eucalyptus grove. It was after six and though the days were long, the sun was ducking behind the steep hills casting deep shadows. The dusky gloom in the woods offered little light to see by as the two worked their way to the cleared spot where she had concealed herself less than thirty minutes ago.
Before they covered her body, Erik bent down briefly and said to her, “Sorry, Lindsay. No hard feelings, okay?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
DEAD GIRLS DON’T BLOG
1996
Saturday, May 11
The morning after Lindsay’s death, Adam Hobart was enjoying his morning coffee in his leather recliner while reading the paper and watching the Golf Channel, when Phil entered the room shortly after eight a.m.
“Hey, Dad.”
Adam nearly jumped out of his skin, sloshing coffee on his plaid, flannel robe. “Holy crap! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” He twisted in his chair to see his son. “What the hell happened to your face? Did somebody beat you up?”
Murder Blog Mysteries Boxed Collection Page 16
