Pretty Girls Die Last

by Lisa Mancini

  Freya didn’t answer immediately. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she stalled.

  “Um, let me see. I’ll talk to Lou. I’ll let you know,” she answered evasively.

  Erik smiled and pulled his vehicle into her driveway. He seemed satisfied with her answer. That worried her even more. Her cat Dexter met her at the front door with a loud MEOW.

  “Dex, are you hungry again? Come here sweetie, I’ll give you a snack.”

  Erik and the cat followed her into the large open modern kitchen. She slid off her coat and hung it in the closet. Taking the cat food bag from the cabinet she poured a little into a small dish and placed it on the floor. The cat ate greedily. Freya and Erik walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. Freya had started decorating her artificial tree and the unopened boxes of ornaments sat piled up on her coffee table. Erik picked up a small box of ornaments and looked inside.

  “This one is pretty.”

  Freya smiled. “That was my mom’s favorite.”

  She took the glass ornament with the hand painted poinsettia and hung it on a branch. She still found this time of year difficult. It reminded her that both her parents were dead, killed by a drunk driver almost five years ago. But, life must go on. So, she put up a tree and decorated it. She wondered if she would ever be able to celebrate a holiday without thinking of her parent’s sudden death.

  “Freya, do you ever think about your future?”

  Startled by the suddenness of the personal question, she was speechless. Yes, she thought about her future a lot. But she had the impression he meant something else.

  “Yes, I have plans, doesn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t mean career plans. What about marriage and kids? Do you ever think about that? I know you’re young but we’ve never discussed our future. We are in a relationship but it’s not a priority for you, is it?”

  “Well, is it for you? I mean, you’re young too. Twenty-eight isn’t old. What’s the hurry all of a sudden? What has changed?”

  “Well, that’s just it- nothing has changed for us in the past year. We go out, sometimes I sleep over, but that’s it. I just wonder what the future holds for us, don’t you? I guess I want something more. Do you?”

  Freya shook her head at the irony of his questions. Just one year ago, Freya gave Erik an ultimatum and he turned her down. She thought it was the end for them. But things worked out. They had been together ever since but he was right. Her career came first, just as his did for him. She reminded him of that.

  “Yeah, but that was last year. Don’t throw that in my face,” he admonished her. “You know a lot happened last year and I wasn’t in a good place to be in a relationship. I just think that we should have a discussion about the future.”

  A discussion.

  “Erik, did something happen in Montreal?”

  Before he could replay, Freya’s cell phone rang. She looked over at the phone lying on the coffee table. Erik saw her eyeing it.

  “Go ahead, it might be important.”

  Freya answered the phone.

  “Freya, I hate to bother you on a holiday but something happened and I knew you’d want to know,” said Duke.

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Brandon Cambridge is in the hospital. He had a seizure tonight and went into cardiac arrest. He’s in the ICU at Mercy Regional. That’s all I know for now. I’m on my way there. I’ll call you later when I know more. Good night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mercy Regional was a 100 bed hospital specializing in outpatient services. Serving the southwestern portion of the state’s needs, the hospital promoted wellness and preventative care. Its intensive care unit provided specialized treatment to patients who were acutely unwell or required critical care.

  Brandon was placed in the Level 3 CCU, cardiac care unit. Patients placed there were considered high dependency and thus the unit was known as the High Dependency Unit. Anyone needing two or more organs supported or needing mechanical ventilation was placed under level 3 surveillance. Since Brandon had a cardiac arrest, he was placed in the cardiac care unit of intensive care. For heart attack patients, the first 24 to 48 hours were crucial. It is the time span where their health would be most unstable.

  Brandon had sustained a cardiac arrest due to poisoning from cyanide. The lab results confirmed that. But where did the cyanide originate? The young man was celebrating Thanksgiving with his family and a host of friends. The meal was a catered affair and no one else had been poisoned. So, why him?

  This was the question Detective Ramirez asked herself as she stood outside the boy’s room. Brandon collapsed at home in front of his family during dinner. He was resuscitated by his uncle, a retired physician who happened to be at the party. He awakened briefly only to fall into a comatose state and remained that way. Since cardiac arrest is rare in someone young and healthy, opiate poisoning was suspected. Opiate addiction poisoning can lead to cardiac arrest and cause both metabolic and structural damage to the central nervous system. But the boy’s father was adamant his son was not an addict. Toxicology reports confirmed that Brandon had consumed an almost lethal dose of cyanide. But from where? The food catered from Green Creek Catering had tested negative for cyanide. So, how did the boy ingest it? And, who poisoned him?

  “So, what have I missed?”

  She jumped at the question. She was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice Duke Mott. She gave him a quick update.

  “That’s all I know for now. He’s having an EEG now to confirm brain activity. It doesn’t look good,” she added. Just then, Brandon’s father emerged from the room. Staring Ramirez in the eye, he quickly walked past her.

  “He does not like you,” said Duke.

  “Hmm, well, I don’t care for him either,” she quipped.

  They watched through the glass window as the EEG tech attached electrodes to Brandon’s head. He reminded Ramirez of the character Pinhead in the horror series, Hellraiser. Her cell phone pinged. She had a text from the police lab.

  Lab results show cyanide breakdown

  from mass amounts of apricot seeds.

  Apricot seeds. Where did he ingest that? Ramirez googled apricot seeds and sure enough, if a person ingested enough of them while crushed, the amygdalin in them broke down into cyanide. According to the article, apricots contained vitamin B17 and the seeds were often ingested whole but not crushed. Like apple seeds and cherry pits, amygdalin was contained. If crushed, the human metabolism broke down the components into cyanide. Enough cyanide in the body could lead a person to cardiac arrest and then stroke. Worst case scenario – a comatose state. Bingo. Brandon was intentionally poisoned. But by whom?

  She relayed the information to Mott and they left for the police lab. As they exited the CCU, Brandon’s father observed them and grabbed for his cell. He made a call and spoke quietly into the receiver. When he was done, he pocketed his phone and reentered his son’s room. He watched the EEG technician and the doctor read the results. He could tell from the look on their faces it wasn’t good.

  “So Doctor, how’s my boy?”

  The doctor knew the truth. But how do you tell a parent their only child is in a prolonged vegetative state?

  “Mr. Cambridge, his brain activity is very weak. But, it is still early. Let’s hope for the best and see what happens in the next 48 hours.” The physician walked briskly out the door and down the hallway leaving Brandon’s father alone in the room.

  If I ever find out who did this to my boy, I’ll kill them myself. It wasn’t the first time he’d made that promise to himself and he never broke a promise – never.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As quietly as they could, the intruder entered the house unnoticed. This time of day, no one was home. They went up the stairs directly to the boy’s room. They had at least an hour before anyone arrived home. It was the day before Thanksgiving, the perfect time to set their plan into motion.

  Looking around the large bedroom, they immediatel
y went over to the lap top. It was sitting on the desk facing the window. They turned it on, sat down at the desk, and began downloading the information that would seal this young man’s fate. Wearing gloves, they typed a few emails and hit the send button. After ten minutes, they were done. It was such a short period of time and yet it would cause so much damage.

  Then the intruder looked around the room again. Where to stash it? It needed to be in a place the authorities could easily see it. Hmmm, what about the desk itself? Opening a drawer and peering inside, they saw enough room for their cache. They left it there, shut the door, and stood up. Then, just to make things easy for the cops, they decided to leave some obvious evidence in the bathroom too. So, they deposited more of their reserve on the sink and floor by the toilet. Now, that looked right. The cops will think he tried to flush the evidence down the toilet.

  Pleased with themselves, they exited the room, walked swiftly down the stairs and into the kitchen. Using the remainder of their cache, they added it to a bottle of Gatorade and stashed it in their backpack. That was it. The entire affair took less than half an hour. But, more than enough time to ruin someone’s life. They left by the back door and walked into the dense forest behind Mike Chancellor’s home. Their plan was almost complete. Now, all they had to do was get inside Brandon’s home and place the bottle of Gatorade in his refrigerator. Feeling confident, the intruder walked the short distance to Brandon’s home.

  The house looked deserted. Today was arraignment day. Brandon would be at the courthouse with his dad. The family had a security system but that was no problem. All one had to do was capture the codes being sent to the security box. The intruder was astute enough to have purchased a software program that detected the password used to disarm the system. Using their I-pad, they downloaded the password. It took less than five minutes. Entering the security code at the back door, they walked in and went directly to the kitchen. They opened the refrigerator door and spied the other bottles of Gatorade. They added their bottle to the batch on the shelf. It fit right in. No one would know that it was filled with poison.

  Shutting the fridge, they quickly left. They disappeared into the dense forest behind Brandon’s home. Feeling elated, they walked through the woods until they saw their house. They casually entered through the front door as if they had done nothing more than return from an early morning jog. After all, the neighbors were familiar with their routine -a jog every morning without fail. So, no one would expect anything nefarious. Besides, it was their experience that everyone was only concerned with themselves and their lives.

  We live in a selfish world. We don’t speak to each other face to face anymore. We email, we text or we skype. We don’t interact. We don’t engage. We are all living in our own little worlds. Why, a person could commit murder in broad daylight and no one would ever be the wiser.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Agatha Falls had experienced much change in the past few years. The little New England town with the idyllic postcard scenery was now gripped with its own opiate epidemic. Like other small towns across America, the ravages of drugs had taken its toll.

  Rural and small town America had been hard hit by the drug crisis and Agatha Falls was no different. The effects were felt both economically and personally. The local police department advocated for treatment for those under incarceration. They introduced education into the high school and middle school. Officers were trained to recognize the signs of abuse or dependence in people with substance abuse disorders. But, in spite of their efforts, death by overdose was common. In the last five years, Agatha Falls had suffered a dozen drug overdose deaths.

  The town’s residents wanted so much to blame the death of Sydney Sanders on such a person. It was easier for them to accept her death that way. They wanted to believe that the boys who raped and harassed the girls at St. Bernadette’s were drug users. Many couldn’t accept that their rape parties were fueled by cruelty and hatred toward females, not drugs. This was one more example of the rape culture that existed in America today. It was easier to accept drugs as the reason for rape. Thus, the act of rape became normalized and substance abuse was blamed instead of the individuals who committed the act.

  Freya Barrett knew many of the people who felt this way. Some of them were even her college friends. Rape on college campuses was often normalized as a drunken mistake. Some of the male students used the word rape as a verb. For example, “I raped that exam.” Freya hated hearing that expression from the male coeds. It frustrated her to acknowledge that even at an institution of higher learning people could be so stupid. Now, with Brandon in the hospital, she thought that was the end of it. But, last night, his best friend, Mike Chancellor was arrested for his attempted murder.

  Crushed apricot seeds found in his desk and bathroom led police to believe that Mike added them to Brandon’s Gatorade at some point before the Thanksgiving dinner where Brandon ingested them. Searches were performed on his home computer. They revealed over two dozen articles on the dangers of crushed apple and apricot seeds had been downloaded. Once ingested, the crushed seeds broke down into cyanide after the human body metabolized them.

  Someone anonymously called the tip line and gave Mike’s name as the perpetrator. They said he was jealous of his best friend and wanted him out of the way. A warrant was issued and the house searched. Voila! Murder suspect arrested and jailed, all in one day. Case closed. But was it?

  As much as Freya disliked both Brandon and Mike, she felt the whole thing was a little too neat. She had one of her hunches that maybe the whole thing was a set up. After all, there were plenty of people who hated both boys now. But, with no proof to go on, it was just a hunch. She scheduled an upcoming meeting with Detective Ramirez to share her suspicions. But for right now, she had other business to confront and it was personal.

  Erik was driving her crazy! Suddenly he had transformed into a very needy person. She felt suffocated. He called her and texted her every day. He stopped by her house almost every night. Freya hated needy people. She herself was an island. She hated weakness in others but had the empathy to understand that not everyone was like her. Some people needed people. They needed relationships to complete them. They needed marriage to validate them. But Freya was different. She really didn’t need anyone. And the realization scared her. She knew Erik was intuitive enough to notice that. So, he became needy. She presumed his need came from his abandonment issues and his younger sister’s murder. But she didn’t want that in her life right now. Her career and education came first. And her book was almost finished.

  Her publisher, Donal wanted to release the book at the beginning of the summer. Books sell best then. People are searching for things to read over their vacations and school breaks. He also planned a small book tour. He envisioned a college tour capitalizing on her being a college student.

  Freya was excited by the tour but hadn’t told anyone about it yet. She worried what her boss; Lou would think if he found out she had written a book. Her best friend, Ali was supportive and so was her brother. But she hadn’t shared the information with anyone else. It was her secret.

  With her birthday tomorrow, she felt like maybe that was the time to share the news. She planned a small dinner party at her home for tomorrow night. She invited a small group of people, including her best friend, her brother, and his fiancé, and some people from work, including her boss. She’d break the news to him then. She exhaled at the thought. Lou was tough but fair. She’d just have to deal with it.

  Freya looked forward to her birthday. She would be twenty-one. Ali sent her a card that read; when you turn 21, you can legally do all the things you’ve been doing since you were 15. It made her laugh. She looked inside her fridge. The bottle of champagne was chilling and a bottle of red and white wine sat beside it. She was making her famous lasagna and garlic bread. And for dessert, birthday cake. But this time she was baking her own.

  Ali had fallen in love with the show, The Great British Baking Show. She ad
ored Paul Hollywood, the famous baker who hosted the show. Freya binge watched the first three seasons on Netflix last weekend. Watching other people bake was very entertaining and relaxing at the same time. Freya was a great cook but not a baker. But after watching the show, she longed to bake something. So, today was the day.

  Ali was coming over later to help her bake a birthday cake. She knew exactly what she wanted to bake too. She found the recipe online and it paired her two favorite flavors, chocolate, and peanut butter. The formal name was the crunchy milk chocolate-peanut butter layer cake. The original recipe called for rice krispies for the crunch but she was substituting roasted peanuts. The cake would be three tiers and she intended to decorate with spun sugar.

  She’d purchased a sugar thermometer and two pairs of gloves. The sugar must reach 105 degrees before you can shape it. So gloves were a necessity. While she cleaned her kitchen in preparation for her bake off with Ali, she heard a knock at her back door. Her cat Dexter turned from his cat tower to look at her.

  “Don’t worry Dex, I’ll get it. You just lie in your cat tower and stare out the window.”

  As if on cue, the cat turned around to resume his watch on the back yard. Freya looked out the back window to see Duke. She smiled when she saw him.

  “Hey, I thought you were in Boston.”

  “I was. I just got back an hour ago.”

  He walked in and took a seat at her kitchen table. He playfully tugged at Dexter’s tail. The torbie cat batted him with a paw, rolled over, and glared at him with one eye open. Freya laughed. She handed Duke a flavored water and sat beside him. She could tell he wanted to talk to her. He seemed a little anxious.