Poisonous

by Allison Brennan

“Always.” She drained her wine and stood up, her appetite gone. “I’m going back to my room. I have work to do.”

  * * *

  In her room, Max changed into sweatpants and a tank top. She washed her face and put her hair up into a clip. She didn’t want to think about her argument with David. Was it even an argument? He’d challenged her … but isn’t that why she liked him so much? He always told her the truth.

  And tonight, his truth was that maybe she shouldn’t look for the answers. That was not acceptable. Why had David irritated her so much over dinner? It seemed like he did it on purpose.

  She took a deep breath. Letting go wasn’t easy for her, but she’d been working on it. Plus, she kept everyone at arm’s length. She supposed she’d always known she did that, but it was the first time she wanted to change. It was difficult with her boyfriend Nick because he lived three thousand miles away, but with David, her closest friend, she worked to close the distance. He was street-smart. Efficient. Courageous. He observed people as well as she did, and sometimes he brought new insight. He had the calm, cool, rigid military aura that commanded fear and respect.

  He had issues, and she didn’t push. She didn’t like being forced into talking about her private life, and she wasn’t going to do it to him. David was an angry man. He’d gotten into fights in high school and been expelled twice. She wondered if he had been like Austin as a young teen, angry with everyone and everything. For David, it had been related in part to realizing he was gay. He’d once told her he’d hated himself and only the birth of his daughter had saved him.

  “I pictured myself dead, a bullet to the brain because I’d thought about killing myself so many times I knew exactly how I would do it. And then I saw my daughter growing up, believing that I was weak and full of self-loathing.” He’d paused, not looking at Max. Not looking anywhere but in his soul. “I still took risks I shouldn’t have when I was in the army. I was willing to die a hero, but not a coward.”

  Was Austin so angry that he would act out, too? On the one hand, Max admired the way Austin protected and cared about his stepbrother Tommy. But if someone hurt Tommy, what would Austin do?

  She should go to bed because she would likely wake before dawn, but Max wasn’t tired, and she wanted to get the case firmly in her head. She needed to understand—to know who Ivy was and what was going on in her life at the time she was murdered.

  David had left a folder with his report on the desk in her hotel suite. She opened his report and started going through the sad summary of Ivy Lake’s short life. Thirty minutes later, Max got up and opened a bottle of wine she had chilling in the suite’s small refrigerator.

  When Grace Martin had told Max that Ivy Lake used social media as a weapon, Max hadn’t realized exactly what that meant. She was familiar with the Heather Brock suicide because she’d read the depositions from the civil suit that had been pulled after Ivy’s death. Ivy had posted a video of Heather having sex with her boyfriend on a pornography Web site. Max still felt there were federal laws that could have punished Ivy, but she also understood that because these were two minors involved it wouldn’t be treated the same way.

  There was so much more.

  Because he was meticulous, David had organized the information into three categories—innocuous, critical, and bully. Max didn’t use the word “bully” lightly. She felt that too many people bandied around the word so it ended up losing its meaning.

  However, Ivy was, in fact, a bully. In many ways, she was much worse than the thug on the playground who uses fists to resolve conflict.

  Ivy started a blog when she was thirteen, but posted clips to several social media sites that linked back to her blog. Most of her posts were classified innocuous. Selfies, group shots, scenic photos, food, any number of things that had nothing to do with anything except sharing an everyday occurrence. Max would prefer an Internet filled with puppy and kitten photos to the crap most people posted.

  A small stack of posts were critical—commentary on individuals, some named and some not. But even in the anonymous posts, clues could be picked up. Based on the information he found on her friends’ social media sites from the same period, David had figured out nearly every person Ivy spoke about, even unnamed.

  Nothing in the critical stack seemed to be reason enough to kill Ivy.

  Though small, the bully stack was powerful.

  David had included a memo written in his small, perfect block letters.

  Ivy Lake seemed obsessed with four people in the year before she died.

  First, Heather Brock. Prior to posting the sexually explicit video on a pornography site, Ivy posted humiliating details about Heather on her blog and unflattering photos and comments on her social media accounts, specifically: a photo of Heather tripping downstairs; a picture of her mimicking oral sex; and several comments about Christopher Holbrook only dating Heather because she “put out.” Ivy also took Heather’s personal photos and wrote her own captions that implied Heather slept around. It appears Ivy made Heather the negative center of attention and dozens of individuals at the school, mostly girls, joined in on the criticism and commentary. On one blog I counted ninety-four individuals who gave Ivy a cyberpat on the back or added a critical comment about Heather.

  Second, and most recently: Travis Whitman. After Ivy and he ended their relationship, she also used his posted photos and wrote embarrassing captions. She humiliated a friend of Travis’s named Rick Colangelo by outing him as bisexual. What I could put together from the public information is minimal, but my educated guess is that Travis told Ivy about Rick, and when Ivy and Travis split, Ivy used the information to out Rick in an attempt to hurt Travis. Rick had been on the football team and became the subject of ridicule and torment. He moved in with his grandparents in Scottsdale the summer Ivy was killed. A few days before Ivy died, she posted a photo of Travis smoking what appears to be marijuana under the bleachers with a girl. Comments from Travis accused her of doctoring the photo and he wanted to know where she got it, claimed it wasn’t true. That issue is secondary. Betraying a friend like Rick would give Travis a far better motive to kill Ivy than a doctored photo. Especially since—based on my examination of both Rick’s and Travis’s social media profiles—they are no longer friends.

  Third, Bailey Fairstein. According to older posts, Ivy and Bailey had been best friends until Heather committed suicide. Bailey then shut down all her social media accounts, and multiple times Ivy posted a photo of Bailey with the caption “Hypocrite.” Others joined in and gave examples where they felt Bailey was a hypocrite. Shortly after this incident, Bailey transferred to a private school.

  Finally, Tommy Wallace. Ivy repeatedly made fun of her stepbrother Tommy by posting unflattering videos of him stuttering or sounding unintelligent. She would ask him to say or do something, and he would do it and she would film him. Through the comments, I tracked Austin retaliating by posting embarrassing photos of Ivy. One month before she died, the posts about Tommy stopped.

  Prior to the civil suit being filed after Heather Brock’s suicide, Ivy used social media under her own name. When the civil suit was filed at the end of April, there was a six-week period of nothing. Then Ivy picked up where she left off on the day school was out for the summer—but she opened different accounts on all social media outlets and didn’t use her real name. The only thing she didn’t start up again was her blog, at least nothing that NET staff could find.

  The last post that Ivy Lake made was on Twitter, not her Instagram account. It was posted at 1:10 A.M. July 4.

  No show, no go. Payback’s a bitch—are you sorry now? You will be. #sweetrevenge

  That tweet wasn’t directed at anyone. I called Jess at the office, thinking there might have been a mistake on her end, and she explained this is called a “subtweet” which means that it has a double meaning and is directed at one individual who knows it’s directed at them. I don’t fully understand the purpose, but it’s apparently a passive-aggressive method of social
media communication.

  Max filled in the information David had uncovered on the timeline, drawing thick lines during the peak of Ivy’s online attack on the individuals involved.

  Grace Martin was right: they had many suspects and no solid evidence. Max pulled out the notes she had taken from her meeting with the police officer, along with the newspaper accounts, and what she’d learned from Austin.

  According to Austin, Ivy had been gone most of the day and came home at eight the evening of July 3 in a really bad mood. When she found out that Tommy was still at the house, she told him to leave. Tommy was scared of the dark, so Austin walked Tommy home.

  Austin returned home shortly after nine and argued with Ivy about how she’d treated Tommy. Ivy ignored him and went to her room. Austin was playing the Xbox in his room when he heard Ivy yelling at someone on the phone in her room. Ivy stormed out of the house just before ten thirty. Austin didn’t ask where she was going or when she’d be back because he was mad that she hadn’t let Tommy stay for the night.

  Grace had looked into Austin’s alibi—that he was home alone while his sister was killed—and he’d been on his Xbox playing online with several other people. The logs had been reviewed by the cybercrime unit and determined to be valid. Austin had been playing video games until just after three in the morning. While it was possible that he had someone come over to play his game for him—and therefore provide him an alibi—there was no clear motive, and he’d been twelve at the time. Not that a twelve-year-old couldn’t plan and execute a murder, but it didn’t fit with the other evidence.

  The last conversation Ivy had on her phone was with her ex-boyfriend Travis—fifteen minutes before she sent the tweet. It lasted three minutes and Ivy had called him. Travis claimed that Ivy had called to apologize for posting the fake picture. Mr. and Mrs. Whitman claimed Travis never left the house after they returned from a movie, but Grace wasn’t holding much weight to that alibi. It would have been easy for Travis to drive to the preserve, kill Ivy, and return while his parents slept.

  Max made a note: What was that three-minute call to Travis really about?

  Justin Brock had the strongest motive for murder, in Max’s mind, but David hadn’t singled him out.

  Justin was five years older than his sister Heather. They had an idyllic upbringing—their parents had been married for more than twenty-five years, they lived in a lovely home in Larkspur overlooking the bay, Dr. Brock was a surgeon and Mrs. Brock had been a stay-at-home mom until she opened an antiques store in town when Heather started middle school.

  On New Year’s Eve, six months before Ivy was killed, Heather committed suicide with pills and alcohol. A subsequent investigation revealed that Ivy had bullied Heather for the better part of a year. Heather had never sought help from her parents, her brother, or a teacher.

  Cases like Heather Brock’s should get more attention. Someone should have put a stop to that situation before it got so out of hand. Ivy had gone far beyond name-calling or mean-girl spats; it was cruel and humiliating, made worse because so many others remained silent and watched from the sidelines, some actively cheering on Ivy when she went after Heather.

  The Brocks had filed a wrongful death suit in civil court, suing Ivy, her mother, and stepfather for ten million dollars. According to investigators, Ivy had posted no fewer than 180 comments or photos about Heather. Ivy had branded Heather as a slut, resulting in cruel teasing by her peers. Heather had lost weight, had become depressed, and her grades had suffered.

  At one point, Ivy had written: Poor Heather. She doesn’t like her new reputation? If you don’t want to be called a slut, don’t act like a slut.

  The video of Heather that Ivy put on a porn site had been posted a day before her suicide. It had been shared with virtually everyone in the high school, but the Brocks didn’t know about it until after Heather killed herself. Heather had kept the bullying private because she didn’t want to tell her parents about things she’d done the summer before.

  A summer of wild fun had ended in a suicide when it was revealed for everyone to laugh at, joke about, tease over. Heather was ridiculed and embarrassed, then dead.

  It angered Max that so many people had jumped on Ivy’s cruel bandwagon. They piled on those who didn’t defend themselves, as if tearing down someone else made them better. And why hadn’t anyone noticed Heather’s weight loss and the depression? Had she made some excuse or was it sudden? Had she feigned being sick, or were the family and friends in her life simply blind to her pain and suffering?

  A knock at her door made Max jump. She stretched and her back cracked. Two hours had passed with her hunched over her boards and reading David’s findings; it was nearly midnight. She glanced through the security hole and saw David.

  She opened the door. “I’m sorry I walked out,” she said.

  He held up a small bag. “I brought dessert.”

  “You were at the restaurant for the last two hours?”

  “I went to high school with the bartender. Didn’t realize it until I was leaving and he flagged me down. We had a chat.”

  Chat? David wasn’t someone who chatted.

  He stepped inside and looked at her workspace. “You’ve been busy.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Can I get that in writing?” He smiled.

  Chatting. Smiling. Joking. “What did you do with my dark, brooding friend I had dinner with?”

  David shook his head, still smiling. “Charlie is renting a car at the airport so I don’t have to pick him up. He’ll be here at eleven tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll be meeting with Paula Wallace then. Let’s go to the Brock house at nine. And, if we have time, I want to talk to Bailey Fairstein’s mother. Bailey will be in school, but her mother will have some of the information I want.”

  “Are you certain you want to do this?”

  “Yes. I need to understand how all the pieces fit.”

  Max walked over to her timeline. “I need to confirm, but after the civil suit was filed, there was a six-week window of cyber silence.” She pulled out David’s notes. “You wrote that the alias she used was created with one of Ivy’s e-mails. We need to triple-check that she didn’t create additional accounts.”

  Max stepped back and looked at the board she’d created. Gestured toward the photo of Travis Whitman allegedly smoking dope.

  “Ivy resumed her bad habits after her six-week silence. She didn’t learn from Heather’s tragedy.”

  “Six weeks hardly seems long enough for a punishment.” David nodded to the bag. “Eat your dessert, go to bed. We’ll leave at eight thirty.”

  “I’m meeting Austin and Tommy for breakfast at seven in Corte Madera, then I want to check in with Detective Martin.”

  “We’ll leave at quarter to seven.”

  “Thanks, David. For understanding about tonight—I don’t know why I got so emotional about this case.”

  “It’s what you pay me for.”

  He walked out.

  Pay him for? Is that all it was?

  She tried to sleep, but it eluded her until well after two in the morning.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WEDNESDAY

  David dropped Max off at the diner where she was to meet Austin and Tommy for breakfast. He thought it would be less intimidating for the boys if Max met with them alone.

  “You? Intimidating?” Max said with mock surprise.

  “How many hours?”

  She had no idea what he meant.

  “Sleep, Maxine.”

  “Enough.”

  He didn’t smile, but didn’t comment again. She was irritated that David was watching her so closely, but instead of arguing with him, she got out of the car.

  She walked into the restaurant and looked around. The boys weren’t there. If Austin bailed on her, she’d track him down at school. She wasn’t in the mood to be manipulated by a thirteen-year-old.

  The waitress sat her in a corner booth where she had a view
of the door. Max ordered coffee and a muffin. She was done with her second cup before the boys showed up—twenty minutes late.

  Austin looked exactly the same as the day before—defiant, angry, a slight swagger in his step. Tommy was nervous. He kept looking around as if he shouldn’t be here. She raised her hand. Tommy smiled and waved. Austin didn’t. They slid into the booth across from her.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” she said.

  “I don’t know why we have to do this,” Austin said. “Emma said you know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  The waitress came over and Max told the boys to order something. Tommy ordered bacon and eggs; Austin ordered nothing.

  When she left, Max said, “I’ve already made progress on the investigation. I met with the detective, I spoke to Ivy’s ex-boyfriend, and I’m bringing in a private forensics team to reexamine the evidence using state-of-the art technology. But it’s important to me to make sure you both understand this process.”

  They stared at her, waiting. Tommy openly curious; Austin openly suspicious.

  “I will do everything I can to find out what happened to your sister. But sometimes, even if we know the truth, we can’t prove it.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Austin said. “All we need is to know what happened.”

  “Even if we do know what happened, that might not change your situation.”

  “Of course it will,” Austin said. “All we need is to prove to my stupid mother that Tommy didn’t do anything to Ivy.”

  “You shouldn’t say stupid,” Tommy said. “That’s not nice.”

  Austin’s mouth twisted, but then he relaxed. Interesting. Max had seen a bit of that yesterday when Austin was with his stepbrother. He controlled his irritation and anger much better with the older boy. It was a sign of maturity that Max hadn’t expected.

  “There’s also the chance I may not be able to find out what happened,” Max said.

  The waitress came with Tommy’s breakfast and a refill of Max’s coffee. She put the bill facedown on the table and walked away.