by Valley Sams
“You ok?” No formalities necessary, not after all these years. She had been groggy, but when she heard Brie’s breath catching in her chest, she was more awake than she had been for months.
Someone had hurt her. Brie never cried. Never.
“I woke up in the middle of the night,” she said, her voice hitching. “He was gone. The door was open; I was totally alone…he was just gone.”
It took less than a minute for Mac to feel the full import of her regret. Louis had been right. She should have said something. She should have ripped her blinders off and confronted Brie, told her what they had learned and saved her from what was evidently a major heartbreak.
Brie sounded foreign and far away, her voice alternately clear and thick with the waves of her emotion.
“We didn’t fight or anything. I know it’s probably not a big deal.” The tears began now, heavy like cotton, muffling the reception.
“I can’t figure him out, Mac…I’m so tired, Can you…”
There was no hesitation.
‘I’m coming…” Mac said. “Stay there. Give me half an hour, at least, but stay there,”
Now, dressed in Louis’s infamous Oxford t-shirt and a pair of fleece leopard print bottoms, she was doing all she could to not lay on the horn as she made her way through city traffic.
Mac was lucky to have secured a spot outside Paul’s apartment. In this part of the city, if you stopped for longer than a few seconds, someone would be there to demand money for valet parking.
She waited, impatiently, for Brie to make her way from the glass and concrete prison she had checked into.
Five minutes. Ten minutes. An hour or so away, her detective was practically wrapped around their dog, snoring peacefully. Unaware. Or smug…she couldn’t decide.
Finally, Sabrina appeared – first, framed by the elevator door then rushing past the concierge and then finally slipping into the seat beside her, Sabrina looked no bigger than she did when she was a child. Her body still tiny, her soul too big to hold it in, her best friend looked as lost as she had almost twenty years ago.
“We have to find him.” Sabrina said, haphazardly wrapping herself in a seat belt, “You have to help me find him and figure out what the hell is going on.”
******
The two girls stood in the shadows of the computer science department building at New York University. All the lights were out, seeing that it was only a few hours before the sun came up. The building stretched out before them, all brick and darkened windows in the chilly spring dawn.
Mac turned to Brie, who was shifting her weight in an almost psychotic manner. Right foot, left foot…all the while twirling one of her overlong stands of hair between her fingers.
Even though they had spoken about it in length for the last hour, even though it had been the first question Mac had flung at her friend…she had to ask again.
“You’re sure he’s here?” Mac said. She wrapped her arms around herself tighter, feeling the insistent April damp against her skin.
“No,” Brie said, glaring at Mac. “I am obviously not sure that he’s here. But it seems like the most logical spot.”
Mac couldn’t help but roll her eyes.
“Oh, so if he’s not with you, he’s at work…right?”
Sabrina’s mouth formed a tight little line that Mac had seldom seen. Her English country garden beauty seemed to dissolve in a second, leaving behind the kind of lines that only come from a hard life earned hourly.
“There’s no other place he’d be,” she said.
She turned to Mac. The light under the doorway of the offices was dim. A few moths danced around the blasé bulb with little to no commitment. “Something is wrong.” she said, fixing her giant brown eyes on Mac. “I wouldn’t have called you otherwise.”
Mac felt as if she had been slapped. Of course she wouldn’t. She knew Sabrina better than she knew herself and one thing Sabrina seldom did was call her in the middle of the night over a man, of all things.
Mac took a deep breath.
“You’re right.” she said. “Something is wrong. Go ahead.”
Brie rolled her eyes.
“With your blessing?”
“Absolutely.” There was a pause when Sabrina punched in the suite numbers on the intercom and waited. The girls barely breathed as the archaic system announced one…two…three…four rings. It remained unanswered echoing off the concrete corners of a perfectly beige, perfectly safe administration building.
Sabrina turned suddenly to Mac. Her jaw was set and her eyes glazed.
“I’m going around the back.” she said rapidly. “His office looks out onto the park out there…I’ll go knock.” Before Mac could stop her, she was gone.
What if he’s with another woman?! she wanted to yell. What if you catch him wallowing in the arms of another at 4am?
“Brie…” Mac shouted pleadingly. It was too late. She had already disappeared around the side of the building. Begrudgingly and with the kind of fuzzy thinking that comes from too little sleep, Mac followed her friend to the back.
Each of the ground floor offices had patio access out to the strangely manicured lawns that lead to a man-made lake. Mac wasn’t surprised when she discovered Sabrina making her way to one of the ground floor sliding glass doors.
Her head barely clearing the perfectly manicured hedge, Mac hissed, “Seriously? Brie, honey. Seriously?”
Sabrina’s hand was already wrapped around the smooth plastic handle of the patio door. Mac had to stop herself from breaking into a full volume yelp.
“You don’t know what you’re going to find in…”
Sabrina turned to Mac and silenced her immediately. It wasn’t the sadness in her eyes that stopped her, but the disappointment. It was deep. It was dark. There was a least a few months’ recovery time, waiting for the two of them, burbling deep in there.
“No one.” Brie hissed, “NO one has ever left me in the middle of the night. No one…” Her voice grew thick again with emotion. “No one has ever made me wait like this. I need to know…”
Mac moved past the hedgerows that functioned as barriers between the office patios. Now that she was closer, Mac could see the tears on Brie’s cheeks.
“You’re right,” Mac said, now close enough to whisper. “You need to know….” Despite the obvious misery that Brie was feeling, Mac thought she detected an amount of gratitude. Brie turned to try the sliding glass door to see if it was locked.
It wasn’t.
The door slid open easily, noiselessly scooting along its path…allowing the girls full access to what lay behind it.
Her hand on the door, the thick black behind her, Brie turned to Mac.
“Are you…”
“Nope.” Mac stopped her before she could continue, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “It’s all yours. I’ll be here for the getaway…should need the need arise.”
“I love you,” Brie said, hastily embracing Mac. The next second she was gone, swallowed up into the darkness that was Paul Creed’s office.
CHAPTER SEVEN
First the light came on. Then the screams began. Every inch of Mac’s flesh seemed to sizzle with adrenaline. Emerging from the darkness behind the mild, suburban-style sliding glass door, Mac could hear the worst noise imaginable. The sound of her best friend’s heart being ripped to pieces.
Without a moments pause, Mac ran into the darkness. As soon as she entered the room she was immediately blind. Unable to distinguish anything, all she could make out was Brie’s choking sobs and a tiny sliver of light hovering above the floor a few feet off.
“Sabrina…” Mac shouted, her own voice shaky and unimpressive in the humid darkness. Even though it was spring, the apartment was dank with trapped heat.
She stumbled toward the yellow slash that indicated a doorway. Still shaking with every shriek Brie made, she managed to open the door.
The first thing Mac saw was Sabrina’s back. Still dressed in a heavy knit cardigan th
rown over her pajamas, Brie was stooped with horror. Her body shook with sobs, too appalled by whatever was in front of her to even notice Mac’s loud entrance.
“Brie…what….” Mac rushed to her side to take her into her arms but stopped.
It was all she could do to stop her own scream from joining Sabrina’s almost constant shrieks of loss.
Face down on the desk, Paul Creed’s body was doing its best to spread as much blood around his office as it could.
Although his face was buried in the mass of papers on his desk, the part of his head that was visible was as lurid, moist and appalling as a squirrel lying dead by the side of the road.
Everything was crimson. But not one shade, as one would expect…but a variety of tones. From the dried, darker shade to the parts that…god knows how many hours later, were still glistening in the light from his desk lamp.
His hands were spread out on either side of him, large fingered and absolutely useless. His struggle had ended.
“Sabrina. Here…no…”. What was she saying? None of it made much sense. No? No what? No, don’t look at the dead body of your lover? No, don’t get used to what must have been the third of such crimes the two of them had stumbled across in the last half year? Trouble had its eye on the two of them, that was for sure.
Sabrina was frozen, her hands to her mouth. Her face was mottled pink and deadly white…her eyes blank with horror. Despite Mac’s insistence, she continued to stare…
Mac grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her toward her. It was difficult. Her strong body was stiff and it took Mac forcibly turning her head to face her to make eye contact. Brie was gasping for air, her chest hitching.
“That’s him. It’s him! Why would someone…why would…”
“Honey, I need you to go back to the car,“ Mac said. Despite her best friend’s tears, despite the hollow, insane look in her eyes, she could think of only one thing. Call Louis.
“Is he dead?” Brie, her tangled hair hanging like vines, her legs kicking out under her nightshirt, struggled to get free from Mac’s grip. “Let me see if he’s dead, Mac. He might be…”
“Sabrina!” Mac hollered. She pulled out her most authoritative voice, despite her heartbeat thumping in her throat as if she’s swallowed a rabbit. “We need to get back to the car and get some help, ok?”
In her arms, Brie suddenly shrank like a popped balloon. Mac felt the full weight of her against her smaller, reedier frame. Safely in her best friend’s arms, Brie turned her face against Mac’s shoulder and allowed herself to sob.
“Call Louis,” Brie said, almost gagging against her sobs. “Please call Louis.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“It took a while, but she’s asleep.” Mac sighed, sliding into the window nook gratefully. She picked up the mug of tea Louis had made and cradled it in her freezing hands. Louis, his tall frame awkwardly arranged in the tight nook starred past Mac at the grey ocean pounding against the empty beach. He was deep in thought. Deeply troubled, was more like it. His tea was going cold in front of him, the cheerful cat mug in stark contrast to his dark demeanor.
“I should’ve said something,” he said finally, more to himself than to Mac. “How many more indications did I need that he wasn’t the most well liked of all people.”
Mac shook her head.
“She was so happy,” she said. “It would take a special kind of coldness to ruin that.”
Louis looked away from the view for the first time since Mac sat down. His mouth was a straight line, curving down into a slight frown. His beard hid it well, but lines had been etched along his face to match – worn like water against rock, from years of seeing things that would have sent anyone else straight to the psych ward.
“I used to have that special kind of coldness,” he said, his eyes as hard as his mouth. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”
Mac took his hand across the table, intertwining her fingers with his.
“Mackenzie Bay happened to you.” He scoffed and looked back at the water. A mist so thick it looked like a stone wall was slowly advancing toward the shore. On the small patch of grass that was Sabrina’s backyard, a congregation of gulls had gathered, seeking shelter from what was apparently going to be quite a storm.
Mac was trying to welcome it. After the night they’d had and the emotional wreckage of the morning, she was reminding herself seemingly every minute that it was good to be sequestered in Brie’s house. Her best friend safely but exhaustedly sleeping upstairs, the sweet, chocolate scented warmth of the old house insulating them… It was probably best to be landlocked until the trauma began to fade.
If only she could convince herself it was true.
She was itching as much as Louis was to get to the bottom of Paul’s murder. Her mind hadn’t stopped running over the events of the weekend, over everything she knew about him, about his friends or lack thereof.
Watching the detective ignore his tea, she felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him into action.
“Louis…” She began, squeezing his fingers slightly with her own.
Louis let go of her hand and took a deep drink of his almost cold tea.
“It’s not my district, so there’s really not much I can do. However…” he sighed. “However, I do have a few contacts. Useful ones apparently.”
Mac’s heart flipped in her chest. He didn’t…did he?
“They’re letting me take part in the investigation.” Mac gasped, her eyes shining. She had to stop herself from clapping her hands together with joy.
“Oh my god…really?”
Louis looked over his glasses at her. There wasn’t a trace of humor in his eyes. His eyes, the kind, brown pools she fell into on such a regular basis, really could be colder than she imagined.
“They’re letting ME take part. Just me. That means no breaking in anywhere, no running up cliff sides after suspects, no provoking madmen for amusement.”
“But…can I ride along with you?” She had missed the point completely. Louis’s broad shoulders dropped and he let his head fall slack with frustration.
When he looked up, Mac was staring at him like a puppy someone had mistakenly said ‘walk’ to. She might as well have had a leash in her mouth and a furiously wagging tail.
Despite his annoyance, Louis couldn’t help but feel a disconcerting flush of love for her. Her odd, elven little face that he could practically fit in one hand, her intimidating intelligence…her inability to take ‘no’ for an answer. He was the wary seagull to her oncoming storm.
“Do you know anyone who can come watch Brie while we’re gone?” He mumbled, his tone resigned and weary.
Mac practically leaped across the small Formica table, slamming her mouth against his in a grateful kiss. His glasses knocked off kilter; he was too shocked to kiss her back, his lukewarm tea spilling over his hand where it had been suspended between the two of them.
Oncoming storm indeed.
CHAPTER NINE
Louis’ colleague at the NYC police department had supplied him with the home address of Paul Creed’s old roommate. The phone on speaker, Mac had silently scribbled the street name and house number on the back of an old fast food napkin she had found in the glove compartment. It wasn’t the most sophisticated detective work she’d ever done, but at least it was something.
As excited as she was to go along with him, she felt a little bit embarrassed that she had been so desperate to be asked. There was no way Mac would be so transparent in everyday life. She was far too guarded for that and after six months Louis knew that all too well. In a way, it was as if he had found her weak spot. Even Sabrina didn’t know where that was.
They were parking in the perfectly clean driveway of a suburban dream home about an hour from the University. It was obviously a very affluent neighborhood, but one that was eerily devoid of character. Every sprawling mansion seemed to follow one of three basic designs. Every lawn was cut to the same length and every drive way housed t
he same, glossy SUV status symbols.
Paul’s roommate had apparently enjoyed more than his share of success. His house was the largest on the cul-de-sac, situated at the end of the loop like a proud patriarch at the family table.
Louis pulled up beside the white Cadillac escalade parked in front of the garage. His beat up Toyota looked like the country bumpkin cousin alongside of the shimmering vehicle. In fact, Mac had the distinct impression that if Louis took too long inside she’d find herself being asked to move along by a local rent-a-cop.
Louis opened the door, one long leg already out of the car. He stopped and turned to Mac, as if in afterthought.
