It wasn’t hard to locate the exact spot where Bethany had fallen, as all of the nearby landscaping was trampled down by the onlookers and paramedics. This particular spot was almost equidistant between the two closest floodlights, making it one of the darker places in the park. And since most of the surveillance cameras in the city were mounted to street lamps and traffic lights, I was in a dead spot. That must have been why the city surveillance cameras hadn’t caught much.
I dropped down to my hands and knees. Using my cell phone’s flashlight app, I crawled around scanning for anything that the police might have missed. If Bethany had lost her bracelet or phone down here, they were long gone by now.
Glancing up, I saw that the elevated walkway was almost directly overhead. I pocketed my phone and headed down the park. The walkway was designed by the same architects that created the popular High Line Park in Manhattan. It ran almost the entire length of Domino Park, and was constructed at least partially from original beams from the old sugar factory. I wound my way through the switchbacks of a ramp leading up to the walkway. I passed two towering metal cranes painted nearly the same shade of turquoise as Bethany’s cute little owl tattoo and worked my way back down the length of the elevated path.
The walkway ran along the meandering bank of the East River. Even in the middle of the day I wouldn’t be able to see from one end to the other. If I’d been posing for a selfie on a crowded day, I might capture a glimpse of some of the other people around me, as long as they were within arm’s reach. There were always plenty of people around, but the walkway itself made a boring background, especially compared to the river and the illuminated Manhattan skyline. Which meant anyone taking pictures would get themselves with the skyline as the backdrop. They could have stood right next to Bethany and not gotten her in the photo.
I made my way along the walkway. As I approached the spot above where Bethany had landed, I realized I was not alone. A shadowy figure stood approximately where Bethany had been about ten hours earlier, hands clutching the rail as he stared at the water.
My shoulders stiffened and a chill ran down my spine. Was this Bethany’s killer, hunting for his next victim? I froze, unsure of what to do next. There was nowhere to hide, one of the park features that up until now I had really appreciated.
“Ms. Dean. Fancy seeing you here.”
My heart just about burst out of my chest.
The figure turned toward me, and I could make out his rugged features. “Detective Castillo?” To my embarrassment, my voice came out shaky.
“Did I scare you, Ms. Dean?” he asked.
“Maybe a little.” Did he scare me? Does a gator scare a fish? “How’d you know it was me?”
“I recognized your neon green shirt from a block away.”
I looked down at my uniform shirt. Usually I kept a spare shirt in my messenger bag, in case I wanted to go out after work without looking like a corporate tool, but I’d been running late this morning. “I haven’t been home to change yet.”
“They say that the killer always returns to the scene of the crime. This is the second time I’ve seen you here. Where were you at 10:41 a.m. this morning?”
“It must be nice to have a death on video,” I said in lieu of answering. I closed the remaining few feet between us and stood next to the detective, facing the river. “At least you don’t have to worry about pesky details like time of death.”
“It is convenient,” he agreed. “And your whereabouts?”
“At work. Ask anyone.” I turned to face him, understanding dawning on me. “Detective, if Bethany’s death was an accident, why are you treating me like a suspect?”
5
Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ June 24
It’s hard to believe in yourself when no one else does. #inspiration
WHEN DETECTIVE CASTILLO didn’t answer right away, I wrapped my hands around the railing and peered over at the ground below. The lawn didn’t look that far away. At its highest point, the elevated walkway was barely fifteen feet off the ground. I wouldn’t jump that distance for no reason, but if I had to, I could probably do it. I might break my ankles, but that would be a worst-case scenario.
So how did such a short fall kill Bethany instantly?
Bethany was several inches taller than me. The railing came up almost to my elbows, and would have been at least waist high on her. I climbed up on the bottom rail and leaned forward. The wide wire mesh that ran between the bottom of the walkway and the railing would prevent children or pets from slipping through, so the only way down was over.
“You want me to believe that a grown woman accidentally fell over this railing?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Castillo must have been contemplating the same thing. “Or she jumped.”
“Or she was pushed,” I insisted. I waved my arm at the Williamsburg Bridge, just a few blocks away at the end of the park. “Why jump off a fifteen-foot walkway when there’s a three-hundred-foot-tall bridge right down the street?”
“Why push someone off a fifteen-foot drop when there’s a three-hundred-foot drop right down the street?” he countered. “People do strange things. Chances are, she figured she wouldn’t get hurt.” He put his feet up on the bottom rail and leaned over as far as he could. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you’d limp away from a fall like that.”
Up until now, I’d just had a weird feeling gnawing away at my gut that the cops were wrong about Bethany’s death. The closest I had to any evidence of foul play was that her phone and bracelet were missing. But the more I looked down onto the lush lawn not far below, the more I was convinced that whatever happened here was no mere accident. “So you agree with me?”
He turned his head and stared at the Williamsburg Bridge. It was close enough that I could hear the distant rumble of traffic. “Unless the ME’s report says otherwise, Ms. Kostolus’s death was an accident.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
“Wish I was.” I almost missed the note of wistfulness in his voice over the sound of the wind coming off the river.
“Can’t you, like, trace her phone or whatever?”
“It’s turned off, probably dead by now. Last activity we had, it pinged off a cell tower consistent with our deceased’s place of business.”
Knowing that he at least tried to find her phone and had returned here tonight was encouraging. “Makes sense.” I wondered why Bethany had dashed out on her shift like she had. “Any chance she got a call right around ten thirty?”
“She hadn’t received a call for days. Without a warrant, we can’t know much about her phone usage, but she wasn’t using it for calls.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, who actually makes calls anymore except for emergencies?” I could think of three or four messaging services I was connected to, and that wasn’t counting straight texts or direct messages associated with all of the apps I used. Last time I checked, I had more replies to Yelp reviews than recent calls.
Castillo continued to stare off into the distance. I wasn’t even sure if he was listening to me anymore. “Bethany was like a social media guru. She had a popular YouTube channel, and a huge following on Instagram. Wasn’t there a story a few weeks ago about a YouTube star with a stalker?”
“Online stalkers are nothing new,” the detective replied. “Did your friend Bethany have a problem with trolls?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone?” Even the café’s professional account attracted its fair share of trolls, bots, and spammers. “The internet is toxic.”
Lightning cracked the sky, and I jumped. “Storm’s rolling in,” he observed.
“I’m thinking we might not want to be on a metal bridge when it hits,” I said. New York City storms were pretty tame in comparison to the destructive tornados and flash floods back home, but when it came to lightning, I didn’t mess around.
�
��I’ll walk you down.” The first drops of rain splattered at my feet, and we hurried back toward the ramp on the north end. The bridge grew slick under my cowboy boots, and I clutched the rail for support. “Can I give you a lift?” he offered when we reached the ground.
Normally, I would have turned him down. Untapped Books & Café was only a few blocks away, and it would be open for several hours still. I could probably shelter there until the storm passed, but I didn’t feel like going back to work and risk running into Todd, not today. My aunt’s building was probably a good fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from here, which would be miserable in the driving rain. I didn’t have money for an Uber, so my options were down to huddling under the shelter of a metal walkway during an electrical storm, or taking the detective up on his offer. “Yes, thank you.”
A second before we reached his car, an unmarked brown Chevy sedan that practically screamed “undercover cop,” the skies opened up and a deluge rained down on us. I glanced over my shoulder. The lights of Manhattan were faint, blurry dots of color in the thick fog rolling off the river and heavy downpour. If Bethany’s bracelet was still in the park, it would be washed into the river within minutes.
“Get in!” Castillo bellowed, and I realized I’d been standing in the rain like an idiot long enough to be soaked to the bone.
I slid into the front seat. “Sorry, I’m getting everything wet.” Rain dripped down the bridge of my nose.
“Don’t worry,” he said. He slapped the side of his seat. “You can’t imagine the things I’ve washed out of this car. Good thing it’s Scotchgarded.”
I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about the things his car had seen. I gave him directions to my aunt’s building. “Thanks for the lift,” I said as he idled next to the curb. I reached for the door handle.
“Nice digs,” he said, straining to see through the rain. It was coming down in sheets now. The couple of steps between the street and the front door of the lobby might as well have been a mile. The building itself used to be a warehouse. It had been gutted and rebuilt as luxury apartments, while maintaining the industrial look of the original building. The wall facing the side street was covered by a mural that incorporated old street graffiti with a newer image of the Williamsburg Bridge.
“I’m house-sitting for my aunt.” I don’t know why I felt the need to explain that to him. Before coming to Brooklyn, I’d looked up my aunt’s building so I’d know how to get there from the bus station. The website had listed the prices for available apartments. A three-hundred-fifty-foot studio cost more in rent per month than I had paid for my car. I didn’t even want to know what Aunt Melanie paid for her large two bedroom with a balcony overlooking a small garden plot. The last thing I wanted was for Detective Castillo to think I was some hoity-toity snob who could afford a place like this.
Castillo dug out his wallet, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me. I glanced down at it, running my thumb over the embossed NYPD seal. I looked back over at him. The detective was out of my league. If my league was Piney Island, Louisiana, he was the moon. And yet, he was giving me his number. “Call me if you think of anything else about Ms. Kostolus.”
Oh. Duh. Even if I dyed my boring brown hair funky colors, guys like Castillo were way out of my reach. “Yeah. Sure. Will do,” I mumbled. “Thanks for the lift.”
I dashed through the rain and fumbled with the front door lock. After a few frustrating seconds, I was standing in the lobby dripping water all over the floor. The air conditioner was on full blast and I shivered.
I took the elevator upstairs and let myself into my aunt’s apartment. When I opened the door and flipped on the lights, Rufus, my aunt’s longhaired, long-tailed cat, wound himself around my legs, getting all tangled up in my long, wet skirt. He purred loudly, and meowed up at me. “Hey, Rufie,” I said, bending down to scratch the top of his head. “Miss me?”
Rufus was a striking-looking cat. Most of his face was dark gray, but one cheek was bright orange and his nose, chin, and chest were white. The rest of his body alternated between the three colors everywhere except for his pure white socks. But his most remarkable feature was his fluffy coat that looked like he’d tried an at-home perm.
He was the friendliest, and most talkative, cat I’d ever met. Whenever I was home, he had to be right by my side. He was also the primary reason I was staying in Williamsburg while my aunt was out of town. Some cats were content to be left alone for long stretches of time as long as they had food and water, like a houseplant. But Rufus needed attention and when I wasn’t soaked to the bone, I was happy to lavish it on him. I pried off my cowboy boots and let them drip onto the rubber shoe tray by the door.
For the record, Texas might be famous for cowboy boots, but they didn’t have a monopoly on them or anything. They were worn all over the country, from Montana cattle ranches to California avocado farms. They were practical, comfortable—once properly broken in, that is—and let’s be fair, cute. Sure, New Yorkers looked at me like I was a visiting alien from Mars or something when they noticed them, but I liked them.
Besides, it never occurred to me to pack a lot of shoes. Or, any shoes except the boots on my feet. They were murder on these urban streets, but they were my only option.
“Come on, little dude,” I said, reaching down to pet Rufus again. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Aunt Melanie’s apartment looked like a flea market had exploded. From the handwoven throw rugs on the floor to the seven-foot-tall metal giraffe statue in the corner, everywhere I looked I discovered something unique and wonderful. Bookshelves lined the walls and were filled with everything from first-edition Charles Dickens to ceramic tanuki statues—a stylized Japanese raccoon-slash-dog that carried a sake bottle with him wherever he roamed.
The lighting was every bit as eclectic as the rest of her decoration. The overhead light above the front door had been replaced with a chandelier fashioned out of severed doll heads. Other lamps scattered around ranged from original lava lamps and goddess rain lamps from the sixties to a three-foot-high armadillo holding a lightsaber.
I scooped a can of food into Rufus’s bowl. Once the cat started eating, I could finally get out of these sopping-wet clothes. The big bathroom was decorated with all things hippo, from a blue ceramic hippopotamus covered in hieroglyphs to a hippo planter holding a lush ivy. I stripped out of my clothes and tossed them onto the floor before turning on the shower.
When I passed the wall-to-wall mirror above a sink that looked like a hippo yawning, I caught a glimpse of myself and ground to a stop. My torso was the exact same shade of green as a bottle of Midori. As I stared, a giggle escaped, and before long I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. Talk about a fitting ending to one of the weirdest days of my life.
I toed aside the offending shirt and reminded myself that the next time I was gonna wear a cheaply dyed neon shirt in a downpour, I should probably wash it a few dozen times first. A puddle of green water spread across the floor. Not wanting to dye my aunt’s bathroom floor, I tossed the shirt into the shower under the running water.
After wrapping one of Aunt Melanie’s big fluffy towels around myself, I dashed into the kitchen to grab a roll of paper towels and used them to mop up the mess. Luckily, the shirt didn’t stain the floor like it had stained my skin. I threw the towels in—what else?—a trash can shaped like a hippo.
The hot shower felt great after the freezing cold lobby downstairs, but by the time I had scrubbed most of the green dye off my skin, the water was tepid at best. I finished up and tossed my new work shirt into the tiny washing machine in a closet near the kitchen. If I needed to wash anything much larger than two days’ worth of clothes, I would use the laundry room in the basement, but for small loads, it was terribly convenient.
It was early—most of the hotspots in Williamsburg didn’t get interesting until midnight—but I didn’t feel like going out again, even
though the rain had mostly abated. Aunt Melanie didn’t own a television, unless I counted the ancient cabinet TV set that had been converted into a terrarium. But I had Netflix on my laptop, and before I knew it, I’d watched half a season of The Great British Baking Show. When I finally drifted off, I dreamed of decadent desserts that collapsed when I got too close.
I slept until nearly ten o’clock the next morning, which was a glorious luxury. I had a missed call from Todd and a voicemail begging me to work the day shift. I don’t know why Todd bothered with voicemails when he could text me instead, but that was his way. When I called back, he’d already found someone else to cover for Bethany. He also mumbled something that might have been an apology. Apparently, reliable word of her death had finally gotten to him.
Stretched out in Aunt Melanie’s bed—a queen-sized mattress in a sleigh frame—I stared at the ceiling, thinking about Bethany. I didn’t know why her death was eating at me so much. We were hardly what I’d call close. Maybe it was because I’d never had to deal with the death of someone I knew before, but it felt like something else. Something more. I couldn’t stop the nagging voice in the back of my head screaming at me that the police had it all wrong.
Rufus jumped up on my chest and began kneading the hem of the soft T-shirt I’d worn to bed. “You wanna play, don’t you?” I asked. He meowed in response. I hadn’t grown up with cats, and I had no idea how much he actually understood, but he certainly acted like his vocabulary rivaled a relatively intelligent kindergartener.
I selected a feather on the end of a fishing pole out a basket of toys that sat on a repurposed nine-drawer tool chest, and Rufus proceeded to chase me all over the apartment. He leapt from the backs of couches and chairs as if the floor was lava. He twisted in midair, caught the feather, and yanked the pole out of my hand. “Nice move!” I complimented him, but he was too busy dragging his hard-won prize up to the top of the bookshelf to acknowledge my praise.
Killer Content Page 5
