The noise quickly drew Helen Billings back inside the room.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as Cassie pushed away from the table and stood, tears streaming down her face in earnest.
“Kelly’s gone, and nothing can bring her back,” she railed at Jo, her whole face pink and blotchy. “Can’t you just let her rest in peace?”
Then she brushed past the principal, taking off. Jo could hear her shoes tapping on the hallway tiles at first and then nothing.
Helen Billings opened her mouth to speak, but a bell rang, drowning out any words. Then she took off, too, no doubt chasing after Cassie.
It didn’t matter. The interview was over.
Jo sat still for a long moment, trying hard to steady her racing heart.
“Can’t you just let her rest in peace?”
Wasn’t that what they were trying to do? Give Kelly some peace, some resolution to the tragic end of her very short life?
Like Jo could walk away now, after learning Kelly Amster had gone to a party mere weeks ago, where—if Cassie Marks could be believed—she’d been assaulted. Was that what had driven her to suicide?
Or was there more to it?
CHAPTER SEVEN
“You done in here?” Hank asked.
Jo’s head jerked up. Her partner’s bulk filled the doorway.
“Yeah, I’m done,” she told him, getting to her feet. Her heart felt heavy, her emotions even more unsettled than after meeting Kelly Amster’s mom. She didn’t know what she’d expected to hear from Cassie Marks, but it definitely was not that Kelly had been victimized at a party just weeks before her death.
“What the heck happened? You get anything out of her?”
“More than I could have imagined.” At the arch of his tangled eyebrows, she added, “Let’s get to the car. Then I’ll fill you in.”
Students swarmed the hallways, engulfing them as they made their way out.
Jo didn’t know where Helen Billings had gone, or Cassie for that matter. She figured she and Hank would pop into the principal’s office on their way out. She wanted to leave her card for the principal’s assistant, too, in case anything should come up.
But they’d barely turned the corner when Helen Billings reappeared. Her white hair bobbed through the sea of teenagers as they made a path for her.
“Come,” she directed them over the noise of chattering voices.
She led them back to her office, past her assistant’s desk, where a couple of girls in bilious pink and green Lilly Pulitzer dresses stood loudly complaining about the senior parking lot being overcrowded. The teens glanced at Jo and Hank long enough to decide they weren’t important.
Once Helen Billings had closed the door to her office behind them, she flung hands in the air. “Cassie’s with the nurse,” she said. “She’s lying down until she’s calm enough to return to class. I’m tempted to call her parents and suggest one of them come take her home.”
Jo stood beside Hank, keeping mum and giving the principal a chance to vent.
“I feel like the wind’s been knocked out of me, yet I don’t have time to rest,” she said and picked up her cell phone from the desk, giving it a glance before she set it down. “I need to compose an e-mail to our families explaining that a student has passed away and call in a grief counselor for any kids who need support.”
“That’s a good idea,” Hank murmured.
Jo just watched and listened.
“We don’t expect to lose them so young,” Helen Billings went on, taking deep breaths every now and then, for all the good they seemed to do her. “We’ll have to issue some kind of press release, although I hardly know what to say. It’s like you’re not even allowed to grieve anymore before the tragedy’s all over local media and social media . . .”
“You’re right,” Hank said, as the principal’s voice drifted off. “It’s a flash-mob world. Nothing’s gentle anymore.”
Jo wished she could say something reassuring, but she could only imagine the weight on the woman’s shoulders. The school had just lost one of its own, a mere child, who likely spent more time on campus than with her own mother.
“I hope you can find out why,” Helen Billings said, bespectacled eyes beseeching. “I need to know for the future, if there’s anything I could have done differently . . . if I could somehow have intervened and prevented this.” She slumped into her chair. “I feel like I failed her.”
“I understand,” Jo said. “And I am sorry.”
Death had such a ripple effect.
The principal nodded.
Hank cleared his throat. “Did you have something to tell us?”
He seemed as itchy as Jo to wrap this up and get going.
“Yes, you’re right, I do,” she said, snapping to. “Well, it’s more like something to show you.” She swiveled her chair around to the cabinet behind her desk, unlocked a door, and removed a laptop with a Post-it attached. She peeled off the note and scribbled on the back before she restuck it on the computer. “This is Kelly’s school-issued laptop. The district launched a program last year to make sure every kid had one for lessons and homework. Kelly brought hers by last Friday afternoon and said she thought the battery went bad, as it wouldn’t power on. I was going to ask the IT people to take a look today. Now, I guess, I won’t have to.”
She stood, holding it out, and Jo leaned across the desk to take it from her.
“You’re giving us permission to review its contents?”
Helen Billings raked white hair behind her ears. “Yes, I’m giving you permission, if you can get it to work. It’s school property, or rather, property of the district. We’ve got filters on it so the kids can’t load it with games or visit porn sites, and we maintain administrator control, so they know we can get into their accounts at any time and make sure they’re not using their computers to bully or to share naked pictures.”
“I’m sure the parents appreciate that,” Jo said.
“They do,” the principal agreed. “But there are almost too many monsters lurking online for us to protect them from everything.”
“Oh, yeah, there’s no shortage of monsters,” Hank said, thick eyebrows cinching. “You’d think that as tech savvy as kids are today, they’d be more careful, but sometimes I think it makes them fearless. They don’t believe just chatting online with a stranger’s going to harm them in any way.”
“If Kelly was engaged in any risky behavior, I’m not aware of it. She is . . . she was a good kid, the quiet kind who often slips through the cracks.” The woman’s voice broke.
“We won’t let her slip through, ma’am,” Hank assured her.
“Is the laptop password protected?” Jo asked.
“Yes, but you can bypass Kelly’s password with the administrator’s,” the principal said, pulling herself together. “I wrote that and the username on the back of the Post-it. If you have any trouble getting in, let me know.”
Jo took a moment to glance down at the fluorescent yellow square that had K. Amster-Won’t Boot printed on the front. When she lifted it up, she noticed the mix of characters and numbers that would otherwise have made no sense.
“Thanks.” She tucked the laptop under her arm so she could fish out a couple of cards from her pocket. “If you hear anything or come across anything more about Kelly that might shed some light on things, call, okay?”
“If I discover anything important, I will.”
“At this point, ma’am, we don’t know what’s important,” Hank said, earning him a solemn nod from the principal.
“Of course.”
Jo thanked her for her time, and she managed to slip a card in front of the principal’s assistant, too, before they got out of there and back to the car.
The sun blazed high in the sky, looking molten, and the Ford sizzled without a tree to shade it. When Jo opened the passenger door, she felt the oppressive heat, like something heavy pushing against her. She sucked it up and got inside, thankful when Hank coaxed the engine t
o life and the air-conditioning began to blow, even though initially, it was more hot than cold.
“I think I’m ready for Christmas,” Hank said as he cranked down the windows, like that would help.
“And when Christmas comes, you’ll be ready for summer,” she quipped, because that was how it went.
He waited till the car cooled down and then rolled up the windows. “What happened with Cassie? She ran out on you, huh?”
“Not until she’d spilled her guts,” Jo replied, belting herself in as she told him about the party that Cassie said Kelly had attended just before the start of school, and how Kelly had awakened on her lawn at five in the morning with blood in her underwear. “She had to wait for her mom to get home from a job because she couldn’t find her keys.”
“You’re telling me the kid might have been raped?” Hank muttered. “I would’ve figured that’d be something her mom might have told us about. What the hell’s wrong with her?”
“I’ll bet Kelly didn’t exactly explain.”
Hank hit the steering wheel hard with a palm. “Even if she didn’t give her mom details, didn’t she realize that something was wrong? Seeing her kid locked out on the lawn at the crack of dawn? She’s a nurse, for crap’s sake. Shouldn’t she be able to take care of her own kid?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, partner.”
“Yeah, you do. You’re thinking the same thing as me. Some people aren’t fit to have pets, much less children,” he said and sighed, pursing his lips in a tight line as he drove the car out of the high school lot.
Jo used his momentary silence to tell him more about her chat with Cassie and how she got a sense that Cassie was pissed at Kelly, at the way Kelly was apparently trying to fit in with the cool kids. “I think Cassie felt like Kelly was leaving her behind. Kelly was wearing a friendship bracelet when she died. I saw the same bracelets on both girls in the photo that Barbara Amster showed us. But Cassie wasn’t wearing hers today.”
“Which means what?” Hank asked. “They had a falling out and broke up?”
“Could be.”
“That’s high school,” he remarked. “Some kids mature faster than others. Relationships change. It happens.”
“And it hurts,” Jo added, because that was how Cassie had acted—a little bit spurned. “I’m getting the impression that Kelly was trying hard to move up the social ladder.”
Somehow, it had backfired, Jo mused. What had the girl gotten herself into? Whatever it was, she’d been in over her head.
“Cassie said Kelly mentioned having an ‘in’ with one of the Guccis.”
“The Guccis?” Hank turned to look at her.
“Rich kids,” Jo told him, having just learned the term herself.
“You think this Gucci owed her, or she had something on him?” Hank asked. “Like, maybe the person who dumped her on the grass when she was unconscious?”
Jo was wondering the same thing.
“We need to find out about that party,” she said. “Somebody knows what happened. If we could just get her phone—”
Hank interrupted her. “I heard from Ramsey.”
“They found it?” Jo said hopefully. They’d be able to fill in so many blanks—who Kelly had texted, what she’d said—and get a better picture of what had been going on before her death. “That’s great,” she added, feeling a little giddy. “Are they back at the station? Is the SIM card intact?”
“Hey, I didn’t say they found it. You did,” her partner corrected.
Jo deflated. “So they didn’t?”
“No. Ramsey said they only found some of it.”
“Some?” Jo’s heart sunk all the way to her belly.
“They’ve collected bits and pieces. Duncan’s theory is she broke it before she jumped. He said there was a chunk from the back of the phone on the catwalk. Seems she had an older phone, a no-name brand that came apart more easily than the newer models.”
“She trashed her phone before she leaped?”
“It sure looks that way,” her partner said. “They can’t even locate the SIM card. It must’ve come out when she beat the thing and threw it overboard. They tracked down some of the casing. The glass is busted like she pounded the thing hard against the railing or the barrel of the tower.”
“Can’t they use a metal detector to find the card?” Jo said, the first thing that popped into her head.
“You know how small those things are?” Hank took a hand from the wheel to pinch his fingers nearly together. “They’re itty-bitty. The tower’s sitting on a couple of overgrown acres that are littered with old cans, broken glass, and crap.”
“I know,” she said, though it pained her to admit he was right.
“On the bright side,” Hank offered, “we can still get a list of calls in and out from her cell phone provider.”
“But we won’t get texts or e-mails or browsing history that way.”
“No,” Hank said. “But, hey, we have her laptop. She must have left some kind of footprint on there.”
“You’d think so,” Jo replied. She held the laptop on her thighs and took that moment to prop it open, pressing the power button and wishing for something to happen. But nothing did.
“So the battery’s dead for real?” Hank asked.
“As a doornail.” She sighed and closed the thing. When they got back to the station, she’d scrounge up an AC adapter, just for kicks. And when that didn’t work, she’d call in the techs. Because what she didn’t know about computers could fill the 50,000-gallon tank of an old water tower, and then some.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When they walked through the door, their captain popped out of his office, flagging them down. He had damp spots under the armpits of his blue oxford-cloth shirt and a loosened tie at his unbuttoned collar. Jo knew the tie went on only if he had a meeting with the chief or the city council, or he had to stand before the press. Whichever it was, he looked grumpy as hell.
“In here, now,” he said in his typically succinct fashion.
Jo and Hank went in and closed the door while Captain Waylon Morris perched on the edge of his desk. He crossed his arms and uttered two words: “Brief me.”
Jo was pretty sure he didn’t mean about the missing dog.
Hank produced the alleged suicide note they’d bagged, and Cap plunked on his specs to read the purple ink. Jo told him about talking to Barbara Amster and then to Cassie Marks, and how they were following up on the tip about the party where Kelly had gone alone before the start of school.
“Something happened to Kelly while she was there,” Jo said. “If we want to believe her best friend, a fifteen-year-old girl was sexually assaulted.”
“But she didn’t report it?”
“No,” Jo said, and he merely grunted, because that was hardly unusual.
There were a million reasons victims didn’t speak up. They didn’t think they’d be believed, for starters. Being threatened came in a close second.
“What else have you got?” Cap wanted to know.
She showed him Kelly’s school-issued laptop that was DOA, and Hank filled him in on Ramsey and Duncan’s search for the missing SIM card.
Cap, in turn, informed them that Kelly’s body had been picked up by the county and transported to the ME’s office in downtown Dallas to await an autopsy.
“A young girl dying like this,” he said as he ran a hand over his buzz-cut hair, “it’s a heartbreaker. So let’s dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s before we sign off on this one. If it’s suicide, we don’t want to have doubts. Ditto if it was accidental.”
Jo didn’t even need to hear him say it. “We won’t leave any questions unanswered.”
“We’re on it, sir,” Hank assured him.
They had extra pressure to get this one right. They’d been there and done that before with a high-profile case that looked like a suicide on the surface, except it had turned out to be something else. If Jo had stopped pushing on that one, if she’d scratched
only the surface instead of digging, the case would have been closed before they’d learned the truth.
“I’d like to visit Mrs. Amster again,” she said, glancing at Hank. “I’m hoping she’ll let us go through Kelly’s room and her things. If Kelly really had proof that she was raped at a party, I want to find whatever it is. And maybe we can jog the mom’s memory about finding Kelly locked out the morning after.”
“It’s hard with teenagers,” Cap remarked. “They’re not always eager to share.”
Hank lifted a hand. “It’s my fault we didn’t hang around long enough to do a search,” he admitted. “The mom was acting pretty out of it. I figured she might want some time alone to digest that her daughter was dead.”
Cap nodded. “I get it.” He rubbed palms on thighs. “All right, then. Go do what you need to do, and I’ll handle the brass and the press.” With that, he shooed them out the door.
Good luck with that, Jo thought.
The press had already begun knocking.
Jo had a message from a Dallas-based reporter about Kelly Amster’s death on her voice mail. The woman had inquired about the possible bullying of the victim, a hot topic these days, Jo realized, but one she wasn’t ready to address.
So Jo had ignored her.
But, after they left Cap’s office, when she and Hank stepped into the lounge to hit up the vending machine for lunch, she caught the midday news on the TV. There on the screen was the old water tower, a blond reporter standing in the foreground, microphone in hand, remarking on the tragic apparent suicide of a schoolgirl just north of Big D. Jo recognized the reporter’s name. She was the one whose call Jo hadn’t returned.
Plainfield Teen Plunges to Death, the crawl hollered below her talking head. Then the shot shifted to prerecorded video of the reporter in front of a house that looked familiar. She was chatting up a woman in sunglasses, messy brown hair pulled into a ponytail. Jo could see a logo on her polo-collared shirt: At-Home Angels, it said with a little halo above the o.
Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2) Page 6
