Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2)

by Susan McBride

  Was that Kelly’s mother?

  “I still can’t believe she’s gone,” the woman moaned. “I never thought she’d do something like this, not for real. I loved her so much. My heart is broken.”

  “For crap’s sake,” Hank muttered.

  Yep, it was definitely Barbara Amster.

  “So much for her taking time alone to digest it all, huh?” Jo said.

  Hank groused. “She’s talking suicide to the press already? Doesn’t she know how to say ‘no comment’? How’re we supposed to investigate if she’s telling everyone her daughter jumped?”

  “They went to her door,” Jo said, truly wanting to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. “She was probably on her way to work and got ambushed.”

  “Yeah, let’s say that. It feels better,” Hank remarked, snatching a bottle of Coke from the vending machine and handing it over. “Let’s blame the reporter for jumping on a mom who’s just been told a few hours before that her daughter was toast. It’s like catnip to them, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Jo agreed, waiting for him to hand over the crackers with peanut butter she’d given him money for. She had an apple in a drawer at her desk. “Everything’s a tabloid headline.”

  “I wish they’d stick to covering the gubmint clowns and let us do our jobs.” Hank angrily punched in the code to get himself a bag of chili-cheese Fritos. He always brought bagged lunches from home that his wife, Trish, prepared, full of cut-up carrots and tubs of hummus and other good-for-him stuff that ended up mostly in the trash.

  Adam had started doing much the same thing with Jo.

  Bottled tea had replaced the bottles of Coke in her fridge. Fruit and carrot sticks had suddenly appeared in the produce drawer, where she used to hide loaves of bread going moldy. But she and Hank had a pact: what happened at work stayed at work. There would be no mention of dietary indiscretions outside the break room.

  Jo unscrewed the cap on her soda and took a swig, fortifying herself with caffeine. Then she nudged him. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get an adapter and see if Kelly’s laptop boots up, just for kicks.”

  “An adapter? I think we’ll need a medium,” Hank said, dripping sarcasm. “You know, the kind that can talk to the ghost of a dead battery.”

  “That’s the spirit.” She gave his back a pat.

  “Bad pun.” He shook his head. “Really bad.”

  Back at her desk, Jo made quick work of her crackers and apple. She took a final slurp of her soda, then tossed the bottle in a recycling bin. She rubbed her hands together, praying for some good mojo before she started to rummage around in her drawers. She’d managed to accumulate a rat’s nest of myriad cables for assorted electronics, kept on hand “just in case.” Surely one of them would prove functional, if she only could disentangle them.

  After an interminable few minutes of intense yanking, she extricated a couple of AC adapters. One, thankfully, was compatible with Kelly’s computer. She hooked it up, plugged it in, and held her breath as she pushed the power button.

  “Come on, Farmer,” she said, “do your thing.”

  As expected, the power button never lit up.

  “Who’s Farmer?” Hank asked from his desk, having overheard her little pep talk.

  “It’s a Dell,” she told him, tapping the laptop. “You know, the farmer in the . . .”

  “I know.” He groaned. “I know.”

  Then he rolled his chair over and peered across her shoulder, near enough that she could hear him crunching chili-cheese Fritos in her ear.

  “You bring it back to life, Dr. Frankenstein?”

  “No such luck.”

  She sat back with a sigh. She hated to feel defeated this early in the game. “I wonder if the hard drive crashed.”

  If that was the case, they were screwed.

  “Didn’t the department just hire a kid with a fancy computer-science degree to do geeklike things around here?” Hank said.

  Yes, as a matter of fact, it had.

  “Bridget,” Jo said.

  “Yeah, that’s her.” He nudged Jo’s arm. “Let the she-nerd figure it out.”

  Bridget Morris, aka “the she-nerd,” was a twenty-two-year-old pursuing an advanced degree in digital forensics at the University of Texas at Dallas with plans to join the department full-time after graduation. Cap was the one who’d pushed for the hire, asserting that they needed more technical support because of the bump in cybercrimes. The city council had given them a thumbs-up, largely because she’d start off as a lowly paid intern, saving them money. Oh, yeah, and she also happened to be the captain’s niece.

  “Better her than me,” Jo said and shut the lid on the laptop.

  “While you’re dumping that piece of junk on the girl geek, I’ll make some phone calls. I’ll check with a few stray rescue places around town for the Pearson case, and I’ll touch base with the ME’s office and see if I can get a date and time for Kelly Amster’s postmortem,” Hank told her. “If they give the girl to your boyfriend, maybe we’ll get it done in the next twenty-four.”

  The girl.

  “Kelly,” Jo said as much to herself as to him, because it was important not to forget that victims had names, even if they had no voice.

  “Yeah, Kelly,” her partner repeated. “That’s what I meant.”

  Jo shook her pen at him. “You must think I have magic powers or something if I can get a PM done faster because—” I’m sleeping with McCaffrey, she nearly said, but mentally tweaked before she finished with, “I’m seeing Adam.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Hank joked. At least, she thought he was joking. Chuckling all the while, he scooted his chair back to his own desk and got busy.

  If Adam did catch Kelly’s autopsy, the only favoritism she’d get would likely be a heads-up on the preliminary report. She doubted her relationship with one of the county’s dozen medical examiners would speed things up when it seemed there was a never-ending supply of victims waiting for their turn on the table, their families all wanting answers as soon as possible.

  For now, she could only do what she could do.

  She frowned, picking up the laptop, and headed off to find Bridget, which wasn’t hard, considering the station that housed the entire Plainfield PD was little bigger than a shoe box. She thought about all the money the town had spent on the new water tower, and like every other officer on their small but growing force, she kept waiting to get the funding promised for a new structure and more staffing. Soon, they were always told as their evidence room overflowed, and solitary holding cells ended up looking more like detainee puppy mills, with too many crammed into one cage.

  She rounded the corner of the hallway, passed a small waiting area and the janitor’s closet, and stopped at the door to the room that housed the department’s server.

  That was where they’d stuck Bridget.

  It was the only place they’d had room to shove another desk, and it kind of made sense, considering she was the resident computer genius. Except that it wasn’t exactly quiet. In fact, they’d given Bridget noise-canceling headphones from the firing range so she could work alongside the racket.

  “Hey!” Jo called out as she stepped inside the room and closed the door, getting goose bumps. Not only was the server noisy, but it needed cold, too. Jo felt like she was walking into a refrigerator.

  “Hey!” she tried again and raised her voice to something shy of a scream, trying to be heard over the audible whirs and hums she knew were fans within the server and the occasional hard drive rebooting.

  The department had only a single server at the moment but wanted more as the need increased to store high-def video and other electronic evidence. But if it had more servers now, no way could anyone have shared the space, as the noise would have been deafening rather than merely irritating.

  The headphones must have worked wonders, as Bridget didn’t even turn around. She appeared to be focused on three monitors connected by cables and wired to an iPhone with its cas
e removed. All the while, her fingers danced over a keyboard. The lines on the screen kept moving as she fed it some kind of instructions, causing code to scroll across and down. It looked like a foreign language that Jo couldn’t understand.

  Jo came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

  Bridget jumped, tearing off the headphones as she swiveled in her seat. She had wiry black hair and dark eyes and an energy that crackled off her skin like electricity, which may have been the reason she didn’t wear a sweater despite the cranked-up AC.

  “Hey,” Jo said again loudly. “I hate to interrupt, but I need your help.”

  “Sorry. I was pretty focused. What’s up?”

  Jo held out Kelly Amster’s useless laptop. “I can’t make this thing boot up, and I need to get in. I’m guessing it’s more than a bad battery.”

  “Did you try an AC adapter, just to see if it needed a charge?”

  “I did, and it still wouldn’t power up,” Jo said, not wanting to sound like a complete idiot. “I’m looking for . . . God, I don’t know what. But it’s a school district–issued computer, and I’ve got the administrator’s user name and password, so access shouldn’t be a problem once we’ve got it working. It belonged to a student—”

  “The girl who took a dive from the old water tower?”

  “Yes. Kelly Amster,” Jo replied, not surprised that she’d heard, considering the story had already hit the local news. And, even if it hadn’t, the department was small enough that you could count the full-timers on both hands, so word traveled fast. “I’m not sure what we’ll actually find on it, considering it was mainly for school use, but we’re hoping for e-mails, maybe a journal, photographs, something that might shed light on what happened to Kelly.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to get it running,” Bridget said and took the laptop from her. “It could have a corrupted memory or bootloader, or maybe it’s a virus.” She glanced at the Post-it note stuck to the lid, checking both sides of it. “Looks like I’ve got everything I need. I’ll let you know when I get in.”

  When, not if. Jo liked her already.

  “May the Force be with you,” she said.

  Bridget smiled. “Thanks.”

  Well, heck, she had a Death Star pencil holder, and she was wearing a T-shirt with Yoda and the phrase, Do or Do Not . . . There Is No Try.

  Bridget pulled her headphones back on, and Jo left her to do her magic.

  She had other fish to fry.

  So she couldn’t get into Kelly’s laptop—yet—but that wasn’t the only way to find out about a high school party. She had another idea to pin down the location, and it just might work.

  Jo went back to her desk and got into the department’s system, doing a simple search for noise or parking violations during the last two weekends before the start of school. Since the city council had initiated a 311 call-in the year before for nonemergency incidents, residents could file complaints by phone as well as online.

  Jo couldn’t imagine any big-shot high school senior throwing a quiet shindig. If Cassie was right that alcohol was involved—and she’d bet that was the case, particularly if the parents were out of town—then there was probably loud music and plenty of cars parked where they shouldn’t have been.

  She pulled up the database, going through a litany of barking dog complaints, loud cars, loud motorcycles, ongoing construction, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and, yes, music in the wee hours of the night. She found one incident that piqued her interest. The address was a posh neighborhood where McMansions were as plentiful as the corporate executives who owned them.

  She paired the date and time with a couple of calls that came from the same hood regarding parking violations. According to the complainants, the subdivision allowed parking only on one side of the street so emergency vehicles could safely pass. But that same night, “earsplitting music” was reported emanating from a house on the block where half a dozen vehicles were parked in such a way as to make safe passage nearly impossible.

  “You’ve been sitting there for an hour and a half without moving,” said a voice in her ear, and she looked up. Hank squinted past her at the monitor. “I don’t get it. You’re trolling for noise infractions and parking violations. Why?”

  “There’s a method to my madness,” she said, rubbing at her eyes, which had gone a bit blurry after staring at the screen for so long.

  “You working a case I don’t know about?”

  “No,” she told him. “It’s for Kelly Amster.”

  His brow scrunched up. “Why? She wasn’t even old enough to drive. Did she play her stereo too loud? Do kids even have stereos anymore?”

  “I can’t answer that.” Jo pushed aside her keyboard. “But I do think I can answer a question that’s a little more important. I know who held the party,” she said, feeling like she’d won the lottery.

  “The party,” Hank repeated, looking impressed.

  “I’ve just got one last thing to check.” Jo picked up the phone and dialed.

  She felt considerably less magical a few minutes later once she got Helen Billings on the line. She apologized for the interruption and asked if she might speak with another student who could possibly have information about Kelly’s Amster’s death.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” the principal said. “But I can’t help you with that.”

  “Oh?” Was it something she’d said?

  “He’s not here today. His father called and spoke with me earlier. He said his son had been up late last night with a bad stomach, so he was letting him sleep in. But if he was better when he got up, he’d be here for afternoon classes so he wouldn’t end up missing football practice.”

  “Oh,” she said, when what she really meant was damn.

  “If you need to talk to him right away, you’d best try reaching him at home. I’ll give you the number . . .”

  “Yes, please.”

  And once she got it—and told Hank to grab his keys—they were on their way.

  CHAPTER NINE

  They pulled up in front of a shiny monstrosity of a house, obscenely large by any normal person’s standards but probably average-sized if you were Bill Gates.

  The lot couldn’t have been any more than an acre, and still the mansion seemed to dwarf it—all timber and copper and glass, like something you’d imagine finding in ski country, except no one was doing any skiing in the marginally hilly suburbs of northern Dallas County on a sticky September day.

  Jo and Hank got out of the car, shutting doors one after the other with a percussive slap-slap.

  Hands on hips, Jo stood in the middle of the cobblestone driveway, looking around her.

  Yep, she could see how having a party on this street could get you into trouble. There wasn’t even as much space between neighbors as in Amanda Pearson’s sixty-year-old neighborhood. Despite attractive landscaping between lots, it was easy enough to view the house next door; ditto, the ones across the asphalt road.

  Without difficulty, she spotted a sign stuck in the ground six feet to the left of a neighbor’s driveway. It stated clear as a button: NO PARKING THIS SIDE OF STREET.

  It made sense that folks nearby were upset with finding a slew of rich kids’ rides taking up enough of the road to make it hard to pass.

  “You really think this is the right place?” Hank asked, seemingly hesitant to take the liriope-bordered path toward the front door. “This is pretty posh company for a girl whose mom is a home health nurse.”

  Jo sucked in enough humid air to fill her lungs before letting it go. “Yeah,” she agreed, “but it fits.” She’d dug deep enough after finding the noise and parking complaints to know a little about who lived here. “Cassie said the party was thrown by someone older, a big shot on campus whose parents were out of town.” She jerked her chin toward the house. “The son’s a senior at the high school. He’s starting quarterback for the Plainfield Mustangs. His dad’s a local CEO.”

  “What’s their name?”

 
“Eldon,” she said, catching a shadow crossing one of the many front windows, though the way the sun reflected so fiercely off the glass, she couldn’t be sure if they were being watched or if it was a momentary wave of a tree branch. “The father’s Robert Junior. He’s the head of a tech start-up that hit it big in security software about a dozen years back. He’s got two sons. The older one is Robert the Third, aka Trey.”

  “Yep, yep, I know exactly who he is,” Hank muttered, and his eyes brightened amid his weathered face. “Trey Eldon’s got a smokin’ hot arm. He’s a blue-chip recruit. I heard he’s been flirting with the Longhorns, although he hasn’t signed a letter of intent yet.”

  “Let’s see if he’s been flirting with younger girls whose moms don’t pay them enough attention,” she said.

  “I hope you’re wrong. I’ve got the ’Stangs pegged to win the state championship again.” Hank made an unhappy noise in his throat. “I’d hate to see a kid with so much potential self-destruct. Quarterbacks are supposed to be the smart ones.”

  “Even the smart ones screw up.”

  “You think Eldon the Third assaulted our girl and bullied her into jumping off the water tower?”

  “I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,” Jo said and started walking.

  From the driveway, she took a wide paver path toward a timber-and-concrete basin with a fountain in its center. Around the splashing water they went, toward the thick-paned glass door flanked by concrete slabs—twin walls that mimicked giant bookends.

  There was a strange bump on the right side of the house that looked like an old silo with a peaked copper roof. Was it meant to add a rustic touch? Through a large vertical window, Jo could see a baby grand piano lit by an interior spotlight. A round room just for the piano?

  You’ve got too much money, she thought, if you can do stuff like that.

  She’d barely reached the monogrammed welcome mat when the door came open. A man stood behind it, his eyes narrowed on her. His lean figure belied his middle age, as did the dark shade of his hair and eyebrows. Her mama would have called it “shoe polish black,” and it would have looked more natural on a crow.