Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2)

by Susan McBride

  She took it from him, cracking open the cardboard cover to find page after page of drawings on the lined paper. There were dresses and shoes and handbags, all sketched with colored pencils. And they weren’t half-bad.

  “Maybe she wanted to be a fashion designer,” Jo said, flipping through the pages until she ran into a slew of empty ones in the back. “She could have been the next Michael Kors.”

  Hank scrunched up his brow. “She’s going to make fashion for beer brewers?”

  “No, wrong Coors,” she started to correct him, but what was the point? Hank’s idea of high fashion was wearing socks that matched.

  She returned the notebook so he could stick it back in the milk crate. Then he picked up a pink box. “I thought you ladies kept these stashed away in the bathroom,” he cracked.

  Jo reached for his arm, stopping him from putting it back. “What’s that?”

  “You have to ask?” he said, eyeing it and then giving her a funny look. “Did someone miss getting a lecture about the birds and the bees?”

  Hardly. It was impossible to miss the bright pink color or the silhouette of a dancing female on the front. “It’s a box of tampons, smart-ass. I can see that. Did you open it up?”

  “I’m married to a woman.” Hank squinted. “I know what tampons look like.”

  Jo snatched it from him. “I want to see what’s inside. I found another tampon box with a stash of candy bars. Maybe she’s got a phone she keeps out of sight from her mother.”

  “’Cause who’d check inside a box like that, right?”

  “Not you, apparently,” Jo said dryly. The top had been taped closed, so she peeled the adhesive strip away and opened the flaps.

  Oh, God, could it be?

  She poked at the contents with a gloved finger. Yes, it was. It was exactly what she’d thought. She sat back on her haunches, the breath knocked out of her.

  “What’ve you got? Is it a phone?” Hank asked. “Please, let it be a phone.”

  “Not even close,” she said, holding the box open for him to see.

  Stuck inside was a baggie with a date written on the white label in black laundry marker, a date Jo recognized as the night of Trey’s party.

  Hank let out a whistle.

  Carefully, she used gloved fingers to extricate the contents of the bag: a pair of pale blue panties.

  “She said she realized she had, like, proof, and that she could get someone in big trouble if she wanted to.”

  “Scully, you were right. It was out there,” Hank said.

  “Kelly’s proof,” Jo remarked, excitement bubbling in her chest. “It’s not pictures or a video. It’s DNA.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Can you run it down to the ME’s office?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now,” Jo said, putting the panties back in the baggie and getting up off the floor. She hoped to God that any potential evidence on the fabric—any blood or semen or bodily fluids that might yield the name of Kelly’s assailant—hadn’t degraded. “Adam said they were assigning Kelly’s autopsy today. The lab should get this ASAP.”

  “You want me to go without you?” Hank looked at her, bug-eyed.

  “I’m not done here,” she told him. She really meant that she wasn’t done with Barbara Amster.

  “How’ll you get back to the station?” He took the baggie from her, and she began to shoo him into the hallway.

  “Call Dispatch and have them send a squad car to pick me up in twenty minutes, okay?”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Heck, it was only a couple of miles to the station. She could walk if she could ignore the heat.

  She steered him through the living room and to the front door. Pulling it wide, she walked out with him, though he paused on the cracked sidewalk, looking back at the Amsters’ house.

  “You okay with going back in there alone?”

  “Of course I am.” What was she? Five?

  “Don’t pull a Floyd Mayweather and knock her out or something.”

  Jo dryly replied, “I’ll do my best.”

  He had concern in his eyes and written across his middle-aged face with all its comfortable creases, but he nodded, just the same.

  “Go get her, tiger,” he said, and then he gave her his back, heading toward the car at a pace that suggested his bum knees weren’t bothering him too much that day, or maybe it was just the adrenaline rush of finding something meaningful.

  Jo went back inside, back to Kelly’s pink room.

  Jerking aside the curtain draped over the closet, she began to dig.

  She moved shirts and skirts, pants draped over hangers, targeting a dozen dresses in every color but blue.

  Where was it? she wondered, the blue dress that Kelly had worn to the party, the one Barbara Amster finally had remembered her daughter wearing when she’d found her crying on the stoop. Was it the same dress she’d mentioned when they’d first interviewed her yesterday morning, the one she’d disparaged, too?

  “She had this awful blue dress she seemed obsessed with. It was way too tight. When she lost it, she flipped out, nearly tore apart the house trying to find it. But, honestly, I was relieved. One less trampy outfit for her to put on.”

  Where had it gone?

  Only one way to know.

  She went to find Barbara Amster in the kitchen.

  “Where is the blue dress Kelly wore to the party?” she asked point-blank, as the woman put down her coffee cup, though she made no move to rise from the tiny, two-seat table. “The one you hated because it was too tight. What happened to it?”

  “It’s gone. That’s all I know.” Kelly’s mom pushed at hair that had escaped her ponytail and fell in her face like a frizzy halo.

  “Gone where?” To the dry cleaner? To Cassie’s house on loan? To Goodwill?

  “A few days before . . . before Kelly died,” she started slowly, “I came home to find the back door unlocked. Nothing looked out of place except in Kelly’s room. It was a mess. I was so tired that I couldn’t think beyond cleaning up. When Kelly got home from school, I yelled at her for being a slob. I asked what the hell had gotten into her, but she swore, ‘It wasn’t me, Ma.’ She was so panicked about it that I believed her. Her stuff was all there, she told me, everything but the blue dress, which makes absolutely no sense. I thought she’d misplaced it, maybe left it at Cassie’s house, but she went nuts. Was it that important?”

  “It could be,” Jo said, particularly if there was evidence on it, tying Kelly to someone who’d been at Trey’s party.

  What if Trey had known about it? Maybe that was part of the discussion in their encrypted e-mails. Kelly had left her purse at the party, which was why she hadn’t had her keys when she’d awakened on her front lawn. Had Trey made a copy before he returned the purse, with Kelly none the wiser?

  “Tell me about your daughter’s relationship with Trey Eldon,” she said.

  “What relationship?” Barbara Amster let out a dry laugh. “It’s not like they were dating. I already told you that I was Mary Eldon’s nurse at the end, but that was years ago. Trey’s a football star. To him, Kelly was a kid. She wasn’t even in his orbit.”

  “Perhaps they were seeing each other in secret,” Jo said, though Trey had already denied it, insisting that Kelly wasn’t his type. Clearly, Kelly’s mom believed that, too.

  “I’m not sure Kelly even liked him much,” she remarked. “Trey wasn’t the brother that Kelly played with when I took her over to the house. He didn’t treat her as well as the other one.”

  “The other one?”

  “The younger boy, John.” The puffy face softened. “Trey was kind of cold, like his dad. He didn’t talk much. He mostly gave Kel a hard time when she followed him around. But John was different. He had a heart. His mama’s death near to broke him, and he got into drugs. He did crazy things after she passed.”

  “Like what?”

  “He crashed one of his father�
�s fancy cars into a fence. He swallowed a bunch of his mom’s leftover pills and almost died. He was disruptive at school, mouthing off to the teachers and the principal. I heard a rumor that they would have expelled him, except his dad donated so much money to the school association.”

  “How old was he then?” Jo asked.

  Barbara Amster paused to think. “He must’ve been twelve, right in the throes of puberty and without his mother to guide him. Kelly was a year younger. I think the last straw was when John showed up here one night. Kelly caught him looking in her bedroom window. He was”—she hesitated—“pleasuring himself.”

  Kelly had caught an adolescent John Eldon masturbating outside her window?

  “Did you report the incident?” Jo asked, already anticipating what Barb’s answer would be before she shook her head.

  “No. I called Robert.”

  Of course she did.

  “And that’s when John was sent away?”

  Barbara Amster wet her lips. “John . . . he needed focus. He was such a lost soul. I realize that now.”

  Hadn’t Robert Eldon said that going away had been his son’s idea? But, if what Barbara Amster said was true, it sounded to Jo like the Eldons had been caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. What better way to get rid of a problem son than to ship him off to boarding school out of state?

  “When did Kelly last see John?”

  Barbara squinted. “Four years ago, at Mary’s funeral.”

  “Did she keep in touch with him?”

  “She had no reason.”

  No, Jo thought, maybe she didn’t. But Kelly did get in touch with Trey, and she had plenty of ammunition to use against him and his family, enough to score some new clothes and the promise of popularity. It was no wonder Trey had agreed to her requests, and it wasn’t exactly surprising that he wasn’t grieving over her sudden death.

  With Kelly alive, he had so much to lose. Having her out of the way had to be a relief for both him and his dad.

  “Is that all, Detective?”

  Jo started to nod but remembered something. “Do you know a girl named Angel?”

  “Should I?”

  Barbara Amster was damned good at answering with nonanswers.

  “She was on Kelly’s Facebook page,” Jo explained, “though all she did was criticize. She told Kelly to go back to being who she was and that, if she didn’t, she’d be all alone.”

  “It’s too bad Kelly didn’t listen, don’t you think?” Barbara said, and her face closed off. Her eyes met Jo’s, and there was real pain in them. “Will you tell me when I can bury my daughter? Will I get her back soon?”

  “Yes,” Jo promised. “You’ll have her back soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  Barbara Amster made no move to get up, so Jo let herself out. She half expected a blue-and-white to be waiting for her at the curb, but it wasn’t a car she spotted as she came down the front stoop.

  A slim figure stood on the sidewalk, one hand on the rail of the chain-link fence that ran along part of the Amsters’ front yard. The sunlight on the dishwater-blond curls made them look almost red, so she didn’t recognize the girl at first, not until she turned her head, and Jo saw her face. The eyes seemed puffier than yesterday, the skin even blotchier, as though she’d spent the better part of the morning crying.

  “Hey, Cassie,” Jo said as she approached.

  “Detective Larsen, right?” The girl gnawed on a glossy lip. “What are you doing here?”

  Jo wanted to ask her the same thing.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” she said, and the young woman smiled nervously, giving a rare glimpse of her plastic braces.

  “Mom and Dad thought I should stay home today, because of Kelly dying and all. I didn’t sleep much last night.” She yawned on cue. “But they both went to work, and it felt weird being home by myself. I thought I’d come talk to Barb. Is she doing all right?”

  “She seems to be taking Kelly’s death pretty well,” Jo remarked, which seemed an understatement.

  “Oh, she’s good at hiding things,” Cassie told her. “Barb’s not one to show her emotions. Kelly was the opposite, always a nervous wreck.”

  “They weren’t close?”

  “You’d think they would be, right? Since they kind of had only each other. But Kelly felt like they never really connected, not with her mom working all the time. They hardly saw each other.”

  Jo nodded, glancing out to the street. Still no sign of the cruiser. Had Hank forgotten to call Dispatch?

  “Did you get into Kelly’s phone?” Cassie asked, drawing Jo’s attention back to her. “You said you were looking for it yesterday.”

  “No, not yet.”

  Cassie nodded, her eyes brightening. “What about the guy who threw the party? Did you find him?”

  “We did,” was all Jo would say.

  The corners of Cassie’s mouth twitched. “I think I figured out who it is.”

  “Really?” Cassie had told her the day before that she didn’t know.

  “It’s Trey Eldon, isn’t it?” The girl tightened her fingers around the fence rail. Her painted nails looked short, the shiny green on them chipped. At Jo’s raised eyebrow, she scrambled to add, “Since Kelly jumped, people at school have been talking.”

  “Oh, yeah? What are they saying?”

  Cassie seemed all too eager to share. “Trey’s boys have telling people that Kelly was puking up her guts by Trey’s pool at the party. Were they the ones who tossed her on her front lawn the next morning?” Cassie squinted across the fence into the tiny yard, and her knuckles whitened where she clutched the railing. “Those Guccis make me sick. They act like they’re better than everyone else, but they’re a whole lot worse.”

  Jo had already figured that out, but she wanted to hear more. “How’s that?”

  Pale eyes narrowed. “They have their own gang,” she said. “They call themselves the Posse, and they think they’re thugs underneath all that white bread. Stupid rich kids who figure they’ll get away with anything.”

  “Did Kelly tell you about a blue dress?” Jo asked, taking a shot in the dark.

  Cassie swiped her hand beneath her nose, which had begun to run. “She and I weren’t talking as much after the party. She ghosted me, you know. She quit taking my calls, so I burned her stupid bracelet. I thought she was dumping me for them so she could be popular. And look where it got her.”

  “Do you know Angel on Facebook?” Jo asked, and Cassie’s eyebrows went up.

  “Did Barb tell you about that?”

  Jo cocked her head. “Did Kelly talk to her mom about the mean comments?”

  If that was the case, why hadn’t Barbara said something when Jo had asked?

  “She didn’t have to,” Cassie replied, then she looked away, toward the street.

  What did that mean? Jo sighed and glanced past Cassie’s mop of curls to see a cruiser rolling up the street.

  Cassie stiffened. “More cops?”

  “No, one less cop,” Jo told her. “I’m leaving.”

  “Hmm,” the girl said, her shoulders relaxing. She uncurled her hands from the fence and dropped skinny arms to her sides. “I’ll go check on Barb. I’ll bet she could use a hug. I’ll hang out with her till she goes to work.”

  “You do that.”

  “It’s hard, you know, realizing you won’t ever see someone again, someone you used to love.” Cassie stared at the house. “I wish things had been different.”

  “I do, too.”

  The girl came around the fence, passing Jo on the sidewalk, allowing Jo to read the words on her graphic tee: Born to shine, they said.

  She hated to be so cynical, but she couldn’t help wondering if Cassie could shine brighter now, since the best friend who’d outshone her was dead.

  Maybe she’d just been working this job for too long, but she found herself wondering as well if Trey Eldon wasn’t the only classmate letting out a sigh of relief now that Kelly was g
one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Cassie’s question about Kelly’s phone was one that nagged at Jo as well. So on the way back to the station, she had Dispatch track down Officer Ramsey to get an update.

  She had her on the phone within a few minutes. “Hey, Charlotte, any sign of Kelly Amster’s SIM card?”

  “You mean the needle in the haystack?” the officer replied. “We’re back out here looking. We even borrowed a canine from the county that’s supposed to sniff out electronics. We’re hoping he might turn it up, even though it’s a long shot. Cap said to give it another day, then shut it down. We’re already starting to get kids out here, trampling the scene, tying balloons to the chain link and leaving homemade sympathy cards and teddy bears and candles. It’s getting tough to keep it secure.”

  “Just do what you can,” Jo said, having already figured the captain wouldn’t let them tie up resources on the SIM search forever.

  “We’re good for now, unless it rains or someone from Public Works decides to mow this old patch of cow pasture when we’re not around.”

  “They’d have to hack through that jungle with a scythe first,” Jo joked, doubting the city would preen the acreage before they took the old tower down. As for rain, water would likely be about as bad for the chip as the blades of a riding mower. “You find anything else?”

  “Nothing that changes the suicide scenario,” Officer Ramsey said. “You have any doubts she killed herself?”

  “No,” Jo replied, finding it hard to say. But it was the truth.

  “Then I won’t beat myself up if we can’t locate the card.”

  “No, don’t beat yourself up.”

  The cruiser that had picked her up in front of the Amsters’ house deposited her at the station before taking off. Jo hadn’t even gotten through the back door when her cell phone rang.

  “Jo Larsen,” she said by rote, hoping it wasn’t another reporter asking about Kelly Amster’s alleged suicide and where they were in their investigation. She had her patented “no comment” ready to go, just in case.

  But instead of a barrage of questions, she heard only what sounded like a quiet weeping.

  “Hello?” she tried again. “Can I help you?”