Microphones and Murder

by Erin Huss

  Jeremy: “No.”

  Me: “Detective Ramsey didn’t ask about him?”

  Jeremy: “No.”

  Me: “The name doesn’t sound familiar at all?”

  Jeremy: “No.”

  Me: “Amelia never mentioned him?”

  Jeremy: “She lived with her parents during the time we were dating.”

  How did I not catch that the first time around? If Jeremy had no idea who Carlos was, then how would he know he was Amelia’s neighbor?

  In short: Jeremy Wang lied to me.

  Episode Twenty-Three

  The Motive

  I had no idea what time it was exactly, but the sky had turned a metallic grey with a blush hue and I knew we were closing in on morning. We were still occupying the dining room, running on pure adrenaline. Hazel went to bed hours ago, leaving us to feed ourselves.

  We ordered pizza.

  “Y-you need to come at this from a different angle.” Austin said from the ground. Sometime after midnight, he announced that he thought better when he was vertical and laid down with his hands clasped over his chest, like he was occupying a coffin. “Th-the police have tried the same narrative for the last ten years and we still don’t know what happened.”

  Good point.

  Camry grabbed a slice of cold pepperoni. “What if I disappeared tomorrow and all you had to go off of was what I had done this past week. What if you knew I went to Pirates Cove, but you didn’t know why I went there, you’d assume I went there to hike.”

  Oliver sat up straighter. “I know where you’re going with this. We should take what we know and assume the opposite of what’s natural, just to see what we come up with.”

  Camry blinked. “That’s actually not what I was saying.”

  “Assume the opposite of what makes sense?” I stepped over Austin. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Oh…you’re welcome,” Camry sang.

  I erased the daily menu board Hazel had hung in the dining room. “Let’s make a list of facts. Here.” I handed the chalk to Camry. “You write while I talk and sign.”

  Facts:

  -Amelia Clark is gone.

  -There was saliva mixed with her blood.

  -Blake Kirkland took the video.

  -Scottydog00 posted the video to YouTube.

  -Blake Kirkland is dead (we’d found his obituary online).

  -Amelia left her job on October 6.

  -Amelia and Oliver had a date October 10, but she never showed up.

  -Jeremy Wang was in Austin.

  -Jeremy Wang lied about knowing Carlos.

  -Amelia parked in the visitor parking spot on October 10.

  -The last reported sighting was October 10 at six fifteen p.m. Amelia withdrew one hundred dollars from a bank in Orcutt.

  “I think we can assume she was on her way to meet Oliver,” I said and signed. “She was dressed up.”

  “W-what about the apple?” asked Austin from the floor. “H-how does that factor in?”

  “We have no idea,” I said. “I confronted Carlos and he threw a cart at a candy display. It could have been him or not.”

  Oliver helped himself to a slice of cheese pizza, wiped the grease from his hands and signed. “If we’re going against the obvious. What if it was Jeremy?”

  “We hadn’t talked to Jeremy before the apple,” I said.

  “He sure didn’t seem surprised when we told him about the podcast, though,” said Camry. “If your ex-girlfriend went missing and suddenly these two hotties show up in your office and want to interview you, wouldn’t you be at least taken aback?”

  Good point.

  I drummed my fingers on the table. We had made a mess in Hazel’s dining room. Scraps of paper on the floor, two pizza boxes strewn across the table, paper plates and greasy wadded up napkins. It reminded me a little bit of what a mess Jeremy’s office was when we visited him, which gave me a thought. “What if the girl with Jeremy at CVS was Penny?”

  “Oooh,” Camry said. “And the plot thickens!”

  “Pull up the video.”

  “Aye, aye.” She sat behind the computer and opened the video, while I found Penny’s LinkedIn account on my computer. We all gathered around and compared the girl in the video to Penny’s profile.

  The surveillance video only gave us two good shots of the blonde’s face, while the LinkedIn picture was of Penny ten years and many husbands ago. We needed another defining feature to be able to say the blonde was in fact Penny.

  Aha!

  Weight and hair length may fluctuate through the years, but height will remain the same. I rose to my toes, giving myself another two inches, and held up a hand to about where Jeremy stood in comparison to me when I had on my Converse Wedges. My head came to the bottom of his breast pocket. When standing next to Penny, she was barely taller than me with the extra two inches. Which would put her about five foot two or five foot three.

  Which coincidently, thanks to the height measurement by the entrance of CVS, made Penny the same height as the mystery blonde. This coupled with Amelia crawling on the floor gave me reason to believe: “That girl is a young Penny.”

  “Th-that’s a big accusation,” said Austin.

  Camry squinted at the screen. “Now that you point it out, I can see it.”

  I started pacing again, turning this information around in my mind again and again and again until it all clicked into place. “Jeremy said he’d hooked up with a girl who turned out to be crazy, that’s why he went on a business trip. If this video is the day before he left, and he was buying condoms with Penny, then she’s our crazy girl. Think about it!” My mouth was moving faster than my hands, and I couldn’t keep up. I stopped to face Oliver so he could read my lips. “Amelia and Jeremy hooked up the week before the gala. If Penny Scott had a crush on Jeremy then she’d have the motive to post the video. She was jealous of Amelia. She wanted to humiliate her and get her out of the picture so she could move in on Jeremy.”

  I went to the chalkboard and wrote suspects in big blocky lettering under our facts list. “We have Jeremy, Carlos, Janet, Penny, and Richard, since he lied about Janet’s whereabouts that week.”

  Episode Twenty-Four

  Penny Scott

  We parked behind Target and waited for Penny to show up to work. I knew she was coming in today. Austin’s cousin’s girlfriend worked part-time at Target, and she looked at the daily schedule to confirm when Penny would be in next.

  Austin had an arsenal of good contacts.

  Penny arrived at 9:50 a.m. in a maroon minivan with stick figures stuck to the back window. The big one was Penny. The three smaller ones must have been her children. All that was left of Mr. McDonald (or Lin or Green) was half a leg.

  Camry and I jumped out of the car like cops about to catch a perp and caught Penny before she walked in. “Can we ask you a few follow-up questions before you start work?” I said in lieu of a hello.

  Penny clutched her chest. “You scared me. My gosh. Where did you come from?”

  “I’m parked over there.” I cocked a thumb.

  “Oh. Okay. Is this about the aloe vera rub? I promise you I didn’t know anything about the class action lawsuit until after I gave you samples,”

  “What lawsuit?” Camry pushed past me. “I rubbed that stuff all over my face!”

  Penny’s eyes grew about an inch in diameter. “It’s a foot and hand rub. Why would you put it on your face?”

  “Because I couldn’t remember where it went.” Camry clawed at her neck. “Is that why my skin has been burning all morning?”

  “The reaction only lasts a few months.” She pulled out a tub of lotion out of her bag. “Here. This should help.”

  “A few months!”

  I nudged Camry out of the way. We were not there to talk about aloe rub—although that w
as unfortunate. I watched Camry lather her face in that green goo this morning. “I’m here to talk about the email address Scottydog00. Does it sound familiar?” I held up the recorder.

  Penny looked from Camry to me. “I can’t talk.” She turned to leave and Camry jumped in front of her to block the entrance, even though I had specifically told her on the car ride over that we were not going to bombard Penny, nor were we going to do anything crazy like block the entrance to Target, prohibiting her from getting away.

  Clearly, she and I had to work on our communication skills.

  “This is your chance to share your side of the story,” I said with as much compassion as I could muster.

  Penny looked around to be sure no one was listening then heaved a sigh, sagging her shoulders. “It wasn’t supposed to go that far,” she said barely above a whisper. “It was just a stupid prank.”

  “Then why did you send the video to all the employees of Direct Dental?”

  Penny began to cry. It had less effect this time around. “I was immature and jealous. How was I supposed to know she’d go missing one week later?”

  “Why were you jealous?” I asked.

  She ran a finger under her eyes to save the mascara from spilling down her cheeks. “It’s stupid. She was with Jeremy and, like, she didn’t even appreciate what she had.”

  “What about Blake Kirkland?”

  “He moved away and stopped talking to me. He was mad I posted the video and then, like, he died.” She paused to sniff up a snot bubble. “But he’s the one who took it and sent it to me. He’s the one who shared it first. It’s not my fault.”

  Camry thunked her forehead with the heel of her hand. “You post a humiliating video for millions to see without permission from the person in the video, or from the person who took the video, and now one person is dead and another is likely dead and it’s not your fault? You think it’s all some crazy coincidence?”

  “It was just a joke!” Penny blurted out. “How was I supposed to know so many people would watch it?”

  Camry turned around and gave me a she’s-nuts look then walked back to the car.

  “It’s not my fault,” Penny said to me, pleading with her eyes. “I’m sure Blake would have died anyway, and Millie obviously had problems.”

  “Perhaps, but if Amelia so obviously had problems, then why not reach out to her and ask if you could help instead?”

  Penny faltered. “I...I...I mean, it was just a stupid joke.”

  “What were you hoping to accomplish by posting it?”

  “I don’t know.” She played with the hoop earrings dangling from her ears. “I thought maybe Jeremy would see how crazy Millie was, or maybe she’d lose her job. Look, if I could take it back I would.”

  “Then why haven’t you removed the video?”

  Penny threw her hands up. “That’s the problem. I can’t! My account has been hacked.”

  I could hear Camry whistling behind me, I imagined she was inspecting the sky.

  “You could have taken it down as soon as you heard about her disappearance,” I said.

  “No! That’s the thing. I couldn’t!” Penny’s breathing quickened. “The day I heard they found her car I went to take the video down and someone had hacked the account and I couldn’t get in!”

  Camry stopped whistling and returned to the conversation. “Did you try the recovery questions? Contact YouTube?”

  Penny shrugged her shoulders. “I didn’t know what to do. It just said that my password no longer worked.”

  “So you did nothing?” Camry said.

  “It’s not my—”

  “Fault,” Camry finished for her. “Right, got it.” She turned around and gave me another she’s-nuts look.

  Nuts or not, if she were telling the truth then there was someone else out there who didn’t want that video to go away.

  But who and why?

  “Do the police know it was you who posted the video?” I asked Penny.

  “Aren’t they the ones who told you? Detective LeClare? She’s the one who figured it out.”

  “No. We had an anonymous tip,” I said. “Very anonymous.”

  Camry went back to whistling.

  “Does Jeremy know?” I asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of.” She paused to suck in a shaky breath. She was trembling and I felt a tinge of sadness for Penny. She made a bad judgment call. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, she blamed herself. It was written all over her face.

  Penny Scott/Green/Lin/McDonald felt guilty.

  Hopefully someone listening to this story would learn from her mistake.

  “When was the last time you spoke to Jeremy?” I asked.

  “We hooked up before he went to Texas. He stopped talking to me after he got back.”

  “Do you remember going to CVS with him right before he left?”

  She blew out a breath. “That sounds familiar.”

  I’ll be damned.

  “Wait, that’s not right.” Penny wrapped an escaped tendril of hair behind her ear. “I did actually talk to Jeremy the day after you interviewed me. I saw him at Melba’s Diner eating breakfast. I said hi. He said hi. That’s the first time we had spoken to each other since Millie disappeared.”

  Jeremy was at Melba’s Diner the morning we were waiting for him. That explained why he wasn’t in the office. Not ground breaking news, but something.

  “When was the last time you spoke to Carlos Hermosa?” I asked.

  “This morning,” she said to my surprise. “Our daughters are in the same class.” She readjusted her purse on her shoulder. “That’s actually who Jeremy was having breakfast with that morning at Melba’s Diner. I thought it was funny since we’d just talked about the both of them the day before.”

  Hold on. Jeremy and Carlos together. I guess Jeremy did know about the podcast before we met him.

  Episode Twenty-Four

  Amelia’s Cell Phone

  We were back at Hazel’s before noon. While we were gone, Oliver read a message sent to the Missing or Murdered Facebook page from Todd Erickson, a former classmate of Amelia who had a “strange encounter” with her the week she disappeared. Oliver thought the story checked out, and I set up a Skype interview with Todd for later.

  But first, nap.

  It had been an emotionally taxing day and I was working on very little sleep. My head was a fog, my limbs felt like Jell-O, and my eyelids were heavy. I walked up the stairs and flung open the door.

  “Ugh.” I kicked a pile of Camry’s dirty clothes out of the way and maneuvered through her mess, which had managed to creep over to my side of the room.

  Normally, this would have driven me insane, but I didn’t have the energy to care.

  I face planted into bed and didn’t move for the next twenty minutes.

  It was called a power nap.

  Studies showed a quick snooze midday could revitalize the body. Twenty minutes later and I didn’t feel particularly revitalized. More so like a drunken zombie. But if I didn’t get up then, I may have slept until Tuesday.

  When I walked downstairs, Oliver was sprawled out on the couch, asleep. Camry was curled up on the chair, asleep. Austin had his head on the table in the dining room, asleep. Hazel was sitting on the sofa in the den with a book on her lap, asleep.

  Careful not to wake anyone, I took my laptop to the upstairs closet, set up my recording equipment and called the number Todd provided. On the third ring he answered. We exchanged pleasantries. Hi, my name is Liv. I’m Todd. How are you? Good and you? I asked him to say a few things to test the sound quality and he recited the alphabet—as most people did. Todd had a nasally voice. I pictured him with glasses, slicked hair, and a pocket protector.

  I started with my go-to first question. “Tell me your name, a little bit about yourself, and how you knew Amel
ia Clark.”

  “My name is Todd Erickson. I grew up in Santa Maria, and I now live in Thousand Oaks, California and work as a biochemist at a pharmaceutical company here. Millie and I went to high school together. We had all the same classes for almost four years, and we even went to Homecoming Junior and Senior year.”

  This was the first person I’d talked to who actually interacted with Amelia in high school. “What was she like back then?” I asked.

  “She was nice. Really smart. Really pretty. I had a massive crush on her, but she wasn’t interested in a relationship. Millie played soccer, basketball, and she was on the tennis team for a couple of years. She wore her letterman’s jacket every day, no matter how hot it was. She didn’t like chickens, and she was good at math. That’s about all I remember. Truth is, I didn’t know her that well. She was pretty shy.”

  Well, shoot. I’d hoped for more insight. Seemed no one knew Amelia, aside from Jeremy. But he lied to us, so I have no idea if his account of her was true or not.

  I glanced over the notes Oliver wrote down. He had impeccable penmanship. As if he used a ruler to trace each letter. “You had an encounter with Millie the week she disappeared,” I read. “Can you tell me more about that?”

  “Sure. I managed The Cellular Store in the mall while I was in college, and she came in. She’d lost a lot of weight and I almost didn’t recognize her. When I approached her she immediately started talking about wearing foil. To be honest, I didn’t see the video until yesterday. So I had no idea what she was talking about. The entire interaction had me uneasy.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t know what to make of the way she was acting. She was on edge from the minute she got there. I thought she might be on drugs. She wanted to cancel her cell plan and give back the phone. When I told her she couldn’t cancel, she punched the counter, threw a display case, and accused one of the customers of taking video of her. It was really bizarre. If I didn’t know Millie, I would have called the police.”

  This was the first I’d heard of Amelia lashing out. But, of course, there’s the gala video so it wasn’t a far-fetched idea she would “go mad” in public. Dr. Deb Naidoo said Amelia had an incident at a cell store. Her story had been spot on. Which had me asking the question: Was Janet home the week Amelia went missing?