One by One

by Sarah Cain

  “She left it tucked against the wall. I think we should take it to her.” Alex opened it and began to go through the contents. “Sam, it’s important.” She held out a small medic alert card in Barb Capozzi’s wallet. “She’s allergic to naproxen. You have to find out what was in that Coke.”

  18

  An accident just outside Baltimore shut down I-95 to all but one lane, and it took over an hour of creeping bumper to bumper before traffic cleared out. It was almost midnight before Danny reached home. When he pulled into his driveway, he saw Alex sitting on his back steps, legs stretched out, smoking a joint.

  “Don’t say a word, Ryan. It’s been a shitty night.”

  He sat next to her. “You tell me about your shitty night, and I’ll tell you about my weird afternoon.”

  “Barb Capozzi is in the ICU at Penn.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “How?”

  “Severe anaphylaxis. Something—we think naproxen—was put in her Diet Coke tonight.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was at a book signing that she was catering. She drank a Diet Coke with naproxen in it. Barb is allergic to naproxen.” Alex spoke very slowly as if he were a child.

  Danny let her words sink in, felt them settle into his gut. Had he caused her to be poisoned? He thought of the young guy on Second Street, and a chill passed through him. Something about those eyes. Had someone hurt Barb because of him? When Danny opened his eyes, Alex was watching him through a thin thread of smoke.

  Danny took the joint from Alex’s fingers and took a hit. Despite his high school occupation, he’d never been much of a smoker. He’d sold dope because it was a way to make money, and money bought freedom from the old man. Using was for people like his sister. When he exhaled, he closed his eyes and leaned back on one elbow.

  “Jesus Christ, Ryan. You’re getting high.”

  “Barb Capozzi is in the ICU. Greg Moss ran sex parties. So yeah, I think I’m getting high.” He took another hit and handed her back the joint.

  “Sam is staying downtown tonight. He’s going to let me know what’s the deal with Barb.” She took a hit. “Whoa. I must be high. Did you say Greg Moss held sex parties?”

  He nodded. “According to Smokes, they were pretty intense, but they were also consenting adults. So unless someone was killed or raped at one of said parties, they don’t count at the moment.”

  “Were you ever invited to one?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you getting texts?”

  “Good question.”

  “So this still probably goes back to your high school adventures.”

  They sat in silence. Danny never gave much thought to high school beyond the famous arrest incident. He got caught selling dope to Ray Gretske, and his father allowed him to sit in an overcrowded juvenile detention center rather than bail him out. It was a life lesson, the old man had said. Danny had written an essay about it that got published in the Sentinel. So he’d won in the end. Or maybe he’d just been fooling himself.

  In his father’s world there was only one way to live: you obeyed your parents, grew up, became a cop, got married, had kids, and started the cycle all over again. It didn’t matter that his father had failed miserably at the parenting part. Tommy Ryan had expectations. You met them or you got out. Danny had gotten out, but he’d been so busy escaping that he’d forgotten something important. Something he needed to remember.

  He didn’t want to think about Barb gasping for air on the floor, because everyone he got close to seemed to end up grasping for the last strings of life. Maybe he was some kind of fucking banshee. “Naproxen?” he said with effort. “You can get that over the counter. So someone slipped it into her whatever?”

  “Her Diet Coke.” Alex handed him the joint. “The cops are looking at the security footage, though who knows what they’ll find. Greg Moss threw sex parties. Jesus Christ.” She tucked herself under Danny’s arm and leaned against his shoulder. “You knew some strange people, Ryan.”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t know them all that well.”

  He was never part of Greg’s world. But because Greg spoke to him, even Barb and her pals smiled in his direction. Barb. He’d liked her. She didn’t deserve to end up choking on the floor.

  What was this really about? Sex parties? Real estate? Or was it all about high school? The cool kids versus whom?

  Danny couldn’t remember picking on anyone, though he’d been a smartass back then. He’d come from a weird home. His father had been a drunk who also happened to be one of the top detectives in the Philly PD. His two older brothers were tough. It tended to keep the bullies away because nobody wanted to mess with the Ryans.

  By the time Danny was in high school though, he’d been able to elude the old man for the most part. He’d stayed out at night and hung with average guys. He’d scraped together money with a bunch of other guys to rent a deathtrap in Wildwood. Danny barely remembered the house. He was dating Michelle Perry and stayed with her the whole time, though they had ended up at Greg’s place that one night. No, they had been on the porch. He tried to pull the memory forward.

  He could almost grasp it. The salt air, the song on the stereo with a driving beat, the girl in his arms. A lot of whooping from inside. He couldn’t remember now. That wasn’t good enough. He had to do a better job. Something about Greg’s house nagged at him. It glittered just below the surface.

  He handed Alex the joint. She took a last hit and carefully crushed it out. “Goodnight, baby. I’m saving you for later.” She looked up at Danny with drowsy eyes. “I believe this is a first. Daniel Ryan got high.”

  “You’re a bad influence.”

  “Oh, no. I’m a good influence. I am very, very good. I want you to loosen up. You’ve got all this garbage floating around in your head. You need to let go of it.”

  “Stop wearing black, you mean.”

  “I mean the whole Greg Moss experience. Just let it flow. Maybe something happened that you forgot? So you need to look inside.”

  “I’ve been trying to look inside and there’s nothing. Just trying to remember. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe Barb got hurt because of me.”

  “You don’t know what it’s about yet, baby. More likely Barb got hurt because of Greg.”

  Danny gazed up at the sky and tried to remember the constellations. Only a few years ago, he would have been sitting in the grass at the old house with Conor. He would be pointing out the Pleiades and Orion’s Belt and telling Conor all the myths he could remember. Conor would ask if that was before or after Star Wars, and Danny would say he thought it was a different kind of time.

  Moonlight filtered through the leaves, making silver patterns on the grass. Fireflies twinkled. He breathed in the warm air. Conor used to chase the fireflies. He’d catch them and cup them in his hands because he liked the way they made his skin glow pink. The force was with him, he’d say.

  The expected pain dug into Danny, a second delayed but no less sharp. His child danced just out of reach, a luminous spirit, forever chasing fireflies while he kept struggling to rebuild his life.

  Danny sighed. He had no right to wallow in his own misery. As someone he’d loved once told him, he was still young. He needed to get on with the business of living.

  Alex squeezed his knee. “You okay?”

  He nodded. “In another galaxy, far, far away.”

  “I don’t know if that’s good or not. You’re the tensest man in the world.”

  “Not tonight. Tonight I am definitely not tense.”

  She touched his cheek and pressed against him. She smelled of jasmine, and her mouth was so close he could taste the pot on her breath, even as he felt her heart bumping against his. He watched her eyes darken as he let his hand slide down her back over the curve of her hip to where the edge of her dress met the smooth flesh of her thigh. Her skin was a warm feast, and he was a starving man.

  If he kissed her, he’d be lost. He didn’t care. Her mouth was
warm and yielding, and she molded against him as she pulled his shirt free and ran her hands up his back.

  Suddenly, something smashed against the house, followed by thrashing in the bushes near the edge of the yard. An owl protested and fluttered in the high branches of the red oak.

  Danny startled and jerked away. “What the hell was that?” He thought he heard footsteps pounding down the street, but maybe it was just his heart.

  “I don’t know. Was someone there? I thought someone was there.” Alex pushed herself up, slightly unsteady on her feet. Her hair was a tangled mane around her face, and her eyes were wide and filled with something akin to remorse. She tugged at the straps of her dress. “Oh, shit. It’s late. I’ve got to get home.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “No. I think I better—I need to think.” She squeezed his shoulder and took off down the driveway. “Night, Ryan,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Alex.” He watched her hurry away. Damnit. He slumped down on the steps and pressed his fingers against his forehead. What an idiot he’d been. He’d felt the chemistry. It had always been there, but he’d figured it had distilled into friendship. No, he’d been lying to himself. He knew something stronger existed between them. It had flared up that night by the airport. What next? Right now he couldn’t think straight.

  He stood and walked into the backyard. Using the small flashlight on his keychain, he looked at the back wall of the house. A baseball-sized rock lay on the ground. It had been hurled with enough force that it left a white mark on the gray stone. A little farther to the right and it would have gone through the kitchen window.

  Danny walked to the far corner of the yard, by the tall boxwoods. Several branches had been broken, like someone had pushed through them. He couldn’t see footprints, but someone could have stood here watching tonight. Whether it was a neighborhood kid or someone worse was yet to be determined. Should he call the police? He gazed back toward the driveway. If he called the police, he’d have to get Alex involved, and he didn’t want to do that. It was possible that it could have been an animal. A raccoon or even a deer. A rock-throwing animal.

  Not likely.

  He returned to the back door. One of Alex’s gold hoops glittered in the moonlight, and he picked it up before he unlocked the door.

  “Christ, you really fucked up this time, Ryan,” he said and dropped the earring on the counter.

  *

  Two blocks down the street, the watcher rested against a thick maple and considered the couple on the steps. Would they have done it right there? Out in the open? That would have been interesting. He shouldn’t have lost his temper. He should have taken pictures. Or better yet, filmed them.

  They weren’t being very subtle, though the position of the house and the well-placed shrubbery hid them from view of the neighbors. A pair of would-be adulterers. They deserved whatever bad thing happened to them.

  And something would.

  It was just a matter of time.

  “The eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall not escape, and their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost,” he said and sauntered back toward Ryan’s yard. He slipped in through the hedges and melted into the shadows.

  19

  Kevin Ryan shifted in the leather lounger in the basement rec room. Out front, the twins were playing soccer in the cul-de-sac with the neighborhood kids. He could hear the shouts as someone made a goal. As a playing field, it wasn’t the best of spots. Cars stood in driveways or rimmed the edges of properties, but it was safe. Kevin believed in safe.

  Sean and Mike stood at close to six feet already, though they had just turned twelve, and he figured they’d head well north of that number. They took after him. Big and blond, goofy, like oversized pups, the way kids should be. In a normal home, he might have been that way himself. Kelly and TJ were slim and dark with those wide, deep-blue eyes that reminded him too much of Ma and Danny.

  “June 1992.”

  Kevin jumped at the sound of his brother’s voice. He hadn’t heard Danny come down the stairs. Danny always had a way of slipping in and out. It came from years of trying to become invisible. Now he perched on a barstool and watched Kevin, his head tilted slightly and his mouth drawn in a half smile.

  Once Kevin had asked him why he tilted his head that way, and Danny had told him it was a less intimidating position to the people he interviewed. “You want people to talk to you, and you want their stories, so you do everything you can to make them feel comfortable. If you lean in too hard and stare them down, it scares them. You don’t lean in until they trust you.”

  Danny was a great bullshitter, but people liked talking to him, including Kevin’s own family. All that crap about body language though. Kevin wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but he knew from years of interrogations when to be aggressive and when to hold back.

  “What about June 1992?” Kevin asked. Then he remembered that Danny had graduated in June of 1992.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what connects me to Greg Moss other than high school and the occasional bag of weed. The only other time we crossed paths tangentially was senior week, June 1992. He had a party at his house, and I spent the night on the porch. Everyone who died was there.”

  Of course. Danny would have to come here to ruin a perfectly good Memorial Day afternoon with this goddamn murder investigation. Kevin knew, he just knew, life was going to get shitty.

  “So what happened that night?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. But something happened. Barb Capozzi was Greg Moss’s girlfriend, and she went into anaphylactic shock at a book signing last night under mysterious circumstances. Alex was there. If her husband hadn’t been, Barb would have probably died.”

  Kevin sat up. Wonderful. Danny was going to drop this goddamn revelation in his lap and expect him to do something with it. Kevin chewed his lip and considered.

  “You think something happened where?”

  “Greg had a house down in Wildwood. Every night was a party down there. I was there with Michelle—you remember Michelle Perry—but half the senior class probably showed up at some point or another. Even Jenna Jeffords was there, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Wait, wait.” Kevin put up his hand. “Greg had a shore house in Wildwood that you visited, but you don’t remember anything happening. Yet you suspect something might have happened. That’s not helpful. It may be a pain in the ass, but you know the way us cops are. We like evidence.”

  Danny shrugged. “Yeah, I know. But just because I can’t remember doesn’t mean something didn’t happen. It’s either that or it’s something connected to the client parties Greg ran. But I never went to a client party, and I’m pretty sure Nate Pulaski didn’t either. He hadn’t lived in Philly for ten years. Neither did Rick Farnasi or Chris Soldano.”

  “That doesn’t mean they didn’t visit.”

  If Greg Moss’s death was connected to some dubious client party, Kevin could relax a little. That would involve a familiar line of investigation. This whole revenge killing idea was a whole different beast. How did you investigate past bad behavior—especially when people had moved on and settled into their real lives?

  Still, he expected Danny was right. Danny had never been a lover of the kinky. He wouldn’t have been a participant in any weird sex party, but it was more than possible he was a bystander at a teenage party that zoomed out of control. It didn’t take much booze and dope plus teenage hormones to combine into a toxic mix. “Do you remember who was at the shore?”

  “Some football guys and their girlfriends, but others showed up. Greg was pretty relaxed about people coming and staying. I expect he had no idea who was hanging out. I guess we need to find some of the people who might have been there.” He hesitated. “I spoke to some former classmates already.”

  “And you have a list.”

  “I have a list of possibilities. Like I said, I don’t remember for sure everyone w
ho showed up. I wasn’t paying close attention.”

  Kevin sighed. “Okay.” It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start. Kevin could at least see what he could find out about the people Danny could remember. He could check to see if anyone else on the list had a record. “Though if these deaths are connected, why didn’t you get a Bible text?”

  He could see from the way Danny wouldn’t look at him that it bothered him as well. “I don’t know. I need to get a list of my class and see if anyone else is dead.”

  “That would be nice,” Kevin said. “Unfortunately life ain’t so easy. Most people don’t send obituaries to high schools, and we don’t collect them. So you’ll have to do an obit search for every person you think might be connected to you or Greg Moss in some way.”

  “Lucky for me, there’s the Google,” Danny said with just the right touch of sass. It pushed Kevin’s blood pressure up a notch, but he told himself it wasn’t worth getting into it with his brother. Kevin struggled with the complexities of social media. To him, it was a gross invasion of privacy. Computers were necessary for gathering and compiling data. Smart phones were a little too smart.

  Kevin knew about the Internet, but not the fun parts. He knew about the dark web where children were used and abused by sick old bastards that he would gladly throw in a dark pit, if he only had the resources to catch them.

  It annoyed him that Danny knew about all the fun stuff—the things that his kids seemed to find important. Maybe he was jealous. He loved his brother, but they always seemed to scrape against each other. That was his burden and his penance.

  Kevin was about to stand when the back door banged open and Kelly bopped into the room. She yanked her earbuds out at the sight of Danny and dropped her shopping bags, her face lighting up as she ran to hug him.

  Danny was her godfather—something Jean had insisted on—though how she could have known that their eldest would bond with his brother was a mystery. It was a perfect match. Kelly was born questioning authority.