Double Booked for Death

by Ali Brandon

  “All right, kid, let me catch up here, since I came to the party late,” the older woman began. “You say you saw this girl from a third-story window half a block away, but you’re sure she’s the same girl from the other day who you also saw only from a distance. No offense, but that’s pretty thin as far as eyewitness testimony goes. How could you be sure it was her?”

  “Right,” Reese interjected, jabbing his pen in the air for emphasis. Though technically off-duty, he had whipped out a notebook and was scribbling in it as she described her encounter. “I was there last night and saw the same girl, too—except I didn’t really see her face, because she was wearing some sort of hood. No way could I pick her out of a crowd. Jake’s the only one who actually ever talked to her, as far as I know.”

  “I know it was her,” Darla insisted. “I could tell from her body language, from the way she stood.”

  When the pair merely looked at her expectantly, she shook her head.

  “Look, back in high school I had a friend who was nearsighted. She couldn’t wear contact lenses for some reason, and she was too vain to wear glasses. But it didn’t matter. She told me she could see someone clear down the hall and tell who it was, even though they were blurry, just by the way they moved. Same principle here. Besides, isn’t it telling that the girl took off running when I tried to talk to her?”

  “Uh-huh.” Reese flipped his notebook shut. “Which is what I’d do if I had a crazy woman chasing after—ouch!”

  Clapping a hand to his neck, he swung around to glare at Hamlet. The feline lay sprawled atop the sofa back, conveniently within paws’ reach of the man but with both those appendages neatly tucked against his chest.

  “Your damn cat scratched me,” the detective claimed in an accusing tone. Hamlet stared back at him, green eyes unflinching and round with innocence. Darla knew from experience that this likely meant the hardheaded feline indeed was guilty as charged, despite none of them having actually witnessed the supposed attack.

  She suppressed a smile as she fleetingly reflected on the concept of instant karma as it applied to Reese. Hamlet was owed a nice treat for that one. She and Hamlet might not be bosom buddies, but apparently he didn’t care for a stranger dissing his human roommate.

  Aloud, however, she made the appropriate noises of concerned dismay.

  “Bad kitty!” she declared and shook a finger in the cat’s direction. Then, to Reese, she added, “Are you bleeding? Here, let me take a look. I’ve got bandages if you need them.”

  “Don’t be such a big baby, Reese,” Jake said before he could answer. “I can see from here it’s just a nick. Hell, I’ve had worse paper cuts than that. Believe me, you’ll live.”

  From the expression on the detective’s face, Darla guessed he was counting to ten. After a few seconds of silence, and through gritted teeth, he said, “Thanks for everyone’s concern . . . and yes, I’ll live. But that spawn of Garfield better hope I don’t come down with cat scratch fever.”

  The detective shot the spawn in question a cold look and removed himself to one of a pair of ladder-back chairs situated a safe distance from the feline. Straddling it—chair, not cat—and tapping his notebook against his knee, he said, “So let’s assume the girl you saw is your Lone Protester. That could be interesting in light of some things I found online last night. Problem is, your sighting doesn’t do us much good, not unless you got the cab number.”

  “Gotcha covered.” Darla rattled off the information, which she had taken care to memorize as soon as she realized that the girl had escaped her. While Reese scribbled that down, Jake gave her a smile of approval.

  “First-rate work, kid. Now, I don’t suppose your girl conveniently dropped her wallet or anything, did she?”

  “Not her wallet . . . but I have something almost as good.”

  Setting down her tea, Darla went over to her old-fashioned rolltop desk. Propped atop it was a large white note card illustrated with a single red rose. Careful to hold it by one corner, she handed off the note to Jake, who’d dragged herself up from the couch to follow.

  “I saw her put this on a pile of black carnations along with a bunch of other cards,” she explained, trying to sound blasé, though in fact her discovery had only bolstered her earlier suspicions. “I stopped to pick it up, and that’s how she got away from me.”

  Which sounded better than admitting she’d been outrun.

  Jake squinted at the card a moment and then read aloud, “Sorry for what I did, I needed the money.”

  “I told you there was something fishy going on,” Darla exclaimed. “Maybe everyone was wrong about Marnie and her gang being innocent victims, too. Maybe the Lord’s Blessing Church paid her to help bump off Valerie.”

  Her enthusiasm for her hypothesis building, Darla rushed on, “It all makes sense now. The girl lured Valerie outside with the whole protest act, waited for the right moment and, pow . . . off the curb Valerie went. Marnie and her van do the dirty work, the girl vanishes into the crowd of fans, and the police chalk off Valerie’s death as an accident. Case closed. So what do you think?”

  “I think you need to take a deep breath and leave the investigating to the professionals,” Reese answered her, not bothering to suppress a dismissive snort that promptly burst Darla’s sleuthing bubble. “There’s a little thing called evidence . . . and a random Hallmark card isn’t enough to convict someone with.”

  “Whatever,” Darla muttered. “But you have to admit, that card is more than the police have.”

  “Now, now, children . . . play nice,” Jake said with an absent frown, still studying the card in question. Darla noted that she, too, was taking care not to touch more than a corner of it. She reviewed it a moment longer and then looked back up at Darla. “I hate to ask, but how about we take a look at the lipstick note that Hamlet found?”

  While Jake explained to Reese how Hamlet had found the discarded paper, Darla opened the desk’s top drawer and triumphantly handed over the page, still in its plastic protector.

  Jake scrutinized both documents side by side before walking them over to Reese. “Doesn’t look like the same handwriting, but it’s kind of a coincidence that we found this, too. Take a look.”

  Reese did as ordered, and a flicker of interest replaced his previous expression of forced tolerance. “Okay, let’s see if we can track down that cab.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed. His muttered conversation with the person on the other end took only a few seconds before he hung up and addressed the women again.

  “I’ve got a buddy at the cab company who’ll call me back in a minute. Now, don’t get your hopes up,” he cautioned as Darla allowed herself a celebratory fist pump. “Even together, all this isn’t exactly what I’d call a confession, but maybe your hellcat over there”—he gestured at Hamlet, who responded with a yawn—“has a knack for police work. Darla, do you have a computer here with Internet access we could use?”

  “Sure.”

  Feeling vindicated, Darla slid up the rolltop’s slatted panel to reveal a sleek laptop within the oversized cubby. She booted up the computer as Reese abandoned his seat and headed in her direction.

  “I assume you want to drive?” she said with a deliberately bright smile, vacating her seat.

  Appearing not in the least chastened, he simply nodded and sat down. While Jake and Darla both peered over his shoulders, he entered the address of a popular video-upload site.

  “Like I said before, with all the kids and their camera phones, I figured there’d be plenty of video from the autographing floating around. I checked when I got home last night and found at least fifty new Valerie Baylor clips that had been uploaded to YouTube. I must have watched forty-nine of them before I found something.”

  He typed in a search string, and a series of tiny screen shots appeared on the page. He clicked on one, which pulled up a black rectangle tagged at eleven minutes, seven seconds that was labeled “Me and Alexa and Bridgette and Emily waiting for Va
lerie Baylor.” The clip loaded to focus on a red-lipsticked, braces-filled mouth that presumably belonged to the “me” of the title. The lips pursed in a series of air kisses, while girlish shrieks and giggles served as an audio backdrop.

  After a few seconds, the amateur videographer turned her camera from her dental work to the grainy, close-up faces of several other shrieking teens, equally red-lipped and grinning. Wincing a little, Reese dialed down the volume. Now, the clip was a silent show of black-caped girls chattering, dancing, and mugging for the camera. Despite the nighttime venue, however, the ambient light along the street had provided a surprisingly decent view of the action.

  While Darla and Jake watched expectantly, Reese took on the role of voice-over narrator. “You’ve got the one girl filming her three friends”—he pointed out two blondes and one brunette, all of whom appeared about fourteen years old—“and you can see the antique store behind them. That’s our establishing shot. Now, the girl with the camera phone swings around to show the steps leading up to Darla’s store, and then goes back to her friends.”

  “Ugh, I’m getting dizzy,” Jake complained as the video swirled just as he predicted. “Another Spielberg, the kid ain’t.”

  “It goes on like this for a while,” Reese said. “Now, around the nine-minute mark is where we get down to business. You’ll see Ms. Baylor walking toward us in a minute. Watch.”

  Darla and Jake obediently leaned closer as the camera girl apparently ducked beneath the barricade. The video jumped about again for a few dizzying seconds, and Darla felt a bit of momentary queasiness herself. Then the camera focused in again, showing a long view of the street leading away from the store.

  The line of blue barricades was clearly visible, though the youthful fans lining the sidewalk behind those sawhorses were almost indistinguishable from each other with their uniform black garb. Just as Darla recalled it, they had managed by this point in the evening to edge the barricade closer to the street, leaving barely enough space on the walk for a pedestrian to squeeze by.

  Knowing what was to come, she focused on the street traffic with an uneasy eye. A steady stream of vehicles rushed toward the camera, the view unimpeded because of alternate-side parking restrictions on that side of the street. While not traveling at expressway speeds—and, in fact, they were going slower than the posted speed limit due to the gawking factor—it was apparent that those cars and trucks were moving swiftly enough that no amount of emergency braking could stop them in sufficient time should a pedestrian dart into traffic.

  “There,” Reese said, diverting her attention back to the sidewalk.

  He pointed toward a black-caped figure walking on the wrong side of the sawhorses, moving toward the camera. The figure sidestepped a concrete trash container at the curb, the movement revealing a second similarly caped figure following behind the first. A flash of white broke the latter’s black silhouette, and by dint of squinting Darla recognized a large rectangular shape that appeared tucked beneath the second figure’s arm.

  The protest sign.

  “Which one’s Valerie?” Jake demanded, her nose almost touching the screen now.

  Darla had leaned closer, too.

  “That must be her in the back, because she was holding the sign when she was hit.” Then, remembering the witness statements that Jake had mentioned, she amended, “But maybe that’s her in the front, since some of the kids said they saw her struggling with the protester.”

  “Uh, it’s hard to say, since you still can’t see any faces,” Reese admitted, cranking up the volume again so that the sounds of laughing and shrieking girls filled the room again. “Now, watch. The one with the sign is going to grab the other one.”

  As he spoke, the first caped figure paused and turned, as if sensing trouble. The pursuer swiftly closed the gap between them and reached out to grab her quarry’s arm with her free hand. With the other, she gesticulated with the sign that she clutched, seemingly forcing the other to read it. The pair was perhaps a dozen feet from the camera now, Darla judged—close enough to tell both pursuer and pursued were of similar height, though the billowing capes made it difficult to distinguish their builds. The first figure shook off the other’s grasp and made as if to turn.

  And that was when a trio of grinning teenage faces shoved their way into a close-up, all but blocking the scene going on behind them.

  “Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” Jake exclaimed, the words echoing Darla’s own annoyed reaction. She thrust a strong finger toward the screen, pointing at a gap between two of the mugging girls. “There. You can see Valerie and your protester, but I still can’t tell which one is which. But it does look like some sort of a struggle going on. And, wait, they’re moving closer to the curb. Crud, and now the damn kids are blocking the view again!”

  Listening to Jake’s blow-by-blow description, Darla gnawed her lower lip in equal frustration. Not that she was looking forward to watching Valerie Baylor’s grisly end; she simply wanted to know the full story of what had happened to the author. Accident, or something more sinister? And where was the white van being driven by Marnie?

  Sure enough, in the line of oncoming traffic Darla spied a large white vehicle headed on its inevitable path toward what would be the accident scene. She glanced at the progress bar again and saw that only a few seconds now remained of the video. She sucked in a deep breath and steeled herself for what she knew was coming.

  The moment of truth proved distinctly anticlimactic.

  Darla managed another glimpse of the grappling pair when one of the mugging teens bent with exaggerated laughter. The girl bounced back into the frame almost immediately, however, once more blotting out the action behind her. Then, so swiftly that she almost missed it, Darla saw a flutter of black that must have been Valerie’s cape spiral out of camera range behind the girl. At the same instant, though barely audible over the block-party bedlam, Darla heard the unmistakable squeal of automobile brakes being frantically applied.

  “Hey, I think something just happened,” the camera girl’s puzzled voice overrode the background noise just before the video went black.

  The three of them stared in mutual silence for a few moments at the screen, which now displayed an invitation either to share or replay the clip. Jake was the first to speak up.

  “Interesting, but not exactly helpful. All this does is corroborate some of your witness statements. I think you need to find that girl.”

  Reese’s phone rang just then. He answered, interspersing a few “uh-huh’s” with the scribbled notes he was making while Darla and Jake replayed the final few moments of the video. Next event like this, Darla grimly told herself, she’d have a camera on the crowd the whole time, just in case.

  Reese had already hung up by the time the screen went black again. Eagerly, the pair turned to him.

  “Got it,” he confirmed. “My buddy was able to get hold of the driver who picked up your girl. He said he just dropped off a fare matching her description at a coffee joint in the Village. If we’re lucky, maybe she’s planning to camp there the rest of the afternoon like all the kids do. Jake, you feel like reliving the good old days and heading out for a cuppa joe? Strictly off the clock . . . you know how the department is about OT these days.”

  “Fine by me, since I’m off the clock permanently,” the woman replied with a grin. She rose from her spot on the couch. “I’ll be bad cop, okay?”

  “Not so fast, Dirty Harriet. Guess you retired right about the time they hit us with all that sensitivity training. These days, it’s ‘good cop, mildly disapproving cop.’ Don’t want to hurt the perp’s feelings, you know.”

  “Fine. I’ll stand behind you and look annoyed. Now let’s get moving.”

  “Hey, what about me?” Darla wanted to know. Jake and Reese exchanged glances. Then, before either of them could protest, she added in a casually offhanded tone, “I have a car. A Mercedes.”

  From the reaction she got from Reese, her words might as well have been punctu
ated by a sudden beam of sunlight accompanied by a harp glissando.

  “A Mercedes?” he echoed with the sort of reverent awe usually reserved for weeping statues of saints and angelic visitations.

  “Great-Aunt Dee left the car to me along with the apartment. Jake’s ridden with me before. It’s parked in a garage a few blocks away.”

  That particular bequest had been, to her mind, a godsend. If there was one thing she’d yet to grow used to living in New York, it was being so dependent on public transportation. Not that she didn’t understand the whole New York car-free thing from a practical point of view. The simple act of trying to snag a parking space on the crowded city streets could take up to an hour on a good day. Moreover, once said spot was snagged, it usually ended up being a couple of blocks’ hike from one’s final destination. And this didn’t even take into consideration the veritable game of musical chairs that was alternate-side street parking, which might or might not be enforced on a particular day, depending on the vagaries of weather, politics, and official holidays.

  But coming from the wide open spaces of Texas, one was almost a nonentity without a gas-powered vehicle at one’s beck and call. A car was not so much a privilege as a birthright. Darla couldn’t envision life without her own personal wheels. Especially since the car was hers, free and clear, and the exorbitant garage fees were already paid for the next year.

  Reese had apparently already calculated the advantages of having a car at his disposal—particularly one that was likely eight or ten steps above what he normally drove when on duty—for he nodded as he grabbed his jacket. “Sure, Red. You can come, but you’re only there to ID the girl if Jake doesn’t spot her first. No chasing suspects on foot. Or running them over.”

  Darla was already digging into her purse for her keys, when she halted and gave Reese a stony look. Jake, who knew the cause of her sudden ire, grinned broadly.

  “Hey, Reese,” she said, “you’d better retract that, or you’re gonna be walking the whole way to the Village.”