by Madelyn Alt
“Tea!” Liss called from the café counter.
“Ooh! I’ve been thinking about this all day!” Evie turned to hightail it over. Tara followed. Abbie hesitated a moment. I mouthed, Over there, to her and indicated the counter with a nod of my head. She followed suit, uncertainty making her scuff the toes of her Chucks over the old uneven floorboards.
Liss had poured four cups, steaming hot, and they were waiting for us with the usual accoutrements of honey, pure cane sugar, cream, and ground nutmeg on standby.
“There you are . . . Abbie, is it?” She nudged the cup at the girls’ school friend. “Good for everything that ails you. Try it with honey—just a dollop—and a dash of nutmeg. Go on. Try it.”
I could tell by Abbie’s face that tea wasn’t her usual drink of choice, but she lifted it to her lips anyway. The surprise in her eyes was a delight I never grew tired of. “Yum!”
Liss beamed. “Ah, my dear. I’m glad that you like it. It always makes me especially happy to introduce the genteel pleasures of tea to a new generation.”
“So,” I said when given the opportunity, “you said that the police talked to you at school, then?”
Abbie nodded glumly. “I am going to be in so much trouble when my mom finds out.”
“She doesn’t know that you were at the apartment complex?”
“I was supposed to be at school. I ditched.” She met my eye, a ferocity in her own. “But I’m not sorry. I just wish I’d found it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a little lost. What were you looking for exactly, and how did you come to be there? You obviously had a reason.”
Abbie took a sip of tea, bracing herself. “I used to live there. My mom and me. That was our apartment last summer, and that jerk of a manager booted us out. My mom and me, we were homeless for three whole weeks before she lucked into a new place for us. That guy didn’t care, though. He just said we broke the terms of the lease, so it was at his discretion.”
I frowned. “Broke the terms of the lease. How? Oh. You mean the age thing?”
Abbie nodded. “But it was the only place we could find that my mom could afford, so you can’t blame her for making him believe I was over eighteen,” she said urgently. “And it was a stupid rule anyway. It’s not like I was going to make any trouble at the complex. Anyway, I didn’t do anything wrong. Except for the breaking into the apartment thing, which technically speaking wasn’t breaking in since I had a key and everything. It’s not my fault the jerk didn’t think to change the locks.”
Teenage sensibilities. Wasn’t it wonderful the way the mind worked?
“Why did you break in . . . I mean, go back?” I asked her, curious.
She shied away from the question. “I didn’t find it. You guys got there before I could. And he got what was coming to him, as far as I was concerned,” was all that she would say. “After the way he treated my mom, and . . . everything . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The answer troubled me. A lot. What did she know? And my thoughts kept coming back to her boyfriend, JJ, who had logged off from his conversation with Tara rather than reveal what he knew. And I hoped desperately that neither of them had anything to do with it.
But my questions slipped away from me when I heard my cell phone ringing away back in my purse in the office. The rousing strains of the 1812 Overture, trumpeting triumphantly away. I had changed it to something less . . . extreme . . . several months ago, but Marcus had changed it back to my ring tone for him and only him one day after I broke my ankle. He said it brought back fond memories, and who was I to complain when he was being romantic?
“I’ll get it for you, Maggie,” Evie offered, sliding from her stool and racing toward the back of the store without even waiting for me to thank her or protest. She found it in my purse with much less trouble than I usually had and came running back out in record time with it suspended in front of her. “It’s Marcus,” she whispered. Unnecessarily, since it was still ringing and there was no way Marcus would have heard her, and he wouldn’t have minded in the least if he had.
I quickly grabbed it and clicked Send before the call could go to voice mail. “Hey!”
“Hey, sweetness. You free?”
“For you, yes.”
“Hmm. I like the sound of that. So, is it all right if I stop in?”
“Yes, of course.” My heart started beating faster; I knew it couldn’t be just another social call. Could it have something to do with his project for Tom, so quickly? Anticipation settled in all my nerve endings “Aren’t you going to give me any hints?”
“Nope. You’re just going to have to be patient.” I could hear the smile in his voice.
“Fine,” I said, pretending to pout. “What time will you be here?”
“How about now?”
Chapter 14
I heard the store’s back alley entrance open and close, followed by the booted footsteps my ears were attuned to pick up anywhere. “Excuse me, everyone!” I sang out and hurriedly crutched my way toward the office. We met in the middle when he flung back the violet-hued velvet curtain.
“Sneaky,” I said. “Very sneaky.”
“I was already here.”
“So I see.”
“I figured Liss wouldn’t complain.”
“And you were right, ducks,” Liss said, waving at him. “Are we all set for next Monday?”
“We are indeed. Or at least we will be as soon as we buy our books.” He looked at me and grinned. “I love using the royal ‘we.’ ”
Liss laughed.
“Mind if I steal Maggie away for a few minutes?” he asked her.
“Of course not. Steal away.” She returned to the girls at the counter, smiling to herself.
“So . . .” I said. “Where to?”
“Any suggestions?” he asked. He flicked his gaze over my shoulder. “Little pitchers and all that. Including an extra today, I see.”
I nodded. “I’ll explain in a minute.” I called to Liss to let her know I’d be outside a few minutes, and then I followed Marcus out the back door.
“So?” I said, my natural curiosity getting the better of me. He indicated his truck, which was parked in my usual but currently unused space behind the store, and held the door for me while I slipped inside, out of the sun.
“All right, I’m in,” I said when he entered from the driver’s side and closed the door behind him, rolling down the window. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
“Not.” As my face fell, he relented and said, “I’m going to show you.”
He reached behind the seat and drew out a big, heavy duty envelope. A big, fat, heavy duty envelope.
“I”—he said, his voice pumped up with pride—“managed to get the thumb drive operable.”
His proud moment was my proud moment. “As if there was ever any doubt. So . . .?” My eyebrows lifted expectantly. “Was it important?”
“I think so. And I think it makes it that much more important that Fielding and his crew locate the old drive or any backup drives that may be hanging around Locke’s office or apartment. Makes me wish I had done a full backup on my own, but once all the files were transferred from the old drive to the new with no errors, there was no need.”
“What was on it?” The suspense was killing me. A part of me wanted to see . . . and a part of me was cringing at the uncertainty of what he might have found.
Without a word, he opened the envelope and handed me a stack of papers, upside down. Slowly, I flipped the stack and turned it lengthwise so that I could see properly without my mind having to make that small adjustment.
It was a photo of a young woman. The photo was a little grainy, as though it had been taken from some distance away, with lines across it, and the apparent subject, the young woman, was in a state of half undress, bra and panties only to cover her bits, her blond hair draped over her face as she bent down to her upraised leg to slip off a shoe.
“Locke had a girlfriend?” I proposed, hoping beyond hope. E
xcept it didn’t seem like the kind of pose a girl would adopt when trying to be sexy for her boyfriend. There was something altogether too casual about it, even unaware. Like she had just gotten home and was getting ready for the shower and had no idea a camera was recording the event.
I flipped to the next page in the stack and tried not to be surprised to find it was another photo.
Another partially clad woman.
With brown hair.
In other words, not the young woman in the first photo.
This pic, too, seemed to be shot from a distance but zoomed in, with the same type of fuzzy lines in the foreground, although perhaps from a slightly different angle. And again, the girl was seminude, wearing nothing but a towel around her waist, her arm raised to bare her breasts as she pulled her hair from her neck as she faced a mirror that showed all, but only from the mouth down. Just below her collarbone was a tattoo of what looked like a bird.
Both women were quite lovely in form. Enviably so. The faces, though, in these two photos were not captured.
There were more pictures of each of them, many catching them in the middle of doing very innocuous things. Brushing their hair. Their teeth. Putting on a pair of boots. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, typing on a laptop. Darting naked from the shower with hair wrapped turban-style, as though on the hunt for fresh undergarments. Sometimes their faces were shown, sometimes the focus was more on their bodies. Okay, always on their bodies. The faces seemed to be extraneous details. And then there were the shots that were more . . . risqué . . . like when they brought male company back to their place, and the usual activities ensued. Then the sheer volume of frame-by-frame pics became really intense. And not once did I get the impression that these sessions were staged for the camera. Not once.
The hair on the back of my neck had risen, prickling its way up to my scalp. A warning.
There were more women, too, in similar situations. This had been going on for some time.
Who were they?
There was a sameness to the photos that leapt out at me, the deeper into the pile I traveled. The rooms. There was a similarity to them. A sameness of design. Different bedding, but the angles of the rooms seemed to match, even when the angle of the photo did not.
“It’s enough to make you want to keep the curtains and blinds closed at all times, isn’t it?”
I let my breath ease out of me, realizing for the first time that it had pent up with all the intense discomfort I had felt flipping through some other woman’s sexy-times photo op. “No kidding.” I shuddered, releasing even more energy. “Creepy. He had quite the thing for naked women. Multiple naked women.”
“Well . . . most men do,” he admitted, not entirely apologetic about it, either.
I laughed in spite of myself. “True.”
“But there’s a difference to these pictures, I think.”
I nodded. “Because the women had no idea they were being photographed. That is what you were getting at, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Exactly that.”
“The sameness in the photos. Did you notice that, too?”
Marcus nodded.
“It’s because they were taken there, at the apartments. The mirrors. Did you get far enough past the ever-present boobage to recognize that the mirrors were all very similar? Big, heavy, over the bed . . .”
“I did, in fact, notice that,” he said.
“Good. Anyway. The apartment I looked at had that exact same kind of mirror. Now, I didn’t go through the other apartments, obviously, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“Like Liss, I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“The mirror in the apartment I looked at was cracked. Like it had been hit with something. Maybe when the previous tenants had moved out, I don’t know. I didn’t like the mirror at all. Locke told me he’d put it on the repair list. I asked him if it couldn’t just be removed, and he refused. He said it was a built-in, so it would have to be repaired. I didn’t question him.”
“Hm. I mean, it could be part of the original design of the apartments, I suppose. You did say they were an older place that was being remodeled. Maybe built-in mirrors over the beds are common to that design era.”
“I think the brochure said they were built in the seventies. I don’t know if all of the apartment buildings were constructed at the same time or what, but I’m guessing they were. I seem to remember riding past them years ago on one of the many townwide bike excursions that Steff and I made as marauding teenage girls, looking much the same. The apartments, not Steff and me. So . . . maybe. But if they were being remodeled to bring them up-to-date, the way that Locke suggested to me that they were, why would they leave a design element in that was so very outdated?”
Neither of us had an answer for that particular question. Chalk it up to poor taste or bad advice, I guess.
“What comes next?” I asked him.
“I take these to Tom, along with the copy I made of all the files. And we’ll see what he says.”
“Do you think he’ll be surprised?”
“Does anything seem to surprise him? Really?”
Hm. He had a point.
“I thought Tom said he had a record for child pornography. How on earth does this fit in with that?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. We’ll let Tom worry about how to connect the dots, huh?”
We’d been out here long enough, so I told Marcus I was going to have to get back. He kissed me quickly and told me he was going to go pay a visit to Tom at the police department. “I should be back in time to take you home, no problem,” he promised. I watched him drive off, waving as he pulled away, and then went back inside.
The group at the counter had been joined by a party of one, I noticed. I made my way over. The addition was a woman who might have a few years on me, but no more than that. Brown hair, medium length. Pretty enough, but perhaps a little tired, if the strain around her up-tilted eyes was any indication. Jeans, sturdy tennis shoes, a thin jersey hoodie . . . this was a down-to-earth working woman, with a worldliness in the lines that were starting to etch themselves into her forehead and between her brows. There were hundreds of women like her in town. Never would they be a part of Mel’s coffee clique. They had more important things on their mind. Like day-to-day survival.
“All taken care of?” Liss asked, smiling.
I nodded. “I think so.” I wished I could confide in her about what Marcus had found. She had been my sounding board on everything for almost a year. I trusted Liss with my life. She was the most conscientious person I knew, and she was also the most connected, spiritually. And with that in mind as we found our way through these troubling times, in my opinion the more she knew about everything that was going on in this town, the better I felt. Knowledge was power. Forewarned is forearmed.
But I couldn’t. Not with the confidentiality agreement binding me as effectively as any spell. I had given my word . . . and no matter how hard it was to keep things from her, I had to uphold that promise. “Abbie’s mother has come to pick her up,” Liss told me. “Becky Cornwall, meet my assistant and right-hand woman, Maggie O’Neill.”
Becky Cornwall held out her hand, and I shook it. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
Abbie had transferred her gaze to the floor the instant I came back into the store, an obvious effort to lie low and deflect attention.
“My daughter tells me that you’re the one that found Mr. Locke’s body, Miss O’Neill,” she said, getting straight to the point. “I hope it wasn’t too awful. I know that the police spoke with Abbie today with her school counselor present. I assume that means they will be in contact with me, too. Guess that’s just how it works these days.”
Surprised, I glanced over at Abbie. “Oh, I wasn’t aware she—”
“Told me? Yes. She can be headstrong, but she’s a good girl.”
I nodded my understanding. She was a teenager. Headstrong came with the territory. “From what I understand they are trying
to speak to as many individuals who might have had contact with Mr. Locke as possible. And since Abbie and I both saw him the day before he died, it was inevitable that we would be among the first.”
She looked confused. “Abbie saw him?”
“Yes, at the . . . at the apartment building that day . . .”
Behind her, Abbie cringed. Evie and Tara were frantically shaking their heads. Uh oh.
She looked at her daughter. “I thought they questioned her because we used to live there.”
“Now, Mom, before you get all psycho about things, just remember . . . the guy kicked us out. For no reason.” Abbie Cornwall pleaded for understanding.
Her mother looked stunned as realization dawned. “I can’t believe you . . . you went back there? Didn’t I tell you, never go back?”
“I know, I know. Mom, geez. I was safe.” Abbie met my gaze. Stared me down, actually.
“And now this . . . this murder. Abbie, tell me you’re not mixed up in this. You and JJ. Tell me.”
“Mom! You know we’re not. It wasn’t about that. You think I could ever do something like that? I’m not crazy, I’m not violent, and I’m definitely not stupid. Sheesh. And JJ would never—he was on standby to protect me, Mom. To make sure I was okay. And for your information, JJ was at the high school gym, working out on the weight machines, when the cops said it was all supposed to have gone down. There were a lot of guys there. You can ask any of them.”
“That may well be, but I still think you and I and JJ need to have a talk. Tonight.”
I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Cornwall, unless the police find some evidence to the contrary, there’s no real indication that Abbie had anything to do with Locke.”
“Ms., not Mrs.,” she corrected automatically. “I never married.” Frustration tightening her already thin features, she raised her arm and pushed her hair off her face and shoulder. As she did so, her thin jacket slipped from her shoulder. Before she could pull it back on, a colorful bruise on her shoulder caught my eye. Not a bruise. A tattoo of a hummingbird poised over a daisylike flower. Just under her collarbone.
