Out for Blond

by V. J. Chambers

“What?” I said.

  She motioned for me to come around. “Look at this.”

  I walked around the desk.

  “I have a Google alert set up on my email to send me anything about the Tess Carver case that gets posted on the Internet,” she said. “The past couple days, there hasn’t been much of anything, but my inbox just exploded.”

  I peered over her shoulder. Sure enough, all the emails were Google alerts, and they had various headlines.

  Cult Member Takes Deal to Implicate Gunner Bray. Bray’s Former Friend to Testify Against Him.

  “Who’s testifying?” I said.

  “It’s Kellen,” said Brigit, turning to face me, eyes wide.

  “Whoa.” I pulled a chair over and sat down. “I wonder if it had anything to do with that talk that I had with him. He was pretty convinced that Gunner was guilty, and I let him know that they weren’t getting the details of the murder right. I thought he’d just change his story, but maybe he cracked because he realized that no one really believed him.”

  “No way to know,” said Brigit, clicking links and scanning them. “You want me to forward these to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. I headed back to my office.

  I spend the next half hour or so reading news articles. The information was fairly scant. There was nothing about the details of Kellen’s testimony, but he had apparently decided to take a deal—he’d testify against Gunner and then he’d be allowed to go free.

  Of course, I had no idea where he’d go. He wouldn’t be allowed back on the farm.

  Apparently, Odette—his girlfriend—was included in the deal as well. They would testify together against Gunner. They both supposedly had different viewpoints, and therefore different information.

  I was stunned. They’d never cracked, no matter how many times I had questioned them, and now they were cooperating with the police? Things didn’t look good for Gunner. I knew that Kellen was convinced that Gunner had actually killed Tess, and I supposed that I should be too. So, who had helped him? I needed to figure that out, and then I could be done with this whole mess.

  I’d take as much money as I could from the Clayton Society, and then I’d deliver to them the truth they didn’t want to hear—their leader was a murderer.

  But…

  Well, what if he wasn’t?

  In the outer office, the phone rang, and I heard Brigit answer it.

  The truth was that all I had was evidence pointing me toward Gunner, nothing pointing me away from him. No matter how much I dug, I couldn’t find anything that led me to anyone else. I was going to have to face the fact that he was guilty.

  “I’ll transfer you,” floated back Brigit’s voice.

  And my phone started ringing.

  “Line one,” Brigit called. “It’s Laura Hopper.”

  Why was she calling? I picked up the phone. “How can I help you, Ms. Hopper?”

  “Did you see the news?” she said, her voice tight and high and worried.

  “I did.”

  “Why would Kellen and Odette do such a thing?” she said. “I can’t understand it.”

  “Maybe Gunner is actually guilty,” I said.

  “Stop saying that!” She was practically hysterical. “Listen, we need you to do what we hired you to do. Everything is getting worse and worse, and you haven’t found anything to cast suspicion on anyone besides Gunner.”

  “Well, I know you don’t want me to say this, but maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  “No.”

  “Look, you’re obviously upset—”

  “I know I said that I wouldn’t question your investigation from here on out, and I’m happy that you’re back on the case, but the thing is, you haven’t found any information because you haven’t looked anywhere besides the Clayton Society. You won’t consider that an outsider did this, when we all know for a fact that it couldn’t have been one of us.”

  I tried to make my voice gentle. “The fact of the matter is that it could have been. You have to accept that. Anything’s possible.”

  She laughed wildly. “Oh, next you’ll be saying I killed Tess.”

  Hmm. That was something to consider. She was loyal enough to Gunner to have helped him. She was crazy enough to help cover it up.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare suspect me.”

  “I suspect everyone, Ms. Hopper,” I said. “Everyone.”

  “Well, suspect someone who doesn’t live on the farm for once,” she said and hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I upended my bottle of High Life into my mouth for the last swig and then set it down on the bar. “I need another one.”

  “Why aren’t you looking outside of the cult?” said Crane.

  “What?” I gave him a funny look. Then I turned my attention to the bartender. “You got a minute, Steve?”

  “I see you, Ivy,” he called from the other end of the bar. “High Life coming up.”

  I smiled.

  Crane showed me two different bottles of e-liquid. “Pumpkin spice or bananas foster?”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “Isn’t it weird to smoke a flavor you’re used to eating?”

  “Vape,” he said. “I’m vaping, not smoking. And no, it’s not weird. It all goes in your mouth, after all.”

  “Pumpkin,” I said.

  He nodded, opening the bottle and dripping some into his e-cigarette’s cartridge. “Look, maybe it isn’t so crazy to look outside of the Clayton Farm.”

  “What?” I said. “It has to be connected to the farm.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I glared at him. It was obvious why. “Because of the ritual and the Ocapotactu and everything else. It’s all connected to the farm, to Gunner, to all of that.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but what if it wasn’t?”

  “It is,” I said.

  I must have been pretty aggressive about it, because he held up both of his hands in surrender and took a drink of his vodka and cranberry.

  Steve the bartender arrived with my High Life. He set it down in front of me and told me how much it was.

  I paid him. I could have started a tab, but I preferred to pay in cash. I didn’t always have cash on me, but today I did, so no tab. Crane thought I was crazy for not always using plastic. I half-expected to get a lecture from him on it again today.

  But he was just sucking on his e-cigarette and expelling clouds of pumpkin-spice-smelling vapor.

  I sighed. “Okay, fine. Why do you think I should be looking outside the cult?”

  “I didn’t say ‘should.’”

  “Well, why’d you bring it up, then?”

  “Look,” he said, “you were complaining before about how you don’t have any suspects, right?”

  “No suspects except Gunner,” I said.

  “Who’s gotten in your head and twisted it all around,” said Crane.

  I gulped at my beer. “I know it’s probably Gunner, okay? I’m not stupid. I just feel like I need to examine every angle. Thing is, I’ve run out of angles.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said.

  “I have,” I said. “There’s no one else on the farm that I can figure out to be connected. I’ve hit a series of dead ends.”

  “What if there wasn’t any weird ritual stuff?” said Crane. “Who would you look at then?”

  “But there is weird ritual stuff.”

  “Humor me,” said Crane. “You want other angles, this is where you’d find them.”

  I picked at the High Life label. “Well… I guess I’d see if she had a boyfriend or something.”

  * * *

  “Finally,” said Gunner Bray. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me about Dalton ever since you took this case.”

  “Dalton?” I said.

  “Tess’s boyfriend,” he said.

  “So, she did have a boyfriend?” I said. We were sitting together on the porch of the main house on the farm. I wasn’t going to chance being alone with
him just yet. I didn’t totally trust myself. Not because Gunner was so sexy that he was too tempting to keep myself in check or anything. Just because I wanted to make sure everything stayed professional from here on out. And Brigit hadn’t been able to accompany me on this outing, so I didn’t have her presence as protection.

  “Yeah, and he hated me,” said Gunner. “The first time I went out to meet with her, he was with them, and he was totally rude to me. He made it clear—”

  “Met with them?”

  “Oh, Tess and my son Joey. I went out to meet them at a fast food restaurant. That one in town that has the jungle gym in the front. Joey ran around, going down slides and jumping up and down in the ball pit, and we started hashing out how I’d see him. I could tell that Dalton didn’t want me to see him at all. He didn’t like me. Called me a cult leader and a pervert and said that if I messed up in the slightest way, he’d put an end to all of it.”

  “Pervert?”

  “Yeah, on account of the fact that we aren’t monogamous on the farm? That was really threatening to him. Some people are blind. You can put a man like that in the middle of a garden full of bright colors, and he will still claim he can see nothing.”

  “Uh huh.” I furrowed my brow. More sermonizing from Gunner, which wasn’t making anything clearer. “But why do you want me to ask about him?”

  “Well,” said Gunner, “he obviously hated the Clayton Society. So, he has motive to try to hurt us.”

  I deepened the furrows. “I don’t follow.”

  “The publicity from the stuff with Tess has been really bad for us,” said Gunner. “It’s painted us in a bad light, and it’s going to make it difficult for us to hang onto some of the things that we’ve come to depend on, like grants and our status as a nonprofit. Our image is being tarnished.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But surely he wouldn’t kill his girlfriend to achieve that. He only hated you because of what you’d done to Tess anyway.”

  “But I hadn’t done anything to Tess,” said Gunner.

  “Well, he thought you did. So, he doesn’t have a motive for murder.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Gunner. “I mean, isn’t it true that most murders are committed by people close to the victim? Family members, lovers, best friends?”

  It was true. There was always a motive to kill your girlfriend. Couples fought, and there was so much passion in the mix that things went wrong all the time. I supposed that using the ritual to cover up something like that wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

  Now that I was thinking about it, I was intrigued by the idea. A crime of passion. Whoever this boyfriend was, he killed his girlfriend, angry, in the heat of the moment.

  And then, after realizing what he’d done, he needed a way to cover it up, and what better way than to blame it on the Clayton Society?

  Yes, as a murder, it had possibilities. I eyed Gunner. “Did this Dalton person know about the Ocapotactu rituals?”

  “Well, he knew Tess,” said Gunner, “and she knew about them. She could have told him all about them.”

  “Hmm.” I tapped my chin. I wanted to talk to the guy. I wanted to see if it was possible. Strangely, I felt relieved at the idea that Gunner himself wasn’t responsible.

  I told myself that it was because I wanted to be able to keep working the case and milking Laura and the Society for money, not because I wanted Gunner to be innocent.

  “But I don’t really think it was him,” said Gunner. “I mean, you should check him out, and he’s definitely a suspect. But there are some other people that I think had more of a motive to screw with us.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Gunner. “You don’t think it was him?” What kind of person served me a suspect on a platter and then backtracked on the whole idea?

  “Well, look, there’s an organization, it’s called Zion’s People, and they are committed to trying to shut us down. They’ve made it their mission to get our nonprofit status revoked, and they’re really zealous about it. They’re religious, and they think we’re evil or something.”

  “They’re religious?” I said. “And you think they committed murder just to hurt the Clayton Society?”

  “You don’t understand how much they hate us,” said Gunner. “It’s a passion for these people. And the worst of all is Braxton Whitney, Archer’s brother. He’s really got it out for us.”

  Archer Whitney’s brother. Archer was the millionaire bank rolling the Clayton Society. I could see why Archer’s brother might be annoyed with the Society. He probably thought that they’d brainwashed Archer and were taking advantage of him just for his money. Which didn’t seem to be far off from the truth, quite honestly.

  “Well, I’m not sure I blame him,” I said. “You’ve manipulated his brother—”

  “No one in Archer’s family ever cared about him one way or the other,” said Gunner. “Least of all Braxton. He’s angry because it makes his family look bad. And he’s annoyed that the family money is going to our cause. That’s what that’s about.”

  “And he’s angry enough about that to murder someone? Really?”

  “You should meet the guy,” said Gunner. “But if it isn’t that Zion group, then it might be this housing developer.”

  “A housing developer.” I gaped at him. He wasn’t serious about this stuff.

  “Yeah, he wants the land,” said Gunner. “His name’s, um, Hector Brennan.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I’ve seen his billboard ads. He builds a lot of those developments around here, right?”

  “Guy’s made a career out of buying up farmland and then throwing up cheap ugly houses on every square inch of it. He wants to do the same thing with our land, but there’s no way anyone’s going to let him get away with that. We’re not selling. No way.”

  “Again, Gunner, this doesn’t sound like a motive for murder.”

  “You should talk to the guy. Buying up land is his reason for being, I swear. It’s all he wants to do.”

  “We’re talking about murder, though.”

  “Yeah, a murder that could destroy the Clayton Society and make it so that he could buy the land.”

  “Does he even know about the ritual? The symbols?” I said.

  “He could have found that out if he wanted,” said Gunner.

  “So, no.”

  “Look, check this guy out.”

  “It’s not even a good market for real estate right now.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Gunner. “He knows that stuff always comes back around. Right now, he’s buying up land for cheap, and as soon as the market turns around, he’ll start building houses again. He wants our land. Wants it bad. Trust me on this.”

  I nodded to humor him, but I was really thinking the boyfriend made better sense than the land developer.

  * * *

  Dalton Peck, Tess Carver’s boyfriend, lived about two hours away, and so Brigit and I took a road trip to see him. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the boyfriend. On the one hand, he seemed most likely of all of the people that Gunner had talked to me about, and I did want to keep working on this case. On the other hand, I didn’t relish the idea of journeying back and forth two hours every time we wanted to talk to him.

  Especially since Brigit had terrible taste in music. I thought that we could just listen to classic rock. Everyone likes classic rock, right? It’s great, because it’s basically like listening to the best music ever recorded for the past forty years or so. They only play the songs that were hits, so you never hear a bad song, only the best stuff from each year. And it’s nostalgic.

  But no.

  Brigit liked to listen to country music.

  I put my foot down. No country, none of the time. Not in my car. I couldn’t believe this, really. Brigit didn’t seem like a person who would like country music to me. I thought all country music listeners were rednecks in flannel shirts with a piece of straw sticking out of their mouth. Brigit seemed normal enough.

  Whatever the case, we
couldn’t agree on the music, so we drove up in complete silence.

  After about an hour of that, I began to wonder if any music might be better than silence, even country.

  But then I thought of the twanging, and the accent, and…

  No. Just… no.

  Dalton met us at the door of his apartment, looking puzzled. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi,” I said. “Ivy Stern. This is my associate Brigit Johansen. We’d like to ask you a few questions.” I didn’t identify myself and I didn’t make it a question. I also kept my manner brusque and professional. I’d discovered that people more often than not went along with it if they thought I was someone important. They never thought to ask who the heck I was. They were swept away by my manner.

  Not Dalton, though. “Who are you?” he asked, knitting his brows together.

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “I’m looking into the murder of Tess Carver, your girlfriend.”

  “Why would you be doing that?” he said. “Aren’t the police handling it?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s nothing formal, Mr. Peck, just a few questions. It’ll only take a few moments of your time.”

  He stepped out of his door and closed it behind him. “A few moments, then.”

  Great. This guy was already defensive. And I was going to question him about the possibility of his murdering his girlfriend. That wouldn’t make him warm and fuzzy. I figured that the best course of action was to go for it, no niceties. I gazed sidelong at Brigit. Maybe she and I needed to work out a system of hand signals, so that I could tell her the tone of the interview without speaking, and she could go along with it.

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Tess?” I said. “Were the two of you happy?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Very happy, until that asshole Bray came along and cut her throat. He killed her for the kid, you know. But I’m making it my business to make sure he never sees Joey’s face ever again.”

  “Well, sometimes Tess must have done things that made you angry,” I said. “Every couple argues now and then.”

  “Sure, I guess.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why would you bring that up?”

  “Just that if you happened to get angry with Tess, it would be understandable. If you did something in the heat of the moment, accidentally—”