As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  [Insert clip]

  PIP: Hi, Jackie. So just to introduce you, you’re the owner of an independent café in Fairview, on Main Street.

  JACKIE: Yes, that’s me.

  […]

  PIP: Can you tell me what happened?

  JACKIE: Well, Jason Bell was here a few weeks ago, standing in line to order his coffee. He came in quite a bit. And there was someone in line in front of him, it was [—-BEEEEEEEP—-] […] Jason shoved him back, spilled his coffee […] told him to stay out of his way.

  PIP: A physical altercation, would you say?

  JACKIE: Yes, it was quite violent, quite angry, I’d say. […] Very clear that they disliked each other.

  PIP: And you said this was just two weeks before Jason was killed?

  JACKIE: Yes.

  PIP: Are you suggesting that [BEEP] might be the one who killed him?

  JACKIE: No, I…no, of course not. It’s just that I think there was already animosity between them.

  PIP: Bad blood?

  JACKIE: Yeah […] because of what [BEEP] did to Jason’s daughter Becca. Even though he wasn’t convicted. I’m sure that gave Jason plenty of reason to hate him.

  [End clip]

  PIP: I don’t know about you, but there’s already one name on my Persons of Interest list. All of this and more coming up in episode one. Join us soon for season three of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: Who Killed Jason Bell?

  [Insert clip]

  DETECTIVE HAWKINS: I promise I will find out what happened to Jason—who killed him.

  [End clip]

  PIP: So do I.

  [Jingle plays]

  It started with a phone call.

  “Hi, Pip, it’s Detective Hawkins here. I wonder if you have time to come down to the station today for a little chat?”

  “Sure,” Pip had told him. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about that podcast trailer you posted a couple of days ago, about the Jason Bell case. I just have a few questions for you, that’s all. It’s a voluntary interview.”

  She pretended to think about it. “OK. I can be there in an hour?”

  The hour was gone now and here she was, standing outside the bad, bad place. The graying building of Fairview Police Station, a gun going off in her heart and her hands slick with sweat and Stanley’s blood. Pip locked her car and wiped her red hands off on her jeans.

  She’d called Ravi to tell him where she was going. He hadn’t said much, other than the word “fuck” over and over again, but Pip told him it was OK, not to panic. This was to be expected; she was indirectly involved in the case, either through her interview with Jackie or through her phone call to Max’s lawyer that night. That’s all this would be about, and Pip knew exactly how to play her part. She was on the outskirts of this murder, that’s all, a peripheral player. Hawkins wanted information from her.

  And she wanted some from him in return. This could be it: the answer to the question she couldn’t shake, the lurking undertow to every waking thought. The moment Pip learned whether they’d managed to pull it off or not, whether their time-of-death trick had worked. If it had, she was free. She’d survived. She was never there and she hadn’t killed Jason Bell. If it hadn’t worked…well, not worth thinking about that quite yet. She locked that trailing thought in the dark place at the back of her mind and walked through the sliding automatic doors.

  “Hello, Pip.” Eliza, the detention officer, gave her a strained smile from behind the front desk. “It’s all go here, I’m afraid,” she said, her hands fidgeting a pile of papers.

  “Detective Hawkins called me, asked me to come in for a chat,” Pip replied, digging her hands into her back pockets so Eliza wouldn’t see how they shook. Calm down. Need to calm down. She could crumble inside, but she couldn’t let it show.

  “Oh, right.” Eliza stepped back. “I’ll just go tell him you’re here, then.”

  Pip waited.

  She watched as an officer she knew, Soraya, hurried through reception, stopping only briefly to swap quick hellos and how are yous. Pip wasn’t covered in blood this time, not the kind you could see, anyway.

  As Soraya walked through the locked door at the back, someone else came through from the other way. Detective Hawkins, his limp hair pushed back, his face paler than usual, grayer, as though he’d spent too much time in this building and its color was leaching into him too, claiming him.

  He can’t have slept much since Jason’s body was found.

  “Hi, Pip.” He beckoned her over and she followed.

  Down that same corridor, from the bad, bad place to the worse, worse place. Treading in her own out-of-time footsteps again. But this one, this Pip, she was the one in control, not that scared girl who’d just seen death for the first time. And she might be following Hawkins now, into Interview Room 3, but really he was following her.

  “Please, have a seat.” Hawkins gestured her into a chair, taking his own. There was an open box on the floor beside him, a pile of files inside, and a tape recorder waiting on the metal table.

  Pip sat on the edge of her seat and nodded, waiting for him to begin.

  He didn’t, though. He just watched her and the darting of her eyes.

  “So,” Pip said, clearing her throat. “What did you want to ask me about?”

  Hawkins leaned forward in his chair, reaching for the tape recorder, the bones in his neck clicking. “You understand that even though this is voluntary, and we just want you to help us with our inquiries, I still need to record our conversation?” His eyes searched her face.

  Yes, she understood that. If they seriously considered she had something to do with it, she would have been arrested and read her Miranda rights. This was standard practice. But there was a strange look in his eyes, like he wanted her to be afraid. She wasn’t, she was in charge here. She nodded.

  Hawkins pressed a button. “This is Detective Hawkins interviewing Pippa Fitz-Amobi. The time is eleven-thirty-one a.m. on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of August. This is a voluntary interview in relation to our inquiry into the death of Jason Bell and you can leave at any time, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Pip said, directing her voice toward the recording device.

  Hawkins sat back, his chair creaking. “So,” he said, “I heard the trailer for the new season of your podcast, as did hundreds of thousands of other people.”

  Pip shrugged. “I thought you could use some help on this case. Considering you needed me to solve two of your previous cases for you. Is that why you asked for a chat today? Need my help? Want to give me an exclusive for the podcast?”

  “No, Pip.” The air whistled through his teeth. “I don’t need your help. This is an active investigation, a homicide. You know you cannot be interfering and posting important information online. That’s not how justice works. The journalistic standards apply to you too. One might even see this as contempt.”

  “I haven’t posted any ‘important information’ yet. It was just a trailer,” she said. “I don’t know any details of the case yet, other than what you said in the press conference.”

  “You released an interview with a”—Hawkins glanced down at his notes—“Jackie Miller, speculating about who might have killed Jason Bell,” he said, widening his eyes as though he’d scored a point against her.

  “Not the whole interview,” Pip said, “just the most interesting clips. And I didn’t name the person we spoke about. I know that might prejudice any potential future trial. I do know what I’m doing.”

  “I’d say the context made it pretty obvious who you were talking about,” Hawkins said, reaching down for the box of files beside him. He rerighted himself, a small pile of papers clutched in one hand. “After I heard your trailer, I spoke to Jackie myself, as part of our inquiries.” He shook the pages
at her, and Pip recognized an interview transcript. He placed the transcript down on the metal table, flicked through it. “I think there was a certain amount of bad blood between Max Hastings and Jason Bell,” he read aloud. “You hear these things around town, especially when you own a café on Main Street…. Jason must have hated Max for what he did to Becca, and how it was connected to Andie dying…. Certainly seemed like Max didn’t like Jason either…A lot of anger there. It was pretty violent. I’ve never had a situation like that between two customers. And, as Pip said, isn’t it concerning that that was just two weeks before Jason was murdered?” Hawkins finished reading, closed the transcript, and looked up at Pip.

  “I would say it’s a fairly standard first step in an investigation,” Pip said, not dropping his eyes, she wouldn’t be the first to look away. “Finding out if anything unusual happened recently in the victim’s life, identifying anyone who had any ill will toward him, potential persons of interest. A violent incident leading up to his murder, interviewing a witness. Sorry if I beat you to it.”

  “Max Hastings,” Hawkins said, his tongue hissing three times as it tripped over the name.

  “Seems like he’s not very popular in town,” Pip said. “Has a lot of enemies. And apparently Jason Bell was one of them.”

  “A lot of enemies.” Hawkins repeated her words, hardening his gaze. “Would you call yourself one of his enemies?”

  “I mean”—Pip stretched out her face—“he’s a serial rapist who walked free, hurt some of the people I care about most. Yes, I hate him. But I don’t know if I have the honor of being his worst enemy.”

  “He’s suing you, isn’t he?” Hawkins picked up a pen, tapped it against his teeth. “For defamation, for a statement and an audio clip that you posted to social media the day the verdict was read in his sexual assault trial.”

  “Yes, he was going to,” Pip replied. “As I said, great guy. We’re actually settling out of court, though.”

  “Interesting,” Hawkins said.

  “Is it?”

  “Well.” He clicked the pen in his hand, in and out, and all Pip heard was DT DT DT. “From what I know of your character, Pip, from our handful of interactions, I’d say I’m surprised you’ve decided to settle, to pay up. You strike me as the type who would fight to the very end.”

  “Normally I am.” Pip nodded. “But, see, I think I’ve lost my trust in the courts, in the justice system, criminal or civil. And I’m tired. Want to put it all behind me, start fresh at college.”

  “So, when was it you came to this decision, to settle?”

  “Recently,” Pip said. “Weekend before last.”

  Hawkins nodded to himself, pulling another piece of paper from a file at the top of the box. “I spoke with a Christopher Epps, the attorney representing Max Hastings in this defamation matter, and he told me that you called him at nine-forty-one p.m. on Saturday, the fifteenth of August. He says that’s when you told him you wanted to accept a deal he had offered you a few weeks prior?”

  Pip nodded.

  “Strange time to call him, don’t you think? That late on a Saturday evening?”

  “Not really,” she said. “He told me to call him anytime. I’d been thinking about it all day and finally made the decision. I didn’t see a reason to delay any further. For all I knew, he was going to file the lawsuit first thing Monday morning.”

  Hawkins nodded along with her words, making a note on the page that Pip couldn’t read upside down.

  “Why are you asking me about a conversation I had with Max Hastings’s lawyer?” she asked, wrinkling her eyes in confusion. “Does that mean you have started to look into Max as a person of interest?”

  Hawkins didn’t say anything, but Pip didn’t need him to. She knew. Hawkins wouldn’t know about Pip’s call with Epps if he didn’t first know about Epps’s call to Max just a few minutes later. And the only way he’d know about that was if he’d already looked into Max’s telephone records. He probably hadn’t even needed a warrant; Max probably gave up his phone voluntarily, on Epps’s advice, thinking he had nothing to hide.

  Hawkins could already place Max at the scene at the time Epps had called him and the later calls from his mom and dad; surely that was probable cause to get a search warrant of Max’s house, his car? To take samples of his DNA to test against those they found at the scene? Unless the time Max was there didn’t match Jason’s time of death. That last unknown.

  Pip tried not to let it cloud her face, staring ahead at Hawkins, a hint of interest in her narrowed eyes, but not too much.

  “How well did you know Jason Bell?” Hawkins asked, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Not as well as you did,” she said. “I knew a lot about him, rather than knowing him, if that makes sense. We’d never really had a full conversation, but, of course, when I was looking into what happened to Andie, I did a lot of looking into his life. Our paths have crossed but we didn’t really know each other.”

  “And yet you seem determined to find out who killed him, for your podcast?”

  “It’s what I do,” Pip said. “Didn’t have to know him well to think he deserves justice. Cases in Fairview don’t seem to get solved until I get involved.”

  Hawkins laughed, a bark across the table, running his hand over his stubble.

  “You know, Jason complained to me after you released the first season of your podcast. Said he was being harassed, by the press, online. Would you think it’s fair to say he didn’t like you? Because of that.”

  “I have no idea,” Pip said, “and I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Even if he didn’t like me, he still deserves justice, and I’ll help in any way I can.”

  “So, have you had any recent contact with Jason Bell?” Hawkins asked.

  “Recent?” Pip looked up at the ceiling, as though searching through her memory. Of course she didn’t have to look far; it had only been ten days since she’d dragged his body through the trees. And before that, she’d knocked on Jason’s door to ask him about Green Scene and the DT Killer. But Hawkins could never know about that conversation. Pip was already connected to the case indirectly, twice. Recent contact with Jason was far too risky, might even give them probable cause to get a warrant for her DNA sample, especially with the way Hawkins was looking at her now, studying her. “No. Haven’t spoken to him, let alone seen him around town in, well, it must be months,” she said. “I think the last time our paths crossed would have been at the six-year memorial for Andie and Sal, remember? You were there. The night Jamie Reynolds went missing.”

  “So that’s the last time you remember coming across Jason?” Hawkins asked. “Back at the end of April?”

  “Correct.”

  Another note on the lined paper in front of him, the pen scratching, the sound traveling all the way up the back of her neck. What was he writing about? And in that moment, Pip couldn’t shake this uncanny feeling, that it wasn’t Hawkins sitting across from her, questioning her. It was herself, from a year ago. The seventeen-year-old who thought the truth was the only thing that mattered, no matter the context, no mind to that suffocating gray area. The truth was the goal and the journey, just as it was for Detective Hawkins. That’s who was sitting across from her: her old self set against whoever she’d become now. And this new person, she had to win.

  “The phone number you used to call Christopher Epps,” Hawkins said, running his finger down a printed sheet of paper, “that’s not your cell phone number. Or your home phone number.”

  “No,” Pip said. “I called him from the landline at my friend’s house.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That’s where I was,” Pip said, “and I’d lost my phone earlier that day, my cell phone, that is.”

  Hawkins leaned forward, his lips in a tight fold as he considered what she just said. “You lost your cell phone that day? On Saturd
ay the fifteenth?”

  Pip nodded, and then said “Yes” for the recorder, prompted by Hawkins’s eyes. “I went jogging in the afternoon, and I think it must have bounced out of my pocket. I couldn’t find it. I’ve replaced it now.”

  Another note on the page, another shiver up Pip’s spine. What was he writing about? She was supposed to be in control; she should know.

  “Pip.” Hawkins paused, his eyes circling her face. “Can you tell me where you were between nine-thirty p.m. and midnight on Saturday, the fifteenth of August?”

  And there it was. The last unknown.

  Something released in Pip’s chest, a little more breathing room around her gun-beat heart. A lightening in her shoulders, a loosening in her clenched jaw. Blood on her hands that was only sweat.

  They’d done it.

  It was over.

  She kept her face neutral, but there was a fizzing by the sides of her mouth, an invisible smile and a silent sigh.

  He was asking her where she was between nine-thirty p.m. and midnight because that was the estimated time of death. They’d done it. They’d pushed it back by more than three hours and she was safe. She’d survived. And Ravi, and everyone she’d turned to for help, they would be OK too. Because Pip couldn’t possibly have killed Jason Bell; she’d been somewhere else entirely.