“Stefanie Grossman and Dean Xavier had a relationship. That’s why she was written up for S&M violations.”
“They were dating?”
“Maybe,” I answered in a tone that meant maybe not.
Ty scribbled a few lines down on his ever-present pad.” What is someone looking for at Xavier’s office?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was a demand. Again. That was fine.
“Last Friday, I paid Dean Xavier a visit. And gave him a whole stack of papers that belonged to Liza McCarthy.” I paused, watching as Ty processed that. “Someone wants something that Liza had. They looked in the office, they looked in my apartment, then they looked in Xavier’s office.”
“Who knew you took Liza’s stuff to Xavier’s?”
It was a very short list.
Before I could go over that list, there was a commotion in the front of the station. A commotion that could only come from one person.
Ty muttered curses under his breath and pointed at me. “You. Stay here.”
When had I ever listened to Ty Hatfield? I jumped up and followed him. I had to see the show.
At the front desk of the station, it was no longer quiet, no longer boring. My best friend Casey Kenner was yelling at the top of his lungs. “HELLO! Is anyone in this godforsaken town going to answer me?” Behind Casey Kenner was Mabel Donahue, the Vice President of Collegiate Chapters for Delta Beta Sorority, Incorporated.
I could only see Ty from the back side, which was enjoyable in itself, but I was sure the expression on his face was priceless. His whole posture took on an “I’m the sheriff, I’m in charge” kind of vibe. Like I said, it was enjoyable from the back.
“Are you the detective in charge of the Liza McCarthy case?” Casey asked imperiously, projecting his voice like the inveterate showman he was. I wondered if I could scooch around the side to get a better look at the drama. But if I moved, I wouldn’t have such a good view of Casey, and he really was the star of this show.
“Yes.” Ty played the role of the taciturn, grumpy policeman well.
With a flourish worthy of a dramatic telenovella, Casey whipped out a piece of paper and presented it to Ty. “This is a subpoena duces tecum. You are hereby ordered to present property that is currently in your possession and which is the legal property of Delta Beta Sorority, Incorporated, ad nauseum.”
“What property is that?” Ty asked with a dry, lazy voice. It was almost like he didn’t appreciate Casey’s flair.
“The aforementioned property legally consists of one cell phone belonging to Liza McCarthy. It’s spelled out, habeas corpus.”
In case you couldn’t tell, Casey spent some time in law school.
Ty looked at Mabel. “And you are?”
“Mabel Donahue.” She tilted her head like a queen. “Legal representative of Delta Beta Sorority.”
“Incorporated,” Casey added.
“If I say no?” Ty asked.
Casey whipped out his cell phone. “The Delta Beta attorney was hoping you’d say that. She so wants to earn that retainer.”
Ty looked at Casey and Mabel for another second, then half turned to look at me. I motioned that I had no idea what was going on. This was just another of Casey’s brilliant ideas. Ty made a sound of resignation, then “You’re free to go, Ms. Blythe.”
He was dismissing me? He cut me off before I could start arguing. “After I get your friend Mr. Kenner his item from the evidence locker.” Then he stalked out of the room.
Casey and Mabel fist-bumped surreptitiously, but Mabel threw me a wink. Ty returned with the glittery phone in a depressing plastic evidence bag, and we were leaving when a totally unexpected person marched in: Amanda Jennifer Cohen, still in the same clothes she’d worn to Liza’s memorial service.
I told Casey to go ahead but stayed to give Amanda a quick little hug. If Liza’s service had taught me anything, it was that we should treasure the time we had with our sisters.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her. “Did Ty call you in for questioning?”
Amanda’s brows shot up in alarm. “No!” She tilted her head toward the file she had under her arm. “Official college stuff. The chancellor asked me to bring this by.”
“What is it?” The file looked very official, with the Sutton College seal embossed in gold on the navy binder cover.
“It’s the college’s Clery Act report.” At my blank face, she continued. “Every year the college has to assemble their report on campus violence.”
I eyed the thick binder. There were a lot of tabs in there.
“Here you go. You can look at it while I find someone to talk to.” She thrust the binder into my hands, and I read the labels neatly printed out. DRUGS. ALCOHOL. WEAPONS. ASSAULT- SEXUAL.
MURDER.
Was Liza McCarthy’s death going to be reported in this fancy, impressive binder next year?
Amanda’s heels clicked on the linoleum behind me. “Seriously? Where is everyone?”
I waved my hand at the lack of attentive personnel at the Sutton police station. “This binder’s really thick, Amanda.” I said, queasy at the idea of so many students being victims each year. And at the idea of so many attackers.
She shrugged. “You know college kids.”
I frowned and gave the binder back to her. I did know fifty college kids fairly well by now, and I would hurt if they were hurt.
“Did I see Mabel Donahue in the front? What is she doing here?”
“They’re just collecting some of Liza’s effects.”
“Like what? Why would Mabel want Liza’s stuff?”
I decided to go with Casey’s almost legal explanation. “Her phone was the property of Delta Beta.”
Amanda shuffled the binder from one arm to another, nervously tapping her toes, waiting for a Sutton police officer. “God, what do the police do in this town?”
I eyed the thick collection of reports detailing a year’s worth of violent incidents and substance abuse and worried for the first time that the Sutton police officers might be too busy for our own good.
Chapter Twenty-six
THE LINE BETWEEN Casey’s fabulous ideas and his horrible ideas could be a really thin, invisible line.
“I don’t think we should do it,” I said for the forty-seventh time.
“I’m doing it,” he said for the forty-eighth time.
“Casey!”
“When did you become such a wuss?”
I flashed him a final-warning look. But still, I didn’t like this.
“Can we double-check, one more time?”
Casey rolled his eyes and muttered “wuss,” so I punched him as I pulled up the document on his laptop again.
Once we’d gotten back to the sorority house, Mabel took one look at the phone and decided it wasn’t, after all, the one that Delta Beta had issued to Liza. Funny how that works. She left for Atlanta, but not before telling Casey and me what a good job we were doing here. That meant a lot, coming from her.
After we had charged Liza’s deader-than-a-doornail phone, we pulled up her call history. Sure enough, there were lots of incoming calls from the phone-sex numbers. We had learned from Casey’s research that the way these things usually worked was by forwarding calls from the 1-900 line to the operators. Assuming that all the operators had disposable phones, we had no way of knowing who those numbers belonged to. Google definitely didn’t help.
Liza’s call history also had numbers that we had matched up to the computer spreadsheet. If we were right in our guess that the spreadsheet was a record of payments, and the ten-digit numbers were phone numbers, we now had a direct tie between Liza’s phone and the phone numbers of her phone-sex employees.
Now Casey wanted to call them. From Liza’s phone. I liked the detective work, but this part, I was being a baby about. For a professional sorority girl, I’m not great with confrontation.
“You need to do it.” Casey shoved the phone at me.
“Why
?”
“Because you’re a girl. If they hear a man’s voice coming from Liza’s number, it will freak them out.”
He had a point. It was weak, but a point.
“Margot, you know we have to do this. We have got to find out how far this goes. There isn’t any other way to figure out the extent of Delta Beta’s involvement in this. I can’t have this coming back to bite us in the butt.”
I puffed out some air, blowing my bangs out of my face. “What about the money?”
Casey’s face was blank. “What about the money?”
“How were people getting paid?” I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this angle before. “If we got access to Liza’s checking account, we could see who she was writing checks to …”
“Please Margot,” Casey interrupted. “It’s not like that. This stuff is off the books, or in another name, or a corporation or something. It’s not like Liza was writing checks from her Delta Beta checkbook.”
I knew he was right. I was grasping at straws, and besides, the police had probably already pulled evidence like her bank accounts.
“Fine,” I muttered. Casey dropped Liza’s phone in my outstretched hand. “Let’s do this.”
We picked the number we’d seen most often in Liza’s call record, although, interestingly, it wasn’t the most frequent number in the spreadsheet. “Maybe she was high-maintenance or something. Or Liza had to train her in heavy breathing.” The thought was weird and gross.
I sat in the recliner and took a deep breath before dialing. The phone rang two, three, four times and right before it should have gone to voice mail, someone picked up.
But no one said anything on the other line. “Hello?” I asked.
There was a faint click, then a rustle, then the sound of a door’s being closed. I remembered what Casey had said about the operators needing privacy for verbally turning some random guy on.
“Hello?” The voice over the line was hesitant and quiet. Before I could come up with something reasonable to say (I really should have thought this through a little more and not let Casey irritate me into things), the voice said, “Who is this?”
I gasped. I knew that voice. “Aubrey?” I whispered, shocked.
“No.” Although it was still a whisper, the voice was sharper, a different tone altogether. “Aubrey isn’t here.”
I believed the voice. It wasn’t Aubrey St. John on the phone. It was her sister.
“Ainsley?”
There was another muffled sound, of a door’s opening or a cabinet’s closing. Then a click, and she was gone.
I pushed a palm against my forehead, sweeping my bangs away from my face, and sought Casey’s face. He was as shocked as I was.
“Well, that explains a lot,” I said.
“This is the chapter president’s twin sister? The Tri Mu?” Casey hadn’t met Ainsley, he’d only heard me talk about her. I nodded in confirmation and he rolled his eyes. “Freaking Moos.”
I got what he was saying, believe me, I did. But. “If Ainsley’s been working for Liza, why is she trying to expose the ring and ruin Delta Beta’s rep?”
“It’s the perfect cover. She’s bringing us down from the inside, the diabolical cow.”
It really was the perfect cover. It was shocking, even for a Tri Mu.
“Poor Aubrey,” I murmured. “To have a sister betray you like that.”
“Do you think she knows? Casey asked.
I thought about it and shook my head. “No, I don’t think she knows anything. You should have seen her at Stefanie Grossman’s S&M hearing. She was Stefanie’s biggest defender. She really thought Stefanie was innocent. She couldn’t have known that Stefanie or Ainsley were phone-sex operators.”
While I was still worrying about Ainsley’s machinations and Aubrey’s potential heartbreak, Casey had moved on. “Let’s do another one,” he said, running his finger over the list. “How about this 610 area code. That one comes up a lot.”
Then Liza’s phone rang. I don’t think I’ve ever jumped so high. Casey let loose a swear word.
“What do I do?” I whispered, as if the caller could hear me. Casey picked up the phone, pressed a button and shoved it at me. “Answer it,” he mouthed.
I took a deep, noisy breath. “Hello?”
“Hi, Heather,” the man said.
My eyebrows shot up and my mouth dropped open like a fish out of water. It was a freaky pervert dude!
Casey very helpfully reached over, gently took the phone from me, put it on speaker and set it down on the recliner arm. Then he sat back to listen with an avid expression on his stupid, handsome face.
“H-h-hi,” I said, irritated that my stuttering came across a lot like heavy breathing.
“I’ve missed talking to you,” the man said.
Oh my. “I’ve missed talking to you, too.” Casey made a keep-going motion with his finger, like I had when he made his call to the phone-sex line. Payback sucked. “So, so much.” Casey threw up his hands like I was hopeless. I wasn’t hopeless; I just wasn’t horny. There was a difference.
“Sooooo,” I drew the word out as I reached for a way to get this guy to talk. “What are you wearing?”
“My suit and tie. Remember what you like to do with silk ties?”
I closed my eyes tightly, trying not to go there. “Mm hmmm …” I said instead. “Lots of nasty stuff. Oh. Yeah.” Casey clapped a hand over his mouth, either in shock or to keep himself from laughing, the jerk.
“What are you wearing?” The caller’s voice got deep and thick. I looked down at the Delta Beta tee and jeans I’d changed into after we got home from the police station.
“Just a … robe,” I finished lamely. “And, um, panties.”
“Take the panties off,” the dude ordered me.
“Okay,” I said. Of course, I didn’t do anything. I paused. “They’re off.”
“Now take the sash of your robe off, slide it out real slow.”
I looked toward the ceiling and counted to ten.
“Oh yeah, like that,” the guy said. I gave the phone a weird face. I hadn’t made any sounds. The imagination was a powerful thing.
“You look so beautiful,” he went on.
To be honest, by this point I was thinking there was something to this phone-sex business. I could sit here, in a ratty T-shirt, old blue jeans, not doing anything, get told I was beautiful, and get paid for it? I might have to rethink my moral stance.
“Tell me where you are,” I said. “I want to picture you.”
I heard the telltale grind of a zipper. The man laughed, low and dangerous. “I’m just outside my office. Get this, there are cops everywhere. They’re next door, and they don’t even have a clue what I’m about to do to you right now.” That’s when it started to get gross. As a general rule, the sounds of a random pervert and his overactive imagination aren’t as sexy as he thinks they are.
I think I said, “oh, yes” and “oh, baby” and Casey might have moaned a few times, because he couldn’t help himself, but the guy was very self-reliant. Really, he took care of most of it by himself, which, after paying 2.99 for each additional minute wasn’t very economical of him.
He was on his third round of describing how big he was and how young I was when I heard the sound of a knock against wood, and a familiar voice. “Professor, we’re almost finished.”
“Shit,” the man said, and the phone disconnected.
It was Hatfield’s voice in the background—and it all fell into place.
I wondered how much money Professor Xavier had just paid to jerk off to the halfhearted sounds made by a girl in a T-shirt and her gay best friend.
Chapter Twenty-seven
WEDNESDAY MORNING, I woke up to a text from Amanda, asking me out to lunch. I felt guilty that while Casey and I had spent half the night laughing about phone-sex clients, I hadn’t called her to see if she wanted to join in the fun.
Of course I wanted to see her, but there was going
to be a giant elephant in the room. And I knew exactly what that giant elephant liked to do with silky ties and robe sashes.
Maybe they weren’t that serious, Dean Xavier and Amanda. Maybe it was just a casual thing. But I didn’t think so. I knew my big sis, and I knew she didn’t waste her time on anyone that she couldn’t see with the minivan and the 2.5 kids and golden retriever. She had high standards. I just wasn’t sure I could tell her that her instincts might be off with this one.
We met at the tearoom again, early for lunch, at 11 A.M. I gave her a big hug.
“You look beautiful,” I told her, mostly because it was true.
“You’re so sweet.” Amanda carefully set her clutch on a corner of the table, removing her phone and keeping it where she could see it.
I had to say something. “Amanda, is that what I think it is?”
A small, satisfied smile touched her lips. “Maybe.”
“Shut up.” I put a hand out. “May I?”
When she nodded permission, I picked up the fine leather accessory. Smooth, supple calfskin, exquisite handmade craftsmanship, a distinctive H on the buckle. “Hermès?” My question was whispered because this was a holy subject matter.
She tilted her head coyly. “It’s secondhand. I found this great vintage shop on eBay.”
“It’s beautiful. And I’m mad that you’re keeping all the great eBay sellers to yourself!”
She put a hand to her heart. “Margot, you don’t know how much that means to me!”
I must have looked confused. She went on, “I mean, you were always the one in college who had everything. It’s just flattering that maybe now you’d look up to me.”
That was insane. I’d always looked up to her. She was my big sister.
“How did everything go yesterday?” When I’d left the police station, she was still waiting to see Ty Hatfield. “Did Ty sign off on your report?”
Amanda quirked her brow at me. “It’s ‘Ty,’ is it?”
“It’s a name,” I said, dismissing her innuendo. “Seriously, tell me about it,” I said after the waitress came and took our orders. I ordered tea and chicken salad. Amanda ordered chardonnay and chicken salad, which was surprising. It wasn’t even noon yet.
Sisterhood is Deadly: A Sorority Sisters Mystery Page 14
