“So Liza wrote her up for doing Dean?” I asked.
“Liza was going legit. She told me she couldn’t look herself in the mirror anymore. She had to do right by Delta Beta. And that meant starting to enforce the S&M rules. ”
But this still didn’t make sense. I was missing something huge, or else I was never going to narrow down exactly who killed Liza. And Stefanie. Because right now there were approximately five suspects. And one of them was me.
“I need to get into Liza and Stefanie’s apartment.”
Aubrey’s eyes widened.
“And you’re going to let me in.”
IF LIZA HAD trusted Aubrey with a key to the chapter advisor’s office, I was fairly sure she was close enough to Liza and Stefanie to figure out a way to break into their apartment. Turned out, we didn’t need to break in. During that last chapter meeting, Liza had stored her purse in Aubrey’s room. With her keys in it.
Casey was the perfect lookout, I figured. He was distractingly handsome, he could lie his pants off, and the odds of anyone in Sutton recognizing him were low. The problem was, he sucked at lookout fashion. He picked me up at the sorority house wearing tomato red chinos and a blue, red, and yellow checked shirt with a yellow paisley handkerchief neatly folded into a pocket. He looked like Chuck Bass crossed with Will.I.Am.
Liza and Stefanie’s apartment was in a complex with exterior doors, and theirs was a second-floor unit overlooking a green area that smelled like dog poop. Casey stood at the bottom of the stairs to delay anyone who would come in and surprise me. I felt bad. It was really stinky down there.
I held my breath while the key slid in easily and opened the door. The apartment was in terrible shape. It was hard to tell whether it had been searched or whether the police had gone through it. The front door opened directly into the living room. There was a galley kitchen immediately behind the living room, with a small eating nook that had been turned into an office of some sort. Two doors led off the living room, one to my right and one to my left.
I perused the living room first, wondering whether I’d even recognize evidence if I saw it. After all, I hadn’t recognized ten digits as phone numbers when I’d first seen those. I flipped open a few boxes of photographs under the TV stand. Some Cosmopolitan magazines were piled on the Ikea coffee table, which maybe came in handy for phone sex, with all those “Sixty-Seven Secrets to Please a Man” articles. In the office, there was a laptop dock but no laptop. Briefly flipping through the papers, I saw a bunch of printouts on Latin American history and a women’s studies class syllabus. Those were probably Stefanie’s. One thing I didn’t see were any bills. Interesting. I checked under the desk and didn’t see a shredder or a trash can.
In the kitchen, I flipped through the cabinets, praying that something would jump out at me. Other than a murderer, or a dead body.
With no telltale spreadsheets or bank statements with the name “Heather” on top, I chose the bedroom on the left first. From the pictures next to the unmade double bed, this had to be Stefanie’s room. I teared up at the picture of a young girl with her grandma at her Bat Mitzvah. She shouldn’t have ended up dead on the lawn of the Delta Beta house.
I spent too long looking at Stefanie’s pictures. She had wild brown curls that she liked to toss right before a photo was taken. They always seemed to be in motion. And now they’d never move again. The thought spurred me on. It didn’t matter what questionable choices Stefanie had made. She deserved justice.
I filtered through a bookcase, opening books, fanning through any pages that looked bulky. The drawers of her dresser were stuffed full of Delta Beta tees, and there was another tight squeeze on my cardiac muscles at the reminder of who this girl had been.
The apartment and the bedroom didn’t seem like people had been here recently, much less been hiding out. Where had Stefanie Grossman been since the last conversation with Aubrey? Aubrey had assumed she’d been here, but I thought there’d be a lot more evidence of dirty dishes, or piled-up laundry. Not that the place was superclean, but it didn’t seem like the place Stefanie had been holed up. Even the bathtub was dry. Maybe it’s TMI—but if I shower every day, there’s definitely residue.
Leaving Stefanie’s bedroom, I crossed the living room to Liza’s room, checking my watch as I did. I’d been here for fifteen minutes and hadn’t heard from Casey. I hoped he was still breathing through his mouth.
I checked the same things in Liza’s room, the books, the magazines, the drawers. There was nothing suspicious or noteworthy. The bathroom was similarly dry. On impulse, I picked up the Delta Beta Busy Bee on Liza’s bed and gave it an absentminded squeeze, even as my eyes scanned the room for something—anything—that would help me figure all the mysteries out.
That’s when my fingers felt something up the bee’s butt. I turned the stuffed animal over, revealing a seam loosely basted together. With the pull of a string, Busy Bee’s butt emptied, and two zip drives fell into my hand. Jackpot. I don’t know about most people, but Delta Betas don’t violate stuffed animals for no good reason.
The zip drives stuffed in my pocket, I locked the front door and joined Casey at the bottom of the steps. He had his yellow paisley handkerchief tied around the bottom half of his face like a flamboyant bank robber.
“Way to be inconspicuous,” I said, as we headed toward the parking lot.
“You’d think they’d get bored of crapping in one place,” Casey muttered. I’m not sure Casey ever lived in an apartment complex of college students with dogs. Neither long, leisurely walks nor doggie bags were considered a requirement.
“Did you get anything?” Casey asked when we had the car doors safely closed.
“We’ll see,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-eight
CASEY’S HOTEL WAS closer than sorority row, so we went there to view the zip drives. He insisted on scanning them for viruses first, which I thought was mighty health-conscious of him. We couldn’t know what kind of files were on them. More spreadsheets? An open letter from a serial-killer/phone-sex client admitting his guilt?
When we plugged in the first drive and double-clicked a file at random, the media player opened. And up popped a scene I was semifamiliar with: the inside of the chapter advisor’s office.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “There really was a bug in there?”
“Holy shit,” Casey said. I gave him a chastising look. There was no excuse for foul language.
There were fits and starts in the surveillance footage, either from a motion sensor or from someone’s deleting scenes, or both. There was Liza, talking with Aubrey, then Callie, then the housekeeper. Then there was Callie, opening the door when the office was empty. Then the door opened again. Hunter.
Then they were kissing.
And undressing.
And … “OH MY GOD!” I cried out, covering my eyes.
“Holy SHIT!” Casey yelled. This time I didn’t correct him. There was a time and a place for everything.
There was no audio, thank goodness, and Casey let me know when it was safe to look again. A minute later, Callie and Hunter were back at it again, this time against the bookshelf. Then on the desk. Then the chair.
I closed my eyes and told Casey to review the rest. Nothing else was on the zip drive but pictures of Callie and Hunter doing it like bunnies in the chapter advisor’s office.
I was really scared of the second thumb drive. Even Casey gave it a speculative thought. The fact that he even paused was something.
He waited until I was ready to plug it in.
I took a deep breath. “Do it.”
I expected the media player to pop up with a video, but instead, it was a sound recording. With lots of heavy breathing, lots of talk about being tied up, and lots of Dean Xavier. I wasn’t sure if I could prove it was him until the phone-sex operator very clearly said, “Yes, DEAN, DO ME DEAN.” And then he said, “Don’t call me Dean.” Which probably wouldn’t prove his identity since
you can’t prove a positive with a negative (or something like that). But he did finish with, “Call me Professor Xavier,” which helped me out a lot.
After about ten minutes’ worth of freaky-deaking, I motioned to Casey, who fast-forwarded to see if we had anything else good on there. Like a woman’s voice identifying herself as Heather, confessing that she was going to kill Liza McCarthy on a Monday night, but our luck had run out.
“So Liza had these in the butt of a Busy Bee? Why would Liza put them there?”
I had been thinking about it. “One, she wanted to keep them safe. But you know what? I think someone knew about these.”
“Why?”
“The Busy Bee in the chapter advisor’s office was torn open when Hunter trashed the place. I don’t think that was a coincidence. Maybe Hunter knew the recordings were in there, and he wanted them?”
“But how would he know he was being recorded? Or where they were?”
“And what did he do when he didn’t find them?” I asked rhetorically low. “And this was all after Liza was killed. So either she told Hunter before she died …”
“Or someone told him after.”
No doubt there were huge pieces of the puzzle that I was missing. But I knew how to knock out a bunch of the corner pieces.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked Casey.
“We need to go find that camera.”
“Yeah. That, too.”
I HAD TO fill out some chapter-advisor paperwork first. Yes, I know that sounds boring, but it was really vital. Then Casey and I headed to the police station.
For once, there was someone at the front desk. Will wonders never cease? His name tag identified him as Deputy Winchester.
Casey argued some legal mumbo jumbo about a prisoner’s rights under the Geneva Convention which, I had to say, impressed the heck out of me. The most international law I knew about was diplomatic immunity, and that was only because so many scumbag diplomats were also creepy pedophiles on Law & Order.
Deputy Winchester rolled his eyes and said we’d come during visitor hours anyway, which seemed like a good cover story for him.
Hunter was still sitting in the cell, now dressed in a county-issued scrub set. “Why haven’t you paid bail yet?” I asked. Surely a Sutton College fraternity brother could spare some cash to help a friend out.
“Mom and Dad are on a cruise down the Rhine. They’re trying to teach me a lesson.”
I almost felt sorry for him.
Casey pulled up two chairs to the bars. I set the laptop on one of them. The second chair was for Hunter’s next visitor. Just a few minutes later, Callie Campbell walked slowly down the hall, her blue eyes big and scared. “What’s going on Margot? Why did you say there was urgent chapter business here?” Her gaze sought out Hunter’s, and the pain in them was obvious to even Shakespeare, dead in his grave, all the way back in England, who was impressed by how Romeo and Juliet these two were.
“Sit down, Callie.”
She responded immediately to the inherent authority in my voice and sat in a chair with a view of the laptop screen.
I began with an official statement. “In compliance with rule 10.9, subsection C (1) of the Delta Beta sorority Standards and Morals manual, I am hereby inciting an emergency standards and morals hearing, under my authority as a properly instituted chapter advisor.”
There was no evidence of Callie’s adorable dimples as her face went ashen.
I handed her the S&M paperwork I had filled out and, as she started to review it, Casey pressed play on the laptop. As we’d seen earlier, there was nothing very notable about the first minute or so of the video, and Callie ignored it, as her horror grew while reviewing the pages I’d written up. But Hunter saw the screen immediately and knew what it meant. “Where did you get that?” he whispered urgently.
“Where do you think we got it?” I asked him.
He shook his head, mute as he and Callie burst onto the screen. His strangled sound made Callie look up, startled. And then she saw what was on the laptop.
“What?” she squealed. “What is that?” Panicked, she looked up at Hunter, who was now at the bars, gripping tightly. “You taped us? You pervert! Asshole!”
“I didn’t. I swear, baby, I did it for you.”
Casey and I exchanged a look. Now that was a line.
Callie buried her face in her hands. “Turn it off! Turn it off!”
“Callie, baby, I swear, listen to me, I never would have done it, but she said she was going to take your pin. And I knew that would destroy you.”
I held up a hand. “Who told you she would take Callie’s pin?”
Hunter brushed both hands in his thick hair, looking like a very sad Romeo. “I don’t know. She never gave me a name. She blackmailed me into breaking into the office, and she said she needed the evidence in there. In the stuffed bee.”
“What about the computer?” I asked.
“She told me to get rid of it.”
“And the file?”
Hunter stilled, his stricken eyes focused on Callie. “She wanted that, too.”
“You stole Stefanie’s file?” Callie’s voice was strangled. “You are a bigger idiot than I thought! I could get in trouble for that. I’m in charge of that file!” She stood and screamed the last bit. The dramatic flair surprised me.
“But if it’s gone, how do they even know about it?”
“You are so dumb!” Callie exploded. “You think if you steal the file it just goes away? Delta Beta is way more organized than that!”
“Thank you,” I said. Hunter looked devastated.
“Hunter, back to the point, please.” I snapped my fingers.
“What’s the point?” He groaned dramatically, sitting on the bench, his head in his hands.
“If you don’t tell me the truth, I will pursue this S&M hearing against Callie. Her pin will be taken because of her involvement with a house brother, in direct violation of S&M manual section 24 B.”
Callie’s response was a soft cry. I would have felt bad for her, but she was leverage and had clearly broken a major S&M rule.
I pressed my advantage and focused on Hunter again. “So someone called you out of the blue and blackmailed you into breaking into the office to steal Stefanie’s file and getting the evidence out of the stuffed bee. What did you do when you didn’t find it?”
Hunter slowly raised his head and looked at me, a question clear on his face. “But I did find it.”
Casey held up his hand in a “stop” gesture. “What did you find?”
Hunter tilted his head towards the laptop. “A thumb drive.”
Casey and I exchanged a long glance. “Hunter …” I drew his name out slowly as my brain worked through that information. “When did you get the call blackmailing you?”
“The night after Liza died.”
“Did you recognize the voice?” That question came from behind us, from a voice I recognized as belonging to one Ty Hatfield.
Hunter looked surprised at that question, like he’d never even considered it. “No. I got texts from an unknown number.”
“Did you know what you were supposed to get out of the Busy Bee?” I asked.
“They just said it was a thumb drive, and if I didn’t get it, they were going to tell the Delta Betas about me and Callie.”
“And did you actually look at it?”
Hunter’s lip curled at me. “I know she doesn’t believe it,” he said, nodding at Callie. “But I’m not an idiot. I listened, and it was just some pervert talking dirty. It had nothing to do with me and Callie.”
“What I want to know is who did you give the drive to?” Ty asked, ignoring Hunter’s question.
“I was told to drop it off in a trash can at the Commons,” Hunter said. “Right next to the fraternity advisor’s office.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
TY BROUGHT ME and Casey back to his office. At my unspoken suggestion, Casey shut the laptop. We left Callie
to fume at Hunter. Or kiss him, whichever she chose.
Ty shut the door behind us and spread an arm inviting us to sit down. I chose to stand, and Casey stood with me like the best friend he was. Since we didn’t sit, Ty didn’t either. It was like a shoe department face-off at the Nordstrom semiannual sale.
“I interviewed Hunter, and he didn’t tell me any of that,” Ty ground out.
I could tell that the good lieutenant was a little frustrated, but I wasn’t sure how he spoke at all when his jaw was flexed that tight.
“He’s a romantic guy. He was trying to protect his girlfriend,” I said, surprised I was making excuses for Hunter now.
“He thought his parents were bailing him out.”
“That too,” I said, “or his fraternity advisor.”
Ty’s blue eyes locked onto mine, and we communicated telepathically for a moment, long enough for Casey to notice. “What? What are you two up to?”
“The question is, what are the frats up to?” I asked. “Have you talked to Brice Concannon yet?”
Casey perked up. “Oh, the cutie patootie?”
“The cutie roofie patootie.” I reminded him.
He frowned. “Phooey.”
“Well?” I demanded of Ty. “Or do I need to take care of this myself?”
“We should totally do it,” Casey affirmed.
“No!” Ty half shouted. “I’m still in charge here. You do not approach Brice Concannon without my approval!”
“Someone’s a little territorial,” Casey said under his breath.
Ty’s jaw clenched again. That wasn’t a good sign. “And where did you get the surveillance footage?” He was shifting gears, and I decided to go along with it, for the moment.
“So that’s a complicated question,” I started to say, thinking quickly. “Because it seems like, according to Hunter, there were multiple copies, anyway.”
Now Ty’s eyes narrowed. Very scary. “Really, who could say where one gets anything,” I hedged. Ty reached for the baseball on his desk and squeezed hard. I spoke quickly. “But I’ll give you permission to find the hidden camera that you didn’t find during your search warrant.”
Sisterhood is Deadly: A Sorority Sisters Mystery Page 20
