Truth and Consequences

by V. J. Chambers

  Probably already up. Amos sat up in bed and his head started to pound. Oh, wow, he’d had way too much to drink last night. He groaned a little and then looked around on the floor for his clothes.

  He only found his jeans. That would have to do. He pulled them on commando and stumbled out to find the bathroom. He remembered where it had been from the night before. He went in there, locked the door and surveyed himself in the mirror.

  Well, for being hungover as hell, he didn’t look that bad. He splashed some water on his face and ran his fingers through his hair.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Carlos peered out of the kitchen at him. “Good morning!” he said cheerily.

  Ugh. Carlos had obviously not had nearly as much to drink as Amos had. Amos padded into the kitchen.

  Carlos was wearing a pair of pajama pants and nothing else. He had his back to Amos as he tended to some things on the stove. It was a nice back. Nice back. Nice backside. Very nice. Carlos turned around. Nice front too.

  “Hey, you aren’t a vegetarian or anything, are you?” said Carlos.

  “No,” said Amos, peering at what looked to be scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns frying up on the stove. “You cook too?”

  Carlos grinned. “Just breakfast. I’m good at breakfast and basically nothing else.”

  “Being good at breakfast is good,” said Amos, feeling wistful. It sucked, because Carlos was pretty great all around. They’d had so much to talk about last night. He was gorgeous and a good kisser and now he cooked. Amos really liked him. But he couldn’t be with him, because Carlos was the jackass who’d written that article. And he had probably orchestrated all of this just to get an angle for another article or something. There was no future here. None at all.

  “Coffee?” said Carlos.

  “Yes, please,” Amos groaned. “And water. I need to hydrate.”

  “I bet you do,” said Carlos. He pointed at the refrigerator. “Bottles of water in there. Help yourself.”

  Amos crossed to the fridge and grabbed himself a bottle of water, which he promptly guzzled and then tossed in the recycling bin, which was next to the trash and labeled. Damn. Carlos was neat and organized too. Amos really, really like him.

  Carlos was dishing up their breakfast at the stove. “So, what are you doing tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” said Amos. “Recovering from last night?”

  Carlos laughed. “Want to hang out? We could watch movies or something, order in food?”

  “Well, that sounds great,” said Amos, “but we probably shouldn’t.”

  Carlos carried the plates over to a table in the corner of the kitchen, a little dining nook. “Why not?”

  “Because I think it would just end up being confusing for us,” said Amos. “Better to make a clean break.”

  Carlos raised his eyebrows at him. “What are you talking about?”

  Amos sighed, coming over to the table and looking down at the breakfast. It looked delicious. And after he said all this, it would probably be weird between them, and he’d feel like he had to leave, and he really wanted some bacon. He snatched a slice off his plate. “It’s not like this can, you know, go anywhere between us.”

  Carlos surveyed him for a moment and then he gestured to a chair. “Sit down.”

  Amos sat.

  Carlos sat down too. “Look, I’m not the kind of guy who likes to get serious right away, let me just say that up front. Whenever we see each other, we seem to have a lot of fun, and physically, we seem to mesh well, so that all bodes well, but you never know what the future might bring. So, I’m not saying that I want to settle down with you or anything. But it seems to me that there’s the potential here, so why are you dismissing it out of hand?”

  “I can’t trust you,” Amos said glumly. He shoved the bacon into his mouth and chewed.

  “You barely know me. How can you say that?”

  “I can’t know if you’re doing this because you actually like me or because of your job.”

  “You mean that article?” said Carlos. “I’m so sorry about that. I kept telling you last night how sorry I was.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” said Amos, “because you might just be saying that, and then I’ll end up on the front page or something.”

  “That’s not happening,” said Carlos. “I promise.”

  Amos picked up his fork and scooped up some hash browns.

  “Seriously,” said Carlos. “That would go against journalistic ethics.”

  “You have ethics?” said Amos.

  “Hey,” said Carlos. “That’s not fair.”

  “It was a pretty horrible article.”

  “I was following my assignment. That Powell guy showed up at the paper with all this research, said he could blow the CRU wide open. My editor told me to write the story. I interviewed Powell, and I reviewed his evidence. Then I wrote what was true, to the best of my ability.”

  “You said that my boss was a drug dealer and my co-worker was a murderer.”

  “No, I didn’t. I quoted people who said that,” said Carlos.

  “That’s not much of a distinction,” said Amos.

  “Maybe not,” said Carlos, “but I didn’t go into that article with an agenda. I realize now, though, that it hurt people and it was skewed towards Powell’s opinions. I should have worked harder for a more balanced viewpoint. Anyway, I don’t mean to defend it. I definitely made mistakes with that article, and I’m not proud.”

  Amos sighed again.

  “Hey, what does it hurt to hang out tonight?” said Carlos. “If you’re really worried, how about we make a rule that neither of us talk about work? That way there’s no possible way I could get surreptitious quotes for my story.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to see where this goes between you and me,” said Carlos. “And my job won’t come between us, I swear.”

  Amos ate more hash browns. “You’re a really good cook.”

  “Thanks.” Carlos grinned at him. “That mean we have a date tonight?”

  God help him, he was probably going to regret this, but Amos nodded. “Okay. One date. See where it goes.”

  “Excellent,” said Carlos.

  * * *

  Tony Watson stood warily in the doorway of his apartment. A young man in his mid-twenties, he was wearing a pair of tight ripped jeans and an oversized jacket. His hair was cut so that it was shaved on one side and long on the other. This meant that his hair kept getting in his eyes and he would toss his head to get it aside every few minutes.

  “Yeah, you called before,” said Tony. “But I told you I wasn’t interested. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “This will only take a few minutes,” said Elke. “We’re just trying to get some things clear about Curtis Fisher’s case.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m talked out about that. Back five years ago, I had to talk to the police over and over and over again. Drove me crazy.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but I’m not with the police. I’m with the CRU—”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Tony, who was trying to shut his door. “Like I said, I talked to you on the phone.”

  It was Amos he’d talked to on the phone, but either way, it amounted to the same thing. “Well, then you know that this is only about Curtis and whether or not he’s guilty.”

  “What?” Tony furrowed his brow. “Of course he’s guilty.”

  “You’re pretty convinced of that?”

  “Yeah, I am. Of course he did it.”

  “Because he called you and asked for a shovel.”

  “Right.” Tony tried to close the door again.

  She caught it. “Please, just a few minutes. I just want to go over your story.”

  “That’s what the police always said,” said Tony. “We went over it and over it. After a while, I got confused, I could hardly even remember what actually happened.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He hung his head. “Nothing.”


  “What did actually happen?”

  “You know what happened,” he said. “On the phone, you said you have a transcript of my testimony at the trial. So, that’s what happened.”

  “Maybe you can tell me more than what’s in the transcript.”

  “No.”

  “We understand that you were selling marijuana to other students at the school? Is that correct? It’s not in your testimony, but it’s in some of the interviews we have with the police.”

  Tony raised his gaze, his expression fierce. “What the hell? Why does that keep coming up? They promised me that was buried, but they never buried it. They lied to me, and you’re probably lying to me too.”

  “No, Mr. Watson, I promise you—”

  “Shut up, lady,” said Tony, putting pressure on the door, more pressure than he had before. “Leave me alone.” He shoved the door closed.

  She barely got back away from it before getting her fingers crushed.

  Sheesh.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Elke paused in the doorway to Iain’s office. “What are you doing right now?”

  He looked up from his computer. “You have something for me to do? Because since you took the Sanders thing away from me, I’ve got nothing to do except look into Mark Thomas Bennett.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, coming into the office. “Tell me what you’ve got on him.”

  “Did you have a job for me?”

  “No, I just wanted to bounce some things off you,” she said. “I finally got out to talk to Tony Watson, the guy who says that Fisher called him for a shovel, and he was not at all open to talking. Really hostile, and I wonder if maybe he should be a suspect.”

  “I feel like all we do is expand suspects with this case,” said Iain. “And to be fair, we don’t even have a particularly good reason to think that Fisher is innocent.”

  She sighed. “We’re not making a lot of progress, are we?”

  He shrugged. “You know, what happens if we dig through all of this and we find out Fisher really is guilty? Then we’ve wasted a bunch of time on some guy who doesn’t deserve it.”

  “But what if he is innocent? Then everything we do is justified, right?”

  Iain didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, what have you got on Bennett?”

  “Well, I’ve been looking into his victims, looking for similarities and differences to Allison.”

  “And? Anything conclusive?”

  “Well, she fits his profile. She’s a teenage girl, about the right height and build, and she was a cheerleader.”

  “He always killed cheerleaders?”

  “No, sometimes gymnasts or members of the dance team or volleyball players. But teenage girls in sports, usually. He would go to the games or meets and watch them, picking out his victims.”

  Elke made a face. “Ugh. What a creep.”

  “Definitely,” said Iain.

  “If he’s so interested in young girls, why did he say that awful stuff to me? You think he’s just desperate after being locked up for so long?”

  “I think he’s socially stunted and has no idea how to speak to women. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be killing them.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, Hudson.”

  He pointed at her. “No comments about my pointing out he’s socially stunted. I know it’s ironic.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” she said honestly. She must be getting used to Iain. Back when they first started working together, he seemed odd all the time, but now he very rarely did.

  “Anyway,” said Iain, “he fits the profile. But nothing else really matches up.”

  “The cuts on the face?”

  “Well, sort of. They’re different,” said Iain. “He cut the other girls differently.”

  “But you think it might be an evolution.”

  “Maybe,” said Iain. “The other thing is that he tended to dump his victims in the river naked. And Allison was found in her car, clothed.”

  “Did I know this? That she was clothed?” She furrowed her brow. Yes, she remembered the crime scene photos now. She guessed the ruin of Allison’s face had distracted her from the fact that she was wearing clothes. “Is that significant?”

  “It could be,” said Iain. “We’re talking a killer who treats his victims like trash, dumping them off somewhere. Not to mention the fact that the water obscures any DNA or evidence. But before that, he’s careful not to leave any evidence behind and then goes to the trouble of dressing her? That doesn’t make sense. Dressing a victim is a sign of respect, remorse—”

  “What if she wasn’t dressed?”

  “She was. She was wearing—”

  “No, I mean, what if her clothes were never taken off? What would that mean?”

  “That would point away from Bennett. His crimes were sexually motivated.”

  “It would point away from Sanders, too, right?”

  “Maybe,” said Iain. “Or maybe Sanders did dress her, because he did feel guilty.”

  “Or that cheerleading coach,” said Elke, tapping her bottom lip. She shrugged. “Or maybe it is Noel Hughes. Maybe she was angry because Allison stole the cheerleading coach from her.”

  “Wait, what?” said Iain.

  Elke sat back, musing over it. “So, I’m thinking that the cheerleading coach comes in and rapes and kills Allison, because he’s a creepy pervert, but then Noel, who’s in love with him, sees, and she goes in and stabs Allison’s face to all hell.”

  “That’s… just… you pulled that out of thin air.”

  “Do we know if the cuts were done post-mortem?”

  He paged through the file and then stopped. “Actually, they were, but that doesn’t mean that your little theory holds up.”

  “What about Bennett? He carve up his victims while they were alive or dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “We can’t rule that bastard out, can we?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, we need to rule someone out. You say that he was definitely sexually motivated?”

  “Yes, that’s what motivates a killer like that.”

  “So, he would have had her clothes off at some point, then?”

  “I would say so. Why are you asking me that?”

  * * *

  “Hi, there,” said Elke, sitting down opposite Curtis in the interview room at the prison. Iain sat down as well.

  “Hi,” said Curtis. “What’s going on? You guys here to tell me you’re not going to work on my case anymore?”

  “That’s not it,” said Elke.

  “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t do that in person. You’d maybe just send a letter. Heck, you might not even do that.”

  “We need some information from you,” said Elke. “It might not be easy for you to talk about, but it could be pretty important to the investigation.”

  “Uh, okay.” Curtis furrowed his brow. “What kind of information?”

  “It’s about Allison,” said Elke.

  “Sure, anything you need to know.”

  “Did Allison have any, um, tattoos?”

  “No,” said Curtis.

  “How about distinguishing marks? Moles? Freckles? That sort of thing?”

  “Well, she had a beauty mark under her left eye. You can see that in every photo—”

  “I don’t mean on her face,” said Elke. “I mean hidden marks, in places that no one could see.”

  Curtis’s jaw twitched. “Uh… why are you asking me this?”

  “I wish I could tell you, but I really can’t at this point,” said Elke. “It’s all part of our investigation, but I don’t want to jeopardize anything by talking about it to anyone who doesn’t need to know.”

  “You mean that if you drop my case, you don’t want me to know who you’re investigating, because you think I’ll try to use that information to get an appeal or something.”

  “I really can’t talk about it. I’m sorry.” She gave him a sympathetic smile.

  He s
ighed. “Whatever. Look, the thing is, you’re out of luck, because she didn’t have anything like that. No birth marks, no freckles, nothing like that.”

  “Actually, that’s just fine,” said Elke. “That’s all I needed to know.” She stood up, and she nodded for Iain to do the same. “Thanks, Curtis.”

  * * *

  It would have been handy if Fisher and Bennett were in the same prison, but they weren’t, so they had to drive to the prison where Bennett was being kept. It was, however, the same prison where Felix was locked up, not that Elke told Iain that. She tried not to think about it, anyway. She tried not to think about Felix.

  Thinking about him reminded her that she still had to figure out the Patrick situation, and she had no idea how she was going to do that.

  When they got in to see Bennett, it was in the same interview room as before, and Bennett was sitting in the same place he had been before, his shackled hands resting on the table. When they came in, he gave them a little smile.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you again, Elke,” he said.

  Elke sat down. “Well, I couldn’t stay away, what can I say? I’m still real curious about whether you’re the one who killed Allison Ross.”

  “And I’m curious too,” said Bennett. “About all kinds of things. Mostly about you, Elke.”

  “I want to talk about Allison Ross,” said Elke. “Can you walk me through what happened with her?”

  “Can you walk me through the way you like to have you clit licked?” said Bennett.

  Elke choked.

  Iain, who had been sitting stiffly next to her, vaulted up to his feet.

  Bennett giggled. “I hear you like circles. Tiny, tiny little circles. And that then you make these little sighing, mewling noises, like a kitten.”

  Iain looked down at her. “Lawrence—”

  “No,” she said. “Sit down, Hudson.”

  “I also hear that you don’t like a cigarette after sex, but instead chocolate pudding.”

  Elke froze. Wait. How did he know that? The other stuff he’d said was true, as far as it went, but she didn’t think it was too hard to guess. She didn’t think her sexual preferences were all that different from most women, and she figured Bennett was being crude to get under her skin. But the chocolate pudding…