Guns and Roses

by Brennan, Allison; Armstrong, Lori G. ; Tabke, Karin; Causey, Toni McGee; St. Claire, Roxanne; Brown, Josie; Littlefield, Sophie; Griffin, Laura; James, Lorelei; Day, Sylvia

  Terrence Nestor’s autopsy revealed nothing unexpected. All those stab wounds made for a pretty unambiguous result. His blood carried too much alcohol to drive, but then, he hadn’t been driving.

  There was no evidence of drugs in his body, but his room at the fraternity was another matter. Out in the open, on the closet shelf in one of the singles reserved for upperclassmen, was a Rubbermaid tote containing a variety of prescription drugs, many in bottles bearing other people’s names, as well as half a dozen inexpertly rolled joints.

  There was plenty of flunitrazepam— also known as Rohypnol, or roofies. His parents, en route from South Florida, were bringing their own attorney, who had already requested copies of all the reports.

  Meanwhile, word was that Gia refused to see her father in the hospital. Joe wondered how the man was holding up. Formal charges had not yet been filed, but while they waited for results on the blood found in Gia’s room, Trina had made it clear to Frank Hanover that it would be in everyone’s best interest if Gia remained in the hospital overnight. They were treating her for mild dehydration, and the psychiatrist who’d evaluated her found her disoriented and urged further tests.

  Ed and Paulette hadn’t been able to get anything off the bottle opener except one print that belonged to Tank himself and a few fibers that seemed to indicate someone had wrapped it in fabric.

  A morning of leaning hard on the girls from the dorm, as well as a few others whose names came up in those conversations, had resulted in two of them being willing to talk about date rape at the hands of Terrence Nestor.

  After lunch, Joe ran into Marcia Coake in the diner where he often picked up a coffee to keep him going through the afternoon. Marcia was the psych consult who’d initially interviewed Gia when she was brought into Monte Vista Regional. Joe had worked with her a few times in the past. He bought a second coffee for her and they sat on a bench outside the diner, soaking up the afternoon sun with their collars turned up against the cold. When he turned the conversation to Gia, Marcia hesitated for a moment.

  “I’m only telling you this because the Hanover’s lawyers already found out. They’ve got her on a self-injury alert.”

  “You mean suicide?”

  “No, but that’s how they’re treating it. It’s the same procedure either way. No sharps, no belts, no shoelaces, no bed sheets. The room is monitored and a nurse checks every fifteen minutes.”

  Joe’s heart sank. “Why? Something happen?”

  “Not since she came in, but there’s evidence she’s a cutter.” Marcia held up her wrists to illustrate. “She’s also got a bald patch—she’s been pulling her hair out. It’s called trichotillomania.”

  Joe remembered the girl’s thin limbs, the way the sweatshirt hung on her body. How she glanced around her with fear and confusion in her eyes, shrinking back even from the girls who called after her as she was led out of the dorm.

  “Do you know if her mother has been reached?”

  Marcia wrinkled her brow in thought. “I think she’s disabled. Or sick or something. Cancer maybe? Something serious. No one’s been able to talk to her, that I know of.”

  Joe didn’t bother to correct her. Thought of Gia, trying to shrug off his attention in the interview room, looking as though she wanted to disappear into nothing.

  ~*~

  Bits were coming back, but Gia didn’t tell any of the nurses or psychiatrists or whatever. They weren’t complete thoughts, anyway, just little flashes and fragments.

  Now her stomach was roiling in protest of the few bites of turkey sandwich she’d forced down for lunch. She tugged the blanket, thick and stitched until it was barely flexible, over her shoulders and lay with her face against the wall.

  Tank had said he’d noticed her the first day in class. She could still hear him saying it; a couple of six-packs in, after pizza, after everyone else had gone down to the lounge to shoot pool. He’d pulled her toward him on the couch and whispered against her ears, so close his chilly damp lips brushed against her lobe, “I’ve never wanted anyone as bad as I want you.”

  That was enough. It was the being wanted; it lit the spark in her and kept it humming. It was the being special.

  More beer, a little weed for Tank, none for her, his hands under her top and she didn’t mind; she was thinking Spring formal, he’d take her to the dance. She’d take it slow this time; she’d learned, hadn’t she? They didn’t like it when you rushed things—but she wouldn’t this time. She’d let him call first and see how much he wanted her. It would work out right this time.

  The rest of it wasn’t all that great, and Tank seemed to be getting distracted even before they were done. She started to worry when he didn’t say anything as he went off to the bathroom after, pulling on his boxers and nothing else.

  He was gone longer than she expected, so she had time to get her clothes on and fix up in the small mirror hanging on the wall and think up the right words. She was thirsty, so she drank the punch he’d given her downstairs at the party. “Hey,” she said when he came back, making her voice bright, tossing her hair. “I should go. Walk me home?”

  He didn’t want to. She knew it and she ignored it. She should have just left. Should have been gone before he got back to the room.

  But she hadn’t, and now everything was messed up, and she was in the hospital and Frank was out there in the waiting room. Under the heavy cloth she pressed her fingers hard into the soft flesh of her palms, but they’d cut her nails so short she couldn’t get to the pain.

  This was the memory that had come back. Tank must have walked her home because they were in her dorm room. She was so sleepy, all she wanted was to lie down, but he kept waking her up. He had pushed her on her knees and forced himself into her mouth, and she remembered trying to shove him away. Her knees were on the hard tile floor, but he had her pressed against the bed, her skull smacking the bedpost, and still she was falling asleep.

  It was like she was watching it happen from somewhere else and then he said, “I walked you home, didn’t I?”

  And as she drifted off, she realized there would be no dance, no nothing, just another Monday with everyone talking about what a slut she was.

  Gia ground her fingers into her palms. She knew there was just one way to stop the memories from coming. In the dim fluorescent light from the corridor, she got out of bed and knelt on the cold tile floor, put her wrist to the metal plate near the bottom of the hospital bed and went looking for strength.

  ~*~

  Shamim called, asking if Joe could come that evening before the day nurse went home. There was an issue with a persistent ulcerous sore that wasn’t healing; Joe knew it was only a matter of time before his mother finally agreed to consider long-term care for his father. If not today, then soon.

  He was on his way into his parents’ building when his phone rang. The weather was cooling down fast, the sky purple, fading to black. The smell of cooking drifted from open windows.

  “Detective Bashir,” Joe said, noting Marcia Coake’s private number.

  “Gia Hanover’s managed to injure herself pretty badly,” Marcia said without preamble. “She’s a mess. I thought you might want to know.”

  Joe abruptly stopped walking. He was in the stairway enclosure of his parents’ building, halfway up the steps to the second floor. The landing was just a square of concrete, as familiar to him as his own hand. There was the crack that looked like a man with a hooked nose; there were the initials scratched when the concrete was wet—“DM”—which had been there since his childhood. Joe leaned against the iron railing and cupped his hand around the phone, though there was no one else around.

  “How bad?”

  “Nothing life-threatening, but she cut up her wrists. Mangled, is more like. The doctor said he hasn’t seen anything like it. She somehow found a sharp edge on the bed; I’m not entirely clear on the details. But she barely nicked the vein. Still, there was a fair amount of blood loss.”

  “Ah, hell.”

&n
bsp; “Yes. And I heard the father’s talking about suing.”

  “Of course.” Joe sighed. “He probably made that call before he even got to see her. Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  He hung up and started slowly up the stairs again, his steps clanging dully against the metal. Thought about the way Gia had picked at her skin in the interview room, the nervous energy that pulsed through her. The misery sketched on her gaunt face, her youthful prettiness barely a shadow on her waxy skin and anguished, hollow eyes.

  At least this would keep Gia in one place while they scrambled to put together enough to hold her on. While the blood in Gia’s room matched Tank’s, someone else could have entered the room and planted it there. And the traces of Rohypnol remaining in Gia’s blood when she was tested indicated that she could have easily been out cold at the time of the killing.

  A riot of color caught Joe’s eye on the second floor landing. Holly’s door was covered with the same paper blooms that Josephine had made for his father. The paper roses— red and yellow and white—were clustered near the bottom half of the door, as if the little girl had insisted on taping them up herself. Joe smiled, and before he could change his mind, knocked on the door, careful not to mar any of the petals.

  Holly answered the door, with her daughter right behind her. When she saw Joe, Josephine shrieked with delight. “Did you see what I made? I made all of those.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Joe said, his face warm. “I was just on my way to see my parents and I saw… well… This is quite a special display you’ve made.”

  “And we got a kitten! Her name is Buzzy! Come see!”

  Holly laid a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, but Josephine wriggled out of her grasp and dashed back into the apartment. “Come on, Joe!” she yelled, without turning around.

  “I really didn’t mean to—”

  “Would you like to come in? There really is a cat. Probably not my best decision, but someone put a sign up in the laundry room, with a picture.” She shrugged, as though that had decided the matter.

  “I’d like to. For a moment. If you’re sure…”

  “I’m sure. I don’t think I can spend one more minute cutting out petals. Jo-jo’s obsessed.”

  On a low coffee table, in a room full of furniture that had seen better days, were piles of paper scraps and scissors and tubes of paint. Glitter and paper littered the floor, and the cushions of a soiled cream-colored sofa appeared to have been scribbled on with markers. A love seat was mounded with stuffed animals.

  And all around, the apartment was filled with roses in every color. They hung from the light fixture and decorated the cabinets. A string of them wound along the hall.

  “She gets… focused.” Holly pushed a pair of square-framed tortoiseshell glasses up on her nose. Joe liked the way they looked on her, the contrast of the sturdy frames against her ripe, feminine features. “My ex thinks we should get her tested, but I don’t know… I mean it’s just flowers. I mean, it’s a lot of flowers, but I feel like there are so many worse things she could be doing.”

  “No doubt.” Joe hesitated, wondering what the hell he was considering starting. There was a child. An ex. A job with crazy demands. And there was the matter of his parents.

  “I’ve looked in on your folks a few times,” Holly said, as if reading his mind. “Your mother has told me, um, about…” She seemed to run out of steam, the faint crease between her eyebrows deepening.

  “My dad,” Joe finished for her. “She’s having a hard time with the idea of moving him, but he needs more care than she can manage here by herself.”

  “I’m sorry. It really isn’t my business.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. Please. I’m just so glad… so grateful… I mean, the fact that you’ve—” His words tripped over each other as he tried to express what he hadn’t even worked out in his own mind: the stew of love and guilt and fear and sadness and hope. And Holly’s presence in the middle of it all, an unexpected brightness.

  “Here!” Josephine came out of the bedroom, her arms full of squirming kitten. It was almost a full-grown cat, a wriggling yellow ball of fur with white paws. “Pet her!”

  Joe knelt down so he was eye to eye with both cat and little girl. He was allergic—but so what. He touched the soft fur of the cat’s belly and was rewarded with a swipe of sharp claws. The cat burst free of Josephine’s arms and streaked into the living room, disappearing under a couch.

  “I think she might be feral,” Holly sighed.

  “Listen, I was wondering… could I call you? Sometime?”

  “Sure,” Holly said, and her face took on a pink tone that went well with her striped hair. “I could give you my number. I could write it down. I could call you, and then you’d have it… oh, hell.” But she was smiling, as she went to find a pen.

  “May I have a rose?” Joe asked Josephine. “To bring to my mother?”

  The little girl put her hands on her hips and evaluated him, eyebrows raised. “Well, I guess. But we’re going to have to make it now.”

  “Oh, I just thought, you have so many—”

  “You can’t have those. Those are all my mom’s. Here.” She picked up a pair of scissors and handed them to Joe. “You have to cut. These are grown-up scissors.”

  As Joe sat down cross-legged next to the coffee table, he suppressed a grin.

  “Do pink,” Josephine said, handing him a piece of construction paper. “Moms like pink.”

  ~*~

  It was late in the week when Joe and Trina picked Robby Singh up from his chemistry class. He saw them before they spotted him in the packed lecture hall. He slid his notebook into his backpack and made his way down the row. No one spoke until they were outside.

  “We’d like to talk to you some more,” Trina said. “Janice DeSmet changed her story. Apparently, she wasn’t the one throwing up that night.”

  Robby nodded, eyes downcast. “She did ask me to walk her home.”

  Joe sighed. What the girl had said was that Robby was one of the nice ones, the ones who actually talked to you, looked at your face instead of your chest. She’d been embarrassed for him when he got sick. In fact, she’d offered to watch the girl’s bathroom door for him while he was inside, but he’d told her he was fine and he’d see her the next day, and she figured he would prefer to be left alone.

  “You liked her. Janice.”

  Robby’s eyes flashed with anger. “Yeah. I was going to ask her to the Spring Formal that night. I wanted… the pledge trainers kept making us drink, at the party. You had your choice— like a whole jug of water or this drink they call death. It’s got like Tabasco and shit in it. Or you could just do a shot. I did the water first but, you know. You can’t do that more than a couple times.”

  “So when you walked her home, you got sick. You were in the bathroom, you saw Tank—”

  “I was heading to the bathroom when he came out of one of the rooms. Didn’t even close the door and followed me to the bathroom. I knew I was busted, but all I cared about was getting the puke off my shirt. We’re at the sink and I’m trying to clean myself up, and—did anyone tell you what he calls me? The nickname he got everyone to use over at the house?”

  Joe noted the use of present tense, didn’t bother to correct him. “No.”

  “Abdul. He thinks it’s hilarious. Or sometimes camel fucker. So I’m standing there trying to decide if I should even bother rinsing my shirt or if I should just throw it in the trash, and Tank’s watching me, laughing at me, and then he’s all, “Hey, I think I’m gonna spend some time with her,” and I knew exactly who he meant.”

  “Janice?” Trina said.

  Robby’s jaw hardened and he stared off in the direction of frat row. “The girls come in these little groups and they think that’ll keep them safe,” he said softly. “But then… you know. Shit happens.”

  “So you…”

  But Robby refused to say anything more.

  Until Trina took a shot
at him again later in the day, after he’d had a few hours to think. They sat in the same interview room where Joe had talked to Gia. Joe watched through the glass, marveling at how long Trina could go without blinking. Sometimes her voice went so soft that Joe couldn’t make out her words—but he could hear Robby just fine.

  “I had that bottle opener in my pocket. I just, you know, it’s like it was in my hand before I thought about it. After, I wiped it off on my shirt.”

  “And the blood in Gia’s room?” Trina asked. “Let me guess. You already had your shirt in your hand, and you used it to swab up some of the blood. You were nervous; you dropped the bottle opener. And then you went to her room. No one was up at that hour, no one saw you.”

  “I knew she’d be passed out. That’s how it always happens. And the door was open.” He paused. “I didn’t really think it through. I didn’t want her to get in trouble. I just—you know—I just didn’t want anyone to think of me.”

  “A little late for that, I think,” Trina said.

  ~*~

  Fisch handled Frank Hanover. Now that Robby had been charged and Gia cleared, Hanover had his lawyers whipped into a frenzy. Joe didn’t envy the chief.

  Fisch was going to do the press conference solo, too, which meant Joe was off the hook until tomorrow.

  Gia was going to be released into an in-patient center back in L.A., some sort of self-injury treatment program. Tank’s parents had already made a statement to the press, challenging the allegations that their son had possessed narcotics.

  Rain was forecast, so Joe took an umbrella with him when he went to buy his afternoon coffee. The wind sent a plastic bag skittering along the curb in front of the diner. Joe sat on the bench with his hands wrapped around the steaming cup.

  After a while, he got out his phone. He dialed Holly and his pulse quickened when, after several rings, her voice invited him to leave a message.

  “It seems to me that my mother might owe you some babysitting,” he said. “I’d like to take you out.”