The Tell-Tale Con
Page 15
Someone in front of us glanced back furiously, and Harrison and I looked at each other and fell silent. I had more questions to ask, but at the moment I was keeping them to myself. I went back to surveying the crowd. I spotted a few familiar faces, including the cops who’d interviewed us at Nate’s house. They looked exactly the same. I thought they might be wearing the same clothes. Maybe they only had one set, like people on cartoons.
The preacher droned on, and it was almost impossible to listen to what he had to say. Especially when the crowd was so thick and twitchy. Someone was constantly coughing, moving in their chair or scratching something. I saw three or four women in the crowd who looked familiar to me, though I could have sworn I didn’t know them, and that made me assume they were more of Van’s famous friends. I’d seen them in a show or something and simply couldn’t remember.
Finally, the ceremony was over, and we moved outside immediately. Not out of some desperate need for fresh air, but because I feared getting trampled by the crowd. We moved aside, and I used the opportunity to watch the comings and goings, though I had no idea what Harrison was going to do.
He asked if I would be okay for a minute and went off into the crowd of people he’d identified as relatives. I tried to peek on what he was doing, but he was immediately swallowed up by a sea of white, and I was left alone. But it didn’t last very long. I was joined by the two cops from the crime scene. Immediately I bristled, though I maintained my casual demeanor. “Do you remember us?” the woman with the huge hair asked.
I nodded that I did, and if they were bothered by my silence, they didn’t show it. They didn’t bother to tell me their names again, maybe because I said I remembered them, or maybe because they didn’t care if I knew their names.
She moved in close to me while the male cop stood off to the side, taking in the crowd like he was her bodyguard. Or her lookout, and she was the schoolyard bully. I felt a little bullied, considering how much she was violating my personal space. I forced myself to continue to stand where I was and not to back away.
“You want to hear the weirdest thing?” she asked, deceptively casual-sounding.
I shrugged again, because I suspected “no” wasn’t an answer that would be particularly well-received. “Nate had activity on his bank account after he was already dead. How odd is that?”
“That’s odd,” I agreed without inflection. I had no idea how much she knew about who had done it or why they’d been into his account. But if she knew it was us, we were so going to jail.
“We went to the bank to look at their security videos, and what do you think we saw?”
“The inside of a bank?” Tension made me cranky and less able to control my instinctive responses to irritations.
The other cop, to my surprise, laughed. “Actually, that’s exactly what we saw. Somehow the cameras had gotten off track and were pointed at the back wall of the bank. All we could see is the bathrooms and the side of the loan desk.”
The lady cop gave him a look that would have cowed a lesser man. He seemed unimpressed. “Well, if we could have seen, you know what I think we would have had a bird’s eye view of?”
I shrugged. Now it seemed like she was starting to get irritated with my lack of communication. I was probably ruining the conversation she’d planned out in her head. Her mouth pinched into a tiny line, and I got the distinct impression that she was done asking me leading questions that she’d hoped would produce…some kind of confession? I certainly wasn’t that easy.
Frankly, I couldn’t understand how they’d known about the bank at all. It was a gimme that they would have been watching for activity of Nate’s account, but that should have been other activity, the withdrawal of money or someone using a credit card. Certainly not someone going to check on a deposit. Honestly, I was at a loss how they’d even become alerted to something so small.
As if she could read my mind, which I certainly hoped she couldn’t, girl cop stopped asking questions and told me what this was about. “There was a trace attached to a particular deposit that Nate made for twelve thousand dollars in cash. Whenever someone deals with cash in an amount over ten thousand, the IRS is notified and begins to watch their transactions.”
At least that was one question answered. I didn’t respond to the statement, and girl cop didn’t seem to expect me to.
“When the feds received a hit on the money, and they had a sticky note on their file saying that Nate was dead, that looked pretty weird to them so they forwarded the information to us. A very nice lady at the bank told us that a young, sharply dressed, East Indian man and a red-haired woman in a black suit came into the bank and asked who wrote the check, not realizing the deposit was made in cash.”
Still I said nothing. I thought maybe I was breaking her and not the other way around. She seemed very irritated at my lack of response. “She said the ID didn’t look exactly like Nate’s, and she’d been about to ask for another piece of identification, but the woman, who she described as bubbly and charming, distracted her into a conversation about jewelry.”
Man cop interjected cheerfully, “I said it couldn’t possibly be you and the cousin because you’re not bubbly and charming.”
I tried to remain impassive, but my eyebrows pulled together sharply. Was he supposed to be Good Cop? I decided that he was. That the comment was supposed to either be funny or to make me feel secure. They stared at me, expecting some kind of answer, and I merely stared back.
I could feel the air around me kind of shift, almost change in density, and immediately I knew that not only was someone standing right behind me, but that the person was Harrison. I wished I had time to warn him what he was getting into. But when I turned to look at him, the grim determination on his face made it clear he’d come over here to save me.
Well, that was…nice.
Both comforting and extremely weird and awkward. And much more threatening than anything the cops could do to me. I restrained the urge to run away, fast and far.
Bad Cop turned her attention on Harrison with an intensity that was uncomfortable. This wasn’t about the trip we’d made to the bank. This was about murder. She truly did suspect Harrison. That wasn’t just crime scene talk to keep him in town. Of course, I knew he hadn’t done it, because I’d been with Harrison at the time that the murder occurred, but she certainly wasn’t going to take my word for it. She’d think I was making it all up.
I had to know what evidence made her think it was Harrison. Was there anything, or was it all intuition? She turned to Harrison. “Well, isn’t this handy. I was going to go look for you next.”
“Were you?” He didn’t seem the slightest bit nonplussed, like he wasn’t bothered by her aggression or by the fact he’d been next on her hit list. Good Cop, like me, didn’t have much to say, but I could see that, like me, he was watching carefully, taking it all in.
“Why don’t you tell me again what you did before you found Nate that morning?”
Harrison glanced around. His eyes pinned down his bereft-looking grandparents across the yard. “I don’t mind going over this all again, but do you really think this is the place?”
I could tell she was keenly aware that Harrison had called her on her social graces and that she was embarrassed for a fraction of a second, and that pissed her off. I had no way to communicate that to him, so I said nothing.
“Why don’t you tell me what you did that morning. We’ll save the rest of the questions for later.”
“I woke up at six and took a shower. I knew Nate would be gone if we didn’t get there by ten at the latest, so I called Talia and woke her up at seven.” He glanced at me, and I nodded. “Then I got dressed, talked to my step-mom and made a phone call.”
“To whom?” Good Cop asked.
“To my friend, Davey. We were going to go play some ball. But I had to cancel.”
“Why did you have to cancel to go see Nate right then and there. Couldn’t you have seen him another day?” Bad Cop asked.
“What time did you leave Albuquerque?”
Harrison glanced at me for confirmation, but honestly I had no clue. “Seven thirty?” I suggested.
Harrison shrugged. “Maybe. Something like that.”
“And you were together the whole time after seven?”
I wasn’t exactly sure how we could have been apart. I didn’t ask her where she thought one of us could have gone on a long, straight trip down a mountain highway. “Yeah. After that we were always together.”
Bad Cop continued on with her questions, and I got distracted by all the people leaving the church, since no one was talking to me anyway. I listened to their conversation with half an ear as I watched the mass of humanity file away to their cars. Two middle-aged men in dark suits, who stood way too close to be just friends. A teenaged girl wearing too much mascara, being dragged by a couple who looked almost identical. Like bookends, or a married salt and pepper shaker. A woman who was older, by herself, with dark frizzy hair and cheap plastic sunglasses. She looked like the victim of poorly done plastic surgery, her collagen enhanced lips sadly deflating, and her wrinkles obscuring her true appearance. A woman with two small children who seemed bored and possibly slightly confused.
I sighed and turned back to Harrison and the cops.
“So when you got there, no one was home?”
“Well, no one answered.”
That seemed like an important distinction to me, too, since technically someone had been there. They’d just been sort of…indisposed. “How did you get in?”
“We’ve already been through this. Do we need to do this again right now?” I saw a hint of irritation in Harrison, a flash of darkness over his features. It was rare so I noticed it immediately.
“Why don’t you humor me? We’re almost finished.”
Harrison sighed. “I have a key.”
“So you could come and go whenever you want?”
Harrison was getting annoyed, but he wasn’t showing it completely. I could feel the tension radiating off his body from my position two feet away. “I guess I could if I didn’t mind barging into another person’s house. But since I do, the question is kind of moot.”
“When you came in, the victim was already dead?”
“The victim is my cousin, and this is his funeral, and that is his grief-stricken family.” Harrison pointed across the yard to a quietly weeping woman I assumed to be Nate’s mother. “If you want to talk to me more you’re going to have to pick a different time. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t wait for an answer from her, just started walking away. She grabbed his arm. “I want you to come down to the station later and answer some more questions.”
If our lives had been a movie that would have been the point where Harrison demanded to know if he was a suspect. But he said nothing. Merely met her eyes and then glanced at her grip on his arm. She let him go but didn’t move. Because we were breaking all the movie rules at the moment, she pointed a finger in his direction. “You should know that you’re my main suspect right now, and I’m watching you.”
“Why?” I demanded without thinking first. Then I doomed myself for being so stupid.
Her head immediately whipped in my direction. So did Good Cop’s and Harrison’s for that matter. I wished I hadn’t spoken at all, but the question was out there now.
“Why do we want to see him later? Why are we watching him? Or why is he a suspect?”
“Why is he a suspect?” Since I’d started there was no point in backing off now.
She didn’t address the answer to me, but to Harrison. “You had free access to the victim’s home. He had your name all over his papers. Personally, I think that you’re the one who accessed Nate’s bank records. Your animosity is well known among all of your relatives.”
“I won’t pretend that Nate and I got along,” Harrison said quietly. “But there’s a huge space between animosity and murder.” Harrison looked over the crowd again. “This isn’t the place. I’ll come and see you later.”
They watched us leave, disapproval on Good Cop’s face, outright anger on Bad Cop’s. But neither one of them tried to stop us. We crossed the parking lot while Harrison stopped periodically to say goodbye or to offer condolences to another family member. When I realized we were headed for his family members from India, I dug in my heels. His mother was standing there. Regardless of the fact we had no real relationship, I still didn’t want to meet his mother. It was, like, way too much.
“Is there something wrong?”
I shook my head. “I can’t meet people. I just…I’m not that good with families. I’ll meet you at the car.”
He seemed like he might argue, but then he shrugged. “Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
I took my time making my way to the car, watching the parking lot largely clear out. By the time that I got there, only a handful of cars remained, including Harrison’s relatives’, who left en masse in six dark cars. Harrison waved at me from across the parking lot and headed my way. For a moment, he distracted me. Then another car, sort of parked behind a bush, caught my attention by inching forward.
I recognized the driver as the woman with the bad plastic surgery. The one who sort of looked like she could either be a man or a woman, and I would never know because of her wiry wig-looking hair and large dark glasses. I cocked my head to the side. Why did I feel like I knew her?
Mick Jagger. She looked like Mick Jagger in drag. Crap.
Harrison was getting closer to the car now, within a few feet. The woman inched her vehicle a little farther forward. “Harrison…”
It was all I managed to say before she raised her hand, sunlight glinting off the gun she was holding. I had no doubt that in reality it all happened very fast. But in my head it took an indeterminable amount of time for her to raise the gun. Everything was in slow motion. Harrison jumped. He must have recognized her from the time she tried to run him over. He’d realized before I had that something was wrong.
She fired off three shots in quick succession before a compact sedan slowed beside the parking lot, evidently scaring her enough to make her flee. Though two had been aimed at Harrison, one had been aimed at me. Luckily she was a bad shot and Harrison had distracted her, running in my direction and knocking me to the ground. It was like the last time, except with bullets. She drove away in cloud of dust and gravel, leaving us alone in the secluded parking lot.
I was torn for a second between scrambling up and running to try to get a better look at her license plate, or seeing if Harrison was okay.
But next to me, Harrison’s prone form was still and he was face down. Blood spread on the rocks and my pulse tore into a panicked thump at the base of my neck. Struggling for breath, I bent over him. Then his fingers twitched, and he rolled on to his side. My heart stopped beating for a second and then kicked in again, double time.
“Are you okay?”
It was an idiotic question. Clearly he wasn’t okay. In fact, he appeared to be only about half-conscious and blood poured down the side of his face when he tried to sit. I steeled myself against the urge to pass out and put my hand on his arm, crouching down in front of him.
“Don’t sit up. Where are you hurt?”
He blinked at me, his gaze unfocused. “I think I hit my head.”
I touched the side of his head, and my fingers came away wet. A gentle pushing aside of his hair provided me with the truth. “You didn’t hit your head. But a bullet nearly did. It’s grazed. Bleeding badly. The kickback from the bullet must have made your head bump off the ground.”
If he hadn’t been diving to try to get me down, he would no doubt have been killed. Good thing chivalry wasn’t dead, or Harrison would have been. “You have to go to the hospital! And the police. She would have shot you in the head if she cou
ld have!”
The glaze over his eyes was clearing, and it was obvious he was becoming progressively more aware of what was going on. “Get in the car. We have to get out of here in case she comes back,” I said.
I helped him stand, and he headed for the driver’s seat, panic finally abating slightly. “No way. Friends don’t let friends drive with head wounds.”
I held out my hand. Grimly, he laid his keys in my palm, and I helped him get into the passenger seat, aware that bushy haired She-Jagger might be back any second. I put the car into drive and tore out of the spot like the entire church was on fire. Checking every direction, I jetted out into traffic. “Let me take you to the hospital and then the police station.”
He grimaced. “Do you think they’re going to believe me? I’m the prime suspect, and five minutes later, oh look, someone tried to kill me. How odd.”
Well, when he put it that way, it did sound slightly unlikely. “Well, you have to tell them. She is not playing. She tried to murder you, Harrison. Flat out. That wasn’t an attempt to scare you or get your attention. She tried to shoot you in the head!”
He flinched. “Don’t shout. I’ll go to the cops. But I don’t want you to take me. It will make things worse. They’ll start to think you’re in on it.”
“But what about the hospital? And you can’t take yourself,” I protested.
“I’ll take a shower and have Ana take me. No worries.”
That didn’t exactly lower my level of worry. The woman I’d seen wasn’t Ana. There was no way. No one could disguise themselves that well. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been hired by Ana. Or wasn’t Ana’s friend, or mother, or brother’s ex-girlfriend, or old college roommate. I still didn’t trust Ana, and I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Harrison putting himself at her mercy when he was already hurt and at a disadvantage.
But I couldn’t share those fears with him. So I could trust that he knew what he was doing and let him do it, throw a fit until he took me, or find some way to follow him. I considered it all the way back to the house, driving like a lunatic as my way of trying to prevent us from being followed. I had no idea if it worked or not, but I was too freaked to drive normally anyway.