by Raven Snow
Rowen laughed without meaning to. It was a mirthless sound, but it startled her all the same. “I’m not sure you have that kind of authority.”
“We’ll see,” said Sutton, the words sounding too much like a threat for comfort.
“What are you even doing here anyway?” asked Margo, looking around until her eyes settled on what had to be his car a little ways down the road. It was unmarked, making Rowen herself wonder in what kind of capacity he was here.
“That’s really none of your business,” said Sutton.
“Oh?” Margo raised an eyebrow like she had just been issued a challenge. “All right. If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll just find out on my own.” By that, it was clear she meant she was going to have a word with Ben. She nodded to the passenger side door he was still blocking. “Now, if you’ll get out of my way…”
Sutton stepped to one side, though he did it while maintaining that judgmental expression. Margo moved around to the passenger’s side. She was about to get in but paused. She was looking past them all. Rowen turned to find she was looking at a quickly approaching Tilda.
“Hi there,” said Tilda, wearing a smile. “Is something wrong?” She looked from Rowen to Sutton then back again. Her cell phone was in her hand like she was ready to make a call if need be.
“It’s all right, ma’am,” Sutton assured her.
“He’s a cop,” blurted Margo. Sutton looked back at her, sharply.
Tilda’s eyes widened. “A cop?”
“A detective actually,” said Sutton, looking back to Tilda. He nodded like he was showing her a sign of respect by doing so. “I was driving past to make sure you were all right, and I noticed a car here. I knew who it belonged to. I just wanted to make sure they weren’t bothering you, Ma’am.”
“Oh, they weren’t bothering me at all,” Tilda assured him. “I invited them over.”
“Told you,” Margo muttered, opening the car door on her side. She didn’t get in immediately. “Awfully far out of your way just to drive by and check on Tilda here.”
Sutton frowned at Margo, but seemed to have an explanation ready. “I know how close she was to the deceased,” He cleared his throat. “I know how close she was to Teaghan. It seemed prudent to keep an eye on those most closely involved.”
Rowen assumed that meant he was keeping an eye on people who had the most valuable testimony. Either that or he suspected her of something. Rowen was betting on the former. He would have done a better job at hiding his presence if it was entirely the former.
“I appreciate it,” said Tilda. “Especially with my husband being out of town and all. It’s making it sort of difficult to sleep at night, you know?”
“We should be going.” Rowen was happy to leave Sutton to chat on the front lawn with Tilda all night long. “See you around,” she said with a half-hearted wave to the both of them. She quickly put the car into reverse and got the heck out of there.
“That new detective is really something else, huh?” Margo was looking over her shoulder at the two people quickly growing smaller and smaller in Rowen’s rearview mirror. “I’ll bet you anything he wants Ben’s job.”
“I’m not taking that bet. It seems pretty obvious.”
Margo sighed and turned back around, facing the front. “It’s a shame. He’s awfully cute, don’t you think?”
“No,” Rowen snapped. “And neither should you.”
“What?” Margo sounded scandalized. “I’m allowed to find guys cute. I know I’m dating Jasper and all, but I’m not blind. He’s cute, and you know it.”
Rowen wasn’t sure she would call Sutton “cute.” He was more the antithesis of cute, really. He had a rugged look about him, a hardboiled detective look. “Don’t go flirting with him. Remember you’re dating Jasper right now.”
“Oh, please.” That Margo had the gall to act offended was annoying. “It’s not like I’m cheating on Jasper by saying another guy is cute.”
“Yet.”
Margo gave another huff, like she wasn’t the sort of person who had cheated in the past, like Rowen’s words were completely unwarranted. “It’s not like it’s even a possibility. It’s pretty clear that he hates us, isn’t it?”
Chapter Eight
Rowen didn’t want to worry Rose. She didn’t want to go behind her back either, but this felt like the lesser of two evils. Rose was working late. That much she knew. She also couldn’t help but notice that Ben’s car was in the driveway when she passed by his place. She pulled into the driveway. Surely there was time for, at the very least, a short conversation. She parked and got out of the car.
The front door was already opening. Ben stood in it, still wearing his clothes from work. There was a frown on his face as Rowen approached. It wasn’t like he was disappointed to see her or anything. He mostly just looked confused.
“Sorry to just show up unannounced. I was in the neighborhood.” Rowen walked right past him and inside. She was used to just barging in to the homes of family members. It was a bad habit, one she probably needed to break.
“I’m not on your way home,” Ben pointed out, closing the door.
“So I took a detour to see if you were home. That’s not a crime… Wait, is that a crime?”
“Only if you make a habit out of it after I tell you to stop.” Ben motioned her toward the kitchen. There was a delicious smell coming from that direction. Ben leaned his cane against a wall and returned to a cutting board. He was chopping bell peppers. It looked like some kind of saucy stir fry was simmering on the stove. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Sutton.” Rowen took a seat on a stool at the bar.
“What about him?”
“I hate him.” Those seemed like strong words. She reconsidered. “He seems to hate us, and… Well, honestly, I’m not all that crazy about him.”
“You don’t have to be crazy about him.” Ben was good at chopping up the peppers. He made a dozen uniform slices while he spoke before scraping everything on the cutting board into the pan. “In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t really get along. It throws less suspicion on me when I help you guys out with cases. It keeps me fair, too. I show you guys a lot of favoritism, you know. I give you access to things you shouldn’t have access to. Having him around helps me to better see how outsiders perceive me.”
“Yeah, okay, but showing us some favoritism helps solve more cases in the long run. I know we’ve talked about this. We’ve talked about it a lot.”
“Which is partly why bringing Sutton on to the team is such a good idea.”
“I don’t follow.” Rowen swiveled the bar stool left and right. She watched Ben expertly scrape his spatula around in the stir fry he was preparing. Rowen wasn’t sure what was in there besides the peppers, but it was making her stomach growl.
“He came highly recommended, you know.”
Rowen wasn’t sure that clarified what he had said. “Implying that whoever had him before us wasn’t all that eager to keep him,” she muttered. “No surprise there.”
“He was up for a promotion in Tarricville, but their police force is much larger than our own.”
Rowen did know that much. They were always calling in forensics and police from Tarricville when they lacked the resources or manpower. “I hope you’re not training him to take your job.” She couldn’t help but glance in the direction of the cane. According to Rose, he wouldn’t have to rely on it forever. The doctor and physical therapist were optimistic he would be able to be done with it within the year.
Ben glanced over his shoulder, a blond eyebrow raised. “Of course not. I love my job. I still need help, though. I need someone with experience, someone who can stand in for me when something happens. I know you don’t think much of him, but Sutton is quite capable.”
That didn’t mean a whole lot to Rowen. She was fairly certain you could be capable and bad news. “I don’t trust him. I just… I have a bad feeling about him.”
This got Ben’s full attentio
n. He lowered the heat on the stove and turned back to look at her. “How so?” A Greensmith having a gut feeling about someone or something wasn’t anything to sneeze at. Ben knew that better than most by now.
“Well, for starters, I was interviewing Tilda Crenshaw and he just barged up all accusatory like I had no right to be there.”
“Did you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I did. I called her first and everything. She was the one who invited me over. I don’t think she invited Sutton over though. If that means anything at all to you. He was just parked down the street and standing out by the car waiting for us to come back to it. If that’s not creepy, I don’t know what is.”
Ben inclined his head, like this was a fair point she was making. “What did he say to you exactly?” he asked.
“He asked why we were there, and honestly, he was just super rude about the whole thing. I’ve only interacted with him a couple of times now, and both times he was super rude. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to help anyone, you know?”
“Well, I didn’t hire him because he seemed polite.”
“Good, because he’s anything but.” Rowen couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t communicating to Ben what she wanted to get across. “I really do have a bad feeling about him.”
“I believe you.” Ben turned back to the stir fry. “I’ll keep an eye on him, but there’s not a whole lot I can do aside from that.”
“You could tell him not to single us out.”
“I’m not sure that won’t just make things worse for you.”
Rowen hadn’t considered that. She supposed he was right. “Does he at least respect you?”
“He listens to me and follows direct orders.” Ben didn’t expand upon that. He changed the subject instead, evidently finished with the one at hand. “Did you find anything out from Mrs. Crenshaw?”
“Tilda? Some. It’s probably all stuff you’ve already heard, though. She and David both seem to think Teaghan was having an affair with Trish’s husband. I haven’t talked to Trish or her husband yet, but Tilda and David suspect that Richie guy as the murderer.”
Ben nodded. “That’s what they told me too.”
“And what do you think?” asked Rowen.
“It’s one possibility of many.” Ben didn’t expand upon that.
“How’s Rose been?” Rowen asked, changing the subject. She could sense that Ben was finished talking about Sutton.
Ben glanced back at her again. “She’s been fine,” he said as if the question itself puzzled him. “Why do you ask?”
“This case is stressing everyone out.” Rowen said with a small shrug. “I mean, there are so many people who want to be part of the story, so we’re super busy at work. There’s the whole… traumatic high school flashback side of everything.”
“Rose hasn’t said anything about that.” Ben spoke thoughtfully before lapsing into a troubled kind of silence. “Did she have a hard time in high school?”
Rowen laughed, though it was a rather mirthless sound. “You should know. You were there.” Heck, Ben had even dated Rowen for a while. He had spent more time around the Greensmiths than most. Of course, he hadn’t spent much time around her after she had cursed his mother and the two had broken up for good. “Of course she had a hard time. Not that it was just restricted to high school. I think we all had a hard time in public school, period. I’d wager Rose had an especially rough time.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’s adopted.” Rowen thought about that a lot. She wondered how it must feel to be Rose. She got all of the Greensmith hate and none of the magic. “It was super obvious too, what with her being Asian and all, I guess. Plus, I can’t really remember any other Asian kids in school with us. They picked on her for that too, if you can believe it. Kids can be mean.”
Ben’s gaze went distant. He nodded distractedly, as if only now remembering. “They can,” he agreed.
“So how’s she been?”
“A little distant now that you mention it, I guess. Of course, it’s still early days in this case for the both of us. We’ve been busy.”
“Well, keep an eye on her.”
“Don’t I always?”
“Yeah, you do.” Rowen gave him a smile. He was a good guy. She approved of his marriage to her cousin. The romantic relationship between the two of them might not have worked out, but he was still good husband material. He and Rose made for a good match. “Anything else about this case you can tell me?”
“Like what?” asked Ben, apparently unwilling to just offer information.
“Did the school have cameras that picked up anything?” That was the main thing Rowen had been wondering as of late.
“Unfortunately, no. The school has some cameras, but most of them are broken. We don’t have footage of the auditorium that catches everything.”
“Do you think whoever killed Teaghan knew that?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to say. The way they disposed of the body was so haphazard that I can’t rightly believe they planned this out much. They didn’t show the best critical thinking on the spot.”
Rowen nodded. That really was an odd choice, placing the body where they had. “Did you manage to catch anything? When was Teaghan last on the cameras?”
“She was near the dance floor.” Ben went to a drawer and retrieved a fork. “She walked across it and off camera. She never came back after that.” He dipped the fork in the pan and brought some of the stir fry to his lips. He blew on it a few times before trying a bite.
Rowen considered those words. “Was that when she went to the bathroom?”
“That’s the working assumption. She was headed in the direction of the bathrooms. Unfortunately, it creates a very large window of opportunity for her murder. There was a considerable stretch of time between her going to the bathroom and her falling from the ceiling.”
“Is there anyone who has a solid alibi because of the footage?”
“No one of note. Not friends or family or people like Rose—not most folks she used to bully.”
“You’re telling me Rose is a suspect?”
Ben actually chuckled at that. “Goodness, no. Can you imagine? No, we have a pretty short list of likely suspects. All of them were absent from footage long enough to potentially make them the killer.”
“Can I ask who’s on that short list?”
“You can ask,” said Ben, leaving it at that.
“Oh, come on,” Rowen whined. “It’s not like I’m going to put this in the paper. I can help. You want me to help, don’t you? Sutton doesn’t have to know. This can just be between us.”
“Sutton isn’t an idiot. That’s another reason why I hired him, you know? He’ll get suspicious if you suddenly know more about this case than you’re supposed to.”
“Well, then he better get used to that, shouldn’t he?” Rowen challenged. “Because I usually end up knowing plenty whether you tell me or not.” She was speaking, of course, of her psychic gifts. Not that those had done much for her of late. She hadn’t discerned a whole lot about this case using them. Still, it stood to reason that these gifts would come into play sooner or later. It was better to get Sutton used to them now, as far as she was concerned.
“That doesn’t seem a little shady to you?” asked Ben, though the smile on his face suggested he wasn’t being too serious. “I’m not sure it’s going to bolster his opinion of you if he correctly suspects all this inside information you have is coming from me. You’d be guilty of doing exactly what he suspects you of.”
That was a good point, though Rowen was reluctant to admit it. “Whatever,” she muttered. “You don’t have to tell me stuff if you don’t want to. Just know that I could help a heck of a lot more if I knew where you were at with all this.”
The smile fell from Ben’s face. He nodded and put his cooking aside to approach the bar Rowen was seated at. “It’s what you’d expect. I’m sure we’re looking into the people you’re
already looking into. There are the husbands, and then there are Teaghan’s friends. The more people we talk to about her, the more vivid a picture it paints of this woman. It doesn’t sound like many people genuinely liked her.”
“Really?” Now that did catch Rowen by surprise. “I’d been hearing the opposite from people I’ve talked to. Heck, people were lined up outside the Inquirer to tell us that.”
Ben raised his shoulders in a shrug. “People are just more honest with us, I guess. They’re probably afraid stretching the truth any is going to get them into trouble. We do tell them as much. I find I make people kind of nervous.” He sounded mildly proud of that, like he was pleased people were afraid to lie to him. Either that or he was just glad to have seen a side of things Rowen hadn’t this time. It was probably a little bit of both.
“And what have they been telling you?”
“What you would expect. They talk about how she bullied them or froze them out of a circle of friends. It seems like she could really make or break the high school reputation of a lot of kids. I don’t remember a whole lot about her myself. I wasn’t really worried about my reputation.”
“Obviously,” said Rowen, thinking back to when he had dated her.
“It sounds like not even her friends were that crazy about her,” Ben continued.
Rowen leaned a little closer, surprised by this. Sure, their friendship had seemed a little false, but Rowen had still sensed real affection. She had felt confident Teaghan’s little trio of friends were all quite close. “How do you know that?”
Ben gave a small shrug. “They all had their own set of complaints. It’s an odd thing to hear so close to the murder.”
Rowen thought back to how Tilda and Dave had reluctantly revealed things they knew to be true. “So, I guess they complained about the idea that she was having an affair, right? What else? What did Trish have to complain about?” She hadn’t gotten a chance to question Trish yet. She had promised Dave she wouldn’t until tomorrow at the earliest.
