White Hot

by Elise Noble

  I marched through the door, reaching for my car key. So. Many. Assholes. I’d had enough, at least for today.

  As I stepped outside, a cloud of tobacco smoke engulfed me, thick enough to make my eyes water. Through the blurriness, I saw a glowing end and recognised one of the men I’d seen hanging out by the bar.

  Lightbulb moment. “Want to earn a few bucks?”

  He considered my offer for a nanosecond. “How?”

  “A couple of months back, I went on a date with the dick behind the bar in there, and I left a necklace of mine at his place. I want it back, but he said he gave it to the girl that came after me.”

  The guy blew out another lungful of carcinogens and coughed. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “He still won’t tell me her name.” I softened my voice a little, pleading. “The necklace belonged to my grandma. I don’t want to cause trouble; I just want it back.”

  “How does that get me cash?”

  “I need to know who the other girl was.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “How much you offering?”

  I held out a hundred. This was all going on my expense account. If Emmy was going to give me a bullshit job, she could damn well pay for it.

  “Two months ago, you say?”

  I nodded.

  “That was probably Lisa. You must have dated Ty when they were on a break. They’ve had their ups and downs over the last year or two, but I think they finally split for good. I haven’t seen her around for weeks.”

  “Lisa. You have a surname?”

  “Never knew it, but she works in the nail salon two blocks down. Tall girl, wears a lot of earrings. That enough?”

  “That’s enough.”

  I handed the bill over and walked back to my car. In the dim glow from the courtesy light, I checked my nails. There were a few chips, and the polish was growing out at the bottom. Yeah, I could probably use a manicure.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN DAYLIGHT THE next morning, my nails looked even worse, and one snapped off completely when I used it to clear a jam in my AR-15 out on the shooting range. Oops.

  Emmy was in New York, but Mack and I got into a contest over who could shoot five into the centre ring the fastest. Then Ana came out and did it twice as quick without even warming up. Then Carmen stopped by and matched Ana’s time, but from twice the distance.

  At times, I felt like the poor relation, especially beside Emmy and Ana. Neither of them deliberately tried to make me feel as if they were superior, they just…were.

  Emmy had always done her best by me, even when I fucked things up by crashing her cars and falling out of my heels in her clubs. She’d always be my best friend, no matter what. Ana, I still wasn’t sure of. She was damaged, like all of us, but I hadn’t fathomed out to what extent. The only person who truly understood her was Emmy, and she didn’t share.

  I suppose that was partly why I wanted to crack this case. To prove that I could get thrown to the wolves and come back leading the pack, just like they did.

  And to do that, I needed to speak to Lisa.

  File ’n’ Style was the second in a row of five ageing storefronts, crying out not for a coat of paint but for demolition. As I walked along the cracked pavement, a panhandler shook a paper cup with a few coins in it at me.

  “Spare some change?” he croaked.

  I leaned down and dropped twenty bucks into his cup, earning a toothless grin in return.

  “You’re an angel, darlin’.”

  Nothing could be further from the truth, but at least I’d made one person happy today.

  A faint buzzer sounded as I walked into the salon, a last gasp from its dying batteries. A girl with vivid pink hair sat at the back, her feet soaking in a basin while a middle-aged black woman worked on her fingernails. It wasn’t long before a second nail technician wandered over, and this girl fitted cancer guy’s description of Lisa.

  “Are you looking for an appointment?”

  No, lady, I’m looking for a lost dog. “Yes, please.”

  “This morning?”

  “If you have a slot available.”

  Looking around the almost empty room, it was hard to see how they could be fully booked, but she made a show of paging through the diary anyway.

  “I can fit you in right now if you want?”

  She was pretty when she smiled. It transformed her face. But working in this place and dealing with a guy like Ty, I bet she didn’t have much to smile about. She led me over to a vacant chair and fussed around, setting my fingers to soak in a bowl of fragrant water.

  “Do you have anything in mind?” she asked.

  Yes, I did, but I was going to wait until my nails were done until I broached that subject. I didn’t want to end up on the street with half a manicure.

  “I’ll leave that up to you. Something funky. And can you fix up the broken one?”

  “Sure.”

  She decided on tiny sunsets, shades of purple, peach, and yellow set behind the sea with a palm tree outlined in black on each of my thumbs. Not a bad job. If she was still speaking to me after this, I’d come back again for sure.

  “Anything else?” Lisa asked as she put on the final touches.

  “Actually there is. I understand you know Ethan White.”

  She sucked in a breath and the brush skidded across my nail, leaving a black streak in its wake.

  “Oh shit,” we both said at the same time. Well, Lisa said “shoot” because she was politer than me.

  “I’m not talking about him,” she whispered harshly, dabbing at my nail with a cotton ball. “What are you, a reporter?”

  “Just somebody who’s trying to help him, but I’m not having much luck at the moment.”

  “He’s beyond help from what I understand.”

  “He is if everyone takes that attitude.”

  She glanced sideways at her colleague. “Will you keep your voice down? Look, Ethan’s in my past. I’ve got a new boyfriend, and he doesn’t know about that part of my life. I want to keep it that way.”

  “I don’t want to make your life difficult.”

  “Then leave me alone.”

  “Five minutes. Just give me five minutes.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I work for Ethan’s lawyer.”

  “I’m not sure anything I know would help.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that? We only want to find out what drove Ethan to do what he did. You know the prosecutor’s going for the death sentence? Finding a motive could mean the difference between Ethan living and dying.”

  “If I talk to you, do you promise it stays between us?”

  “Scout’s honour.”

  Not that I’d ever been a Girl Scout, but it was better than swearing on a half-empty vodka bottle. Drinking had been my favourite pastime at that age. Lisa fell silent, for an entire minute according to the dusty clock on the wall behind us. Finally, she came to a decision.

  “Do you know the park three blocks down?”

  No, but I’d find it. I nodded.

  “Meet me there at one, by the snack bar. I’ll talk to you while I eat lunch.”

  I squeezed her hand, causing another smudge on my long-suffering nails. “Thank you.”

  Two hours to kill. I headed to the Richmond office to catch up on my regular work. You know, my actual job before Emmy decided to make my life hell? My team had closed a couple of cases and made progress on others, so I had to be thankful for that at least.

  At one o’clock, I sat waiting in a plastic lawn chair next to a grubby table. I’d bought myself a hotdog from the van behind a shabby-looking basketball court, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat it. I’d had better-looking food on survival training in the jungle. What were the green bits?

  Lisa shuffled along ten minutes late, looking like she’d rather be at an appointment with her gynaecologist. She plopped into the seat next to me and looked at my meal.
/>   “Want one?” I offered.

  “Yeah, I’ll get something. I know the guy who runs this place.”

  She waved a finger at him, and he smiled and nodded.

  Great. Now, I was going to have to take at least a bite or I’d seem rude. Actually, it didn’t taste too bad. I just hoped it wouldn’t give me the shits.

  “So…” I said.

  Lisa looked at me.

  “What’s the story with Ethan? I spoke to Ty, but I wanted to hear your side of things.”

  “Ty’s an asshole, that do ya?”

  “I was hoping for something a little more concrete.”

  She sighed. “Fine. Ty saw me out with Ethan and laid into me about it. It was none of his business. We were on a break, and after that I made it permanent. Ty was a control freak. He got pissed if I so much as looked at another man.”

  The guy from the snack bar came over with her food, a stacked burger dripping with grease. Boy, she must have some metabolism.

  “Ty made it sound like you were still dating.”

  “We weren’t, we’re not, and we won’t ever be again.”

  So, she wasn’t cheating as Ty had made out. White’s halo had remained intact, at least at that point. “You said you’ve got a new man. What happened between you and Ethan? Did you split with him as well?”

  She laughed, a cross between incredulity and humour. “I wasn’t dating Ethan. He doesn’t do the girlfriend thing, which is a crying shame. Was a crying shame. We just had dinner. He asked me to go with him as a favour, and I couldn’t say I was too upset about it.”

  Didn’t do the girlfriend thing? That was news. What did he do? The boyfriend thing? How did that fit in with Christina?

  “What kind of a favour?”

  “There was some weird woman following him around. Everywhere he went, she’d be there. He hoped if she saw him out with another girl, she’d get the message and back off.”

  White had a stalker? Why hadn’t he mentioned this?

  “Did she turn up that night?”

  “Only briefly. She saw me there and left, which I guess was the plan.”

  “What did she look like? Could you identify her?”

  “I didn’t see her. I had my back to the door. Ethan looked up and told me she was there, and a minute later, he said she’d left.”

  “Nothing else? Did he say where he first saw her? How long had it been going on?”

  Lisa gave a quiet moan as she bit into her burger, and I wondered if I’d been too hasty in my judgement. I took another mouthful of hotdog, chewing slowly.

  “Ethan never used to say a lot. He always was quiet.” She thought for a second, looking into the distance. “But he mentioned she left him notes. Slushy notes. He got embarrassed when I asked what they said and changed the subject.”

  Hmm… The stalker couldn’t have been Christina, could it? She’d been pretty and willing, after all. Perhaps Ethan had needed some action and gave in to the temptation following him around?

  It was a possibility, and one I needed to consider. I knew firsthand how crazy stalkers could be. My friend Nick’s girlfriend had almost died at the hands of hers. Maybe when Ethan invited Christina into his house, he didn’t realise how deep her issues ran and something went wrong?

  “Do you know if the woman kept hanging around after she saw you and Ethan together?”

  Lisa looked away, embarrassed. “I kind of lost touch with Ethan after that. When Ty punched him, I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I felt like it was my fault, being as their disagreement was over me. I should have made it clearer to Ty that I wasn’t interested anymore.”

  “You never saw Ethan again?”

  “Just once, in a club. The music was deafening, so we didn’t get a chance to talk.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “I didn’t see anyone with him.” Her eyes widened. “Hey, come to think of it, that was the night the Ghost played a set. I didn’t realise back then that they were the same person.”

  “I guess he kept that quiet.”

  “None of my friends knew either.”

  Despite being liked by everyone I’d met except Ty, Ethan seemed to have kept people at arm’s length. Did he go home most nights alone, his only company a stalker?

  “You said earlier that Ethan didn’t do the girlfriend thing. Was he gay? Bisexual?”

  “I don’t think so. I saw him talk to women occasionally, flirt a bit, but I never saw him do the same with guys. Plus my gaydar’s pretty good, and he never registered on it.”

  “Did he ever date anyone?”

  “Not that I know of. And when I made it clear I was interested, he didn’t bite. Guess that turned out to be a good thing.”

  “In all the time you were friends with Ethan, did he ever get angry? Or violent?”

  “The opposite. Even when Ty gave him a black eye, he just walked away.”

  “You saw it happen?”

  “No, I but I heard the story from half a dozen people afterwards.”

  “Would you be willing to talk about Ethan in court?”

  “I already told you I can’t. My new guy’s sweet. A family man. Looks after his grandma, goes to church on a Sunday. I don’t want him finding out I used to hang with the likes of Ty and Ethan.”

  “It could be the difference between Ethan getting sentenced to death or life in prison.”

  She stared down at the remains of her burger then pushed it away.

  “Look, I don’t want to, but if it comes to that, I’ll do it. The Ethan I knew was a kind man. I don’t want him to die.”

  With that small victory, we parted company, and I knew what was next on my list: taking a closer look at Christina.

  Up until now, everyone, myself included, had assumed she was collateral damage. A victim of circumstance, the object of Ethan’s violent outburst, a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Nothing in the evidence we’d unearthed so far suggested she and Ethan had met before that night. But what if they had? What if she’d been a contributor to what happened rather than the passive victim everyone thought?

  CHAPTER 14

  ON MONDAY MORNING, the forensics report finally got uploaded to the police network, and Lyle got his hands on copies of the lab work. I strongly suspected Jay had engineered the weekend delay, just to give Lyle two fewer days to go over everything. He was considerate like that.

  The mere thought of Skinner made me clench my teeth. How had I let myself get taken in by him? He’d seemed so charming when we first met, and it took me months to realise his outward respectability hid a pool of slime.

  Mack and Bay were with me in the lab when details of the crime scene started to arrive. Mack could be overly sensitive at times, and I told her she didn’t need to look at the photos, but she still insisted on helping. I glanced over at the door. Yup, there was a trash can next to it, complete with a fresh bag. I had a feeling Mack would be using that before the morning was over.

  “Where do you want to start?” Mack asked.

  “Let’s check out the pictures first.”

  Not only did they have the potential to tell us the most, but there was also an element of getting the worst over and done with. Having to look at the moment someone’s life was snuffed out then break it down in excruciating detail was never a pleasant job.

  Bay loaded the photos up onto the big screen, one at a time. While three forensics assistants studied the technical details, I blocked out their mutterings and concentrated on the overall scene.

  To say it wasn’t pretty was like saying Jabba the Hutt wasn’t quite a supermodel.

  Christina lay broken on the bed, her arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles. No care had been taken over the arrangement of the body—it was as if she’d been shovelled onto the mattress and left there. Trails of blood ran from her torso, pooling underneath her and soaking into the cream sheets. Jackson Pollock would have been proud.

  “Forty-seven stab wounds,” read out o
ne of the assistants.

  “If you’re going to stab somebody, it’s worth doing it properly, yes?” Bay said in his clipped tones.

  English wasn’t his first language—he was originally from the Philippines—but he’d managed to adopt a sense of American gallows humour perfectly. And he was right about the level of effort. This wasn’t a burglary gone wrong or some kinky sex game that ended in tragedy. This was anger. Pure anger. Christina had been stabbed with a passionate fury I’d rarely seen.

  A fury hard to reconcile with the quiet man I’d met in prison.

  Emmy picked that moment to stop by. “Whoa, someone was pissed.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  She picked up a copy of the detailed crime scene report and glanced through it. “And all so unnecessary. The wound to the heart alone would have done it, and the ME reckons that one came first.”

  I took the file out of her hands and read it for myself. Christina’s left ventricle had been pierced by a single stab wound as the knife blade slid up under her sternum.

  The frenzy of slashes, slices, and punctures led to a patchwork quilt effect, and in the good doctor’s opinion, the killer had carried on after Christina was dead, otherwise there would have been more mess. The bleeding had slowed after her heart stopped pumping, according to his notes, but in my opinion, the room still looked like a slaughterhouse.

  Bay clicked on to the pictures of the autopsy. We all took a step forward, except Mack, who went rapidly sideways and grabbed the trash can. I heard her retching in the corridor.

  “You could have warned her,” I told Bay.

  “Oops.”

  The new photos showed the damage to Christina’s chest and heart. A dark gash marred the muscle, and close-ups showed the severed blood vessels.

  “They say the way to a woman’s heart is through the stomach, past the liver, and right a bit,” Bay said, coming over to stand beside me. “And it’s certainly quicker than queueing to buy chocolates.”

  “He still had a crack at the traditional method, though.”

  “What do you mean?” Emmy asked.

  I thumbed through the file and pointed out the open bottle of champagne sitting on White’s nightstand, a single glass next to it, still half-full.