Текст книги "Vindicate"
Автор книги: Beth Yarnall
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
Chapter 3 Cora
While I was in Nash’s office I calculated that I have just enough money to pay my rent, eat, and put gas in my car—if I’m careful—for about three months. It will take all of my savings, but I can do it. I’m taking a huge risk that
a) this guy Leo actually has had some training in private investigation.
b) Mr. Nash will teach me enough that if at the end of the summer we haven’t been successful, then at least I’ll have learned something I can use to help Beau.
c) we find some kind of lead that will eventually go somewhere.
Those are big risks.
And now here I am on a leave of absence from my job and about to put Beau’s life in the hands of the owner’s kid, who looks like one of those loser skater dudes who make just enough money to cover skate-park fees and buy new trucks for their board once in a while (if they can’t get their parents to buy them). I have to make sure his dad is as involved as possible and that he teaches me everything he knows before the summer is over and skater dude goes back to whatever it is he does the rest of the year.
Balancing my box on my hip, I open the door to the office the second I hear the click of the door being unlocked. The box is damn heavy, but it holds everything I collected on Beau’s case, including a possible lead on a new witness. I accidentally bump that blond bitch who wouldn’t let me in to see Mr. Nash yesterday and she lets out a yelp. I guess she wasn’t expecting the door to open or else she wouldn’t have still been standing so close to it.
“Sorry,” I say, as I close the door behind me. “I didn’t know you were there.”
And then my gaze tracks to the reason she was so distracted. Leo’s standing near the file cabinet again, just the way he was the day before. It’s like Groundhog Day and I’m caught up all over again in whatever drama is playing out between Leo and the receptionist. The way she looks at him—a combination of lust and loathing—makes me want to laugh. Except I kind of know how she feels.
Leo doesn’t ask me if I need help. Not that I’d take it. I’m very protective of my box. He just stands there like he’s posing for a camera or waiting for a bus, his gaze latched on to my chest like he’s seeing his first set of tits. I wonder for the millionth time if I’m doing the right thing here or if this is just a colossal waste of time.
“Why are you here?” Blondie asks. Her hostility toward me is completely baseless. Skater dude can leer at me all day, for all I care. I’m here for my brother. End. Of. Story.
Leo peels himself off the file cabinet and swaggers toward me. “We’re working together on a case.”
Reception lady gives me the once-over, one side of her upper lip lifting like she smells something bad. “A charity case?”
If I wasn’t holding this box…
“Knock it off, Savannah. She’s a client…and also kind of a temporary employee.”
Savannah’s as pretty as her name, even when she’s being a bitch toward me. She really needs to get over her whatever with Leo and move on to bigger and better things. Like a guy with a real job, a real haircut, and real aspirations.
“I’m only here to help my brother,” I tell Savannah, trying to make it clear that I have no intention of horning in on her territory. “Mr. Nash has agreed to go over his case and train me to be a private investigator.”
“Call me Ed.” Mr. Nash stands in the doorway of his office with a mug of coffee in his hand.
I didn’t notice him. From the way Savannah immediately tries to look busy, I’m guessing she didn’t either. Leo looks like he couldn’t give a shit. Typical boss’s kid who gets everything handed to him.
Mr. Nash (I just can’t call him Ed) waves me into the office next door to his. “Come on in and let’s get started. Leo…” He motions with his head for his son to follow.
We all shuffle into an office with a conference table that’s too big for the room. Mr. Nash stands behind a chair and waits for me to put my box down and sit. What a gentleman. His son takes the seat across from me before my butt hits the chair. Since he clearly hasn’t learned any manners from his father, I hope to hell he’s at least learned something about private investigation.
“Can I offer you some coffee?” Mr. Nash asks me.
“No, thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”
Leo looks at me like he can’t believe I’m for real. Whatever.
Mr. Nash takes his seat. “Tell me about your brother’s case.”
I reach into my box and pull out the binder where I’ve recorded the timeline of Cassandra’s murder. I have a page devoted to each witness; each of the cops who were involved, from the first responder to the detectives who arrested Beau; the prosecutors; the medical examiner…Anyone who was involved in the case is in my binder. I have copies of reports, news articles, blog posts, etc., in my box, but I’ll save those for when I come to them.
I start the story, from the last time anyone saw Cassandra alive to Beau’s last appeal, pulling out my backup information and the expert reports as I come to them. By the time I’ve finished, I’ve nearly covered the table with paper and my box is empty.
As I drop back into my seat, I take a long pull off the bottle of water Leo got for me about halfway through. I’m exhausted yet energized. My brother’s story has lit a fire in Mr. Nash’s eyes, and Leo—much to my surprise—has not only filled a notebook full of notes, he asked some really intelligent and relevant questions that I could tell also impressed his father. Maybe he’s not going to be as useless to me as I thought.
“And your brother?” Leo asks. “Will he talk to us about the case?”
“No. He’s…resigned to his fate.” I’m afraid to tell them that Beau’s given up. No, I’m terrified to admit it, because his defeatist attitude could be seen as an admission of guilt.
Mr. Nash flips through my notebook to Cassandra’s page. He studies the profile I created on her. It’s not as complete as I’d like it to be. None of her friends or relatives were eager to talk to the sister of her accused murderer. I don’t blame them, but it’s made my work harder and I can’t help the tiny seed of resentment I have against them. Even with those omissions, my profile on Cassandra is pretty good. I had to think outside the box since I’d made the mistake of approaching her friends and family as myself instead of pretending I was a journalist or a kid doing a report for school or something. Learning that lesson early helped me create more rounded profiles for the other people connected to the case.
Leo picks up the copy of the coroner’s report. It’s gruesome. The photos…the description of Cassandra’s wounds and what was done to her…horrific. I looked at it only once. Halfway through the photos I bolted to the bathroom to vomit. I got to know Cassandra pretty well during the time she and Beau dated. I liked her. I liked her a lot. Seeing her like that…I still have nightmares. She comes to me in dreams sometimes and she begs me to help her, begs me to make “him” stop hurting her. I wake up screaming, coated in sweat.
“How did you get this?” Leo asks.
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” I joke.
That report was not easy to get. The San Diego coroner’s office has a brilliant firewall. But not as brilliant as my friend Jamie. I had to promise to do her hair for a whole year in order to get that file. She loves the way I cut her hair even though I’ve never taken a class and don’t have a license to do hair. Someday, when my brother’s free, I’ll go to beauty school. Until then, my little side haircuts and colors help to finance a lot of the work I do on Beau’s case.
Leo’s eyebrows jump up on his forehead. “You’re a hacker?”
“Not me,” I hedge. “I’ve managed to find ways in and around the system to get a lot of this.” I make a sweeping gesture, indicating all of the papers spread across the table. “I learned quite a bit about investigating in the last five years.”
“Impressive,” Mr. Nash finally says.
Up until now he’s been quiet, listening and jotting down notes. His compliment makes my cheeks burn and I stare at my hands in my lap. I don’t get many compliments. Not because I’m unworthy of them, but because the people who would give them—like my parents or Beau—are too caught up in their own grief and suffering to notice if I’ve done anything at all.
“How long have you been working on this?” Mr. Nash asks.
“Pretty much since the day my brother was convicted.”
“You believe that strongly in his innocence?”
“Yes,” I say, my gaze rising to meet his. “He’s as innocent as I am. As innocent as you and your son. Beau loved Cassandra. They were getting back together when she was killed. That’s why his DNA was found on her body. He didn’t do this and I won’t give up until he’s freed.”
“Okay,” he says with a nod, and some of the tension runs out of me. I finally have the help I need. I want to jump up and down and go to my brother and shake him into believing in himself again. Beau now has a champion in this middle-aged man with tired eyes, graying hair, and a jelly doughnut stain on his tie.
“You’ve done a lot of the work for us,” Mr. Nash says. “Tell me about this witness that was never interviewed by the police.”
I catch Leo watching me. He has this look on his face like he’s impressed. And I realize that he hasn’t so much as glanced at my tits since I took my notebook out and started turning its pages. Maybe he’s not the total-loser asshole I thought he was.
“She was Cassandra’s downstairs neighbor at the time of the murder. She’s an elderly lady confined to a hospital bed for the past ten years.” I open my folder containing the photos I took of Cassandra’s apartment building and point to a lower window. “Anyone taking the stairs to Cassandra’s apartment would have to walk past her bedroom window. At the very least she can verify that my brother wasn’t there. A few years ago she moved and I haven’t been able to find her.”
“She could be dead. I wonder why the police never questioned her.”
“If she is there’s no record of a death certificate on file. There’s a note in one of the reports that the detectives made a couple of efforts to contact her, but were unsuccessful. She’s confined to a bed,” I scoff. “Where’s she going to go?”
Mr. Nash nods. “Could be lazy police work. After all, they had your brother’s DNA and an eyewitness who saw him leaving Cassandra’s apartment. Why go out of their way to find another witness? Or there could’ve been a cover-up.”
I lean over and flip through the pages of my notebook until I find the one I created for the eyewitness. “Damien LeFeaux. He’s got several arrests for possession and three for dealing. He’s a big, fat meth head. He testified in my brother’s case and somehow escaped California’s three-strikes law. Of course, he’s such a freakin’ idiot that he got arrested again for possession and is serving twenty years in Donovan. I guess he didn’t witness any new crimes to get out of that one.”
“I’d like to talk to him,” Leo says.
“That might be a job better suited for me,” Mr. Nash cuts in. “I have a connection at Donovan. We’re going to have to tread very lightly with Mr. LeFeaux.” He turns a few more pages. “I’m not joking here, Cora. This is some of the finest, most thorough investigative work I’ve ever seen. You’re organized and resourceful. If you’re ever interested in a career in private investigation, I’d hire you in a minute.”
I lower my head and nod. My cheeks are on fire, my heart is thumping hard, and I don’t know where to look. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Where do we start?” Leo asks.
“We start at the beginning.” Mr. Nash flips back to the first page of my notebook. Cassandra’s page. I used a photo Beau had taken of her. She’s smiling at him and you can see how much she loved him.
“We start with the victim, Cassandra Bethany Williams.”
Chapter 4 Leo
My dad isn’t easily impressed. He’s certainly never been as enthralled with anything I’ve ever done as he is with Cora and the work she did on her brother’s behalf. I should be jealous or ashamed, but I’m not. Cora is damn impressive. When I think about her—which has been pretty much every waking moment since I laid eyes on her—I imagine what life has been like for her since her brother went to prison. I try to picture myself putting my life on hold to help one of my sisters, but I can’t. That realization does shame me. I wouldn’t have done what she has. Not many people would.
Glancing over the papers strewn across the table after she unloaded her box, I realize I’m totally fucked. Luckily my dad helped us map out a plan and now it’s up to me to captain this investigation. I’m in way over my head. Cora is looking at me like she expects me to either come up with something brilliant or fall on my ass. I will not fail her. I won’t. This isn’t at all the way I pictured my summer, but now, looking into her take-no-bullshit stare, I can’t remember any of the plans I made. I’ve fallen headfirst into her life, inserting myself into it like I had a right to be there. She challenges me on that every time I dare to meet her gaze.
“Tell me about Cassandra,” I say.
She pulls her binder toward her. It’s meticulous. I mean that in the most sincere way possible. It’s a work of art. She took the tiniest pieces she could find and fashioned them into something that is organized, informative, and flat-out fucking brilliant. I can see the case the way she sees it. She laid it all out for anyone who would care to look. But I don’t need her to tell me what’s in it. I need her to tell me what’s not in it. I need to know what can’t be put down on paper—her impressions, her feelings, her, I don’t know…intuition.
She opens the binder to the first page—Cassandra’s page. For a split second I can see the grief on her face and then in the next blink it’s gone and her usual don’t-fuck-with-me expression is back.
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me how she and Beau met. What was their relationship like? What did you think of her?”
“They were both juniors in high school when Beau asked her to prom. It was their first date. They were inseparable after that. She was his first serious girlfriend. I don’t know if he was her first or not. She came over to our house a lot, so I got to know her pretty well. Some of his friends were real assholes to me, but she wasn’t. She treated me like a sister. Even let me borrow her clothes sometimes.”
She loves Cassandra. I can hear it in her voice, but I don’t think it’s an old love. I think it’s a love that grew from necessary familiarity through the case and with Cassandra being a victim in this just like her brother.
“Why did she and Beau break up?”
“I’m not really sure.” Her gaze slides away to the photo of Cassandra.
“Beau never said?”
“No.”
“How long were they broken up?”
“Two months. Maybe a little longer. Cassandra was getting ready to go to UC San Diego. Beau was supposed to go to Santa Barbara. I don’t know if they broke up because they thought they had to because of the distance or if it was…something else.”
She rubs her thumb over Cassandra’s hair. She’s far away, somewhere in her head. I want to reach across the table and take the hand that can’t stop touching the photo of a dead woman. Instead, I stand and move around to her side of the table. She glances at me as though I materialized into the chair next to her by magic. I pull the binder away from her and try to see what she sees when she looks at the photo. All I see is a pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes. I have no emotional attachment to this person, but I can tell by the expression on her face that she was happy. And in love.
“Did Beau take this?”
“Yeah.” She’s uneasy letting me touch her binder. She puts a hand out as if to take it back and then pulls the gesture, tucking a blue strand of hair behind her ear. Earrings stud her ear from bottom to top. That blue again. Cora blue.
I stroke my thumb over the pic just the way she did. I want to know Cassandra. I want to know what it’s like to have a chick look at me like Cassandra’s looking at Beau. I want Cora to look at me like that just once. That’s a stupid, fucked-up, selfish thing to think, but I can hardly think of anything I want more.
“Why do you think they broke up?” I have to know. How could they go from this picture to…nothing? Beau must’ve hated not seeing that look on Cassandra’s face anymore. I know I would.
“I think…” She stares down at the photo as though she doesn’t want to betray a woman who wouldn’t even know it if she did. “I think Cassandra met someone else.” Not just Cassandra. Cora’s admission betrays Beau too, because it gives him a motive to kill.
“What makes you think that?”
“I overheard part of a conversation Beau had on the phone with her a couple weeks after she stopped coming over. Beau locked himself in his room every day when he was at home, so I knew something was up. Then one day I heard shouting, so I put my ear to his door. I heard Beau ask her how many times and then he asked her why she was just telling him this now. He was very, very angry with her.”
Whoa. “What do you think he was talking about?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I heard.”
“Did you ever ask Beau about that conversation?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it then or now. He gets mad all over again when I mention it. I didn’t find anything that might answer your questions in my investigation. But then my notes on her aren’t as complete as they could be.”
I nod. We’re going to have to find a way to get in with Cassandra’s group of friends and family. That isn’t going to be easy. We can’t come at them with the truth.
Cora takes a long drink of water. I watch her throat move and the way her lips press against the mouth of the water bottle. She drains it and replaces the cap, looking at it like she doesn’t know what to do with it. I take it from her and toss it behind us. She gapes at me like I’ve just committed some horrible crime. I like surprising her. She doesn’t seem like someone who’s easily shocked.
“I’ll get it later,” I tell her.
She taps her nails on the table once, twice, and then looks at the bottle.
“I’ll get it,” I say again.
The expression on her face as she turns back around makes me laugh.
“No, really. I will.”
A corner of her lip tugs up. “Uh-huh.”
“Are we having our first fight?”
“Something tells me we’re going to have lots of fights before the summer’s over.”
“As long as we make up.”
I took it too far. The almost smile fades and she takes in a breath like you do when you’re about to deliver bad news.
“It was just a joke,” I cut in, before she can say anything.
I don’t like the rejection in her eyes. I want the almost-smile back. I want to make it grow into something real that creases her cheeks. But I have a feeling it’s been a long time since she’s allowed herself to smile with any real happiness. Too damn long. I don’t feel sorry for her though. You can’t look at her and feel pity. That’s not one of the emotions she provokes in me or from the world in general. There’s pride there—so much pride—and determination. She’s stubborn, but it’s the kind of obstinacy that draws you in and makes you want to be a part of whatever she’s involved in.
That’s exactly why I’m sitting in this chair next to her, silently vowing to be her knight in this battle she’s waging. And why I gave up whatever fuck-around things I was going to do this summer to do the one thing I swore I’d never do—become a private investigator, if only temporarily.
“What did Cassandra do after she and Beau broke up?” I have to get her mind back on the case. That’s the only way I’m going to win with her. “Did she have a job?”
“She worked at a clothes store in the mall. But that was years ago. I doubt anyone would still be working there who knew Cassandra.”
“We can try.”
“Yeah, okay. I guess.”
“I think I should talk to Beau. Alone.”
“He doesn’t talk about Cassandra.”
“Not to you, but he might talk to me.”
She thinks this over with flickers of hurt flashing across her features like lightning across the sky. It had to have occurred to her that her brother wouldn’t want to talk about his love life with his little sister. I sure as hell wouldn’t. I don’t want my sisters to know anything about sex, especially since the youngest one just got her first boyfriend.
“Maybe,” she relents. “But you have to tell me what he says.”
“I can’t make that promise.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s not going to confide in me if he thinks I’ll take everything he says straight to you.”
“If you can get him to talk.”
“Challenge accepted.”
“This isn’t a game. This is my brother’s life.”
And hers too. Both siblings have a lot at stake here. Neither one of them has had a life since Beau’s conviction. Even though Beau’s the one in prison, Cora built and maintains a wall that blocks her off from the rest of the world. Beau’s the convict, but they’re both doing time.
“We’re going to figure this out,” I say, wanting more than anything to touch her. “Trust me.”
She doesn’t really have a choice, but I feel like I have to ask for her trust or she won’t completely give it. I have to want it and I have to show her I want and deserve it.
She lets out a laugh like she can’t believe what she’s about to say. I hold my breath because I don’t think I’ll be able to either.
“Okay.” She doesn’t add the part about her not having any other choice but to trust me.
I won’t forget that.
