Betrayal (12 page)

Again, Annie held her tongue.

“I understand that you've done a great job with your community service, Mindee,” she said.

Mindee checked her makeup. “Don't call it that. That makes it sound like I'm a criminal.”

Too easy.

Mindee snapped her purse shut. “I'm not here about me. I'm here because I saw something that was very disturbing and it is my civic duty to tell you about it.”

“Your civic duty, yes,” Annie said. “What's it about?”

Mindee tilted her head as if she was about to say something she didn't want anyone else to hear, though, of course, that wasn't much of a worry. No one else was listening.

“Brianna Connors and the murder of that beautiful girl, Olivia Graham.”

That was one response Annie hadn't expected to hear.

“Olivia
Grant
,” Annie corrected. “What do you know?”

Mindee leaned forward, revealing cleavage in major need of a push-up bra. She wanted to make sure that all of what she was about to say was completely understood.

“Okay,” she said. “You might want to write this down.” She pointed to a pad.

Annie nodded and picked up a pen. “All set,” she said, halfway humoring Mindee, but also intrigued.

Mindee cleared her throat. “I'm not a gossip, and you know that. You know from sitting in my chair at the salon that I never, ever speak badly about anyone.” She stopped when she caught the look of disbelief in Annie's eyes. “Not unless it's true, anyway. Here's the deal. Yesterday I was at Victoria's Secret at the mall and I saw Brianna and Drew carrying on like they were completely oblivious about what had just happened at her party. They were practically making out by the thong bins. Something's wrong with that girl.”

Annie thought of the yoga poses Brianna did the night of the murder. That was strange too.

“Wrong?” she asked. “Just what do you mean by that? Be specific, Mindee.”

“Who carries on like she was shopping for her honeymoon when her girlfriend was sliced like a Benihana hibachi steak the night before?”

“That isn't fair. People handle shock in different ways.”

Mindee nodded. “I know. But I Googled it. She's a sociopath. You should Google it too. And besides, it isn't just me,” she said. “Others think something's up with her too.”

“Others? What others?”

Mindee shrugged. “I'm not sure. Just others. You know, kids at school.”

“Did Starla tell you something?” Annie asked.

Mindee looked away for a second. “Starla isn't talking to me right now,” she said. “Not much. You know, we're so close that sometimes we just don't get along.”

Annie nodded. “Right. So what others told you things, and what things?”

“Just people,” Mindee said, clearly backpedaling.

Annie looked down at the pad. She hadn't written a word.

“You should go to Victoria's Secret,” Mindee said. “Investigate or something.”

ANNIE GARNETT HAD NEVER been inside a Victoria's Secret store, though she'd always dreamed of doing so. It took a criminal case, not desire, to get her inside of the Pepto-pink store at the Kitsap Mall. She made her way past the displays of the things that would never, ever fit her right.
Look. Don't touch. This isn't for you.
The big-boned police chief longed to feel silk on her skin, not the stiff weave of polyester, staticy granny panties that she had to buy from Penney's on the other side of the mall.

It took a murder and a visit from Mindee Larsen to bring her into this lingerie dream/nightmare.

Doralee, the manager, was a pretty, 40-ish woman with soft curls, a sugar voice, and a name to match. She set up Annie in her office to watch the video surveillance tape from the time Mindee had said she'd been shopping.

“Chief,” Doralee said, “you'll want to watch this tape here. Counter numbers actually match the time stamp.”

“Thank you,” Annie said as she settled in.

“If you see something you want to keep, let me know. You'll need a subpoena for that, but no worries. I'll guard the tape with my life.”

The tape was HD-clear, which surprised Annie. She expected it to be as fuzzy as one of those black-and-white convenience store films that made it on to the evening news whenever there was a holdup in Tacoma or Seattle. After ten minutes of searching, right there in living color Annie spotted three familiar faces. Mindee was lurking off on the edge of the frame, looking a bit like a crazed stalker (doing her “civic duty”). Nuzzling each other like they couldn't wait to get a room were the stars of the tape: Brianna and Drew. They were kissing. Laughing. They didn't appear to have a care in the world.

As her heart sank lower into that PowerBar-churning stomach of hers, the word Mindee had uttered, had Googled, came to Annie just then:
sociopath
.

They'd just come from being questioned by the police about a murder in Brianna's bedroom, but it didn't faze them a bit. Olivia was . . . what was it that Mindee had so indelicately said? Benihana-ed to death.

A few minutes later, Doralee returned carrying a big pink shopping bag. She put it on the table next to the video player and set it in front of Annie.

“I don't have a subpoena yet. I'm fast, but not that fast.”

Doralee smiled and shook her head. “I saw you admiring our Angel line on the way in, Chief Garnett. We tried some sizes last year for bigger girls, but they didn't sell. Big girls just don't come in here. We try, you know, but nothing works. Anyhow, I'm tossing them out, and, well, I thought you might like to have them.”

Annie looked into the bag. It looked like a parade of pink and white silk ribbons. She could have cried just then; she was so touched by the gesture. But she didn't. Not when she had a murder to solve. It was against department guidelines for her to accept gifts of any kind, but just then she decided to forget about that particular point in the handout that came with the job.

Victoria had her secrets. Annie was entitled to a few of her own too.

In her car on the way back to Port Gamble, she dialed the numbers she had for Brianna and Drew. She didn't care that Brianna's folks had said their daughter was off-limits. She just needed to talk to the young couple. Just one more interview.

She had a tape to show them.

Both calls went to voice mail.

Damn, where are those kids now?

KEVIN RYAN WAS A NEWS JUNKIE, and his girls had picked up the habit. No matter what was going on in their lives, the Ryans always seemed to find their way to the living room for the evening news. With the tail end of
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
emanating from the TV, the twins were doing homework on the couch, Valerie was listening in the kitchen through the doorway, and Kevin was not-so-successfully multitasking, scrolling through his iPad.

At six o'clock sharp, the news closed in on its blonde anchor, a Seattle legend who had been on the air almost since the time media moved from radio to TV. She stared right at the camera with her all-knowing and sympathetic eyes.

“In other news, we bring you this special report on the murder of Olivia Grant, a foreign exchange student from the United Kingdom . . .”

Kevin stopped scrolling through his Twitter feed and looked up as Mindee Larsen, of all people, came into view. She was standing in front of the Kingston hair salon, holding a pair of scissors and shaking her head.

“I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I reported it to the police,” she said. “It made me sick to my stomach.”

The camera cut to a Victoria's Secret salesgirl.

“Yeah, that girl was basically bumping uglies with that boyfriend of hers when she was here.”

Next rolled the store's video footage of Brianna and Drew cuddling by Thong Mountain before the producers cut back to Mindee.

“What kind of a person acts that way when a girl is killed in her house? I don't get it. I really don't know what's wrong with people these days.”

The segment concluded with the mention that “while Brianna Connors and Drew Marcello were not named suspects by any law enforcement agency, they were considered ‘persons of interest' and sources indicated an arrest warrant was imminent.”

“Dad?” Hayley asked. “What's going on?”

For a change, her crime-writer dad Kevin didn't know. He had been following the case ever since the twins had told him about it, but from a distance. “They must not have anything on Brianna and Drew. They need more evidence to arrest them than just tacky, bizarre behavior.”

“What reason would they have for killing Olivia? I mean, unless it's a random mall shooter, Dad, don't killers usually have a reason?”

Kevin shook his head. “Motive isn't something we can ever really be sure about, unless it's for greed or power.”

“But that wasn't the case with Brianna and Drew.
If
they did it, they didn't benefit by killing Olivia. I can't think of a single good reason.”

“There's always that other category of killer, the one who does it because in his twisted mind, he thinks it's fun. We call those sickos ‘thrill killers,'” he said.

Taylor slumped on the sofa next to her dad. “Brianna isn't like that. And Drew is a moron. So I don't think that's possible.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” Kevin said. “Maybe they were doing something and it went too far.”

He left the phrase “doing something” appropriately vague.

Neither of the twins knew Drew or Brianna all that well, so a creepy scenario of some kind couldn't be ruled out.

Taylor had read online about the horrible things some kids had done when messing around: eating spoonfuls of cinnamon, the so-called choking game, and consuming vodka in ways that were disgusting and wrong.

None of them involved the sharp edge of a knife.

Chapter 13

TAYLOR RYAN STOOD NEXT TO HER LOCKER, pulling some books out of her backpack and shoving them into the tight metal space. She was pretty sure that her right shoulder drooped a little because of the strain of carrying around her thick door-stopper of a geometry book. That was the worst offender.

Beth Lee saw her from across the pod and hurried over, earbuds still jammed into her ears.

“Hey, we have to talk. I need to tell you something, and I don't want you to broadcast it to your sister. She'll tell Colton. He'll probably tell his mom. Follow me,” Beth said, tugging Taylor toward the girls' bathroom.

“Colton wouldn't do that,” Taylor insisted. “He can keep a secret.”

Beth shook her head. “Whatever. This is big, and I'm freaking out.”

The bathroom looked empty, except for a freshman girl named Tia Malone who was messing with her long black hair and retro Goth makeup in the broad mirror over a bank of sinks.

“You're gonna leave now, Tia,” Beth told her.

Tia kept her eyes on the mirror, barely glancing at Beth. “Who's going to make me?”

“I am,” Beth said, her fierce eyes now glowering.

Tia spun around and faced the girls. Taylor, in her dark-dyed Sevens, pale-blue North Face jacket, and cream-colored pullover, didn't seem like much of a threat. Beth's eighties-style acid washed jeans,
SAVED BY THE BELL
T-shirt, biker boots, spiked hair, and scowling face, however, told a very different story.

Tia fumed as she went for the door. “Beth, you're such a poser.”

“I'll pose you,” Beth shot back.

“What's the matter with you?” Taylor asked. “Since when did you become trash-TV mean? I get that you're upset over Olivia, but you've got to get a grip.”

Beth didn't answer. Instead, she looked around the perfume-bombed utilitarian bathroom to make sure they were alone. She checked the first stall for feet.
No one.
The rest of the doors were open a sliver. The school had removed the latches because they were getting stuck. That was the principal's story, anyway. New ones were supposedly on the way. Until their installation, girls had to use their toe tips to push the door shut if someone was lurking in front of their stall.

Satisfied, Beth grabbed Taylor's shoulders and looked squarely into her eyes. “I'm in trouble, Taylor. Big, life-changing trouble. I'm totally scared right now.”

Taylor didn't blink. Beth
was
terrified. It was all over her face and in her eyes. “Scared about what?”

Beth took a gulp. “That police chief called again about Olivia's murder.”

Taylor's blue eyes widened. “What about her murder?”

Beth ran her fingers over her spikes and looked around again, making sure that her only audience was Taylor. “They found one of my dad's neckties from my costume jammed into Olivia's mouth. It was, you know, used to, like, shut her up.”

“Ugh. That's so sad. That's gross too.”

Beth clamped both hands onto Taylor's shoulders. “Sad? It's a nightmare. I think they think that I killed her.”

“You? That's crazy. You wouldn't hurt a spider,” Taylor said, randomly and unfortunately pulling up a mental picture of Charlotte, the homemade spider tattoo that Beth had inked on her inner thigh in middle school.

“Someone must have taken your dad's tie. Do you remember leaving it at the party?”

“No. But there's something else that also looks kind of bad.”

Taylor thought she saw some movement on the door of the last stall, but she put it aside.

“What is it, Beth?”

The bathroom door swung open. It was a freshman named Sassi or Cici or something like that.

Beth pointed an index finger stacked with four silver rings she'd made from her mother's flatware service in the seventh grade. “You have to leave,” she said to the intruding girl. “My friend here might be pregnant.”

Sassi or Cici looked at Beth, and then shot a judgmental gaze at Taylor before turning around and leaving.