Green Tea (30 page)

Teagan and I were making a quick trip down to the store on Benita and Benigno when running toward my car, I smacked full into my neighbor.
 
He’d noticed the parade of people into my apartment and wanted to make sure everything was okay.
 
We told him we had to go to the store but he was welcome to join us in the car and we’d explain everything or when we got back he could come on over to hear my brother explain everything to some guy he had coming over.
 

I figure, after he’d been playing bodyguard all this time it was the least I could do.

He decided to join us in the car.
 
He locked his apartment door and smooshed himself into my backseat, even though Teagan offered to climb back there since she is a whole bunch smaller than he is.

We went through the whole thing again, without visual aids, and waited for my neighbor to punch holes in our theory.
 
All he did was shake his head, let out a little whistle, and say he’d like to see the pictures.

By the time we got back to the apartment, Mom had set up a proper tea at the dining room table, and Daddy and Rory had collated all the papers we had produced throughout the day.

A rather large older gentleman joined us.
 
Rory explained that Erik Nylund was his training officer and that he trusted him one hundred percent.
 
We then sat at the table and explained everything from the moment that Louis entered my awareness.
 
We shared all of our ideas, theories,
the
facts as we knew them and the fears that we were putting Rory in a terrible situation.
 

AJ and Jessie showed up about halfway through, leaned on furniture, and listened.

Erik listened without so much as a question.
 
When we were done, he took a very deep breath, leaned back, drank some tea, and rubbed his chin.

We all sat in limbo, waiting.

“I need to get this in front of the right person and I’ll tell ya why.
 
It’s pretty clear you’ve done a great job of building your case, but the unfortunate part is this.”
 
He pointed at the picture of Jerkface’s sister’s mother.

I was completely perplexed, “I don’t understand.”

“I can’t be positive, but I’m almost there.
 
There is a big-shot lawyer in town. Lawyer by the name of Peter Magnar.”

“Is he the Magnar, of Magnar, Wyatt and Strong?”

“That would be him.
 
If I’m not mistaken and I’m pretty sure I’m not, your murder suspect is the niece of Peter Magnar.
 
I went to school with the SOB.
 
That whole family is a piece of work.”

“I’m confused.
 
I thought her last name was Gagnon, or Branden, or Usha, where does Magnar come from?”

“When we were kids, their last name was Usha, but then the family broke up and Magnar went one way and his brother went another.
 
Magnar took his stepfather’s name.
 
Happens all the time these days.”

“Well, crap.
 
That would explain why Steph, who works for that firm, showed up.
 
And why they were involved.
 
And why the police seemed to be secondary.”

Teagan was incensed.
 
“Oh, it’s worse than that.
 
You asked me what to do with the journals, I called Steph, and I handed them over, and I handed over the memory cards too.”

“Then we are just screwed and all of this is going to get blamed on Louis, and Jerkface and his sister are going to get in trouble for some small part of a cover-up, but with a really big legal firm like Magnar and whoever, they’ll come up smelling like a rose and it’s my fault for being stupid, and at some point they are going to come after me and mine.
 
God, I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

My father spoke in a very stern voice, which is unusual for him, “You aren’t stupid.”

“Okay, it is my fault for being trusting and naive.”

AJ pushed away from the wall.
 
“Promise not to get mad.”

“What?”

“Cara, I’m a photographer.
 
I had those memory cards in the safe at my studio.
 
I couldn’t help it.
 
I backed them up.
 
It’s just what I do.”

Erik brightened, “You have professionally made and maintained copies in a secured environment.”

“I do.
 
I made backups. I didn’t want Jovana mistakenly showing them to a client, so I sealed the thumb drive in an envelope and wrote my name across the seal.
 
I know it was stupid but I figured if the cards were sensitive enough to put in a safe, then they were sensitive to protect.
 
I also left the copy I’d uploaded on my computer and put it in a hidden file, cause I figured if there really was a bad guy out to get them, hiding them in plain sight was the smart thing to do.”

“Oh. My. God.”

AJ looked at the floor, “Wait, it gets worse.”

“Worse?”

“Remember when I took the journals, you thought they were missing, and I told you they were just in my room and I forgot to put them back, that wasn’t the whole truth.”

“What’s the whole truth?”

“Digital images don’t cost anything Cara.
 
Once you have the equipment, doesn’t matter if you shoot one image or a thousand.
 
I’d just bought a new light box for a series of brochures I was contracted to do.
 
I wanted to make sure I could create the image exactly as I wanted with the proper depth of field and shadow control and contrast.
 
Anyway, I set it up in my room, and the journals were right there.
 
The writing was beautiful; the curve of the page was a challenge.
 
I wanted to make sure I could get the image without distortion.
 
I shot a few pages, then a few more.
 
All I had to do was flip and shoot.
 
It really didn’t take any time once I had it set up.
 
I wanted to check for consistency among the different pages, the different colors of ink, the different books.
 
I have it all.”

Before I could do a happy dance, Teagan blurted, “We’ll never get that into court.
 
They’ll just say that we faked it, or altered it or something.”

Erik smiled, “It’s enough to get us in front of a judge.
 
I know exactly the shark to get us there.
 
I’m going to make a call.”

By the time everybody left, I was exhausted, unsure of exactly what had happened, and elated that soon this would be all over.

Erik had a meeting with his shark first thing in the morning.
 
AJ was going to go to the studio and turn everything over to Erik.
 
Erik and his shark intended to have everything in front of a judge by the end of the day, and promised to be in touch.
 

The good news is that the real professionals are now working on it.
 
The bad news is that while they are working on it, we’re pretty much in the dark.

I didn’t even get to the mall to buy my super sheer fabulous something.
 

I showered first.
 
By the time AJ was out of the shower, I’m sure I was snoring.
 
Figuratively.
 
I would never snore literally.
 
Well, unless I had a really bad cold.

I think it’s pretty much a law of nature that when people that actually know what they’re doing, start doing what needs to be done, things move a whole lot faster.

Erik called to let us know that the department’s finest was now working with the DA’s office.
 
They didn’t have all the facts yet, but things were looking good.

Jerkface and his sister were lawyered up, we all knew that, and when you have a lawyer they aren’t supposed to ask you any questions without your lawyer present, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t pay attention to what you say.
 
Turns out the whole jail is
pretty much on tape.
 
The city has the lawsuits to prove it.
 
But this time it worked out to their advantage.
 
I’m not sure if the cops set it up, and I doubt we’ll ever know the whole story, but Kirsten was on a special ward, mostly at the behest of her lawyers, and they were also making sure she didn’t commit suicide.
 
One of the regular guards there could pass for Kirsten’s mother.
 
Granted, it’s a bit of a stretch. Kirsten’s mother died pretty young, but if she’d lived long enough to put on some weight and grow in some gray hairs, she would have looked a lot like that guard.
 
She would have look a lot like half the women in the mall, but Kirsten was already stressed, so it didn’t take all that much.

Kirsten flipped a nut.
 
Somewhere in all the ranting was a confession or three.

Erik has already warned us that all the facts will have to be checked.
 
That just her confession is not enough, and that Jessie, Teagan, AJ and I will probably have to testify at some point, so he can’t tell me everything, but he can tell us what is likely to end up in the paper.

Jerkface’s father married again shortly after his wife took off with some guy she met in a bar.
 
That’s when Jerkface and his sister were introduced.
 
They rapidly became inseparable.
 
Looking back, it may have been for survival, but at the time it wasn’t seen that way.

After a couple of years, inappropriate sexual contact was reported, and before charges were brought, Kirsten and her mother moved out of the house.
 
Times were different then and because the sexual contact was between a young man and an older woman, and she had vacated, nothing ever became of it.
 

A very large part of me wanted to point out that a 12-year-old, for the purposes of this type of conversation, is not a young man, but I let it go.

Kirsten’s mom then married the big-shot lawyer’s brother, an equally horrific example of humankind.
 
There is some discussion of which adult was more damaging to Kirsten.
 
From the age of 12 through 17, Kirsten was passed back and forth between her mother, her stepfather, and other people in their social circle.

It is believed that Jerkface knew about this, but was powerless to do anything to help.

None of the dead girls looked like each other.
 
None of them looked like Kirsten.
 
All of them looked like a young version of Kirsten’s mother.
 
The theory is that Kirsten kept killing her mother.
 
Over and over and over again.
 
It is also theorized that she killed her actual mother as well, but that is still being investigated.

Kirsten is on the psych ward sedated.
 
Her lawyers seem less inclined to work with her now that the family secrets are out.
 
Turns out that the big shot lawyer had pretty high-level political aspirations, and this particular family skeleton could not be spun into something positive, no matter how good the spinner.

Kirsten’s stepfather cannot be found, although the statute of limitations is over in the strict sense, he might still be held accountable if they can find him.

So far they have been unable to find any evidence that would lead to the conclusion that Jerkface or his sister killed Louis.
 

The journals, the images from the memory cards and a surfeit of other evidence is being reviewed by people who know what they are looking at, and looking for.