Rushing to Die (17 page)

 

Chapter Thirty-­one

F
OR THE FIRST TIME,
I was gratified that the front lobby of the Sutton police station was unmanned and empty. As far as I was concerned, no one needed to know that I was here—­or who the most recent occupant of the holding cell was.

I stormed past the reception desk, where no one sat, and into the hall, where no one stopped me from going straight to the depressing gray cell with the disturbing drain in the middle of the room. But before I made it, Officer Malouf stepped out of a nearby office. “Ms. Blythe, you can't go back there.”

I stopped short. “Oh. Of course. I forgot, I'm sorry.”

Malouf's eyes softened. “It's okay, I know you're probably a little distracted.”

I nodded and looked over my shoulder. “Should I go back to the reception area and sign in with the officer up there?”

Malouf frowned. “Officer? What officer?” He moved past me, back toward the front door. Rookie. I turned and picked up the pace down the hall toward the holding cell.

Malouf realized what I'd done right away, but I had a head start, and the cell wasn't that far away. Ty was there, and so was Callie, backed up against a wall with markings for Ty to take her picture.

“Callie!” I called out, my voice breaking, going to her with my arms outstretched.

“Crap.” Ty lowered his camera. “Malouf! What did I tell you?”

“She looked so sincere!” Malouf exclaimed.

“Of course she did, she's Blythe!” Ty looked exasperated. I thought he'd gotten over that with me months ago.

I pulled Callie into a tight embrace. “Let her go, Margot. I'm not done here.” Ty sounded less exasperated but still not superempathetic.

“You are done here. We're all done here.”

“I told you, you don't get to decide who gets arrested and who doesn't.”

“Well, if some ­people made better decisions, I wouldn't have to insert my opinion.”

“Margot, it's okay.” That was Callie, and she sounded a little strangled. I loosened the grip on her throat. “I'll be okay.”

Sweet girl. So brave. So noble. “I know you will,” I assured her. “When we're back at the house, and your dad's lawyer is on the phone.”

“Blythe . . .” The warning in Ty's voice was real.

How many times did I have to explain this to him? “As chapter advisor, I have a quasi-­legal duty to represent the interests of the sisters of Delta Beta—­”

“Even if they confess?”

He was just being stupid now. I wasn't even going to deign to respond to such a ridiculous hypothetical. “And I would be abdicating that responsibility if I let you book innocent, God-­fearing women—­”

“Margot!” Callie pulled away from me and put her hands on my shoulders. “I'm so sorry.”

Ever since I first met Callie Campbell, she had burrowed into a special place in my heart. Apologizing to me for the possibly libelous acts of the Sutton PD? This earth did not deserve to host such an angel. “Shh . . . We're going to get this taken care of,” I assured her.

“I confessed.”

I blinked. Then I looked at Malouf and Hatfield to see if they had spoken in the soft Southern feminine voice. Neither looked like they had just finished uttering two unbelievable words. I swore to heaven that I would get more sleep and cut back on the coffee because I was clearly having some sort of caffeine-­induced hallucination.

Callie was still standing there, cool as a tall glass of cucumber water, looking into my eyes expectantly. “Okay.” I nodded my head. “We'll get you out of here right now.”

“Margot . . .” Her voice was distant, now. Coming from a very far-­off place . . .

“Okay,” I repeated. “We're going.”

Far off down the tunnel, I heard Ty shouting. “She's going down!”

Then something came up and smacked me in the face.

I
WOKE ON
some sort of examining table in a back room. I had been covered with a thin polyblend blanket that smelled like solvent and stale coffee. Curiously, my stomach rumbled.

My hand went to my forehead and patted around my skull, which hurt like the dickens. My cheekbone was especially raw and achy. I closed my eyes and felt myself tumbling back down a smooth black tunnel, and I didn't fight it. Instinctively, I knew it was the safest place for me.

At some point, I was aware of lights again. And voices. And pain. “Ms. Blythe?” I was pretty sure the voice belonged to Officer Malouf, and when I cracked one eye open, I confirmed that. He held his police baseball cap in his hands, rubbing the brim between this thumbs. “Ms. Blythe, you're awake now.” He seemed relieved by that.

“Did I fall asleep?” I asked even though I knew the answer was negative. Nice girls like me did not fall asleep in police stations.

“You passed out, I think. Are you thirsty?” He reached behind him and lifted a water bottle. My throat felt scratchy and dry, so I motioned for the bottle and took a big drink.

It was all coming back to me. Rush and murders, then the unthinkable. My poor brain only accepted the world in one incarnation. Accepting the words that had come out of Callie's mouth? It was too much. I wouldn't process it now.

I took a deep breath and asked the only question I could. “Where's Callie?”

“Right. Lieutenant Hatfield said you'd probably want to chew him out first.”

“No.” Yet again another nearly incoherent statement. In what world would I chew out Ty Hatfield
before
I visited my own sister? My priorities would always be sisterhood first, chewing Ty Hatfield out second. He would never understand me.

“I want to see Callie,” I informed Malouf, and put all the authority and weight of my office into that demand. Rather than deny a formidable sorority chapter advisor, he acquiesced and led me down the hall to the place I'd hoped I'd never see again.

Three months ago, I had briefly stayed in this holding cell, a large square with concrete benches and fluorescent lights and lots of gray bars facing the hall. Callie had been here, too, when her then-­boyfriend Hunter was arrested for burglary and messing up my nice clean office. But now, Callie was on the inside, and I didn't even have a knife or a shank or a pack of smokes to give her.

She was on the bench, her knees pulled up to her chest, when she saw me. Her face was determined, with no trace of a smile or her cute dimples to indicate that she was going to laugh, and cry out, “gotcha,” and tell me this was all a joke.

“Callie!” I put my hands through the bars, and she rose to meet me, clasping my hands. “What's going on?” I whispered fervently.

“Are you okay?” Callie looked concerned about me. I could not love her selflessness more.

“I'm fine,” I insisted. I paused before I asked the next question. I'm not good with facts that alter my worldview. “Did you . . . really?”

“I did.” She said it plainly, so that I didn't misunderstand her this time. “I confessed to the murders of the girl in our yard and the other girl at the Tri Mu house.” If I weren't holding on to her hands, I probably would have lost my balance a little bit.

“Why?”

She glanced briefly at Malouf, then back to me. “I . . . I don't know.”

“Why did you confess to this?” An awful thought occurred to me. “Does your mother know? Your sisters? Your grandmother?” The idea was horrifying. An entire lineage of Delta Beta womanhood would have its reputation demolished. Sweet Mary Gerald. Would we ever recover from the scandal?

Now tears formed in Callie's eyes. “No. They don't know yet. Unless . . .”

“It's on GreekGossip,” I had to tell her. “That's how I found out you were arrested.”

“Damn,” she muttered, and with that swearword, I could see just how fast incarceration damaged innocent souls. Her big brown eyes pleaded with me. “You have to talk to them, Margot. You'll have to tell them that everything I've done, I've done for all of us.”

“You're going to tell them soon,” I said. “When you get your phone call.”

She shook her head. “I already used it.”

Of course, I should have known that a smart, classy woman like Callie would have a criminal lawyer on retainer. Debs are nothing if not prepared for all eventualities.

“We're going to get you out of here,” I swore. “I don't understand why you felt the need for self-­defense, or whether you're truly, medically insane.” I lifted my voice, to make sure that Malouf overheard me. I knew from
Law & Order
that it was important to start laying the groundwork for these defenses as soon as possible. “You have, after all, been talking to imaginary ­people at the house for a long time.”

Callie frowned at me, but I just squeezed her hand. She'd thank me eventually.

“I'm going to support you,” I told her. “We're not going to stop until we've found the real killer. We'll have a hunger strike, and I'm going to get
Dateline
out here and maybe we'll film a documentary like the one that freed those Satanists in Arkansas.”

“Margot.” Callie was staring at me intently. “Don't. Just forget about me. Focus on the chapter, on rush. I'll be fine.”

“I'll never forget, Callie,” I said bravely, wiping a tear from my cheek.

“Seriously,” she said between gritted teeth. “I confessed. I deserve to be here. You need to do what you need to do.”

I didn't understand her. I didn't understand why she'd done what she did or why ­people kept blaming us for murders on sorority row. I certainly didn't understand when she asked Officer Malouf to escort me back to the sorority house as if she didn't want me around her sobbing hysterically.

When I was all curled up in my bed in the chapter advisor's apartment in the Deb house, I felt like my whole world had been turned upside down. Everything I'd worked for, for the past three months, was gone. Rush was in limbo. Our house was under a cloud of suspicion. And I had gone to an ice-­cream social with a Tri Mu, for heaven's sake. Nothing in Margot Blythe's world made any sense.

 

Chapter Thirty-­two

I
WOKE UP
to the sound of an argument. This was not unusual in a sorority house. What was unusual was that one-­half of the argument participants seemed to be male.

“She's had a head injury!” the man said in a raised voice.

“She's had a trauma!” That was the female.

“Exactly!”

“She needed rest!”

“I need to see her!” Why would the man need to see me?

“She's busy!”

“You just said she needed rest!”

“Because rush is starting again!”

I sat straight up in bed. How long had I been out? I swung my feet out of the bed and entered the tiny living area of the apartment. There was Lieutenant Ty Hatfield in his waterproof police jacket and jeans, and in his face was the chapter president herself, Aubrey St. John. She saw me, then pointed a finger in his direction. “You woke her up!”

He threw his hands up. “Head injury!”

Aubrey came and took my face in her hands. “You look better. The swelling's gone down.”

“Swelling?” I asked.

“At the hands of the police.” She gave Ty a nasty look over her shoulder. “We'll probably sue them for a million dollars.”

Ty's jaw worked as he threw out his hand toward me. “She did that when she fainted and fell on the floor.”

Aubrey rolled her eyes. “Next you'll be telling me that the hose just accidentally turned on. You didn't mean to use the pepper spray. The police dog was just trying to play.”

“Would you tell her, please?” Ty asked me with frustration all up in his voice.

I was still about three sentences back, though. Gingerly, I pressed against my cheekbone. “Ouch,” I said. It did feel tender and swollen.

“Great,” Ty muttered.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Eight,” Aubrey said.

“Oh wow.” I peered out the window. “It's not dark yet?”

“Eight in the morning. She let you sleep all night long,” he said, with another gesture toward Aubrey.

“You were tired,” she assured me. “You cried yourself to sleep.”

“Head injury!” Ty reminded the room.

“Police brutality,” Aubrey sassed back.

“A million dollars does sound good,” I said. Ty looked up to the ceiling like he was praying.

Aubrey patted my shoulder. “I'm glad you're feeling better.”

I wasn't. I was just awake and achy and a little foggy with all the craziness that had happened the day before. Even though as a chapter advisor I was now used to busy days, a day that started out with me waking up in a bed with Sheila DeGrasse and ending with my sorority sister confessing to a murder (I hope) she didn't commit was one for the books.

“Did I hear something about rush?” I asked Aubrey's back, as she had turned to shake out some Advil out of a bottle.

“Yes! We got a call from the Recruitment Council. Pref night is tonight.” She handed me five Advil. “We have so much to do. Not to mention the chapter is a wreck from hearing about Callie.”

The name made me feel sick to my stomach. Which could also be the sign of a concussion. I considered the painkillers and tossed them back without water. A strong woman had to overcome all sorts of things during rush.

Aubrey gave me a little hug. “I'm so glad you're feeling better. I don't know what we'd do if you were taken from us, too.” While I appreciated the sentiment, it reminded me of Callie and also brought back all the feelings.

“Aubrey—­” And then I broke off.

“It's pref night, Margot.” I heard the plea in her voice, and I understood. We only had so many things we could control in this world. We couldn't control cancer, or global warming, or when no amount of hair products could keep the natural curl out of our hair. So we clutched tight to the things we could control. Like lighting candles and singing. And choosing our sisters. In the middle of a crazy, unpredictable world, Aubrey and the rest of the chapter wanted normalcy and predictability. If I couldn't give them anything else, I would give them that.

“Okay.” I nodded and looked around the room. Time to break out the rush binder. “We should probably start decorating ASAP.”

I was rewarded with a smile that only Aubrey could give me, and I knew I had made the right decision.

Until Ty Hatfield ruined everything.

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no'?” I asked, more than a little exasperated. He was the one of the reasons I couldn't control things for my chapter.

“You and I need to talk.”

I hated him. I really, really did. Now was so not the time to deal with the police, but I could tell from the expression on his face that I could do this the easy way or the hard way, and the hard way might end up with me in a cell next to Callie. Which, while dramatic, wasn't going to help the Debs make quota. “Fine,” I said. “I'm going to shower and change first.” I was still wearing the same clothes from yesterday, and I'm pretty sure there's a rule about wearing the same outfit to a police station twice.

A
LMOST AN
HOUR LATER,
I realized that Ty Hatfield wasn't driving me to the police station. In fact, we were going the opposite way, to the old downtown part of Sutton. When we pulled up in front of Joey's Diner, I almost didn't want to get out of the car. What did Ty have up his sleeve? He walked around and opened the door for me, and I had no choice but to step out onto the curb. We entered, the bells over the front door jangling, and in a low voice, I asked, “What are we doing here?”

He gave me an inscrutable look and put his hand on my elbow, leading me to a booth by the front window, where anyone could see me with the finest member of Sutton's Finest. This whole thing was suspicious.

I hadn't been to Joey's Diner since I'd relocated to Sutton, but when I was a student, late-­night meetings of study groups were fortified with constantly refilled pots of Joey's coffee. The diner still looked the same; somewhere around the millennium mark, Joey's kids decided to stop updating the place and apply for historical-­landmark designation, which the town had granted. Now, the original 1950s checkerboard linoleum and chrome fixtures were complemented by the seventies macramé potted ivy hangings and the eighties Robert Plant and Genesis music on the jukebox.

Ty slid one of the laminated menus across the teal table at me. “What are you going to have?” he asked.

“Coffee.” It was mostly an automatic answer, but also one of self-­preservation. I didn't know why Ty had brought me here, and I had to stay on my toes, preferably with a pot of coffee in my bloodstream.

Ty shrugged out of his jacket, and from this close-­up, I tried not to notice how nice his shoulders were, or the way his plaid shirt folded up around his lean but muscular forearms. They were efficient arms, meant for getting a job done quickly and well. Like handcuffing one of my sisters.

The thought made me push my menu away, and Ty noticed. “Seriously, you should eat something.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Last night,” I snapped. “I had Mexican takeout with . . .” Oh right. I amended my statement. “The night before last,” I informed him.

Ty stared at me for a moment, a strange expression in his blue eyes. I thought he was about to argue with me, but then he slid out of the booth and went to the counter to order. A few minutes later, he was carrying a tray full of food back to our table. He set a basket of fries, a plate of pancakes with bacon, a glass of orange juice, and a milk shake down on the table.

In college, Ty weighed about fifty pounds more, and his nickname was “Fatfield,” so I was really proud of him for being confident enough to pack it away now.

He pushed the milk shake toward me. “You have to eat.”

“I just wanted coffee,” I replied stubbornly.

He flicked the straw at me. “Drink.”

Since I was a woman with a healthy respect for authority, no matter what Ty Hatfield would have ­people believe, I reluctantly took the straw between my fingers and sipped.

My eyes popped open. “Coffee! It's a coffee milk shake!”

Ty's smile surprised me almost as much as the flavor bursting in my mouth. He was smiling because I was smiling, and it was a nice feeling. “I had them put a shot of espresso in a vanilla milk shake. I didn't think there was any other way to get the calories in you.”

Wow. “Thank you,” I said. “It's really good.”

We sat quietly and drank for a minute or so, me from my espresso shake and him from his orange juice. It was companionable and pleasant, and I almost forgot why he'd asked me out.

Wait. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

Ty took a moment before he answered, pouring a big dollop of ketchup on the side of the French fries before he did. “I haven't investigated that many murder cases here in Sutton.”

Hmm . . . I reached over, took a fry, dunked it in ketchup, and ate it while I waited for him to get to the point. “It's a small town, but it's also a college town, so we get pretty lively on the weekends, more than our fair share for a town this size.”

The fry was crispy and hot. I took another one. “Before you came to town, there had only been two unnatural deaths since I've had my badge. One was a drunk-­driving incident. The other was a woman who shot her abusive husband in the crotch and let him bleed to death in their bathroom.”

I chose not to dunk my next French fry into the ketchup.

‘Of course, we have a fair amount of other crimes in Sutton. Some pretty significant, theft, hit-­and-­run, drunk driving, assault.”

I got a funny feeling from the way he was looking at me. “I haven't assaulted anyone.” I sniffed before draining my milk shake.

“No,” he agreed. “You haven't. Not that I know of.” His eyebrow went up, and I realized he was making a joke. Ha.

I pushed my glass away and toyed with the edge of the bacon hanging off the plate with the pancakes. It was a deep red-­brown, just the slightest bit of burned on the end. I broke off a piece and realized that I was actually interested in Ty's stories about Sutton. If I were a different woman with different priorities, I would have enjoyed a brunch with Ty. Hearing crazy stories about crime in Sutton, funny things and sad things. I would have enjoyed just spending time with him: He was kind (when he wasn't arresting me or my friends), steady, and quite nice to look at. Like now, with his sandy hair combed away from his chiseled, clean-­shaven face and his shirtsleeves rolled up, his fingers moving up and down the orange-­juice glass.

I had a sudden sharp memory of the “police” who had visited the house and wondered if Ty knew about the “rookies” that were going around impersonating Sutton's Finest. If Ty ever listened to Rihanna . . .

I shoved the strip of bacon in my mouth.

“I'm surprised, Blythe.”

“Hmm?”

“You haven't asked me the question I know you're dying to ask.”

Oh crap. How did he know?

“What's the point of all this?” He directed the rhetorical question toward the table and lifted his eyes to mine. “All of these crimes in Sutton and the first time anyone walks straight into the police station and volunteers to confess? Your girl. Callahan Campbell.”

I dropped the second piece of bacon I had selected back onto the plate. Now we were getting to it. Maybe he thought I was supposed to be proud of her civic-­mindedness? Even the Delta Betas standards and morals code didn't require our members to voluntarily confess to felonies they didn't commit. And I know Callie didn't murder two ­people. Especially ones she didn't know.

“I'm suspicious, Margot.”

I jerked out of my thoughts. What had I done now? “About what?”

“Why this young woman, by all accounts a smart, accomplished, leader, waltzes into the police station and confesses to murder. Especially one she has an alibi for.”

The pedicures! A wave of fresh hope hit me. “Did you check her toes?” I asked.

Ty frowned. “No. But you said she had a receipt.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“The only thing I could come up with is that someone like Callie might confess if she was trying to protect someone.”

The way Ty was looking at me right now was throwing all my brain cells off. I couldn't think right while under the scrutiny of such a hot, straight guy who had bought me breakfast. I now understood how prisoners at Guantanamo felt. I had no choice under this pressure.

But I also had no answers for him. “I don't know. I don't know why she's done this or whom she could be protecting. I just know . . .”

I realized I did know some things that Ty didn't know, and before he broke his jaw clenching it like that, I attempted to reassure him. “Okay. I just figured this out yesterday. I haven't been holding out on you.” I spilled on Sheila. Also, I made it clear that the inn's housekeeper had kindly and enthusiastically volunteered to unlock the door of Sheila's suite for me.

I explained about her shoes and her friendship with one of the murder victims.

“So she knew Shannon Bender,” Ty said, almost to himself. “That explains her hysterics when I questioned the Tri Mu chapter.”

“I really think they were friends,” I said weakly, thinking of the fragile truce part two I had with the rush consultant.

Ty leaned back in the vinyl bench, and it made a creaky, sticky sound behind him. “That explains why Shannon was here. But who would have a motive to kill someone that no one knew? Especially when all the Debs were at the salon?”

“She was wearing a Delta Beta shirt . . .” I broke off. This was one of the things that had been running through my head for the past four days that I had just kept ignoring because, really, it was unthinkable. “Maybe someone hates us enough to kill one of us.”

Ty rubbed his chin. “But Sutton College isn't that big a place. Someone who had that big a vendetta would surely know all of you. Unless it was someone who was new to Sutton.”