The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (21 page)

Her fingers still shaking, she took it from him.
She stood and walked over to me. She knelt down next to me. With a purple
fingernail she pointed to the photo of Zach Gilcrist. “Him.” Then she pointed
to the photo of Martin Hunt. “Him. He hired me—to do five boys. One-hundred
dollars each. Five-hundred dollars. That was agreement.”

“So why did you do ten boys?”

“In drink. Maybe put drug in drink.”

Chapter 23

Back at headquarters, Ryan
and I tried to unravel what Krista had told us at the Comstock Hotel after we
chased the fat john out of her room.

“I don’t buy it,” Ryan said. “She’s a liar. That’s
what she does for a living—and what she does every time we interview her. She
doesn’t know who the video guy was? I do: it was her pimp, or a guy working for
him. One minute, she doesn’t know who screwed her at the party. Next minute,
she identifies two of the guys from Virginia’s course. She sees Martin Hunt put
a
roofie
in her drink, then she drinks it? She hasn’t
given us one piece of evidence that we can use. There won’t be any forensic
evidence in her body—nothing that would show up in a
tox
screen or a rape kit. One thing about Krista: Everything she denies, we have
evidence it happened. Everything she claims, there’s no evidence it happened.”

“Yeah, I know her first instinct is to lie to us.
I get that. But you noticed she didn’t tell us anything when all we were
talking about was the gang-rape at the party. Once she figured out the point of
the party was to shit on Virginia, she fingered two of the idiots.”

“And she’s got you thinking that now she’s really
telling us the truth. But if she’s a chess player, this is how she sets up
someone else for Virginia’s murder. The frat boys are low-life rapists, so they
must be murderers, too. But isn’t that exactly what a whore and her pimp would
like us to think?”

Ryan was right. If Krista had any brains at all,
she’d start by lying and denying everything. Then, if we got closer to the
truth, she’d make this big show of how she really loved Virginia so we should
to believe her now when she points us to the frat boys. She played Virginia for
a fool, and now she’s playing us. Yes, Ryan was probably right. He usually is.

But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t have the
evidence yet, but I knew Krista was telling the truth. Not that she didn’t lie
every time she opened her mouth, but that her story was true. She had some kind
of genuine bond with Virginia. Krista didn’t care about herself, but she did
care about Virginia. She never would have hurt Virginia. I knew it, but I
didn’t know how to prove it.

“All right,” I said. “One theory is that Krista
was stealing from Virginia, right?”

“Right.”

“You don’t mean taking bills from her purse. You
mean stealing from her bank account, blackmail, that sort of thing.”

“That’s the sort of thing.”

“Let’s look at Virginia’s financials. Credit
cards, banks. See if she’s making any regular withdrawals.” I thought a second.
“Of course, she’s got a kid in college.”

“She’d write him a check. Not give him cash every
month.”

“Okay, get the authorization from the chief, would
ya
?”

Ryan got up and headed to the chief’s office.
Meanwhile, I started catching up on the paperwork. I checked with Montana State
Police to see if they’d had any luck running down Robert Rinaldi’s car, which
was stupid because if they found him they would’ve notified us immediately
since we were the agency that put in the request in the first place.

I headed home at five, nuked a wonderfully salty,
fatty prepared dinner and went to my eight o’clock AA meeting, where I ignored
all the heartfelt sob stories and tried to figure out how I was going to link
the frat boys to the murder.

A little after nine, I made it home and turned on
the TV. The local news was covering a fire at an apartment building. It took me
a few seconds to figure out why the apartment looked familiar.

I called Ryan. He picked up. “Look at Channel 5.
Now.”

It took three or four seconds. “Jesus.”

He never says “Jesus.” “I’ll see you over there.”

Ten minutes later, I pulled into Abby Demarest’s
apartment complex. The driveway forked immediately, one side heading east, the
other west. On one side of the driveway was a grassy strip about ten yards wide
and the two-story development. On the other side were the covered parking stalls.
I followed the red, white, and blue lights slicing through the grey smoke and
parked in the staging area the fire department had already set up. One squad
car was there, along with a fire engine, an ambulance, and the fire marshal’s
sedan. Ryan pulled up in his Mitsubishi just as I arrived.

We rushed over to the scene. I gagged on the acrid
air, which was full of suspended bits of paper and fiber and pieces of ash. We
pushed through the small crowd and ducked under the yellow crime tape. A
uniform named Hollins recognized me and Ryan and came over to us.

“You the first on scene?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I got a call from Dispatch.” He looked at his
watch. “Eighteen minutes ago. They’d already confirmed that the fire crew was
on its way. I arrived about twelve minutes ago. They were already here. It was
a small fire.”

He pointed to the apartment that had a blackened
window frame with grey streaks snaking up the outside wall toward the
second-story unit. “That’s a bedroom, almost completely burned out. The rest of
the unit sustained some damage.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Young woman in the unit.”

“How bad?”

Hollins wore a grim expression. “Smoke inhalation.
Fatal.”

“Holy shit.” I started to shake, and I felt my
knees go rubbery. “You got a name on her?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you go in the unit? Did you see her?”

“Yeah.” His eyes were glassy. He was the right age
to have a teenage kid.

“Blond hair, cut short?”

He shook his head. “Dark hair, long.”

It was the roommate. I turned to Ryan. “What’s her
name?”

He had his notebook out. “Jennifer Taylor.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I started to sway. Ryan
grabbed my arm and lowered me to the grass. I fought to stay conscious.

Officer Hollins said to Ryan, “Is she gonna be all
right?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Hollins said, “The fire marshal’s got the scene
locked down. He already called the state fire marshal.”

“It was arson?” Ryan said.

“He’s pretty sure.”

“Can you point us to him?”

Officer Hollins pointed toward a guy around sixty
years old, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a baseball hat that said
Rawlings Fire Department. He was holding a clipboard and talking with a
firefighter. “His name’s Hynde. John Hynde.”

Ryan said to me, “You okay?”

I started to stand up. Ryan helped pull me to my
feet. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“You want me to get you back to your car?”

“No. No. Let’s talk to Hynde.”

Ryan got the message and we walked over to Chief
Hynde. I introduced us.

He said, “Chief Murtaugh assigned a couple
detectives already?”

“No,” I said. “We’re working another case, the
professor? One of the people we’re working with—college girl named Abby
Demarest—lives in this unit.”

“Good thing she wasn’t home. We might’ve had two
fatals
.”

“You think the victim is Jennifer Taylor, right?”

“We haven’t done a positive ID yet, but yeah, we
think so. She was working at her desk in her bedroom. The Molotov cocktail
detonated in the other bedroom. The concussion knocked her out of the chair.
Maybe she hit her head or something. The fire in the other room burned through
the wall separating the two bedrooms.”

“She died in the fire?”

“No, the sprinklers in the ceiling kicked in, but
not before the smoke filled her room. It was smoke inhalation.”

“You’ve called in the state fire marshal?”

“That’s right. They do the arson investigations.”

“Can you walk us through it?”

He nodded. “Come with me.” He led us over to the
outside of the apartment.
 
A few feet
down from the entry door was a kitchen window. “Look at the glass.” He pointed
down to the grass. “The flashover blew the glass out.”

We followed him down to Abby’s bedroom window.
“This was the point of entry.” There were jagged shards of glass in the window
frame, but no glass on the ground. “You stick your head in there, there’s the
rest of the glass on the carpet. This window was broken before the explosion. I
don’t know if you can make it out through the smoke, but there’s the pieces of
the bottle a couple of feet inside the window. My guys saw the bottle right
away. Usually there’s gasoline soaked into the carpet beneath it. You can’t
smell it out here, there’s so much stuff in the air, but inside the room the
odor is strong.”

“So you think someone was driving by and tossed
the cocktail inside?” I said.

“I don’t think so. They’d have to time it just
right. More likely, they walked up to the window, broke it with their elbow or
a hammer or something, and tossed the cocktail in.”

“Are we gonna be able to retrieve prints off the
bottle?”

“Possible but not likely.”

“Are you gonna oversee the investigation?”

“No, it’s the state fire marshal. I’ve already
briefed Chief Murtaugh. Is he going assign you two to be the liaisons?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. This case we’re
working is already spreading out into some other areas. The chief might want to
give it to another team.” I paused a second. “You haven’t removed the victim’s
body?”

“No, it’s going to be a few hours. We have to do
complete documentation of the scene—video and photos—and catalog all the
evidence first. The state marshal should be here within a half hour. We need to
be ready to assist with canvassing, whatever he wants.”

“Is there any way we can stick our heads in, just
take a quick look? It would help us a lot in our murder case.”

He sighed. “If you let one of my guys escort you,”
he said. “You got any booties?”

Ryan pulled two pairs out of his windbreaker
pocket and held them up.

Hynde gestured to his guy standing at the door,
waved him over. “Escort these two detectives into the bedrooms.”

The guy led us along the concrete walkway to the
front door. When the firefighter opened the door, the smoke hit me, and I
started to cough again. Ryan tapped me on the arm. He was holding a patch of
his windbreaker over his mouth like a mask. I tried it. It helped.

The smoke got a little heavier as the firefighter
led us past the kitchen into the living room. But I didn’t see any physical
damage from the fire. The carpets, soaked through from the ceiling sprinklers
or, more likely, from the hoses, squished underfoot as we walked toward the
hall leading to the two bedrooms.

The walls of the short hallway were blackened from
about waist height to the ceiling. The doorway to Jennifer’s bedroom was taped
off. Except for the smoke and the soaked carpet, you couldn’t tell there had
been a fire. Ryan and I looked in from the hallway. On one wall was a low
dresser and a small desk. On the desk was a laptop, the screen now black. A
book lay open next to it. A plastic desk chair was tipped over. On her side,
one arm over her head, one at her side, lay Jennifer Taylor. She didn’t seem to
have a mark on her.

“This way,” the firefighter said, leading us to
Abby’s bedroom. This one wasn’t taped off. The three of us walked in. “Don’t
touch anything, please,” the fireman said.

About five feet in from the window were broken
pieces of what looked like a liquor bottle. Beneath the glass, on the carpet,
was a darker wet circle about a foot in diameter. As I bent down to look at the
bottle, the gasoline fumes hit me. I almost puked. I turned away, took a deep
breath, and leaned in again to look at the bottle. There wasn’t enough label left
for me to identify the brand, but I could tell there weren’t going to be any
usable prints left.

I straightened up and walked over to the
queen-size bed, which was up against the wall separating the two bedrooms. On
the side facing the room, the two wooden legs were blackened and covered with
charred blisters. The sheets and bedspread, except for a little section up near
the head, had been consumed by the fire. The mattress batting had burned up,
too, leaving only the springs, which were covered by little tufts of tan
insulation, now mostly grey and black, that had fallen out of the wall above.
Most of the drywall alongside the bed was gone. The ceiling had burned through.
The beams and sub-flooring of the unit upstairs were black but intact.

I bent over the bed and looked through the tangle
of bedsprings to the fist-sized hole in the wall, through which the smoke had
bled into Jennifer’s bedroom.

I walked over to the closet, which had cheap pine
accordion doors, partly opened. I turned on my flashlight and looked inside.

“Look at this,” I said to Ryan.

He came over and looked in the closet. “What am I
looking at?”

Chapter 24

First thing Friday morning,
Ryan and I were in the chief’s office.

The chief nodded to us, but nobody made any small
talk. “I got a call last night from Chief Hynde. He briefed me on the fire. He
told me he had contacted the state fire marshal, who would be the lead on the
case. He said it was almost certainly arson, and he told me about the
fatality.” The chief looked up at me, then at Ryan. “He called me again, after
he’d spoken to you two on the scene. Were you contacted by Dispatch?”

“No,” I said. “I saw the fire on TV. I recognized
the building from when we interviewed Abby Demarest’s roommate. I called Ryan,
and we met there.”

“You knew it was her apartment that was torched?”

“I knew it was her apartment complex. I assumed it
was her apartment.”

Chief Murtaugh nodded. “I filled in Chief Hynde on
our interest in Abby Demarest. He already knew who she was—I mean, that she was
in the video.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He shook his head. “Apparently, someone they
interviewed during the initial canvass told him.”

“Do you see him and the state fire marshal
cooperating with us?”

“Yes, I’m confident they will. But remember the
state fire marshal’s office calls the shots on the arson and the fatality.”

“But we’re still in charge of Abby and her
involvement with the Rinaldi murder.”

“That’s right—if there is any involvement.” He
paused a second, apparently finished with that issue. “The chief said he let
you take a look inside the apartment. What did you get?”

“It was just what he said. The pieces of the
liquor bottle in the middle of the bedroom. You can see where it exploded, the
path the fire took to the bed, then where it burned through the wall into the
other bedroom.”

“I went over there early this morning.” The chief
shook his head. “Chief Hynde said he hoped he’d have the forensics later today.
He said he’d be happy to share them with us, but he wasn’t optimistic there’d
be anything on the bottle to identify the arsonist.”

“Has he got the resources for canvassing and
interviewing?”

“He said he thought he was okay, with his people
and the state people. I offered to give him whatever resources he needed.” He
looked up at me, then at Ryan, as if he wanted to wrap it up.

“I’d like to talk to Abby again.”

He raised an eyebrow, asking me to explain.

“I want to ask her if she came back to the
apartment.”

“You mean, since the fire?”

“No, before the fire.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe to get something.”

The chief could tell I was trying hard not to tell
him something. “What are you saying, Karen?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying. It’s just—something
about the apartment was off.”

I felt the two guys looking at me. The chief said,
“What?”

“It happened at dusk. The Molotov cocktail was
thrown into Abby’s bedroom.”

“If you’re going to break an apartment window and
torch a place,” Chief Murtaugh said, “you wait until after dark.”

“She wouldn’t be asleep at that time,” I said. “You
want to kill her, you do it at three
am
.”

“The guy was trying to scare her, not kill her.”

“Yeah, I understand that.” I knew I had to say it.
“I think Abby knew someone was gonna torch her place.”

The chief’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, she was
worried she might be torched.”

I shook my head. “No, I think she knew it.”

The chief raised his palms, asking me to explain.

“There were no clothes in the closet.”

The chief scratched his cheek slowly. “Maybe she
liked her clothes? She took them with her when she cleared out?”

I shook my head. “She’s scared shitless because of
all the threats. The university gets her someplace to live. She grabs her
phone, her computer, textbooks—those things. Whatever she needs for three or
four days. Underwear, three or four outfits. She tosses the stuff in the trunk
of her car and drives off. But Abby took all her clothes. A girl doesn’t do
that if she’s planning to come back in a few days.”

The chief rested his chin on his tented fingers.
“Does she know who’s going to torch her apartment?” He spoke slowly, like he
was trying hard not to misspeak and reveal he thought I might be having some
kind of brain episode.

“She knows—but I don’t.” I shook my head. “Most
obvious possibility is Richard Albright. But I have no idea. Could be her new
fuck-buddy Krista, or Krista’s pimp, or that idiot from the fraternity.”

“Motive?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t figured it out yet.
There could be some real harassment going on. I’m pretty sure there is. But
she’s playing it up, you know, to make herself look more like a victim. There’s
no way she can control the bad publicity about the porn video, but at least she
can try to spin it. You know, so she’ll look like a good girl who made a
mistake, and she’s paying a heavy price for it, so everyone should cut her some
slack.”

“Okay, I see that. But why Krista or her pimp?”

“Maybe Krista’s really pissed about the video
getting online. Maybe the pimp is pissed that he’s losing one of his best
girls. He wants to teach her a lesson. He already took out Virginia, now he’s
sending a signal to Krista’s new girlfriend.”

“And the fraternity boy? Give me a motive.”

“He’s afraid we know he drugged Krista at the
party. The arson is a diversion. Takes the attention off him. Maybe scares
Krista so she won’t press charges against him and the other rapists.” I sighed.
“I know. I know. It’s just not coming into focus for me yet.”

“We need a motive,” the chief said. “We’re not
going to identify the arsonist until we have a motive.” He paused. “What’s your
next move?”

I looked at Ryan, who shook his head. He didn’t
have a good answer. “I’d like to talk to Mary Dawson at the university,” I
said, “see if the university wants us to take over custody of Abby. Plus, I’d
like to know how they’re gonna handle the arson.”

The chief said, “You mean, see if they’re going to
link Jennifer Taylor to Abby and the video?”

“Yeah, if they make the link public, that might
set Richard Albright and his guys in motion. I’d like to be prepared in case
they make a move.”

The chief nodded. “Keep me in the loop.”

“You bet.” Ryan and I stood and left the chief’s
office. Back in the bullpen, we grabbed our coats and headed out to the
Charger. We were at the Administration Building in eight minutes.

“Is Mary Dawson in?” I said to the secretary in
the dean of students’ office.

“Sorry, she’s in an important meeting.” She looked
at her watch. “She should be back in ten or fifteen minutes. Would you care to
wait?”

“Actually, could you tell us where the meeting
is?”

She didn’t like that idea, but glancing at the detective’s
shield around my neck, she said, “She’s in the University Counsel’s office,
just down the hall. Room 114.” She pointed.

“Thanks.”

Ryan and I turned and left. “I don’t want her to
leave that meeting, then go get some coffee or something.”

“I get it,” he said.

We walked into room 114, where we were greeted by
another secretary, who explained that Arthur Vines was unavailable and would
likely be unavailable for the rest of the day. The point being, go away.
“Thanks,” I said and sat down on the couch to wait. She gave me a dirty look
but didn’t respond. Ryan remained standing.

Ryan and I were silent as we waited. Every little
while, the secretary looked over at us. She seemed preoccupied. When she looked
at Ryan, he offered her his polite smile. When she glanced at me, I gave her my
screw-you stare.

After about ten minutes, the door to Mr. Vines’
office opened. President Billingham, grim-faced, came out first. Head bowed, he
strode past us and out the door. A moment later, Mary Dawson emerged. She looked
like hell. Her mascara was smeared under her eyes, her skin looked blotchy and
puffy, and her makeup was flaking in the lines running down from the corners of
her mouth.

Right behind her was an attractive, distinguished
looking man of fifty-five or sixty, slender, wearing a three-piece suit and
super-shiny black dress shoes. His silver hair was thinning on top. He wore
silver rimless glasses on his long, thin nose. He carried himself with the kind
of self-confidence that comes from decades of deferential treatment. “I’ll keep
you informed, Mary.” He nodded, the gesture saying that it will be all
right—because he’ll make sure it will be.

When Mary turned back in our direction, she
noticed us and stopped abruptly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Detectives, I didn’t notice
you there.”

I gave her my best smile. “Dean Dawson, we need to
talk to you for a minute.” Then I turned to the guy. “You’re Mr. Vines, right?
My name is Detective Karen Seagate. This is my partner, Detective Ryan Miner.
We’re the lead investigators on the Virginia Rinaldi case.” I didn’t wait for
him to respond. “You know what would be great? If you could give us a minute,
too.” I swept my arm toward his office door, signaling for him to go back into
his office.

With a pained smile, he turned to head back into
his office. He didn’t say anything, which I interpreted to be his way of saying
he would comply, but only because I was a cop. His silence suggested he did not
care for my manners. That was okay with me, since I didn’t care for how he
protected his students.

I sat down at the small conference table in his
office. I turned to Ryan and nodded. He sat down, too. Mary Dawson followed.

Arthur Vines remained standing. “I’ve been sitting
all morning.” He made a weak show of stretching his torso from side to side,
then folded his arms in front of his chest and raised his chin, signaling for
me to start talking.

“I’m very sorry to hear about Jennifer Taylor,” I
said. Mary Dawson’s eyes teared up. She pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in
her suit jacket. Arthur Vines nodded formally to acknowledge my statement.
“Have either of you had a chance to speak with Chief Hynde today?”

Arthur Vines said, “He informed me that the state
fire marshal has arranged for all the resources and begun the investigation
into the arson—it is now officially an arson case. And I pledged to him all the
resources at Central Montana State University’s disposal. President Billingham
has authorized me to be the university’s liaison and assured me that we will do
everything we can to assist the authorities.” He nodded to me to show that he
considered the police department among those authorities.

“Jennifer was never on our radar,” I said. “She
wasn’t in Virginia Rinaldi’s class, is that correct?” I knew she wasn’t.

“No, she wasn’t.” Mary Dawson wiped at her eyes.

“And she didn’t have anything to do with Abby
Demarest and the porn video, right?”

Mary Dawson shook her head to confirm it.
“Jennifer was a marvelous student. Pre-law. Top grades. Just excellent.” She
started to cry. “I’m sorry, this is such an unbelievable tragedy. I cannot …”
She broke down.

We were all silent for a moment, waiting to see if
Mary Dawson wanted to finish her thought. But I didn’t think she could have
spoken.

Arthur Vines cleared his throat. “President
Billingham and Mary and I will be meeting with her parents this afternoon.
They’re driving in now.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“That they have our deepest sympathies for the
loss of their daughter. That we have three fine agencies that are pledged to
solve this case. And that we stand ready to be of whatever assistance we can be
as they struggle to cope with their loss.” It came out like talking points for
a PowerPoint he had been rehearsing.

“Mr. Vines, is the university planning to
publicize that the target was Abby Demarest, and that she had been receiving
various threats because of the porn video?”

He shook his head. “At this point, it would be
premature to speculate that Abby Demarest was the target. We don’t know that.”

“When the death of Jennifer hits the news
tonight—and the state fire marshal announces it as arson—reporters are gonna
ask if the marshal figured out a motive for the arson. He knows—Chief Hynde
knows—that Abby was in the video. He’s gonna tell the truth. Then they’re gonna
want to know where Abby was when her place got torched. There’s no way you’re
gonna be able to keep a lid on this. It’ll take Twitter ten minutes to light up
with the porn-star student getting her roommate killed.”

“Detective,” he said, “I am aware that this is a
very precarious situation—as well as being a terrible personal tragedy, of
course. But I cannot formulate a response based on speculation about the
motives of an arsonist—”

“You have all the threats, don’t you? The texts,
the emails? When reporters ask where Abby was, you’re gonna have to tell them
you responded appropriately by arranging for another place for her to live. So
how come her roommate’s sitting at her desk in her bedroom when a bottle full
of gasoline blows up ten feet away?”

“I have reviewed the complete file, I can assure
you, Detective Seagate. I have been here since ten
pm
, when I first was notified of the incident. I have
reviewed all the information we had. There were no threats suggesting arson was
even a possibility—”

“The threat has to spell out the means?”

“Detective, if you would excuse me. I was
speaking.” He paused and tilted his head, as if I was supposed to say I was
sorry and would be a good girl. “Perhaps you do not know that when Ms. Demarest
brought the threats to our attention, I also told Ms. Taylor that we would be
happy to arrange for alternative accommodations for her as well, either with
Ms. Demarest or separately.”

“And you told her what the threats were about?
About the video?”