aterovis_bm_reapthewhirlwind.p65 (27 page)

“Oh yeah,” Keisha said, still looking confused. “So why are you here?”

“Well, Blake is the one who found him.”

“Yeah? Oh, you’re here to see Blake. She’s at class.”

“I know. We’re the ones who called up. We were hoping she might have said something to you about what happened that night. None of us was there and we were just trying to figure out what happened. You know, so we can move on.”

“Sure, I know what you mean. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Blake and I aren’t exactly bosom buddies.

She doesn’t tell me much and I don’t tell her anything.

To be honest, I can’t stand her. The girl’s like the fucking energizer bunny. You know how bunnies mate? They got nothing on Blake. She just keeps going and going 246

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and going. Guys in here all hours of the day and night.

I hafta do all my studying either in my girlfriend’s room or in the library.”

I was the first to grasp the possibilities here.

“You and Blake don’t get along?” I asked to clarify.

“Nope. Oil and vinegar.”

“Would you care if we looked around her stuff real quick?”

“Help yourself; it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but as far as I’m concerned, you can take whatever you want. The less of her shit in here the better. She’d probably not even notice it was missing. Not that she has anything worth taking unless you want a lifetime supply of condoms.”

“We’re not going to take anything—” I started, but Keisha waved me off as she turned back into the room, disappearing briefly from view. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to follow her or not.

“I don’t care what you do, baby,” she said as she quickly reappeared carrying a canvas backpack. “I’m off to class. The room is all yours. Just leave my stuff alone and nobody will get hurt.”

She slipped past me and sashayed off down the hall to the elevator. We watched her go with slack jaws until the elevator door closed after her.

“We have a class together,” Aidan said unnecessarily.“You are such an imbecile,” Laura growled.

“What? I got us in, didn’t I?”

“No, Will and I got us in. You almost got a date.”

“We can stand out here and argue, or we can take a look inside,” I said as I started into the room. Laura and Aidan followed. It was immediately obvious which side 247

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of the room was whose. You didn’t even have to be a detective to figure it out. Keisha’s side was meticulously neat with everything in its designated place and a few pictures of what must have been her family set up on the desk. In contrast, Blake’s side looked like a dump truck had backed up and dumped a load of trash on it.

Wadded balls of fast-food wrappers were tossed haphazardly about the floor and almost every surface was covered with discarded clothing, make-up products, and papers.

“Dear Lord in heaven,” Laura breathed. She nudged the closest pile cautiously with her foot, as if afraid that something alive might be hiding in it.

“Where do we start?” I asked.

“With a shovel?” Aidan suggested.

“We’ll never find anything, even if we did know what we were looking for,” Laura lamented.

I picked up a pile of papers and flipped through them.

They were all school assignments. I dropped them back in their place and picked up another pile which turned out to be the same thing. With a matching pair of sighs, Laura and Aidan started pawing through piles of their own. We worked for a few minutes, trying to keep things pretty much where they were just in case Blake did have some sort of order to the chaos.

“Hey,” Aidan called just as we heard someone at the door. We all jumped guiltily to our feet and clumped together in the center of the room. The door swung open to reveal a rather startled-looking girl with shoulder length dirty-blonde hair. She had on just a little too much make-up and was wearing skin-tight jeans and an equally tight shirt that made the most of her considerable assets.

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“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my room?”

“Hi, Blake. Keisha let us in,” Laura said quickly. “I’m in one of your classes. Laura Duvier?”

“Yeah, okay,” Blake said looking confused. “So what are you doing in my room? And who are they?” She gestured toward Aidan and me.

“These are my friends, Will and Aidan. We came to talk to you.”

At our names, Blake’s eyes flickered over us uncertainly, but then came back to rest on Laura. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

“You’re the one who found Joey Taylor at David Kemp’s party, right?”

Her eyes slid back toward Aidan and me. “Yeah,”

she said cagily. “So?”

“We were friends of Joey. We wanted to ask you some questions.”

“What did you say your names were?”

“I’m Laura Duvier and this is Aidan Scott and Will Keegan.”

Something was definitely going on inside Blake’s head, but what it was I couldn’t begin to guess. She seemed to become agitated at the mention of our names.

“Look, I have a lot of stuff to do,” Blake said, edging past us into the room. “This isn’t a good time to talk.”

“It’ll only take a second,” Laura tried.

“I can’t help you.” She clutched her books close to her chest, as if they were a shield she had to keep between her and us.

“But you don’t even know what we want to ask.”

“I only found him.”

“Blake, please. At least listen to us.”

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“Fine. You have one minute.”

“How’d you find him?”

“I, uh, I needed air so I stepped outside and there he was, floating face down in the pool, just under the surface. It was horrible. I—I screamed.” Her eyes had become unfocused, as if she were seeing that night again.

“Was anyone with you?” Laura asked gently.

She snapped back into focus. “What? No! Why would you ask that?”

“So you were alone?”

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”

“Did you see anyone before you went out there?” I asked. “There was nobody in the back yard when I was inside.”

“You were there?” Blake asked, her eyes narrowing.

“For a little while.”

She thought for a moment, as if deciding how much she wanted to say. “There was nobody else around when I found him. The back yard was empty.”

It looked like things were going to be over before they even got started. I turned to leave but then I noticed the expression on Laura’s face. I’d seen it before. It usually meant she thought I wasn’t telling her the whole story and she wasn’t about to give up before she got it.

“Who else was with you?” Laura asked ever so casually.

“What? I already said there was nobody else there. It was just me.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“For Christ’s sake, are you saying I’m a liar?”

“Who was it, Blake?”

“Get out. Leave me alone.”

“Not until you tell me his name. If you didn’t see 250

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anything, maybe he did.”

“Nobody saw anything. Just please leave me alone.”

“What are you scared of, Blake?”

“I—I’m not scared.”

“You know it wasn’t an accident, don’t you? What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything. I’m calling security.” She snatched up the phone. I was getting nervous. It seemed like Laura was pushing too hard.

“Just tell us who he was and we’ll go.”

Blake slammed down the phone and spun around angrily. “I don’t know, okay? I never even got his name.

I was high. I’d done some E. He was cute and sweet. He suggested we go somewhere quieter so we went out to the pool house in the back yard. Like he said, there was no one out there.”

“What happened? How’d you find Joey?”

“He wasn’t there when we went out. We went into the pool house and we were—you know, and all of a sudden, he says he hears voices. I wasn’t exactly paying attention, you know? I tell him to ignore them. I guess he does because he kept on. And then, after we’re done, we go back outside and there he is, like I told you, floating in the water.”

“And what happened then? Where’d your friend go?”

“I told you, I screamed. That’s when he took off. He just took one look at—at him in the water like that and he just took off running. Jumped right over the fence.

He just left me there with a dead body.”

“Poor baby,” Laura said with undisguised disgust.

“You think I’m some kind of slut, don’t you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You do. I can tell. Your type always thinks you’re so 251

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much better than me.”

“My type? What type is that exactly?”

This was quickly degenerating into a cat fight. We’d gotten what we came for; I thought it would be wise to get all of us out of there. Apparently, Aidan had the same idea. We each grabbed one of Laura’s elbows and started pulling her toward the door, which Blake had left open.

“Look, thanks for talking to us,” I was saying, as if Laura had given her much choice.

“Just get out and stay the hell away from me,” Blake snapped.

We managed to get a sputtering Laura into the hall before Blake slammed the door. A couple other doors on the hall opened and a few heads popped out to see what all the fuss was about, reminding me of the prai-rie dogs at the zoo.

I smiled reassuringly. “It’s okay.” The heads retreated back into their rooms.

“Okay, I don’t think getting into a fight with the person you are questioning is an approved interrogation method,” I said.

“She started it,” Laura sniffed. “Skank.”

“At least we found out what we were looking for,”

Aidan said helpfully.

“Not really,” Laura said.

“We know there was someone else with Joey.”

“Do we? All we know is that Blake’s lover boy thought he heard some voices. We don’t even know his name or what he looks like.”

“Actually, we might know what he looks like,” I said thoughtfully.

“We do?” Aidan and Laura asked in unison.

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“Caitlin and I were in the front yard when Blake screamed. We heard her and wondered what was going on. We were still there when the guy came over the fence. It has to be the same guy. I think I would know him if I saw him again.”

“Great, so now what do we do? Ask for a line-up of all the guys who were at the party?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe Killian will have some ideas.”

“In the meantime, we can all think about it and maybe we’ll come up with something,” Aidan suggested reasonably. “More importantly, though, we know that Blake is the one who sent you the necklace and the note.”

His voice took on a smug sound with this last statement.

“Oh really?” Laura said archly. “And just how do we know that?”

“It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”

“If you think you’re Sherlock Holmes, you got another think coming,” Laura growled warningly.

“Look, just before Blake came in, I found this.” He produced a crumpled sheet of paper with four words written on it in bold block letters, just like ones I’d seen before.

“IT WASN’T A ACCIDENT,” it read.

I gasped.

“Rough draft?” Aidan asked. “See how she used ‘a’

instead of ‘an’? She wrote another one, correcting her grammar mistake, the one she sent to you.”

“How considerate,” Laura said dryly.

“Should we go back in and confront her with it?” I asked.

“I don’t think now would be the best time,” Aidan 253

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said, with a meaningful look in Laura’s direction.

“Oh, so now it’s my fault, is that it?” she snapped.

“I didn’t say that,” Aidan placated. “I just don’t think this would be the best time. For now, we should just go.”

Laura waved us away irritably. I wondered what exactly her problem was. Aidan and I started toward the elevator, but Laura didn’t move.

“You coming?” I called back to her.

“I’ll take the stairs,” she said.

The elevator arrived at that moment, so I just shrugged and stepped in. When the doors opened on the ground floor, I stepped out, almost running right into Caitlin.

“Caitlin!” I exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“I have a friend in the building,” she said after an almost imperceptible pause. “What are you doing here?”

“We just came from talking to Blake.”

“Oh, you talked to her? Did you find anything out?”

“Yes and no,” Aidan said.

“We think she was probably in the pool house when Joey was being killed,” I explained, “but she was, um, otherwise occupied.”

Caitlin’s blank look quickly changed to understanding as my meaning sunk in. “Does she know anything?”

“The guy she was with may have heard voices, she’s not sure. I think he may have been the guy we saw, the one who jumped over the fence and told us Joey was dead.”

“Really? What’s his name?”

“We don’t know. That’s what we have to figure out 254

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next.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if I think of anything, I’ll call you. I’d better get going. My friend is waiting.”

“Okay, see you, Caitlin.”

“Bye, Will. Bye, Aidan.” ***

I woke up the next morning, and for a few disoriented moments, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then I felt Aidan’s arms around me and it all came back to me. The night before I had started into my room out of habit before Aidan had caught my hand and drawn me into his. It made sense that I would move into his room since it was bigger, but I would miss my view of the river—though not the balcony and all its associated memories.

I lay for a while just watching him sleep. I could lie like this forever, I thought, but the morning was wearing on and I had to get to work. I carefully slipped out of bed and I succeeded without waking him. I started the shower then went into my old bedroom to get my clothes. When I went back into the bathroom, I was startled to find Aidan waiting for me in the shower.

Before I could say a word, he pulled me under the hot spray, boxers and all. He cut off my protest with a passionate kiss.