Busted (23 page)

"You don't think I had anything to do with her death, do you?"

Steve waved Joe's question off. "No, I don't. But I do think her death might be related to Stephanie's family."

"You don't—" Joe started to protest.

"I don't think she did anything wrong, no. And I'm not even sure there is a connection, but Chris has a hunch and—"

"Chris has a hunch?" Joe's voice was cold.

"Yes, and despite the fact that he can't manage to not be an ass around you, he's good at what he does. He thinks there's a connection, so… Humor me," Chris said.

Joe sighed. "Fine, okay. The last time I saw her was about four and a half months ago. It was back in February." Joe flipped through his desk calendar. "The tenth, it was a Saturday. We'd get together for lunch every four or five months, just to catch up and stuff. My lease was ending so we went out looking at apartments.

"That was it. Nothing fancy, nothing exciting. We had lunch at that Greek place on the edge of town, drove around and looked at empty apartments, and bitched about how hard it is to find a guy worth anything." Joe got a goofy grin on his face. "Funny thing was, I met Alex two days later and we've been dating ever since."

Steve didn't miss the grin. "I don't suppose you have a list of the places you went, do you?"

Joe gave Steve a puzzled look. "Yeah, sure." He unclipped the page from the desk calendar and handed it over. "I think we went to all the places on the list. Looked around but nothing was worth moving for, so I stayed put."

Steve scanned the list. He wasn't surprised Joe had decided not to move; none of the apartments on it were as nice as the complex he was in now. One place did stand out.

"Wildbrook, huh? Decided to skip it?" That was somewhere he wouldn't forget. The Ramirez killings happened there in February. It hadn't made a big splash in the media; two dead out of state drug dealers didn't even warrant fifteen seconds on the evening news, or the front page of the local paper. The date nagged at him, and he made a note to check up on it later.

"Yeah, I did. It was okay, but not great. Alex's apartment is in that complex, so I'm over there anyway."

"Really? That's very interesting. What apartment's he in?"

The question raised Joe's suspicions. "Why do you ask?"

"Humor me."

"He's in apartment 4F.
 
It's nothing fancy, 'cause he's never there. We joked about it a couple of times. That mean anything?"

"It might, it might not." He was pretty sure it did, though, and Steve made a note of it to check on later. "Anyway, how long did you know Jill Sorenson?"

"We met in college freshman year. Psych 101. We hit it off, and ended up sharing a place off-campus starting sophomore year. It was a dump, but it was cheap. You know."

Steve smiled. "Yeah, tell me about it. Chris and I did the same thing our senior year. And yes," he said at Joe's raised eyebrows. "We're edjumacated. Really."

Joe laughed. "I bet. Studied fast girls?"

"And cheap beer," Steve said. "But don't tell Mary, she'll kill me dead. But back to Jill. The two of you were good friends, right? Was there anything unusual about her?"

Joe hesitated. There was one big thing, something he and Jill shared after a fashion, but he didn't want to talk about it, not if he could avoid it. Steve was good at what he did, though, and caught the pause.

"Spill, Joe. If it's something you don't want to talk about it's probably important."

"Fine," Joe said, with a lot of reluctance. "Jill was… we were pretty sure she was borderline schizophrenic. She'd hear voices sometimes. She was under treatment for a while, but the meds never seemed to do anything but mess her up. She used to say they were worse than the stuff she heard. It was funny, we'd always joke about her amazing psychic powers, but in the three years we shared the apartment I never lost my car keys."

Steve frowned at Joe, watching him fiddle with a pencil. He was agitated, more so than just telling someone something unusual about a dead woman. There was something he was hiding.

"And what aren't you telling me, Joe?"

“What? Nothing, just…” Joe stared at the pencil, the seconds drawing out as the silence grew longer.

"It wasn't just her, it was me too," Joe said, his voice ragged as he forced the words out. He hated admitting that. He hadn't told anyone, not since Jill, and only because she was the same, in her own way. She understood what it was like, to feel things scrabbling on the edge of your vision. Hell, to see them writhing on top of a coffee table or trying to eat a drunken co-ed. Worse than the creatures and visions was the choice they represented. Either loathsome things really were lurking around the edges of the world, or he was at least slightly mad.

"I see things, okay?" he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Any time I was on anything. Didn't matter what."

"People do that when they're tripping," Steve said. Under normal circumstances he'd give Joe crap about it, or put on his scary cop face. Joe was looking tired and defeated, though, not like someone who did things voluntarily, so he tried to sound as reassuring as he could. It felt like Joe was going somewhere with this as well, and he wouldn't get there if Steve shut him down.

"Not like I do. Not like…” Joe shuddered “'ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night'. It's like being trapped in a horror movie. They're everywhere and they can see me, and…" Joe shivered. "It's horrible."

"So you don't do drugs?"

"I don't do drugs, I don't drink, and hope to god I never get into an accident or have to get more dental work done."

"That tattoo," Steve said, remembering the design he'd seen etched across Joe's back and what he'd said the night they hauled a drunken Chris up to bed.

"Yeah. I had my wisdom teeth pulled my freshman year of college. There was something wrong, I dunno what, but they knocked me out to yank them. I woke up… I woke up and screamed myself hoarse for the next four hours from the stuff I saw. I was lucky, Jill was there. She understood, kept them from knocking me back out."

"People don't generally hallucinate from anesthetics, Joe." Steve was far too familiar with what people did hallucinate from. What Joe was saying didn't match what he knew about how people worked. That was a mystery itself, one more for the pile of things to find out.

"People don't generally hallucinate from drinking
beer
, Steve. I do. I start getting fuzzy and they just… fade in."

Steve nodded. "So you got the tattoo."

"Yeah. My magic spell, to keep the monsters at bay. It's stupid, I know. It's all in my head, and none of it's real, and I really don't care, 'cause when I see them they're real enough to me." Joe shrugged. "My Gran always said the Sight ran in the family, but what the hell, schizophrenia probably does too."

"But you drank beer at my place?"

"I
brought
beer to your place. I drank water. And yeah, I had a beer at my apartment the day we found Stephanie, but it was only one, and my apartment's… safe. Or I think it is. Doesn't matter, it's good enough."

Steve thought for a moment. "So does anyone else in your family do that too? Or is it just you?"

"No idea," Joe said. "Why?"

"Looking for a connection, something to match up Jill and your sister-in-law and another case we've got. It's unusual enough, it might've hit this guy's obsession. She didn't do street drugs, did she?"

"Jill? No, not in the whole time I knew her. After how the meds made her in college she wouldn't touch anything stronger than aspirin."

"Dammit. Anything else you can think of?"

"There were a couple of ex-boyfriends, but nobody serious. Guys always freaked and bolted if she had an episode. She did the rounds of the 'psychics' in the state for a while. We both thought it was kinda crazy, but she was willing to try anything. If believing in ghosts that weren't there was what it took to make the voices go away she was willing. Can't say I blame her."

"Huh," Steve said. "Interesting. Got any names?"

Joe shook his head. "No, sorry. Like I said, we only got together every six months or so. She probably had records, if they didn't get cleaned out. I don't know what her family would've done with her stuff, and it's been a few weeks since the funeral. I don't remember anyone saying anything about her being murdered. They just chalked it up to her being nuts and having a stroke in the woods or something." There was bitterness in Joe's voice.

"I'll ask around," Steve said. "Can't hurt. Thanks, Joe."

* * *

Joe had been staring at his phone for the better part of an hour. Ever since Steve's visit he'd been there, sitting and staring, wishing the phone would melt and spare him what he knew he had to do. He shook his head. Putting it off wouldn't help any. It would make things worse, really. The later it got the more likely someone would be drunk. He didn't need to deal with that.

Sighing, Joe picked up the phone and dialed a number he knew by heart. He hadn't called his parents in more than fourteen years. He'd honestly planned on never calling again. Plans change.