Rushing to Die (14 page)

 

Chapter Twenty-­six

A
N HOUR LAT
ER,
when the doorbell rang, the ladies of the chapter gathered eagerly in the front hall, expecting perhaps some firefighters with big hoses or EMTs delivering mouth-­to-­mouth. There was an audible sigh of disappointment when the door opened, and it was not a crew of off-­duty shirtless Marines, but Alexandria Von Douton with her sleek platinum French twist instead.

“Ms. Blythe,” she greeted me coolly but with a feral glint in her eyes. “I have the pleasure of delivering this to you in person.”

I accepted the envelope, and asked, “Has the stay been lifted? Is rush restarting?”

Her cold smile faltered. “No. Which I'm sure you're quite pleased about.”

“No one wants rush to continue more than I.”

“I have a hard time believing that considering all the illegal acts you've been promoting this week.”

“Illegal?” I sputtered. Was Callie's mom's lawyer friend wrong about North Carolina surveillance laws? How had Von Douton heard about that?

“Don't play innocent with me. You Debs have gone far too long without consequences.” Her lips twisted in satisfaction. “Until now.”

She turned and left with quite a dramatic flair. I had to give her credit for pulling it off at her age, in those shoes. My begrudging appreciation for a well-­executed flounce aside, I opened the envelope with trepidation.

The paper inside was worse than anything I had expected. I headed straight into my apartment, where Zoe was at the computer, and Callie was posting fake pictures on Casey Fenner's Instagram account.

I showed them the letter from Panhellenic.

“Not rule number five,” Callie groaned.

“Probation,” I muttered, shaking my head. I couldn't believe it. We were getting probation for having men in the house during rush. We were on a break!

“Not double-­secret probation?” Zoe asked.

“No,” I sighed. “Not this time.”

“How did they find out?” Callie asked.

“Clearly, someone posted something about it,” I said. I should have known this was going to happen when all the women's cell phones were being held up, capturing the day's almost-­nude entertainment. But maybe they just wanted to relive the moment later, in the privacy of their own rooms. I couldn't say.

“On it,” Zoe said, sliding Callie out of the desk chair and pulling up Casey Fenner's accounts. This might be one thing I felt actually guilty about. When we were putting the Casey Fenner scheme together, Callie (the standards and morals director, after all), suggested that Fake Casey request to be friends with everyone in the chapter, as well. It would look odd if Fake Casey was only friends with other freshmen, she argued; and this way, we could see whether the chapter sisters were behaving themselves on social media, as well. I felt a little funny about basically spying on my own sisters, but it was for their own good.

In a few quick clicks, Zoe had reviewed everyone's postings from the past hour. No one had posted anything about our surprise strippers. And they were a surprise, which made the whole probation thing superunfair. We hadn't arranged for mostly naked men to appear on our doorstep—­Casey had. Hadn't he?

I double-­checked with Callie and Zoe and confirmed that as far as they knew, no one in the house had scheduled this visit. I almost smacked my forehead. Of course. How could I have been so stupid? This hadn't been Casey at all. Even though he would have appreciated the dancers' artistry, he knew Panhellenic rules too well to do something like this.

“We were set up,” I said. “This was a setup. One of the other houses called the strippers in, then ratted us out to Alexandria Von Douton.”

Zoe frowned. “Von Douton? She's the Tri Mu, right? The one that looks like Cruella De Vil?”

Now that I thought about it, Von Douton's fur coat had looked very puppylike that morning.

Zoe moved the mouse and one of the surveillance camera feeds popped up on the screen. Footage of the Tri Mu house sped backwards for a few seconds, then it stopped. “I noticed this a little while ago,” Zoe explained. “But I thought it was just some Panhellenic thing going on.”

A large black Mercedes pulled up in front of the Tri Mu house. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then a familiar figure approached the driver's side window. It was Ginnifer. She handed a cell-­phone-­shaped object through the window, then the object was passed back. The conversation looked short, and Ginnifer soon walked away, in the opposite direction from the Deb house. A few seconds later, the figure who emerged from the Mercedes was clearly Von Douton, her confident stride leading her toward the Deb house.

“When was this?” I asked, unable to decipher the numbers at the bottom.

Zoe checked her watch. “Just about ten minutes ago.”

Von Douton's next stop had been to drop off the probation paperwork in my hand.

“The Gineral sold us out,” Callie exclaimed.

“We don't know that,” I reasoned uncertainly though it was hard to explain why Ginnifer had given Von Douton something through that car window. I had to use common sense. “Von Douton didn't print the paper in her car. She had it before she ever saw Ginnifer.”

“The Gineral has had it in for us from the beginning,” Callie insisted. “She's always looking for something wrong with us.”

Which was true, but . . . “She's also insisted that we follow every single rule,” I said. “Why would she do that if she'd just rat us out for accidentally having strippers over?”

“Because we haven't broken any other rule,” Callie said.

“Well . . .” Zoe tilted her head toward the computer monitors.

“We did get written up for disobeying the Rush Council,” I added sheepishly.

Callie wasn't having any of it. “The Gineral set us up. I bet she called the strippers, then gave Von Douton pics.”

I understood Callie's theory, but there was one thing she was forgetting. “Ginnifer is a Delta Beta,” I said sternly. “She is your sister, and mine, and she has said sacred vows to uphold our sorority. Accusing her of violating those without proof is just as serious as if she did rat us out to Von Douton.”

Taking a deep breath, I looked at the paper in my hand again. It wasn't dated, and it only held the one sentence. “For violation of rule five of the Sutton College Panhellenic Recruitment Code, the Delta Beta chapter is hereby put on probationary status.”

Probation wasn't that serious. It was one of those consequences that sounded worse than it was. Like “house arrest.” And since I knew that the Debs were one hundred percent following all the rules that anyone cared about, I was confident that this decision wouldn't ultimately affect our chapter negatively.

“I'll talk to Ginnifer,” I told the girls, mostly to calm them down and make them feel better that I had everything under control. “I'm sure she was just giving Von Douton directions or something.”

“With her phone? Von Douton's Mercedes doesn't have GPS?”

I ignored Callie's well-­reasoned and logical points. Now wasn't the time for logic. Maybe I was biased because of my own recent tenure of being the (sometimes) unpopular visiting sisterhood mentor at various chapters, but my intuition still told me that however sketchy Ginnifer's actions were, she was only looking out for the Delta Beta good. “Zoe?” I turned my attention to my adorable tech genius. “Do you have everything ready for the police?”

She unplugged a thumb drive from the CPU and gave it to me. “I found something I wasn't expecting when I was going over Daria Cantrell's social-­media accounts. When she told me, I must have looked as sick as I felt because she asked me with wide eyes, “This is okay, right? We're not getting in trouble?”

“Of course not,” I assured her. What else could I say? When it came to Delta Betas at Sutton College, it seemed like trouble was always a possibility.

 

Chapter Twenty-­seven

T
HE
S
UTTON POLICE
station had always been a huge disappointment to me. On
Law & Order
, police stations are hubs of constant activity. There's always something going on in the background, like a bunch of cops consulting on a case file or bringing in a sweaty, inebriated, homeless person. The set is grim and dim, and you can almost smell the old coffee and stale body odor.

By contrast, here in Sutton, the station was clean and quiet. The building was probably built in the midseventies, but it was well lit and smelled like toner cartridges and floor wax. Like I said, disappointing. On top of all that, there was hardly ever anyone stationed at the front door. This bugged the bedazzled out of me. It was as if they thought criminals wouldn't just walk in and take advantage of all the fresh new toner cartridges, just stacked on top of that filing cabinet over there.

But since I had an appointment, Ty Hatfield stuck his head out into the waiting area, and I didn't have to ponder the annoying cleanliness any longer. I followed him back to his normal office, with piles of paper and files and no gruesome crime-­scene photographs or bloody knives in sight. “What did the murderer use?” I asked abruptly, realizing that it had never come up.

Ty looked taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“What killed Shannon Bender and Daria Cantrell?” I asked.

“Who said that one person did it?”

He put his hand out. I knew what he wanted. But he also knew how this worked.

“This is how we do it, Ty. We share information. I give you all our surveillance footage of the entire block plus the social-­media records of Daria Cantrell's locked accounts, and you share one teensy, eensy bit of information with me.”

“You could be a suspect.”

“That would be true, if I didn't have fifty Delta Betas who would swear that I was getting my toenails painted School Boy Blazer navy at the time of Shannon Bender's death by . . .” I let that hang out there, just in case he'd relent.

“And Delta Betas never lie,” he said with that tinge of sarcasm that always rubbed me the wrong way.

“Not fifty of them at the same time,” I answered smoothly.

“You could be a suspect in the Cantrell murder.”

“You know very well that I was incarcerated at the time.”

That threw him. “Incarcerated? Ah, Margot, I thought that was our special thing.”

So he found it not so much surprising as funny. Really. Whatever was I going to do with a man who thought my being locked up was hilarious?

I calmly informed him where I was during the time of the Cantrell murder. The side of his mouth hitched up. “Yeah, I heard. Sheila DeGrasse said you were her alibi.”

Yeah, I thought the fact that I was Sheila DeGrasse's anything was
just weird, too
.

He extended his hand again. “According to the county medical examiner, both Cantrell and Bender suffered head trauma. The weapon was a four-­to-­five-­inch-­long spike of some sort.”

I rubbed my head at the idea of a four-­inch-­long spike piercing my skull. “Really? That seems short. That's like the length of a coffee stirrer.” I held my fingers apart, easily imagining the length of a little green stick that I poked into my reusable cup every few hours. “Are you sure?”

Ty raised an eyebrow. “It's not just about length.”

I rolled my eyes. I'd heard that one before.

“There's also velocity, force of the thrust, technique . . .”

I held up my hand. “There's a
technique
to stabbing someone in the head?” Were there tutorials on YouTube, too?

“Sure.” Ty walked slowly around me, a predatory gleam in his eye that sent a shiver up my spine. “Like this.”

I felt a gentle pressure on the back of my neck as Ty's fingers pressed against my skin. “This would be a good place. It's tender, exposed. But you'd have to be hard and accurate.”

His hand slid up, messing up my hair, but I didn't care. Being touched felt good, even if it was just Ty demonstrating a murder technique. “Here is where the victims were stabbed.” He rubbed a little circle on my scalp, and another shiver went through me. “Death would be quick and fast, but the weapon would have to be very sharp to make it through the skull.”

“That's it?” My voice was breathy. “Wham bam, thank you, ma'am?”

Ty's arm slipped around my middle, pulling me back into him. “Someone could do this,” he said low into my ear. “What would you do, Margot? If someone grabbed you like this?”

Oh, Ty. He was always underestimating me.

I jerked my elbow back into his stomach, threw my foot back into his leg, and twirled out of his arms. “Then I'd kick him in the balls,” I said with confidence. Every Delta Beta took a self-­defense course in college.

Ty was doubled over, and for a moment, I was worried I had really hurt him even though I had mostly been pretending. Maybe I was just naturally an excellent fighter. “Ty?” I asked carefully. “Are you okay?” I stepped closer to him and reached out. His pride was definitely hurt. No man liked to be beaten by a woman and especially a tough police officer like him.

His hand whipped out, grabbed mine, and yanked me to him. His arms pinned mine down, I was pressed against his hard thighs, stomach, and chest, and when I looked up at him, the twinkle in his eyes told me he was enjoying this.

“Faker,” I accused him.

“It's called technique, Blythe.” Up close like this, his smirk was real pretty. I wanted to do something to wipe it off his face.

“I could take you down, Hatfield.”

The smirk disappeared, and Ty let go. “I'm sure you could.” He stepped away. “Now tell me, Margot . . . why did you ask me that about what killed Shannon and Daria?”

I went ahead and passed over the thumb drive. “There might be a connection between them.”

“Do I need to plug this in, or are you going to just tell me?”

Since the answer was buried among ten thousand hashtags, I decided to make it easy on him. “When Zoe was reviewing Daria Cantrell's Facebook page, she found that Daria had checked in to a location a week ago on campus.”

“And?”

“And Shannon Bender also checked in there. It was a conference room that Nick Holden had reserved for his round table on “Real Life Scream Queens of Sutton College.”

Ty's brow furrowed. “That's it? They were in the same room once?”

“With Nick Holden, a reporter who has been tweeting inflammatory things all week long and had the gall to tell me that sorority life was anachronistic.”

“Are you accusing him of something?”

I lifted my shoulders. “He's not being very nice.”

“Wait, let me get my handcuffs—­”

“I'm serious.”

“You're serious?” Ty unsnapped the holster on his hip. “I'll just go shoot him then and get it over with. Save everyone the time and trouble of arrests and trials and all that.”

I crossed my arms. “You asked me for help, and when I give it to you, you mock me.”

Ty's lips flipped up a bit. “Thank you. I appreciate the tip.” He weighed the thumb drive in his hand and shook his head. “I still can't believe—­”

“That the Delta Betas had the forethought to install security cameras around Greek Row?”

“Security. Yeah.”

That was my story, and I was sticking to it. Really, we should get an award or something. Sutton Panhellenic Crime-­Fighting Chapter of the Year. If we ever got off probation, I was sure that was going to happen.

I nodded at the drive in his hand. “If you need any help with that, I'm sure Zoe can help you out.”

“How many days have you had these cameras up?”

“Just since Sunday.”

“Anything interesting that you've noticed?” He held up a hand. “Besides mean boys giving you a hard time?”

I thought of Ginnifer and Von Douton's meeting. It looked really bad, but it wasn't the kind of thing Ty was looking for. “Just the usual. The stinky cheese and the blue lilies and the Internet hacking. From our feeds, we saw the Lambda sisters sneaking into the Tri Mu house to plant the cheese and the Moos waylaying the florist's truck to dye the Beta Gam lilies blue.”

“What about the ingenious plot to reverse-­filter the Lambdas' Internet router to only show porn?”

Of course he'd pay close attention to that one. “We're not sure; it was probably done remotely.”

“By a highly skilled Internet genius in the Delta Beta house?”

I gasped when I realized he meant Zoe. “No!” And made a mental note to ask her later.

“Anyway,” I said to get back on track, “I think I need to look at the Witness glasses' card again.”

He flipped on his computer screen, and, a few moments later, I saw what I'd thought I see. “There!” I pointed at the lilies in the background of the footage shot by Shannon Bender. “We thought those were irises, remember?”

“Sure we did,” Ty said. Typical male, pretending he knew anything about flowers.

“But that would be odd because clearly, from the clothes of everyone else in the frame, this was shot either in the winter or late fall. Look at the jeans and boots and the girl in the Patagonia jacket, here.” I pointed at the corner.

Ty squinted. “How did you—­That's just a black jacket.”

I didn't have time to explain everything to a man who couldn't distinguish Patagonia from North Face from a hundred feet away, and refrained from asking him how he got to be a police officer. “Irises don't bloom in January, and besides, she's clearly in a Lambda sorority house because of that needlepoint crest there on the wall, but it's not the one at Sutton because the Sutton Lambdas don't have green wallpaper in their music room, they have soft rose walls and—­”

“Blythe! Spit it out!”

“I'm trying to!” I took a deep breath. “Those aren't irises.” I nodded at the screen. “They're dyed lilies. Like the dyed lilies here.”

Comprehension began to dawn on Ty's face. “That's another chapter . . .”

“Where the same prank was pulled,” I confirmed.

“According to her parents, Shannon Bender graduated from Oregon at the end of the fall semester. They said she'd been home with them since then and just left to visit friends before she was going to find a temp job before grad school started.”

“We need to call the Lambda chapter at Oregon and find out if they were the victims of the lily dye job.”

“And then what?”

“We know Shannon Bender didn't orchestrate both because she was murdered before the lilies were dyed here.”

“So Shannon might have had a friend here who carried out the plans for the flowers?” Ty sounded like he couldn't believe he was having this conversation. And he wasn't getting the point, at all.

“We already know who dyed the Lambda lilies!” I reached for the thumb drive on the desk, the one I'd just given him. “We know the Moos did it! Shannon Bender was a Moo! She obviously came here to visit her Moo friends and help them with rush, and someone in that house killed her!”

“I just questioned the Moo—­I mean Tri Mu—­chapter yesterday. No one recognized Shannon Bender's picture.”

I pushed the drive back in his palm. “There. That's all the evidence you need to put the entire Tri Mu chapter behind bars.”

“Margot . . . I need more than some pictures of flowers to arrest sixty ­people.”

“Sixty?” I scoffed. “There's no way that chapter has more than forty-­five women. They haven't made quota in two years.”

“I interviewed sixty women yesterday.”

I quickly did the math. “Those ho-­bags have been illegally rushing! I am so reporting this to the Recruitment Council.” To pledge women outside the confines of formal recruitment was one of the biggest sins at a small Panhellenic like the one at Sutton. We had rules, gosh darn it. Lots of rules, all written to ensure everyone was on an even playing field.

“I thought you wanted them behind bars.”

“That, too,” I muttered.

Ty sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I never knew sorority rush was this dirty.”

No longer caring that I was speaking to a police officer, I let my anger get the better of me. “They are so going down.”

“You know, it's not an open-­and-­shut case. We're getting anonymous tips from everywhere about the murders.”

Something in his voice made me pause and give him all my attention. “Like what?”

“Like anonymous tips about sorority sisters being outside their house after curfew.”

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. “I tried waiting in the lobby, but no one came.”

It was Callie, dressed as I hadn't seen in her in days. Gone was her rush-­week work wear of fleeces, tees, and jeans. In their place was her usual Callie Campbell style—­slim wool trousers and a perfectly pressed oxford shirt with her mother's string of pearls at her throat and at her ears. Her perfectly curled hair and groomed eyebrows made me feel a little self-­conscious that I had run off to the police in my casual state. Delta Betas should always put some effort in, especially while meeting with law enforcement.

“What are you doing here, Callie?”

She looked between me and Ty. “I was called in for an interview?”

My hands went to my hips as I glared at Ty. “Did you think you were really going to get away with interviewing one of my girls without notifying me?”

“Hope springs eternal, Blythe.”