Truly, Madly, Deadly (17 page)

Sawyer’s heart thrummed with embarrassment. “Yep, got it. Thanks.”

The folders seemed to vibrate in Sawyer’s bag, and her fingers itched to pull them out and examine them, but she smiled graciously at the female officer, and walked slowly out of the police station. As if on cue, her cell phone began to chirp once Sawyer stepped into the parking lot. She looked at the digital readout and sighed.

“Dad,” she muttered to the empty car.

She hit the
ignore
button on the phone and slid it into her purse.

Sawyer got on the highway, guiding her car down the first exit. The trees that had looked so black and ominous the night of Maggie’s death looked cheery and welcoming now, and Sawyer’s little Accord zipped past, her heart seeming to speed up with every mile crossed. She pulled her car to a stop across the street from Maggie’s house and killed the engine, breathing in the silence.

Sawyer slid the file folders from her bag and found Maggie’s, running her fingertip over the handwritten marker—
Gaines, Maggie E.
She flipped the manila folder open quickly, her stomach clenching at the two side-by-side photographs clipped to the front cover of the folder. They were both of Maggie, her long hair brushed back from her forehead, her lips pursed. In the photograph on the left, her lips were a glossy, impish pink, the edges slightly turned up. Her eyes stared straight out, daring you to look away; they seemed to hold a world of mystery, of mischief. In the photograph to the left, the glossy pink on Maggie’s lip was replaced by a matte, unnatural blue. The edges that had so often turned up in a grin or a snarl were slack now, giving way to sallow-colored cheeks. Her eyes were open but the spark was gone, the mischief, the mystery faded. Her eyes stared at Sawyer, unseeing, milky white, dead.

Sawyer was surprised when a fat tear plopped on the file folder. She sniffed, willed her shaking fingers to turn the page. The autopsy report was clipped in next and read like the newspaper article—nothing Sawyer didn’t know—nothing she wanted to know.

Finally, she pushed open the car door and approached Maggie’s house. It stood quiet, the entire street desolate. Sawyer pushed her hands in her pocket, unsure of what she wanted to do. When she went to reach for the doorbell, she saw the upstairs curtain twitch, a snatch of blond hair. Her heartbeat sped up. She knocked.

Olivia opened the door a few inches, her red-rimmed eyes zeroing in on Sawyer. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry, Olivia, I know I’m probably the last person you want to see right now.”

Olivia swallowed hard and looked over her shoulder into the darkened house. She opened the door a small bit more and slid out. Sawyer was surprised at how small and frail the girl looked, even though only a few days had passed.

“I don’t want my mother to see you,” she said.

Sawyer nodded. “I understand.”

“I know you weren’t bullying her.” Olivia sunk down on the porch step, slipping her sweatshirt over her knees.

“Do you know if anyone else was?”

Olivia shook her head soundlessly, and Sawyer bit her bottom lip. “I need to get into Maggie’s room.”

Olivia’s eyes flashed, brows high. “Why? What do you want from her?”

Sawyer held up her hands placatingly. “Nothing. I don’t want anything from Maggie. We may not have been friends at the end but we were, once. We were best friends, remember? I want to help her.”

“No one can help my sister anymore. She’s dead.”

Sawyer closed her eyes, struck by the bitterness in Olivia’s voice. “I know. I want to find out who did this to her.”

Olivia looked over her shoulder again as if considering. “My mom took a pill. You have five minutes.”

Sawyer nodded and followed the girl into the house.

Maggie’s bedroom hadn’t changed much since she and Sawyer had been friends in elementary school. The walls were painted the same billowy pink, the bed was still spread with the lacy linens that Sawyer remembered walking her Barbies on and telling ghost stories under. The only difference was the posters and pictures tacked everywhere—Libby, Maggie and Kevin, cheerleaders, bands that Sawyer had never much cared for.

That, and the silence.

An overwhelming silence permeated the whole room, as if everything in there knew that Maggie wasn’t coming back.

Sawyer wasn’t sure what she was looking for and touched things gingerly—Maggie’s schoolbooks, her cheer uniform, the pompons discarded on the floor. When she turned and faced the closet, beads of sweat pricked out at her hairline.

She tried hard not to think of Maggie’s final moments and instead dropped to her knees, feeling around the closet floor. Her fingers closed around a woven bracelet, her heart speeding up as she brought it closer to examine it.

“Best friends,” Sawyer breathed. The words were embroidered into the thing, a bracelet that she and Maggie shared the summer they spent at camp. Like Maggie’s, her own was probably discarded somewhere in her closet.

“Time to leave,” Olivia said from the doorway.

Sawyer slid the bracelet into her jeans pocket and stood, passing Olivia as she left.

“Did you get what you came for?” Olivia wanted to know.

Sawyer just nodded, her emotions knotted in her throat.

When Sawyer got back to her car, she noticed she had missed another two calls from her father. She ignored them and put the car in gear.

Sawyer drove home on autopilot, was at the gates to Blackwood Hills Estates before she realized where she was going. She paused briefly to glance at a car just inside the gate. It was mud splattered and parked on a stretch of untouched earth that Sawyer’s dad assured her would one day be a community park. Sawyer blinked at the car, faint recognition glowing in the back of her mind. It was the same make as Cooper’s, but this one had a heavily dented passenger door that seemed to be slightly open. Sadness throbbed in her throat. There wasn’t much chance that Sawyer’s life would go back to normal now; not much chance that a nice guy like Cooper would be interested in a girl being chased by the police. She sighed and pressed on the gas, leaving the car—and thoughts about Cooper—behind.

The rain was falling in heavy sheets now, darkening the sky and giving the bare trees and vacant homes in the tract an ominous look. Sawyer zipped past them and parked in her own driveway, car skewed. The yawning living room was awash in shadows, and Sawyer turned on every light, clearing this morning’s paper from the kitchen table and laying out the file folders. On a steeling sigh, she pulled Kevin’s to the top of the pile and opened it.

Stapled to one cover was the coroner’s report. Sawyer winced, trying her best not to fixate on anything there—grisly descriptions of textbook body parts—body parts that had belonged to Kevin, that she had loved and caressed and brushed up against. Her fingertips brushed over the toxicology report, listing Kevin’s blood alcohol level 0.22. A heavy black X covered the box marked
legally
intoxicated
. Sawyer sighed, pinching her bottom lip and peeling open the envelope included in Kevin’s report.

Her stomach roiled, and she clamped her lips down hard as she spilled out the contents of the envelope. Full-color crime scene photos littered the top of the dining table, and Sawyer’s fingers fumbled as she worked to gather them up, stacking each horrid image one on top of the other. Her mouth filled with blood, but she kept her teeth gritted hard, her hands fisted as she forced herself to sift through each picture, taking in every putrid detail—the crushed, buckled metal of the broken car, the splinters of blood-edged glass staining the concrete. The first few shots were exterior, and Sawyer smelled the acrid smell of hot metal, the choking stench of blood on the night air. It stung her nostrils and she flipped, fingers shaking, to the next group of photos. These were interior, and Sawyer was blinking, the itch from her tears tracking over her cheeks. She remembered the soft feel of the ruined leather, the glint from the tiny crystal that hung from the rearview mirror. She remembered the night she gave it to him.

It
was
September, but summer still hung on the stillness of the night air, the long days being slowly chased away by tiny wisps of fall on the breeze.

“I got you something,” Sawyer said, a smile playing at the edges of her pink, glossed lips.

Kevin’s head lolled against the gray leather headrest and he grinned at her, eyebrows raised sexily. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

She
pulled
the
little
charm
from
her
pocket—a cut glass football that she had picked up at the Boardwalk—and dangled it between forefinger and thumb. The orb caught the yellow glow from the streetlight and broke it into a thousand tiny shards of rainbow-colored light.

Kevin’s fingers brushed against hers as he took the charm. Electricity, like the lights of the prism, broke through Sawyer in a thousand tiny, twittering vessels.

“Do you like it?” she breathed.

“It’s from you, isn’t it?” He hung it over his rearview mirror. “That means I love it.”

Sawyer
felt
a
cold
shiver
of
delight.

“Here,” Kevin said, shrugging out of his hoodie. “I don’t want my girl to get cold.” He slipped the well-worn sweatshirt over Sawyer’s bare shoulders and pulled her to him; she softened, fitting her curves against his angles.

“This is perfect,” she said, breathing deeply, letting the familiar cut-grass cologne scent of Kevin’s hoodie envelope her. “So, so perfect.”

She closed her eyes and could still smell Kevin, the fading scent of cologne on his hoodie. She pushed away the photographs and held her head in her hands, breathing deeply. The edge of a photo caught her eye.

Beer bottles. Crushed brown glass on the floor of Kevin’s car.

She thought of that night, the way the slick shards of moonlight glinted off his eyes, even though his face was mostly obscured by his hood. Sawyer remembered the way he pulled it up so only a few licks of his dark hair showed; she remembered the way the too-long sleeves curled over his knuckles. She remembered that he was wearing that black hoodie as she jogged away from him, the beer bottle sailing past her left ear.

And now that black hoodie was in the back of her car. Sawyer squinted, trying to remember. How had Kevin’s hoodie ended up in her car? It was lying in a crumpled heap half under one of the seats and she had dismissed it at the time, but now the thought nagged at her.

She flipped through the rest of the documents in the file, pausing briefly on her interview with Detective Biggs, her breath hitching in her throat when she saw the next interview form enclosed—
Haas, Logan.

It was dated a full month before Kevin’s death, and Sawyer squinted at the handwritten page, the photocopy imperfect, ink fading.

“Kevin bullied Logan,” she mumbled to herself, laying the paper down flat. “That wasn’t news.” Sawyer turned the paper over, noting that the attending officer was Stephen Haas.

She pushed Kevin’s file aside. It caught the corner of the stack, and the whole group flopped off the table, pages scattering and falling gracefully to the slate flooring. Sawyer leaned over to pick them up, snatching up first a handwritten incident report from Maggie’s file.

…attempted break-in the night before; authorities were called but no intruder was found on the premises…

…subject reported a run-in with a student at Hawthorne High School [Junior Sawyer Dodd] earlier that day. No follow up reported…

Another page floated down, landing delicately on the floor. Sawyer’s stomach lurched as she read the typewritten header—
SUBJ: Amendment to M. Gaines’ Autopsy Report and Statement.

Sawyer continued to read:

J. Hugh, M.E. Crescent County

It is my professional opinion that subject M. Gaines was asphyxiated with a belt (approximate 1” width) cinched around her neck. Assailant assaulted Gaines from behind; pre-mortem bruising indicates assailant aimed the cinched area downward either deliberately or due to a height discrepancy. Once subject was subdued, assailant pushed fabric “gag” down her throat (also pre-mortem). Bruising around the trachea is consistent with these findings.”

Sawyer shuddered and pushed the page aside with her foot, just enough to expose one line from the paper underneath:

First on the scene: Officer S. Haas.

Stephen was the responding officer every time.

Could
he…?

Sawyer’s mind started to race. She thought about Logan, slight, shy. His hands trembled when he asked her out. Was he her admirer? Was Stephen covering up for his little brother?

Sawyer shuddered, dumping the files in a hasty stack on the table, and jumped when the phone rang. She grabbed the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Sawyer, oh, thank God.”

Heat raced through her. “Oh, uh, hi, Dad.”

“I have been calling you for a half hour. Have you been home all this time? Do you know the police are looking for you?”

Sawyer considered hanging up the phone and running upstairs to her room, diving under the sweet-smelling covers on her bed. Instead, she started to shake. “I didn’t do anything, Dad. You know that, right?”

Andrew blew out a long sigh. “Your mother will be calling you soon. I don’t have her flight information yet.”

“Mom’s coming?”

“Sawyer, she’s an attorney. You’re in some pretty deep trouble here.”

Sawyer pinched her lips. “Is Tara with you?”

“No, that’s why I’m calling. She’s not answering her cell phone either. She barely made it to work before they sent her home.”

Sawyer looked around the still house. “I don’t think she’s here. Oh, wait. I see her purse. She didn’t say anything when I came in.”

“She’s probably asleep. Do me a favor, just check in on her—don’t disturb her, she needs her rest—but have her call me when she wakes up.”