Crash and Burn (8 page)

“Eventually,” she said. “I have a couple other ideas first.”

“Don’t jeopardize your relationship with Riley over this.”

“Over keeping you out of prison? Really? You want to go back?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“What did you want to tell me before?”

“Do you know what caliber gun was used?”

“No.”

“Can you find out?”

That lead ball in her stomach came back. “Isaac—spit it out.”

“I own a .357 revolver.”

“Shit.”

“It’s not legal. I can’t pass—”

“Don’t tell me anything else yet. Just—” Just
what?
Turn it over? Get rid of it? Lie?

“Promise me you won’t talk to Bishop without a lawyer.”

“I won’t.”

Scarlet hated feeling that she was on the wrong side of the law.

She’d better be able to prove that Isaac was innocent, or she was going to have to question every instinct she thought she had, and she feared she’d come up short.

Chapter Seven

It took Scarlet an hour to learn Valerie had been discharged from the hospital that morning and where she lived—a large, sprawling apartment complex near the campus that catered predominately to college students.

The police would have already taken Valerie’s statement, and there was no reason Scarlet couldn’t talk to her about the events last night.

She knocked on Valerie’s door. At first, there was no answer, but her car was in the carport, so Scarlet knocked again. And waited. She heard movement inside.

A full minute later, a hung-over Valerie came to the door. Her dark hair was stringy from being washed and then left to dry without brushing. Her face was splotchy from crying, and she wore over-sized clothes that were too warm for the ninety-plus-degree day. She had victim written all over her.

“Valerie? I’m Scarlet Moreno, a private investigator.” She held out her card. Valerie took it without looking.

“I’m really tired.”

“I won’t keep you long.”

Valerie sighed and walked away from the open door.

Scarlet entered and closed the door behind her. “Are you alone?”

“So?”

“You might want to have a friend with you today.”

Valerie collapsed on the couch as if she didn’t have any bones, resting her head on the back. The apartment was sparsely furnished, relatively tidy, with posters of the beach and baby animals all over the walls. Her lone floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was crammed with romance paperbacks and textbooks on marine biology.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

Common reaction. Scarlet pushed a stack of magazines aside—on odd mix of fashion and conservation—and sat on the unfinished oak coffee table directly across from Valerie. “I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do,” she began, “but there are a lot of people and groups who will do everything in their power to help you deal with all that has happened.”

She closed her eyes. “There was so much blood. It just spread all over the place. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Did you see what happened to Richie Sanders?”

She shook her head and finally focused on Scarlet. Her eyes were still bloodshot, but her pupils weren’t dilated or wild, and Scarlet though Valerie looked tired and hung-over, not under the influence of anything except emotional pain. “I don’t remember anything. I was upstairs. I think. Then I heard yelling and a gun went off. I came downstairs and saw him lying there, with all the blood.”

“Okay, that’s good.”

Her bottom lip quivered. “Good? What’s good about any of this?”

“I meant you’re doing good, talking about it.” Scarlet considered her options. Valerie had been traumatized, but her memory was fuzzy. She needed to be walked through what happened yesterday, because open-ended questions weren’t going to get them anywhere.

Scarlet knew the group of seven had come into the bar around six. She started there. “You and your friends came to the bar, Diego’s, about six yesterday, correct?”

She shrugged and hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “I guess.”

“Whose idea was it to go to the bar?”

She thought on that a minute. “Tessa and I went to the movies with Chase, Juan and Parker, then went to eat on the pier. Tessa and Parker are kind of going out. She really likes him, and he likes her, but they’d never been available at the same time.” She smiled, a genuine grin. “I hooked them up finally. I’ve been friends with them for so long, when they were both free, I made sure they knew it.” Then confusion replaced her expression. “Parker—” She stopped herself.

“Parker what?”

“You don’t think he could have hurt us, do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”

“I don’t remember anything. Not until I saw Richie lying there on the floor bleeding. He looked at me, but couldn’t talk.”

Scarlet had to get her away from that scene or she was going to lose Valerie. People who didn’t see violence up close and personal had a multitude of different reactions, and blocking it out was one. She didn’t want Valerie to lose whatever memories she still retained.

“What did you eat at the pier?”

“We split a bunch of appetizers. It was only five or so. Had a couple drinks. Then we decided to go bar hopping before heading to a party on the beach. Chase’s fraternity got a permit for it.” She frowned.

“What?”

“We never went to it. I don’t think so. Odd.”

“You went to Diego’s. The five of you?”

“No—Richie caught up with us with some guy I didn’t know.”

“When?”

“At that little margarita hut near the pier.”

Scarlet knew the place.

“It was crowded and we couldn’t get a table, and Chase said Diego’s had good drinks and wasn’t too crowded. I’d been there before with Chase to watch baseball games.”

“Is Chase your boyfriend?”

She shrugged. “We’ve gone out. But it’s not serious. We’re just friends.”

She wasn’t looking at Scarlet. Was she lying or confused?

“Do you remember the bartender at Diego’s, the broad-shouldered guy with tattoos on his arms, coming over to your table?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything.”

Scarlet needed to back track. “I was at the bar, and from my vantage point, it seemed Richie was hitting on you. How did you feel about that?”

“Richie knows I don’t like him. He’s been friends with Chase forever.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why Chase didn’t stop him from being a dick.”

Good question.

“Do you remember leaving Diego’s?”

“I don’t remember going there. Well—I do, but it’s… fuzzy.”

“Run me through it. There are no right or wrong answers.”

Valerie was trying, but she didn’t come up with much. “We’d been outside, so the place felt so dark. But it was cool and comfortable. Then Tessa said we had to go. She made Chase and Parker take us somewhere. Chase has a place nearby.” Her eyes widened. “Chase rents that house. With Richie, and a couple other guys who are never around. Where Richie was shot.”

That was new information to Scarlet. Bishop certainly hadn’t told her. Four college guys renting a house that cost upwards of five thousand a month? Where’d they get that kind of money? Family? Likely. She made a mental note to ask Mac to run financials on Richie and his friends.

“And do you remember what happened after you got to the house?”

“I don’t remember walking there. I don’t remember anything—until I heard the gunshot and ran downstairs and saw all that blood. I… I was naked. I hurt so bad, everywhere. I have no idea how I got naked or what happened. I think I screamed. I talked to someone. On my phone.” She put her hands on her head. “God, it hurts to think.”

“That’s okay, Valerie. Really.”

“The nurse said—she said I had sex. That I might have been raped because I have so many bruises on my legs and arms. But I don’t remember! And then they did all these things to me, at the hospital, and it was so humiliating. Why can’t I forget that, too?”

“Where does Tessa live? Do you know her last name?”

“Drake. She lives right upstairs. In three-forty, with her roommate, Mandy.”

“Valerie, think for me. Is there anything you remember from the time you left the bar until you saw Richie’s body? More than six hours passed.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Scarlet didn’t know if she was stopping tears or concentrating. “I think we went to the beach. I don’t remember it, but I found sand in my purse.” She looked down into her lap. “What if I killed him? I don’t remember it, but I could have.” She stared at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger.

“You didn’t kill him,” Scarlet said, though how could she be certain she hadn’t fired the gun? “Richie isn’t dead. He’s in surgery.”

If she was a suspect, Bishop wouldn’t be looking so hard at Isaac.

“Did you see a gun?”

“No. One of the cops told the detective who came by the hospital that they couldn’t find a gun. Maybe I got rid of it.”

“Did the police give you a GSR test?”

Valerie stared at her blankly.

“They probably put a pad on your hands that gunpowder is attracted to, in order to test in the lab.” There were field tests, but Scarlet was pretty certain Valerie had been taken to the hospital before the crime scene team had arrived.

“They did so many things to me—I really don’t think I shot him, but how can I know?”

“You woke up to the sound of a gun going off. You said you heard someone yelling. Did you recognize the voices?”

She shook her head and now the tears started. Scarlet didn’t handle tears as well she did calm victims. “That’s okay,” she said quickly.

“When I woke up—” She hesitated, then said, “I was naked. It wasn’t my bed. It was Chase’s. I can’t believe Chase would do that to me.”

No talk about the dead guy on the beach. “What was Chase wearing last night?”

“Wearing?” She shrugged, growing agitated. “A T-shirt.”

“What does he look like?”

“Brown hair. Cute.” She gestured toward a corkboard on the wall. “He’s in half those pictures. Like the one with me at Disneyland. I can’t believe he would hurt me like that. He’s always been so nice.”

Scarlet got up and looked at the picture. She didn’t think Chase was the dead guy on the beach, but she wasn’t one hundred percent positive. She saw a picture of Valerie, Chase, Tessa and another dark-haired boy who was at the bar. “Can I take this?”

“Sure.”

“Who’s this guy with Tessa and Chase?”

“Juan Robertson. He goes to Irvine with the rest of us.”

Juan looked far more like the John Doe on the beach than Chase.

“What’s Chase’s last name?”

“Flores. We started college together. Became friends.”

Scarlet was losing her again. She asked, “And Parker? Who’s he?”

“Parker Cresson. He’s a friend of Richie and Chase.”

“And the fifth guy, you said you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t—I think they called him Skip, but that was probably a nickname. I barely remember him at all.”

“Thank you.” Scarlet was going to leave, but then she walked to Valerie and sat back down on the table. “Valerie, just because you don’t remember what happened doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to forget. Not knowing creates its own set of problems. Take the advice of the nurses and talk to someone, either someone from the hospital, or at your campus. There are rape counselors there.”

“But what if I didn’t say no?”

“You were drugged, Valerie. They took away your voice. They took away your free will. The drugging itself is a crime. Having sex with you after drugging you is a crime, no matter what you said or did. Do you understand?”

Her eyes dampened, but she nodded.

“Is your family in the area?”

“My mom lives in Laguna Niguel.”

“Maybe you should stay with her for a while. Just to clear your head. Can you do that? Would she be okay?”

Valerie nodded. “I just don’t want to tell her.”

“I can call her for you if you want.”

“No. I need to—it’s just, she always told me to be careful. She always told me not to take drinks from people. But they were my friends, you know?”

“I understand, Valerie. And so will your mom. Call her. You’ll feel better if you have someone with you for a few days.”

Once Valerie agreed to call her family, Scarlet went upstairs to apartment 320, almost directly above Valerie’s. A girl answered, not Tessa.

“Mandy?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Tessa. Is she here?”

Mandy shook her head. “Hasn’t been here all night. Probably at her boyfriend’s place.”

“Her boyfriend is?”

“Who are you?”

Scarlet didn’t want to explain who she was. “A friend of Valerie’s.”

“I heard what happened.”

“You did?”

“Who hasn’t? Richie was shot and nearly killed and Valerie might have done it, but she has amnesia. That’s convenient, isn’t it? And the police arrested her, but then let her go.”

It took all of Scarlet’s willpower not to shake sense into the girl. Instead, she said, “Not exactly. I really need to talk to Tessa.”

“Parker lives in a townhouse over on Stanford, on the other side of campus.” She gave her an address and number. “His parents are loaded.”

Scarlet got into her Jeep again, and drove less than five minutes to Parker’s townhouse. It was in the center of another sprawling complex, this one a lot more upscale than the building Valerie lived in. Winding paths led to apartment boxes, as she thought of them—four apartments per box, two upstairs, two downstairs. Each had a patio or deck, surrounded by trees. Rather idyllic, considering they were mostly occupied by college students and people who worked at the university.

The townhouses all framed a man-made lake, each two stories with a private yard. Two units shared a common wall, and pathways separated each two-unit building. Definitely more expensive than the shit-hole apartment Scarlet lived in while going to the police academy.

Parker’s townhouse was on the far eastern end of the structure, but there was a road that circled the property and she parked by the row of mailboxes next to a jogging path. There were a lot of people out, even in the heat, and though she couldn’t see a swimming pool, the sounds of the splashing told her there was a community pool nearby.