Bad things, p.5
Bad Things, page 5
“I hope she rots in that jail cell!” Marcia declared suddenly, vehemently.
“Diana’s in jail?”
“Well, she killed him, Kerry. Of course she’s in jail!”
“For possession?”
“She killed him! That’s why.”
Kerry knew it was way too early for that conclusion to have been reached. If Diana was being held in jail, it was likely for a different crime.
“She must’ve been taken in after I left . . .” Kerry murmured, running the scene at Diana’s apartment through her mind again. The police officer on the scene had most likely made that decision. Ben, Diana had said. She’d known him. And Cole had mentioned Officer Ben Youngston.
“I hope she doesn’t get out on some technicality,” Marcia said. “That’s how these things go way too often.”
“We don’t know that Nick’s death was anything but a terrible accident.”
“Oh, yes, we do, and so do the police. When someone dies of an overdose whoever they’re with is tested, and if they’re a user, they get arrested, thank God. It’s time people take responsibility. And believe me, I’m going to be there on Diana’s day in court to make sure she gets what’s coming to her.”
“Was it Officer Youngston who took Diana to jail?”
“How would I know? You’re the one who was at the morgue ... with Jerry,” she reminded her.
“At the hospital, not the police station.”
She shrugged and turned back to the file, lazily flipping a page.
“Do you mind?” Kerry asked coolly.
“Why do you have Jerry’s will?”
“I told you. He gave it to me.”
“Yeah, but why now? Because Nick’s gone?”
“I guess.”
Kerry so wanted to tell her to put down the will, but she felt too raw for the argument that was bound to occur. Nick had married Marcia for a lot of reasons, like the fact she was beautiful, capable, and smart. And once upon a time she’d been more full of joy than the emotional cripple she’d since become. In one of their few moments of confidence, Marcia had told Kerry it was all Nick’s fault that things had fallen apart, that he was the one whose attitude had nosedived. She wasn’t completely wrong; Kerry, only seeing her stepbrother sporadically, had noticed the decline in his happiness over the years as well. But whereas Marcia blamed it on Nick, Kerry had sort of felt it was Marcia’s fault. She’d been this engaging, energized person while she and Nick were dating, but that had dissipated pretty fast after the wedding. Maybe it had all been an act to snag a husband, and once they were married her true self emerged. Maybe the A-Team knew more; they’d gone to school with her.
Marcia flipped to the asset page, and Kerry held her breath. It took her a couple of long moments, then she expelled in horror: “You’re Jerry’s heir after Nick?”
“As I said, Jerry just gave it to me, and I—”
Marcia cut in, “You’re not even his real daughter!”
That brought a surge of heat to her cheeks. “I didn’t ask for it, Marcia, okay? He just handed it to me. This morning. I think he was feeling vulnerable and wanted me to have it. It’s been set up this way for years.”
She was on her feet. “Well, I’m sure as hell going to talk to him about that, you can be sure.”
You do that.
Now tears rained down Marcia’s face. “Nick’s gone and all you can think about is money!”
“Are you kidding me?” Kerry demanded. “All I want is Nick back. Here. Right now. Right here. Alive and well, and I don’t give a goddamn, flying fu—”
She cut herself off, an image of Nick waggling his finger in front of her face, saying, “Ah, ah, ah,” whenever her blue streak of swearing entered the “danger zone.” The thought of her stepbrother squeezed her heart. It was too much. She sank onto the couch and buried her face in her hands. Unlike Marcia, she was cried out. She just sat there, chest heaving.
Several moments later she heard Marcia get to her feet and walk toward the door, hesitating. “Maybe I should leave,” she said stiffly.
Kerry nodded.
Another pause, as if Marcia wanted to say something further, but Kerry kept her hands at her face, willing Nick’s ex to leave. A moment later she did just that. Kerry heard the door slam behind her.
Immediately, she jumped up, twisted the deadlock, and pulled the chain across. Then she sank down on the couch again, only to leap back up, swearing anew as she glanced at the clock in the kitchen. Grabbing her purse, she headed to the back door, then did a quick about-face to stop at the mirror in the front entry alcove. She needed makeup. And a hair comb. And the hours of lost sleep before she saw Cole.
She wasn’t going to get any of them.
Slamming the door behind her, she headed out the door to the police station and Cole Sheffield.
Chapter Four
The sound of sobbing from one of the three jail cells inside the Edwards Bay police station could be heard throughout the building as Cole used his key fob to enter the back door and then strode down the hallway toward the central room that held a number of desks and computer monitors. Ben Youngston was talking with Charlene “Charlie” Paige, flirting actually, and that made Cole, already tense over Nick Radnor’s overdose and death, nearly lose his cool.
“Release Diana Conger,” Cole told Youngston. He hadn’t known she’d been arrested until he was at the morgue with Nick’s father. That information had been kept from him deliberately, while Youngston handled the case. Only around seven, when he’d been shaving, had his cell phone buzzed and he’d been alerted to Nick Radnor’s death. Hours later ... hours when he’d been sleeping with no one calling . . . hours when decisions had been made that wouldn’t have been had he been alerted.
This was the insubordination he dealt with. Nothing overt. His officers just seemed to have a general feeling that Cole wasn’t the right man for the job of chief of police, that he hadn’t deserved it, and they therefore didn’t have to abide by the rules as tightly as they might.
Ben slowly straightened from where he’d been slouched against the counter. He was wearing his uniform, which had already seen some rough use; Cole could see the stain on the side of his shirt.
“You need to change,” Cole said, knowing Youngston kept another uniform in his locker. Charlie did, too.
A flash of resentment crossed Youngston’s face. He and Cole were close in age and had both graduated from Edwards Bay High, but Cole had recently taken the job as chief of police, which didn’t sit well with his fellow alum.
“Conger likely killed him,” Youngston said. “She’s definitely on drugs. Puked up some on me. I gave her a Breathalyzer, and she was over the limit. Need to test her for other drugs.”
“Let her go.”
Cole’s order brought Charlie’s sharp green eyes darting his way. She glanced at Ben, then back to Cole. She was also an Edwards Bay grad, a number of years younger than both Ben and Cole. Though Edwards Bay High was small, Cole hadn’t really known Ben by much, other than his name, and Charlie had been a complete stranger when Cole took over as chief.
The tips of Ben Youngston’s ears grew red. Cole could just imagine the kind of comments that were running across the screen of the officer’s mind. Cole had finished college in law enforcement and gone on to Seattle PD. When the job of chief of police came up in the sleepy town where they’d both grown up, Cole had landed the job ahead of both Ben and Charlie, to both of their chagrin. They’d felt they’d been overlooked. They both seemed to feel the fact that they’d stuck around should supersede Cole’s years of experience with a much larger police department. He’d left; they’d stayed. Experience didn’t matter. Loyalty did. So when old Art Beckham finally retired they’d expected one of them to be appointed chief. The Edwards Bay mayor had had other ideas, and Cole had won the job.
Youngston opened his mouth to protest, but Cole cut him off. “She wasn’t driving. You don’t know that any crime was committed. She could sue the department for wrongful arrest.”
“She came willingly!”
Cole didn’t respond, but his hard expression said he didn’t believe that.
Youngston nodded a brisk assent and stalked down the parallel hall to the one Cole had just entered and toward the jail cells. Charlie didn’t lift her gaze as she returned to one of the central desks, pulling out the chair with a little more gusto than necessary. Cole waited until Youngston returned with a dark-haired, disheveled woman who wore a pair of tight jeans and a sweatshirt and sandals. At least Youngston hadn’t taken her shoes before she was locked in the holding cell, Cole thought. Ben handed Diana Conger her belongings: a small purse, a wallet, and keys.
Cole had only learned of her incarceration when he was at the morgue with Nick’s father and Kerry Monaghan, as he’d gone straight there upon being belatedly alerted to the tragedy. His officers hadn’t exactly gone against protocol. Not a lot of serious crime happened in Edwards Bay and there was a certain amount of leeway and general expectation that nothing seriously bad happened here. At least that was the sense Cole got when he’d taken over. But Nick Radnor was someone they all knew, or at least knew of. He was one of Edwards Bay’s golden sons, having left for Silicon Valley and made it in the tech world. His ex-wife, Marcia, another Edwards Bay High graduate, had returned home after the divorce with all sorts of stories about Nick’s success, though she’d apparently received only a stipend of his apparently enormous wealth because of the prenup in place.
And Nick had been coming back more recently, followed by rumors that he’d sold out, burned out, or dropped out, though his residence was still listed as Palo Alto.
Cole hadn’t paid a ton of attention to what was up with Nick. He was, after all, Kerry’s stepbrother, and Cole had made a point to distance himself from both of them rather than stir up old memories. Now, however, he needed to know everything.
“I’ll drive you home,” Cole told Diana.
“I’ll drive her,” Ben put in quickly, somewhat alarmed. He might not like Cole being his boss, but neither did he want to have any reason for Cole to upbraid him on his duty. He was that guy.
“Thank you,” Diana said, looking gratefully at Cole.
She was a mess. Her face was splotchy and wet and her nose was running.
Charlie spoke up. “I’m going to be driving by Diana’s place, so let me do it. I’m taking Mrs. Wrong’s keys to her.” Hearing herself, she flushed and amended, “Mrs. Wright’s.”
One of Edwards Bay’s colorful inhabitants, Cecily Wright was intermittently dotty, with occasionally erratic driving. Her son, Adam, took her keys away from her on a regular basis and even went so far as to have her license revoked. But Cecily marched right back down and passed the drivers’ test again. She even had herself checked out by her doctor. She could be so remarkably “on” that it was difficult to ascribe her behavior to dementia, so now they were in a period where Adam took the keys from her and dropped them at the station. He wanted somebody to take responsibility for her other than himself. When Cecily couldn’t find her keys she would call Adam, and he would say he didn’t know where they were. Next, she would call the police and either Uber or Lyft her way down to pick them up, or the officers would take them back to her.
The officers joked that she was Mrs. Wrong, or sometimes Mrs. Wrong Way. Since her license had been reinstated, she hadn’t had an infraction, but they all knew she was an accident waiting to happen.
Diana gave Charlie a long look. Charlie was young, slim, and seemed to believe people would think she was tough and capable if she put a hard lock on her personality. The look Charlie sent back said not to test her.
“Hand me Mrs. Wright’s keys,” Cole said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I’ll be heading out unless you want to pay overtime,” Ben said sulkily.
Cole shook his head. Their budget didn’t stretch that far, and Ben was the officer who’d been on call and therefore had shown up at Diana Conger’s apartment.
Charlie handed over a set of keys attached to a matted, fuzzy yellow puff with a happy face on it. He then walked ahead of Diana to the back door, holding it open for her, so that she stepped into the gray, overcast day ahead of him.
She was silent in his Jeep, then said, “Thank you” as she climbed out in front of her apartment building.
He walked her up the stairs to her door, waiting until she’d unlocked it and let herself inside. Once across her threshold, she said tearfully, “I would never hurt Nick or anybody.”
Cole thought about his initial talk with the coroner before he’d met with Jerry Radnor and Kerry at the morgue. “There’s a needle mark on the man’s right arm,” the gruff, older man had said. Cole had filed that away, wondering if they were all wrong about Nick, that he was a user. That didn’t jibe with what he’d heard, but sometimes what was heard and what was the truth were two very different things.
“You take care,” he told Diana.
“We were just having fun.” She gazed at him earnestly.
“There will be an autopsy.”
She’d willingly allowed the Breathalyzer, but that meant nothing because she hadn’t been operating a vehicle, so Cole wasn’t certain what Ben was trying to prove.
Now she hesitated, looked concerned.
“Was there something you wanted to say?” he asked.
“Nick wasn’t . . . this wasn’t . . . he was just so unhappy, y’know? I wanted him to feel better. He wanted to feel better.”
“What did you do?” Cole asked carefully, sensing some kind of confession forthcoming.
“Nothing. Nothing!” She backed off right away. “We were just at the Blarney Stone and he was talking to me and I could tell he was really miserable. I think that’s why we . . . ended up together at my place . . . for companionship.”
She sounded like she was making it up as she went along, testing it out. Cole waited, but she just shrugged, shook her head, and said, “That’s all I remember.”
Cole nodded at her as she closed her door, then he retraced his steps to the police-issue Jeep. He next drove to Cecily Wright’s rambling old white house on the crest of the main hill that faced the Sound. It was very close to Gerald Radnor’s address. In fact, a number of the homes along this ridge were the ones the parents of some of Nick’s classmates, the ones he’d met with the night before, still lived in. Cole, being a few years older, only knew of them. He could remember the football fathers forming a club of sorts and cheering on their sons. It had been a loose group that spent a lot of time bragging, according to Cole’s own father, who’d moved to Arizona after first Cole’s mother’s death from surgical complications and then Cole’s brother’s death while on active duty in Afghanistan. His father had since married and divorced one woman and was now dating another one.
Cole knew, as probably his father did as well, that we all made peace with unthinkable tragedy in our own way.
Mrs. Wright was just coming down her front steps, a flight of concrete stairs cut into the mounded grassy slope that led to her wraparound porch. An Uber driver was waiting for her. Cole pulled up behind the driver’s Prius, got out, and said to the henna-haired woman in the flowing blue caftan coming toward him, “Mrs. Wright, I have your keys.”
“What?” She stopped, holding fast to the metal rail that ran down one side of the steps.
“I have your car keys. I’m Cole Sheffield from the police department.”
“You the new chief?”
“Semi-new,” he said. They’d met several times, though this was the first time he’d been the one to bring back her keys.
“Someone keeps stealing my keys. I think it’s my son.”
He held up the yellow fuzz ball. “Let me bring them to you.”
“You can go away!” she called to the Uber driver, waving one arm at him.
Cole walked to the driver’s window. The man rolled it down and gazed at Cole with a frown. “What’s going on?”
“I brought Mrs. Wright her keys, which is why she called for Uber.”
“She doesn’t need the ride?”
“Not anymore.”
“Cole Sheffield,” the man said in sudden recognition.
It took Cole a moment longer to recognize the bearded man behind the wheel. “Lawrence Caufield?”
“Sure thing. I heard you were back. Hey, God. Is it true what I heard? Nick Radnor overdosed last night?”
The heavy stone pressing down on Cole’s own chest over Nick’s death, a weight he’d managed to ignore somewhat while he’d been dealing with Diana, Ben, Charlie, and Mrs. Wright, suddenly felt heavier.
“Chief! Chief!” Cecily motioned from her perch on the steps, clearly wanting him to come to her with the keys.
“Heard he died at Diana Conger’s apartment. Is that true?” Lawrence asked.
“I’ve got to deliver these,” Cole said, pulling away from the driver’s window.
“She’s going to have to pay for the cancellation, you know. She called me here.”
“Okay.”
He left the Prius and took the stairs two at a time until he reached the older woman, who was about halfway down the twenty-some steps and stopped at a small landing. Cecily turned around and headed back up the steps, surprisingly spry, and Cole had no choice but to follow. At her front door, she stopped and turned around to accept the fuzzy ball that held her keys. “He’s trying to make it out that I’m losing it,” she said in a whisper, as if afraid someone might hear them. “He wants my money. Thinks it’s his already. He’s gaslighting me, Chief. Thought you should know.”
“You mean Adam?”
Cecily waved a dismissive hand. “Conrad was a son of a bitch. Doesn’t hurt my feelings. Everyone said so. Wanted Adam to be on the team, but Adam liked tennis.”
Cole tried to make sense of her non sequitur but gave up. There were too many more pressing issues. “You be careful out on the road,” he told her, heading down the steep steps.
