Authors: Kylie Brant
Waking Evil 02 (17 page)
The lobby of the building seemed to echo with their footsteps as they made their way across it. Rollins nodded to the clerk manning the desk, who buzzed them through the door that would lead to the morgue.
“How long has it been since you’ve talked to your sister?” Ramsey inquired.
The flicker of guilt on the woman’s face didn’t go unnoticed. “About six months ago, I guess.”
Ramsey exchanged a look with Rollins. “Would you say the two of you were estranged?”
Sarah’s head came up sharply. “Of course not,” she snapped. “We’ve always been close. We . . . there was some stuff recently, but we’ll work through it. We will. Because I don’t think this is Cassie. You’ve identified the wrong person.”
“I hope that’s true, ma’am.” There was an unfamiliar tech awaiting them outside the morgue door. Ramsey took a moment to wonder where Don Wilson was before pressing Sarah, “What sort of problems were . . . are you having with your sister?”
There was another flicker on Sarah’s face, strengthening Ramsey’s earlier impression. “Oh . . . you know. Guy problems.”
She subsided then, because the tech was leading them to the wall of metal drawers. Pulling out the gurney holding the victim. Ramsey and Mark surreptitiously moved to flank the woman as the sheet was pulled back on the corpse.
Sarah Frost’s weak scream bounced off the walls and gleaming stainless steel tables in the room. Ramsey caught her in the next moment as the woman’s knees gave out.
“Cassie! Oh my God, Cassie!”
Rollins motioned to the tech to re-cover the victim as Ramsey turned the woman toward the door. She was sobbing now. Great wrenching bouts of weeping that racked her body. With an arm around Sarah’s shaking shoulders, Ramsey moved her down the hallway, to the lobby, where the clerk, with one swift look in their direction, disappeared into a back room to give them some privacy.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Sarah,” she murmured, her throat tight. She recognized the guilt in the woman’s devastation. The tragedy of loss always made survivors feel their flaws more deeply. Magnified each slight they might have dealt the victim. Reminded them of everything done or not done.
“It’s my fault.” Ramsey could barely make out the words, but she noted Rollins’s attention to them. “She wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for me. It’s all my fault.”
Guiding her to a bench in the lobby, Ramsey helped the woman sink into it before sitting beside her. Rollins stood next to them, his discomfort showing in his expression. It was clear he was fine with Ramsey taking over with the distraught woman.
“Why do you say that?” Tissues sat on a nearby table—probably for just this sort of occasion—so Ramsey snagged some and handed them to Sarah.
“Quinn . . . he was engaged to Cassie.” Her breath heaving, Sarah managed the words between sobs. “They were supposed to get married last year. But we . . . he and I . . . it was just so strong, y’know?” She raised swimming eyes to regard Ramsey imploringly. “We didn’t mean for it to happen. But it was like we were meant to be together. Cassie was so hurt. So . . . devastated.”
“So she broke the engagement?”
“Quinn did. We told her together. It was a pretty bad scene.” The woman’s face seemed to crumple again. “We all said some hurtful things. A couple weeks later she packed up and left town. I’ve only talked to her a few times since.” Rollins had pulled open his notebook and flipped it open.
“What’s Quinn’s last name?” Ramsey handed the whole box of tissue to the other woman.
“Sanders. He has a fitness gym in Memphis. That’s where we’re from.”
“How long ago did Cassie leave town?”
“April of last year. They were plannin’ to get married in May.”
“Has Quinn talked to Cassie since then that you know of?”
Sarah shook her head and blew her nose violently. Although her manner seemed calmer, the tears still flowed freely down her cheeks. “We thought it best for him to cut off all contact. And I tried to call her more frequently, but she didn’t often answer my calls.”
“What happened the last time the two of you spoke?” When the woman just looked at her, Ramsey expanded. “You said you hadn’t talked to her for six months. But sometime after the last conversation you had, it sounds like she quit her job and moved away. Did she say anything to let you know why?”
The tears seemed to flow faster. “I thought enough time had passed, y’know? That maybe she’d gotten over . . . everythin’. At first we had a real good talk, and it was almost like things were back to normal between us. But when I told her that Quinn and I were gettin’ married, she just hung up. And no matter how many times I called since, she wouldn’t answer.”
“Did she threaten to make trouble for the two of you?” There was a reason they always looked at family first in homicide cases. Strangling someone took a certain amount of passion. Emotions ran deepest with those who knew the victim.
“No, she would never do anythin’ like that.” Sarah blew her nose again, regarding Ramsey with bleary eyes. “Cassie wasn’t like that. She just got real quiet and then she hung up.”
“Sarah, we’re going to do everything we can to find your sister’s killer. I know you want to do what you can to help us.” Ramsey caught the warning in Rollins’s eyes, but it was unnecessary. She knew how to extricate the information she needed without shocking the interviewees into lawyering up. Waiting for the woman’s jerky nod, she went on. “We’re going to be talking to everyone who knew your sister and asking them the same questions I’m going to ask you. We want to build a picture of her last hours.”
The other woman took a fresh tissue and wiped at her mascara, smearing it worse beneath her eyes. “But none of my friends have talked to Cassie since she left.”
“She was last seen at three A.M. on June fifth. For our records, can you tell us where you were between the fifth and sixth of this month?”
The woman stopped wiping ineffectually at her ruined makeup and shot a sharp look at Ramsey. “What are you askin’? Are you suggestin’ that I . . .”
“I’m suggesting that you want to help us solve your sister’s murder,” Ramsey put in smoothly, cutting through the woman’s outrage. “We’ll ask everyone who knew her well the same question. We’ll check their stories. And when we find the person whose story doesn’t hold up, we’ll look closer. That’s how it’s done, Sarah.”
Her throat worked for a moment, and she glanced down at the hands she had tightly knotted in her lap. “Quinn and I . . . we were at our engagement party that weekend. A bunch of us booked a place on Pine Lake for a few days.” Her voice trailed off as if the thought just struck her. And Ramsey could read the abject misery in her expression. “Are you tellin’ me . . . that my sister was killed while we were celebratin’ our engagement?”
“Well, that’s karma coming back to bite you in the ass.” Glenn Matthews broke the silence that had stretched after Ramsey had relayed her earlier conversation with Frost to him and Warden Powell.
It was nearing ten o’clock. They’d returned to the motel only a couple hours earlier. After the scene at the ME’s office, Ramsey had driven to Kordoba to join the agents in interviewing locals about Cassie Frost, to a noticeable lack of success.
“I got a list of the other people attending the engagement party and compiled their names and addresses, as well as that of the operators of the resort Frost says they were at.” Ramsey batted Matthews’s hand out of the way as he moved to snag the last piece of pizza. She hadn’t eaten that day, and the agent had practically inhaled the whole thing himself.
“We’ll need to look at the ex-fiancé,” Powell put in. He was chomping morosely on a deli sandwich. “Husbands and boyfriends are always at the head of the list for a homicide like this.”
Ramsey nodded. But she was betting they were going to find that Quinn Sanders was tightly alibied for the time in question. Kordoba was across the state from Pine Lake. “That’s what Rollins said. But it doesn’t sound like Cassie had much to do with either Sanders or her sister after he called off their wedding. Of course, we don’t have her cell phone, so we can’t be sure. But it shouldn’t be much longer before we get the Local Usage Details for it.”
“Couple days,” Powell agreed. They’d put in a request the day before and had had no difficulty obtaining a judge’s signature for it. Wadding up the wrapper to his sandwich, he tossed it into the nearby trash. “What’s the latest on the test results your guy is runnin’?”
She finished chewing before answering, and moved her slice of pizza farther from Matthews’s reach. She didn’t like the avaricious look in the man’s eye. “Jonesy was able to tell that the substance in her stomach came from some sort of plant root. Plenty of people experiment with plant parts that give you a buzz. But whatever she digested didn’t show up in her blood under any of the tox screens that were run, so apparently it doesn’t act as a stimulant.”
Taking another bite, she chewed reflectively. “Might be worth it to pursue a line of questioning with local healers. When I was with TBI, I heard plenty of stories about people who claimed to heal all sorts of disease and illnesses with herbs and plants and stuff.”
“The autopsy report didn’t show any signs of disease,” Matthews pointed out.
“But people self diagnose all the time. Try holistic remedies for anything from headaches to menstrual cramps. If we can get a list of things used in the area by these people, we can get samples for Jonesy to compare to the stomach contents.” She thought of something else the scientist had mentioned. “He’s more specific than the ME was in his report about when the plant root was ingested. There are no signs of digestive acids mixed with the root. He believes it was eaten shortly before she was strangled. Maybe only minutes earlier.”
“Meanin’ she almost had to have been given it by her attacker.”
She finished off the pizza and wiped her fingers on a napkin, studying the wall postings that acted as a murder book of sorts. Their findings in the last twenty-four hours hadn’t been added yet. In the excitement of following up new leads, it was hard to take the time out to do the necessary information logging, but the task would have to be done to maintain a complete picture.
“People are buzzing about that suicide in town.” Matthews stood and stretched. “Lots of hogwash about the legend and deaths in threes and all that.”
“That’s all it is,” Powell said. He rose, as well. “Bunch of superstition. Just makes it harder for us to get answers from people in these parts.”
“I got a quick lesson on the origins of the legend today.” Ramsey got up and threw away the pizza box, then wiped off the table with a spare napkin. “Figured it always helps to know what sort of superstition you’re dealing with.”
“Who’d you get that from. Stryker?”
She glanced at Matthews. Didn’t like the sly look in his eye. “He was there,” she said coolly. “Lady at the Historical Museum gave us both a rundown on local lore. I had to leave early for the ME’s office when Frost showed up, though.”
“I’d have thought he could fill you in himself.” Matthews cut off as Powell announced he was going to bed and left the room. Resuming, he said, “In a roundabout way, he’s sort of linked to the last so-called red mist murder. Way I heard it, Stryker’s father went to prison for committing it.”
Chapter 9
“Your light was on.”
It wasn’t much of an excuse, Ramsey reflected uncomfortably, for knocking on someone’s door at eleven P.M. But the urgency she felt to talk to Devlin Stryker wouldn’t be assuaged.
And the irony of
that
was hard to ignore.
that
was hard to ignore.
If he was surprised to see her, it didn’t show in his expression. He regarded her somberly with one hand propped against the doorjamb. And she had the fleeting thought that he already knew what had brought her here.
“Light’s on because I’m still up.” He reached forward to push open the screen door, and with only a second’s hesitation, Ramsey walked into the house.
It wasn’t his. She would have known that even if she hadn’t been told as much when the man walking his dog down the street had directed her here. There was no stamp of Stryker’s personality in the worn leather furniture or the wildlife prints on the walls. But there were plenty of photos framing his famed grin. A computer on a desk in the corner of the dining room had notes and piles of books next to it. And a familiar looking heap of cases and tripods were stacked neatly on the floor a few feet away.
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