Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 03 - Saving Sasha Brown Read online

  Carrie scooted to the edge of the couch and leaned her elbows on her knees. All that red hair flowed over her shoulders in winding curls and waves. I didn’t know much about the trio’s relationship dynamic, but if I were young again, I’d say Holden made the wrong choice. Of course, I had a secret obsession with redheads. (So much for that secret, huh?)

  Carrie said, “There’s no connection.”

  It seemed a strange coincidence that her father went missing and three days later, she’s found dead in the snow. But I still didn’t have a lot of information. Hell, cause of death for Sasha hadn’t even been released yet. If the local reporters didn’t squeeze this info from the police soon, I might have to give Palmer a call and draw it out of him myself.

  I stroked my chin like a kung fu master contemplating the worth of a student’s skills. I’d actually been watching a lot of old kung fu movies lately, so I had the gesture down pat. Don’t judge. After working as a private eye and running a karaoke bar, there isn’t much left for a wealthy bachelor to do.

  I drew back my focus to include the entire trio. “Do you guys know anything about what happened to Sasha?”

  Holden opened his mouth, but Carrie jumped in first with a single, declarative, “No.”

  Holden clammed up and looked down at his knees. I saw his grip get a little tighter on Rachel’s hand. Rachel squeezed back.

  I looked from their clenched hands to Carrie’s eyes which I could tell were focused on a point over my left shoulder, but not really on me.

  “You guys do realize I’m a private detective, right?”

  Carrie wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad. “Of course.”

  The other two nodded, gazes still downcast.

  “A big part of my job is noticing little things. Like tells.”

  Holden looked up, genuine light in his eyes. “Like playing poker.”

  Rachel hunched her shoulders, turtling her neck in between them. “Holden, you can’t gamble.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t watch it on TV,” he said. He asked me, “Ever watch the World Series of Poker on TV?”

  “I don’t watch a lot of TV,” I answered, but my attention was on the now blushing Rachel. She blushed so hard the color went down her scrunched up neck. “What’s wrong with gambling?”

  “It’s a sin,” Carrie cut in.

  “I see. Are you guys Mormons?”

  Holden made a face and a disgusted sound. “No. We’re members of CYAN.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about the color. “What’s that stand for?”

  He lifted his chin and his back when straight for the first time since he’d come into my office. “Christian Youth for an American Nation.”

  Rachel nodded, got a little stiffness to her spine as well. “It’s sort of like a church youth group, only it doesn’t belong to a particular church. Young men and women from all over are welcome to join, as long as they’re dedicated to Christ and how his teachings can make ours a better nation.”

  Sounded swell. Sounded exactly like not my kind of thing. I tried not to judge them, though. Everybody had their quirks and beliefs. One of mine was that I didn’t believe in much of anything. Live and let live.

  “You guys have a meeting this morning?”

  Rachel nodded with vigor. “Every Sunday. We hold them late morning, so everyone can go to church first, then meet up at the Hawthorne Rec Center.”

  Oh, goody. My tax dollars paid for the building where a bunch of nutty religious kids met up every Sunday.

  Easy now. What happened to live and let live?

  I decided the best thing was to get back on track. “I was talking about tells.”

  All three of them nodded. Holden and Rachel continued to hold hands, but talking about their special group had perked them up a bit, too. Their gazes stayed up and on me. Holden even had a sprouting smile.

  “A bit ago, I asked you a question. I asked if you knew anything about Sasha’s death. Carrie answered for all three of you. Not one of you could look me in the eye. And you two,” I swung a pointing finger between Holden and Rachel, “nearly broke each other’s knuckles holding hands so hard.”

  As if I’d flicked a switch, all three of their gazes dropped. Carrie studied the floor. Holden had his eyes on my desk. Rachel turned her gaze to Holden’s and her hands twined together.

  The central room to the building’s upstairs, my office, was well insulated and, as an inner room, had no windows. It made for a thick silence. At that moment I couldn’t hear a thing but the sound of this odd trio breathing. Holden sounded a little congested.

  I also noticed a lack of any perfumes or colognes on the trio. Only a whiff of body odor as if they’d recently left a locker room. I wondered if deodorant was also a sin. Then I remembered that they’d been drinking the night before while Sasha went up and did her song. I couldn’t imagine liquor being any less of a sin than poker. But I let it go. None of my business.

  “Again with the tells,” I said, though I didn’t need to. They knew they were caught in a lie. I stayed quiet and let them simmer in the silence.

  “Last night,” Rachel said. “Sasha—”

  Carrie cut her off. “Don’t, Rachel.”

  Rachel turned in her seat to look at Carrie. “We’re trying to hire him. Shouldn’t we tell him what we know?”

  “What happened to Sasha had nothing to do with her dad.”

  I butted in. “How do you know that?”

  Carrie threw me a fierce glare. “Because he’s been gone. He wasn’t even around.”

  “As far as you know,” I said. “Just because he’s missing, doesn’t mean he can’t be close by.”

  “You’re making it sound like he killed her.”

  “I’m not making it sound like anything. I don’t have enough pieces to even form an opinion. But the fact remains, her father disappeared three days ago and Sasha ends up dead sometime between yesterday and this morning…” I threw my hands up. “Coincidences make me skeptical. I’m skeptical by nature.”

  “Well, he couldn’t have had anything to do with it, because Sasha killed herself.”

  Chapter 3

  Carrie covered her face with her hands and wept softly.

  Rachel and Holden lost their firm grip on each other. They drew their hands in like hauling up anchors. Holden rubbed his hands together. Rachel sat on hers as if she were afraid what they might do unleashed.

  I cleared my throat. “How do you know?”

  Carrie wiped her face. Aside from the redness around her eyes and the blush to her cheeks, no makeup smeared along with the tears. That clued me in that neither of the girls wore any makeup. A fashion choice? Or another sin?

  “After I got home last night,” Carrie continued, “she sent me an email. It was a video she made on her webcam. In it she said something about a terrible sin she couldn’t live with. It was too hard. She said she loved us like family.” She gestured in a circular motion. “She meant the three us. Then she said she was sorry she couldn’t be with Christ, but she had to end it.”

  Carrie covered her face again. But I waited in case she or one of the others wanted to add anything.

  Just silence.

  “Have you all seen this?”

  Nods.

  “Did you hand it over to police?”

  More nods.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Oddball religious kids or not, I felt damn sorry for them. “Do you know what she was talking about when she said she couldn’t wait anymore?”

  All three of them shook their heads.

  Carrie shrugged. “I guess she could have meant waiting for her dad to come back.”

  And here we came, full circle. “So why do you three want me to find him?”

  “He needs to know,” Carrie said, “that his daughter committed the ultimate sin, and that it was his fault.”

  “How was it his fault?”

  “Because he ran off when she needed him most.”

  “So you
lied when you said this has nothing to do with Sasha.”

  Carrie dropped her hands into her lap. She gathered the nerve to look me in the eye. Her face was flushed, the color highlighting her freckles. “You didn’t need to know that part, not for tracking him down.”

  I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the three of them. “Listen, most of the work I do, I don’t need to do. I don’t need to make a living. I’m set up fine. Google me and you’ll see why.”

  Holden pulled his phone out of his back pocket and started tapping at the screen with his thumbs. I watched as he found me and started reading. His eyebrows went up. His mouth opened. “I know some of those songs,” he said. He must have read something about my parents. They had written a number of songs that famous pop stars went on and made famous. That’s why they were so stinking rich when they died, and why I was so stinking rich after inheriting it all.

  Rachel gave him a playful jab with her elbow and took his phone. She read a little and her eyes turned big. “Whoa.” She twisted in her seat. “Carrie, you should see this.”

  Carrie crossed her arms and kept her eyes locked on me. “I already looked him up.”

  And here I had expected the one from the back seat, the girl who took the couch in the corner, would be the passive bystander of the group. I had pegged her way wrong.

  “My point in showing that to you was so you know where I come from. Not to brag or anything.” I thumped my fingertip down on the surface of my desk a couple times. “I do this job because it means something to me. It fulfills some…I don’t know. My point is, I don’t need cases. I can take my pick. So when clients…or potential clients…aren’t straight with me, their case gets kicked right out the door.”

  I could see the thinking going on behind Carrie’s eyes. Her mouth formed a line. Her red eyebrows drew close.

  Both Holden and Rachel pivoted in their seats to look at Carrie, waiting for her lead.

  Carrie unfolded her arms and nodded. “I’m sorry. We should have been more straightforward.”

  “It’s a tough situation,” I said. “Have you or your parents spoken much with the police yet regarding Sasha.”

  Carrie shook her head. “Not us. But I know they’ve spent a lot of time with Sasha’s mom and her little brother.”

  Damn. A little brother? First his dad abandons him. Then his big sister. What a clusterfuck.

  I took a deep breath to keep my voice steady. “What about cause of death? Do you guys know that?”

  “No,” all three of them said as if a chorus.

  “What does this have to do with her dad?” Carrie asked.

  Good question, too. For some reason my mind kept getting drawn back to Sasha. She had made quite an impression on me with her signing and my mind didn’t want to let her go. If I got honest with myself, I could say I was almost disappointed that they didn’t want me to investigate her death.

  But they hadn’t. Which meant focusing on the dad.

  I ignored Carrie’s question and simply got relevant. “What’s the father’s name?”

  “Peter,” Carrie answered. “Peter John Brown.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You know his middle name?”

  “I did my research.”

  “What else do you know about him? Any of you.”

  Holden shrugged slowly. Rachel cocked her head and made a hesitant sound.

  Carrie gave me the details. “DOB is March third, nineteen sixty-five. He weights around two-twenty, probably about six-feet tall. He smokes Camels, the ones without the filters. Dark hair, normally parted on the left side. He uses Vitalis hair tonic to style it. I have a picture of him on my phone I can email you. I don’t have his social or driver’s license number, though.”

  Another inch and my jaw would have hit my desk. At least that’s how it felt. I didn’t even have a notebook out. I pulled open the top drawer and withdrew a fresh pocket-sized notebook and a pen. I suppose I could have used my phone to make notes—I’m sure some PIs did—but I liked to scribble on paper with ink. Pixels were too easy to lose.

  I wrote down in my own shorthand what she’d already given me. When I came to the part about the Camels, I looked up. “Smoking’s not a sin?”

  “Oh, it’s a sin all right.” She curled her lip. “The body is a temple, but Mr. Brown isn’t much of a church-goer.”

  Made sense. I felt certain abandoning your wife and two kids also sat somewhere on CYAN’s list of sins.

  That made me think of the drinks at the bar again. It shouldn’t have mattered. Was really none of my business. Then again, details mattered. If all three of these kids chose the night before Sasha’s suicide to break a cardinal rule, there could be some connection to… And there I went, thinking Sasha was my case again.

  I forced myself to forget about the drinks and focus on the case. The real case.

  I finished my notes and looked up from the pad. “Anything else you can think of I should know about Mr. Brown?”

  The three of them exchanged glances, then shook their heads.

  “You have no idea why he left? Is it remotely possible he didn’t leave of his own volition?”

  Rachel scrunched up her face. “You mean, like, someone kidnapped him?”

  “Huh,” Holden said. “Never thought about that.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” Holden said.

  Carrie made an unconvinced face. “Anything is possible, especially in the Lord’s hands. But Mr. Brown left on his own. No doubt.”

  I clicked my pen and held the tip ready on the notebook. “Why no doubt?”

  “Sasha would talk to me about things going on at home. Her parents were having trouble.”

  Holden drew back. “She never said anything to me.”

  “Or me,” Rachel added.

  Carrie shrugged as if the reason was obvious. “You guys aren’t the most…discreet.”

  At first, the couple looked insulted. Carrie stared at them until their indignation collapsed under their own thoughts. You could see in their posture and eyes that they knew Carrie was right and there was no point trying to deny it.

  I made a brief note, then asked, “What kind of trouble are we talking about here?”

  “Lots of fights. Shouting. And one time Mrs. Brown went after Mr. Brown with a kitchen knife. Almost killed him.”

  Chapter 4

  I asked her to explain that one real quick.

  She blushed, as if embarrassed by the story and that she had some part in it. She didn’t. But the players in this drama should have been ashamed of themselves.

  According to Carrie, who got the story from Sasha—third-hand stories aren’t the most reliable—Mr. and Mrs. Brown had had another row about his drinking problem. Apparently, Mr. Brown, a line worker for the Ford factory just beyond Hawthorne’s southern border, would come home at night and polish off a twelve pack of canned beer while watching Saturday Night Live reruns on the DVR. He would also smoke his Camels until the haze in the room made it impossible for non-smokers without a gas mask to breathe.

  Mrs. Brown had said on occasion that the only reason Mr. Brown smoked so much was to keep people away from him.

  On this particular evening, he was doing a pretty good job of it. But apparently, Mrs. Brown had invited some friends from church over for supper. Pete Brown, however, hated his wife’s church friends, and so he camped himself in the living room with an ashtray and a twelve-pack, and had the living room nice and smoky by the time company arrived.

  Pete actually refused to sit at the table with them. He collected a plate and took it back to the living room to eat, drink, and smoke while chuckling at his SNL reruns.

  Needless to say, when Mrs. Brown bid her friends farewell, she went to the only thing that kept her calm besides prayer. She started making a rhubarb pie.

  With his wife’s friends finally gone, Pete came out of the smoke-filled room to scrape his plate into the trash and set it in the dishwasher. He came upon hi
s wife vigorously chopping rhubarb.

  “You go at that rhubarb any harder,” Pete said, “you’ll likely take off a finger.”

  Debra Brown spun on him, knife in hand. She pointed the tip of the knife at him and wagged it like a sharp finger. “Don’t even start to pretend you care what happens to me.”

  Then, Peter John Brown dropped the worst kind of verbal bomb you can at an angry woman. “Aren’t you blowing this out of proportion?”

  I stopped Carrie’s retelling to ask where Sasha was in all this. According to Sasha, she was clearing plates from the table to put in the dishwasher. They carried on this argument as if she wasn’t even there, which apparently was common when they really went at it.

  I nodded and asked her to carry on.

  Carrie took a minute to find her place in the story, then continued.

  Debra Brown’s eyes widened while her face turned red. The tip of the knife drew tiny circles in the air as her hand that held it trembled. “Sure, Pete. I’m overreacting. I have no business being embarrassed about my sinful husband, who disdains his wife’s friends so much he refuses to be in the same room with them.”

  Pete thumped the tip of his thumb against his chest. “I spend twelve hours a day on the line, working my ass off so you can waste time with your church groups and your crazy friends. I think I’ve earned a right to spend my evenings however the fuck I want.”

  Well, Debra had a number of dislikes, and as many peeves as the next person, but she simply despised foul language, especially in her own home. Some kind of cruel instinct took over and she swung the knife at him.

  Pete had just enough time to flinch back, the knife slicing through the air a few inches from his face.

  He gaped at her.

  She glowered at him.

  Sasha stood on the other side of the table, a couple plates in hand, her feet seemingly glued to the floor. She couldn’t believe the scene playing before her now.