Cul de Sac, page 15
“You guys mind if we do this outside?” Scott asked. He led them out a small side door that led to a thin wooden walkway. A yard sat below, with basketball hoops and a horseshoe pit.
“DJ and a band,” Rhodes said. “You must stay busy.”
“Music is all I know and all I ever wanted to do. And in a place like Barnes Point, you have to keep yourself busy to make a living off of music. Now…you said on the phone that you had a question about Lauren Hilyard and the high school reunion, right?”
“That’s right,” Chloe said. “We met with some of her friends and one of them claimed they saw the two of you speaking a bit longer than it would take to request a song. Can you remember what you and Lauren might have talked about that night?”
“Oh, sure. Nothing too serious. We were just catching up. I was a year ahead of her class, but like just about every guy in that school, I had a thing for her for a while. I asked her about Jerry—teased her about him not coming.”
“Did you find it odd that he didn’t come with her?” Chloe asked.
“No way. Not Jerry. He was never one to do stuff like that. He hated dances and events of any kind. I’m pretty sure the only reason he ever went to a school dance back in the day is because he had the prettiest girl in school on his arm.”
“So, back to Lauren,” Rhodes said. “Was there anything at all the two of you discussed—maybe even just something she mentioned offhandedly—that seemed weird?”
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“Did she seem to be in a good mood?” Chloe asked.
“She didn’t at first. It was obvious that she did not want to be there. But I guess she had a few drinks and the music was doing its thing. By the time things got into full swing, she seemed to be enjoying herself.”
“Thanks,” Chloe said, feeling defeated all over again. This was going absolutely nowhere.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly are you looking for?” Scott asked.
“We don’t know yet. Anything that might give us a clue as to whether or not something occurred Saturday night that might have resulted in Lauren being murdered.”
“Well, I don’t know if it will help, but yet another thing I do in addition to DJing is to provide these flashy kind of videos of the events I DJ. I do it by setting a camera up on top of my DJ booth. It’s tedious because I go through all of the footage to find the highlights. I’ve barely started the project for the reunion, so the majority of the footage is still raw and uncut.”
“If you’d let us see that footage, that would be a tremendous help,” Chloe said. “And the sooner, the better.”
“Of course,” Scott said. He then looked back to his bandmates and shrugged. “I have to bounce, guys. You guys mind locking up?”
They agreed, and Scott walked with the agents out the back side door and around to the parking lot. As Chloe got into her car, she heard the band kick into Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”
Scott pulled out ahead of them, leading them to his home. Chloe glanced at her watch and saw that it was 8:41 and had a feeling that it was going to be a very long night.
***
Scott Lambast had a nice little recording studio set up in his basement. Chloe assumed his time and attention to music came easily because he was not married. The house, while nice and warm, had the feel of a man who had never been married, a man who enjoyed the life of a bachelor.
He sat down behind a desk that was decked out in a small control monitor that was hooked to several speakers, some of the wires snaking into the foam insulation of the small recording booth in front of the desk. Scott did not look at any of this, though; he swiveled his chair to look at the large desktop monitor on the other side of the desk.
“How many hours of footage are we talking about?” Rhodes asked.
“About five hours, I’d think. Usually, when things start to get chaotic and just sort of a drunken blur, I shut it off. It’s rare to get anything that’s showable in the highlights from my videos.”
“How many of these have you done?” Chloe asked.
“This will be my ninth. I did the reunion last year as well.”
“So you’ve done enough of these to maybe notice strange things?”
“I’ll say,” Scott said. “This includes a rather blatant but well-hidden sex act between a boyfriend and girlfriend at the high school’s senior prom earlier this year. There’s apparently a lot that can be done when the guy wears his pants a little loose. But…I digress. Yes, I have something of an eye for things that are out of place.”
“If you have a few hours to spare, we’d appreciate it,” Chloe said. “An extra set of eyes never hurts.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Scott said. He pulled up the reunion footage and pressed play. He then got up and walked elsewhere in the basement, leaving Chloe and Rhodes to view the footage. The footage was only a single shot, but it had been mounted high enough to get just about the entire room—what looked like a nice-sized dance hall. The footage began before the music had started. Chloe watched as a few people started to file into the room, most of them heading to the small bar area that had been set up on the right side of the room.
Scott came back with two other chairs, simple folding lawn chairs that creaked when he opened them. He offered Chloe his seat while he and Rhodes hunkered down in the lawn chairs. Together, the three of them started to view the footage.
“I don’t even see Lauren yet,” Chloe remarked. “Can we fast forward a bit until she comes in?”
Scott bounced to action quickly. He set the footage to shoot forward at three times the normal speed. The footage blurred by in this fashion for several seconds until a group of three women could be seen entering from the bottom left of the screen. “There she is,” Scott said.
“And that’s Kaitlin and Tabby with her,” Chloe said. The fact that she had spoken to these women about going to the reunion with Lauren and now seeing it on a screen in front of them was enjoyable in a strange way. It made Chloe feel that they were on the right track now.
“It’s always odd to watch the parties from this vantage point, from up high,” Scott said. “You can see these little clusters of activity, different conversations, different emotions.”
Chloe saw what he meant right away. She could see Lauren Hilyard, clearly there against her will, sort of hunched over as she spoke to a few people that meandered over to her and her two friends. Not too far away from them, two men spoke closely, as if exchanging secrets.
They watched in silence, the only conversation occurring when Scott asked if he could get them anything to drink. They both accepted waters and continued to watch. As they did, Chloe noticed what everyone else had been saying; after a few drinks and once the party started to truly get going, Lauren seemed to loosen up. She would laugh on occasion and, as the night wore on, tended to move farther and farther away from Tabby and Kaitlin.
As they watched Lauren’s movements, Chloe noticed another woman. She was standing alone not too far away from the bar. She remained by herself most of the time, only being interrupted whenever someone approached her to talk. The conversations were always short and the woman remained in place most of the time. While her posture was a little angled, it looked like she was looking in the direction of Lauren, Tabby, and Kaitlin.
“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to the screen.
“Not sure,” Scott said. “Melanie something, I think. I noticed her a few times. Sort of pretty, but stayed to herself. She sort of stuck out—not really part of a bigger group, you know?”
Chloe eyed the woman a bit longer. She wondered if this woman had been the type who had pretended to intentionally be by herself in school but secretly wished to be part of a larger group. The woman’s posture and the almost longing stares made Chloe feel bad for her.
She continued to watch the scene play out and was able to spot the moment where Lauren and Brandie Scott spoke to one another at the end of the bar. After a while, Lauren moved away from the bar and headed to the back of the room, where the bathrooms were located.
She disappeared from the screen for a moment as she stepped out of view, toward the women’s bathroom. Chloe watched the doorway, noticing that a lone figure was starting to inch along the back wall. It was a man, standing by himself. He moved slowly, as if inching himself toward the restrooms in a way that made it clear he did not want to be noticed.
“See that?” Chloe asked, pointing to the screen. “This lurker?”
“I do,” Rhodes said. “He looks sneaky.”
“That’s Jason Morton,” Scott said. “He was always a little strange as far as I’m concerned. I never knew him personally, but there were plenty of alarming stories.”
Chloe almost asked him what sort of stories he was talking about but then she saw Lauren appear back on the screen as she exited the restroom. She made it maybe two steps before the man who had been lurking against the wall—Jason Morton—stepped out in front of her. Lauren stopped and did not try to sidestep the man. She spoke to him and when she did, they stepped close to one another, as if exchanging secrets. Jason then took a step closer and for a single moment, they were so close it looked as if Lauren had her head on his shoulder.
But then, as soon as they came together in what looked like an intimate manner, Lauren was shoving him away. It was a hard shove, but not a very exaggerated one. Jason staggered back as Lauren walked away, nearly storming back toward the bar. There, she got a drink and headed back over to Tabby and Kaitlin.
“You know if there’s a history between them?” Chloe asked.
“I’m not sure if there’s any truth to it, but yeah…I think there might be. One of those sort of high school legends, you know?”
“About Lauren and Jason Morton?”
“Oh yeah. This, I think, was before she and Jerry became a thing. A girl who looked like Lauren but wasn’t offering up sex got a certain reputation, you know? Cock tease. The Blue Ball Queen.” He paused here, perhaps fully recognizing his company, when he added: “Pardon the crude expressions.”
“It’s okay,” Chloe said. “Go on.”
“Anyway, Lauren did get caught every now and then messing around with guys. Either on dates or, once or twice, at footballs games, behind the stands. But because she was so well liked and pretty, it was seen as this sort of alluring thing. She was considered desirable rather than something worse, you know? Rumor has it that at some point during high school, she let Jason Morton feel her up in the back seat of his car…that she was about to go even further…but that he couldn’t get it up.”
“But you say it’s just a rumor?” Rhodes asked.
“Yeah. A weird one, too. Because the Lauren I remember from high school would not have messed around with Jason. But she sure wasn’t above slinging insults at people.”
“The version of Lauren Hilyard I’m getting from the people I’ve spoken with paints a different picture. I hear she wasn’t necessarily mean, just non-inclusive.”
Scott chuckled at this. “I’m not so sure about that. She called some guy a fat ass during lunch one day, loud enough for everyone to hear. Even offered him a second chair to accommodate his large butt. She’d constantly make fun of sweaty guys in gym class. There was this one story about a guy asking her out…just randomly, you know. A brave kid, I guess. Rather than just saying she wasn’t interested, she berated him in the hallway, embarrassing the hell out of him.”
“I guess any friends she had wouldn’t want to share that sort of thing,” Chloe said. “Not wanting to speak ill of their dead friend.”
“That, or the fact that they were just as bad sometimes,” Scott said. “Anything not to seem different than their queen bee.”
They were a little more than three hours into the video now. Chloe had gotten to her feet, pacing to keep her muscles from getting tight. Scott had put on a pot of coffee—also sitting in his studio space—and she was sipping from a cup. She now watched not only Lauren’s movements but Jason Morton’s as well. On a few occasions, he walked over to the exit doors and seemed to just float there. Maybe speaking to Lauren had irritated him enough for him to want to leave. Maybe he had been embarrassed all over again.
But then he slowly made his way back into the party. When he did, Lauren had made her way to the dance floor. She hugged to the outside of the dancing crowd, not doing much moving but remaining with a group of four or five friends. About halfway across the gym, standing near the back and pretending to engage in a group conversation with a few other people, Jason Morton was clearly visible. He was staring in Lauren’s direction. In the footage, his face at something of a distance, it looked as if he were staring a hole directly through her.
Another half hour passed before anything of note happened again. Lauren and one of her friends walked over toward the bar. Jason, who had still been keeping tabs on Lauren, made a straight line toward the bar as well. He hurried his pace when he saw that she was about to get there before he did. When they crossed paths at the bar, Jason said something to her. He tried to get close to her again but Lauren stepped away. She responded to him in an animated way, speaking directly into his face and using exaggerated motions with her hands. Right away, a few people surrounding them started to laugh. Jason looked down to the ground, turned, and made a quick exit to the back of the room. He made his way to the exit doors and there was no hesitating this time; he hit them hard and left the reunion.
“Do you know if Jason Morton lives around here?” Chloe asked.
“Not in town, no. He lives in this little hole of town called Lovett. It’s about half an hour outside of Barnes Point.”
Chloe glanced to her watch. It was nearing one in the morning. She considered her options, wondering if they should wait until the morning. But her gut was telling her to move, to act on this right now.
“What can you tell me about him?” Chloe asked.
“There’s not much to say, really. He’s one of those guys that finished high school just to say he did it. He’s worked a string of meaningless jobs since then. Clerk at a grocery store, cook at a burger place here in town, and, his most current job, inventory specialist at the Barnes Point Advance Auto Parts. There have been more in there, but those are just the ones I know for sure.”
“He ever get in trouble with the law?” Rhodes asked.
“You know what?” Scott said, realization sinking into him. “I did hear some people talking about how he had been kicked out of a strip club in Richmond a few years back. Stayed in jail up there for a few days, I think. Locally, I don’t know. He stays to himself. He was always like that, even in school. Which is why that rumor about him and Lauren Hilyard in the back of a car was so weird. Hell…maybe that’s why it stuck.”
“I don’t suppose you know where he lives in Lovett, do you?”
“Sorry, no.”
Rhodes followed Chloe and got to her feet. She let out a yawn and then looked almost admiringly at Chloe’s cup of coffee.
“Mr. Lambast, thank you so much for your help.”
“You want me to finish watching this to see if I notice anything else?”
“That would be a massive help,” Chloe said. “Thank you for the offer.”
She drained the rest of her cup of coffee, set the cup down on the desk, and then headed out of Scott’s house.
“We going after him tonight?” Rhodes asked.
“I don’t see the point. I say we go to the station, see if there are any records at all on Jason Morton, get his address, and meet him bright and early in the morning.”
“Did you notice how easy it seemed?” Rhodes asked as they got into the car.
“How easy what seemed?”
“Well, that little altercation at the bar. Lauren was around people. She had an audience. And she gave them a show. And whatever she said got the response she was looking for. Sounds like the sort of person she was in high school, according to Scott. She slipped right back into that role a little too easily if you ask me.”
Chloe only nodded, the thought striking her as profound. Perhaps Lauren had only fooled a few select people into thinking she had changed after high school. And if she had, surely it had only been for image management. And if that was the case, what had she been hiding about herself since graduating?
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Chloe pulled their car into Jason Morton’s driveway at seven o’clock the next morning. He lived in a simple one-story house with a yard in serious need of some maintenance. It looked like the kind of house that had been in the town for decades, passed down by either family members or previous tenants who had gone elsewhere in search of greener pastures.
Rhodes, in the passenger seat, tossed the very thin file on Jason Morton to the back seat. Scott Lambast had not been wrong; Jason did have a very minor file at the Barnes Point PD. Three years ago, he had been brought in for questioning concerning a potential case of sexual misconduct at Barnes Point’s rundown little bar, Nelly’s. In a bit of a twist, another man who had been questioned about the incident had been Sebastian Fallen. In the end, neither man had been charged, though the notes in the file indicated that Jason’s name had come up in a similar case a few years prior but the allegations had eventually been dropped.
His incident at a Richmond strip club was in the file as well. He’d apparently gotten handsy with a few of the dancers and after being called out for it, pushed one of the dancers. Security clocked him in the face and then escorted him out of the building. When he tried fighting security, the police had been called and he spent thirty-six hours in jail.
“None of this really screams killer to me,” Rhodes said, nodding to the files she had just tossed into the back seat.
“No, but it spells…something,” Chloe said.
They got out of the car and walked across a badly cracked sidewalk that led to the front door. Rhodes knocked on the door, the sound hollow and somehow loud in the quiet of the morning. There was a slight commotion from the other side and several seconds later, a muffled clicking as the door was unlocked from the inside.
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