Shakedown in Havana (Rising Tide Adventures Book 2), page 6
“Yeah, what’s on the phone that the killer didn’t want anyone to see?” Dylan wondered.
Dylan and I were on the couch in the living room, and Fiona sat with her desk chair swiveled toward us.
“If Kale had the presence of mind to take the weapon with him,” Fiona pointed out, “then he probably would have taken the phone with him, too. If he didn’t have the presence of mind to hide the murder weapon, he wouldn’t have hidden the phone, and the police would have found it on him.”
“Possibly, but it’s still possible he tossed it out the window or something and was getting ready to do the same with the murder weapon when the police pulled him over,” I said.
“Or maybe Sarah knew there was something incriminating on it, so she took it,” Dylan said. “And she’s got it hidden away somewhere. Fiona, can you track it?”
“If I can find the phone number, and it’s not been turned off, maybe,” Fiona said with a shrug. “I’ll see what I can do after we speak to the ex-girlfriend. I’ve got her place of work in case we can’t find her at home.”
“Then let’s get a shake on,” I said. “Everyone ready to go?”
They were, so we headed out the door and piled into Dylan’s car this time since Fiona had driven us around yesterday. I let Fiona have the front, enjoying the chance to stretch out in the backseat in silence. We’d stalked the ex-girlfriend, Kate, on social media yesterday, too, though she didn’t have a particularly large or vocal online presence. Most of her posts had been from Michael tagging her while they’d been together, but she fell back into silence after they broke up. She seemed like a nice young lady as far as we could tell, but I was curious if she would have any insight for us as to Michael or even Sarah’s interiority.
We drove up to the northeast suburb she lived in, right near some college campus that I hadn’t heard of before. There were a lot of brick buildings, and even some ivy climbing up the buildings like the neighborhood was trying to pretend it was somewhere other than Florida. Kate’s building was on a quiet side street where most of the buildings looked rather tired with faded paint and drooping windowsills as if they had heatstroke. There was plenty of street parking, so we were able to pull in right in front of her building. I took a quick look up and down the street as I got out of the car and immediately wiped the sweat from my brow as the humidity closed in around me. It had gotten worse since my morning walk with Felicity, and now it felt like a thick, heavy blanket over the city. Dylan muttered a curse as he fanned himself as well, and I hoped Kate would let us inside and that she had her air conditioning going.
We hustled up the front walk, and Fiona hit the button for Kate’s unit. We weren’t sure if she was home, but we had the ability to chase her down elsewhere if need be. There was no answer right away, but Fiona tried it again, and this time, after about ten seconds, the buzzer clicked, and there was someone on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” a woman asked.
“Kate?” Fiona asked, her tone polite and inquisitive.
“Yes?” she replied as a question. “Who is this?”
“Do you think we could have a moment of your time to talk about Michael Byers and Kale Thompson?” Fiona asked.
I found myself holding my breath as I waited to hear Kate’s answer. After being turned away by Sarah and the Byers, I didn’t have faith that Kate would do otherwise.
“Are you the police?” Kate asked. “I already spoke to the police.”
“We’re not the police,” Fiona replied. “We’re a concerned party, I suppose you could say. We’re trying to clear some stuff up, and we think you might have the answers we’re looking for.”
“I—Okay. I guess you can come up,” Kate said, and I breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t being turned away.
The door buzzed as it unlocked, admitting us into the building. Fiona held it for Dylan and me, and then we quickly discovered that there was no elevator, and we had to climb to the fourth floor ourselves. When we reached Kate’s door and knocked, she opened it within a second, like she’d been waiting right inside since buzzing us in.
Kate was short, probably barely five-three, and curvy, and her hair was thick and curly to frame her anxious face. She wore a loose, gauzy cardigan over a band t-shirt and a pair of shorts, and she scuffed her bare feet across the floor as she moved back to let us in.
“Thank you,” Fiona said. “We really appreciate your time. I’m Fiona, and these are my associates, Pierce and Dylan.”
Dylan and I gave Kate nods hello since her arms were wrapped around herself, and it didn’t look like she wanted to shake hands. Grief seemed to be clouding her thought process since she didn’t ask any more questions about who we were or why we were there. She just let a couple of strangers into her house.
“I guess we can go in the living room,” she said. “Sorry, everything’s a bit of a mess. I haven’t been able to think straight since I heard Michael died.”
“That’s quite all right,” Dylan assured her.
We followed her back into the kitchen, which assuredly showed off the grief Kate was caught in. There were dishes and takeout containers left on the coffee table and end tables, as well as the floor, and a sprinkling of sparkling water, pop, and cider cans was interspersed amongst the rest of the trash, all accented by a horde of used tissues. Kate had tried to contain them in a small trash can, but they’d quickly overflowed to swamp the floor. The television was paused on some kind of reality show, which Kate turned off as we entered. Then she tried to gather the trash into some semblance of order, but she didn’t have much success.
“Sorry,” she said again.
We found ourselves places to sit amongst the disorder, and as she perched on the couch, Kate pinched her hands between her knees and seemed to have trouble looking at any of us. Fiona glanced at me with a slight nod that suggested that I should take the lead.
“Kate,” I began, tone gentle. “You said you spoke to the police already?”
“Yes,” she said with a sniffle. “The day after Michael died.”
“What kind of questions did they ask you?” I wondered.
Kate pulled a couple of faces as she thought about it, pursing her lips and wiggling her eyebrows. “Standard stuff. The last time I had seen Michael. What I knew about his fight with Kale. The—” her voice hitched, “the fact that we cheated.”
“What answers did you give them?” I asked and leaned forward to rest my elbows on my knees as I watched Kate’s posture and body language.
“That I hadn’t seen Michael since Kale broke up with me,” she began. I noticed that even though she was already having trouble with eye contact, she was turning her head all the way away from us and scrunching in on herself. “And, of course, I knew about his fight with Kale because I’d caused it pretty much. They meant the fight at Kale’s work, and I meant the first fight they had when they stopped being friends. And I admitted that we cheated and that I feel horrible about it.”
I detected one lie: that she hadn’t seen Michael since she and Kale had broken up. It was in her body language. Now, it was just a question of how to loop around to get her to tell me the truth. I didn’t want to come out and accuse her of lying straight away and thought I could get her to relax her guard with some other questions first.
“Why cheat on Kale?” I asked although I made sure my voice wasn’t judgmental or accusatory, trying to sound something like a therapist.
“I’ve known Michael longer than Kale,” Kate admitted. “He was the one who introduced us, actually. There was always a hint of something between Michael and me, and once I was going out with Kale, we started hanging out more because we’d hang out as a trio, and that something between us became more and more real until, I guess, we couldn’t help but act on it. It was an accident, really. We were hanging out at mine, all three of us. Kale didn’t feel well and went home early. Michael and I’d had a few hits of the bong. And it just kind of happened.”
She heaved a great sigh and put her head in her hands, curling forward over her knees. “I felt so bad after the fact. I wanted to tell Kale right away, but Michael insisted we not. He didn’t see why we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing or why Kale needed to know. I shouldn’t have listened to him. Maybe if I’d told Kale right away, things would have turned out differently. As it was, he walked in on us, and that was so much worse than if I’d been honest with him from the start.”
“How long was this going on before Kale found out?” I asked.
Kate slowly drew herself off her knees and slumped back against the couch cushions like she had gone boneless. “A month or so. Maybe a little longer.”
“And did it keep going on after you broke up?” I used the exact same tone as the rest of my questions to disguise the fact that this was the answer I really wanted and to avoid raising Kate’s suspicion that I was trying to bring her around to reneging on her lie.
“Yes,” Kate admitted in a murmur.
“For how long?” I pressed gently.
She slapped her hands against her face and let out a groan so despondent I almost didn’t understand the words she was saying. “Until he died.”
And there it was. Michael had also been cheating on Sarah with Kate.
“Did Sarah find out?” I asked.
It took Kate a long time to answer as she trembled within the couch cushions, using her hands to hide her face. When she finally dropped them back to her lap, her cheeks were streaked with tears, her eyes welling with wetness.
“I didn’t even know Michael had started seeing her,” she whispered. “I thought we were going out properly. Then I found a pair of her underwear she’d left at his place, and I confronted him about it. He admitted to going out with her, too. Said some bullshit about him having too much love to give to just one person.” She let out a sob, then grabbed a tissue and blew her nose noisily before she wadded it up and tossed it on top of a pizza box.
“I feel like such an idiot,” she said. “If he’d cheated with me, I should have suspected he’d cheat on me, too, but I thought I was special.” Her tone grew bitter. “I wasn’t special.”
“Did you ever meet Sarah?” I asked.
“I reached out to her,” Kate said with a nod. “I wanted to make sure she knew what Michael was doing and make it clear that I had no idea. We met in a park, and she totally blew up at me. She blamed me for it and kept calling me a home-wrecker. She even got…” Kate gulped. “She got physical. She tried to hit me. Some other people in the park had to pull her off me.”
“What about Michael?” I asked. “Did she make any threats toward him?”
Kate wiped her eyes, her head bowed. “She said he was going to regret this, that we both were, then she stomped off. I texted Michael to warn him, but he never replied to my message.”
“When was this, exactly?” I asked, wanting to place it within the timeline of Michael’s murder.
“Maybe two days before he… died.” Though she’d already said it once, Kate had difficulty getting the words out a second time.
I nodded. Right around the time he’d had the fight with Kale as well. It seemed possible that Sarah had simmered in her rage for two days, gone to confront Michael, and killed him in a fit of passion, though then I wondered why she’d framed Kale rather than Kate. Her beef was with Kate, after all, but maybe Kale had been the easier and more believable frame job.
“Did you tell the police this?” Dylan asked Kate while I was thinking about my different theories.
Kate gulped and scratched at her throat until her fingernails left red marks behind. “No,” she admitted in a whisper, turning her face away once more.
“Why not?” Dylan pressed. “If Sarah made threats against Michael, it seems like that’s something the police would want to know.”
“I was embarrassed,” she said, and her cheeks turned pink as evidence of her words. “And they’d already caught Kale by then. I thought—I hoped—it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to admit the mistake I’d made with Michael. I felt stupid. I should have said something. I’m saying something now, I guess. I hope it helps.”
She blinked and wiped her wet eyes as best she could, though she only succeeded in smearing the tears around her face. As she sniffled, she cocked her head to the side and furrowed her brow slightly. “Wait, do you think Kate did this instead of Kale? Is that what this is about?”
“We’re examining a few different angles,” I told her. “The Thompsons are convinced Kale didn’t do it. We’re conducting our own investigation to at least give them peace of mind if nothing else.” I hesitated, waffling. “Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. If we investigate and give them a second opinion, they’ll at least know one way or another.”
“I don’t think Kale has something like this in him if that helps,” Kate said. “Yeah, he had a bit of a temper, but he was also one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. One time, he found a kitten with a broken leg on the street, and he brought it to the vet and then took care of it until it was better. His lease didn’t allow pets, though, so he had to give it up for adoption when his landlord found out about it. He was devastated.”
“We’re still putting the pieces together,” I said. “This talk has certainly brought some interesting points to light, so thank you for that, but we’ve got a long way to go yet.”
“It would be nice if you exonerated Kale,” Kate said with a faint smile. “I hope you can prove he’s innocent. I can’t shake the feeling that everything that’s happened is my fault.”
“It’s not,” I said. Even if Sarah or Kale had killed Michael because of his cheating ways, Michael was the one who’d chosen to keep lying to everyone in his life, and Sarah or Kale had chosen to act with violence because of it. Kate had the misfortune of being connected to all the events, but they were in no way her fault.
Kate sniffled and blew her nose again as she nodded in acknowledgment of my words, but I couldn’t tell if she took them to heart. It would probably take a lot more than one stranger telling her it wasn’t her fault for her to actually believe it.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” I said so she wouldn’t have to get up again. It seemed like she was folding in on herself, eaten by the depths of the couch.
“Goodbye,” Kate said quietly.
Fiona, Dylan, and I stood up and, careful not to step on any of the trash, walked out of the living room and then out Kate’s front door. I closed the door gently behind me, listening to it latch, and just before it did, I thought I heard one last, heartbroken sob coming from within the apartment.
7
“Kate gave us some interesting information to work with,” Dylan said.
We were back at our headquarters, and Fiona had rolled her desk chair over to the couch so we could sit in a little triangle as we talked about what we had learned.
I nodded and leaned back against the cushions with my hands laced atop my stomach. “Definitely,” I agreed, chewing my lower lip in thought. “It sounds to me like Sarah is a pretty good second suspect for Michael’s murder.”
“We need more evidence before we confront her,” Fiona said. “Something to make it stick. Michael’s phone, ideally. Maybe she texted him some threats that will back our claims up.”
I nodded, lips pursed. “I’d like to try to get a look at the crime scene,” I said. “Maybe we can pick something up the police missed or get a better feel for the murder, at the very least. Maybe we could also break into Sarah’s apartment to see if we can find Michael’s phone in her possession.”
“The crime scene is probably still closed,” Dylan said. “It might be difficult to get in, but we could give it a try. If not, we can always speak with Michael’s neighbors as well.”
“It’s about three right now,” I said as I glanced at my watch. “If Sarah is at work right now, we could snoop around her apartment, then go over to Michael’s as it gets dark.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Dylan agreed. He cracked all his knuckles, then let out a grunt as he hauled himself off the couch.
One of the first things I’d done upon returning to Miami from Turks and Caicos and starting up this vigilante outfit was to buy a lock pick set and teach myself to use it by watching YouTube videos. I figured we’d be breaking into a place or two with each investigation, and it seemed prudent to be able to do so quietly and efficiently rather than always counting on a window being open or having to break said window. This would be my first time attempting to pick a lock out in the real world, and I found my fingers were itching to give it a try.
I snagged the leather roll my lock picks had come in and stuck it in my back pocket before I followed the others out the door and got in Dylan’s car. We knew where Sarah worked, but even if we called the store, the manager, or whoever we spoke to, wouldn’t give us her schedule—that was against policy. Plus, we didn’t want them telling Sarah someone was asking after her. Best she not know she was on our suspect list until it came time to confront her.
We drove back to her apartment building, which we had visited the other day, and found ourselves somewhere to park a few blocks away. Once we made it back to the building, we tried Sarah’s buzzer first to see if she would answer. She didn’t, though I wasn’t going to take that to one hundred percent mean she wasn’t home, though it seemed likely. After that, I rang a second buzzer, told the person that I was an Amazon delivery driver, and they let me in without question. Fiona, Dylan, and I slipped inside, and since we had Sarah’s full address, we knew which floor and then which door to go to.
I knocked and leaned my ear against the wood to listen for the sound of footsteps. I didn’t hear any, nor did the door open, so I looked at Fiona and Dylan and shrugged.
“Seems like no one’s home,” I said.
Fiona glanced up and down the hall. “Let’s get inside quick.”
