Authors: Terri Blackstock
Morning came too soon. They’d gotten down the tracks for three more of Parker’s songs—something other artists might consider miraculous. Counting the songs she’d already mixed before the tour opportunity came up, she had seven recorded. She needed to record three more, and the three they’d just recorded still had to be mixed. They were still so far from finishing. Spent, she came out of the studio at seven a.m. as a producer showed up to take the room over. Pete and LesPaul, and even Daniel, were able to go home and get a few hours’ sleep. But Gibson had to go back to work. She hoped he wasn’t too tired to figure out who her weird delivery prowler was. Yesterday’s efforts had gotten him nowhere.
Not sure she’d make it through the day, Parker went to Star-bucks and got two coffees and a banana nut muffin. She ate the muffin in the car, not caring about the crumbs going all over her shirt and seat. As she drove back to the studios, she wished she had time to go home to shower and change clothes. But it was too late now. George expected her there at eight, and Andy, who’d worked the desk since midnight, was ready to leave. She had no choice.
She got to Colgate on time. As she set her laptop and coffee down and dropped into the chair behind her desk, she prayed the phone wouldn’t ring much today. If things were quiet, she could work on her album cover. She flipped through the snapshots in her computer files and found a few artsy shots her mother had taken. She would use Photo Shop software to zoom in and put it in negative, then add bright colors and stock elements until it looked somewhat professional.
If she had six more weeks and a lot more money, she could do a drop-dead job. But the tour provided a brutal deadline, and time was running out.
She dropped her head to her desk. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t get this all done. It was impossible!
“Hey, you okay?”
She pulled her head up, hair stringing into her eyes. George Colgate leaned against her desk. She hadn’t realized he was in the building.
“You look terrible. Are you sick?”
“No, I was here all night. Crater finished early, so I took his midnight to seven a.m. slot in Studio E.” She sat up straighter. “I’m fine, though. Just need a little more coffee.”
He looked tired, too. “I would have thought you’d be afraid to be here in the middle of the night.”
“My brother the cop was with me.”
“Oh, yeah. Gibson’s good to have around.” He went to the part of the window that hadn’t been shot through, and peered out. “I sure wish the glass guys would get out here today. We need to replace this pane as soon as possible.”
“They said the insurance adjuster had to sign off on it first. I’ll call them again.” She was also waiting for them to replace the glass at her house, too. Gibson had boarded up the broken window in the meantime.
George rubbed his eyes, leaving them red. “Poor Nathan Evans. Knowing it was Brenna’s boyfriend must have really knocked them for a loop. I don’t know how they’ll recover. Tiffany’s got a new album coming out. They were already promoting it when Brenna died. Word was they were racing to get it out before Serene’s new one releases. Street date’s next week.”
Parker thought of Tiffany Teniere’s condition the day of the funeral. Grieving like that, she wouldn’t be touring anytime soon.
After George ambled back to his office, Parker did an Internet search on Tiffany Teniere. The hoopla at her website, much like Serene’s, made her out to be a super-spiritual person who happened to be sexy at the same time. No cleavage in her pictures, but poses and smiles and seductive looks that would make young men salivate, even though she was old enough to be their mother.
Parker looked back over the record charts. The Christian Top 20 had had Tiffany in the top ten for the last few years, but it had been a long time since she’d hit number one. Serene had knocked her off every time she had a new release. With the failure of Alena Moore’s album and Tiffany’s decline, Nathan Evans’s bank account had undoubtedly diminished quite a bit in the last couple of years. Evans’s angry words the day of the funeral played through Parker’smind, tangling with Tiffany’s slurred declaration that Nathan’s enemies had used Brenna to get at him. What had he done to deserve that?
And of course, if Chase was the killer, then both of Brenna’s parents were wrong.
But how were Parker’s prowler and the song sheets and the man on the phone connected to Chase? Since he was in jail, he couldn’t have been the one who broke into her house. According to Gibson, ever since his arrest, he’d been claiming he’d been framed. Maybe his claims were true.
She had a sudden desire to talk to Chase. If only she could see him face to face, ask him some hard questions. Yes, Gibson had warned her not to get involved. But Chase couldn’t hurt her from a jail cell.
She looked for the number for the county jail. Maybe they would let her visit him. Maybe that would help Gibson get to the bottom of this case sooner, before someone else lost their life.
Parker had never visited anyone in the slammer, and she was nervous as she pulled into the parking lot of the Davidson County Detention Center. Men in orange suits loitered near the door, smoking. She recognized the uniforms—these were the men who picked up trash along the highways. As she got out and locked her car, she wondered how these prisoners had earned this amount of freedom. Had they been rehabbed into law-abiding citizens, or should she fear them as she walked through?
She went in and made her way through the crowd of waiting visitors to the booth at the far corner. A woman wearing glasses with half-inch-thick lenses seemed to be the gate-keeper.
“Hi.” Parker leaned on the counter and offered an overbright smile.
The woman didn’t match her feigned perkiness. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m Parker James. I’m here to visit Chase McElraney.”
“You on his list?”
“Yes. I called yesterday and they said they would ask him to put me on it. This morning I was told that he did.”
“I need your ID.”
Parker realized that her hands were trembling as she pulled her driver’s license out of her wallet. She handed it to the woman, glad she had no way of knowing that Parker barely knew Chase.
The woman read it and typed something into her computer, then thrust the card back. “Wait over there.”
Almost surprised that it was that easy, Parker found an empty chair among the waiting visitors. A dozen children were in the place, some preschoolers, dodging people as they came and went. Women barked complaints at them as if they were little adults. She wondered if the children were there to see their fathers. What must it be like to visit your child this way?
Several seats down, she saw a couple that looked as uncomfortable here as she did. The woman, about forty-five, wore black slacks and a lavender pastel sweater. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and though she had on makeup, it was smudged by the tears in her eyes. The man next to her looked the same age. He wore jeans and a golf shirt, and he held the woman’s hand and whispered softly to her.
Parker tore her eyes away, crossed her legs and wiggled her foot, trying to distract herself from the nervous tension stiffening her muscles. Were they going to search her before she went in? Should she put her purse in the car? No, it was all right. Many others, including those who looked as if they’d been here many times before, had purses with them.
What would she say to Chase? She dug through her purse for the piece of paper she had jotted notes on.
“Excuse me.”
Parker looked up. The nicely dressed woman stood over her. “Yes?”
“I heard you say you were here to see my son.”
Chase’s parents. Parker stood. “Yes. I work for Colgate Studios. I met him a few days ago. I just wanted to talk to him today, but … I didn’t realize you were here. They said he only gets twenty minutes. I don’t want to cut into your time.”
His father stood and put his arm around his wife. “I know he wants to talk to you. He called last night and told us. We’ll see him after you do.”
“All right. Thanks. I won’t take long, I promise.”
Chase’s father’s eyes were soft, moist. “I know they’re only holding him for the gun thing,” he said, “but it feels like they’re going to charge him with murder. He didn’t do any of this. He’s never given us any trouble.” His voice broke, and he rubbed his face to hide his trembling mouth. “Your brother’s a detective, right? Please tell him this is all a big mistake.”
Nodding, she sat back down, wondering why they hadn’t warned him not to talk to her without an attorney. Since they hadn’t—what did that mean? That they thought Chase could convince her to influence Gibson? Clearly, they didn’t know the ropes yet. How sad that they’d been thrust into the justice system without any warning.
She felt bad about taking any of their visitation time. Since they didn’t live close by, they would have to travel some distance each way to visit him twice a week. She would hurry, leaving them as much time as possible.
A child came running out of an open door. “Your turn,” she yelled, and her sister got up and raced inside. She heard the child cry, “Daddy!”
Hoping she didn’t look too conspicuous, Parker stepped over to the open door and peered in. She saw a row of windows with people sitting at them, visiting prisoners in orange jumpsuits on telephones, on the other side of the glass. No wonder purses were allowed. There was no way to pass anything to the prisoners through a system like this. She felt bad for the children who couldn’t even get hugs.
She went back to her seat and jittered for fifteen minutes more until the group in the visitation room came out. Her name was called, startling her. She dropped her bag. Her cell phone, lip gloss, and two pens rolled out. She knelt and grabbed them up like a kid with something to hide. Throwing everything back in, she slipped the straps over her shoulder and followed the group into the room.
A new group of jumpsuited men were taking their places at the windows. She spotted Chase and gave him an awkward wave. He pointed to an empty space, and she went to it. Sitting down on the metal stool in front of him, she picked up the phone. He punched in a few numbers, and then she heard his voice.
“Thanks for coming.”
She gave him a half-smile. “Thanks for putting me on the list. I didn’t know if you would. I know your parents are waiting, so I won’t take long. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“Anything,” he said. “Anything I can do to prove that I’m not guilty.” He leaned forward, his face close to the dirty glass. “Parker, I know your brother’s working on this case. I hope you believe me—I didn’t know that gun was in my apartment. I don’t even own a gun.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“I don’t know. It’s like I told your brother. Someone put it there. The real killer, apparently. Whoever it was is setting me up. Making the police think I’m the one who killed Brenna. But I wouldn’t do that. I loved her.” The emotion squaring his lower lip seemed real. “Chase, some weird things have been happening. Someone broke into my house the other night and left something. Song sheets, with a word written across it.”
“What was the word?”
It was part of a police investigation, so she decided not to tell him. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, my house was broken into. And before that I got this freaky anonymous phone call …” She didn’t know why she was telling him this. Shaking her head, she tried to steer her thoughts back to her questions.
“Chase, why did you tell me you put your hand through the wall
after
you found out about the murder?”
He paused a moment. “I knew how it would sound to say I did it earlier because of my fight with her. They would think I’m violent. That I could hurt her.”
Her hand was slick against the phone. “Tell me about that fight.”
He sighed, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t. “I shouldn’t be going into this with you, but I really want you to believe me.” He leaned forward again, the knuckles of his free hand touching the bottom of the glass. “Earlier that day I was talking to her on the phone, and I felt like she was being secretive again. I accused her of cheating on me, and when she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, I lost it and slammed my fist through the sheetrock. But she wasn’t even there when I did it—we were on the phone.” He studied her face. “I need you to believe that, Parker.”
She glanced at the man in the booth next to him. He had a tattoo of Pegasus on his jaw. “What I believe doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to work through all this in my mind. There’s a lot at stake for me, because if you didn’t kill Brenna, then somebody else did—maybe the same person who came into my house.”
“Check out her father.”
“Her father? You think he killed his own daughter?”
“No. But I think he was into some things that were pretty corrupt. Maybe somebody got mad at him and killed Brenna to get even.”
Again, the light was back on Nathan Evans. “What kind of corruption are we talking about?”
“He was always doing dirty stuff. Brenna told me about some of his publicity stunts, tricks to get his artists name recognition. He had a little payola going on, too, to get his artists airplay. He had a lot of the radio people in his pocket.”
“But he’s in the
Christian
music industry.”
“It’s still business, Parker. Brenna told me over and over that money is the bottom line.”
“And what about Tiffany?”
“I know she loved Brenna. You saw her at the funeral. She was a mess.”
“But what about her career? The grapevine says she was failing and that she and Nathan were trying to rally to recoup some of their loss.”
“Nathan would have done anything to boost Tiffany’s career, and trust me, he’s not above using Brenna’s death to do it.”
“Using it in what way?”
“As a sympathy card. To make people buy Tiffany’s records. Trust me, he’ll have her out there on stage talking about her grief way before she’s ready. The sad thing is, she’ll probably mean every word of it, but he’ll exploit it.”
“Sounds like you don’t think much of Nathan Evans.”
“I don’t. He had this weird hold over Brenna. She would do anything for him. They were really close. Whenever I reacted to the stuff she told me about him, she would get mad at me. She thought he was smart, not corrupt.”
Parker just looked at him for a moment. “Chase, what is the real reason that Brenna was at Colgate Studios? It wasn’t for her career. She wasn’t trying to make it on her own. That’s not the place to do it.”
He shrugged. “I thought she was there to meet guys in the music business. It ticked me off.”
She stared at him a moment, imagining him driving by and seeing her through the window, talking to a musician. Could it have ticked him off enough to get revenge?
He seemed to read her thoughts. “Not ticked off enough to kill her, Parker. Ticked off enough to put my hand through my wall.” His eyes looked honest, and her gut told her he was telling the truth. But she had more questions. “Do you think Brenna could have been at Colgate to spy on our artists?”
Chase stiffened. “Don’t make this something
she
did. She was the
victim
.”
“But she could have done it for her father.”
“She didn’t do anything wrong, except show up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She saw the conflicted emotions pass over his face. If he had been the one to kill her, would he be defending her now?
He rubbed at a spot on the table in front of him. “The gun … it must have been registered to
somebody
. Can’t they find out who?”
“Even if I knew, Chase, I couldn’t talk about it.”
“Look, I don’t blame them for locking me up if that’s the gun that killed Brenna. Of course, they would think I did it. But if it’s the murder weapon, then they should be looking at everyone who’s had access to my apartment since the murder. I gave your brother a list of all my friends who’ve come and gone. Whoever killed Brenna wanted to get the heat off themselves and put it on me, the most obvious suspect. I’m taking the fall for something some lowlife did to my girl.” His voice broke off, and his mouth quivered. He shielded it with the phone. “Parker, I want you to promise me that you’ll do everything you can to see that your brother looks into those people. I’m telling you, one of them is the killer.”
Parker realized she believed him. “I’ll do the best I can.”