At least it wasn’t Marilyn this time. Unless she was using Loni’s phone, which had happened before when she needed to reach him to let him know Loni was in the hospital from an overdose of pills.
“Hello?” he answered carefully, picking up the phone just before it switched over to voice mail.
“Hello, Jake,” Loni said, sounding world-weary. “I just wanted to call and hear your voice. You’re always so up.”
Not a good sign. He knew better than to get sucked in to another drama, but he also understood how fragile she was at times. Until he was sure which Loni he was talking to, he had to be careful.
“Hey, Loni. How are you?”
“Well, I’m not in a hospital,” she said on a short laugh.
“That’s always good,” he answered lightly. It hadn’t been that many weeks since she
had
been in a hospital. He’d gone to see her when Marilyn had called him.
“I know . . . Umm . . . you’re involved with Nine Rafferty. That’s not why I’m calling. I just . . .” She sighed. “It’s hard to lose a boyfriend and a friend at the same time. That’s all.”
Jake thought that over. They’d never really been friends, and since their last and final breakup they’d pretty much left each other alone, not counting that last bout with the downside of her condition and the pills that had sent her to Providence Hospital.
Before he could formulate a response, she asked, “How is Nine? I heard she was stabbed? Is that right? Is she okay?”
He tried not to let it bother him that Loni called September by her nickname. They’d all been in high school together. Everyone called September Nine. He did, so why couldn’t Loni? “She’s doing all right. I’ve been taking care of her.”
“She’s got a helluva scary job.”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“But she’s going to be okay?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“She staying with you?” she asked casually. “You said you’re taking care of her.”
He kept his plan to have Nine move in permanently to himself and asked instead, “How are you? The last time I saw you, you weren’t doing so well.”
“I’ve been taking my medication, and it’s evened me out, but you know the deal. Makes me feel dull. But it’s given me a lot of time to think about how I’ve acted and I’m just sorry. For years and years of everything. I’m sorry, Jake.”
“It’s okay,” he dismissed it.
“No. It’s not okay. You always say that. But it’s not okay, and I want you to know that
I know
it’s not okay. But I really am better. I’ve gotten back into real estate, and things are turning around some in the market. I was showing this newlywed couple property before I . . . took that last trip to Providence. And they actually bought a two-bedroom house last week. Such a cute place.”
“That’s great,” he said, aware that she’d skipped over saying “before I overdosed.”
“It was hard, seeing them, y’know? The newlyweds. Thinking it could have been us. But that’s not why I called. Well, maybe it is.” She laughed again. “I just wanted to touch base, that’s all. I’m not asking for anything. Really. I just wanted to talk to a friend.”
“You can always call me.”
“Yeah . . .” There was a sadness to her voice. “I’ll try not to, okay? I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You’re not a bother, Loni. It’s good to hear you’re doing well.”
“Is it? Good to hear? Sorry. I sound so desperate. I just want everything to be cool between us.”
“It’s cool.”
“I know it can’t be like it was. Of course it can’t. I was just thinking yesterday, y’know, while I was watching the newlyweds, that you and I used to have something really special. I know practically everybody says that about someone they loved, but we really did. I just started thinking about all the good times we had, and I forgot about the bad.”
Jake realized his hand was clenching the phone and he slowly released the pressure. He never forgot about the bad, but he said, “I hear you.”
“I’m going to be embarrassed about this phone call later. I can already tell.” She huffed out a half laugh. “But it’s worth it, just to talk to you. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re my touchstone, Jake. You always have been and you always will be.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
There was a long hesitation, then she finished with false cheer, “Well, I’d better get going. We’ve got the home inspection today. Their house is over by Laurelton High. Every time I drive by I think about high school and that makes me think about you. Guess that’s why I called.” Before he could respond, she said, “Take care, Jake,” and then she was gone.
Jake’s gaze was on the contents of his top desk drawer but he didn’t see any of it. He remembered Loni as she’d been: blond, beautiful, smart, spoiled. They’d been the couple mostly likely to break up, again and again and again, and they’d batted a thousand on that prediction. Her disease hadn’t really grabbed hold of her until college or maybe sometime after, but now it was in full play, and though he’d tried, he couldn’t save her.
With a feeling of desperation of his own, he placed a call to Nine’s cell. He might be Loni’s touchstone, but September was his.
The Emergency Room at Laurelton General was fairly quiet this Tuesday morning. September saw Wes as she entered through the sliding glass doors. He was wearing a black shirt and blue jeans and the ever-present cowboy boots. “Where’s the vic?” she asked, looking toward the closed hydraulic doors behind which she knew were curtained, exam-room cubicles.
His gaze followed hers. “Through there. He called somebody to bring him some clothes, but they haven’t gotten here yet. He didn’t even want to come, but the uniform who found him and the EMT got him into the ambulance. He didn’t have a car at the site. Name’s Stefan Harmak, and—”
“What?”
Wes had been moving toward the hydraulic doors but now he stopped short, his dark eyes sweeping back to her. “You know him?”
“Yeah, I know him,” September shot back. “Stefan Harmak was my stepbrother. Unless there are two in the area, which I strongly doubt, that’s who our vic is.”
“Wow.” He shook his head.
“Stefan.” She couldn’t credit it. “What the hell was he doing?” From somewhere in her memory she recalled her ex-stepbrother had started working as a teaching assistant in the hopes of landing a full-time job.
“He told the guy who found him—a jogger—that it was a prank, someone tying him to the basketball pole. But he told Lennon, the uniform on the scene, that a guy had robbed him.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“The second. He’s got stun gun burn marks that he didn’t mention. A number of them. When I asked him about them, he clammed up.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Seeing as it’s family and you should stay the hell away, I’ll go with you.”
“He’s not family,” September said succinctly.
“Tell that to the courts.”
Wes pressed a button on the wall that allowed the hydraulic doors to slowly swing inward. No one stopped them, and they walked into a large rectangular room lined with a row of curtained cubicles, only one of which was being used—Stefan’s, apparently. A nurses’ hub occupied an adjacent wall and there were double doors that led to other hallways on the wall opposite the cubicles.
September walked to the curtained off area and said, “Stefan? You there?”
The curtain was pulled back by a nurse who stood on the other side. Beyond her, still in the bed, his hands folded over his chest and a look of angry determination on his face, lay her stepbrother. When he spied September color swept up his neck and suffused his face.
“What happened?” she asked him as the nurse replaced the curtain now that they were inside, collected a few items from the tray next to Stefan, then left them.
“Did Mom call you?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “I haven’t talked to Verna.”
“She was supposed to bring me my clothes.” Anger flashed in his eyes.
Stefan Harmak had been a gangly teenager, and it had followed him into adulthood. His hands always looked too big for his arms. When his mother, Verna, had been married to September’s father, Braden Rafferty, she’d placed a large picture of her son over the mantel in the living room of the sprawling Rafferty home—dubbed Castle Rafferty by Jake a name she’d adopted as well. But Stefan then, as now, had never been what you’d call portrait worthy. He wasn’t actually all that bad looking really, but his attitude, which permeated everything about him, was petulant and secretive, and it came in flashes of meanness.
Stefan’s portrait had been removed upon Braden’s marriage to his third and current wife, Rosamund, who’d replaced it with one of herself when she was in her early stages of pregnancy. Rosamund’s baby girl was due in January. While Rosamund insisted the child’s name would be Gilda, all of the other Rafferty children were named after the month in which they were born, so September and her brothers, March and Auggie, and her sister, July, expected she would be named January, no matter what Rosamund wanted.
“Someone tied you to a basketball pole at Twin Oaks?” September asked Stefan when he subsided into silence. She felt rather than saw Wes come up beside her.
Stefan’s beard stubble was just coming through. He was younger than September by two years but he seemed even younger now. He’d always been socially inept, kind of sneaky and hovering, and she’d stayed away from him as much as possible.
“Bastard drugged me so I couldn’t fight him and stole my wallet and phone. Left me there damn near naked,” he bit out, his face a dark glower.
“He drugged you in order to take your wallet and phone?”
His gaze flew to hers defiantly, apparently taking objection to her careful tone. “That’s what I said. He drugged me and then robbed me.”
“After he used a stun gun on you.” September, too, could see the small marks. Several of them. Wes was right. Whoever had zapped Stefan had done it more than once.
“Jesus.” Stefan’s face was dark red. “Yes! Used a fucking stun gun, drugged me, and tied me up!”
In the Ballonni case, the man had been drugged as well, but there had been no stun gun marks. And though Ballonni’s clothes and wallet were nowhere to be found, it hadn’t really felt like a robbery, especially because the body had been staged with a placard around his neck that read:
I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE
. This didn’t feel quite like a robbery, either.
“This thief left a placard around your neck?” September asked.
Wes said, “Crime techs have it now.”
“Fucker thought he was funny,” Stefan muttered.
“So, it wasn’t a prank. It was a robbery,” September said.
“It was both. Clearly!” Stefan snapped.
“Did he make you write it out himself ?” September asked.
The color that had turned his face red now seemed to leach right out of his face. “What did it say?” she prodded when he didn’t answer.
“I
WANT WHAT I CAN’T HAVE
,” Wes told her when Stefan’s silence continued.
“It doesn’t mean anything!” Stefan’s nostrils flared. “God! It’s all just so fucked up!”
“What were you doing when he attacked you?” September asked.
“What do you mean?” Stefan folded his arms over his chest and glowered down at them, refusing to meet her gaze.
“Was it at the school? It must have been fairly early this morning that the robber found you,” September prompted.
“Yeah, it was.”
“What were you doing there so early?” she asked.
“What the fuck, Nine.” He glared at her. “I was . . . I like to get to work early, and I was going to jog around the track.”
“And he Tased you while you were . . . jogging?” Wes asked.
“Well, I stopped for a moment.”
“So, he came up to you on the track, Tased you, then dragged you to the pole and tied you up,” September said.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything to you?” she pressed.
“No.”
“Do you jog often?” she asked. “So that he might know your routine?”
“No. I don’t. . . . Jesus. You people—”
“Stefan?” a high-pitched voice called from beyond the curtain.
Stefan cut himself off short. Wes looked at September, then pushed back the curtain. Standing just beyond, her face taut with concern, was Verna Rafferty, Stefan’s mother and September’s one-time stepmother. Her blond hair was swept into a French roll and she wore a brown pantsuit with a white shirt, the collar of which was unbuttoned as if it had been hastily donned. She carried a gray duffel bag in one hand and when she saw Stefan in the bed, she dropped the bag as if her fingers had given way.
“Oh, darling . . .” She moved in quickly, arms outstretched, brushing past September without really seeing her, and then stopped short before giving Stefan the bear hug September had expected. Her arms dropped to her sides and it looked like she might cry. “What happened?”
“The clothes,” he said through his teeth.
“What happened to yours?” she asked, half turning to the abandoned duffel that Wes had picked up and was holding out to her.
“They were taken by the bastard who drugged me and tied me up and stole my wallet,” Stefan answered.
“Oh, baby.” Ignoring Wes, she threw her arms around her son, who accepted the embrace in silence, his body language screaming his discomfort at the display of affection. “I’ve got your things right here.” Now she accepted the duffel from Wes and placed it on Stefan’s chest. It was at that point she noticed September and her mouth began quivering.
Drawing herself up straight and looking down her nose in that haughty way that was pure Verna, she demanded, “What are you doing here?”
Chapter Two
“I was called to the case,” September told her ex-stepmother tightly. She’d recently learned that Verna and Braden’s affair had begun while her mother was still alive, and that Kathryn Rafferty had intercepted a note from Verna that had subsequently led to the auto accident that caused her death. Was Verna responsible? No. Not really. But had circumstances been different September might still have her mother. And the truth was she’d never liked Verna all that much anyway.
“Leave me alone. All of you,” Stefan said, ignoring the tension between the two women. “I want to get dressed.”
September and Wes acquiesced by stepping outside the curtain, but Verna got barked at by her son when she apparently thought she would stay. By the time she flung the curtain aside, her cheeks were flushed with repressed anger—which she immediately took out on September.
“Who did this to him?” she demanded. “What kind of a sick person would leave my son out nearly naked in this weather?”
“This weather” was midforties, and though it wasn’t exactly red hot, Stefan wouldn’t have died from the elements like Christopher Ballonni had. “We don’t know yet,” September told her.
“I thought you were a detective, or something. Going after real crime.”
“This is a real crime, ma’am,” Wes pointed out.
Verna shot him a scorching look, then eyed him from head to toe. There was something inherently sexy about Wes that must have registered, because Verna turned back to September a little more distracted than before but still rattling down her own path. “Don’t try to tell me you came here to help Stefan. I know how all of you think. You’ve never accepted Stefan like you should.”
This was the song Verna had sung from the moment she’d married Braden. And though there was some truth to it, it was more that Stefan was just someone none of them wanted to know. It wasn’t because he wasn’t a Rafferty. It was because he was odd and remote and sullen.
Briefly, September thought about bringing up the Christopher Ballonni case; the story had been all over the news when it occurred and Stefan’s placard suggested the crimes were by the same doer, as the MO was the same. But, as Wes had pointed out, Stefan was “family” in the loosest sense of the word, and as soon as her lieutenant learned of her connection to him, September might be yanked off the case.
Until that happened, she wanted to garner as much information as possible.
And, really, she didn’t feel like offering any information to Verna anyway.
Stefan stepped from behind the curtain, dressed in dark slacks and a white dress shirt. “God, Mom,” he muttered. “Couldn’t you have found me a T-shirt?”
Verna turned her attention on him, her rigidity melting a little. “I brought your work clothes.”
“You think I’m going to work after this?” he demanded.
“I didn’t think.... You look so nice dressed up.”
September assessed Stefan’s white pallor and the flat line of his mouth and decided Verna must see something that clearly wasn’t there.
“Jesus, Mom,” he muttered, attempting to brush by September.
Verna said, “We’ll just go home, then.”
“Are the two of you living together?” September asked. The last she’d heard Stefan had his own apartment.
He turned bitter eyes on her. “Just for a while.”
“Stefan’s going back to school,” Verna volunteered stiffly.
“You work at Twin Oaks as a teaching assistant,” September said.
“You know I do,” he retorted.
Verna added quickly, “He wants to be a teacher. He’s good with children, aren’t you, Stefan?”
Stefan just gazed at his mother with burning eyes.
“You were on your way to work early, and then this robber came upon you while you were jogging,” September pressed on.
“That’s what I said.”
“Jogging?” Verna stared hard at her son.
“Yeah, jogging, Mom. I know you don’t think I do anything right, but I’m working on my body.”
Verna frowned, opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again without speaking.
“I’d . . . walked to the school. We don’t live that far. And he jumped me. Held a gun on me and made me drink that vile drink.”
“A stun gun,” September corrected him. Stefan looked as if he was going to deny it, then must have seen something in her expression that changed his mind, because he subsided into silence. “We can see the burn marks,” she told him.
“Okay, fine. He zapped me. Hurt like
hell!
”
“While you were on the track, he ordered you to drink the drug and when you refused, he hit you with the stun gun, several times,” she added, just in case he felt like lying some more. “Then he robbed you.”
“Do I have to talk to you?” Stefan demanded. “I don’t think so. You want to make a federal case out of it, go ahead. I drank the stuff because he was going to keep on zapping me, and the next thing I knew I was tied to the pole and it was damn cold!”
“I’m just trying to get the sequence of events straight,” September explained.
“Well, now you know.”
“You were going to say something?” September turned to Verna.
“I just don’t see why you have to interrogate Stefan. He’s the victim here,” she reminded her.
Wes’s gaze was on Stefan. “What did he look like?”
“He was, umm, wiry. Wore a baseball cap. Jeans and a jacket.”
“Was he black, white?” Wes asked.
Stefan looked into Wes’s dark eyes and then he glanced away, as if he were thinking hard. “White . . .”
“You don’t sound too sure,” Wes pointed out.
“It was dark. I couldn’t really see. But shh . . . No, I’m certain he was white.” He jerked away from them as if he couldn’t stand in such close proximity to the police.
“Did you notice anything unusual about this guy? Some identifying mark?” Wes asked.
“No.”
“Did he come from the parking lot?” Wes asked.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Were there any cars in the lot?” September put in.
“I don’t know! How many times do I have to say it?
I don’t know
.”
“Was he carrying the drink in a cup, or a glass, or what?” Wes asked, ignoring the outburst.
“I don’t think you should be harassing him like this,” Verna said tightly.
“It was like a small thermos,” Stefan said. “He just said, ‘Drink it,’ and he was the one with the weapon, so I did.”
That’s about the first thing he’s said that really rang true,
September thought.
“Are we done now?” Stefan demanded when both September and Wes went silent.
“Almost,” she said. “It’s just unusual, the way this went down. Most robberies at gunpoint are simply that: the doer points a gun at you and says something like, ‘Give me all your money,’ and faced with serious injury or death, most people comply. Using a stun gun on you, then forcing you to drink something and write out this message—all of that takes a lot of extra time and says something else about the crime.”
“Maybe he’s just screwed up and likes to drug people,” Stefan muttered, his jaw working.
“Or, maybe he wanted you unconscious for some reason. To make sure you were found after school started?” September posed, figuring Christopher Ballonni must have suffered a similar fate at the hands of whoever had tied him to the flagpole. A complete autopsy had been performed and there were traces of Rohypnol in the man’s system. She’d bet Stefan Harmak had been drugged with roofies, too.
“He just wanted to keep me down,” Stefan said. “He didn’t want me overpowering him, so he took care of that first.”
“It looks like he wanted to humiliate you,” September suggested.
September might have bought Stefan’s theory more if her stepbrother was the kind of man who could physically scare someone, but he just didn’t come off that way. He undoubtedly had some strength, but there was something so Jack Sprat about him that she doubted any adult male armed with a stun gun would consider him such a threat as to drug him.
There was definitely something else at play, and she also suspected Stefan was deliberately keeping whatever it was from her. Maybe he was embarrassed, or maybe he was just being his usual asshole self, but he knew something.
She wanted to get a good look at the placard that had hung around Stefan’s neck when the crime techs were through with it. Since Ballonni’s placard read
I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE
, initially she and Gretchen had believed Ballonni must have been involved in a crime. They hadn’t discovered anything in the man’s past, however; Ballonni was a man who’d apparently been loved by his family and friends. The idea of suicide had been bandied about—an assisted suicide, given the zip-ties—but no one could believe Ballonni had been suicidal. He had a good job, a loving wife, a teenaged son who went hunting and fishing with him, a nice house with a low mortgage, credit card debt that was under control, and a social group with some good buddies.
September realized she knew next to nothing about her stepbrother’s social life. “This attack seems personal.”
“Bastard singled me out,” Stefan muttered.
“He waited for you.” She thought that over. “I’d like to talk to someone you work with.”
“No!” Stefan practically gasped. “They can’t know. It’s too embarrassing.”
“It’s going to hit the news,” September pointed out.
“Oh,
God.
” Stefan raked his fingers through his hair and Verna looked stricken.
“Who do you hang out with at the school? Maybe I can start with them,” September suggested.
“Nobody. They’re all married, old women.” Stefan glared at her as if it were her fault. “It’s just a job.”
“I’ll give Amy Lazenby a call,” September said. She’d met the principal of Twin Oaks earlier in the fall.
“You know her?” Stefan burst out, as if he couldn’t bear the thought. “Don’t talk to her. She’s a bitch.”
September pointed out, “She’s going to hear about this, so I can give her a heads-up before it hits the news.”
“The news . . .” Stefan closed his eyes.
“It happened on school grounds,” September said patiently. Stefan acted like the whole incident could just be swept under the rug, but that wasn’t how these things worked.
Wes asked him, “Who should we talk to?”
“I don’t know. No one.” His chin dropped to his chest as if he were collapsing.
“Aren’t you people the ones who figure that out?” Verna demanded, looking Wes over.
There wasn’t much more they were going to get out of him now, September determined, so she said, “All right, Stefan. I’ll give you a call later.”
She and Wes left the hospital together and as they walked to the parking lot outside Emergency, she asked him, “So, how do you like my stepfamily?”
“Love ’em. Lucky you.”
September smiled faintly. “You haven’t met Rosamund yet.”
“Do I want to know Rosamund?” Wes asked.
“Doubtful. She took Verna’s place as my current stepmother. She’s younger than I am, and she’s pregnant, due in January. You know the whole deal with my family and the names.”
“You’re all months.”
“My father’s idea,” September said. “My oldest brother’s March, then my sister, July, then May, then Auggie and me. We do have a half brother who escaped the craziness, and although Rosamund thinks she’s going to name her little girl Gilda, we’re all betting on January.”
“I thought my family had its issues,” he observed, “but you Raffertys beat us all to hell.”
“We beat everybody,” September said on a sigh as she reached her silver Honda Pilot. “You know the fire at my father’s house—the one that was done with gasoline and a match?”
“Have you got a suspect?” he asked with sudden interest.
“No, no. Not really. My father and half brother saw someone running away but they couldn’t see who it was. My sister July wants to believe it was Stefan.”
Wes had been peeling off toward his Range Rover, but now he stopped short. “Why?”
“Why does she think that? Because she doesn’t like him. Or, why would he do it?”
“Why would he do it?”
September shook her head. “Why did someone make him write
I WANT WHAT I CAN’T HAVE
under the threat of being Tased by a stun gun, drug him, and tie him half naked to a pole outside the school where he worked?”
Wes shook his head slowly, then mused, “What does he want that he can’t have?”
“What did Christopher Ballonni, professed all around great guy, do that someone made him write
I MUST PAY FOR WHAT I’VE DONE
?”
“I was waiting for you to tell Harmak about Ballonni,” Wes said.
“Not until I talk to D’Annibal. There’s a connection. Stefan’s story parallels Ballonni’s too closely, but I didn’t feel like letting that out yet.”
“It’ll be on the news. There are leaks everywhere, and the Ballonni story was big.”
“I’m going to talk to D’Annibal today,” September assured him.
Wes nodded and headed toward his car while September climbed carefully into her SUV. She didn’t relish talking to her lieutenant; she knew he would probably take her off the case and she was trying to come up with some excuse to stay on it.
Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her messenger bag and read the caller ID. Sandler, her partner. Ex-partner, actually, until she was reinstated.
Smiling, September answered with, “How’s that forced vacation going?”
“Like shit.” Gretchen had never been known for holding back her thoughts. “Where are you?”
“Started back this morning and there’s already been an interesting development in the Ballonni case.”
“What?”
“Am I supposed to talk to you?”
Gretchen swore under her breath for nearly half a minute, and September grinned. It was so easy to rile her up.
“Meet me at Bean There, Done That, and you’d better be ready to talk,” she growled.