Dead or Alive (24 page)

For several quiet moments Carrie squinted shrewdly at the screen.

Violet saw it the moment it happened. The color drained from Carrie’s face, and her thin lips jutted open. She didn’t need any further explanation. “I’ll be damned,” she whispered.  “I’ll be god damned.”

“The image is grainy, and it’s easy to miss, but the man in this video is not Captain Remington Archibald.  He’s not a captain, at all.  This man is--”

“A first officer,” Carrie finished, her blue eyes going wide as saucers.

“I have to ask you, Carrie…” Violet said.  “Are you
sure
First Officer Jake Patterson was with you and Ana Anabella the night Meredith was murdered?”

Carrie’s eyes rose back to Violet.

Violet pressed.  “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes, yes…” Carrie stumbled.  “Yes.  He was out with us the entire night.  We had dinner and drinks, and then we spent the rest of the night dancing at the lounge across the street from the hotel.  Neither of them left my sight for more than a few minutes. By the time we got back to the hotel the sun was coming up.  Jake was so drunk I had to put him to bed myself.  He went down like a log. There’s video to prove it. It couldn’t have been him.”

“Are you sure?” Violet demanded.  “Because this video tells a different story.  This video tells me that a first officer entered Meredith’s room that night.”

“Well, The Hilton is easily the largest hotel in this shithole…”

Violet bit back offense.  This shithole was her home!

Oblivious to the reaction her foul mouth had elicited, Carrie rolled her eyes.  “Flight crews from all over the world stay there every night. It could’ve been a first officer from Asiana Airlines that entered her room that night for all we know.”

“In
Redding, CA?”
Now it was Violet’s turn to be down on Redding, but it was true.  Redding, population 90,000, with one police station and apparently, one helicopter, both of which Remy had single handedly turned on it’s ass with one flick of a gun holster, wasn’t exactly an international destination. “You and I both know that yours was the only flight crew staying in that hotel.  So whoever did it, it had to have been one of you.”

Violet felt herself growing suddenly angry at Carrie’s defense of First Officer Jake Patterson.  Why couldn’t Carrie have said any of these things in defense of Remy on the witness stand during his trial?  How had everyone missed such a huge, glaring detail like a couple of stripes on a jacket when a man’s
life
had been on the line?  She didn’t care if the image was grainy to the point of the stripes being almost indistinguishable, someone should have caught it.  She pictured Remy out there somewhere, scared, alone… and she wanted to strangle the woman before her.

Taking Violet’s silent rage for continued doubt in her story, Carrie fished her own cell phone out of her pocket.  “I can prove that Jake was with us all night,” she said, fumbling to wake her phone and tapping away.  “I took photos that night.  Date stamped.  Photos that prove he was out with Ana and I until the next morning.”

With her bottom lip trapped between her teeth, Violet watched as Carrie pulled up her camera roll and began furiously swiping through the dozens of pictures she’d taken since the night of Meredith’s murder.  When she went too far back, she paused, and began swiping forward once more.

As Carrie swiped, Violet caught sight of a photo of Meredith, and she jolted.

“Go back,” she demanded, waiting for Carrie to swipe back to the previous picture.  Violet took the phone, staring at the photo of Meredith, Carrie, Ana and Jake smiling into the camera from where they sat at a round table full of appetizers and drinks with a bustling tapas restaurant in full swing in the background.  “I thought Meredith didn’t go out that night?” Violet said.

“She came out with us, but she didn’t stay long.  She didn’t even order a drink.  She was there for, maybe, five minutes before she went back to the hotel…”

But Violet wasn’t listening.  A wave of warmth was rolling over every inch of her body, but it wasn’t a good warmth.  It was distinctly unpleasant, and rendered the world around her a blurry, uneven mess.  Her ears closed up as her body fought to keep up with her heartbeat, which had escalated to a nearly unbearable pace, and she struggled with the simple act of breathing as her eyes zeroed in on the pendant Meredith wore.

There, hanging down from Meredith’s neck on a delicate silver chain, was a tiny porcelain pig.

If Violet didn’t know better, she’d swear that the ground shook.

Flashing back to just a few weeks earlier, when she’d found a porcelain pig on Jason’s living room table in Santa Cruz, her skin crawled.

“Do you have any more tiny porcelain animals? Can I have this tiny porcelain animal?”

“Sorry, it just has a lot of sentimental value to me.  Like I said, it was a gift from my grandmother.  She died a few years ago so… I feel some kind of weird attachment to it.”

She thought about that porcelain pig, how it had been dotted with streaks of red, and realized, to her horror, that hadn’t been a cool design like she’d originally thought.

Without another word, Violet was racing towards the doors of the ticketing area, Carrie’s phone in hand.  She didn’t even hear the woman’s cries of protest, demanding her phone back, as she robotically dialed Miles’ number.

“Did you find her?” Miles answered on the first ring.

Violet’s hair flew back from her face the moment she stepped out of the ticketing area and into the morning air.  The sun was finally rising, sending a rainbow of warm colors splashing across the sky.

And there it was.

The freedom.

She felt it.

She could taste it.

“I know who killed Meredith.”

***

Violet raced down the highway in Rodney’s Nissan, having decided the four-hour drive to Santa Cruz was a more viable option than purchasing a plane ticket and waiting hours at the airport.

She couldn’t wait.

As she flew in and around cars on the highway, switching lanes like a mad woman, she did her best to explain her frame of mind to Miles.

“So you think First Officer Jason Jacobson did this because he had a porcelain trinket in his house that looks like a trinket Meredith had on her necklace?”

“Yes!”  Violet cried.  “And I don’t think, Miles, I
know. 
I know it was him.”  There was something inside Violet that had never sat still when it came to Jason, from the moment she’d met him, and now she knew why. “The pig that was on Meredith’s necklace in that photo is identical to the one in Jason’s house--except for one thing. Do you know what that one thing is?”

“Tell me.”  Miles sounded exhausted.

“Blood,” Violet cried, the wheels of the Nissan screeching audibly as she switched lanes and passed a driver who was moving slow as molasses.  “When I first saw the pig, I thought the streaks of red all over it were just a cool design.  It wasn’t. It was
blood.
It was a porcelain pig, covered in Meredith’s blood, because she was wearing it around her neck the night she died.  The poison made her vomit blood, and it got on the necklace.”

“And why would he be stupid enough to have something like this on full display in his living room?”

“Because he thought he’d gotten away with it? Because killers are fucking sadistic? Because he feels some kind of psychotic pride whenever he looks at it? I can keep going….”

“Please don’t.”

“Killers don’t think like normal people, and they’re notorious for taking mementos from their kills.”

“We need to call the police.”

“Not yet. We can’t do anything that’ll tip him off or make him uneasy, or he’ll hide the evidence.  I have to get in his house, and get that pig.  I have to be able to prove that he did this, otherwise it’s just my word against his.  The police already suspect that I’m Remy’s accomplice, and they’re not just going to take my word.  I have to be able to prove it, so we can’t tip him off.”

“I’m going to call you right back, Violet.  I need to see if I can dig up Jason’s flight schedule and find out whether or not he’ll be in that house today.  If he is, then I’m sorry, but I’m calling the police.”

“Miles!”

“If you don’t care about your well being then I’m doing it for you.”

“
Miles
.”

But he’d already hung up.  With a scream, Violet threw her phone into the passengers seat, pulling off of a fork in the road at Yuba City.  In about two hours she would be in Santa Cruz city limits, and if Miles hadn’t gotten back to her by then, she was going to finish this without him.

An hour later, her phone buzzed to life.

She answered on the first ring.

“Jason’s scheduled for a trip that leaves in an hour.  So he won’t be home today,” Miles said.

Violet sighed in relief.  “How long is he scheduled to be gone?”

“It’s an international trip, so he’ll be gone for at least three days.”

“Thank you, Miles.”

“Please tell me you’ve come to your senses and are going to call the police.”

Violet nodded.  “Now that I know he’ll be out of the country, yes, I’ll call them.”

“Violet?  Please be careful--”

Her phone suddenly beeped wildly, and Violet pulled it away from her ear just in time to see a picture of a battery flashing before the screen went dark completely.

Her phone was dead.

She tossed it back into the passengers seat.

She had all the time in the world to call the police.

Right now she needed Remy, and without proof, she would never have him.

“Hold on, Remy.” She prayed, before pressing the petal to the floor.

***

Fear plucked with devastating fervor at Miles’ heart as he was sent to Violet’s voicemail for the millionth time in five minutes.  He’d just spoken to her ten minutes ago, and now she wasn’t answering? Was her phone dead?  Had she turned it off?

Had someone else turned it off for her?

As his blood ran cold, and he was sent to her voicemail once more, he realized it didn’t matter.

“Violet!” He screamed into the receiver while racing to his car in the parking lot and climbing in. “Listen to me.  I got an update from crew scheduling at Virgin and Jason just called in sick.  He is not on the trip. Do
not go
to that house, Violet, he is not on the trip!”

Miles hung up and immediately Google-ed the number for Santa Cruz police.

“911 what’s your emergency?”

Miles screamed an explanation into his phone as he tore out of the parking lot.  Even as he yearned for it in the deepest, darkest part of him, Miles knew, to his terror, that Violet wouldn’t get his message.

He prayed the Santa Cruz police would get to Jason before she did.

12

Thanks to the many obscure landmarks and street signs that had led the way to Jason’s house all that time ago with Remy, Violet was able to find it on her own with relative ease.  As she pulled the Nissan up the long, tree-lined driveway, and to a stop in the empty lot in front of his house, she couldn’t help the hurt she felt as she thought about how happy Remy had been when they’d stopped here weeks ago.  How much he loved Jason.  How much he needed him.  It hurt her heart to think about how terrible it would be for Remy when he learned that his best friend was responsible for putting this entire nightmare on his shoulders.

The dirt dusting Jason’s porch crunched at her feet as she climbed the stairs, and she wasted no time producing two bobby pins from her pocket and going to work on the lock of Jason’s front door.

As she jimmied the lock, she couldn’t help but smile to herself.  Right about now Remy would be calling her a demon baby for having learned how to pick a lock at the ripe old age of ten, a charming trick she’d learned from Constance.

In under a minute, the lock was disabled, and she was pushing open the door of the house.

It squeaked as it opened, causing her to jolt, then she remembered that Jason was working that day.  He wasn’t here, so there was no reason to be nervous, or tread lightly.

The house was flushed with darkness, but the sunlight outside gave her enough illumination to see the porcelain pig even from across the room.  It still sat in the exact spot she’d left it, gleaming at her.

Violet hurried over to the table, and the front door squeaked shut on it’s own the moment she let it go, enveloping the room with darkness. Fury coursed through her veins as she plucked the pig up.  The red splatters were still there and, with one swipe of her thumbnail, remnants of Meredith’s blood chipped away easily.

When a deep voice rang out from behind her, the pig tumbled from Violet’s hands as she was chilled to the bone.

She turned on her heel, and immediately pressed back against the table at the sight of Jason’s blue eyes boring into her from where he lingered in the dark shadows of his hallway.

“He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Violet gripped the table with all her might, silently chiding herself for having shown up here, at all.  Miles had been right, she should’ve waited.

Simply calling the police hadn’t been enough for her.  She hadn’t been able to wait for them.  As she found herself face-to-face with Jason, alone in that house, she realized this was one of the biggest mistakes she would ever make.

Her hunger to save Remy before he was destroyed by himself, or someone else, for good, had rendered her completely unable to think logically.  When Jason stepped out of the shadows with a gun hanging at his side, Violet’s eyes instantly filled with tears of regret.

“I called the police,” was all she could manage to sputter.  Several deep, trembling breaths later, with Jason still taking slow steps toward her, she cried out. “Stop coming toward me.”

To her complete shock, he did.  He stopped, but the intensity in his eyes was so powerful that she felt like they were touching her all over, in the worst way, making a bile rise to her throat.

She swallowed it back.  “I called the police and they’ll be here any minute.  Just…” She raised a hand in peace.  “If you turn yourself in… I can help you, Jason.  I’m already going to do a news segment to help clear Remy’s name… and I could help you, too.”

“Are you doing a story, Violet?”  Jason asked, almost adoringly.  “Are you really?”

The question held so many subtle implications that it chilled her bones.  When she saw tears tumbling out of his beet red eyes, she silently thought how much he actually
did
look like Remy.  How easy it would be to mistake one of them for the other when the brim of a pilot’s hat was shadowing their eyes.

“I know you’re not a bad man,” she said. “We all make mistakes.”  She hardly believed the bullshit words pouring out of her mouth, but something about the terror that charged through her gut at the sight of that gun in his hand was so poignantly different from the way she’d felt when she’d seen a gun in Remy’s. She’d always known, in the back of her mind, that she should’ve feared Remy, but she never had.  Her gut hadn’t allowed it.  But now?  Her gut felt like it was tearing itself to shreds.  The fear was capitalizing on her every bone, causing her knees to shake so ferociously it was a miracle she was able to remain standing.  She shook so badly that she could hear the picture frames and trinkets on the table behind her trembling softly against the wood from where she was holding it tightly in her hands.

“He wasn’t supposed to be there.  How the fuck was I supposed to know Arch was covering a trip for the son of a bitch who was fucking my girl?” Jason wheezed.  “He’s my best friend.  I would never hurt him.”  He brought his gun-clad hand up to his eyes, wiping the tears away.  Then, he was banging the metal against his forehead with such force, Violet was sure he was cracking skull.

She took one step back toward the door.  “I’m sure Remy knows you would never hurt him.  I know he loves you.  And I know he would forgive you.” Violet took that moment to take another small step back, then another, but she froze when Jason stopped pounding the gun against his skull, and pointed it at her.  She bit back a scream, and jammed her own eyes shut.

“He wasn’t supposed to be there.  The old bastard who was nailing Meredith, my Meredith--that fucking
whore--
he was the one that was supposed to be there.  He was the one that was supposed to burn.”

Violet’s eyes searched the apartment, looking for anything that she could use as a weapon, but nothing obvious was in sight. To her left, a cordless phone was an arms length away on the kitchen bar. She tried not to be obvious as she eyed it, all while listening desperately for the sound of sirens.  She prayed to god the cops weren’t struggling to find Jason’s far-away, secluded house.

“How could a woman take your heart, your fucking soul, how could a woman take every inch of you… and still treat you like her dirty fucking secret? She
knew
that she wasn’t done swallowing every cock that threw her a passing glance! But she made me believe…” He sputtered, stumbled.  “Meredith belonged to me.
She
told me that,
she
made it real. To find out that every pilot in the company had her, that one had her every night, in every hotel, on every layover… to find out the woman you’d slit your wrists for is making you look like a god damn fucking
joke!”

From behind her, Violet fingered the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, letting her fingers move slowly up the plaster, towards the phone.

“They had to go.”  Jason pressed the gun against his forehead before pounding it softly.  The pounds quickly grew in intensity once more.

Violet took a few more steps back and grabbed the phone, hoping that this lunatic pounded away at his forehead so hard that he eventually knocked himself the fuck out.  Sadly, he didn’t, and the gun was trained on her once more as his forehead and cheeks grew red with heat.

“Arch wasn’t supposed to be there, but he was. I was going to have him go out with some dignity, but you fucked that up good, didn’t you?  Huh?” The gun trembled under his uneven hold.  “I rigged the truck, you wouldn’t take the truck.  I had the cops on speed dial, but you took my fucking phone, you disabled my fucking landline.  You’re a real clever one, aren’t you, Chambers?  I loved Arch enough to send him away with some god damn dignity, but you had to throw a wrench in all that.”  He threw a chair out of the way when she backed up sluggishly into the dining room, lunging at her just as she circled the table, putting it in between them.  “Don’t walk away from me.”

Violet stumbled over her feet as he continued to circle the table, moving toward her.  She knew all it would take was one lunch of his huge body, one swipe of his arm across the table, and she would be defenseless.

To her complete shock, all she could think was that she just wanted to see Remy one more time. That was what sent tears racing to her eyes, stinging them, hardly matching the pain she felt in her heart, but putting up a hell of a fight.

“You can still do the right thing,” she wheezed, stumbling around the table until she was in the corner, where she pushed herself against the wall.  From the window next to her, the dining room flooded with sunlight. “You can still do the right thing, Jason.”

Jason bit his bottom lip as a smile spread on his mouth.  “No, Chambers.”

Violet fingered the phone in her hand, and tried to discreetly turn it on.  When nothing happened, no touchtone, no lights, no nothing, the color drained from her face.

“Yeah,” Jason’s smiled widened.  “Some clever little nugget disabled my landline a few weeks ago.”

Jamming her eyes shut, the phone tumbled from Violet’s hand and hit the floor with a thud.

“You don’t have to be afraid, Violet.”

Her eyes popped open.  His face had gone suddenly calm, almost serene, the sun splashing through the window making him look almost angelic.

“He was my brother.  What he loves, I love.”

Violet blinked heavy tears out of her eyes.

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

Her mouth fell open when Jason brought the gun to his head.

A shot rang out, and Violet screamed at the top of her lungs when the window next to her made a piercing crack out of nowhere, eyes going wide when a bullet instantly seared Jason’s skull, right between the eyes. Her screams intensified when buckets of blood immediately began gushing out of his head.  His eyes were lifeless, the picture of death but, chillingly, still wide open.  His gun toting hand plopped lifelessly to his side, and his limp body bobbed back and forth before finally collapsing into a heap on his kitchen floor with the gun still clutched in his hand.

He’d been a second from shooting himself in the head, but someone had beat him to it.

Sobbing hysterically and tripping over her wobbly legs, Violet raced out of the kitchen and to the front door of the house.

She came barreling out of the front door, expecting to see rows and rows of squad cars with dozens of officers hanging off their open doors, guns drawn.

Instead, she caught sight of a man moving towards her from the far distance, showing himself from where he’d been hidden behind the expanse of trees that led into the dense forest outside of Jason’s home.

Violet cried out in disbelief when she realized the man was limping towards her, gun at his side.

“Remy!” she screamed, the horrified tears on her face flying from her eyes and off of her cheeks as she leapt down the porch steps and made a mad dash for him as quickly as her legs would allow.  With every step she took running towards him, the agony on his face became more apparent, as well as the relief.  The love.  Did she really see love in his eyes, or was she delirious? Was she feeling the love so succinctly in her heart, that it was causing her mind to manifest it onto his face, as well?

He was far off, and by the time she made it to him, she was gasping for breath.  When he opened his arms, she leapt into them, sending him stumbling back, and nearly toppling over on his bad leg.  But he didn’t dare drop her.  She enveloped him with her arms and legs so tightly she could almost feel the moment she stole the air from his body completely, and when he wrapped his own strong arms around her in return, she was rocketed back to the day when she’d first felt those arms around her.

It had been right, even then.

“Remy, it was Jason,” she cried into his neck, tightening her hold around it as she felt his thundering heart, his deep breathing, and his quiet sobs meeting hers between their bodies.

“I know, V.”  He tightened his hold around her.  “I saw him point the gun at you. I couldn’t get a good shot.”

She knew it was the hardest thing he would probably ever do, shooting Jason to save her, and she tightened her arms around his neck.  He’d hit Jason clean, right between the eyes, from a hundred feet away.  With a heavy heart, Remy had confirmed Jason’s previous declaration in the most painful way possible.

He never missed his mark.

Not even from a hundred feet away.

Not even when the mark was a man he called his best friend in the world.

She yearned to pull back and look him in the eye, but was too unwilling to release her hold on him to actually do it.

“I thought I lost you,” he whispered, his face collapsing with tears of white hot relief.  “I was convinced you thought me guilty.  I thought I lost you, V.”

Violet finally pulled back and met his tear-stained eyes with her own.  She tried to smile, but couldn’t, because she could seat the red hot pain flashing across his eyes.  She sighed longingly when his hands went to her hair, shaking her head at him in disbelief.  “My god, Remy.  When are you going to get it?”

It was the words she’d been uttering since the moment they’d met, but they’d never made more sense to him than they did right now.  His eyes suddenly went to the house in the distance, where Jason lay dead, and he exploded into quiet sobs at the loss of his friend.  The man he thought he knew.

Violet threw her arms back around his neck, weeping softly into his shoulder.  “I’m so sorry, Remy.”