Deadly Cool (3 page)

“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!” Sam chanted, as we pushed and shoved each other toward the stairs. We took them two at a time, half sliding, half falling down the last few in our mad dash for the door. Sam hit it first, fumbling with the lock before finally throwing it open and running down the front steps, arms flailing.

I collapsed onto the curb. My legs felt wobbly, my heart was pounding too fast, and my breath came out in irregular little chokes as I blinked at Josh’s house, trying to process what we’d just seen.

“Shewasdeadright?” Sam said, her words slurring together with urgency. “I mean, really, really dead.”

I nodded.

“Ohmigod, ohmigod!” Sam plunked down on the curb next to me. “We saw a dead body. A real dead body. You
touched
a dead body!”

My stomach clenched, and I wiped my palm against my thigh. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Josh has a dead body in his room. Ohmigod, your boyfriend cheated on you with a dead body!”

“Would you stop saying ‘dead body’!” I shouted. “And I’m sure she was alive when . . . you know . . .” I wiped my palm on my jeans again.

“Ohmigod, what are we going to do?” Sam asked, her voice rising into hysterics territory.

“What’s going on?”

I whipped my head around to find Camaro Guy standing over us, camera dangling from his right hand.

I thought I vaguely recognized him from school, though he wasn’t in any of my classes. His hair was dark, cropped close and a little spiky on top. He wore unrelieved black from head to toe—black pants, black T-shirt, jet-black hair—and I wasn’t sure, but it looked like he was even wearing black eyeliner. The whole effect gave him a dark, dangerous vibe, intensified by the way he was towering over us.

“What’s the screaming about?” he asked again, his gaze jumping from us, crumpled in a heap on the sidewalk, to Josh’s front door.

I opened my mouth to speak, but only a strangled sort of cry in the back of my throat came out. I took a deep breath and tried again, this time finding my voice, albeit a shaky one. “In there,” I said, pointing to the house. “Courtney.”

The guy raised an eyebrow in my direction, clearly not getting it. “You two okay?”

I shook my head back and forth so violently that my hair whipped at my cheeks, stinging them. “No. Not okay. Dead. Courtney’s dead.”

This time both his eyebrows went north. “Dead?”

Beside me Sam nodded. “Upstairs. In the closet.” She turned to me. “Hartley found her. She touched her.”

I elbowed her in the ribs. Did she have to keep reminding me? My palm was getting raw from rubbing it against my thigh.

The guy in black looked from Sam to me, then at the house, no doubt trying to figure out if this was part of some elaborate joke at his expense. But the fact that neither of us could stop shaking must have convinced him, because he finally said, “Wait here,” then walked up the front path to Josh’s and disappeared inside.

Sam grabbed my hand. I squeezed back. And we waited in silence for him to come out.

Two minutes later, he did, his face a shade of pale that even a
Twilight
actor couldn’t achieve.

“Give me your cell,” he barked at me.

I complied, extracting it from my pocket. “Who are you calling?”

He gave me a hard look, his jaw clenched at a tight angle. Then he answered, “The police.”

“Name?”

“Hartley Grace Featherstone.

“Age?”

“Sixteen.”

“Address?”

“One seventeen Orange Grove, San José.”

“School?”

“Herbert Hoover High. Um, Detective Raley?”

“Yes?”

“I think I need to throw up again.”

The big, redheaded guy, whose suit looked like it had shrunk two sizes in the wash, took one giant step back as I shoved my head between my knees to keep the world from spinning.

As soon as the guy in black had called 911, the air seemed to fill with the sound of sirens. An ambulance was soon on the scene, paramedics rushing into Josh’s house with first-aid kits. Once it became as obvious to them as it was to Sam and me that Courtney was beyond help, the uniformed police arrived. That’s when the guy in black had quietly disappeared, leaving Sam and me to our own devices. Not surprising. From the look of Tall, Dark, and Dangerous I’d say he made a habit of avoiding authority like most people avoid Brussels sprouts.

Once the police had gotten a look at Josh’s room, they’d called in Detective Raley from homicide, who had then sent for the guy from the crime scene unit (who, by the way, looked nothing like the hot guy on CBS). But it was when the black coroner’s van finally arrived that I’d lost it and tossed my partially digested pizza sticks into Mrs. DuPont’s azalea bushes. Up until then, it had all been sort of surreal, almost like watching a scene unfold on TV. The uniformed officers fending off a growing crowd of curious stay-at-home moms, CSU dusting the front door for fingerprints; and blue and red lights from the squad cars bathing the entire neighborhood in hues that were half dance club, half kindergartner coloring book.

But seeing the coroner wheel a gurney from the back of his van up the front walkway to Josh’s house made me realize just how dead Courtney was and just what kind of trouble Sam and I were in.

“Doing okay?” Raley asked, laying a tentative hand on my back.

I took a few more deep breaths from the curb, inhaling the scents of rainwater, someone’s nearby barbecue, and the rubber from my shoes. Then I lifted my head and slowly nodded. “I think so.”

At which the detective looked immensely relieved. I’d venture to say vomiting teens hadn’t been in his job description. He looked old enough to be someone’s dad, but maybe not quite to grandpa stage yet. Red hair, round belly, lots of freckles, and a generous helping of wrinkles that said he was too tough for sunscreen.

“I just have a few more questions, then you can go home, okay?”

I nodded again. Then stole a glance across the street, where Sam was on her cell, talking faster than a chipmunk on Starbucks to her boyfriend about our gruesome discovery. Knowing Kyle, it would be all over school in a matter of minutes. I willed my queasy stomach not to think about it.

“You said your boyfriend lives here?”

“Yeah. Josh. Josh DuPont.”

“And the victim . . .” He looked down, consulting his notes.

“Courtney,” I supplied, finding myself feeling sorry for her despite all I’d learned that day.

“Right. Courtney Cline.” He looked up, his heavily lined face puckering in concern. “What was she doing here?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “Most likely effing my boyfriend.”

“Effing?”

“It means—”

Raley held up a beefy hand. “Uh, I think I know what it means.” His cheeks tinged red, but he cleared his throat and continued. “So, Courtney was ‘seeing’ your boyfriend?” he asked, doing air quotes around the substitute verb.

I nodded.

“And you came here to confront her?”

“Well, no. I mean, I came to confront Josh, really, but we found her instead.”

“And things got out of hand?” he asked.

“Yeah. Wait—no!” I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean, ‘got out of hand’?”

He paused as if choosing his words very carefully. “Courtney was murdered, Hartley.”

And while I knew it was pretty unlikely that Courtney had accidentally strangled herself with her iPod earbuds, hearing the words out loud sent my stomach lurching again.

“We did not kill her,” I said. “We were just coming to talk to Josh. Only he chickened out and wasn’t here.”

“So, Josh knew you were coming to confront him?”

“That would be my guess.”

“And he got here first?” he asked, gesturing to Josh’s Jeep.

I shrugged. “Looks like it.”

“And made sure Courtney would keep his secret.”

“What? No. You think Josh . . . ? No. No way.”

“No?”

I shook my head again. “There is no way Josh could have done this.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. I know Josh.”

“You didn’t know he was sleeping with someone else.”

I bit my lip. Good point. “Look, he may not be perfect”—understatement alert—“but I know Josh isn’t a killer.”

“Okay,” Raley said, holding up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Let’s switch gears for a minute, then. Courtney. Tell me how you found her?”

“In the closet.” I swallowed, wiping my palm against the side of my jeans again as I relived the scene. I had a bad feeling I was never going to be able to cleanse my brain of those images.

“How did you get in the house?”

“What?” I asked, snapping back to the present.

“You said the front door was locked, correct? So how did you get in the house?”

“Oh. Right . . .” Compared to killing someone, I was pretty sure sneaking in an upstairs window was small potatoes. But, seeing as I was already starting to feel like a suspect, I didn’t want to chance it. “Uh, we sorta went around back.”

“Sorta?”

“Yeah. Sorta.”

“Hartley,” he said, leaning in close, his voice lowering an octave into that friendly slash fatherly thing that the cops on
Law & Order
did right before they arrested someone, “the CSU team is going over the entire house right now. Fingerprints, footprints, hair, clothing fibers. Why don’t you make things easy on yourself and tell me the truth?”

Why was it when someone told you to make things easier on yourself it was never by doing something easy?

“We went around back,” I repeated.

“And?” he prodded.

“Do you really need all the details?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I kind of do.”

“Fine.” I sighed, giving in. “We hopped onto the top of the storage shed and climbed in Josh’s window.”

He frowned. “You know that breaking into someone else’s house is illegal?”

“Not as illegal as killing someone. Which,” I said, making the point again, “we didn’t do.”

“All right, all right. I’ll let it go for now.”

I put a hand to my head where a migraine was brewing. “So, can I go home now?”

“I’ll have an officer drive you home in a minute. I just have one more question.”

I nodded. “Hit me.”

“Where is Josh DuPont?”

I bit my lip. Good one.

And I wished to God I had an answer.

When the police finally let Sam and me go, they took down our personal information, said they’d be in touch with our parents (joy), and told us both to stick around town. Which was so clichéd I almost laughed out loud. A sure sign I was going into some sort of shock because there was clearly nothing funny about this situation. Courtney was dead, I was a material witness, and Josh was MIA.

While Raley assured me that all the questions he’d asked were routine, the way he kept frowning every time I mentioned Josh didn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence that he wasn’t writing the word “suspect” in big, bold letters next to his name. Courtney was found in his house; he was missing; and, as the detective had pointed out, he had a crap-ton of motive.

I closed my eyes, trying not to think about that as a uniformed officer drove me home. Instead, I texted Josh again from the backseat of the squad car.

where the hell r u?!!

By the time the officer dropped me off at home, it was all I could do to drag myself through the door, drop my book bag on the sofa, and raid the back of the freezer for a pint of Cherry Garcia from my hidden ice cream stash. I grabbed a spoon and dug in, leaning against the kitchen counter. I was three bites closer to calm when Mom walked in, Nikes on her feet and a basket of laundry under her arm.

“Geez, Hartley, get a bowl, would you?” she said, grabbing one from the cupboard above the sink.

I refrained from pointing out that I intended to eat the entire carton and instead scooped what was left into the dish.

“I’ve got yoga in twenty,” Mom said as she trailed into the laundry room. “So you’re on your own for dinner. And ice cream does not count. There’s leftover rice pizza in the fridge.”

I wrinkled my nose. Mom didn’t eat gluten, hence the rice-crust pizza. She also didn’t eat dairy. Or processed foods. Or meat. Which basically left her existing on exercise.

“Fine,” I answered, scooping another mouthful of B & J’s onto my tongue.

“How was your day?” she asked, grabbing a soy protein shake from the fridge.

Bad. Awful. Deadly.

But after enduring Detective Raley’s interrogation, I couldn’t face another one from Mom. At least not until I’d had time to put together an edited-for-parents version. So, instead, I went with the standard, “Fine.”

“Great. Listen, I’m meeting some of the girls for coffee after yoga, so I’ll be late. Don’t wait up. Oh,” she added, grabbing her keys from the hook by the garage door, “and get cracking on your homework. Don’t save it all for the last minute again this week, huh?”

“On it,” I lied as she disappeared out the door. A beat later I heard her minivan start up and the garage door rumble closed behind her.

Generally, I’m a pretty honest person. And my 3.5 GPA attests to the fact that, despite my tendency to procrastinate, I almost always get my homework done on time. But tonight I just didn’t have it in me.

So I ignored Mom’s decree about ice cream not constituting a complete meal and trudged up the stairs to my bedroom, flopping spread-eagled on my patchwork quilt as I tried to block out the gruesome slide show of my day.

I shut my eyes, took a few deep, cleansing breaths . . . then felt my cell buzz to life in my jeans.

Josh.

I grabbed for it, catching a nail on the edge of my pocket in my clumsy haste before flipping it open.

A number that was clearly not Josh’s lit up the display. Crap. I swallowed down the surge of disappointment as I read the text from Ashley Stannic.

is it true? cc dead?

I bit my lip. Courtney’s entire life had just been reduced to one line of text. Granted, I hadn’t been the president of her fan club, but I hadn’t actually wanted to see her dead. (Maybe just maimed a little . . . )

I flipped the phone shut, dropping it on the quilt beside me, leaving Ashley to get her gossip elsewhere.