Fireflies: A Katie Bell Mystery (book 1) (17 page)

Katie saw the punch coming out of the corner of her eye but confined space got in her way, as she couldn't actually retreat any further since her back hit one of crowd behind her.

A blur swept across the front of her face and Katie could feel air rushing, and the fist came to an abrupt stop and hovered about an inch from her face.

Gideon stood to her side, his hand holding the Smurf's wrist in a vice-like grip. He looked strangely relaxed about the whole thing.

"Not a good idea," he said, shaking his head at the girl.

The girl with the heels did not take his advice and swung with her cup, cracking it against the side of Gideon’s head, or at least it would have if he hadn't raised his left hand in the last second, blocking the blow.

The glass broke with a horrible crack and Katie saw a small eruption of red from Gideon’s hand, though for his part he was already moving again.

Katie didn't think; she reacted, punching the girl with the glasses in the face once, hard, and the girl went down like a sack of potatoes, and there was a cheer from the crowd watching.

Tim, behind the bar was laughing and pointed at the back door.

"Go out that way," he said before turning back to a few customers waiting for drinks.

T
he three friends
ran until they made it to the nearby park, where they all sat on a park bench, all feeling a bit more sober but of course still being just as drunk as before. Adrenaline had just been added to the cocktail mix in their collective bloodstreams.

"You guys sure know how to have an after party," Stacy said after a minute of silence.

The three friends looked at each other and started laughing.

Gideon was holding his left hand up to keep it elevated and had somehow grabbed some paper towels on the way out the back from probably the bathroom. They were wrapped around the cut and soaked black.

Stacy offered him a small square bottle of water she had in her giant purse and Gideon accepted.

"You just happen to have water with you?" Katie asked.

Stacy shrugged. "I always carry water with me. You never know when you're going to want some. Especially as a dancer," she said grinning and sticking her tongue out, like she was a snake tasting the air.

"Thanks for back there," Katie said touching Gideon’s knee.

"No problem."

"How's the hand?"

"It's not going to fall off or anything."

"You should let me take a look at it and bandage it properly. I have CPR training you know."

He smiled. "Okay. I have a pretty good first aid kit back at my place."

"Good," Katie said before kissing him, hard.

The kiss was a long one. For her part Stacy did not watch them, though if anybody had been watching her face they would have seen how wistful she looked.

I
t took
them well over an hour to actually make it back to Gideon’s apartment, even though it was just short of a mile away from the park. As often happens when mass amounts of the worlds most common and readily available depressant is involved and consumed at high levels, time sort of bleeds together.

They had to walk Stacy back to her dorm of course, despite her protests since she just wanted to give them space. They insisted (mainly Gideon) and by the time they had got back to his apartment the bleeding had stopped. In better light, it was very clear he had gotten lucky.

There were two longs gashes down the back of his hand in general and several small spots where shards still shined in the light.

With a pair of tweezers Katie very delicately picked the glass out while Gideon just sat there, drinking water and not flinching.

"That was a pretty good sucker punch," he said absently as she worked.

"This is going to hurt," she murmured and pushed on the edges of the wound, seeing if she could feel any lumps under the skin.

Thankfully there weren't any, which meant no glass was buried in him. Even drunk Katie was thorough, and carefully felt around the rest of the skin on the back of his hand. Aside from the half a dozen shards she had pulled out, there was nothing. Katie opened the first aid kit Gideon had grabbed from the bathroom and went about wiping the hand down with a disinfectant swab before starting the bandaging process.

"Thanks," she said in a delayed fashion to his compliment.

“Your dad teach you?"

“My mom. I mean I’m officially first aid certified, but when I took the class it was more of a formality. She was a doctor. A surgeon.”

“I know, you told me already.”

“Right.”

Gideon paused for a second before speaking up again. “I meant with the fighting”

Katie nodded. "Yeah and made me take a general self-defense class in high school two years in a row. Eight hours over the weekend thing.”

"You should think about taking a martial arts class here at the college. I hear they teach a couple of pretty good ones."

"Maybe next quarter," she said, not really meaning it.

Katie finished the bandaging in short order and looked at her handiwork.

Gideon held up his hand and smiled. "Not bad. Good as new.”

He sat up from the couch and headed down the hall towards the bedroom. At the door he stopped and turned back to Katie.

"You coming?" he asked before disappearing inside.

Katie didn't respond but followed him, pulling her sweater off before she was all the way down the hall and tossing it on the floor.

D
etective Levitt turned
to her partner and scrunched her nose.

“You wanna do the honors?”

Detective Powell thought about it for a split second and shook his head. “No. It’s your turn.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, because remember with Cortez?”

“What about the Michigan girl?”

“Right … But wasn’t Gibson the last one?”

Powell snapped his fingers. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Okay. Sure.”

They were walking as they talked, away from their unmarked Dodge Charger in the northwest parking lot of SCU, down one of the long paved pathways towards the Gold Brooke residential hall.

Levitt was wearing a heavier black leather jacket over her black and white blouse and jeans, as well as a dark maroon scarf. Her breath frosted as she talked, as did Powell’s. The tiny green digital numbers inside the Charger had clocked the outside temperature at forty-nine degrees, and it certainly felt like it as the two detectives walked.

Powell was dressed in a cheap navy suit and had a heavy coat over it, though no scarf. The warrant was in his coat pocket. While he had just acted like he was resistant to actually be the one announcing the arrest, Levitt was well aware that he was secretly pleased. Powell would never admit it, but arresting people for murder was his favorite part of his job. At least when it was who they were reasonably certain actually did the crime.

The current case … There was some room for debate, but at the end of the day it had become a matter of politics. Both the captain and the DA had made it abundantly clear that it was very important for them to close the case, and they
did
have solid evidence. Certainly enough to convict. While they hadn’t talked much about it, both Levitt and Brooke were aware that in cases like this one the pressing desire to get it out of the public’s mind was when mistakes were made. It didn’t suit the school nor the city to have one of it’s star students being murdered and the killer walking free.

Personally, Levitt had a few doubts, but she kept them to herself. He was good for the crime. Love was a hell of a drug, especially when someone felt slighted.

“Ten bucks he tries to run,” Powell said as they passed through the front doors of Gold Brooke.

“Twenty he starts blubbering like an idiot and tries to make a deal before we get to the station.”

“You’re on,” Powell said and they shook on it before stepping into the elevator.

He lived on the fifth floor, and they rode the elevator in silence.

Levitt’s right hand found the outline of her holstered firearm when the doors chimed and began to open, though she didn’t draw it. Instead her fingers simply brushed it briefly and then she continued out of the elevator.

The two detectives passed several students in the hallway as they walked and the male students tried to not look directly at the officers. It was almost as if the millennials thought they were gargoyles and would turn to stone if they made eye contact.

From the smell of one of them it was probably something more simple like fear of being busted.

Levitt didn’t blame them for their paranoia, but she also had absolutely no interest in a drug bust. That wasn’t her job. Her job was stopping bad people from getting away with murder, and she thought of herself as pretty damned good at it.

They both stopped in front of room 428 and moved to either side of the heavy wooden door. Levitt reached under her jacket coat and undid the clip holding her sidearm.

The two partners exchanged one last look and then Levitt knocked on the door of 428 twice, her knuckles rapping in two quick successions.

Inside, there was silence.

“Chris Golding! This is the police. We need to talk to you for a minute. Can you come out please?” Powell had a surprisingly deep voice when he wanted to, and sounded very authoritative.

Still though, the only reply to the detective’s inquiry was silence.

Levitt knocked again, this time using the base of her fist so her knocks were louder and sounded heavy.

“Golding, we have a warrant for your arrest. We’re coming in,” Powell said, and drew his Glock.

Levitt pulled hers too, but she didn’t raise it. Instead of busting through the door, she held up a master key they had received from the school earlier that afternoon. The female detective placed the key in the lock and turned it. The lock went with a “click,” but the door only opened partway. The chain had been flipped on the inside as well.

The two partners exchanged another look and then Powell kicked the door hard, splintering the wood and breaking the chain free. The door swung inside freely and both detectives entered the dorm room. Powell’s weapon up, Levitt’s drawn but still held discreetly at her side.

T
here was
no need for their guns. In the middle of the room Chris Golding’s lifeless body hung, slowly spinning from the ceiling fan, like he was a music-box-ballerina.

The desk chair was kicked to the side and his head hung forward, his skin a sickly pale hue.

“Jesus,” Levitt said and holstered her weapon.

Powell didn’t bother to as he moved to check the young man he had just come to arrest. It was obvious to both detectives that there was no chance in resuscitating Golding. He had been dead for some time.

Levitt looked around the room and noticed a neatly folded letter on the desk. For a college boy’s room the desk was surprisingly sparse, and in fact aside from the note, the table was completely bare.

“We got ourselves a note,” Levitt said absently going to the desk.

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully unfolded the yellow page.

Powell still hadn’t cut down Golding but was instead just looking at him.

“At least he saved us the trouble of a trial,” he said.

“I suppose he did.”

He glanced over at his partner, and arched an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Spit it out.”

“This feels too neat.”

“I like to think of most of life as controlled chaos.”

“And?”

“I guess we just got the coin flip and got the controlled side of things today. It happens to everybody at some point. We just got lucky on this one.”

Levitt fell silent, but she wasn’t convinced. No matter what the case was, she was sure luck didn’t have anything to do with it.

F
our days
after Chris Golding had taken his life, just about everyone in the entire school was convinced that the shy, book smart and funny-man junior was in fact a horrible murderer, who had killed the school’s all star American football player. While some close to Chris claimed it didn’t really make much sense, talking about how much he had thought of Dan Reedman as a brother and how he had worshiped him, the general consensus was that it was one of the oldest monsters around; the green eyed monster. Dan always got the girls; Dan always was the star, Dan, Dan, Dan. At some point it must have gotten to his shy best friend, and he had simply snapped.

His suicide note had said pretty much just that, and while it wasn’t said out loud, clearly everyone was relieved to have the case over. It wasn’t the nicest ending, but it was an ending, and while there was still finals week to go, there was a silent understanding by the time winter quarter started the school could finally move on.

K
atie Bell was not convinced
. It had only taken about an hour after the detectives had found Chris’s body when she had heard about it, such was the way that social media worked. Within two hours she was as basically briefed as she could have been on the case.

The first person she let know was Stacy, followed by Gideon.

For the first twenty-four hours Katie basically bought the story, but the more she thought about it the more it didn’t make any sense. She was firmly convinced that Chris was not in fact the murderer, but instead just victim number two.

Still, the demands of finals took over and it wasn’t until that Saturday afternoon that Katie was able to meet up with Stacy to discuss exactly what they knew.

Stacy had texted her to meet her earlier in the library, in one of the quiet study rooms on the second floor.

W
hen Katie arrived
, Stacy was already there. Her Air was open and she was in the middle of typing something, a sea of old hardbound books lying around her.

Katie recognized some of the faded covers, most of them being classics. The ones she didn’t recognize were wider but thinner than the normal looking books and they were all marked the same way. Black covers with gold pages and red and white lettering.

They were alumni books for SCU, dating back twenty years in total.

“Doing a little history research?” Katie asked as she sat down across from her eccentric friend.

Stacy’s fingers froze on the backlit keyboard and her eyes moved to the redhead.

“I have something. I…” Stacy trailed off and she leapt up from the desk moving to the door of the private study and looking out the small grilled window.

Various students passed by as they would on the Saturday afternoon before finals week, but nobody seemed to be particularly suspicious.

“You sure you weren’t followed?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

Stacy turned back to Katie. “Good, because I think I have something. Like
really
have something.”

“On Dan’s killer?”

Stacy shook her head and went to the table, pulling one of the alumni books from the stack of them. Katie could see that the cover read 1997 in white and red lettering. Stacy set it down in front of her friend and opened it up to the very back page. She didn’t say anything, but instead started to look through the stack again, pulled out 2007, and followed it with 1993, and finally 2002. She opened the oldest one to the middle of the book, and the others to various pages. Stacy laid them out neatly next to each other on the table in front of Katie.

“What am I looking for?”

“Just look.”

Katie furrowed her brow and did just that. It took her another thirty seconds before she saw the first one, on the book from 1997. A yin and yang symbol that was completely black except for two white dots, and the line breaking up the symbol in half. It was small and in the top right corner of the page, about the size of a quarter. Each book laid next to it also had the dark yin and yang symbol, all equally sized, at various parts of the pages.

“Okay, so some kid is going through old books and leaving his tag?”

Stacy held up her Droid. She tapped on the photo album and scrolled through a couple of pictures, before she handed the phone to Katie.

It was a picture of a giant form of the yin yang symbol, and it was clearly taken someplace dark and damp.

“Scroll to the left,” Stacy said.

Katie did, and found three more yin yang graffiti pictures. She didn’t recognize the location of the second and third pictures, but the fourth she recognized. It was from near the railroad tracks across town, located by the very few warehouses Asheville had. It was sprayed about the size of a door and was obviously on the brick back wall of one of those buildings.

“I’ve been working on this for some time now, and I thought it was time to show you everything I’ve found.”

“Okay, so there’s some tagger that really likes to paint that image,” Katie said looking up at Stacy.

“Right, except now look at the pictures you took the night of Dan Reedman’s death. Of his room.”

Katie pulled out her iPhone and scrolled to the photo album she had of those pictures. She knew them well, but she still wasn’t entirely sure what Stacy wanted her to look for. It was there on the third picture, right under her nose. It only took her about six seconds of staring at it before she spotted it, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Katie had been so busy looking at everything else about the picture, for clues, for anything she hadn’t been looking at the basic shapes of the room … like the bed frame next to Dan’s desk. On the wooden leg of the bed with a black sharpie, somebody had drawn the same dime-sized strange yin-yang symbol.

“I have a confession, Katie. I agreed to help you partly because I saw that picture and saw the symbol right away, and knew it was somehow tied to this club I’ve been tracking now for the better part of two years. I mean … I had whispers, I had rumors, and I had these symbols … but this was more. This wasn’t just something that they were involved with, this was, is, murder. I just couldn’t resist,” she added with a rye grin.

Katie wasn’t upset. She got it.

“Okay, it’s totally fine, but you gotta have more than just some symbols for me to buy some secret club on campus, some secret society. Walk me through it.”

Stacy nodded. “Oh trust me, I will.”

S
he started from the beginning
, and she had created a slide show on her Air, pictures dating back two years prior.

“So, I have another confession … I’ve always been a bit of a conspiracy nut. Started when I was first hitting up message boards back in middle school, and it’s sort of stayed with me ever since. Now I know most the shit I read and hear about is totally bonkers. But like we already stated, where there’s smoke, there’s usually at least some fire. So when I started researching schools I wanted to go to, one thing popped out about SCU. I knew I wanted to go here, partly because I got a pretty good scholarship and partly because the dance program here is thumbs up solid. The other thing is there is this prevailing myth out there about a few higher education secret societies. Everybody's heard of the Sculls … and of course there are way too many jokes about the Illuminati and Free Masons. There was another society that keeps popping up. The Saints. Their symbol is that same yin yang symbol. Maybe they have another name. Maybe that’s The Brotherhood. Anyway, when I took the tour, I made an effort of looking around and that’s when I found the first symbol on the building. Over the last few years I’ve followed every rumor, every hint online and around campus.”

As she talked, Stacy was very animated, and it was obvious to Katie that she had been waiting to tell her about this for some time. It occurred to Katie that Stacy had probably told very few if anybody all about her theories.

“The thing is, while I know there is this society here on campus, I can’t prove it. I have a list of people I suspect are in it, but no real proof.”

“Why not?”

Stacy looked at Katie and sighed. “Because I can’t do this full time. It’s more of a hobby. The other thing was that Dan Reedman was on the top of my list as a potential Saint’s member, and that was before his untimely death. When you brought me all this stuff…”

“You knew there was a connection.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay great. So there’s some secret society on campus that has power and influence and may be directly involved with two students’ deaths … So now what?”

The tall dancer looked confused. “Now what, what?”

“Now what do we do about it? We’re trying to find and catch what we are both presuming is an actual murderer who is currently getting away with it.”

Stacy sat back down in front of her computer and sighed. “I mean, I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not sure if you’re going to like them.”

Katie folded her arms across her chest. “Why, what are they?”

I
t took
another twenty minutes for Stacy to carefully lie out her two plans, and another half hour to convince Katie the game plan actually made sense.

Finally Katie and Stacy agreed and they shook on it.

“How long is it going to take you?” Katie asked.

“With the second part?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve already started, but with finals and everything this break will hopefully let me get a real jump on it. Could be done when we come back next semester. Of course we won’t really know until I have all the pieces if this part actually works…”

“Of course. But at this point it’s our best option.”

“And it’s why we also have the first part.”

“I’m still leery about that.”

“Catching a murderer isn’t without its risks.”

“I know. I’m just saying … we should be cautious of what we are doing. It’s not exactly legal.”

A
s Katie was leaving
the library, she saw Tiffany outside through the second story window, walking at a far brisker pace than Katie was used to seeing her roommate normally move at.

That wasn’t necessarily strange in of it self, but the fact that Tiffany had specifically told Katie she would be swimming at that time perked Katie’s curiosity. She didn’t think about it, but Katie quickly took the stairs and followed after her roommate.