Guns and Roses (46 page)

Sophie Littlefield

A
P
UNISHING
N
IGHT

Joe Bashir did his best to avoid his alma mater, and since UC San Bernardino had its own police department, he had been mostly successful. There hadn’t been a homicide on campus since 2006, which was three years after Joe dropped out and a year before he became a cop, and the few calls the Montair PD received to come help out on campus were generally limited to the sort of trouble caused by hormones and alcohol.

In fact, Joe thought as he pulled into the curving drive in front of Lee Hall, it had probably been two or three years since he’d been on campus, despite the fact that it was only a few miles from his condo. If he wanted to, he could reach it via a series of trails that wound through the Diablo foothills into which the affluent community of Montair was nestled. It would have been a more pleasant run than Joe’s usual loop through the strip malls and church parking lots along Camino Rio and back through the office park, but the campus brought back memories he’d rather forget.

And yet Lee Hall appeared not to have changed at all, at least physically. Same polished terrazzo floors, same seventies-era architectural details, although the rough concrete walls were a little more soiled and the old green sofas were replaced with boxy gray ones. Joe had dated a girl who lived in Lee, and there had been any number of awkward late-night make-out sessions in the public lounge, since boys weren’t allowed upstairs in the all-girl dorm. How quaint that seemed now, though at the time, Joe mostly heard his Muslim parents’ disapproving voices in his head. The girl had been a blond Methodist from Iowa.

Joe shook off the memories and took the elevator to the third floor. Odell Collier was waiting for him in the hall outside the lounge, looking even more uncomfortable than usual. Odell’s arms were folded across his uniformed chest, above his generous gut, and his legs were spread wide enough to give him a sort of Mad Max stance.

“Morning, Odell.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Odell said without preamble. “The kid speaks perfectly good English; I don’t know what-all they were thinkin’—”

Joe waved off the apology. It wasn’t the first time Chief Fisch had pulled him onto someone else’s case when a South Asian was involved. With the changing demographics of the community—high-tech commuters snapping up all the new construction on Montair’s south side —Fisch had his sensitive fingers on the community’s pulse. Yes, there was racism at the core, but Fisch was bending over backward to address the tension that occasionally surfaced around town: bullying at the high school, a few episodes of vandalism and protests over the proposed site of a mosque near the veterans’ building.

Through the wide double doors Odell guarded, Joe could see the girls, at least a dozen, and understood Odell’s discomfort. Most were still wearing what they slept in, which ranged from baggy T-shirts and boxer shorts to thin camisoles which barely covered their breasts. They lay about the sofas and chairs of the dorm’s lounge like women in an Ingres tableau.

Joe handed Odell the cup of coffee he’d brought him, the largest they had at the convenience store, and four sugars. He’d finished his own on the drive over.

“Thanks, Joe.” Odell took a swipe at his brow, beaded damp with perspiration despite the cool October chill. Lowering his voice, he muttered, “Them gals in there are a piece of work, the lot of ‘em.”

“Mmm.” Joe covered his amusement with a nod. Odell’s thick Missouri accent gave him the effect of a bumbling dullard, which couldn’t be further from the case. Women, however, were not his strong suit.

Noticing Joe, a girl got to her bare feet and padded over to the door. Her thin tank top read “Boys Suck”. Her eyes were a beautiful, clear green, the effect ruined by smudged black rims. It looked as though she’d lined them with a magic marker and a shaking hand.

“Are you in charge?” The girl demanded.

“I’m Detective Bashir. I’m working with Officer Collier. And you are?”

“Kaylanna Pace. We just want to know if we can like take a shower or something. Or if we have to be stuck in here, you could maybe get some coffee sent up?”

She was clearly the leader, the queen bee. She looked into his eyes with a directness that Joe still found surprising in people her age; his own niece and nephew, the second generation born in California, retained a trace of the bashful gaze cultivated by Pakistani-American parents in their children. Madiha and Taj looked adults in the chin.

“I’ll see if I can do something about refreshments,” Joe said.

“But what if we have to pee?” a girl called from inside the room.

That was a bigger problem, indeed.

In the bathroom down the hall, a dead man waited for Joe.

~*~

Joe could see the evidence techs at work through the open door to the bathroom, but that could wait for now. He followed Detective Trina Ash’s voice and found her in one of the residents’ rooms, which she was using as a makeshift interview room. One desk had been cleared, its contents pushed to the side, a closed laptop sitting on stacks of books and papers.

A good-looking kid sat across from Trina, arms folded across his chest, looking faintly nauseous.

“Excuse me,” Joe said. “How are you doing here, Trina?”

She gave him a quick hello without taking her eyes off the boy. Trina was the department’s best interviewer, and Joe never tired of watching her in action. The effect, he’d decided, was like a member of the cat family that had cornered its prey. She was silent and unblinking and willing to wait as long as it took for suspects to answer the questions she put to them.

“I guess the chief thought you might need my help with Mr. Singh here,” Joe continued.

“Maybe in a minute. I told Fisch you speak Urdu, not Hindi, but —”

“I don’t speak either,” Joe interrupted, though it wasn’t exactly true: he and his brother Omar had both taken Urdu lessons when they were in grade school. Omar had studied; Joe could only manage a few phrases. He’d spent the long hours in the basement classroom of the Montair Unitarian church with Mr. Shafquat droning on tonelessly, wishing that he was somewhere else. He daydreamed about patrolling the mean streets of New York, dispatching justice, heavy on the gun battles, like they did on
Law & Order
and
NYPD Blue
. He imagined invading the secret prisons of a corrupt government, where he would pull off daring escapes like Schwarzenegger in
Total Recall
.

“Odell’s going to need a little help,” he said to Trina. “We’ll need someone to escort the girls to the bathroom on another floor and so forth. Maybe get some bagels up here.”

“Atley and Fiske are on their way,” Trina murmured in her spooky interview monotone. She never broke character when she was with a subject.

Joe nodded. “Do we know who’s missing on the floor?”

“Yeah, ask Odell. The RA’s got a list. She’s down there with the rest of them. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No, actually,” Joe said. “He had his hands full.”

“Ha,” Trina said softly. “He wishes.”

Joe suppressed a grin. He was fairly sure that Odell would be overwhelmed at the prospect of a handful of the ripe and yielding flesh of a UCSB co-ed.

“So, you mind if I sit in with you?”

Trina didn’t even bother to answer. The boy was nervous, a faint sheen of perspiration along his forehead. Joe sat on the bed across the room, since he and Trina had the only two chairs, and the boy barely looked at him.

“So you think it was around two in the morning—”

“But I’m telling you, I didn’t stay.” The boy, not surprisingly, had no trace of an accent; he sounded like any other teenager from Sacramento or Orange County. So much for Fisch’s hands-across-America sensibilities. “I wanted to get home and change clothes.”

“To Florian Hall?”

“Yeah, you can ask my roommate. I mean, if he says he doesn’t remember me coming in, that’s bullshit, man. He does this all the time, he has like whole conversations when he’s been drinking and says he doesn’t remember anything. But I was there. I took a shower because she got puke in my
hair
. Not cool.”

“But you can’t tell us her name.”

The boy rolled his eyes as though Trina were asking the impossible. “It’s not like that! Okay, this is the Sigma Mu open campus party, right? Everyone gets wasted, half the campus was there.”

“But you’re a member of Sigma Mu?”

“I’m a pledge. I don’t live there yet. I mean, did wherever you went to college even
have
frats? These parties are, like, open to whoever.”

“So you drank, you met a girl, you brought her back to Lee Hall, up here to the third floor, at which point you were seen going into the bathroom—”

“Because she threw
up
on me. Which is what I
told
you. And then she got all embarrassed and shit and ran down to her room—”

“Which direction?” Trina said quickly. “There are twenty-eight rooms on this floor, Mr. Singh, fourteen on either side.”

“I don’t know. I was trying to clean myself up.”

“And all you remember about her—” Trina looked down at her notes. “Blond or medium-brown hair. Between five two and five six. No eye color. Was her hair long, Mr. Singh? If I take you out and have you talk to all the girls in the lounge, do you think it might jog your memory?”

The boy shook his head slowly, but not remorsefully. “It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was just casual.”

Trina allowed herself one long sigh, flipping back several pages in her notebook.

“So you did not immediately exit the bathroom—”

“I had to take a—I had to urinate,” the boy said. “I almost tripped on him.”

“And did you recognize him right away?”

“Yeah. Sure. Be hard not to, since he was one of the pledge trainers.”

“Pledge trainers?”

“You know, the upperclassmen in charge of the pledges.”

Trina made a note and frowned. “So you recognized him, but somehow didn’t make the connection that a guy lying in a girl’s bathroom in a pool of his own blood might be a problem?”

“I didn’t see the blood!” Robby Singh protested. “It was dark and it was like, under him, and mostly I saw the back of his head and I just figured he was passed out. I didn’t get too close, that’s for damn sure. Pledges aren’t allowed in any of the sororities or on the girls’ floors.”

“So you just left him—”

“Hold on, Trina,” Joe said. He’d held off as long as he could and regretted taking her out of the moment, but Trina had gone to Diablo Valley Community College, which had no Greek system. And Joe remembered the rumors that had gone around campus about Sigma Mu back when he’d been a student. During his senior year, they’d almost been kicked off campus after an alcohol-poisoning incident in which a kid nearly died.

“Sure.” Trina gave him an exasperated look.

“How’s hazing been for you?” Joe asked Robby Singh.

The boy’s eyes widened, but only for a second. Then he looked at the floor. “They don’t allow hazing here, sir.”

“They didn’t when I went to school here, either. But that didn’t mean it didn’t go on.”

“It doesn’t.” The boy said it too fast. Another long silence passed before Trina found her place in her notes and started up again.

But Joe had already seen enough; the bruising along the neck and the red marks, almost lacerations, at the wrists. Robby Singh was lying, at least about one thing.

~*~

In the bathroom, he greeted the crime scene techs, Edward Gervais and Paulette Huang, and Marty Huntsucker, the coroner. They ringed the body, which was slumped in an awkward curve as though the boy had been trying to contain the blood that leaked from the wounds in his chest and abdomen. Joe could see how, from a certain angle, with the automatic shut-off lights in the shower area not tripped, you could miss the blood. Maybe.

Joe judged the boy to be about twenty, not a bad-looking guy, though the close-cropped haircut revealed a band of acne along his hairline. A vaguely Celtic tattoo wrapped around his bicep. Jeans like a girl’s, Joe thought, tight and narrow and so new the denim still looked crisp, a style he had trouble adjusting to; during his own not-distant youth he’d argued with his parents about his own jeans, which tended to be baggy and low on his hips.

Gervais held up a plastic evidence bag containing a metal implement about the size of a harmonica. It was a novelty bottle opener, the Sigma Mu fraternity’s letters and crest emblazoned on the oversized plastic handle, the curved metal end crusted with what appeared to be blood.

“Impressive,” Joe said. “That had to take a fair amount of power. Not the ideal weapon.”