Rushing to die, p.20
Rushing to Die, page 20
And the worst part of it was, I didn’t have any answers to give Mabel, when she asked me why I didn’t keep a closer eye on Callie, or Ginnifer, or …
“Wait.” Ginnifer looked up with pathetic, puppy-dog eyes. As if I was going to feel sorry for her. “Why, Ginnifer? Why give all of it to Von Douton? I don’t understand that part. You said you wanted to be more like me, and I would never, ever betray us to a Moo sister.”
Ginnifer looked miserable. “It’s going to come out anyway. Since you’ll probably ask for an investigation …” She let it hang out there like there was some chance that I would give her a hug and tell her it was going to be all okay. Maybe when Moos flew.
She saw the “no chance” written on my face, and continued, “Ms. Von Douton has a granddaughter at Alabama.”
That was Ginnifer’s alma mater, I remembered, and I gestured for her to get on with it. “And her granddaughter had information about certain activities that I encouraged during rush there.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“She was going to tell headquarters about all the tequila shots we gave to the rushees,” she said. “Then there were the bribes.”
“For Leticia’s sake!” I clapped my hands over my ears.
“It wasn’t a big deal, we just … called the Department of Homeland Security on the other chapters. Just the two times. Their study-abroad activities were really suspicious.”
It was all the proof I needed that she was morally deficient. Betraying our chapter hadn’t even been the first of her crimes: She’d had years of experience performing possibly illegal activities. I reached into my pocket to feel the comforting shape of my cell phone. Three little numbers, and I’d get Sutton emergency services. I didn’t even care who won their bet this time. I’d shout Ginnifer’s name right before I was attacked with a spike to the back of my head.
“Did you hurt people, Ginnifer?” I asked quietly, even as my hand shook withdrawing my phone. “Did you kill Shannon Bender and Daria Cantrell?”
A half sob erupted from her. “No!”
She sounded sincere. She looked stricken. But I’d been fooled by her before. “I don’t know if I can believe you,” I said, even as my grip eased up on the phone. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t feel unsafe. Just betrayed.
“I did it for Delta Beta!” she cried.
She didn’t know how many times I’d heard that before. “I have to tell headquarters everything.”
At that, she turned and ran away.
After I went through the Starbucks drive-thru, I realized I couldn’t avoid my responsibilities any longer, even if they were the worst duties ever.
I still had taken vows to these women here at Sutton and Delta Betas throughout the world. Those vows must be honored even if I did it wrong.
At the Delta Beta house, I called everyone into the chapter room. They had all heard the news, and there was a mix of confusion and emotional pain in every question that I couldn’t answer.
When I apologized to the chapter, I meant every word. I was sorry we wouldn’t make quota. I was sorry we wouldn’t pledge new sisters. I was so sorry our headquarters would likely pull our charter, and everyone would be homeless.
That was the extent of my positive thinking. I was out of rainbows and sunshine and baby ducks. The time had come to face facts.
My Michael Kors watch said pref night was starting in five hours. I headed to my apartment, determined to find solace in the flask I had hidden in my lingerie drawer and a pint of cookies and cream that I’d been steadfastly ignoring during rush-work week.
After pulling on a pair of flannel pajama pants and my coziest, most comforting fleece from sophomore year, which had seen many postbreakup pints of ice cream, I poured a dose of Fireball into my Delta Beta shot glass, toasting Mary Gerald Callahan and Leticia Baumgardner. I had barely made a dent in the cookies and cream when there was a knock at my door. I ignored it. As I was about to be fired, I figured the members better get used to not having me around. The knocking grew insistent, then downright pushy.
“All right!” I yelled. “Come in!”
In a whoosh, the door flew open, and there was Sheila DeGrasse, looking all pulled together and chic and evil in a black sweater dress, tights, and thigh-high boots that totally should have been mine.
She arched an eyebrow at my flannel and fleece. “Oh, honey,” she said, her tone pregnant with pity.
“What are you doing here,” I mumble-glared at Sheila, who had the gall to burst in on my pity party in a seriously fierce pair of four-inch red boots. To her credit, she didn’t back down from the girl on the couch clutching a pint of ice cream and wearing pajamas. She tutted and looked pointedly at my cookie dough. “And you call us the Moos.”
Sheila needed to go. She was disturbing the coma I was trying to put myself into. I was about to suggest that she shouldn’t let the door hit her on the way out, when she said something that stunned me.
“Callahan Campbell is innocent.”
Well, the substance of her statement didn’t shock me. But the bald assertion of a truth that I didn’t find the need to argue with from a Tri Mu was pretty incredible. And suspicious.
“I know,” I haughtily said. “I’ve been telling everyone that. Thanks for the update.”
Sheila’s lips tightened at my sarcasm, and I felt sorry for a nanosecond for letting my depression get the better of me.
“Don’t you want to know why I came over?”
Depressed Margot wanted to throw a blanket over her head and tell Sheila to go back to the farm. But, naturally, Curious Margot won out, as she always did. “Yes,” I said.
“I have proof of Callahan’s innocence. And I thought you’d like to be there when I gave it to the cops.”
“Down at the police station?”
Sheila nodded.
This could be a trick. No matter the status of our truce, I still was wary of Moos bearing gifts.
“No,” I said definitively. “When Lieutenant Hatfield has something to tell me about the case, he’ll give me an update.”
Sheila’s brows rose in interest. “Oh. You two are that close?”
Not really. “It’s professional courtesy,” I informed her. Not that she would know anything about that. She didn’t look convinced, so I went on. “I have a very firm policy of not intruding on police work. I don’t even know where the police station is.”
Sheila let out a bark of laughter. “You don’t trust me.”
There it was. “No.” I admitted it because—why not. Let’s lay it all out. “After what happened today? I was stabbed in the back by the Mafia. Like Caesar, they each took a turn, the Deb, the Moo, the Lambda. And the rest of the advisors didn’t do anything. I would have stood up for them, insisted that any chapter leaving rush weakened all of us. We’re stronger together, but no, they saw I was weak, and they all did nothing. And now you waltz in here, with your shiny hair and your Angel perfume and hot boots, and I’m supposed to believe that you don’t have an ulterior motive?” My voice had risen, it was shaking and on the verge of hysteria. “I may have been born on a Tuesday, but it wasn’t last Tuesday.”
As tough as Sheila was, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how she stayed ice cool during my shrieking. I had to give her credit for that. It was probably a character trait that helped her become the preeminent rush consultant in North America: staying chill while frantic, hormonal sorority women screamed at her. Finally, she spoke, calmly and scarily. “You’re absolutely right.”
“You really need to stop agreeing with me!” I half yelled.
“I do have an ulterior motive.” Sheila’s eyes shimmered. “Normally, I’d let your chapter hang, ensure a fantastic pledge class for my client, and move on. But I want justice for Shannon. You were right at Panhellenic. If Callahan Campbell isn’t exonerated, the police are letting the real killer go free.”
Truce or no truce, I didn’t ever know if I’d trust Sheila DeGrasse. But that ulterior motive I understood. I dug my spoon into a big chunk of cookie dough and took a bite. Then I stood. “I’m taking my own damn car.”
“Are you going to change out of …” Sheila waved a hand at my uber-casual attire. “That?”
I lifted my chin defiantly. “No.” Getting dressed up for events hadn’t helped anyone so far. Maybe, after all these years, underdressing was the key to success after all.
Chapter Thirty-five
BEFORE WE LEFT, I called Ty to give him a heads- up, and once he heard the bare details, he asked to speak to Sheila. After a quick conversation, she hung up the phone.
“He said he’d meet us at the house,” she said shortly, turning on a pointed red toe toward the other end of Greek Row.
I waved arms at the front of the Delta Beta house. “Hello? We’re here.”
Sheila lifted an eyebrow. “Not your house. Mine.”
Oh, crap. This was getting worse and worse. It was bad enough when I thought Sheila might be tricking me into turning myself in at the station. But if she expected me to enter the Mu Mu Mu house without a weapon (for self-defense, of course), she had better check herself.
Ty said that he’d meet us there, and he wasn’t kidding. By the time I’d followed a good ten steps behind Sheila down the block, Ty was standing outside the Moo house.
“Are you living here?” I grumbled at him.
“I had some business in the area.” His face was perfectly blank, and I couldn’t detect any of the low-key snarkiness that he usually flung my way. Maybe since Sheila was here, he thought he’d be more professional.
He started to follow Sheila inside, then did a double take, his sharp gaze taking all of me in, the fleece, the slippers, the flannel. Then he reached out and smudged something on my chest with his thumb and looked at it more closely. “Ice cream?”
My face burned. “So?”
“Just glad to see you eating something, Blythe.”
Sheila sighed heavily. “I hate to interrupt the flirting, but pref night starts in two hours.”
Ty’s attention snapped to her. “Yes, I know. Let’s get this done and see what you have.” Since when did Ty pay attention to the rush schedules, much less act like they were a priority? The two walked through the front door of the Moo house with purpose, and I lagged behind, not used to entering the Moo house—invited, anyway.
There was something fishy going on. A Tri Mu wanted to help a Deb, the antisorority police officer was quick-stepping because of a rush deadline, and I had failed to notice the dribbled melted ice cream down my jacket. My whole world had gone topsy-turvy.
I had a vague recollection of the layout of the Tri Mu house from studying the schematics back in my undergrad days, so it wasn’t unfamiliar as we followed Sheila up a back stair and into a TV room that had clearly been taken over by their version of a Rush Dungeon. The same piles of paperwork, photos, receipts, random pieces of bedazzled costumes graced their workroom as they did ours. Their computer system was similar to ours, as well. Several monitors and laptops and cords and …
“OH. MY. GOD.”
I froze at the tone in Ty’s voice. “Is that …”
Sheila nodded slowly, with the same vein of caution that I had when Ty had discovered our high-tech surveillance—scratch that—security system.
“Does this have something to do with the remote-control plane?” I pointed at the toy on the desk, a black-plastic spider with propellers on top.
“That is a Sonssuto Uber Vision,” Ty said, as if I should understand it now.
“Top-of-the-line,” Sheila added. Those words I understood better, but I still wasn’t sure. When Sheila stepped forward and hit a button on the flat screen, and aerial photography popped up, I got it.
“You used drones?” I screeched. “You spied on sorority row from the sky? What’s next? Do you have a satellite intercepting our calls?”
Sheila crossed her arms and rolled her eyes and got all huffy. “Like you have any room to talk, Margot. Don’t think that we don’t know about the bug you put in Sarah McLane’s car.”
Ty tilted his head at me, his eyes wide. I threw my hands up. “That wasn’t us! Why would we bug her car!?”
“Because it’s where she goes to talk so no one listens in at the house.”
“Lord help you all,” Ty said in a mysteriously exhausted voice. “Do you have anything useful here?” The question was for Sheila and, after a moment to collect herself, she nodded and pulled up footage of the night that Callie broke curfew and ran around sorority row mixing up everyone’s Greek letters. Apparently, the Tri Mu drone flew at four hundred feet and had an excellent camera range. According to the time stamps, Callie had just reentered the Deb house about half an hour before Daria Cantrell arrived on sorority row.
Sheila had done something extraordinary. By bringing this evidence to the police, Callie Campbell had been exonerated. I couldn’t wait to go to the jail and be there when the doors burst open, and she was free as a bird. I was about to suggest that next course of action when Ty leaned over the desk, drumming his fingers on the white-painted wood and peering in to the monitor. “Where does Daria come in?”
There was a moment of silence before Sheila admitted, “We don’t have the murder on film.”
Ty’s head dropped low, a lock of blond hair falling in his face. I wanted to pat that tense spot between his shoulder blades where his shirt stretched tight and taut.
Sheila moved the mouse, and a scene came up. “This is all we have.” I recognized the street in front of the Tri Mu house, and it got bigger and bigger, and it looked like the drone was coming down into the bushes.
“I’m sorry,” Sheila whispered. She went on to explain that the drone was programmed to come in each night for charging, and it had right before the hour that the ME said Daria Cantrell had been attacked in the Delta Beta backyard.
Ty shook his head slowly. “Two high-tech surveillance systems of this block and not a damn picture of anything that will help me catch a murderer.”
Sheila shot me a look, and I tried to look ignorant of the other security system.
Then she refocused on Ty, with renewed purpose. “We actually have something else. It’s about Shannon’s murder.” At Ty’s sharp glance, she resumed the explanation in a hurry. “I just went back and looked for it today, after the Panhellenic meeting. You see, Shannon was my dear friend. A sister. At first I thought that it had to be a Deb and I was angry and I assumed that a Deb had to be involved, given the location and, well …” She trailed off as she glanced at me, a heavily charged expression on her face. “Their reputation.”
That brought out a thick sigh from me. “Really?”
Sheila continued, “For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why you weren’t arresting someone from there and battling with my own demons about Shannon.” Sheila pressed her lips together and gave her head a little shake. “And when I heard about the Delta Beta chapter’s mass alibi, I came up here to prove them wrong.” She pulled up a file on the laptop. “And this is what I found.”
The black-and-white footage was remarkably clear for being filmed four hundred feet in the air. I wondered what those drones could catch people doing. Illicit things. Nose-picking things. Could it see my PIN number when I went to the ATM? How could this technology be in the hands of untrustworthy American citizens like Sheila DeGrasse?
There it was, the Delta Beta house. And then came the entire chapter, spilling out of the house in our matching black sweatshirts that day. I remembered it so well. We had still been organized and motivated and hopeful that all our hard work was going to result in a kick-butt pledge class that should have been coming this time tomorrow. The thought that we’d never have that was like a punch to my gut.
Then everyone loaded up in cars and drove off to the day spa, where we’d all had pedicures done, first the seniors, then juniors and sophomores.
The drone drifted toward the Epsilon Chi house to the south, and Sheila put her finger to the screen. “There’s Shannon.” She whispered it, but I could still hear the tightness in her throat.
We saw Shannon get out of a car and head toward the Deb house. “Was she going in?” I asked. Sheila nodded. “Did she have the security code?”
A guilty look crossed Sheila’s face when she glanced at the drone on the table. Guess that answered my question about the capabilities of the device to record PIN numbers.
On the flat screen, Shannon turned toward the woods behind the house, as if she had heard her name called.
Then, barely visible in the bottom right-hand corner, a pixelated figure approached Shannon from behind, lifted a hand, and struck her in the back of her skull.
I gasped, involuntarily, even knowing what was about to happen. Sheila had turned away, her arms wrapped around her middle.
Even Ty took a deep, steadying breath before saying, “I’m going to need all of this.”
Sheila nodded, and Ty got out his phone to call someone to pick up evidence. I sank down in a chair, my brain on overdrive as it processed all that it had just seen. Once again, I had a sickening feeling that my subconscious knew something, had picked up on a key clue, but before I could stitch the strands together, Ty was lifting my elbow.
“We have an appointment,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument from me. But then he said, “Pref night starts in an hour and a half,” and that made me wonder all over again.
Chapter Thirty-six
THIS TIME I didn’t even notice that Ty drove me back to the police station. My brain was replaying the drone footage over and over again. There had to be a link there, but the harder I tried, the more I had nothing. Which was probably the right result. After all, the drone had nothing on Daria Cantrell’s murder, just a dive into the bushes.
When we walked through the front door of the police station, we were immediately met with a waiting room full of very angry sorority women with hand-painted signs saying FREE CAMPBELL! and CALLIE FTW! and PLEDGE DELTA BETA! Clearly, the rush supplies had been repurposed for this impromptu sit-in; I had never loved my girls more, for their dedication to social justice and their commitment to recycling.
