Chapter 2
SABLE
I slowed my steps to minimize the soft slap of rubber on concrete. One step at a time, I moved slowly, silently up the stairs.
The guys started up behind me a moment later. I didn't look back to see if they were all following. I knew they were; I sensed them. Caught their shadows on the walls every so often, illuminated by the dim, overhead fluorescent lighting. Heard the shuffle of their shoes.
Besides, each had his reasons for coming with me. Forrest, because he believed me. Leif because he was, well, Leif. And Woody because his pride wouldn't let him do otherwise.
"Savannah," I called softly.
I listened for a response. None came. I didn't expect one, not here. Not unless she hid somewhere above us. Crouched in a corner of the stairs waiting for someone to find her.
Us, I mean us. No one bad. Not if they knew what was good for them. They'd be facing three armed killers and me, the angry bestie. That should scare the shit out of them.
We reached the first landing, the second, the third. By the time we passed the sixth, I was panting, my armpits damp.
"Looks like I can skip leg day," Leif quipped.
"Don't make me throw you back down," Woody growled at him.
"Right back at you," Leif said with a laugh.
I glanced at them now. Woody was scowling. No surprise there. Leif was smiling. Also not surprising. Forrest's expression was grim, as if he expected to come upon a corpse at any moment.
In that moment, I realized that while I couldn't hear anything, I could smell something. Sharp and tangy. Unwelcome but familiar.
"Is that…" I asked tentatively.
"Blood." Forrest nodded. "Lots of it, unless I miss my guess." His expression was crystal clear; he wasn't missing any guesses. He wished he was, but he'd done this before. Possibly not this this, but close enough.
My hand flew to my mouth.
Oh God, was it Savannah? She could be lying dead on the next stairwell, waiting for us to find her.
Shoving down the sick feeling in my stomach, I hurried my steps, pushing my aching legs faster up the steep steps.
I stopped at the next set of stairs and peered up.
Something was there.
Someone.
Blood pooled beside them, it had already started to trickle down the stairs.
Drip.
Drip.
It pooled at the end of a tread before dripping down to the next.
"If you don't want to look—" Forrest started.
"I need to see," I said. "I need to know if it's Savannah."
I'd seen dead bodies before, a whole two times. I'd handled the first two. I could handle this.
In theory.
Counting the steps, I gripped the rail and pulled myself up. One, two, three, four, five.
I stopped.
"That's not Savannah."
For one thing, Savannah wasn't a six-foot-tall man with black hair. From the look of him, he'd landed at the base of the stairs, hitting his head on the concrete floor.
The knife sticking out of his chest also suggested things hadn't gone his way.
"Is that anyone you know?" Forrest stood on the step beside me, his hand on my shoulder.
"I was going to ask you the same thing," I said. "He's not familiar."
"Sucks to be him," Leif remarked. "Wild guess, he's dead."
"What makes you think that?" Woody said sarcastically. "Is it the amount of blood loss? Or the blade right through his heart?"
Leif raised his hand, turning it this way and that. "A little bit of both."
Woody grunted. "This asshole have anything to do with your friend?"
"I don't know," I said. "Her apartment is on the next floor up."
Woody grumbled something about 'we could have taken the elevator,' but stepped past the corpse and out into the corridor on floor eight.
Like on the street, nothing looked out of place. There wasn't a row of dead bodies waiting to greet us. Nor the man's killer, ready to have us join him in the afterlife, or whatever happened after we died.
What we found was an empty, quiet corridor with carpet that looked like it should have been replaced a decade ago.
"This place has potential," Leif remarked.
Of course he would think that. He was an interior designer.
He analyzed spaces for a living, looking for ways to make them prettier, or more functional.
His creativity was something he probably couldn't switch off, even if he wanted to.
Like my hyper-vigilance. Wherever he went, he thought about the improvements he could make. This place could certainly use it.
My tongue between my lips, I started toward Savannah's apartment. The door was closed. I looked back at the guys before raising my hand to knock. Once, twice.
"Maybe she's not—" I started to say before the door swung open.
Savannah stood there, looking confused. "What are you doing here?"
"I got your call," I said. "That was you, right?"
She shook her head, clearly confused. "No, I just got home."
"What the fuck?" Now I was confused, but only for a moment.
We'd been played.
It hadn't occurred to me someone might have duplicated her voice to draw us here. Of course it hadn't. Why would anyone do that?
I couldn't help my gaze sliding to Woody. Was there a chance he'd done this in the hope I'd come here alone? No, he looked as confused as I was, and only slightly more pissed off.
"You should come in." Savannah stepped back, beckoning us into the apartment.
I hesitated for a moment. Was she part of some kind of trap? No, I couldn't believe that. She wouldn't do that to me. If someone was forcing her into it, she'd find a way to give me a sign. What I got from her was that she had no idea what was going on either.
"This is weird as fuck," Woody said. His expressions suggested he'd prefer to stay out in the corridor, but he stepped inside with the rest of us.
"Hey, you must be Savannah," Leif held out his hand for her to shake. "I don't want to alarm you, but do you know there's a dead body in the stairwell?" He jerked his opposite hand over his shoulder thumb pointing roughly in that direction.
She stared at him. "Excuse me, did I hear you right? I thought you said there's a dead body in the stairs."
"That's exactly what he said. Do you know anything about that?" Forrest asked.
I winced. He wasn't pulling any punches.
Savannah looked at all of us like we were out of our minds. "Is this some kind of joke? Sable, what's going on?"
"That's what I'd like to know," I said. "Someone wanted us to come here."
Leif glanced at Woody, who shook his head. "This has nothing to do with me. Why would I bother?"
"I can think of a couple of reasons," Leif said.
"Whatever reasons you think you can come up with, you're wrong," Woody snapped. "Maybe, just maybe, Sable is making all of this up." He turned his glare on me.
"I didn't," I said. "Someone that sounded like Savannah called me. Then I called Forrest."
"Someone that…" Savannah trailed off and pulled out her phone. "I haven't made any calls for a couple of days." She showed us the call log. The last one she'd made was to her mother. The one before that was to me, three days ago.
I pulled out my own phone and checked the incoming call log.
"There it is right there, see? A call from Savannah that lasted twenty-three seconds."
"Can I see?" Forrest held out his hand.
I handed him the phone.
"I'm guessing they cloned Savannah's number to make it look like it was coming from her," he said. "I'll have my son look into it in the morning. In the meantime, there's a small matter of a dead body in the stairwell. Do you think you could identify him?"
Forrest handed the phone back to me and turned his gaze to Savannah.
She looked from him to me and back again, her eyes wide. I hated that she'd been drawn into this. These dark shadows, they weren't hers. Someone made them hers anyway.
I wanted to push them down the stairs. Knife in the chest optional.
"You don't have to look if you don't want to," I said, putting my arm around her.
"Yes she does," Woody said. "We need to know if whoever wanted you to come here had something to do with her. This is about you."
I was about to refute that suggestion, but he was right. Why else would anyone fake Savannah's voice? Was that knife and fall down the stairs meant for me? Was that man in the wrong place at the wrong time?
My stomach twisted. Someone innocent could have gotten caught up in whatever this was. Someone else innocent.
"I'll look," Savannah said with a nod. "Then we should call the cops."
"Agreed," Forrest said.
Once more, we piled out the door and into the stairwell.
Savannah peered down at the corpse, wincing at what she saw. "I can't unsee that."
I sensed one of the guys was about to tell her she'd get used to it, but they knew better than to say that. Just as well, I didn't want her to get used to it. I wanted to keep her out of this from here on out. This was our problem, not hers.
"Do you know him?" Forrest asked.
Savannah squinted. "He looks familiar. I think I've seen him around at rehearsals. He's not in the orchestra though." She shook her head. "I don't know who he is."
"If it wasn't for the knife. I'd wonder if he got himself caught in his own trap," Leif said.
Forrest grunted his agreement. "I was thinking the same thing. The knife in the chest would suggest otherwise."
"I don't know." Woody leaned against the railing, peering down at all the flights of stairs we'd labored up. "Accidents happen. Remember that guy who accidentally stabbed himself in the ass?"
Leif snort-laughed. "Yeah, that was fucking funny."
"Then there's all the people that shoot themselves in the foot, literally," Woody continued. "He might have held the knife wrong and it stabbed him right through the heart when he fell."
"That sounds like something out of a cartoon," I said. I pictured an animated character dramatically teetering at the edge of a step, twirling a couple of time before tumbling, knife embedding at an impossible angle.
"In my experience," Leif said slowly, "if we can imagine it, then it's possible. With some exceptions, like Brussels sprouts not tasting like shit."
I made a face. I knew a lot of people liked them, but I wasn't one of them.
"Brussels sprouts are good when you cook them right," Woody said. Of course he'd like them.
"You can cook them for us sometime." Leif moved carefully down the stairs, avoiding stepping in any blood, and crouched beside the corpse. He started searching through the man's pockets.
"Either he's going to have ID, or his lack of ID is going to suggest he's someone suspicious, doing something he shouldn't be doing," he explained.
That made sense. Someone coming after me might not have wanted to be identified if something like this happened.
Not that I believed, that this just…happened.
Their theory about him accidentally stabbing himself in the heart was colorful, but it didn't make sense to me.
Not really. If you were about to fall down the stairs, wouldn't you make sure to hold the knife as far away from yourself as possible? Wouldn't you drop it or throw it?
No. Whoever did this, they did it on purpose.
"They might still be here," I whispered. I looked up as far up as the stairs went. If anyone was there, they were hiding in a stairwell, potentially listening to every word we said. Possibly laughing their asses off at the suggestion this was an accident.
No, if they were laughing their asses off, we'd be able to hear them. Wouldn't we? Oh good, now I was picturing an animated ass rolling past us, all the way to the ground.
"Anything?" Forrest asked, addressing the question to Leif, while also keeping one eye on the stairs above us.
"Just a phone," Leif said, holding it up. "It's locked." He held it in front of the corpse's face, but the phone didn't unlock. "Inconvenient."
Thinking for a moment, he pressed the screen against the dead man's thumb. "There we go," he said cheerfully. He pulled out his own phone and took a few photos of the other screen before closing it, wiping it carefully and pushing it back into the dead man's pocket.
"The cops might need it to identify him."
"Should we…" I jerked my head upward.
"Call the police?" From the expression on Forrest's face, he understood my intention. If anyone was listening, pretending to stall would give us a couple of moments.
"I'll call them," Savannah said, pulling out her phone. "I get the feeling you're not sticking around."
"There's nothing we can do for him,” Forrest agreed. In a whisper he added, "Sable, stay here with Savannah. We're going to take a look around."
I wanted to argue, but I couldn't. It would be better if someone stayed with her, at least until the cops arrived.
"We'll wait back in the corridor," I said.
Forrest nodded and gestured to the others. Smiling as usual, Leif was right behind him.
Woody sighed before stomping after them.