CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 19
If Your Hands Are Up, Are You Under Arrest?
“What are you still doing here?” Mr. Prentice splutters at us. “Why are you not in your rooms as you were instructed?”
“Can we put our hands down?” Oliver asks.
“Slowly,” the police officer says. She’s wearing an LA County Sheriff’s Department uniform—forest-green trousers, a long-sleeved khaki shirt with a green-and-gold patch over the breast—and looks to be in her late twenties. Her reddish-blond hair is in two braids, one over each shoulder, and she’s holding her arms out straight with her gun pointed right at us.
She looks deadly serious.
I mean, the gun kind of gives it away.
“What did you drop?”
She’s looking right at me.
Which means the gun is pointing at me, too.
Right at my heart.
“It’s José’s cell phone.” I nod behind me. “The victim. I found it on the ground.”
“Give that to me.”
I pick it up and walk it to her slowly, my eyes on the gun, and give it to her in the palm frond. She takes one hand off her gun and takes it, palm frond and all, then lowers her gun arm slowly.
“There’s an evidence bag in my pocket. Reach in and take it out.”
I do as she asks and pull out a folded piece of plastic with an orange seal on it. She instructs me to open it and deposit the phone inside. I do it, then hand it back to her. She slips the gun into a pouch that she’s wearing like a cross-body bag.
“Return to your friends.”
“They’re not...Yes, of course.”
She holsters her gun, then puts her hands on her hips. “Who are you?”
“We’re here for a wedding,” I say.
“Why didn’t you evacuate?”
“Seemed unnecessary,” Fred says. “After all the planning.”
“There was an evacuation order issued.”
“Yes, but that happened last time, didn’t it? Hurricane Hilary? And then it was all for nothing. Just some rain.”
The officer shakes her head like she’s swatting away a fly. I’m not sure if she recognizes Fred. I’m going to go with no because she’s treating him like a regular person rather than a movie star.
“And what are you doing here , exactly? This isn’t the wedding venue.”
Oliver speaks into the silence, always the good student who never got into trouble. “We were doing the ropes course and then we found José.”
“And whose idea was it to look for evidence?”
“Connor,” I say as he says, “Eleanor.”
The fink.
But, oh!
Was that the point? Is he working for Tyler, even now? Is he smart enough to have used reverse psychology on me?
I’m not sure he is. But I’ve underestimated him before.
“Why would you do such a thing?” the police officer asks.
“I...Who are you?”
“I’m Officer Anderson of the Avalon division of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.” She speaks robotically, like Mr. Anderson from the Matrix movies, though they look nothing alike. I’m not sure who’d play her in the movie—some ingenue, I guess, in her first starring role. “Who are you?”
“Eleanor Dash.” I pause to see if she’s heard of me.
She hasn’t. Fine. Moving on.
“And you’ve been assigned to this case?”
“I’m the only officer on the island.”
“Are others...en route?”
“All ferry service has been canceled—the last ferry went out this morning when the evacuation order got issued. I’m to ascertain if this is an emergency and advise before they send a boat. The sea is already rising, and the storm can come in fast. We don’t want to risk lives.”
“Where is it now?”
“It’s touched land in Baja and is making its way up the coast. Heavy rain is already flooding coastal towns. You all should have evacuated.”
Or never come here in the first place.
“Did you find anything else near the body?” Officer Anderson asks.
“No.”
“What were you looking for, exactly?”
“I was looking for his phone.”
“I say.” Inspector Tucci comes forward with his hand extended. “Inspector Tucci of the Roman police force. May I be of assistance?”
Officer Anderson creases her brow in confusion, or maybe that’s recognition? “Are you...”
“He’s not a policeman!” Simone says. “Just an actor.”
“Oh, I...”
“Ignore him.”
“All right. You’re here for a wedding?”
“Yes,” Emma says, her voice anxious but hopeful. “It’s ours. Mine and Fred’s. We’re—”
“I know who you are.”
Of course she does.
Good for her for not fawning all over them.
Not that I’m jealous or anything.
“Okay, well, yes,” Emma says. “We’re here for our wedding. And I’m sorry we didn’t evacuate, we didn’t mean to be a bother, but everything was all arranged. And...anyway, that doesn’t matter. But you need to find Tyler.”
“Who?”
“Tyler Houston. Our producer. He left this morning on the last ferry.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s suspicious,” Fred says. “Especially given the call I received yesterday.”
“What call?”
“To come see José in the basement of the hotel.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There was an almost-electrocution yesterday morning,” Emma says. “At the soaking pools? They’re up the hill above the villas, below the tennis courts. Anyway, if it wasn’t for Harper’s phone falling in, I might’ve been electrocuted. Or Eleanor.”
“Or me,” Simone says dryly.
“Oh, yes, you too, Simone. And Harper. We were all there. But it was very upsetting, so we told the administration.”
“Oliver and I spoke to him,” I say. “He said the wiring was old, and that was the most likely reason.”
I leave out the part about Oliver and I doing our own investigation in his work shed.
Seems like the wrong time to bring that up.
“And then he called Fred yesterday afternoon,” Emma says, warming to her story. “And asked to meet him.”
“He called you?” Officer Anderson says. “How?”
“On my, um, cell phone. Doesn’t matter. I went to meet him, naturally. Wanted to know what had happened. But I got a cosh on the head for my troubles.”
He mimics someone hitting him on the back of the head, and then him reacting to it.
It’s quite a good reenactment.
“And then Fred was missing,” Emma says.
“Knocked on the head, you see?”
The group laughs, and this seems to unstick something in everyone as they each leap in to add something to the story, everyone contributing something so fast that it’s hard to know who’s saying what.
See if you can tell.
“We were in a panic. But there was a tracker on his phone.”
“My fault, I’m afraid.”
“And then we found him in the basement. In the furnace room.”
“So the wedding was back on.”
“And then the rehearsal dinner was canceled.”
“Because of the cat almost dying!”
“No, the cat was at lunch.”
“Right, right.”
“So we all went to bed, and then, this morning, we played tennis.”
“First there was your fight with Tyler on the docks.”
“Ah, yes. He was attempting to blackmail me. Well, not blackmail exactly, but I owe him money and he was making threats. Saying he would tell the press about it.”
“He said he’d kill you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, yes, he did.”
“So, Tyler left, and then we went to tennis.”
“And we were winning—”
“Connor was making terrible calls.”
“We won fair and square.”
“Think that if you want to.”
“And then we came to do the ropes course and Eleanor saw the body after she and Oliver fell.”
“It was awful.”
“And then the hotel manager left to take a call and we decided to investigate. Not sure it was Eleanor who suggested it. Maybe it was Connor?”
“I say, throwing me under the bus like that.”
“And then Eleanor had José’s number—you’ll want to ask her about that—and she rang it and rang it and then she found the phone.”
“And then she was looking at the phone and then you arrived and said ‘Hands up.’”
Officer Anderson’s head is swerving from left to right and back to front trying to follow all of us as we download what happened over the last twenty-four hours.
“What is Mr. Houston’s connection to the victim?” Officer Anderson asks.
“We’re not sure,” I say. “But they could’ve been working together. That’s why I was checking his phone—to see if they’d had any contact.”
Officer Anderson fishes the phone out of her pouch. She puts on a pair of latex gloves, then takes the phone out of the evidence bag.
I tell her the code.
“Not very original.”
“Right?”
She gives me a look, then punches it in. “There are texts on here.”
“From what number?”
She reads it out.
“That’s Tyler’s number,” Emma says.
“Are you sure?” Officer Anderson asks.
“Yes. If I had my phone, I could show you, but yes.”
“What do the texts say?” I ask.
“He’s asking the owner of the phone to meet him.”
“Where?”
She looks up. “Here.”
A murmur goes through the group.
“So he is the murderer,” Inspector Tucci says. “It is all clear now. The spurned man, and money! Both are excellent motives, no? And he’s here, right on the spot. He tries to disrupt the wedding, to scare the bride out of going through with it, and when that doesn’t work, to cause an accident, and he has, how do you say, the inside man, to help him. But then, the inside man doesn’t want to go along with it anymore. He will tell on Mr. Houston.
“So, Mr. Houston must act. He lures José to this location, kills him in such a way that he can make it look like an accident. He puts him in the climbing harness, cuts the ropes above, then buries him in the brush, and then he leaves the island so he is not here when the body is discovered. If he is lucky, the body won’t be found until today at the earliest, when it is much more difficult to tell how long ago he died. He looks for the phone to take it, but it has slipped from the body and he cannot find it. He is careless, maybe, and does not think to make a call to find it...
“Ah, no. He is not careless . He does not bring his phone to the scene of the crime so he cannot be tracked here, but now that means he cannot find the phone. So! He is nervous. He leaves, worried. He sees Fred on the dock and makes threats. This is also a distraction. If he has acted, why threaten? And now he is waiting somewhere. But he will have an excuse for these messages, mark my words. Now, is that everything? Yes. Yes. I believe it is.” Inspector Tucci’s eyes come back into focus and a smile breaks out on his face.
“By George, I think he’s solved it,” Allison says with an air of surprise.
“I did, didn’t I?’
Connor and I make eye contact. Neither of us can believe it.
I can tell that we’re both cycling through the facts he recited and double-checking them for accuracy and logic. We complete the task at the same time and nod at each other.
I feel a blush creep up the back of my neck at this familiar feeling.
The attraction of being right with someone.
Of solving a mystery together.
It’s a high. I write about it in my books, funneling that feeling into Connor and Cecilia’s romance.
But I haven’t felt it myself in a long time.
I break eye contact. Connor and I aren’t right together. Not in any way but this.
I feel bad for this moment of weakness. But also: Oliver saw it.
Fuck.
“I...” I stop and turn my face to Officer Anderson. “It all makes sense.”
“We will have to verify everything.”
“I can give you Mr. Houston’s address,” Connor says.
“He shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Does this mean we can have the wedding?” Emma asks with a note of hope.
“I’m not sure. I’d ask you to return to your rooms. I have to call all of this in. And we need to secure the body.”
“Are you going to leave him out here?” Harper asks, and shudders.
“We have no choice until a tech team can get here. But we’ll cover him with tarps to preserve whatever evidence you lot have not already ruined.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Let’s hope this is the solution and we won’t have to worry about that. If it isn’t, you all may be looking at an obstruction charge.”
“Do you need anything else from us?” I say.
“I think you’ve all done enough for one day.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Come on, everyone, let’s go. Connor, give her that information about Tyler. The rest of you, follow me.”
I reach out my hand for Oliver. He doesn’t look happy, but he takes it and I give it a squeeze.
Seems like I’ve had to communicate with hand-holding and looks too much on this trip.
As I’ve mentioned, I get a sixth sense about things sometimes. I can tell what someone’s going to say before they say it. And Oliver has something to say.
Something I don’t think I want to hear.
And maybe it’s just the malaise that comes with being involved in a death.
Or maybe what’s coming next is the end of me and Oliver.
That we’re as dead as José.