"If there is one."
"I'm coming over and we're going to search his room. Is your mum in?"
"She's at my nan's, sorting out Pete's funeral arrangements."
I winced. "I'm sorry." Here we were about to rifle through Josh's things when his mum was planning another funeral for her brother.
"Don't worry about it."
"You're so cool about everything."
"I can't help it. I barely saw any of these people growing up. I don't feel like I've lost anyone, and I know I sound like an arsehole right now but I can't help it."
"You don't sound like an arsehole." He was right. How could you feel more than the usual sorry for someone's loss when you didn't know the person? Blake felt how I felt when my mum's old school friend's husband died. I had met her once but never him. I was sad for her but that was it.
He sighed. "You coming now then?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Oh, and since this is your idea you can be the one looking under his bed."
Porn. "Ew."
"That's what I thought. Hurry up." He hung up the phone, and I turned my TV off. I hadn't watched anything, but I liked the background noise. With my parents at work, it was too quiet in the house. I wanted noise.
I walked to my car and kept my head down as the local knitting club walked by on their way to the village hall for their weekly meeting. Before the murders they would have stopped to chat and tell me I needed to put some meat on my bones, this time they whispered to each other, stealing little glances at me out of the corner of their eye.
Mildred, the eldest and brightest purple rinse of the bunch was the first one that would call me over. Last winter she knitted me a pink and brown stripe scarf because I didn't wrap up warm enough, apparently. It hurt that she turned so easily. I was guilty until proven innocent.
Blake was waiting by his front door when I arrived. I opened the door and stepped out, frowning at him. "You're waiting for me?"
"Did Josh have something going on with Tilly and or Gigi?"
"Tilly and or Gigi?"
He shrugged. "I get them mixed up. Both their names end in an E sound."
I shook my head and walked towards him. "No, he didn't with either of them. Gigi was a lesbian, remember?"
"Megan was straight, remember?"
Fair point. "Why'd you ask?"
"Because," he replied, holding out a handful of photos of Tilly, "I found these in his sock drawer."
Cocking my head to the side, I took them from his hand and flicked through them. They were all close up pictures of Tilly. None were too odd, most natural ones as if she hadn't known they were being taken.
"Tilly," I whispered. "Why does he have all these?" There had to be at least twenty pictures. When I reached one of the bottom of her head, cut off just below her nose and stretching down to her cleavage, I shoved them back at Blake. "Why the fuck does he have those?"
"I dunno."
"Shit, was he cheating too? No," I said, shaking my head at how ridiculous the thought was. Tilly wouldn't go near Josh. She almost thought less of him than I did. "They don't look right, do they? If you were posing for your bit on the side, you'd actually pose a little. Half of them look candid and the other half look like general pictures."
"General pictures?"
"Yes!" I exclaimed, sighing. "You know, a smile for a picture anyone is taking."
"Alright. Josh has general and candid pictures of Tilly. No posing." He shook his head and said, "Still don't know where you're going with this."
"Really?" I replied flatly, pushing past him so we weren't still talking on his front step. "Blake, they mean Josh had a thing for Tilly, but it was just his thing."
"She didn't have a thing."
"I'm going to hit you."
He grinned. "Okay, I'm done." He shut the door behind him and stepped dangerously close to me.
I stood my ground, not letting him know he affected me. He would love it if he knew how my legs turned to jelly when he stood just inches from me, how his voice gave me goose bumps and his smile set my body on fire.
"Lead the way," I said, waving my hand over to the stairs.
"Ladies first," he replied. His voice was low, husky and incredibly sexy.
"Ah but you're not a gentlemen." Just go first, Blake! I already felt weak, boneless. Knowing his eyes were on me as we walked upstairs would probably make me collapse.
His lip curved in amusement. "You're right."
Blake walked ahead. As soon as he wasn't that close to me anymore my clouded mind cleared. I shouldn't even be thinking of a guy with everything that was going on. I couldn't even talk to anyone about it because things with Megan were weird and the only other girls I could talk to about boy stuff were dead.
I stopped at Josh's open door. Blake had already gone inside, not caring that we were about to breach the privacy of his dead brother. "You waiting out there all day?"
"It feels wrong."
"Do you want to get us off Wright's little list or do you want to respect Josh's privacy?" I walked in. "That's what I thought. There's nothing else in any of the drawers. I've not looked anywhere else yet. You look under the bed, and I'll look in the wardrobe."
"Great," I muttered. Now what kind of gross shit was going to be under a twenty-year-old guy's bed? That was something I was more than happy not to know the answer to, and I needed an answer for everything.
Turning my nose up in anticipation of all things disgusting, I knelt down and lowered my head to the floor. If there was a used condom I was out! "Nothing," I said, shocked. Everyone had at least a sock that had been kicked under their bed. Josh's was clear; I could see right through to the other side.
"Huh, what a pussy. You should see what's under my bed," Blake said. I couldn't see his amused, cheeky little grin, but I knew it was there.
"No, thank you," I replied and stood up. "So where does he keep the things he doesn't want anyone to find then?"
Blake shrugged, holding up a black plastic box. "In here is my guess."
My first thought was please let there be something in there and my second was I really don't want to know if there is. What if there was something between him and Tilly? Stranger things had happened. Not a lot stranger, but still.
"You ready to see what deep, dark secrets my brother had?"
"Not really."
"Good," he replied as if I'd said yes. "Let's open it then." He dropped the box on the bed, steadying it with one hand as it bounced. I held my breath as Blake took the lid off.
"Car magazines. Why hide those?"
Blake cocked his head to the side and smiled as if to say aw bless. "Underneath," he said and lifted the two magazines that hid the real contents of the box.
My eyes widened in shock. "What the..."
"Ohhh, Joshua!" Blake exclaimed, laughing. "What were you into?" He lifted out a black gag and swung it around his index finger. While Blake was playing and picking out other items, metal handcuffs and something else that looked like it belonged in a medieval torture chamber, I was motionless and speechless.
"Okay!" I snapped. "Put it all back!"
"Oh, we got pictures!" he said, waving a pouch of disposable camera prints.
I shook my head. "I don't want to. We can't."
"These might be a clue. What if some are of Tilly?"
"Then they would be with the others you found." I knew it was likely to be photos of Courtney, handcuffed, bound and whatever else they did. "And why hadn't the police found all this when they searched his room?"
"Because I might have found it in the loft last night and brought it down before you arrived."
I threw my hands up in the air, exasperated. Blake was worse than a naughty toddler. "Well, why did you put it in his wardrobe, and why did you let me look under the bed?"
"I could have hardly left it on his bed, could I? My mum could have walked in and found it. And making you look under the bed was purely for my amusement." He laughed and shook his head. "The look on your
face when you thought you were going to find something disgusting under there."
I took a deep breath.
"Mackenzie, we have to look. The whole point of snooping is to find something."
"Something that lead to him killing Courtney and himself, not the kinky shit that he got off to!"
"How do you know it's not all linked? Fuck knows what he was into or how deeply."
"What if it was some satanic... something."
"Not sure you have to worship the devil to enjoy a bit of kink."
I rolled my eyes. "I'm not saying that, but what if he did?"
"Why don't I look?"
"Oh, you'd love that, wouldn't you?"
"Ain't denying it, sweets." What the hell was wrong with him? "Oh, don't look at me like that. It's not my thing, but whatever tickles your pickle."
I laughed, properly laughed. "Tickles your pickle?"
"You must have heard that phrase before?" I shook my head. No, but I wish I had! "You poor, sheltered girl." He pulled the photos from the sleeve and his eyes widened. "Fuck."
"What? What does that mean?"
He looked up over one of the photos, pale. "You really don't want to see."
The very tips of my fingers tingled. "What is it?" I held my hand up. "No, don't show me, tell me. Is it Courtney?"
He nodded. "And some of Josh." His eyes widened and he shoved the photos back. "Okay. That's going to take a lot of therapy." Chucking everything back in the box, he shuddered and covered it with the lid.
"Blake, what were the pictures of? How bad?"
He shuddered again. "Bad. Let's talk in my room, yeah." Shit it must be bad if he can't even be in the room anymore.
"Well?" I said, closing his door.
"They did things to each other."
"Yeah, I got that. What things?"
"Whipping. I saw a whip and... marks on Josh. Blood."
My pulse thumped in my ears. "Blood?" What were they doing? "Whose blood?"
"Josh's, a cut on his chest. He had the camera at arm's length, taking a picture of Courtney..."
"Courtney? Courtney doing what?"
"Licking it."
"Fuck off!" I said and laughed. If he thinks I'm falling for that!
"Mackenzie," he whispered. His face was straight and serious. Not joking. He was not joking! My stomach lurched. I slapped my hand to my mouth. "You might be right with your satanic thing! I know some guys get off on pain while they're balls deep but that..."
"Oh my God, can you not refer to sex as balls deep again." He half smiled, not being able to completely keep the amusement from his face. "Shit." I sat on his bed. Courtney was into that stuff. She never mentioned it. Not even something like being tied up or blindfolded. We always had girly chats like that. Was she ashamed?
"You didn't know about any of it?"
I shook my head. "She never said a thing."
"I'm not surprised."
"Me neither. Not about the really... odd stuff. I thought she would talk about lighter things though. Not even when Tilly admitted she loved being tied up or Gigi with her chocolate mousse fetish."
"Please tell me you recorded your sleepovers!"
I arched my eyebrow, and he held his hands up, surrendering. "Courtney never said anything. Not anything out of the boring ordinary anyway. Do you think she really wanted to do that stuff?"
"Lick her boyfriend's blood during sex? Does anyone want to do that?"
"Do you think he forced her?"
Blake shrugged. "I have no idea. I am thinking that maybe this murder/suicide thing is a definite possibility now. But I'm thinking Courtney."
"No, she couldn't."
"Think about what she was doing to Josh, Mackenzie. If you saw a way to make that stop, if she really didn't want what was happening, wouldn't you take it?"
"She could have just broke up with him."
"Maybe there was more to it than that? Think about how she would have felt if he had been forcing her to do that stuff." Disgusted and belittled. Murderous and suicidal?
I rubbed my aching head. "I have no idea what to think anymore."
"We take this to Wright and let him investigate." How could you investigate something when the murderer might already be dead? Would they ever be able to prove it?
"Yeah," I replied, sagging into the mattress.
"You okay?"
I shrugged. I honestly didn't know. Tears filled my eyes. "What if Courtney didn't want to do that stuff?"
He dropped to his knees and leant his forearms on my thighs. "I don't know what to say, Mackenzie. Saying the right shit in situations like this isn't one of my strong points."
"You don't have to say anything. Sometimes there are just no words."
"What do you want me to do?"
I frowned. What could he do? What could anyone do? What were you even supposed to do when you found out your dead friend may or may not have been taken advantage of and abused? How did she feel? Why couldn't she have told me? I could have helped her. It might be Courtney. "We have to go to Wright with this. Now."
Chapter Twenty-One
"This is a good idea, isn't it?" I asked Blake, needing reassurance as we looked on at the police station doors. He held onto Josh's kinky and frankly terrifying sex box with a tight grip, his knuckles turning white. It was as if he felt guilty that he was about to expose his brother's dark secret. I admired him for that, but we had to show Wright to back up our murder/suicide theory.
"I don't think we have much of a choice. We can't find anything definite on your friends, and this is a possibility."
It was a possibility that it could have been Josh or Courtney. I didn't particularly want anyone else knowing what they had done in the bedroom because it was clearly something Court wanted to keep quiet, but we were running out of options. I grinned. "Well, at least you're admitting I'm right."
"I never said the suicide thing wasn't a possibility," he replied.
I shook my head. "Let's not get into that now." We always seemed to bicker over absolutely anything, even when we were talking about something so serious. It was actually one of the things that held me together, stopped everything becoming too much. "What do you think he's going to say?"
He snorted. "Who knows? It could literally be anything. Come on."
I followed a step behind Blake. My heart fluttered with nerves, and the palms of my hands started to sweat. Oh God. I just hoped he wouldn't think we were only saying it to cover up our guilt. As soon as Blake told me that was likely I hadn't been able to stop thinking about him turning around and arresting us, as ridiculous as that sounded. My mind was my own worst enemy.
Wright was standing beside the front desk talking to a colleague. He turned as if he'd sensed it was us walking in. My stomach was in knots. How did he just know? The man wasn't human.
"And to what do I owe this pleasure?" Wright said, threading his fingers together over his belly.
Blake's eyes narrowed. "We'd like to talk to you. If it's not too much trouble."
"Have you come to confess, Mr Harper?"
"We want to talk to you about another possibility," I said, cutting in, feeling Blake about to bite back with something stupid or sarcastic. "If you can spare us the time?"
"For you, Miss Keaton, anything."
Cocky, sarcastic bastard! I smiled, or what I hoped looked like a smile, and followed him into the far too familiar interview room. "How has no one ever killed him?" Blake whispered in my ear.
Grinning to myself, I shrugged. He must have rubbed enough people up the wrong way, so I saw Blake's point. I wondered if he conducted every investigation the way he was doing with this one. My knowledge of policing and detective work was severely limited to TV shows, but he didn't seem professional. He was too eccentric to be serious.
"Take a seat," he said, gesturing to the thinly padded metal chairs. Being in an interview room made me feel like a criminal, even though I was innocent. It was similar to when a police car was behind you on the road,
you've done nothing wrong but your heart leaps and you quickly place your hands at ten and two o'clock!
Blake sat beside me, far too close. His arm brushed against mine. I wasn't sure if it was deliberate to show unity against Wright, or he just couldn't be bothered to move the chair from where it was. "So," Wright said, waving his hand, "you have the floor. Over to you."
"Um, we thought of something, and we have something to show you."
He nodded, smirking a little in a patronising way that made me grind my teeth. "Another possibility? And I see you have a box of tricks with you."
I frowned. "Yes." Was he even taking us seriously? The contents of the box would probably wipe that smug smile right off his face.
"We think that maybe Josh could have done it," Blake said. "Or Courtney."
"What an interesting theory. That would certainly be better for you, wouldn't it? That would solve all of your problems."
Yes. "Josh had jealously issues. He saw Courtney as his. Their sex life was far from comfortable old missionary. I don't know, maybe he was mad at her or something or maybe she'd had enough. Can you just look into it, please?" I said, sliding the box over to him.
He cocked his head to the side, ignoring what I had just given him completely. "You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?"
"Clearing mine and my friends' names? You probably won't be surprised by this, but yes!"
"Let me share a little piece of information just to make your own little investigation easier, rookie," he said, raising his dark eyebrows, "Josh and Courtney were both murdered. From the angle of the knife wounds, it would have been very, very difficult for either one of them to have done that to themselves, and given the brutality and quantity of stab wounds, at this point I'm ruling that out. I'm quite offended you assumed I hadn't already investigated that possibility."
Blake shrugged. "Well, you don't seem to know much so you can see how we got there."
I kicked him under the table, which only made him smirk. "Look, we just want to know who did this. They were my friends."
"Except Joshua," Wright replied.
I clenched my jaw. Why wasn't he listening to us? "Doesn't mean I wanted him dead."
"Perhaps not."
"Definitely not," I snapped. "Do you have any idea who it was at all?"
Wright leant forwards, leaning his arms on the table and smiled. "I have five ideas."
Blake sighed and stood up. "That's a no then. Come on, Mackenzie, he's obviously got nothing new to go on. Want us to leave you with that so you can flick through and work out if Courtney would have been capable of stabbing so brutally after what Josh put her through, or are you still ruling that out?"