Eight
The box was lighter than it looked, but it tired Erin out anyways. It shouldn't have, but that didn't change the fact that it did. Maybe the Captain was right. Maybe she should take the next few days and try to get her head straightened out. But she couldn't afford that kind of luxury, not when her sister, the only person in the world who had ever cared about her, was lying there on a slab in the coroner's office with a half-dozen stab wounds to the abdomen.
She opened the box up. A handful of photographs, printed on large paper, and a file with the basic paperwork. Erin laid out the photos on her coffee table.
She'd already seen the body, so that part wasn't nearly as upsetting as it could have been. What she was looking for now was anything she could get from the scene. It would have been better to be there, to see it. But with how queasy the photos were making her, there was a real question how well she would have handled it. She forced herself to keep looking.
Why was her sister even in a place like this? It didn't fit with her, and she didn't fit with an end-of-the-road alleyway in the bad part of town. There was blood all around, so clearly she'd bled to death in that spot. It wasn't a body dump, then.
Could it have been a case of a mistake? She just went out there without knowing how rough the area was? Erin shook her head. No, no way. There were people who wouldn't pick up on the signs, and people who assumed they were just misinterpreting, but Becca had never been that kind. She knew what she was getting herself into when she stepped over there.
It left the question, of course, why she was in L.A. at all. She'd been living with Dad in Minnesota for the last ten years, why would she suddenly need to come and make friends with dear sis. Unless she wasn't there to meet Erin at all.
That made less sense, though, because so far as Erin knew, her sister was still working some dead-end job because Dad couldn't be left alone long enough to take trips across the country for something very serious.
Every avenue of approach just led to more questions.
Two questions bubbled to the top, though, as the most important ones. First, what had brought her here? Second, what brought her to an alley in the middle of a no-go zone?
There were answers that Erin could think of, but none seemed to be a sure thing, not even necessarily very likely.
She wrote the questions down on the top of her pad and dropped it on the couch beside her, and then pulled out the paperwork and started reading through it.
The body was found at ten P.M. the night before Captain called her. Which means that essentially as soon as he got back to the office he had called Erin to tell her to expect something bad when she got back.
Bad didn't begin to cover it, but then again he hadn't used that word exactly, either. Erin sucked in a breath and kept reading. The location was more-or-less where she thought it was. The difference a few blocks made could be surprising, but she had already narrowed it down to that area from the graffiti and the used condoms and dirty needles just lying around.
They got into what had happened specifically. An anonymous tip called in from a cell phone belonging to a local, Marco Rodrigues. He was known to the station to be involved in the narcotics trade, but when they rode around to talk to him about it, the route was a dead end. Erin hadn't expected it to go that easily, but she was surprised to find that they'd moved so quickly on the first lead. Maybe they were working the case seriously after all.
She moved down the page further.
Robbery unlikely. She was found with a wallet containing seventy-three dollars in various denominations, a credit card, and a Minnesota-issued state I.D., no drivers' license. Which meant that someone else had taken her there, perhaps a taxi.
Time of death was officially placed an hour before the call came in, around 9 P.M., and that was about where the official details stopped.
They'd made calls to the taxi companies, seeing if any drivers remembered her face, but it took time for that kind of information to come back, and they probably hadn't gotten an answer yet. Beyond that, though, there wasn't much.
Erin sucked in a breath and collapsed the mess of papers into a single pile, then put it back into the box, the folder on top. There was more to cover, but she needed a break. Part of her was beginning to see exactly why she shouldn't work on this case, but she ignored that part.
She slid sideways into the seat of her computer chair and tapped in the keys to her password. The welcoming blue desktop screen smiled out at her. She'd thought it would somehow be helpful for it to say something motivational, so she had settled on a picture of a pretty blue bird flying and gave a pithy line about keeping on trying until you flew.
She had about forty e-mails. Wasn't that supposed to go through her phone? She furrowed her eyebrows. No, she'd just changed her damn e-mail password. It had silently locked her phone out, without ever once actually prompting her to change it. She cursed under her breath and opened the inbox.
A sale at a local sporting goods store had somehow made its way in, along with a dozen social media notifications. They were all deleted just the same way, with only enough attention to figure out what it was supposed to be before she deleted it. She didn't need any baseballs, and she sure as hell didn't need to tell some website if she knew a Craig Hutchinson. Where the hell did these sites even get ideals like that?
One, though, caught her interest. Her breath hitched as she saw it. Becca had sent her an email. She didn't recognize the email, but then they'd never corresponded through it. But RebeccaRusso85 was definitely her, and when Erin clicked open the message, sure enough, the style fit perfectly.
Either Becca had sent her this email, or someone was working very hard to make Erin think she had, and as crazy as things seemed with Becca's death, Erin wasn't ready to declare that it was a vast conspiracy to mess with her head and commit the perfect murder.
Dad was fine, she started off with. He's been drinking less. That seemed to have gone out the window the minute that Becca left.
She met a guy online, he seemed great. They'd been talking for the better part of a year. She hadn't wanted to bother Erin with it when her work was so busy. But now they were going to meet up, and they'd be right in her neck of the woods. Could she stop by and maybe get a cup of coffee? It would be so wonderful to catch up on old times. If she didn't hear back, she'd assume yes.
Erin remembered the day that Becca had scheduled. She'd spent the whole day on her back in a 3rd-floor ski resort suite. She cursed out loud. What was she thinking? What was wrong with her?
She should never have left. Now Becca was dead. No more chances to catch up. She moved over to the bed. Maybe daytime T.V. was the right choice. The name Becca gave for her internet boyfriend stood out in Erin's memory, though.
Who in the hell was Craig?