“What was that?”
“You shouldn’t have been late,” Walden said. He turned away, looked down at his right hand, spotted a rough fingernail, brought it to his mouth and bit it.
FORTY-TWO
David
I was planning to head straight to the address I had for Marshall Kemper, the Davidson Place custodian who’d booked off sick who, I hoped, might know where I could find Sarita Gomez.
I felt an urgency to get there, but I realized my route would take me to within a block of where Marla’d told me Derek Cutter, the young man who’d gotten her pregnant, lived. He was someone I wanted to talk to, and this might be my best chance at catching him.
So I hung a left and pulled up in front of a brick duplex, a simple box of a building, constructed without a single nod to any kind of architectural style. One apartment on the first floor, another on the second. Marla had said Derek shared the upper apartment with some other students. I parked at the curb, then went up and rang the bell for the top unit.
I heard someone running downstairs, and then the door opened. It was a young woman, maybe twenty, in a tracksuit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “I was looking for Derek.”
Her mouth made a big “O.” “Oh, yeah, right, he said he called you late last night, after all the shit that went down. He’ll be glad to see you.”
“Wait, I think—”
But she was already heading back up, taking the steps two at a time, shouting, “Derek! Your dad’s here!” She must have turned right around when she got to the top, because a second later she was flying past me. “Just go on up. I gotta do my run.”
I climbed the stairs, and as I reached the door to the second-floor apartment it opened, and a man I guessed was Derek looked startled to see me.
“You’re not my dad,” he said. He looked thin in his T-shirt and boxers, his legs coming out of them like two white sticks. He had a patchy beard, and black hair hanging over his eyes.
“No, I’m sorry, your girlfriend, she just assumed. I didn’t have a chance to set her straight.”
“She’s not my girlfriend; she’s a roommate, and, like, who are you?”
“Marla’s cousin,” I said. “I’m David Harwood.”
“Marla?” he said. “You’re Marla Pickens’s cousin?”
“You got a minute?”
“Uh, sure, yeah, come on in.”
He created a space on the couch by clearing away several books and a laptop. I sat down and he perched himself on the end of a coffee table that was littered with half a dozen empty beer cans.
“Why are you here about Marla?” he asked.
When his roommate mentioned something about “all the shit that went down,” I’d assumed it had to do with the Gaynor murder, and Marla’s possible involvement. It had made the news.
“You haven’t heard?”
“I’ve heard about what went down on campus last night, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Marla, does it?”
Now it appeared neither of us was up to speed, but on totally different events. “What happened at Thackeray?” I asked.
“Fucking security killed one of my friends, that’s what happened,” Derek said. “Shot him in the goddamn head.”
“I don’t know anything about this,” I admitted. “Who was your friend?”
“Mason. They’re saying he was the guy.”
“What guy?”
“Who was attacking girls at the college. There’s no fucking way. He wasn’t like that.”
“What’s his last name?”
“Helt. Mason Helt. He was a really good guy. He was in the drama program with me. He was really good. They say he was attacking one of the security guards, who was, like, bait or something, and then he got shot. It’s nuts.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “That’s why you called your dad?”
Derek nodded. “Yeah, just because, you know, I kind of freaked out and I just needed to talk. I was surprised when Patsy said it was my dad at the door, because I didn’t tell him to come out or anything.” He fixed his eyes on me more closely. “You look familiar to me.”
I had a feeling why that might be, but I didn’t want to lead the witness. No sense in Derek’s taking a dislike to me if it didn’t have to happen.
“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” I said honestly.
“You were one of the pack,” he said. “One of the ones who made my life hell. I recognize you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d have been one of them.”
It was a long time ago. Seven, eight years? The Langley murders. Father, mother, son, all killed in their home one night. Derek and his parents lived next door, and for a period of a day or two, Derek was a prime suspect. The real killer was found and Derek completely exonerated, but it had to be a scarring experience.