AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then there were photos of the volunteers mixed in with everything else. Sometimes they were grouped in front of the hospital or standing over someone in a hospital bed, offering them food or reading them a book. It looked like Dana’s Friends also organized fundraising opportunities throughout the city, from 5K runs to block parties to book sales.
Jason pressed a finger to a picture of a group of women standing outside a library pushing shopping carts full of books. Three of them were older, at least in their fifties. One of them was in her late twenties. Black hair. Tattoos and piercings. A forced smile on her face. She looked like she was trying to hide behind one of the other women.
“That’s gotta be Charli, right?” Jason asked.
Cassie leaned closer. “Who does that look like to you?”
Jason placed his face next to hers. Their cheeks were almost touching. When he stood back, his eyes were wide. “Stephanie.”
Cassie kept looking at the picture. It was hard to tell because they were night and day, but the two shared some similarities. The slope of their nose. The point of their chin. The angle of their cheekbones.
They kept looking and found two other pictures of Charli, though none of them were clear enough to make a hard call. It seemed she hated being photographed and usually turned her face to the side or hid in the back of a group. Still, there was no denying it. The two were hauntingly similar.
“This doesn’t make sense.” Jason pointed to a picture of Charli hoisting a bag of bottles during a can drive. “Stephanie said she had no idea who the woman was.”
“People lie, you know.”
“But why?” He shook his head. “I don’t mean why do people lie in general. I mean, why would she want to lie? To us?”
“She only half lied. She said she didn’t know Charli, but she sent us to Pete’s Bar. Maybe she wanted to help but was afraid to.”
“She might know more than she let on, then.”
Cassie ran her fingers through her hair. “What if she’s Charli’s sister? Like the guy at the bar said? She could’ve been the one to tell them Charli died. The one to pick up her check.”
“What if Charli’s not dead?” Jason grabbed the back of his neck and squeezed. His entire forehead screwed up in thought. “What if she and Stephanie know something, and they were too afraid to tell us?”
“We need to go back.”
He nodded. “But how are we going to get her to talk?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there.”
Cassie twisted toward the door, but as she turned, the words HOSPITAL and JUSTICE jumped out at her from a poster near the front window. She stopped so abruptly that Jason nearly knocked her off her feet.
“Sorry—”
“Look.” She pointed at the words that caught her attention. “Justice for Naomi. Hospital malpractice. Don’t become the next victim.”
“Call if you have any information,” Jason continued, “or if a loved one has died under suspicious circumstances at UMC, Tulane, Curahealth, etc. Anonymous tips welcome.”
Cassie looked at Jason and saw her own expression reflected on his face. What had started off as an investigation into Jasmine’s death for the sake of the family’s sanity had exploded into a case of multiple deaths across several hospitals, wi
th no tangible evidence connecting them.
“I’m taking a picture of this.” She held up her phone. “We can call the phone number after we talk to Stephanie again.”
Jason nodded, but didn’t speak. Cassie wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
28
As they rounded the corner to Stephanie’s apartment, Cassie and Jason pulled up short at the exact same time. She could feel his brain spinning with possibilities in tandem with hers, but it took her a full thirty seconds to understand what she was looking at.
The door to apartment 718 was wide open. A male voice emanated from somewhere inside. Pauses in conversation made Cassie think the man was on the phone. The silence between his sentences was deafening. Something was wrong.
Jason approached the door first. Cassie stood behind him and pushed up on her tippy-toes to see over his shoulder. Everything looked as it had yesterday—the kitchen table, a single chair, even the lone recliner. A pair of pint glasses sat on the counter. They had Pete’s Bar emblazoned across the front.
