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Spartan’s bark, followed by a long, mournful howl, tore through the silence. Kay saw the K-9 and his handler standing by the side of the edge. Watching her step on sharp-edged rocks and loose boulders, Kay approached quickly.
“Whoa, this thing’s dangerous. They should install a railing here. This is where she went over,” Deramus said.
“Why is he howling?”
“He’s sad he can’t take us there. It’s his job.”
Kay flashed her light over the edge of the rock, carefully approaching. One wrong step, and she could fall to her death, just like Jenna.
A couple of feet from the edge, she found another partial Converse print. Jenna had stood there, her back turned to the abyss.
She placed a marker and asked Novack to take a photo with a gesture of her hand. “Elliot, why would someone stand so close to the edge, facing away from the fall?”
“It could’ve been dark already, right? She could’ve been disoriented after the assault. Maybe she didn’t know the fall was there.”
Or maybe she was pushed.
FOURTEEN
HUSBAND AND WIFE
It was almost ten in the evening when Richard William Gaskell returned home from his best friend Rennie’s place. The eighteen-year-old with a tall, well-built stature and medium-length hair combed back in an imitation of Bieber’s early days’ quiff resented coming home. Less than a year to go until he’d finally leave for Harvard to study law, just like his parents. Yet, he wanted to be nothing like them—with one exception.
Money.
Quite the difference between Rennie’s place and his.
His best friend, Renaldo Cristobal, almost a year younger than Richard and a senior as well, had been dealt an entirely different hand at the game of chance called life. Rennie had grown up without a father, raised by a mother who stretched every dollar of her physical therapist paycheck to breaking point. Still, Rennie’s small, simple, and sometimes messy abode was more welcoming than the sprawling two-story, ultramodern house Richard was forced to call home.
Some lawyers were like drug dealers, and he wanted to be just like that someday, on the speed dial of the country’s richest, most feared and powerful criminals. Richard used to say his home was the best real estate drug money could buy north of San Francisco because his father was a notoriously successful criminal attorney whose client list read like theYellow Pagesof Colombian cartels and Yakuza businesspeople. The only thing Richard still admired about his father was his seven-figure income.
His mother, also a criminal attorney, used to specialize in white-collar crime before she decided work wasn’t the thing for her anymore and stayed home to ruin his life. She’d had the gall to blame her laziness on him, to say she forfeited her career and a significant portion of the family’s income because her son needed hands-on guidance to become more accountable and learn how to make the right decisions in life.
In a few short weeks after that appalling statement, his satisfying life in San Francisco’s Nob Hill was uprooted to the Mount Chester cottage. To call the four-thousand-square-foot cubist structure in concrete, steel, and tempered glass a cottage was an insult to mountain cottages everywhere as much as to modern architecture.
Richard didn’t care about any of that; he would’ve happily lived in a tent popped up in Rennie’s backyard. He missed his city friends, the girls in miniskirts and high heels wearing expensive makeup and real jewelry, and always looking for a good time. Just when he’d become old enough to go out there and have a real life, he’d been locked up in last century’s small town soon to be another San Fran overpriced suburbia. Instead of bustling city life, he could hear the mockingbirds at night. He’d been buried alive, with his overbearing mother playing both Hades and Cerberus.
Since he’d turned eighteen, every passing day brought the same question: should he run away and be done with it? The promise of Harvard and having his tuition and housing covered enthusiastically by his parents was too alluring to ignore. Day after day, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, he decided to stay. One more year. Harvard was bound to be much more fun with money lining his pockets.
But he didn’t have to like it.
Richard sought refuge at Rennie’s every chance he got. When he’d started school in that forsaken place two years ago, he discovered Rennie was the choice target of the resident bullies. The sensitive, pale-skinned, and dark-haired boy was shy and somewhat effeminate, taking the beatings and abuse without fighting back much. Thin and not very tall, Rennie was smart enough to intuit that resisting would’ve only motivated his bullies to strike harder and for longer.
The bullying ended a couple of days after Richard started classes, angry as hell and looking for a release. He’d stumbled upon the three idiotic brutes who were just starting to pummel on Rennie, and wiped the floor with them. He was only one, and maybe just as strong as any of the three, but the countless martial arts movies he’d watched had taught him a few slick moves, and he was enraged to begin with. Crazy beats strong all the time.
When the fight ended with the three bullies on the floor bleeding and writhing in pain, he offered Rennie his hand to get up and sealed the beginning of a lasting friendship. When the school investigated the fight, the matter was swiftly closed; all the students who had witnessed it swore the three bullies had fought among themselves. And so, in only a few days, Richard had become the school’s unsung hero.
Natalie Gaskell, Richard’s mother, was thrilled with her son’s friendship with Rennie. In her own words, Rennie was a sweet boy, a good influence, educated and intelligent and courteous, nothing like the street thugs Richard used to run with in San Francisco. She didn’t mind him spending time at Rennie’s, and he spent as much time there as he could.
The aged couch in Rennie’s small, dark living room, with its worn fabric and lumpy cushions, was more comfortable than the extended white leather sectional at Richard’s house. Rennie’s mother was rarely home, and when she was, she quietly brought food and cold sodas for the boys who watched TV or played video games, filling the small home with hollering and laughter.
The afternoon had started a bit off. When he arrived, he found Rennie watching the news. A TV announcer was saying the body found at the bottom of the Wildfire Ridge was Jenna Jerrell’s. Visibly shocked, Rennie looked at him. “Did you know about this?”
“What the fuck?” Richard asked, drawing closer to the TV and turning the volume up. “Jenna’s dead?”
Rennie nodded. “They didn’t say anything else.”
Richard shrugged. “I wonder what the hell happened.” After moment of silence he didn’t particularly enjoy, he added, “Let’s playCall of Duty.”
