Knife Music by David Carnoy

Author:David Carnoy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective - General, Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Suicide, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Espionage, Fiction, Palo Alto (Calif.), Physician and patient, Thrillers, Large type books, General, Statutory rape, Thriller
ISBN: 9781602858176
Publisher: Center Point Pub
Published: 2010-10-15T06:00:00+00:00

24/ LIKE LIKE HER

May 1, 2007—2:46 p.m.

“SO YOU’RE STANDING OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM ON THE THIRD floor,” the lawyer asks. “Let’s go back a minute.”

“OK,” Jim says.

“How long were you waiting for Kristen to come out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe five minutes. And then I started to get concerned.”

“And you knocked on the door?”

“Yeah, I knocked a few times. And like I said, I called to her.”

“Pretty loud, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Loud enough so that anybody would hear you?”

“Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t shouting. But it was loud.”

“So, why didn’t you just go in? It isn’t a hard door to open. It swings out. I tried it. Why didn’t you just go in?”

Jim shrugs, glances at the microcassette recorder sitting on the table between them, and says, “I don’t know. Like I told the detective, it just didn’t seem right, going into the occupied bathroom. And then this girl I knew—Gwen Dayton—was coming up the stairs and I just asked her whether she could check.”

The woman doesn’t respond. Instead, with her perfectly manicured fingers, she tears off a small piece of bread from her half-eaten sandwich and tosses the crumbs to a blackbird that’s looking up at her beseechingly from the ground, his head cocked to one side. For an older woman, she’s definitely hot, he thinks. When he first saw her, thin with dark hair and olive skin, a well put-together woman who was wearing a navy blue pantsuit, he thought she could be a TV lawyer. Usually, he’s nervous around good-looking women, but the idea of her being an actress puts him at ease, for it makes the interview seem less real. That, plus the four bong hits he’d done with his friend Dan Fleischman before he headed over to the meeting.

A brilliant, sunny day, they’re sitting in the plaza at the back of Tressider Student Union, which serves, among other functions, as the home for a cafeteria, café, convenience store, arcade, barber shop, and a row of Wells Fargo ATM machines. Just past two-thirty, many of the black, wire-mesh weather-resistant tables and chairs, once filled with students during the lunch hours, now sit empty. But that hasn’t deterred the scavengers—a couple dozen blackbirds and a handful of pigeons, which seem out of place among their suburban cousins—from making the rounds.

“At one point I left to find Carrie,” he volunteers. “She was dancing with some guy. And I pulled her off the dance floor and told her that Kristen had passed out in the bathroom upstairs and that we had to get her out of there.”

When they got up to the bathroom, he says, Kristen had been revived. Well, revived might be too strong a word. But she wasn’t totally passed out. Her eyes would flutter open for a moment and she would mumble something.

“Did you hear what she said?” the lawyer asks.

“I know she said ‘Leave me alone’ a couple of times. And I think she said, ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’”

“That’s it?”

“It was hard to understand her. I mean, she was slurring her words and then she would nod off and Gwen was slapping her in the face.

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