Divine Vices (14 page)

“I
wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I cracked. “My dad’s not exactly the biggest fan
of Ian’s. Surprisingly though, he seems to like you.”

“Really?”
He stroked his chin pleasingly. “Well, that’s a very, very good sign.”

I
gasped mockingly. “You’ve been after my dad this whole time, haven’t you? Ugh,
I should have known! You’re too good-looking to be straight,” I quipped.

He
playfully pushed me over as I recovered from my laughing fit. “No, silly,” said
Jack, roughing his fingers through my hair. “It’s actually a better sign to get
the stamp of approval from the father than the mother if you’re still trying to
woo the woman in question.”

“And
why’s that?” I inquired beamingly as I fixed my mane.

“Because
if the mom likes the guy and says that he’s ‘so adorable,’ that seems to be a
turnoff to girls like you because it means that the guy is too tame. But if the
father is anything like yours and says that he likes the guy, then there’s
suddenly a cool factor playing out in his favor. I mean, let’s face it, someone
like your dad doesn’t want to see his daughter with a guy who’s ‘adorable’ but
can’t take care of himself, and more importantly
her
.”

“That
actually makes sense, in a
Jack
sort of way.”

“Thank
you. I do my best.”

“Hey,
Jack,” called out a voice behind me.

I
turned to see a scruffy guy in a black and white racing jacket approaching our
table. His hair was light brown, and the sides were shaved close to the scalp
but the top was a bit longer, slicked back pompadour style. By his look,
including his slightly cultivated five o’clock shadow, I would have guessed he
was probably in his early twenties.

“Hey,
man,” said Jack, standing up and giving him the stereotypical ‘guy-hug’ that
insisted that one must pat the other person’s back to not make the embrace look
too intimate.

“Who’s
this?” asked the stranger, looking at me.

“Cal,
this is Cassie. Cassie, Cal.”

“Pleasure,”
he said, shaking my hand.

“You
too,” I replied.

“Just
thought I'd let you know that we’ve got a few new troops for Tuesday,” said
Cal, redirecting his attention to Jack. “Which also reminds me, you got plans
next Wednesday?”

“Yeah,
I’m actually going to a friend of a friend’s party. You guys got a game?”

“Something
a bit more lucrative,” said Cal, smilingly.

“Sorry,
gotta count me out.”

“Alright,
your loss. See you Tuesday.”

“See
ya’.

“Planning
on knocking over a liquor store?” I cracked after Cal headed over to the other
side of the restaurant, parking a seat at the bar.

“Wouldn’t
you like to know,” said Jack, grinningly.

With
Gwen’s insistency to meet her, I had Jack drop me off at her house following
our
session
. When I came up to her room, there were mounds of papers
pinned to the corkboard she had on her wall above her desk. She was in the
midst of her investigation, but against Ian’s wishes, she found herself
restless with the dead end her human interest piece had taken and interested
fully in the new local cult killer.

“The
police released the identity of the girl who was murdered in Lancaster this
morning,” said Gwen, pulling out a massive heap of pages and folders from a
box. “Okay, there has to be something linking these two girls together. It’s
our job now to find out what.”

“No,
I’m pretty sure that’s up to the authorities, and where did you get all this?”

“They’re
not exactly proving to be much help here, and I’m just gonna skip over that
last bit,” she said, tossing me a portion of the stack. “Now, start your
sleuthing.”

I
cracked open the file and spent the next ten minutes browsing everything over.
“Fine, two seemingly unrelated cases. The first, a normal fifteen-year-old
student. The second, a normal twenty-one-year-old bartender. Neither lived
close to the other. Neither knew the other.” I flipped through some of the
printouts of their social media pages. “And they didn’t have even the slightest
similarities in tastes. Everything from guys to music says these two are polar
opposites. Meyer, even if this is one case, which the police have yet to prove
since Veronica is still just missing, it doesn’t mean that the perp has to
necessarily have a pattern. He could very well be attacking at random. The
larger the striking zone, the larger the cesspool of suspects the police have
to sort through.”

“True,
but the cult theme has me thinking there has to be some kind of connection.
Predators of this sort are more likely to be calculating. He already proved to
be cunning enough to erase any possible evidence from the crime scene. And
don’t forget that he did this in a relatively open sight, where foot traffic is
fairly active during the early morning for runners and such. Doing this out in
the open showed us just how arrogant this guy really is. You honestly think
that he’s concerning himself with widening his territory out of fear of
suspicion? Doubtful. There’s something about these girls that caused him to
target them.”

I
studied over the information, and despite my reluctance to say it out loud, I
had to at least admit it to myself that she had a point. “Alright, what about
their fathers? It says here that they both lived only with their mothers.”

Gwen
sorted through some of the documents in front of her before settling on an
article. “Veronica’s birth certificate doesn’t have him listed, and I’m gonna
guess that Annalisa’s walked out on her when she was still little.”

“What
makes you say that?”

She
handed me a newspaper printout. “Because even before she turned one, her mother
filed a motion to have her daughter’s last name changed from her father’s to
her own. They were never married. As some standards require, the courts put the
notice in the paper. Annalisa Cossack became Annalisa Leighton.”

I
dropped the article. “What did you just say?”

“What?”

“What
are the parents’ names?”

“Hilary
Leighton and Charles Cossack.”

“Charlie?!”

Gwen
peered over her monitor, seeing my jaw practically on the floor. “Wait a
minute, you know him?”

“That’s
my uncle.”

“I
thought your dad didn’t have any siblings.”

“No,
he’s from my mother’s side.”

“Her
family was from around here? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah,
the Cossacks lived in New Haven until a year or so after my mom graduated from
high school before they moved to the Hamptons. I didn’t know Charlie came back
here, let alone that he had a daughter... but I know someone who did.”

“That
being?”

“My
dad. He used to be close with Charlie. My uncle is the only one on that side of
the family that’s actually tolerable.”

“Well,
obviously he must have known about Annalisa, so why didn’t he ever tell you
about her? I mean, that’s your cousin for crying out loud. Or was.”

“I
don’t know.”

“You
think your uncle had something to do with this?”

“Charlie?
No way. He’s about as carefree as they come. And he’s always been a bit
impulsive, and not exactly the most diligent either. Even if he could commit
the act, which I seriously doubt, there’s still no way he’d get away with it.
He’s not that clever.”

“Leaving
us with what?”

“Keep
looking over everything. See if you can find anything about Veronica’s father,”
I said, rising from my chair and snatching the keys to the Saturn. “I’ll be
back.”

“Where’re
you going?”

“To
talk to my dad.”

“Dad?
You in here?” I shouted over the hammering racket of construction as I entered
the bar.

“He’s
out back,” replied one of the workers.

“Thanks.”

I
trekked my way through the tarp engulfed shop to the back entrance, seeing my
dad in the employee parking lot sitting on the hood of his Buick with a
cigarette in his mouth.

“Thought
you quit,” I called out as I came down the steps.

I
had obviously caught him off guard, because he looked as guilty as a kid with
his hand in the cookie jar.

“Gees,
Cass,” he sighed. “You scared me. What’re you doing here? I thought you were
working with Meyer.”

“I
was. And in a strange way, I still am,” I said, pulling out the article and
handing it over. “Any thoughts?”

He
took a deep inhale and held his breath as he read over the portion I had the
courtesy of highlighting.

“Care
to tell me something?”

He
flicked the cigarette to the ground and grinded it under his boot heel,
discharging the smoke from his lungs with deflation.

“I
don’t blame you for not telling me about Annalisa after the matter of fact, but
that still doesn’t explain why I never even heard about her until now,” I said,
parking a seat beside him.

“She’s
one of the many dirty little secrets that the Cossacks buried away years ago,
and it was forcedly agreed upon us all that no one was going to reach out to
her, especially Charlie, but also meddlesome little me,” he said, his gaze now
shamefully focused on the asphalt.

“Wait,
what? Why would he go back? I thought Charlie walked out on her and the mom.”

“If
only it were that simple,” groaned my dad. “You know how Charlie is. A
maverick. Free Spirit. In other words, your grandparents’ worst nightmare. He
met Hilary Leighton at a party back in his college days, and instantly fell
head over heels for her. So when he found out she was pregnant, he threw all
caution to the wind and proposed to her, quite happily. Unfortunately, Hilary
came from a family with a less than reputable upbringing, and the Cossacks
wouldn’t have her mudding the waters of their name. They already shunned your
mother for marrying me, and they’d be damned to let that happen again.”

“Come
again? They shunned mom?”

He
let out a weak chuckle. “She practically fell on her face from how fast they
ripped the rug out from under her feet. It wasn’t until she started making her
way up the corporate ladder on her own that they felt she was worth readmitting
into the family fold.”

“And
she still wanted to be close to them? I’d tell them to stick it where the sun
doesn’t shine if they did that to me.”

“Yeah,
well, that was the only family she had, so she did the best she could with it.
And as you can see, she forgave them. Charlie, unfortunately, wasn’t so lucky
to escape their clutches.”

I
knew it would be a hard pill to swallow, but I had to ask. “What did they do?”

“Charlie
was almost finished with school, and his mother convinced both him and Hilary
that they should postpone their plans to get married until after he was
finished. Hilary gave birth to Annalisa and Charlie gave her his surname. He
also had a job already waiting for him at a prominent corporation following
graduation. He seemed to have all his ducks in a row. Then your grandparents
unleashed their wrath on him.

“They
pulled their strings and told Charlie that if he married Hilary, the job offer
would be off the table and that they’d also be saddling him with the debt from
his last year of schooling. I’m also not sure what they dug up on Hilary’s
father, but when they threatened to release their findings to the police, that
proved to be the last straw. Charlie was ordered to not have contact with
Hilary or his daughter, and for their cooperation, the Cossacks agreed to pay
support to Hilary on a monthly basis to ensure Annalisa would be taken care
of.”

“And
now the poor guy has remained a terminal bachelor with an increased drinking
problem,” I said. “Nice to see they have their son’s best interest at heart.”

My
dad handed the article back to me. “You should have seen the uproar when your
grandparents found out that the courts would be publishing Annalisa’s change of
surname in the paper. They were angry enough that Charlie gave her his name in
the first place, but this had them foaming at the mouth. I'm really sorry you
had to find out about her this way, kiddo.”

"I
know."

Another
system of storms was rolling through the area, and the skies were grisly dark
as I fell onto my mattress in exhaustion upon entering my bedroom. My dad was
still working at the bar, so there was nothing but the low rumble of thunder to
keep me company. For the past couple weeks I had been struggling to get more
than a few hours of sleep at night. My mind was in a constant upheaval,
boomeranging back and forth between the stresses of school to the peculiar
nightmares that seemed to plague the inside of my eyelids every time I entered
the REM cycle. And considering that I had a whole new batch of problems brewing
their way into my subconscious, I figured trying to get some decent shuteye
even if found only in a brief nap might improve my cognitive function and help
me at actually getting some research done later.

So
there I was, staring blankly up at the ceiling and the many posters that
covered it, completely unable to switch off the hyperactivity swirling around
in my head. Tossing and turning proved to be useless. Music didn’t do anything
to calm me. But this restlessness was different. I didn’t have the remnants of
Mr. Rothenberg’s voice rambling on and on, telling me of just how detrimental
his latest assignment was to my grade if I did not produce a perfect paper. I
didn’t have my mother’s last words to me causing its typical wave of nausea to
course through my insides. No. No hellish fears. No painful memories. Just a
particular individual.

No
matter how hard I tried to brush his image away, my mind kept trailing its way
back to Jack, and his steely blue eyes proved to be potent enough to render me
sleepless. To make matters worse, butterflies had manifested in my stomach once
I reminisced about this morning, when he had been laying right here. I could
even smell him. The coast. I knew his scent hadn’t lingered, that it was only a
scent manufactured by my imagination, but even the mere snippets of what I had
conjured up left a stirring.

But
why? He wasn’t even my type. Granted, I didn’t actually have one, but I wasn’t
stupid. I knew better than to play with fire. And Jack was a torch. Sure, he
was sexy. Sarcastic. A bit more humanlike than I had expected. But he was still
trouble. Then I entered dangerous territories when I thought about him on the
field, an image that I had tried best to suppress to the darkest corners of my
mind. Yes, his physique was perfect, but that’s not what had warranted my
attention, mostly. Okay, not completely. There was something about him that I
could not quite lay my finger on. I was more than acquainted to the conceited
egotists of this world, but he didn’t
quite
fit the bill. That’s what
bothered me most. Jack didn’t just exude confidence. There was also a...
knowingness. And that was not common. Ian had it as well. There was something
about them that had me eager to learn more, like they were harboring precious
insight beyond their years. The difference between them though was that Ian’s
perception was always agreeable. Jack’s was a bit more erratic, at best, which
seemed to be all the more provoking... and terrifying.

Up
until now I had done everything in my power to repress any feelings I had about
him whatsoever, but apparently this exploration was enough to divert the rest
of my pensive anxieties. I closed my eyes and drifted away.