Chapter 20: The Great Punk Detective

Chloe and Max stood outside Sharky's. Max had her hands in her pockets, staring at Chloe who, due to the destruction of her phone after jumping off of a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, had to borrow Max's iPhone. Chloe had another cigarette out, and she was puffing like mad.

The dial tone sounded once… twice more, before the person Chloe was calling picked up.

"Yeah?" Trevor asked, sounding tired.

"Trevor, it's Chloe. Max got an alert on her phone and saw that Margarita Newman was murdered. The cops found her body?"

"What?" Trevor asked. "Why are you asking about Margarita Newman?"

"Trust me," Chloe said. "It would take a long time to explain. How did she die?"

Silence on the other end.

"C'mon, Justin, how did she die?"

"Jesus," Trevor said. "Will you gimme a second? Fuck… Database said she was shot in the back of the head. Her body washed up on shore."

Chloe scratched her forehead beneath her beanie. "Have they done the autopsy yet? Or tests on the bullet that killed her."

"They should have," Justin said. "I mean… Whoa."

"What?"

"That's odd. An order from the Homicide Captain says to 'delay all post-mortem procedures.'"

Pieces of information connected inside Chloe's brain, as easy as adding one and one. The only workable scenario there was floated to the top.

"Trevor," Chloe said. "Listen to me. I know the Arcadia Bay Police Department is filled with dirty cops. Don't even argue with me about this, because we both know it's true. Now I will bet you everything I have that the reason the autopsy is being delayed is because the person pulling the strings on that Homicide Captain told him to delay it because they're waiting for another body to turn up. And I will bet even more that when those tests come in, you'll find that the same gun used to kill Margarita Newman was the one used to kill Arnold Trainor."

"What? Where are you getting this shit?"

"That's how big this is," Chloe said. "Do you know how easy it is to drop a body in the ocean? The only reason Margarita Newman washed up on shore is because the person who killed her wanted her found. Same as Trainor. They're trying to tie this up and make it look like something it isn't."

"Then who's this second body?" Trevor asked.

"I'm positive it's going to be Jennifer Healy."

Chloe saw Max's eyes go wide. Max put a hand to her mouth.

"The missing person's case?" Trevor asked.

"Two half-sisters go missing and one turns up dead. It doesn't take a genius to figure what's gonna happen to the other one. I don't think she's dead yet, but… Trevor, she's running out of time."

"So… what do you need from me?"

"The family's address," Chloe said. "I need to talk to them, and go through Jennifer's things."

"No way," said Trevor. "I'm not gonna let you pester a family when one of the daughters is missing and the other one's dead. Chloe, you're not a detective!"

"Yes, I fucking am!" Chloe said. "And right now, Max and I are the only ones trying to make sure Jennifer Healy gets home safe. The cops won't. They proved they won't. They may be dirty, but I know you're not! So whose side are you on?"

Silence.

"Trevor?"

"Thirteen Forty-Four Parker Avenue," Trevor said. "This doesn't come back to me."


Thirteen Forty-Four Parker Avenue was a two story house. A rather nice place with dead ivy crawling along red brick. Chloe brought The Beast to a stop by the curb in front of the Healy residence.

"Max?" Chloe asked as The Beast performed its coughing ritual.

"What is it?"

"Could you, um… Could you do the talking on this one? I'm… I'm not really in the best place right now."

Which was putting it mildly. Since she had gotten into the truck, and turned the case over in her head, Chloe kept seeing images of Rachel in her minds eye, like flashes of lightning on a dark night. What good was learning from the past if it was just going to repeat itself anyway?

Max, to her eternal credit, nodded and said nothing. They got out of The Beast, and Max held her hand as they walked to the front door. Max rang the doorbell.

Mister Healy (Neither Chloe nor Max had gotten his name) opened the door. He was a tall man in his forties with blonde hair and looks that would be considered boyishly handsome were his eyes not red and puffy from crying.

"I'm sorry," Mister Healy said in lieu of "Hello." "Now's not a good time. There's been a death in the family."

"We're aware of that, sir," Max said. "My name is Max Caulfield, and this is Chloe Price. We're looking into the disappearance of your daughter Jennifer."

Mister Healy looked cluelessly from one woman to the other. "We're not offering a reward, if that's what you're after. I'm…"

Chloe found her voice.

"Mister Healy?" Chloe asked. "How long have you lived in Arcadia Bay?"

"I was born here."

"Then you remember Rachel Amber."

Mister Healy tilted his head. "Yeah. Margarita knew her. What about it?"

"I knew her, too," Chloe said. "I… There was a time when Rachel was my entire world. I couldn't stop what happened to her, because I didn't know the world could get this bad. But this is now. I know what I have to do, but there are things I need to find out first. Things about Jennifer."

Chloe held her hand out to Mister Healy.

"Let me help you. I'll bring your daughter home."


Mister Healy had ushered Chloe and Max up the stairs, past the unseen yet audibly crying Missus Healy. On the second floor, Mister Healy opened the door to Jennifer's bedroom.

"I haven't been inside since she went missing," He said. "I just know she'd be angry if I went through her things."

"We'll be respectful," Max said. She took Chloe by the arm and entered Jennifer's bedroom.

It was a well-kept room, with posters on the wall of bands that Chloe wasn't on the internet nearly enough to recognize. Had they been the same age, Chloe reckoned that she and Jennifer may not have gotten along. Of course, Chloe also reckoned that the number of people Chloe had gotten along with as a teenager could be counted on one hand.

As Max checked the closet, Chloe went for the computer desk. She switched on the PC, to find herself stopped at the Windows ID screen.

"Shit."

Chloe snooped along the various cubbyholes of the desk and found a small spiral notebook with an amateurish sketch of a horse on the front. Chloe opened it and smiled.

"Jackpot."

"What?" Max asked from the closet.

"I found a notebook with all her passwords," Chloe said. "She has a different password for each account."

"Smart," Max said as she joined Chloe by the desk. "But keeping them all in a notebook like that, where anyone can get to them?"

"It's probably for her parents' benefit," Chloe said. "Or she changes the passwords every other week like they tell you you're supposed to."

Chloe found the password to sign into the PC, and immediately went to Twitter. Chloe flipped a couple of pages in the notebook and discovered the password for Jennifer Healy's Twitter account. Chloe signed in and immediately checked Jennifer's DMs.

Chloe found what she was looking for in the first message she clicked on…


JenniferHealy: Troy?

BulletClubFan212: wut?

JenniferHealy: Do you remember that picture of you, me, Jodie and Kevin that we took outside the pool at Blackwell?

BulletClubFan212: yeah why?

JenniferHealy: You walked out into the road after that picture was taken. I saw you get hit by a truck.

JenniferHealy: I watched you die.

BulletClubFan212: um…

BulletClubFan212: what the fuck are you talking about?

JenniferHealy: I think I'm going insane

JenniferHealy: I saved you. It was two years ago, but I saved you yesterday.

JenniferHealy: I love you. I didn't tell you that then.

BulletClubFan212: jen?

BulletClubFan212: hello?


"So I'm thinking," Max said, "that Jennifer went through the photo of her and her friends, and saved this Troy kid from getting hit by a truck. She comes back here and he's still alive."

Chloe nodded. "How did Nathan Prescott's prophecy go?"

"Um… Girl who breaks the world, goes back when others go forward… passes through portals unseen. I like that last part, don't know why."

Chloe nodded again, lost in thought. "I think we're done here."


Max was on the bed in the bedroom of her suite while Chloe was in the living room, looking at the evidence that Max was nice enough to get out of her rental car: the ID badge, the coffee mug, the burner phone, and the pictures of Jennifer Healy.

Chloe had a feeling in her gut, indistinguishable form an upset stomach, that this was all the evidence the case was going to afford her, and that any evidence that was going to reveal itself later, would come after Jennifer Healy's body was found. Whatever players, seen or unseen, who were still on the board would have known that Chloe was buzzing around sticking her nose into shit, so they'd be extra careful.

She summoned everything she knew about the case, everything she'd seen and heard over the past week and tried to rearrange it, disassemble it, work it into a way that fit. The answers were staring her in the face, Chloe knew this in her bones, but it was up to her to piece it together. Any chance whatsoever of three murders and a kidnapping being answered with justice depended on just how clever Chloe Price was.

Chloe picked up the pictures of Jennifer and spread them out in front of her. She just stared at them, taking in the details absently while she thought.

The longer this vulgar shit-show went on, the more Chloe figured that Jennifer Healy was the linchpin of whatever was going on in Arcadia Bay, and not Justin, whose death was what drew her into it in the first place. Chloe felt out-gunned. She felt hopeless, and…

Something drew Chloe's attention.

One of the pictures of Jennifer Healy. Chloe picked it up and scanned the waistline of the white sundress that the clearly-drugged Jennifer Healy was wearing. There… Right there…

A tag. A tag from the shop the dress was purchased at.

The dress was new.

All of the clothes Jennifer was wearing in these photos were new.

Oh…

Oh, shit!

It was as though the sun was only shining on half of a field in an early morning. The other half was covered in murky darkness. She hand a handle on some of it, but not all of it.

"Max!"

Chloe got up and went into the bedroom. Max had heard Chloe, and was sitting up.

"What is it?" Max asked.

"I need to use your phone."

Max nodded, and Chloe picked up Max's iPhone from the nightstand next to the bed. She began tapping and swiping furiously.

"What are you looking for?" Max asked, somewhat taken aback by Chloe's sudden mania.

"That area code for the number on the burner phone. 703, right?"

"Yeah," Max said. "In Virginia."

"But where in Virginia?" Chloe asked.

She entered the area code into a search engine and found the cities under the 703 area code, until she found one city that she was looking for. Chloe set the phone on the nightstand again and looked at Max.

And Chloe could not stop grinning.

"You should do that more often," Max said. "Just sayin'."

Chloe got on to the bed, took Max's face in her hand, and kissed her on the forehead. Then she wrapped Max in as big a huge as she'd dare without actually breaking the poor girl.

"I know everything," Chloe whispered in Max's ear. "I know how it all went down. I know how to stop this."

"How?"

Chloe pulled away and smiled some more.

"A magician never reveals her tricks," Chloe said. "Come on, we have a stop to make."


Chloe pulled The Beast into the parking lot of The Dew Drop. Of all the shitty bars in Arcadia Bay, Chloe pegged this one as the shittiest.

"What are we doing here?" Max asked.

Chloe leaned over Max and opened the glove compartment. Inside was the thirty-eight pistol that she had stolen from David five years earlier.

"Chloe," Max said. "No."

"Relax," Chloe said as she opened the cylinder of the revolver and showed it to Max. "It's not loaded. Now stay here."

"Wait, why?"

"Because it's dangerous," Chloe said.

"Oh, so it's too dangerous for me to go in, but not too dangerous for you to go in with an unloaded gun?"

Once again, Max had a point.


The Dew Drop had once been a boxing gym. When that went out of business, the owner sold it to someone who had turned it into a bar. This made it a deal bigger than the average dive, with the added disadvantage of the seemingly permanent tangy reek of body odor in the air.

It was a place where the lowest of the low did their business in The Bay, and in her dealings with them, Chloe had done her own business here many times in the past.

Chloe scanned the room, hoping to find two particular shitheels among today's inhabitants of the bar. Low and behold, there they were. The Bull's two favorite cronies, The First Guy and The Second Guy, were at a table near the back.

Chloe turned to Max, who was standing near a cigarette machine.

"Stay here," Chloe said. "If this goes to shit, you run." Chloe then handed the keys for The Beast to Max, who only nodded.

Chloe sauntered toward the table where The First Guy and The Second Guy sat, her arms behind her.

"Howdy fellas," Chloe said. "What's good?"

The First Guy looked up at Chloe. He didn't recognize her at first, as she had blue hair and wasn't wearing her glasses. She waited until he did recognize her before she made her move.

WHACK!

In one fluid motion, Chloe had liberated the gun from the waistband of her jeans and cracked The First Guy across the face with it, knocking him out of his chair. Then she leveled it at The Second Guy and pulled the hammer back.

"GET YOUR HAND OFF THAT FUCKING PHONE!"

The bartender, who was reaching for a cordless phone on the bar, stopped and froze.

Chloe looked down at The First Guy. His nose was broken, bent at a rather painful looking angle, and gushing blood down his lips, chin, and the front of his shirt.

"First," Chloe said, "you're gonna go to the hospital and have your face looked at. Then you're gonna go to The Bull and tell him to call the Embassy Suites and leave a message for Max Caulfield's room with the time and the place tonight where he and I are gonna have a sit-down. He wants me so bad, I'll show up gift-wrapped."

"I don't know what the fuck you're planning," the Second Guy said, "but you're not gonna get out of this… this sit-down you want alive. He is fucking pissed. Do you have any idea what The Bull will do once he gets a hold of you?"

Chloe smiled.

"Dude, I've been shot three times, hit by a train, sucked into a tornado, paralyzed from the neck down, overdosed with morphine, and I jumped off a fucking cliff. Does The Bull have any idea what I'll do once I get a hold of him?"