Assignment Austin Read online

  LUCEY PHILLIPS

  Assignment Austin:

  | The Case of the Roller Derby Rivals

  JAE LOVEJOY COZY MYSTERY THREE

  Copyright 2017 Lucey Phillips.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Author's Note

  | One

  When the whistle blew, Kara became a different woman. Off the roller derby track, she was an intellectual, high-achieving Ph.D. student. But when she stepped into the role of captain of the Capitol City Wreckers, she became a fiercely aggressive team leader.

  “Faster! Faster! Block her, Shannon!” Kara shouted.

  It was only fifteen minutes into practice, and her voice was already hoarse from yelling at her teammates as they circled the track inside the River Lane Recreation Center. She yelled out of intensity, and out of necessity—the wheels of the women’s skates made a cumulative low rumble as they glided along the hardwood floor of the old gymnasium. Yelling was the only way to be heard over the noise.

  I watched from a metal folding chair in the corner. A feature on the Central Texas Roller Derby Association would be the foundation of the next story I would write for my “Assignment America” column. I’m a travel reporter, and “Assignment America” is the series I write for the online news outlet Alt News America.

  The article would, of course, be called “Assignment Austin.” I decided to write about the women’s roller derby league, which was popular here, because it captured the unique and independent nature of Austinites. I would have to include sidebar stories about the food, the music, and the “Keep Austin Weird” movement as well.

  “Come on, Mia, watch your flank,” Kara yelled. Her face was red now and there were small streams of sweat running from her temple and down her jaw and neck.

  We were all sweating. There was air conditioning in this old building, but it barely worked, keeping the indoors only a few degrees cooler than the early May heat outside.

  I ran the back of my forearm across my forehead and looked over at Colin, the photographer who travels with me. He was the only one in the stuffy gymnasium who didn’t appear to be melting.

  Colin kneeled on one knee and held his camera in front of him. He was motionless as he watched the screen, waiting for the perfect shot to compose itself in front of him.

  Before I got to know him, I always thought his neutral expression meant that he was detached, emotionless. But now that I’d seen how he works, his process, I realized Colin wasn’t emotionless, he was simply trying to keep himself, his presence, out of the action and therefore out of the photos.

  A muscular blonde woman wearing a Sol T-shirt slammed her shoulder, hard, into a smaller woman with bow tattoos on her legs. The smaller woman lost her balance and nearly went out of bounds, but she recovered.

  She charged toward the woman who’d shoulder-checked her, coming up behind her and shoving her with both hands. I’m still learning the rules of roller derby, but that sure didn’t look like a legal hit.

  The bigger woman cursed and turned around. In seconds, both women were on the ground.

  I cringed when I heard, and felt, the thud of two bodies landing hard on the floor. Then I stood to get a better look, wondering if the other players would break up the fight, or if this would become a full-on brawl.

  Colin was still frozen in place, his camera trained on the women.

  Kara blew her whistle. “Knock it off, guys. Now we have to start the jam over.”

  The two women on the ground were laughing now. Their teammates skated over and helped them up. The two women even hugged before they began to line up for the next jam.

  “Make sure you’re watching the inside this time, Mia,” Kara said.

  The women got into position, each with one toe and one arm forward. Kara took a deep breath and held the whistle to her lips.

  But instead of the whistle, a high-pitched scream echoed around the room. Kara glanced down at her whistle, looking confused. The women on the track dropped their pre-jam stances and looked at each other.

  “Harris is bleeding!” a woman’s voice said.

  A woman with pigtail braids was running into the gymnasium carrying her skates. Her eyes were wide and her skin was an ashy color.

  “Harris Myer is on the floor. There’s blood everywhere,” she said before dropping her skates and burying her face in her hands to cry.

  One player, who had been on the sidelines, shouted to Kara, “Should I call 911?”

  “Yeah. Call ’em,” Kara said as she skated out of the gymnasium.

  The entire team followed her, except for the player with the bow tattoos on her legs. She skated over to the woman who was crying and draped one arm around her shoulders.

  I looked around for Colin, but didn’t see him. He’d probably slipped out with the team to see what had happened, and maybe photograph it.

  The group of women wound their way out of the gymnasium, down the hallway, and into a room with scattered folding chairs and derby equipment all over the floor.

  A portly man lay flat on his back at the end of the room. Dark red blood formed a puddle beneath his head and spread out from one ear. There was a blackened gash below his right eye.

  All of the women seemed to be frozen in silence. One player skated toward him and dropped to her knees, sliding up to the body. She stopped just inches from where his arm lay, flopped out to one side. She touched two fingers against the side of his neck and stared at his chest for what felt like a full minute. Then she craned her neck back toward Kara.

  “He’s dead.”

  The woman who had called 911 held her phone up to her ear.

  “My friend’s a nurse, retired from the Navy. She says he’s dead. No breathing. No heartbeat… Okay… Okay, we will.”

  She lowered the phone and said, “We’re supposed to make room for the paramedics. The dispatcher said don’t touch anything.”

  “I’ll go out front and look for them,” Shannon said as she skated out of the room.

  Another player followed her.

  Kara exhaled a shaky breath. “Okay, guys. We better get out of here.”

  She held her arms out and moved slowly toward the door, shepherding the women out of the room.

  Colin stood in a corner, discreetly pressing the shutter button on his camera. A couple women glanced his way with frowns and narrowed eyes, but nobody told him to stop.

  Instead of going back to the gym, the women lingered in the hallway, talking and taking turns drinking from a child-sized water fountain.

  At first, the conversation was hesitant whispers. Then, after a couple minutes, a steady murmur of voices took over the hallway. Before long, it was downright loud with chatter.

  Some of the women sniffled and spoke with shaky voices, but most were surprisingly calm.

  They all seemed to know him, though not fondly. They were speculating on
what had happened.

  “I think he was diabetic,” one woman said.

  “Well, diabetes doesn’t make you squirt a gallon of blood from your head,” someone else retorted.

  They guessed about what he was doing at the rec center. Someone suggested he had stopped by to pick up equipment that one of his players had forgotten here.

  “They have an away bout tonight, remember? With the Terminators?” Mia said.

  Kara, still in her skates, glided toward me. I’m only 5’2”, so she’d probably be taller than me anyway, but with the extra few inches the skates provided, she towered over me.

  She raised her eyebrows. “I wanted practice to be interesting for you, but not this interesting. Are you okay?”

  I nodded, wondering why she would think I might not be okay.

  “Oh, of course, you’re a reporter. I guess you’re used to seeing dead bodies and stuff.”

  I nodded and pressed my lips together. “More than you’d think.”

  I glanced around the room and back at Kara. “Nobody seems that upset,” I whispered.

  She shrugged and squeezed her lips to one side. “Harris was pretty universally despised. He’s not with our team. He’s with the Violent Crown.”

  Kara went on to explain that her team, the Capital City Wreckers, and the team Harris Myer sponsored, the Violent Crown, had a long, bitter rivalry.

  “A few years ago, we were all one team. I wasn’t captain then,” Kara said. “We had a lot of great players—so many that it was tough for people to get enough playing time. So we decided to split into two teams and share the rec center. It was all very practical and very amicable—at first.”

  She took off her helmet and began twisting one of the straps. “We split in two—tried to give both teams an even set of experienced players and newbies. People were cool about it for the most part. Then we had our first bout. We knew each other’s styles and how to pick apart the other team’s weak spots. Maybe there was more underlying tension than we realized, because it got really ugly. We accused them of playing dirty, they accused us of playing dirty.

  “It was ridiculous. It ended in a brawl,” Kara said with a bitter laugh. “We’ve pretty much been fighting ever since. They think we took the good locker room. We’re mad that they got to keep the original name.”

  “So no one’s upset about this guy being dead because the teams don’t get along?” I asked.

  “Nah, that’s not it. He was a jerk. His niece is the captain of the Violent Crown and she’s just—just awful. You’ll see.”

  The woman who had initially found Harris’ body walked up to us and stood beside Kara. She’d stopped crying. Now she held her skates, hugging them against her chest.

  “You okay, Jenny?” Kara asked, reaching an arm out and wrapping it around Jenny’s back.

  “Yeah, I’m okay, it’s just—it’s so weird,” she said. “I was running late to practice and I was going into our changing room when I saw the Violents’ door was half open.” She looked at the floor while she talked. “Well, you know how they are—they never leave their stuff unlocked around us. So I walked over to it. I guess I was gonna see if anyone was in there and then close it, and there was all this blood.”

  Kara made a motherly aww noise and squeezed Jenny’s shoulders.

  “Do you think he passed out and fell? Like had a heart attack or something?” Jenny asked. Her eyes were wide and earnest.

  “Probably,” Kara said. “He was overweight, always sweating and red-faced… Then there’s the diabetes.”

  Jenny shook her head. “One time he screamed at me for parking my truck crooked. I really hated him… But now, it’s weird. He just looked so pitiful lying on the floor like that.”

  A hush fell over the group when two medics wheeled a stretcher down the hallway. Instead of sheets and blankets on the stretcher, there was a white rolled-up sheet of plastic. I recognized it immediately—a body bag.

  | Two

  Rocky Kruger was sweating all the way through his suit jacket. He was a tall, lanky Austin homicide detective with a terrible haircut and an unashamedly irritated mood.

  “So you’re telling me the building was unlocked when you got here, but you didn’t think that was strange?” Rocky asked Kara.

  She held her ground, folding her arms across her chest and standing with one skate pointed forward and one to the side. That stance prevented her from rolling, and it gave her a bigger presence in the face of this angry authority figure.

  “This is a community center. Lots of people have keys, lots of people come and go. It’s not unusual that the building was unlocked in the middle of a weekday,” she explained.

  Detective Kruger swiped the palm of his hand from the middle of his forehead up through his hair, leaving his brown hair standing on end.

  “When you got here, at four o’clock, was that door open or closed?” He gestured to the Violent Crown’s changing room, where Harris Myer’s body still lay.

  “I told you, I didn’t come through this hallway. I came in the side door and went straight to the gym.”

  Rocky slapped his notepad against his palm, turned, and walked away. He muttered, “This is—” Then he raised his voice. “Nobody leaves! Got it? We have to question every one of you girls now.”

  A collective groan echoed through the hallway, which had become oppressively hot in the hour since medics, and then uniformed officers, began to arrive.

  One of the medics had noticed something we’d all missed: there were tiny, faint spatters of blood on the floor, chairs, and even the walls of the changing room where Harris died. It was a pattern that couldn’t have been caused by a medical emergency. They said it must have been murder—Harris was beaten.

  The tiny sprays of blood weren’t easy for us to see, especially when everyone was focusing on the body. The team members didn’t realize until police pointed it out to them that some of them had actually skated through the specks of blood and spread it on the floors and hallways.

  The women had balked when officers tried to take their skates.

  “You’re not taking my three-hundred-dollar skates without a warrant,” Mia had told one of the officers. “And if you try, you’ll regret it.”

  The officer had raised his palms in surrender and walked away, shaking his head.

  After Rocky’s announcement, some women seemed resigned to doing what he asked. Others complained about being hungry or needing to get home or to work.

  Finally, one woman took a stand.

  “Hey, man, you can’t make me stay here unless you’re going to arrest me. And I know you don’t want to do that. We’ll get the ACLU in here so fast your head will spin,” she said as she stood, pulled her gear bag strap over her shoulder, and walked toward the door.

  No one tried to stop her.

  “Who are you?” Rocky asked me, looking me up and down. “You’re not a roller skater.”

  I was wearing dress pants, flats, and a sleeveless blouse. It was obvious I wasn’t there to skate.

  “I’m Jae Lovejoy,” I said. My tone was direct and flat.

  He continued to stare at me, waiting for me to explain what I was doing there. But I refused to be pressured by the silence.

  Finally he rolled his eyes and said, “And? What are you doing here? You look like a saleslady or something.”

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m writing about roller derby.”

  “For a book?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re a reporter?” he asked, his voice becoming progressively louder.

  I raised one shoulder and smirked. I knew this guy had no interest in playing nice, so I wasn’t going to bother with diplomacy. Or manners.

  “You with the Gazette Mail?”

  “No. Alt News America.”

  He exhaled loudly. “You can’t be this close to the scene. You’re going to have to leave.”

  “I was already here, for a feature about the team. I wasn’t even writing about the dead gu
y.”

  “You’re going to have to go outside and wait, over past the yellow tape with the rest of the press. We’ll do a briefing later,” Rocky said.

  I responded with a cold glare. I expected the detective to either walk away or attempt to escort me to the door. Instead he just stood over me with his hands in his pockets.

  Kara sidled up to us diplomatically. “So. Anything new?”

  “Your reporter friend needs to leave. And the guy with the camera over there is going with you,” Rocky said.

  Afraid I might break into a nervous smile, I avoided looking at Kara.

  “I told you: I’m not even covering this case,” I said. My voice came out so sharp that it surprised me. “And I have permission to be here.”

  “Wallace!” Rocky barked over his shoulder. “This reporter is interfering with an active investigation. Show her to the parking lot. She can wait there with the rest of the press.”

  A beefy officer with his mouth in a sneer walked my way.

  I raised my palms.

  “Fine. I’m leaving.”

  I adjusted my messenger bag on my shoulder and glanced toward Colin. He had already started walking my way.

  “Thanks for letting me come to practice,” I said to Kara. “Text me about tonight?”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding unsure. “See ya.”

  Colin and I left, walking past the press area Rocky had described and straight to our vehicle. I wasn’t about to get dragged into yet another local crime story.

  Colin drove our rented SUV to the Bluestem Inn. I’d asked our travel secretary to change our reservation from a chain hotel to this place at the last minute, when I realized at least part of my story would discuss how locally owned businesses shape Austin’s culture.

  “I thought you might put up a fight when the detective kicked us out,” Colin said.

  “Did you want to stay?”

  Colin shook his head. “Not really. But I was kind of interested to see how things would play out between the Wreckers and that detective.”

  “Me too. They don’t seem like they’re really big on authority.” I laughed. “But I was hot and hungry. I didn’t have any fight left in me.”