There was no answer, and for a moment I thought she might indeed h
ave gone in search of her granddad’s shotgun.
Bree called out, “Cece, will you please talk to us? I promise you we have no ax to grind. We just want to help.”
There was no answer for several beats.
Then a pitiful voice said, “There’s no helping this, or me, or Rashawn, or Stefan. No one can change any of it.”
“No, we can’t change what’s happened,” I said. “But we can make sure the right person suffers for the horrible things that were done to your boy. Please, I promise you we won’t take up much of your time.”
A few moments later, a bolt was thrown, and the door creaked inward.
Chapter
35
In the course of my career, I have entered the homes of many grieving mothers and witnessed my share of shrines erected in mourning for a lost child. But I’d never seen anything quite like this.
Broken furniture. Broken liquor bottles. Shattered plates and mugs. The small living area was a complete shambles except for an oval coffee table that featured a green marble urn surrounded by a collection of framed photographs of Rashawn from infancy on up.
The older pictures all looked like yearly school portraits. In every one, Rashawn was grinning magnetically. Seriously, you did not want to take your eyes off that boy’s smile.
Around the entire edge of the table and surrounding the pictures like the spokes on a medicine wheel, there were toys, everything from an air-soft pistol to action figures, stuffed animals, and Matchbox cars. The only things on the table that looked like they hadn’t belonged to Rashawn were a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two blackened glass pipes, a small butane torch, and a baggie of some white substance.
On the wall hung a sixty-inch flat-screen. It was split horizontally into two feeds. The lower one was playing The Empire Strikes Back, the volume turned down low. The upper one showed home videos of Rashawn as a young boy, four, maybe five. He was wearing a cape and jumping around swinging a toy lightsaber.
“He liked Star Wars a lot,” Bree said sympathetically.
Cece rubbed at her nose, sniffed, and curled the corners of her lips up in the direction of a smile. “He’d watch those movies over and over again. Like they were new every time. Sometimes we’d watch them together. He knew all the lines. I mean, all of them. Who can do that?”
“A very smart boy,” I said.
“He was that,” she said, putting out her cigarette. She scratched her arm and looked longingly at the pipes and the drugs.
“Tell us about Stefan Tate,” I said.
Cece hardened, said, “He’s a sadist and a cold-blooded killer.”
“Did you think he was a sadist before Rashawn died?”
“Who broadcasts they’re a sadist?” she asked.
“Good point,” I said. “But you had no warning?”
“If I’d had a warning, he wouldn’t have spent a second with my boy,” Cece said, going around the couch and almost reaching for one of the pipes. Then she seemed to realize the drugs were sitting there in the open and pushed the baggie under a teddy bear.
She lit another cigarette. We asked her about Rashawn and Stefan, and she corroborated what my cousin had told us: that they’d met at school and took an instant liking to each other, that Stefan had become a big brother/father figure to the boy, and that something had happened in the days before Rashawn’s death that made him want to sever his relationship with my cousin.
“Stefan says he doesn’t know what was behind it,” I said.
Cece took a drag, nodded to the urn, and said bitterly, “He came on to Rashawn, and Rashawn rejected him.”
“Rashawn told you that?” I asked.
“I’m just reading into the way Rashawn acted the last time I saw him.”
“Which was like what?” Bree asked.