Neon Nights Chapter 15

“How's frat life treating you?" Carly asked when he answered the phone.

"What do you want to hear?" Marc asked her.

"I want to hear that you put all the pieces together, we can make whatever arrests we need to, and I can take the weekend off?"

"Hot date?" Marc asked.

"Yep, with my sunscreen, a pool, and a book." “Scandalous,” he said.

The afternoon sun hung high in a cloudless sky, scorching the world below, and Marc pulled at the collar of his polo, trying to get it unstuck from his neck. Shorts and a t-shirt would have been more appropriate, but it was tough to look like a stand-up servant of the law when it looked like you'd rather be at the beach.

"Indeed." She laughed. "So back to my question … are we done here?"

"No."

"Close?" she prodded.

He said nothing.

"So no," she said dejectedly.

"No, not close. Further away. Like adrift at sea away." "Goodbye, pool."

"You're tan enough already," he said.

Marc walked into the house's foyer and ascended the right side of the grand double staircase. He was struck by how clean the place was. For a frat house, this wasn't what he was expecting at all. On the second floor, a railing looked out over the living area, which clearly doubled as the dance floor since all the furniture was still moved against the walls from the previous night's festivities. To his right was a massive kitchen with all the amenities a professional chef could want, and a college kid wouldn't need.

He looked up and down the expansive hall in both directions and spotted another set of stairs leading to a third floor. He climbed the steep steps and felt a tinge of vertigo as he navigated them, holding the railing. How the hell did they get furniture up here? He reached the top and took a breath, allowing himself a moment to get acclimated to the height.

Beautiful Brazilian cherry hardwood floors and framed pictures of each class in the fraternity's history lined the walls. The suites running along the hall were reserved for the top dogs in the house. Jameson's room was the furthest down to the right, and when he reached for the doorknob, he realized the door was cracked.

He knocked on the door, then nudged it to look inside, where he found a man rummaging through the papers on Jameson's desk. Caught off guard by the noise, the man whipped around at the disturbance, and Marc found himself standing face to face with chiseled features and expertly coifed hair that had been splattered across every television and online video ad for six months leading up to his victory in the Senate race the previous year.

"Who the hell are you?" the senator snapped. "A reporter?"

"No, sir. Detective Marc McKinley. I'm investigating the death of your son. I was the one who found him."

The man paused and recollected himself.

"I'm sorry I snapped, Detective. It's been a shitty couple of days." "I'm sorry to hear about your son, Senator."

"Please, call me Lance, and thank you."

"I didn't mean to barge in on you here. I was talking to Evan about things and trying to understand your son better to see how he might have gotten wrapped up in all of this."

"Out of curiosity, what did he say?" Lance asked.

"That they had been friends since they pledged the frat together, that Jameson was well-liked by everyone and popular, but that he had gotten involved in the electronic music scene a few years back, and things had started to change. Sorry, involved is too light a word. 'Consumed' is a more appropriate term."

Marc gestured around a room covered with festival posters, turn tables, and trinkets from what looked like a hundred different shows at first glance.

Lance looked around the room and seemed like he was trapped in place by his thoughts.

When he spoke, rage had built up in his throat, and it came loose in a deep growl.

"This EDM or electronic music, or whatever they call it, has been a cancer for my son and my family. The drugs, the endless parade of screw-ups and sluts, the countless hours away from class. It destroyed his life."

The man moved to the window and put his head in his hands. Marc let the moment hang before speaking again.

"Do you have any idea who did this to him?

"He hung out with so many pieces of shit, it's going to be hard to narrow down a suspect list, but he did have a core group of a couple of friends. For full transparency here, Detective, I am gone all the time now with work in DC, and I don't think there was any period of the boy's life where I would have won father of the year."

The last words seemed to sting, and the man fought to keep the tears at bay. He recomposed himself and continued.

"I wasn't involved enough in his life. I just put him on autopilot and expected it to work out for him. He came to this school because this is where I went. He came to this frat because this is where I went. The track I took worked well for me; I just wanted him to have the

same shot. I guess all of this," he said, gesturing to the EDM shrine, "was his way of telling me to go fuck myself."

The senator's rage boiled over, and he took one of the turn tables and hurled it against the wall, sending knobs scattering across the floor.

Marc stood quietly and said nothing, choosing not to acknowledge the outburst.

"We can talk another time, Lance. I know this is an impossibly difficult day for you."

Lance slumped down in Jameson's swivel chair at his desk and took a deep breath, the squeak of the seat the only other noise in the room.

"I'm sorry. In the last few years since he fell into this world, he was different than in high school or even his freshman year here. Unlike his mother, I wasn't blind to what he was becoming, but like her, I believed that it was a phase."

"So, you knew he was getting involved in the drug scene?"

"I felt it, but I couldn't prove it. Then the election happened, and suddenly, I was gone all the time. It doesn't feel good to say that you were a bad father or weren't there to help your son, but I have to say both."

"We had someone in custody that he was staying with who is still a suspect. Do you know an Avery Bass?"

Lance snapped to his feet, shooting the chair back into the desk with a crash, his erratic temper now in control of him again.

"He was still running around with that kid?!"

The anger in his voice took his response up to a shout. Marc kept his voice even to try to diffuse the man's anger.

"It appears so. They were staying at a campground together in Avery's new Airstream. We ended up bringing Avery into custody on an unrelated matter, and that's when we learned about his camper. When we got there to search it, we found Jameson."

The senator paced back and forth furiously. With each footfall across the floor, he became angrier.

"How do you know Avery?" Marc asked.

"His father and I go way back … to our time here. But we haven't spoken to each other in about five years."

"Were you friends at one time?" "Best of."

"Can I ask what happened?"

"Brad Bass is for Brad Bass at all times. It becomes tiresome to maintain a friendship like that over time."

"Was there something that triggered it, or had time just run its course?" Marc asked.

The senator sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows pressed hard into his thighs, his hands folded together tightly.

"Little bit of both. There was a group of us within the frat that were inseparable through school. After you get out, though, you know how it goes, people head their separate ways, but we stayed really close for years. Around the time I got into politics, Brad started

showing up again. He was reaching out to me for favors more often than ever before. Nothing illicit, just introducing him to people he wanted to meet mostly."

"What kind of people?" Marc asked.

Lance tightened up the slightest bit at the question, like a person realizing that they were talking to the police and might not want to delve too deep into what could be perceived as the potential sins of their past.

"Other people in politics, business leaders in the community. It evolved into more complex requests around issues his clients needed to have resolved, and I got pissed. At that point, I didn't care anymore whether we salvaged our friendship, so I told him I was done, and that was the end of that."

"Do you think Brad or Avery are the kind of people who could commit murder?"

"They aren't winning any humanitarian awards anytime soon, that's for sure. Avery, he was always in trouble. In fact, he got expelled from here. I told Jameson I didn't want him around that kid, that he would drag him down with him, and he ignored me. I have a hard time believing they would murder my son though.”

Tears built up in the man’s eyes.

"With everything going on in your career, did your wife know a little more about any other potential enemies or what he was doing at these festivals? Kids sometimes talk to their moms more than their dads."

"It's possible. We have not been on good terms as of late. I flew in this morning to be with her at home for a while, and then I came out here because I wanted to see the house and collect some of his things. It's been a shitty day."

Marc nodded and leaned up against the desk. "What about Alec Davidson?"

He thought he caught a faint change in Lance's eyes, so subtle that if you weren't watching, you wouldn't have noticed.

"Sure, I remember Alec."

An icy chill rolled through the room, and Lance stood up, thus declaring the conversation over.

At least in his mind.

Marc wouldn't let it go that easily. "Were you friends here at school?"

"We were. If I remember right, he had a couple of wives; the last one was crazier than all the others combined."

"Yeah, I had the pleasure of meeting her just before I came out here. When did you see Alec last?"

Lance scratched the top of his head lightly so as not to disturb his perfectly shaped coffee-colored hair.

"Must be three years or so now. It was at a reunion here." "Were you close friends?"

He thought about it for longer than he should have before responding.

"Sort of. He was a different kind of guy. He wasn't in the same circles I was in outside the fraternity."

"I know you've got to go, and I don't want to take up any more of your time. Do you mind if I reach out to you and your wife if I can think of any other questions I need to ask?"

"That's fine," the senator said, pulling a card from his pocket and exchanging it with Marc's.

The senator reached the door, then stopped as if taking in the altar to the electronic gods before him for the first time. The man's anger and rage were replaced by confusion and sadness as he stared at the colorful posters.

"I know my son wasn't a perfect boy, and we are probably about to find out quickly how imperfect he really was, but I assure you, he didn't deserve this end, Detective."

Alone in the room now, Marc took a deep breath and tried to put himself in Jameson's shoes. Since Jameson was a senior and a well- connected kid, the space was all his, with no roommate. The room was neat. No clothes on the floor, empty pizza boxes, or anything else the movies had us believe were the universal standards for a college kid's bedroom.

It was the antithesis of it.

The festival posters represented events up and down the Eastern Seaboard with names like Elec-TRI-CITY in Raleigh, Dream Den in Miami, and Synth-tember in New York City. The kid had gotten around the last few years.

There was a large monitor on the desk, and Marc plopped into the leather reclining seat and wheeled himself over in front of it.

He touched the mouse with his right hand and was greeted with a lock screen.

Never going to be that easy.

Inside the desk drawers, everything was in its place. Marc rifled through some school papers, but nothing caught his attention. He walked across the room to the closet, opened it, and scanned the contents. Jameson's style was frat house chic. Button downs, university and fraternity t-shirts, and a small army of sneakers on a compartmented shelf that ran up the wall. Marc knew nothing about shoes other than kids today went crazy for collecting them, and there was even a "shoe stock market" that he came across one evening after falling down an internet wormhole. One nice suit hung wrapped in dry cleaners' plastic at the end of the rack. Marc guessed it was for formal events at the frat and maybe stuff his dad made him attend.

Nothing screamed drug kingpin.

He sat back down and swiveled in the chair like a five-year-old. Then he saw it.

The lip of a plastic bin sticking out from under the bed. Marc knelt on the floor, grabbed the bin, and pulled it out.

Unsnapping the lid, he opened it to find a variety of memorabilia from Jameson's life: newspaper clippings of his father's first run for office as a congressman, framed photographs with family and friends that didn't make the desk for whatever reason, and a small book that featured some rookie cards from the Dodgers, which looked to be his favorite baseball team based on the quantity. There were also a handful of books on Woodstock and a long black case in the back corner buried under some festival t-shirts.

Gun?

He clicked the latches and opened the case.

Holy shit.

In it was what looked to be about $50,000 in cash and a sandwich bag stuffed to the brim with neon-colored pills that represented all the colors of the rainbow.