Tessa Stark: Desert Heat

Chapter Twenty Five

You're so pathetic! If you weren't such a stalker, maybe Nate could stand being around you! You need to get a life! Get a boyfriend! Get laid! Just get off Nate! I wish it had been you instead of Hallie! None of us wanted you in the group in the first place!

You're a bully and an asshole! Everyone hates you! We're only still friends with you because Nate asked us to be! If he didn't need your uncle to help him even he wouldn't be talking to you anymore!

Nate only puts up with you because he has to! You're so bat shit crazy obsessive nobody would even speak to you if it wasn't for him! And I'm over it! I don't care what Nate wants, I'm done with you!

The messages sent to Etty Montrose from Chloe, Leva, and Danni went on and on, lasting for nearly half an hour, one rage text after another, beginning at eleven twenty p.m.

As for Etty Montrose, she didn't participate in the incessant texting. At least, until the text that Leva sent her at eleven forty. That message from Leva was fairly brutal.

I'm having a talk with Nate as soon as he's done with the bottle service girl! He ditched you so that he could fuck her, by the way! Probably in your car! I'm going to make sure you don't have a single friend by tomorrow morning! You are finished here! Kiss your entire life goodbye, bitch!

But, the reply from Etty was more...desperate...than brutal. Nate isn't out here, you stupid bitch! I knew he wouldn't do that to me! I'm the only one who never believed he killed Hallie! I'm the one who got him to come out tonight! Where have the rest of you been this whole time! Nate knows I love him. And he lov---"

Etty's message began at eleven forty five and remained unfinished, very likely narrowing her time of death down to the minute.

However, the angry texts from Etty's friends kept coming for a few minutes longer, all along the same lines and ending with a text from Leva, sent at midnight. Don't you have anything to say? Is it too hard to hear the truth, you coward! Nate is here now! I'm telling him to either cut you off or we're all cutting him off! And who do you think he's going to choose! All of his friends, or one psycho stalker slut!

"Well, with friends like that..." Cole said as she finished reading him the last message. "And they're really fighting over Nathan Rutherford?"

"I reckon," she shrugged. "This does answer the question as to where Etty's friends were when she was getting killed. At least, it seems that way."

"It also seems that Mr. Nathan Rutherford had disappeared from the group during the window of Etty's murder," Cole pointed out. "So, should we still question the girlfriends? Or should we go straight at Rutherford?"

"We question the girlfriends," she answered. "If one of them slipped away, they'd have shown back up soaking wet. And so would Nathan Rutherford. I want to get their stories before we get his."

She wouldn't dwell on anything past that. Not for the moment. They needed to take things one step at a time, slowly, so as not to miss anything. They were dealing with a fresh kill now, so every single question answered and word spoken, every single detail, down to the smallest speck...it all mattered.

Using the addresses that Zeb had gotten from the DMV, they crossed town, making their way into a very urban area where a very fancy glass and steel apartment building sat, towering over all the other buildings along the street. 

Entering the heavily air conditioned foyer, which seemed more like an upscale hotel lobby, they headed for the bank of elevators at the back, just past the wall of mailboxes with the copper filigree fronts.  Riding it up to the twelfth floor, where all three young women kept apartments, they stepped off the of the mirrored and paneled conveyance and out into the bright, wide hallway, pointing themselves straight ahead, Tessa handing Cole the cell phone as they walked.