2024.04.18: The Jason McCrory investigation continues

The early evening streets of North Albion are quietly busy with the suburban goings-on of the men and women who live there. People walking to or from the little neighborhood restaurants or bars, or walking their dogs or children... It feels like a small down on the edges of the more urban central districts.

An auburn-haired woman and a tweenaged boy are enjoying a saunter down what could generously be called main street, people watching.

Coming in their direction is a familiar face, but not dressed up like she would normally be for work. A lightweight black sweater, colorful camisole underneath, jeans, and engineer boots instead, which is a very different look. Her hair is back in a low ponytail, and her makeup is minimal; maybe some eyeliner and lip gloss. Her hands are stuffed in her pockets, and she's looking up at the upper levels of a building further down the street, the kind with some retail on the ground level, but apartments on the upper floors.

Doris, who is looking the part of Generic Suburban Mom Who Probably Asks For The Manager, notices the oncoming human and slows her walk, nudging the boy with her and muttering something to him quietly. He also slows. "Lizzy?" A gentle inquiry.

Lizzy looks up and smiles, though she looks a little shocked to see her boss in something other than her stage wear. "Hi! How are you?" She smiles at the young gentleman accompanying her.

"Just out for an evening stroll. Have you met Steven?" She indicates the kid with her, who does the standard twelve-year-old-awkward-around-girls things. "Steven, this is Lizzy McCrory. She works for me."

Lizzy nods her head. "I have not! It's nice to meet you, Steven." She offers her hand for a handshake.

True to boyish charm, he returns the handshake. "Nice to meet you too, Miss McCrory." There is a distinct but not overly obtrusive posh New England sharpness to the boy's voice. He oozes prep school tidiness, making Doris' ladies-who-lunch athleisure look all the more convincing.

"I'd love to chat more, but I have an appointment." She purses her lips. "...going through Jason's stuff." Lizzy has always been pretty proud of her brother and brought him up often. She's been pretty down since his death but has managed to suck it up to get through work.

"I'm sorry." Doris' use of a contraction speaks to the unguarded sincerity of the moment. "Call if you need anything, all right?"

She nods. "Thanks. Having Mr. Cruz there should help keep me focused on getting things organized." She takes a deep breath, as if steeling herself for the rough time ahead. "Take care, Miss Doris. Nice meeting you, Steven." She summons up that smile again, but they might notice how it doesn't reach her eyes this time.

Complex feelings are hard, and Steven does his best to navigate the fraught situation without being a complete idiot tween or opening his mouth. Doris lightly touches Lizzy's arm, one of the rare moments wherein the older woman is not wearing gloves. Her fingertips are cool, even through the cardigan.

Lizzy reinforces the smile, then pats Doris' hand before stepping back and heading toward the apartment, where her brother's secrets are waiting... and likely Balcésar holding up the wall outside the door, as he is wont to do.

It's an aesthetic. But in any event, there's really no good place to sit, and leaning against the building is really just as good. Balcésar is tap-tapping on his smartphone, in a stylish leather jacket despite the lack of need for one, and his typical fare of bright v-neck, jeans, utility boots, and those ever-present red shades.

Frankly, if this were a different kind of street-corner, he might be a type.

Lizzy smirks a little, pretty much having called it. If anything, the man is consistent. "Hey. Thanks for coming. Even if it wasn't relevant to the case, I don't think it would be good for me to try to do this alone."

"Los gatos siempre caen de pie," the man says, politely stowing his phone and slipping it into a back pocket. He was probably playing Candy Crush or something.  It sounds like he's quoting. "You'll land on your feet. Just do your best to focus on the task. And if that doesn't work," he digs into an internal jacket pocket and fishes out a flask, which he tosses over without further comment. Booze is a salve. It's good whiskey, too.

Lizzy's shoulders slump. "...why the fuck didn't I think of bringing a flask." She sighs, then moves to unlock the door. Of course she has a key. "I'm just glad I've got clearance to come back here at this point. The landlord has been super nice about everything, but will only be nice until the end of the month."

When she opens the door, the place looks pretty much about where it was on the night of the murder. However, evidence markers have been cleared away, and the only real evidence this was a crime scene was the remaining dried gore in the carpet and marks in the carpet where the bullet passed clean through. The bullet itself is gone, of course; snatched up by CSI. Of course, this does nothing to help Lizzy relax. In fact, she tenses and freezes in the doorway.

No stranger to death and scenes of this kind, he insists Lizzy keep the flask and gently squeezes her shoulder as he wordlessly walks around her and into the room. Take your time, the gesture seems to say. Naturally, he goes straight to the business end of the room, surveying what gore and damage remains in an attempt to modestly reconstruct a possible trajectory for the bullet, and where the guy was when he was shot. With limited information on the matter, and most of the evidence gone, however, this is a rather short exercise.

Circling this particular room, he seems to touch everything--gliding his fingers over furniture and wall, knick-knacks and decorations alike. It's almost a sort of ritual dance: He's searching for a story, and everything seems to have a little something say.

Lizzy's trembling when Balcésar touches her shoulder. She watches him a moment as he walks through the space, then takes a step inside himself. Even with key evidence taken away, there's signs of a struggle, including a dent in the wall at about Lizzy's eye level. Based on the photographs sitting about, Jason was a pretty tall dude; about 6'4". That dent could have come from his shoulder (or head) hitting the wall with some force.

"You see why I'm not convinced it's a suicide?" Lizzy asks, her voice small.

Otherwise, the place screams bachelor pad, including its own well stocked mini bar in the far corner, not too far from the kitchen. Lizzy heads there, as it's sufficiently out of the way of where Balcésar might do his work... or so she thinks. There's a crunch under her feet. "OH! Shit!" She jumps back, not sure what she stepped in, then relaxes. "...fuck. Broken bottle. Carpet's a little sticky."

"There was certainly nothing in the police report about a struggle," he says, still intently walking the room as if it might whisper something important to him.

That ends when Lizzy gasps, and Balcésar quickly steps over. "Huh," he says, crouching down to gently touch the carpet, and then sniffing at his fingers. He then glances at the bar, and then bottle, as if trying to judge if the bottle fell from the bar or if it was otherwise dropped. "How long ago were the police here?"

The broken bottle is... Chambord. It could have easily fallen if the bar was jostled or possibly broken to obscure a bloodstain. Hard to tell. "A few weeks ago, the night he died. I've only just gotten cleared to come back here because they're officially done with their investigations. They're allowing me to pick up a few of his personal effects that they took for evidence, since they've deemed it as not a murder."

"We'll come back to this," he says, standing. "But let's work under the assumption this was not a suicide. Keep an eye out for disturbances--the odd sock." He's not saying murder just yet. "And," he glances down, then back up. "Mind your feet." There's the sass.

The man is exasperatingly thorough. Every drawer is opened, every item is at least glanced over. It leaves Lizzy plenty of time to gather herself and collect whatever she needs.

Lizzy's eyes narrow at him when he says 'mind your feet.' "Don't open the fridge," she shoots back, and honestly, this is probably sound advice. Damn near everything in there is probably too far gone for human consumption at this point.

The apartment is not terribly fancy, but Jason had a fair amount stuff. Reference books on various programming languages, comics of fair to middling value (if only because they're well read and well loved), pictures of him and Lizzy after a couple 5Ks and 10Ks (with both of them rocking participation medals). Inside one of the desk drawers, though, is an unexpected sight: a red lace thong. Lizzy screws up her face at that. "...whoa. Was that there before?"

Because he's contrary, Balcésar opens the fridge anyways just to be unerringly thorough, and makes the kind of frown you'd expect when presented with a sudden cloud of stench and rotting matter. But, hard-boiled, he doesn't squeal or stomp his feet, instead finding himself a butter knife so he needn't touch the gross and moving things around to make certain there's nothing there to find. Apparently he can hold his breath for a really long time!

Eventually, he follows after Lizzy and joins her at the desk. "I don't suppose he moonlighted in drag." That's not really a question, and he motions for Lizzy to hand it over so he can "inspect" it for clues. Auspex powers, go.

"...if he did, he didn't tell me his performance dates, that asshole." She doesn't touch it, letting Balcésar handle that.

Strong emotions from the item are about what's expected: lust, desire, passion, and the kind of devotion one would expect from someone fully enthralled with the blood bond. A blonde woman with pale skin and perfect makeup features prominently in the flashes before Balcésar's eyes, but she looks angry. The vision is from Jason's point of view. She throws something small, soft, and red at him, snapping "Now you're fucking stealing from me?! Gawd, just take it!"

Lizzy, of course, is not privy to any of it. She rummages around in the drawer some more, and finds a cocktail napkin embossed with Axiom's logo. A phone number is written on it. "Hey... I think I got something."

The very studious look on the investigator's face thankfully should not be anything Lizzy isn't used to at this point, so his momentary zoning out causes no real reason for alarm. He does hear her though, and blinks once before stowing the thong in a jacket pocket. "Yeah?" He glances over her shoulder and memorizes the number, promptly pulling it up on his phone. Is it Axiom's? Is it an unlisted rendezvous? A certain blonde woman? Regardless of what comes up, he reaches for the napkin as well. "May I?" More with the spirit-touching.

Lizzy hands it over distractedly. Again, the vision is from Jason's point of view. The napkin shows him the same woman in a skimpy outfit likely chosen for attracting the dumb and id-driven, scribbling down the number and pushing it in his direction. "If you need anything, and I mean anything at all, give me a call, day or night. My shift is over in an hour."

The number is NOT the number for Axiom, based on a quick search. It appears to be a private number, and a Spokeo listing comes up for a woman, but no name is on file. It's definitely local, and listed as a Verizon number.

Again with the studious face and momentary zoning out. If anything, it looks like the investigator is just memorizing the shape dimension of the napkin, the number, and so on.  He then sniffs the napkin, as if to try and detect some perfume. "Blonde hair," he seems to mumble aloud, apropos of nothing. He pulls out the lacy... thing again and looks it over. "Let me know if you find any strands of blonde hair. Or any that aren't his." He steps away, suddenly interested in the bed, peering over the sheets, under the mattress. "I figure your brother wasn't prone to writing love poetry in a diary, somewhere."

The bedroom seems firmly "bachelor pad" on the surface... and then Bal lifts the mattress. There's a prescription pad, with an address for a Dr. Cohen. A quick Google search reveals that the address is firmly in the Bon Vivant Studios Toreador territory, but very close to the border of Chinatown.

Balcésar retrieves the pad and drops the mattress, appearing somewhat perplexed. The information on his phone about the doctor's location doesn't seem to surprise him, but it's more the fact that the pad is there at all. "Whoever they had assigned to this case did a shit job," he says, waving the pad and he heads past Lizzy and towards the bathroom. He doesn't touch the spirit of the pad just yet, but instead starts tearing up drawers and cabinets looking for any medication labeled as from this 'Dr. Cohen.'

Lizzy makes sure to stay the hell out of the way as he tears around the apartment. The bathroom itself is littered with grooming and haircare products. The medicine cabinet, strangely enough, is where Balcésar hits paydirt. Adderall, Xanax, morphine, oxycontin... but mostly adderall. Lots and lots of adderall.

"Fucking mierda," he says, his voice echoing from the bathroom. He looks around for a wastebin and pulls out any bag there might be, scooping up all of the medication bottles and dumping them into the bin. He checks to make sure they're all from Dr. Cohen before grabbing the pad in one hand and the newest bottle of adderall in the other. Fuck, he's going to be hungry tonight. But even so, he gets to touching some spirits.

"What?" Lizzy says as she walks in, hearing his voice, and then she gasps at the sheer volume of medication bottles. "...oh... oh my God..." She staggers back a few steps.

Meanwhile, Balcésar sees even more from Jason's point of view. A judgy pharmacy tech handing him a bottle, with a more masculine voice in his thoughts saying "Take them an hour before you see her. After that, you're on your own." With the notepad, there's fear. The kind of pants-shitting fear you expect someone to have when they know their life is on the line. A cool sensation against the temple marred with heavy pressure. "All of them," a gruffer voice mutters. "We need to see how much this kid can take."

The pad is maybe a third empty.

The man shakes his head after a moment. He digs into the bathroom trash he just emptied to make sure there aren't any empty bottles or other pharmaceuticals, leaving Lizzy to her shock for a moment. Finally, he stands, picking up the wastebin, which will apparently be coming with him, along with the pad. "Don't jump to conclusions," he says, calmly enough, but clearly disturbed about something. He steps out of the bathroom and setting the wastebin on the bed. He starts going through bedside drawers, and wherever might be considered a hiding place for more medication, including the kitchen.

"First rule of these sorts of things: Keep an open mind. Like you did when you were suspicious in the first place." He talks as he works, grunting, and now being much less delicate than he was earlier.(edited)

There's a moderate amount of porn and a fleshlight in one of the nightstand drawers. No other pill bottles, but there is a tiny baggie of weed that looks like it has been there a while.  Also, iron supplements. Another pass through the kitchen likely also means another peek in the fridge, which has lots of red meat, liver, eggs and slime that might have been wilted spinach at one point. Other food in the kitchen includes brown rice, dried fruits, and other mostly healthy snack options.

The medications appear to be isolated to the bathroom. There's a small hashpipe in the sink, though.

Balcésar is more concerned about the iron pills than the weed, which he hands off to Lizzy just in case she feels like she needs it. The, uh, relief equipment remains untouched. The stuff in the fridge now takes on new meaning, which he records in a small notebook he had stowed in his pocket.  The hashpipe he picks up, considers, sniffs, and checks to make sure the guy wasn't smoking crushed opiates or something.

"Talk to me, Lizzy," he says, while working, but glancing over his shoulder, at least. "Don't bottle it all up unless you want to turn into a thorny asshat like me. What are you thinking?"

She takes the bag of weed, but just stares dumbly. The pipe smells purely of weed, thankfully. She follows wordlessly, her hands shaking. When he finally asks what she's thinking, her response is a choked sob. She plunks down in the overstuffed recliner and sobs into her hands. The bag of weed drops to the floor.

Oh. Oh no. This was the reason for the booze. Balcésar sets down the pipe and turns to look at Lizzy briefly before placing a palm to his bearded cheek and closing his eyes tightly for a moment, exhaling slowly. The man is not a grief counselor, and he had been spending a lot of time trying avoid these kinds of emotions, but sometimes this is just a thing a PI must do. Wordlessly and noiselessly, he moves across the room and crouches before her, gently placing a hand upon her knee. "Hey," he says, gently. "Take your time. Let me know if you need anything."

She sniffles, wiping the tears away with one hand. "I'm sorry. I just... I was scared something like this would happen. I would come here, and discover terrible things about my brother that he was likely trying to protect me from, or just keep from me because it would only make things worse." It all comes out as a ramble, her voice drenched in tears. "I knew something didn't add up, but the idea that... that he might have been..." She can't bring herself to say it. "All those drugs. Why... I just don't understand."

"Shh, hey," he says, squeezing her knee, gently. "Hey. You can't think like that." He affixes his pale gaze to hers, offering her something else to focus on. "Look at me. There's a couple of different reasons he could have had all of those drugs. Yeah, the obvious one is that he was using. But concluding the obvious is bad investigating. Maybe he was being forced into them like some kind of drug mule. Or, hell, he could have been holding onto them for someone else--the owner of the thong, maybe. We just don't know, yet. We need to let the evidence tell us the story. So, this is going to be a long, tedious process, but we will find out the truth, I promise you that."

He gives her a minute to process that, and then slowly retracts his hand. "I'm going to go back over there and keep looking, but you stay here as long as you need."

Lizzy takes deep breaths to keep herself together while Balcésar is talking. She nods slowly. "Thank you. I... I'm scared of what he got himself into. I don't want anyone else to get hurt by this. Like, part of me feels like this isn't my brother, but some pod person or something, and that my real brother is out there, but that's just ridiculous." She looks at the pictures of the two of them. "The man hoarding Adderall for whatever reason can't be my brother. That's my brother." She points to the picture. "The dude who loves dogs and running and coding and... And me." She then shakes her head. "I'm sorry. I'm babbling, and you have work to do." There was nothing mean in it. Just sadness and defeat.

Now, Balcésar is having none of that. "Stop that," he says, firmly, reaching up to gently pat-pat her cheek. It's far from painful, and just firm enough to kind of jolt her of that particular grief-spiral. "Seriously. I support the crying--you need to let out your grief, but I'm not going to stand here and let you do that to your brother's memory; you're just going to regret it later. Look at me," he says, leaning in close, and dropping his hand to her shoulder. He reiterates, gently, "We. Don't. Know. And you're going to need to hold onto the love you had for you brother, including whatever faults he may have had, in order to see this through to the end. Maybe he made some mistakes, but if he were still alive, you'd want to help him. So help him now."

He rests an open hand on her leg, as if waiting for her to take it. "Okay? He deserves to have the truth out there, whatever ugliness there may be to it. But that doesn't matter. Family, right?"(edited)

The tap to her cheek makes Lizzy's breath catch in her throat. He definitely has her attention now. The tears well up in her eyes anew as he talks, and she nods slowly. She takes the open hand, squeezing it, while her other hand moves to her shoulder, where his other hand rests. She squeezes that hand too for good measure. "Family," she manages to murmur. She then lets go of Balcésar's hands. "Thank you."

The man nods and returns the squeeze, lingering in her space for a few more moments for the sake of offering that comfort, and then slowly begins to pull himself away. His skin is only slightly cool, like he hasn't eaten in a minute. It probably feels relieving against the warmer flesh of someone hot with emotion. He reiterates again. "Take your time."

And.

"Don't forget the booze." The flask. A brief, humorful smirk, and he's standing again and heading back to rummaging the apartment. The good stuff seems to limited to the man's bedroom for now, so he starts picking through the guy's clothes. Newer club clothes? More athleisure stuff for the gym? A t-shirt that reads "Freshly ghouled and loving it?" maybe?

There are definitely some new club clothes in there, still in the Amazon boxes. Also, a jock strap and a leather harness that has maybe seen a couple uses. The box is addressed to him, but the credit card info on the packing slip belongs to Joanne Yost.

That's another quick google search. Maybe facebook? In any event, the name gets recorded in his little black notebook. He digs through the boxes a bit, confirming nothing is hidden, and busies himself with the tedious business of opening sock drawers and the like and doing the same. It's like he's tossed an apartment or two in his time. He even ridiculously taps around the floor with his feet, hunting for hidey-holes or loose floorboards, which makes him look a bit like a character from some bad 80's dancing flick.

"Did he have a laptop?" He calls to Lizzy in the other room.

"It's in evidence," she calls back. The name Joanne Yost by itself gets a few hits over Google and Facebook. Might require narrowing it down some.

Balcésar abandons further research into Joanne for the moment. "What about an email?" It doesn't really take much more time for him to toss the rest of the place. He doesn't actually break anything, but it's a hot mess when he's done. He's not hired to not be thorough.

She rattles off the email, and as Balcésar continues to make a mess of the place, the dawning horror that she is going to have to clean it up washes over her. There isn't much else left to toss, though.

The email is noted, and he'll attempt to break into it later. With his art otherwise largely complete he returns to Lizzy and sits next to her on the floor, gesturing for his flask so he can take a swig, himself. "I think I've found most everything I'm going to. I'll take that wastebin with me so I can have the drugs looked at."

She hands him the flask, then reaches for the handle of cheap vodka for herself.

The look she shoots him dares him to judge her for reaching for the rotgut. She apparently learned THAT look from Doris too.

There's no judgment. He was drinking swill just the other day and right in front of Doris, no less. He just takes a long swig of his own stuff and sighs. "Sorry about the mess."

"Help me clean it up and we'll call it even." Her voice is a little rough from the crying and the harsh alcohol... But she manages a little bit of a smile.

The man looks around at the destruction he has wrought and grunts. "Sure." It's a rare capitulation. Treasure it. He takes another long swig and stands to get it done.

"Thank you, darlin'," she drawls with a wry grin. "At the very least I can figure out how many boxes I'm gonna need for stuff that's actually worth keeping. Craigslist is gonna have a LOT of new listings before this is done."

"Do me a favor and keep an eye out for any other odd sock that might tumble out while you're cataloguing his stuff." It's fairly clear that Balcésar doesn't expect her to find anything, but you never know!

"I will. Definitely." She then looks around, takes another swig of that handle of vodka, and gets to work cleaning up. Nothing immediately pertinent to the case comes up, but high school yearbooks and old photographs do. Lizzy gets a bit misty-eyed, but nothing like the crying jag from earlier. Once it's back to something a bit less ransacked, she lets him know she can take it from here.

With his prize of wastebin-cum-drugs, as well with as the lacy underthing and prescription pad, Balcésar confirms that she'll be alright before making with his typically stoic nod and heading back to his office to follow up on some of this stuff. "Call me if you need anything," he says.