Dispatched Confessions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 2) Read online

  Dispatched Confessions

  The Love is Murder Social Club Book Two

  Talia Maxwell

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Also by Talia Maxwell

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Two phone calls changed Holly Gamarra’s life.

  The first was when she worked as a Clackamas County 911 dispatcher.

  All dispatchers had a moment, a single call or two that haunted them.

  They didn’t tell those stories to anyone; the details of those moments, often when people were in the middle of life and death, weren’t amusement fodder presented in the middle of Christmas dinners.

  “Oh, yeah, well let me tell you about the suicide last Christmas. Man murdered his wife…stabbed her eighteen times with a fireplace poker because she’d complained about his mom…called to confess then took his own life over the phone.”

  And yet, despite the constant stress and darkness and experiencing humanity at its worst, she liked being the voice of calm after a car accident or helping a child worried about a sick parent. For Holly, the life of a dispatcher was the life of an unseen angel. She was content with the unseen part of her job—she was happy to work with ease and efficiency and with purpose.

  She would sit with her thick red hair piled on to her head, her arms always brushing up against the side of her breasts as she typed at a crisp 110wpm. Sometimes she sat on a large rubber bouncy ball to help with her nervous energy before it was deemed too much of a distraction for the rest of the dispatch team. Holly loved the work and the people, but she couldn’t prevent herself from taking the work home with her and into her life and her nightmares and the places she went with her son, Alex.

  And that was even before the night of April 10th.

  How could Holly forget the call that made her pack her cubby, take her lunch back from the fridge, slide over her badge to the 911 Call Center, and vow never to return?

  Holly’s shift had been easy that evening: a hang-up, a couple of rowdy teenagers, a noise complaint that turned out to be a bar mitzvah. Then at 10:10pm, the call came in and Holly answered. It was a woman, whispering, and saying that her husband had a gun and he was going to kill her. She said where she was calling from and Holly dispatched a team and radioed in the DV with a firearm in the home. She talked to the woman and kept her calm, until the screaming and the soft pop pop pop, like a muffled champagne cork, almost inaudible, eerie and distant, filled the phone. She heard a scuffle and sounds of a struggle.

  She heard the woman die.

  The police had not arrived on time.

  In fact, they arrived to two dead bodies, not one. And the weight of that call settled on the entire call center like a gravity blanket—full of the shame of loss and tragedy.

  The woman’s voice played in her mind that whole evening—she allowed herself only a small break before she sat back down at her station, and took one last call.

  It was a four-year-old girl.

  “Hello? Is this the police?”

  “I can help the police come find you if you need help. Say if you need the police or a fire truck or an ambulance to help sick people,” Holly said, hoping this was educational, not instructional.

  The girl proceeded to say she needed the police to come get her mom because her mother had sent her to time-out. When the mother wrestled the contraband phone away from her precocious troublemaker, she was remorseful and embarrassed. She apologized and promised to send over a car with donuts or something for their kindness.

  Holly didn’t want to wait to find out if the mom was good on her word.

  She didn’t want murder suicides, and children crying, and having to call the next of kin. She didn’t want to think of everything awful that could befall Alex: a fall, an injury to his spinal cord, choking, a fire, a car accident. And she did—on repeat—think of all of those things as though her life depended on ranking every awful call she’d fielded and how she’d handle it if her child was on the other side.

  She quit her job in an ostentatious show of faith that everything would be okay.

  And it was.

  For eight years.

  Then the second phone call came.

  This one unexpected.

  She’d gone from one set of phones to another.

  Sitting behind the desk at Forest Heights Elementary School, Holly had just finished up tending to a fifth-grader’s scraped elbow and an anxious parent of a kindergartner hastily bringing a new outfit after a peeing accident.

  With her lunch open next to her, Holly grabbed the ringing phone with one swipe and said with a cheerful, no-nonsense tone, “Thank you for calling Forest Heights. How can I help you this afternoon?”

  “Is this Mrs. Gamarra?” a voice said on the other end of Holly’s work phone.

  She glanced down at the switchboard: the call was coming from the high school’s switch-line. Holly, a district employee, recognized the numbers immediately and didn’t find it all that unusual.

  “Yes, I’m Holly. Mrs. Gamarra.”

  “Oh, okay. So, I’m calling about your son.”

  Alexander Mason Gamarra her now 14-year-old freshman, who’d she dropped off at the high school that morning. Her heart quickened with anxiousness as her mind scrolled through all the possibilities behind a midday phone call.

  “Yes,” the voice faltered. “My name is Joel Rusk and I’m Alex’s school counselor.”

  Someone was calling about her son?

  Holly waited for the man to get to the point. A trio of third grade boys sauntered in to get ice and Holly remained silent as an aide lifted them off to safety.

  The counselor continued, “We’re calling today,” she noticed the use of the royal we and the official tone of his voice. She thought about his name again: Joel Rusk. Did she know a Joel Rusk? Had she just seen the name before? “Because we had a disturbing moment with Alex. He was found with a threatening note. Currently, he’s with our safety officer…”

  “Oh dear,” Holly said, in her proper secretary twittering, but inside she was seething and her language much worse. A threatening note?

  But the call got worse.

  The man cleared his throat and added, “The note led concerned school personnel to his locker, Mrs. Gamarra, and he was found with a gun on his person. The gun has been secured and you are needed immediately—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted. She shook her head, even though he couldn’t see her, and pushed the mouthpiece of the phone against her chin, turning in her swivel chair away from the door and the potential to be overheard.

  She moved the phone back into place and sat upright, steady.

  “There are no guns in my house, Mr. Rusk. I don’t own a gun. And…I’
m not disbelieving you about my son’s behavior, but…we don’t have guns. Not in my house.”

  That was ridiculous. She could hear the scoff in her voice, the assurance and the eagerness to set the record straight. A threatening note? Maybe, unlikely. Firearms? A complete and total joke. She knew because Alex knew how she felt about guns, especially after her ex-husband pulled one on her.

  And that was not the way she was raising her child.

  She knew her son; she knew his friends and she knew where he hung out at night; she knew his grades and whom he talked to and what people he found cute. She’d been following the first three weeks of freshman year with the attentiveness of prey stalking her food. She’d monitored his cell phone use, his messages and all his social media accounts on the lookout for troublesome behaviors.

  She turned off his phone when he was at school so he couldn’t be distracted or get sucked into online drama.

  So, that went well. She’d thought of his inability to text as a blessing until she imagined him huddled over a piece of notebook paper pouring out all those pent up words anyway the old-fashioned way. Although, even his generation learned that written on paper or texted, words had permanence.

  “Mrs. Gamarra,” Mr. Rusk said, and Holly inhaled quickly through her nose and scratched her nose, irritated and unwilling to engage in a fight about her name. “He was found with a gun. And he won’t tell us where he got it from either.”

  Holly stopped breathing. She stood up and then sat down again. A parent volunteer came to sign in and she broke into a wide smile and waved them into the check-in computer while waiting for the counselor to elaborate. The parent left and Holly exhaled.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, unable to find the words for anything else.

  “You know what I know,” Rusk said with a definitive pause.

  “I’m exceptionally confused,” she replied. “What kind of statement is that? I know what you know? I know my child and I know that he doesn’t own a gun and he’s not the type to write a threatening…”

  “He implied that he had recently acquired the handgun in the note.”

  Holly paused. She raged and inhaled faster through her nose, trying to regain a sense of balance.

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me. Are you calling about the right Alex Gamarra?” Holly questioned. She closed her eyes, wondering how common the name could be in Portland—maybe this was someone else’s kid, someone else’s Alex who needed to explain his anger to an adult and maybe spend a day out of school.

  “Mother, Holly Gamarra. Secretary in district. No other siblings in school. Family alert says dad should have no contact—”

  “Is that relevant?” Holly asked with a terse growl. Now a small parade of children had been sent to her from the recess monitor. They waltzed in one-by-one and slumped forward, scowly and dirty, kicking each other and communicating in a secret, grunting language. Four boys, grimy and sweaty.

  “We’re here because we hit each other,” a second-grader confessed and Holly motioned for them to sit on the chairs by her desk and wait.

  She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said, “No talking until I’m done.” And the boys quieted down, looking at the floor, feeling the force of the shame.

  On the other end of the phone, Mr. Rusk sighed. “It’s relevant, Mrs.—”

  “Okay. Okay. Please hold. Hold on the line. Just hold,” Holly said and she put him back on the cradle, slipped him on to a hold line, and bounced up out of her seat, practically flying. She knocked on the principal’s door and winced as she looked inside to find him working on sending an email, his face already tight with consternation. It had been a busy day for Principal Miller who’d met with an angry family, dealt with the purchase of broken playground equipment, and had to show up in a first-grade classroom dressed as the Cat in the Hat.

  “I have that lot from Mrs. Beckett’s class out here to discuss proper playground etiquette, I’ve had four parents call with questions about the science fair, so an all-school email might not be bad, and…lastly,” she looked straight at her boss. “Alex got into something at school.” This was their third principal in seven years and he knew his place within the hierarchy of the office—Holly was the one in charge—and he was nodding with understanding before she even asked.

  “Oof,” Principal Miller said. “Go do what you need to do,” he said. “Family comes first. Send the playground troublemakers in, okay?”

  It wasn’t a sentiment shared by most bosses and Holly was grateful. At the elementary level, it was easier to understand that the kids came first—they still looked like kids. Her teenager looked like a growing young man, stupid enough to bring a gun to school although she couldn’t possibly understand how and she was certain it was a massive misunderstanding.

  She popped back on the phone and she cleared her throat, eyeing the wearisome recess kids and motioning them to head on into the principal’s office. They trudged in, their heads hung low.

  “I’m on my way in,” Holly said to the school counselor, still waiting for her on the other end of the line. “I’ll be there in five.”

  Fury and irritation pooled in her body and she forced herself to meditate for a solid sixty seconds before starting up her Oldsmobile and heading through the neighborhood back roads to the high school. She didn’t know if she was angry at or for Alex, but the anxiety about walking into the situation blind gnawed at her. All avenues of possibilities ran through her head, but the one that stuck the most was that her dickweed ex-husband was somehow responsible.

  And she might now actually kill him.

  Divorcing Francisco Gamarra had been the best decision of her life. It had been her marriage to him that felt like the misstep, and not walking away from it when she knew she’d made a mistake. Holly and Francisco met as teens and she was pregnant with Alex barely out of high school.

  She was the curvy redhead with aspirations to become a lawyer and he was a tech wiz, always making the best games on their super-advanced calculators in math class. They had the hubris of teens to think their smarts were enough to carry them through; Holly graduated high school and never made it to college.

  Francisco, on the other hand, ended up becoming a poster child for why college was overrated.

  Her husband created and ran a company based off an app he coded. When he sold it, got filthy rich, and set them up for life, that was when he retired his ambition and golfed and screwed around on her—at golf courses, at golf charity events, at golf stores. She supposed if she could have made herself really care about golf (or develop a better golf-swing with her DD breasts) he would have had fewer places to find women. Except when Holly followed that logic through she was certain her lothario of a spouse would’ve taken up some other sport or hobby—anything to go play a rich suitor for a few hours and not think about a wife and kid at home.

  But she didn’t suffer fools. The first time a long brown hair appeared on her pillowcase, she was gone.

  Francisco didn’t handle the separation very well—he’d expected to grovel, and then fight, his way back into her life.

  She’d been single for ten years.

  And Alex was her pride and joy—her greatest accomplishment— her pièce de résistance to her ex.

  Only, he’d brought a gun to school. How could he have brought a gun to school?

  She could not wrap her head around the call she’d had or what it all could mean. The idea of him having any sort of weapon was ridiculous. Unheard of. Unless.

  She pushed the thought away.

  Holly was aware of what happened to children who brought weapons to school: these were not offenses from which he could recover. More than anything, it was confusing and Holly, despite her meticulous attention to details, that she’d have completely missed something this huge in her child’s life.

  By the time she pulled into the parking lot of the high school, Holly was ready to lock up Alex herself and let him suffer for whatever antics he’d been convicted of, but she also was unwillin
g to give up the fight. Holding her head up high, she walked into the front office and said, “I’m here to see Mr. Rusk.”

  A familiar voice said back, “Hey there, Holly.”

  She looked down, stricken, and watched as the high school secretary came out from behind her perch to give Holly a hug. Holly knew Flora from their Secretary’s Day brunch and annual celebration night to celebrate classified staff. Flora whipped up a visitor’s pass and smiled. “Which kiddo is yours?”

  “Alex Gamarra.”

  Flora’s smile faltered a bit; she gave Holly a sympathetic look. “I can get a student escort to lead you to Mr. Rusk or—”

  “I know that look. Uh-oh. Alex isn’t….he’s…” Holly stammered, eager to convey her son’s worthiest attributes and embarrassed by the pity.

  Flora waved her objections away. “Oh, sweetheart…no, of course. I understand. Welcome to the high school, seriously, it’s a war zone out there—500 freshmen with raging hormones and a lack of impulse control. And that’s only one-fourth of the monsters we keep here. Luckily we make sure they are super engaged with geometry so they don’t figure out there’s more of them than us.” She winked. “He’s a great kid, I’m sure. Mr. Rusk? Down that hall.” She pointed to the left. “Big signs for counseling all the way down.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you,” Holly said and lowered her head, eager to convey that she was a downtrodden mother, belabored by teenage antics. It went against how she wanted to be seen: competent and thorough.

  She once came in during summer break without pay to color code the filing cabinets for the new principal.