“Did you see anyone else in the vicinity? Or anything suspicious?”
His gaze lifted up and to the right. “Hmm. Come to think of it, I might have seen something. Maybe.”
“What did you see?”
“There was a car parked across the street. The engine was running, but the headlights were out.”
“Did you see who was in the car?”
“No. It was dark.” His gaze jerked to his dad, and his lips pursed for a brief instant. So far, I’d seen nothing to indicate he might be lying . . . until now.
“Could you estimate what time that would have been?” JT asked.
“I guess around eleven-thirty.” That was shortly after we’d seen him kissing Hailey. He was right on the money there.
JT asked, “What can you tell me about the car?”
“It was a small-sized sedan. Dark. Maybe black.”
The father sat mute, eyes sharp, jaw a little tight. He hadn’t interrupted again. Not yet.
“That’s it?” JT asked. “A dark sedan?”
“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t really think much about it until now.”
“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to harm Stephanie, Emma, and Hailey?”
“No, sorry. Like I said, I didn’t know them very well. Not even Hailey. We just hooked up that night, made out a little. We didn’t talk much.”
“I understand.”
“Wish I could be more help. If I hear any rumors, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”
“No problem.” Ben stood. “Can I go now?”
“Sure.” JT motioned to the door. “You’re free to leave at any time. Do you have any questions for me?”
The kid sat. “Maybe I do. Say I wanted to be an FBI profiler like you, what would I need to do?”
JT smiled. “You’d need a Ph.D. in psychology for starters. Then you’d need to apply to the FBI Academy.”
The kid’s eyes widened. “Wow, all that? Just to make up stuff about serial killers?”
Make stuff up! Isn’t he cute?
“We don’t ‘make up stuff,’” JT corrected. “We develop a profile of a killer, to help police target suspects in a murder investigation.”
“Sure.” Ben headed for the door. “Come on, Dad. I’m hungry. How about we grab a burger somewhere?”
“Sure, son.”
I said absolutely nothing until I was sure Ben and Tom Gardener couldn’t overhear us. “Obviously, he doesn’t have a lot of respect for criminal profilers.” I chuckled.
“Yeah. Obviously.” JT was staring up at the LCD monitor hanging on the back wall, a remote control in his hand. He hit the button and the screen lit up. “I want to play that last part back. Did you see what I saw?”
“If you’re talking about the microexpression?” I watched the video playback.
“Yeah. That.” JT hit the button, pausing the video at the exact moment when Ben’s lips pursed after he’d mentioned the car.
“Maybe he isn’t the killer, but I think he was lying about the car.”
“So what does that mean?” JT asked.
“If he’s making up a mysterious car—and maybe he isn’t, microexpression theory isn’t one hundred percent reliable in identifying deceit—then I’m guessing he saw something else, something that might incriminate someone he knows.”
“We need to keep a close eye on him, find out what he’s covering up. I’m going to see if Forrester can get someone to tail him.” JT hit the power button, shutting off the monitor.
“Sounds like a plan.” We headed toward the exit together.
“What’s next?”
“After I take you home, I’m heading to the hospital to see Brittany. I’d like to interview more kids tomorrow. Someone at that school knows something. It’s just a matter of finding out who that someone is.”
“I have Hailey Roberts’s yearbook. It’s been autographed. We could start by compiling a list of names from that.”
“Sounds good, Sloan. Thanks again for your help. You’re doing a damn good job. Just remember, don’t let this job take over your life. You’re an intern. It’s summertime. Go. Live a little. Go to the shore. Do something that doesn’t involve chasing monsters with a hunger for blood.”
“Okay, if you insist.” Of course, I had no intention of doing any such thing. Three girls were murdered and a fourth dead. That was four too many in my book. There would be plenty of time for fun in the sun . . . after this effing killer was caught.
Monday morning, I donned my slutty-teen garb, and packed up my list of names for JT, my go bag, and my new superpowerful computer. Then I motored to Fitzgerald High School. I heard a lot of muttering in the halls during breaks between classes. A lot more than normal. I tried to catch bits and pieces of conversations as I made my way from economics to “Intro to Algebra” to chemistry, but it was hard to get more than a few words here and there before I was forced to move on or risk being found out.
This was frustrating.
Since joining the PBAU, I’d pretended to be a suburbanite with an exercise fetish and a very pregnant wife to JT. Those had been tough assignments. Physically and mentally. But this was really bad. Not just because I was living the worst days of my life over again—I was no more popular now than I was then, even dressed in my smut-tastic finery—but I was getting absolutely nowhere.
No friends
meant nobody would talk to me. Nobody would talk to me, except the girl who’d killed herself.
Somehow I had to find someone willing to befriend the new girl.
When I was in school, I’d made a couple of friends. Science nerds. I was tempted to hunt down this school’s science-nerd clique, but I knew for a fact that they wouldn’t be attending summer school. Summer school wasn’t for smart kids.
And then an idea struck me. A brilliant idea.
I approached Mr. Hollerbach and asked if he could recommend a tutor. He said he’d get a list together by the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest. Then he asked me for my phone number, promising to pass it on if he found someone who was interested. I figured I’d have a prospective contact within the next twenty-four hours.
Which was a good thing, because by the end of the day, I had absolutely nothing for the team other than a list of kids who’d autographed Hailey Roberts’s yearbook.
But later, as I was pulling into the McDonald’s drive-through lane, my cell phone rang. The number was a Baltimore area code. I answered and sweet-talked a senior named Jia Wu into agreeing to a tutoring session that afternoon. I did a little celebratory fist pump as my car rolled up to the drive-through window.
Maybe these tedious days of torture were about to come to an end.
Maybe.
You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough.
—Frank Crane
14
“Allotropes are different forms of the same element in the same state of matter.”
This I’ve known since I was six. Examples included O2, oxygen gas, and 03, ozone. But, playing the part of a clueless high-school flunk out, I gave my new tutor, Jia, a look of complete bewilderment. “What? Same what of what?”
“Look here.” Jia drew two circles on a piece of paper.
“These are oxygen atoms. They’re both oxygen. Same element. And when there are two of them like this, we have oxygen in a gaseous form.” Then she drew three circles interlinked. “And now we have three oxygen atoms stuck together. They’re still a gas, but this is ozone.”
I donned a “eureka” expression. “Ah, I get it now.” “Good. We can move on.” My tutor looked slightly surprised. Maybe I’d made it too easy for her. “A molecule is a neutral group of bonded atoms.”
I plastered on my confused face again. “Uh?”
To her credit, Jia didn’t pull out her hair, like I had been tempted to do back when I was a tutor.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Jia said as she flipped the paper over and started drawing more circles, illustrating the difference between an atom, unbonded atoms, and molecules.
“Are you worried about the murderer who is targeting girls at our school?”
“What murderer?”
Jia didn’t even look up from what she was doing. No reaction whatsoever. Was she intentionally avoiding the subject? If so, why?
“What are you talking about?” she asked again.
“You haven’t heard? It was on the news last night. Three girls have been killed, and they all go to Fitzgerald High.”
“No way. Who?”
How could she not have heard? “Stephanie Barnett, Emma Walker, and Hailey Roberts. Do you know them?”
“I knew Emma. I tutored her last year. Geometry.”
“Not the other two?”
“I knew
of
them, but I never talked to them. Our school isn’t huge. My freshman year, I had a couple of classes with Stephanie. But that’s it.”
“So, do you think there’s any reason to be worried? I mean, I don’t know why those three girls were killed. So I don’t know if I might be the next one.”
“Hmm.” She was labeling her pictures. And from the look of it, caring more about that than our conversation about the dead girls. Either she was one very focused tutor, or she was trying to avoid the topic.
“I heard the FBI’s investigating the murders,” I added, fishing for some kind of reaction or information. “They’re calling in students and interviewing them. I wonder if they think it’s one of us. A student?”
“I can think of one or two students who might be capable of doing something like this.”
Now that was more like it! At last, I was getting somewhere. I should’ve thought of this angle a long time ago. “Who?”
Jia looked left. She looked right. She leaned close. Was she afraid someone was listening? “Don’t say a word about this to anyone.”
“Sure. I promise. Hell, I’m the new girl. Nobody talks to me, anyway.”
“I heard Ben Gardener spent three years in juvie up in Indiana. Nobody’s ever said what he did. But if it’s true, three years is a long time. He must’ve done something pretty bad. Maybe something violent.”
“Could be.”
She leaned closer still. “And then there’s Zoey Urish. I’ve known her since kindergarten. She’s crazy. Absolutely insane. She was in my third-grade class and lives one block from me. In fact, I even remember once, when we were in fifth grade, a friend of mine, who lives across the street from my house, was giving her a hard time about her hair during recess. She was being kind of mean, and that wasn’t right. But that night, my friend let her dog out to do his business, and someone broke his neck. The next day, Zoey asked her how her dog was. My friend’s mother called the police right away. We knew she did it, but the police couldn’t get enough evidence, so they couldn’t press charges. After that, both my friend and I have stayed away from her. She’ll do
anything
to anyone who crosses her.”
“Wow.” I was making mental notes. Zoey Urish and Ben Gardener. Forrester hadn’t mentioned anything about Gardener’s juvenile record. I wondered why.
“You won’t say anything to anyone, right?”
“No, I won’t tell anyone.”
Any students.
“I promise. Thanks. Now I know who to stay away from.”
“That’s the only reason why I said anything. Now let’s get back to bonded atoms.”
“Okay. But can I ask you one more question first?”
“I . . . guess.”
“Do you know Derik Sutton? I’ve heard he’s kind of creepy.”
“I . . . um, don’t know.” Jia glanced at the clock. “We’re running out of time. We’d better get back to chemistry.” She pointed at the drawing. “Here we have two hydrogen atoms. . . .”
I called JT as soon as I was back in my car. He didn’t answer, so I left him a message, including what Jia had told me. Then I clicked off and drove home. During the entire drive, I wondered why Jia had been willing to talk about Ben and Zoey, but she seemed to shut down once I mentioned Derik Sutton’s name. Was it a coincidence? Or was there a reason why she’d cut off our conversation at that point? I really, really wanted to know. Fortunately, I had another tutoring session tomorrow. The tutoring was going to cost the FBI some cash; but if she continued to talk, it would be well worth the investment.
I headed to the unit. Empty. There wasn’t a soul in the place. Not even McBride, our techie geek. After spending some time on Facebook, checking out all of the kids who’d signed Hailey Roberts’s yearbook, including Ben and Zoey, as well as sketching out a preliminary profile, I packed it up and headed home.
Just like at the office, I found myself alone. Mom and Dad were winging their way to Tahiti, and Katie was nowhere to be found. Sergio was gone for the night, too. The big house felt cold and a little creepy. I made myself a sandwich and took it upstairs to my room. I ate while reading over my preliminary profile. Then I powered up the new supercomputer, transferred all my files over, and hunted down everything I could find on the Mongolian Death Worm. Gabe had made some good points about its mode of locomotion. Logrolling up a set of steps would be difficult, if not impossible. However, I wasn’t willing to dismiss the possibility of our unsub being a Death Worm—
if
it was able to shape-shift.
Hours later, I had read pretty much everything published on the Internet about the Death Worm. And I’d watched a documentary. Not one source mentioned the ability to shape-shift. I wasn’t sure whether that was because it couldn’t, or if people simply didn’t realize it yet. Regardless, I was tired, and I had another long day ahead of me. I shut down the laptop, put in another call to Elmer, and went to bed, knowing I’d be having dreams about ugly worms that spit acid and shot lightning out of their rectums and creepy undead men who stole from me.
The next morning, I cussed out Elmer for not paying me a visit and then did my usual thing. Showered, dressed, infused my bloodstream with ample quantities of caffeine, and flounced out to school in my high-school ho outfit. I sat through an hour and a half of economics (yawn), another hour and a half of algebra (another yawn), a lunch hour spent eating by myself while getting odd looks from my fellow students (evidently, dressing like a ho wasn’t making me fit in better), and finally one last hour and a half sitting through chemistry (which wouldn’t have been so bad if we weren’t covering material I’d learned when I was six).
By two o’clock, I was
so
glad to say
“sayonara”
to Fitzgerald High. I rounded the north corner of the building, heading to my car. Derik Sutton was approaching from the opposite direction. His gaze flicked to me, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Not with a nod or a wave or even a smile. Just like everyone else in this school.
But as our paths crossed, he suddenly slammed into me, flattening me against the wall. His body held me pinned to the brick building.
“I heard you were asking questions about me,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I—I’m new. I just . . . saw you at the party, and I wanted to know more about you.”
“Why?”
“B-because.” I was shaking all over now. I couldn’t help it. “I thought you were cute.”
He cupped my chin and stared into my eyes, and I felt like he was somehow rummaging around in my brain, trying to dig up all my hidden secrets.
“Sorry,” he said, his lips curling into a sneer, “but you’re not my type.” And he strolled away as if he hadn’t just assaulted me.
Sheesh, I’d known this assignment wasn’t going to be pleasant, but I’d thought it would at least be safer than coaxing an
adze
out of hiding.
My knees felt like gelatin as I pushed away from the building. For a brief moment, I questioned whether I had the stomach for this line of work. Maybe something less risky, like researching the cures for virulent diseases, would be more my thing.
I practically made it to my car when I remembered I’d forgotten my chemistry book in my locker. After checking the time on my cell phone, I hurried back inside to get it. It was a quick trip to my locker and back outside.
But when I rounded the north corner, there he was again, Derik Sutton. He seemed to be waiting for me. My insides crept and crawled. I tried to pretend I didn’t see him there. He made a little noise. Our gazes met. He came closer as I continued forward. My heart started thumping. My chest grew tight. I glanced around, searching the area for other students. None? Why didn’t anyone else walk this way?
“Hello there, Sloan Skye,” he said in a smooth voice, which was probably intended to be seductive. It wasn’t.
“Hi.” Donning a don’t-get-too-near expression, I crossed my arms over my chest and kept going.
“Really? You’re going to blow me off?”
I didn’t say a thing. He was behind me now, and I was doing my damned best to make sure it stayed that way. Unfortunately, he didn’t like it. He grabbed my arm and jerked me around.
“Why do you have to be so fucking rude?”
“I’m not trying to be rude. I’m in a hurry.”
“Yes. Need to get to your tutoring session with Jia, right?”
So Jia had told him what I’d said? After she’d asked me to keep her secret? I felt betrayed. “Yes. You know her?”
“Yeah, I know her. She’s my stepsister.”
“Oh.” Why hadn’t Jia mentioned that? It did explain her unwillingness to talk about him.
“Anyway,” he said, invading my personal-space bubble, “I wanted to talk to you about something else.” His hand, the one that had been clamped around my wrist like a metal vise, skimmed up my arm. “I think I’ve been a little hasty in judging you.”
Lucky me.
Not.
He licked his lips. “You are rather sexy.” His gaze flicked south of my face. “And you have great tits.”
Gag.
I couldn’t do this. There was no freaking way. The FBI couldn’t pay me enough money to put up with nasty, little punks pawing me, leering at me. “You know what? I was wrong too. You’re not cute. Not at all.” I stomped past him, throwing some mean eyes over my shoulder. “And if you touch me again, I’ll file harassment charges.”
“You’ll be sorry, bitch.”
His words echoed in my head for the next hour.
God, I hoped I hadn’t just made myself the target of a serial killer.
On the drive over to the library, I thought long and hard about whether to say something to Jia about her stepbrother’s threat. I decided to keep it to myself and called JT, instead. He answered.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said, sounding like the happy-go-lucky, kick-ass agent I’ve known since my first day. I hoped
this
JT would stick around. I really needed him.
“JT, has anyone gotten anything on Ben Gardener yet?” I was driving toward the library. “Rumor has it he was in juvenile detention in Indiana.”
“No. The rumor’s wrong. I ran a background on him and his father. Both came up clean. BPD’s got a guy watching him.”
“Okay, we need to do a check on another student, named Derik Sutton. There’s something not quite right about him. And he’s been harassing me at school.”
“Okay, I’ll check him out. Is it possible he likes you? Kids that age have strange ways of showing girls how they feel.”
“It’s possible, but I sort of blew him off. He got mad and said I’d be sorry.” I turned into the library’s parking lot.
“Hmm. So it’s not so much a harassment but more a threat.”
“It was most definitely a threat. I’m telling you, it was creepy. The way he was looking at me, touching me.” I shuddered as I pulled into an empty spot.