by Tami Dane
JT leaned toward me. “We’re interviewing a minor. Please let me handle this.”
“Understood.” I made a zipper motion across my mouth, and in we went. The door shut behind us.
A man, the boy’s father, no doubt, was sitting in a chair next to his son. He watched us enter with caution-filled eyes.
“Mr. Gardener?” JT offered the man his hand. “I’m Agent Thomas. FBI. Thank you for bringing your son in this morning. I’m sure this is the last thing you wanted to do on a Sunday.”
“Tom Gardener.” He looked my way as he shook JT’s hand. “Is my son in some kind of trouble?”
“Not at all.” JT motioned for him to sit. “I am a criminal profiler, a psychologist, investigating some crimes in the area and am interviewing kids who attend a local high school, to see if I can find a connection among the victims.”
The father slid his son a sideways glance. “Okay, but if I get uncomfortable with this at any point, I’m going to put the brakes on.”
“Fair enough.” JT leaned back in his chair. I guess he was trying to look relaxed and trustworthy. Nonthreatening. He turned his focus on Benjamin. “Hello, Benjamin. Thanks for coming down to answer our questions.”
The kid shrugged. “Sure. But it’s Ben. Just Ben.”
“Ben, do you know Hailey Roberts?”
The boy glanced at his father before answering. “Yes. Sort of.”
“What does that mean, ‘sort of’?” JT asked.
“It means I know she goes to Fitzgerald. She was in a couple of my classes last year.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know about her?”
“Yeah.”
The father leaned forward, but he said nothing.
“What about Stephanie Barnett and Emma Walker?” JT asked.
“Yeah. I know them too. No better than Hailey.”
JT nodded. “So you’d call them . . . ‘acquaintances’?”
“Yeah. Acquaintances,” the kid echoed. He had a very interesting definition of the word. I wouldn’t call someone I’d swapped DNA with an “acquaintance.” But then, maybe that was just me.
JT continued, in a friendly, just-help-me-out kind of voice. “We’re having a hard time figuring out who killed the girls and why. I’m hoping someone at your school can help. Maybe you. Can you tell me if there are any obvious connections among the three girls? Did they share the same friends? Or enemies?”
“I didn’t know them that well.”
“None of them?”
“Nope.”
JT paused. I had a feeling the hey-we’re-buddies chat was over. “We’ve been told you were seen leaving a party with Hailey Roberts the night she died.”
“That’s it.” The father smacked his flattened hands on the table. “Interview’s over. Ben, we’re leaving.” He stood, grabbed his son’s arm, and hauled him to his feet.
JT remained seated; his expression was calm and cool. “We’re not implying your son had anything to do with anyone’s death. We’re trying to find out what happened after they parted ways.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I don’t have anything to hide. I did leave the party with Hailey. We hooked up, messed around a little. But that was it.”
“Shut your mouth, Ben,” his father snapped.
“I didn’t kill nobody. If I don’t talk, then they’re going to think I’m trying to hide something.”
I agreed.
His father probably didn’t.
JT asked, “Where did you ‘mess around’?”
“In my friend’s front yard. I kissed her a little. That’s all. Then I walked her home and went back to the party. People saw me there, when I came back.”
“Which people?” JT asked.
“Lots. There were a lot of people there.”
“Can you give us some names?”
“Sure. Jake, Matt, and Dalton.”
JT wrote the names in his notebook. “When you dropped her off, did she go directly into her house?”
“Yes, I think so. I mean, I didn’t watch her go in.”
“Was anyone else with her, besides you?”
“No.”
“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, in
cluding 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).
