by Tami Dane
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.
“I’ll run a full background on him. Can you avoid him?”
“A part of me wants to. Another doesn’t. I need to figure out whether he’s our unsub. Then again, if he is, he could hunt me down and . . . you know.” My gaze flicked to the clock on my dash. “His stepsister is my tutor, so I’m going to see what I can learn about him from her. Without calling too much attention to myself. This undercover stuff is tricky. I want to get close enough, but not too close to put myself in danger.”
“I need to call the chief. She should know about this. Do you want to stay at my place tonight?”
“No thanks. I’m probably just being paranoid.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss your intuition. If you ask me, I think we should pull you from the school. The chief’s already taken some heat for putting you in danger.”
“You know what? I wouldn’t complain if you did pull me out. The kids aren’t talking to me, anyway.”
“Your parents’ place has a security system, right?”
“Yes, it does. My father’s the head of security for a queen. Security’s kind of his thing.”
“Good. As long as the system is armed, you should be safe.”
“Unless creepy boy is some kind of Mythic that can vaporize and seep through the crack under the front door.”
“Now you’re talking crazy, Sloan.” His chuckle made me feel better. I’d made him laugh. I hadn’t heard that sound in a while. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it. “I’ll call the chief and see what she thinks. I’m guessing you’ve spent your last day at summer school.”
The all-too-famous Alice Cooper song “School’s Out” played in my head. I felt my lips curl into a smile. “I’d be glad to do lunch runs and make coffee for the rest of the summer, if it means I don’t have to go back.”
“You’d better be careful there, Sloan. You may get exactly what you wished for. Later.” He clicked off.
I glanced at the clock in my car for the second time, shoved my phone into my pocket, and headed inside. Even if I was dropping out of summer school, I still wanted to get in this final tutoring session—see if I could get anything else out of Jia. One thing I would be sure to do, though—avoid mentioning Derik’s name.
I found her sitting exactly where she’d been last time, at a table in the back, near the romance section. She waved me over when she saw me approaching. I donned a smile and plunked down on the chair.
“So how’d your quiz go?” she asked.
“I got a seventy.”
Her brows scrunched. “A seventy? You knew that material.”
“I have problems taking tests.”
The brows didn’t unscrunch. “Huh. I guess we’d better work harder.” She reached for my book, which I’d dropped on the table,
and started leafing through the pages. “What chapter are you doing now?”
“Three.”
“Okay.” She found the start of the chapter and skimmed the pages. “All right. This stuff is easy. We can get that grade up.” She hesitated. “But before we dig in, I need to tell you something,” she whispered.
“What?” I whispered back.
“You mentioned Derik last time, when we were talking about . . . what’s been going on. Anyway, I was talking to my mom about it, and I think he might’ve overheard me.”
“He did.”
Her face paled. “I’m sorry. What happened?”
“He pinned me to the wall and asked why I was talking about him.”
“And . . . ?”
“I told him I thought he was cute.”
“You did? I mean, do you?”
“Um . . . I’d rather not talk about this with you.”
“No, it’s okay. I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
Right. “You’re his stepsister.”
“Not legally. Our parents aren’t married. They’re just dating. They say they’re engaged.”
“I see.”
She inched closer. “The truth is, I’ve been telling my mom for a long time that there’s something creepy about Derik. There’s a strange vibe coming off him, but she doesn’t believe me.” She paused. “But you agree with me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Especially now. He’s very pushy with girls. And more than a little scary.”
“You don’t think . . .” She tipped her head down and cupped her hand over her mouth. “Could he be the killer?”
“I don’t know. Do you know where he was the nights of the murders?”
“I don’t know when the murders happened.”
“The last one was this past Friday.”
She looked up and tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “Hmm. He stayed at our house that night. He left at around nine. Don’t know where he went. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. But he came home around eleven.”
Eleven was too early. The ME set the time of death at after two A.M.
“Are you sure about that time?” I asked.
“Yes. I was awake, watching a movie.”
“Could he have left again, after you saw him?”
“I know he didn’t leave between eleven and about three A.M. That’s when I went to bed.”
Damn. He had an alibi. An airtight one—unless Jia was lying. I’d seen no signs of deception, though. Not one. And why would she bring up this whole thing and then lie? That made no sense. The other alternative was that she was mistaken about the time.
“Did anyone else see him at home that night?”
“Why are you asking me that? Do you think I’m lying?”
“Of course not. But maybe you’re mistaken. Or maybe he slipped out for a while and then came back in, making you think he’d been there that whole time. Criminals do that when they want to establish an alibi.”
“No, there’s no mistake. He wasn’t faking anything. We saw him—I mean, I saw him.”
“There was someone else there? Your parents?”
Jia went silent again. Several seconds later, she mumbled, “Let’s get to work. I shouldn’t have said anything. Just forget it, okay? Why are you so interested in this, anyway?”
“Jia, he threatened me. So you see now why I’m worried! If he’s the killer, I need to tell someone.”
“I don’t think he’s the killer.”
“But you just said there’s something not right about him.”
“Yeah. . . .”
What was this girl hiding? Was she covering for him because he threatened her too? Or was it something else?
“Jia, has he threatened you too?”
“No.”
“Then why do I get the feeling you’re hiding something?”
“Damn it, you don’t give up, do you? You should become a cop. You’d be good at it, I think.” She stared down at the table for several moments. I said absolutely nothing, hoping she’d feel compelled to speak, to fill the silence. “It has nothing to do with my stepbrother. If you must know, I wasn’t alone Friday night.” Her cheeks turned deep red, but her lips curled a little into a shy but slightly wicked smile. “I’d rather not say who I was with.”
I was curious. Much too curious not to ask, “Who?”
She stared at me for a heartbeat, two, three. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone.”
“Again, who am I going to tell? Nobody at school will even say hello.”
“Mr. Hollerbach.”
I tried to hide my shock. I felt my mouth gape open, but I snapped it shut. “The chemistry teacher?”
“You can’t tell. He’ll be fired.”
Oh, this was bad. The notion of this young woman having some kind of illicit affair with a teacher hadn’t crossed my mind. She was bright. She seemed to have her act together. Why would she do something so foolish?
Smart kids do stupid things sometimes.
“I won’t tell anyone, but you really need to think hard about what you’re doing.” I hadn’t noticed if Mr. Hollerbach wore a wedding ring. Even though, technically, I wasn’t a student, I didn’t go around checking teachers’ ring fingers out, to see if they might be single.
“We haven’t done a lot . . . yet.” The color in her cheeks deepened. “Why am I talking about this? We’re supposed to be studying.”
“Forget about chemistry. This is more important.” I grabbed her hand and locked my eyes with hers. “I don’t care if Mr. Hollerbach is single and all you’ve done is sit around and talk about organic compounds. You’re making a mistake. A big mistake. And he . . . That bastard shouldn’t have even entertained the thought of coming to your house at night.”
Jia’s lip started quivering. “But he’s one of the few people I can talk to. He says I’m beautiful and smart, and he loves me.”
Oh, God. It was worse than I thought. “You need to find an adult you can trust, and you need to get some help with this. If you don’t, you will eventually be hurt, and I would hate to see that happen.”
The quiver got worse. “But he loves me. He’d never hurt me.”
“We all want to believe that. The sad truth is, people stop loving.”
“He said he’s going to leave his wife and marry me.”
He was married. Even worse. “Don’t believe him. Chances are, he has no intention of leaving his wife.”
All the color drained from Jia’s face.
Now I felt crappy. “I’m sorry. I’m not saying this to be mean. It’s the truth.”
“You don’t know him. How could you know what he will or won’t do?”
“I can’t, but I know this. Infidelity in marriage doesn’t just hurt the people directly involved. It hurts everyone—the spouse, the children, the entire family. You’re a smart young woman, with a brilliant future ahead of you. Don’t you want a man in your life who you can trust? A man who won’t cheat on you someday, when he gets tired of you, or you’ve lost your youth? Don’t you want a man who will respect you?”
“Of course, I do. But why are you so emotional about this?”
“Because my father cheated on my mother,” I confessed.
“I’ve seen the ugly side of infidelity.”
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“They’re married. They’re having another child soon. And I’m praying for my mother’s sake, and the unborn baby’s, that my father meant it when he promised it won’t ever happen again.”
“I guess I never looked at it from that perspective.” She glanced down at her hand. A small gold band with tiny diamonds was circling her left ring finger. She twisted it. “He gave me this. A promise ring.” She blinked a few times. “He said we’d be married as soon as I graduate.”
“He’s a lying jerk. And even if he’s not lying about marrying you, you will eventually regret it. He’ll do to you what he’s doing now. He’ll dump you for someone else.”
“I trust h
im.”
“You’re trusting the wrong man.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She pushed the book in front of me. “We’re running out of time, and we haven’t studied anything yet. If you flunk another test, I’m going to feel like crap.”
My supposed flunking was the least of her problems. But clearly, she wasn’t ready to hear that yet.
“All right. If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll study.”
Mourning is not forgetting. . . . It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.
—Margery Allingham
15
After that conversation with Jia, I pretty much decided we had nothing on our case but a sketchy profile. We had no viable suspects, no solid persons of interest. No motive. No clues, outside of the marks on the victims and a couple of burned-up electronics. I needed to do something about that.
I pointed my car southeast, toward Quantico.
Using speakerphone, I called JT as I was pulling onto Dumfries Road. He answered on the second ring.
“I talked to the chief,” he said.
“And . . . ?”
“Consider yourself a summer school dropout. You’re through.”
Those words were music to my ears. “That’s a relief. I just finished up my second tutoring session. My tutor states that she not only can vouch for Derik Sutton’s whereabouts on the night of Hailey’s death, but she also can produce—though not exactly willingly—a second witness to support her statement. Derik Sutton was at home when Hailey was killed.”
