Be a Good Girl

by Tess Diamond

  “Sorry,” Zooey said, taking in her startled breathing. “I just got back from talking to Dr. Jeffrey again. The good news is he did remember some detail . . . but the bad news is I don’t think any of it is going to help us pin this guy down.” She sat down next to Abby on the porch swing, looking defeated.

  “He doesn’t have the original pages of the report?” Paul asked.

  Abby shook her head. “Apparently Sheriff Baker had them. Who knows where they are? Mrs. Baker sold the house and moved to Florida last year, so I can’t even ask her if I can go dig through his old files.”

  “Shit,” Paul said.

  “You know what this means,” Zooey said, looking meaningfully at Paul.

  Abby watched in confusion as the blood drained out of Paul’s face. That was not a good sign.

  “Okay, someone clue the non-FBI crime-solver person in here,” she said. “What does this mean?”

  Zooey pressed her lips together, her big eyes staring at the porch floorboards like they were the most interesting thing ever.

  “Why do both of you look like you want to eat your own tongues?” Abby demanded, a horrible prickle spreading up her spine.

  “The next step here is to get more forensic evidence,” Paul explained. “That’s the only way to move forward at this point, since we don’t have any leads.”

  “Okay,” Abby said slowly, still not understanding. “But there isn’t a crime scene anymore.”

  “This isn’t about collecting forensic evidence from the crime scene,” Paul said. “This is about collecting forensic evidence from Cass.”

  Abby felt her entire body go to ice and she realized what Paul was saying.

  “You . . . you want to dig her up?” She was up off the porch swing, looming over him, her hands balled into fists and her eyes shooting fire. “Are you . . . how . . . oh, my God, no. Absolutely not. What would we say to Mrs. Martin? No. There has to be another way.”

  “Abby—” Zooey started to say.

  “No.” Abby held her hand out, staring daggers at the younger woman. “No,” she said again, and her voice shook and her eyes burned, her throat thick with tears that were about to spill. She turned her attention to Paul, her voice lowering to a deadly serious promise as she said, “You even go near her grave with a shovel and you’ll be looking down the barrel of my Winchester and your mama’s and every damn woman around here I can round up!”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Paul said, getting up and grabbing her arm. “We’re going to talk in private.” But she shook him off angrily.

  “No fucking way,” she snarled, before stalking into her house, slamming the door shut behind her.

  He didn’t follow.

  He knew better.

  She got upstairs to her bedroom, where Roscoe was fast asleep on her duvet cover, before sinking down to the ground in tears. Oh, God, Cass. Everything that she’d been tamping down—for years now, as she investigated this—started flooding through her body. Her heart began to race, and she wanted so badly to fall apart. She wanted to stay in her room and never come out and just forget about all of this.

  But it wasn’t who she was. She was her father’s stubborn girl. And she would see this through to the very end.

  Roscoe whined, having been woken by her tears, and jumped off the bed, meandering over to her and nudging her face with his nose.

  “It’s okay, boy,” she whispered, even though it was so far from okay, she didn’t even know how they’d gotten here.

  She sniffed, wiping the tears off her cheeks, trying to take in a breath that wasn’t shaky.

  One of the hardest things she’d ever done was read Cass’s autopsy report—what there was of it—and look at the crime scene photos. And she would be damned if she traumatized poor Mrs. Martin by digging her child up and subjecting her to that horror.

  There had to be another way.

  She had to find a lead. She was the journalist. That was what she was good at.

  Still wiping her tears away, Abby got to her feet, feeling shaky but determined. Her purse was tossed on her bed next to her laptop, and she dug inside it, where she’d tucked the piece of paper with Jayden’s phone number on it. Maybe Keira Rice’s best friend had some information that could be helpful.

  Knowing she probably looked like hell, she went into her bathroom and splashed water on her face, and then came back into her bedroom and booted up her laptop. She clicked open her Skype app, logged in, typed Jayden’s phone number in, and sent her a friend request. In the “message” box, she wrote: I want to talk about Keira.

  She could hear Zooey’s and Paul’s voices—indistinct murmurs—floating through the open window, and she tried to ignore the anger she felt flashing through her.

  She knew Zooey was a scientist. She understood that dead bodies and exhuming them was maybe nothing new to either of them in their line of work. But it was Cass. Paul should understand.

  A pregnancy changes the case, he’d said. Maybe he was right. Maybe the only way to catch Cass’s killer was to figure out who the father of her baby was.

  But surely there was a different way of doing that than digging her up.

  Abby drummed her fingers against the edge of the computer as her call to Jayden Michaels still went unanswered.

  The video call rang and rang, no one picking up. Just when Abby was about to press Cancel, the screen suddenly changed, Call Accepted flashing across the computer.

  The face of a girl around eighteen or nineteen, her hair pulled in a high ponytail, appeared. She was frowning at the screen, and her oversized tank top and her messy hair made Abby think she might’ve caught her on her way back from a workout.

  “Sorry, I think you have the wrong number,” she said.

  “Are you Jayden Michaels?” Abby asked.

  Jayden frowned. “Yeah.”

  “I need to talk to you about Keira Rice,” Abby said. “I’m working with the FBI on a case.”

  Jayden’s eyes widened. “You . . . did you find Keira?” she asked, her voice shaky on her best friend’s name.

  “That’s one of the things we’re trying to do,” Abby explained. “We had a meeting with Keira’s father and had the chance to look around her room. I noticed that you still call her.”

  Jayden’s cheeks turned a dull red. “What were you doing snooping in Keira’s room?” she demanded.

  “Jayden, I get it,” Abby said gently. “Almost sixteen years ago, my best friend was killed. I know how hard it is to lose your best friend. But the thing is? I think the person who killed my best friend is the same person who took Keira. Which is why I’m here.”

  “What? You think Keira’s like, with a serial killer?” Jayden asked, mouth open. “This isn’t an episode of Criminal Minds!”

  “We’ve uncovered a pattern,” Abby explained. “And Keira’s disappearance falls into that pattern. What we’re trying to do is figure out everything that happened the night she disappeared. If there was anything unusual. If she talked about meeting someone or being creeped out by someone.”

  “No,” Jayden said, much too quickly. More red crawled up her face. “You want the details, you read the police report. If you’re really FBI, you can get it.”

  “Jayden, why do you call Keira every Wednesday?” Abby asked. “I noticed it when I looked at her missed call log. You call every Wednesday without fail. I thought at first that maybe that was the day of the week she went missing, but she went missing on a Saturday night. So why Wednesday?”

  Jayden bit her lip. “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “It is, though,” Abby said. “Look, Jayden, I can have the FBI go to a judge and get him to order you to come up here and talk to us.” She had no idea if that was true or if it was an empty threat . . . Paul would probably be furious if he knew, but she didn’t care. “I don’t want to disrupt your schooling. Why don’t you just tell me what really happened here? Because you’re obviously holding back.”

  A long silence, where the tee
n obviously was fighting against her conscience.

  “Do it for Keira,” Abby urged softly.

  “Fine,” Jayden snapped, her eyes brimming with tears. “Fine. I call her every Wednesday because that was the day she was supposed to call me, so I knew she was safe . . . after.”

  “After what?” Abby demanded.

  “After she ran off with the guy she was seeing,” Jayden said.

  Abby’s heart lurched in her chest. “She left that night to meet him. Her parents, they aren’t like, mean. She loves them and they love her. But they are really old-school. She wasn’t allowed to date until college. Those were their rules. And she met this guy at one of our soccer meets I guess and they hit it off. The thing was, he was older.”

  Abby frowned. “How much older?”

  “I don’t know,” Jayden said. “I never saw them. She never even told me his name. Everything with them was super secret.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone this when the police got involved?” Abby asked, trying not to feel frustrated since Jayden had been a sixteen-year-old girl at the time. You did stupid things as a teenager in the name of friendship.

  “I really thought she would call,” Jayden said. “And then I thought . . . okay, maybe they just went off to Vegas and got married and lived happily ever after?”

  But the look on the girl’s face told Abby she knew that wasn’t what happened. There were tears in her eyes, guilt in every smooth line of her face.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Jayden whispered.

  Abby bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m trying to find out. Is there anything else you knew about this guy? His name? If he was older, did he have a job?”

  “I think he had dark hair, because she once compared him to Patrick Dempsey,” Jayden said. “She loves Grey’s Anatomy. She was always talking about the drives they took.” Her eyes widened. “His car!” she said, suddenly, excitedly.

  “What about his car?” Abby asked.

  “There was one time where my parents were out of town, and Keira was spending the night with some of our other friends. Just a big slumber party thing for the girls. But she ended up ditching us, saying she had somewhere to be. I went outside to make sure she got off safe, and I saw his car. It was one of those Karmann Ghias. I remember because my brother loves them. And because it was like, bright yellow.”

  Abby’s mouth went dry at her words. “Are you sure?” Abby asked.

  “Yeah,” Jayden said. “One hundred percent.”

  “Okay,” Abby said, an odd sort of numbness beginning to sweep over her body. “Jayden, thank you. I’ve got to go.”

  She barely heard the girl’s goodbye as she shut her computer down.

  For a moment that seemed frozen, she sat there on her bed, a shaky, horrible sensation of knowing sweeping over her as her mind clicked the puzzle pieces together.

  She had thought it odd that Sheriff Baker had been the one to discourage the truth in the ME report. Baker had been a good man and a good cop. Cass’s murder had been the case that had seemed to finally break him. He’d retired shortly after it.

  Had it affected him so because he’d buried evidence? Because he’d chosen to cave to someone with more power instead of doing the right thing?

  The only person who had that much power in Castella Rock was the mayor. And back then, the mayor was Dominic Clay.

  Her ex-boyfriend Ryan’s father.

  A hysterical little sound burst from her throat.

  She had figured it out.

  She knew what happened now.

  Chapter 22

  “Paul! Zooey!”

  Paul’s head whipped around to the front door at the sound of Abby’s shouting. She burst out the door, and instead of being full of fire and anger like he expected, there was wide-eyed realization painted all over her face.

  “It’s Ryan Clay,” she said. “Cass’s killer is Ryan Clay.”

  “What?” He stared at her, trying to make sense.

  “The guy who checked out the evidence box?” Zooey asked, clearly confused.

  “I just got off the phone with Jayden Michaels,” Abby explained. “That’s Keira Rice’s best friend. It turns out Keira was planning on running off with some guy she was seeing. Jayden didn’t know who it was, but she told me that he drove a yellow Karmann Ghia.”

  Paul’s eyes widened. He remembered when Ryan’s father had gifted him the vintage car in high school. He used to park it sideways in the student parking lot, like an asshole. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Abby said.

  “Okay, but it’s just a car,” Zooey said. “There must be other people around here with the same one.”

  “That’s not a common car around here,” Abby said. “Especially that color. And Ryan’s had the car since high school. Think about it, Paul,” she said. “Sheriff Baker, who by all accounts was honest as hell, decides to mess with evidence in the biggest homicide investigation this town has ever seen. Why would he do that unless he had some major external pressure?”

  “From Mayor Clay, you’re thinking?” Paul asked.

  “Yes.” Abby nodded eagerly. “And why would the mayor do that?”

  “To protect Ryan,” Paul answered. “If it got out that Cass was pregnant, then everyone would’ve thought I was the father. They would’ve done a DNA test to confirm and when it didn’t . . .”

  “They’d start digging into who else might’ve been with Cass—or assaulted her,” Abby finished. “Ryan must have gone to his father and gotten him to cover it up.”

  “Ryan was the father of Cass’s baby,” Paul said. “That’s the easiest explanation here. Her pregnancy could’ve been the stressor that caused him to snap and kill her. He didn’t need to tell his dad that to get him to cover it up, all he had to do was say that the baby might be his. That would’ve been enough for a cover-up, because it would’ve made him a suspect.”

  “There’s something in that evidence box,” Abby said with surety. “That’s why he took it. Not to mess with you or to be an ass. As soon as he found out you were looking into Cass’s case, he knew it was just a matter of time until you made the connection.”

  “I need to call Sheriff Alan,” Paul said grimly. “We’ve got to find the connections between Clay and the rest of the missing girls.”

  “Okay, wait a minute,” Zooey declared. “I agree that Clay is a good lead that we need to pursue. But we’re not factoring in one big thing here: Dr. X. Do we really think Ryan is X’s apprentice?”

  “Wouldn’t that play into the idea of the leader/follower relationship you told me most killing pairs fall into?” Abby asked Paul.

  “He would’ve had to get him really young,” Paul said. “He would’ve needed . . . practice.” He winced at the look on Abby’s face. Sometimes it was hard to remember a time when all this information about death, murder, and killers wasn’t in his head. But when he saw how she reacted sometimes, it all came rushing back; how desensitized he was to the horrors of the world. “What do you think, Zooey?”

  “From what Grace has taught me about adolescent killers, he would’ve shown signs when you all were kids. You had a relationship with him, Abby. Was he violent? Controlling?”

  “He wasn’t violent to me, but he was bossy. And he got into a lot of fights.”

  “I had to pull him off a boy he was trying to beat to death with his cleats when we were in baseball,” Paul said grimly. “I don’t doubt he’s capable of killing someone.”

  “He was also working on Cass, behind my back,” Abby said.

  Paul frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “When Ryan broke up with me when we were seventeen, he said it was because you and I were too close,” Abby said, her cheeks pinkening. “And then he went to Cass and said the same thing. He got in her head because she confronted me about it. That’s the reason I didn’t go visit her at her grandma’s that year like I usually did.”

  Paul’s stomach clenched. She was
just telling him this now? Why had she held this back for so many years? This revelation suddenly made some of Cass’s behavior that summer make sense. She had been always asking about Abby and what she was doing when she was gone that month. And there had been a wariness in her voice whenever Paul had, in his teenage boy obliviousness, cheerfully recounted his days spent with Abby.

  Had Ryan got in Cass’s head, making her think he and Abby had a thing on the side going on, and Cass turned to him only to find herself pregnant? Had that been part of this sick game of his, to set up Cass and then cut her down, literally and figuratively?

  Jesus. His gut lurched, sickness rising in his chest. He needed to find this bastard. And make him pay.

  “I’m tracking him down,” Paul declared. “He has some shit to answer for, no matter what.”

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, dialing Sheriff Alan’s number. It clicked to voice mail. Alan was probably out hunting the arsonist still. On a hunch, he dialed dispatch. And sure enough, it was Ted Phillips, an old friend of his dad’s, who picked up.

  “Castella County Sheriff’s Dispatch, how may I direct your call?”

  “Hi, Ted, it’s Paul Harrison,” he said.

  “Paul! I heard you were in town.”

  “Listen, Ted, I’m trying to track down Deputy Clay. You happen to know where he is?”

  “Let me check the logs,” Ted said. There was a tapping noise. “Huh. Looks like Ryan had a shift today, but he didn’t show up. Or call in sick.”

  Of course he didn’t. Fuck. He was already on the run. He’d had an entire day’s head start.

  “Thanks, Ted.” Paul hung up. “He didn’t show up for work,” he said.

  “What do we do?” Abby asked. “How do we find him?”

  “He may be in the wind. Or he may go to ground,” Paul said. “Hide out somewhere.”

  “If he’s keeping the missing girls for a two-year cycle, that means he needs a remote area. Somewhere he can keep them captive and alive and unnoticed,” Zooey said.