1st Case

by James Patterson

  It was just an educated guess, which was as much as I had to work with. I didn’t actually expect to be right.

  But as it turned out, I was.

  CHAPTER 34

  BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL has no campus to speak of. It’s just one huge building in the middle of the city, with alleys and parking on either side. The Fens was only a few blocks away and a likely spot for stoners, given all the woods, paths, bridges, and other good hiding places over there. I figured I’d start with a quick lap around the school and work my way out from there, depending on what I saw, then maybe head to the park after that, if nobody found Nigella in the meantime.

  I headed up the north alley first, scanning every nook and cranny along the way. From there, I moved down Palace Road behind the school and back up the other side. I was almost all the way around and had pretty much written this off when, sure enough and to my own surprise, I got a whiff of marijuana.

  It didn’t take long after that to hone in on Nigella’s little smoking party. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, passing a vape pen around. Nigella was wearing a huge pair of sunglasses, but I recognized the blond dreads right away.

  They had a pretty decent hideout, too. It was a three-walled alcove in the parking lot, meant to shield two dumpsters from view. Anyone inside the school wouldn’t have been able to spot them. But from there in the alley, I had a clear sight line.

  I stepped back and radioed Keats.

  “This is Hoot,” I said. “I found her. She’s with some friends in the parking area on the south side of the building.”

  Some part of me felt bad for busting them. That’s not what I was there for. But they definitely had a serious buzzkill headed their way.

  “Keep an eye on her, but do not approach,” Keats came back. “I’ll be right out.”

  “Got it,” I said, trying to sound calm. I’d been wishing to get thrown back into the pool, and now here I was, swimming alone in the deep end. I wasn’t afraid of high schoolers, but by the same token, I hadn’t been left to my own devices like this before. Not with the stakes as high as these were.

  A second later, Nigella’s group was on the move. One of the boys chirped open a RAV4 with his clicker and they headed toward it.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “Keats, where are you?” I radioed.

  “On our way,” he said.

  There was no time. And no way I was going to be the rookie who found and lost this person of interest before Keats could catch up to her.

  “Nigella!” I called out before I could even consider it either way.

  All four of the kids turned to look at me. The other girl let out a little half scream, followed by a nervous laugh. I had to remind myself that I was the grown-up here. It still wasn’t intuitive for me.

  “Hold up a second,” I said, hurrying over.

  Nigella lowered her shades to give me a raised eyebrow as I approached. “Do I know you?” she asked. Her lipstick was bright red, but her clothes were all downscale funk. Old army jacket, Rolling Stones tee, and hand-ripped leggings over oxblood combat boots.

  “I’m Angela Hoot,” I said, “and—”

  “Hoot?” one of the boys said, and they all cracked up at once. Clearly, they’d had enough to smoke. Not that I hadn’t been mocked for my last name pretty much all my life.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m with the FBI—”

  “Yeah. Sure you are,” Nigella said. “Do you have some kind of badge or something?”

  “I don’t have my credentials on me,” I said, which was embarrassingly true. I’d left everything in the car. “My supervisor will be here in a second—”

  “Bridget? Get this on your phone, ’kay?” Nigella said, still eyeballing me.

  “Annnd we’re rolling,” Bridget said, pointing her iPhone our way.

  “You’ve got the wrong idea,” I told them. “This is for your protection, Nigella.”

  “Sure,” she sniped. “Because the cops are so good at ‘protecting’ people these days.”

  When she started to get in the car, my patience officially ran out. There were all kinds of feelings running through me now, but none of them stopped me from grabbing that car door and holding on to keep her from pulling it closed. I think it took Nigella by surprise. I’d kind of surprised myself, for that matter.

  “What the hell?” she said. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you need to step off—”

  “Let me put this another way,” I interrupted. I was on a roll now, no stopping. “In about thirty seconds, you’re going to have half a dozen federal agents out here, all of them wanting to speak with you. If I were stoned, I’d want to be ready for something like that.”

  “Whut?” one of the boys grunted out. The other one looked around nervously.

  But Nigella stayed icy. “Who said anything about stoned?” she asked, meeting my gaze.

  I didn’t want any trouble here. Not the wrong kind, anyway, and I was this close to saying a thing or two I might have regretted. Lucky for me, I could just see Keats and a few others rounding the corner.

  And I was starting to think that a little buzzkill was exactly what this girl needed.

  CHAPTER 35

  TO MAKE THINGS worse—much worse—Nigella Wilbur refused to let us examine her phone. Ironically, the school could (and did) take it away, but we weren’t allowed to touch it without her permission, unless we could get a warrant or parental consent. And her mother was still a good half hour away.

  Right now, the phone was sitting in a drawer in the principal’s office, which was just as well. Given what we knew about the app’s listening capabilities, we couldn’t afford to interview Nigella anywhere near that thing. So we holed up with her in the detention room, appropriately enough.

  “This is extreme bullshit,” she said for the fourth time. “You can’t intimidate me.”

  “We’re not trying to intimidate you,” Keats said. “We’re trying to protect you.”

  I could tell he was straining for patience. The longer this conversation went on, the colder our trail was getting.

  “We’re also trying to protect whoever else might be at risk,” Keats went on.

  “By illegally tapping my phone?” Nigella asked.

  “That’s not what happened,” Keats tried again. “If you’d just listen—”

  “Save it,” she said. “I’m not interested in enabling your right-wing NSA crap. This is exactly why people like me don’t trust people like you. Don’t you see that?”

  Ironically, she had a grain of a point in all this. I had plenty of friends of my own whose trust of American law enforcement was at an all-time low, for reasons I could understand, if not agree with. But by the same token, a lot of that knee-jerk resistance was based on equal parts information and misinformation.

  In any case, we seemed to be at a kind of standstill.

  Billy took a beat. Then another. I could just see the gears turning in his mind and wondered if he was trying to use the silence to make Nigella uncomfortable. But as it turned out, it wasn’t that at all.

  “Angela,” he said, “tell Nigella about your first night on this case, will you?”

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t expecting him to pivot like that, but now they were both looking at me.

  “Tell her what you saw in the house that night in Lincoln,” Keats said. “All of it.”

  So far, he hadn’t disclosed any details about the other murders. For a second, I was shocked that he’d go there. But then I realized where he was taking this—and why. Every minute counted right now, and he was pulling out all the stops.

  I took another few beats to gather the memory of that night in my mind. The bodies. The dried blood. The smell.

  Then I started talking.

  “It was my first crime scene,” I told her. “And the first dead bodies I’d ever seen, too.”

  Nigella stood up right away. Her chair tilted back and crashed onto the floor. “Are you kidding me with this? I don’t have t
o listen to you!” she said.

  “Yeah, you do,” Keats said, righting the chair for her. “Sit down and shut up.”

  When she didn’t move, Billy nodded at me to go on anyway. I had no idea if this was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t my call. I just followed his lead.

  “They found the father in the kitchen, shot through the chest,” I said. “All the others had been killed in their rooms upstairs. There was a mom, two little boys, and a girl about your age.”

  Nigella had gone completely still now. It was either a show of defiance or fear. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but I was getting the impression that Billy knew exactly what he was doing. The more I went on with this, the more I felt like I was moving the needle in the right direction. At least this was a chance to use Gwen Petty’s death to try to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to someone else.

  “She’s the one who had been using this same app,” I went on, talking about Gwen now. “I never actually saw her. I only saw the body bag they carried her out in.”

  “That was the third family in this case,” Keats said. “We’ve been working as hard as we can to make sure there’s not a fourth.”

  Nigella’s eyes rolled up and to the side now, fighting tears. I didn’t know if she cared about some nameless other family, but I did think she was finally doing the math on what she might have wandered into herself.

  “It’s just an app,” she said softly.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think,” I told her.

  “I don’t understand how it could be that dangerous …”

  Suddenly, she seemed much younger. I wasn’t going to lecture her. We’d already rounded the corner we needed to get around.

  “Nigella,” I said. “Can we please get a look at your phone? I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to face another night like that last one.”

  I had to stop there. My voice was thinning out and I was starting to choke on the lump in my own throat. I hadn’t even realized the last part until I’d said it out loud. As much as I couldn’t let go of this case, I was also terrified of what else I was going to have to see along the way.

  My body felt hollow, like I’d just let go of something I could never get back. And the look on Nigella’s face told me she was feeling something similar. The first real tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  “Fine,” she said. “You can do what you need to. But I’d better get my phone back when you’re done.”

  Keats was on his feet now. This was good news, but we had to move fast.

  “Believe me,” he told her on our way out the door. “You don’t want that one anymore.”

  CHAPTER 36

  BEFORE WE PICKED up the phone from the principal’s office, Keats briefed me quietly in the hall.

  “I want to make contact with this guy right away,” he said. “And I want you to be the one to do it. As Nigella.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. It was a stupid question, mostly just a knee-jerk bit of nerves. Obviously, Keats was serious, even if it did mean putting both of us out on a limb here. So I quickly added, “I mean, yeah, of course. If you want me to, I’m down.”

  The idea of it scared the hell out of me, but it didn’t take long to see where Billy was coming from. I was more qualified to do this than anyone else on hand, just in terms of my age, my experience, and the way my mind worked. It was the same reason he’d brought me along in the first place.

  He didn’t want to change locations, either. If we moved Nigella’s phone away from school property, the app she’d downloaded would track our movements and send that information right back to whoever was on the other end. So we stayed put.

  A few minutes later, I was carefully placing the phone into a borrowed backpack to blind the camera. Then I carried it down the hall to the same room where we’d interviewed Nigella. Keats closed the door from the outside and watched through the glass while I silently got to work. We couldn’t afford to be seen, heard, or detected here.

  I took the phone and carefully laid it flat on the table in front of me. The only thing the camera would see from that angle was ceiling tiles.

  Then I opened the app and typed in my first message, going for Nigella’s “voice” as best I could. I’d read through her texts that morning. It was all the research I had time for.

  Heyyyy! You still there?

  For several long minutes, nothing happened. I kept looking at Keats, and he stared back encouragingly, keeping to his side of the glass until finally a little swoosh sound told me a new message had come through.

  I looked down without leaning into the camera’s range and read what was there.

  Hey sexy.

  This was it. Whether it was coming from a killer, or someone who hired killers, or even just one cog in a much bigger machine, it was our first direct contact of any kind. Talk about going from zero to sixty in one shot. My adrenaline was uncomfortably high, but I knew what I had to do. I carefully keyboarded in a reply, making sure I stayed out of the camera’s way.

  Can’t stand this place!! I said. I’m ditching. you still wanna meet?

  He came back at me almost immediately.

  For real? Hell yeah.

  I gave Keats a thumbs-up to let him know it was progressing.

  Awsome … where? I asked.

  I’ll come to you, he said. What school?

  Boston Latin, I answered.

  I was just kidding, he said. I know what school you go to.

  you do? I asked.

  Sure. I know a lot about you, he said. And then, Like for instance, I know this isn’t you.

  Right on top of that, a photo came through. It was a snapshot of the school, taken from across the street. When I pinched it open to enlarge it, I realized what I was seeing. It showed Nigella standing on the sidewalk out front, along with me, Keats, and several other agents, just after we’d found her.

  My mouth literally dropped open. I heard a soft tap on the glass and looked up at Keats’s confused expression. Then I heard one more swoosh sound.

  When I looked down, I saw that another text had come in.

  You people are seriously underestimating me. Fuck off.

  CHAPTER 37

  THEY FOUND THE corresponding phone in a trash can just up the street from Boston Latin. It was just a cheap burner, the kind of thing anyone can pick up at a convenience store or a Best Buy, use anonymously, and then ditch without any danger of getting tracked down.

  Even so, it felt like a taunt as much as anything. My guess was that we were meant to find the phone, as a little reminder of how closely we’d been observed all morning and how little we could do with that information. Keats couldn’t even put out an APB, since we had no idea who we were looking for. The whole team worked for several hours, combing the neighborhood, but it was a lost cause.

  When Keats and I headed back to the field office, it was just after six o’clock. Neither of us had eaten a thing since breakfast, so we picked up some sandwiches on the way. We got as far as the parking lot before we broke down and decided to eat them right there in the car. I guess Billy was as starving as I was.

  “You really rolled with it today,” he told me. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You know, you say that a lot,” he told me. “And the more you do, the less I tend to believe it. I saw you get pretty emotional back there, during the interview with Nigella. I’m sorry if I put you in a tough position—”

  “You didn’t,” I said, mostly because I didn’t want him to think so. However tough my position might have been, it was nothing compared to the bigger picture here.

  But Billy wasn’t buying it. “Come on, Angela. It’s just us,” he said. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  I nodded and stalled with a long draw on my iced coffee.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “You’re right. It wasn’t easy. And maybe I’m not made of the kind of nails I’d like to be. But hey, I’m sti
ll here, right? And I’m still ready for more.”

  Everything I’d just said was true. This thing was kicking my ass, but that’s not the same as wishing it weren’t happening. It was more like the opposite. I didn’t want to give Billy a single reason to stop bringing me in on this case.

  He took his own time responding and smiled at me over the Coke can he was sipping from. Then he sat back and stared just long enough to give my pulse a little uptick.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m just going to go ahead and say it,” he told me. “You’re impressive. You really are. I know you’ve got this massive IQ, but you’re tough, too, in your own way. You’re going to be great at this, if you want to be.”

  “Does that mean I’m not yet?” I asked half seriously.

  “Well,” he said with another smile, “you did almost lose Nigella Wilbur in the parking lot. But other than that—”

  I don’t know what he was planning on saying, but he never got there. I’d already leaned across the seat and planted my lips on his.

  There was no plan for it. No premeditation. It just happened, as A.A. might have said. And sweet Jesus, the man’s lips were as soft as those blue eyes of his. Once I started I didn’t want to stop.

  Billy didn’t pull away and he didn’t lean in. He just let me kiss him, which was its own kind of mixed message.

  “What was that?” he asked when I sat back.

  “Um … a kiss?” I answered.

  Sometimes I like to do things just because I’m not supposed to. Or maybe there was more to it than that. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood for apologizing.

  “All right, well, that conversation’s going to have to wait,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of people expecting to hear from me at the shift meeting.”

  “Understood,” I said, and we got out of the car. I wasn’t sure I needed to talk about that kiss, anyway. Not on top of everything else. But it was moot for the moment. What I really needed to do was get out of his hair, let him get to his meeting, and be on my way.