ONCE LOST

by Blake Pierce

  “What about the other missing girl?”

  “I think she’ll probably turn up alive any day now.”

  “Maybe we’ll know more soon,” Riley said. Then in a softer voice she added, “Towns like this give me the creeps.”

  They were only a few blocks from the Russo house now. As she kept driving, Jenn mulled over everything that Riley had just said.

  It was all very insightful, of course—but what else did she expect from Riley Paige?

  But this was also the first time Riley had opened up to her about anything personal.

  Is she starting to trust me? Jenn wondered.

  Riley had actually told Jenn very little that she didn’t already know. Jenn had studied Riley’s life in great detail—including her childhood as a military brat spent in small towns like Slippery Rock and Lanton, Virginia. She knew about Riley’s cases.

  She didn’t know all of Riley’s personal secrets. But she did know a lot more about Riley than Riley realized.

  A lot more than she knows about me, Jenn thought wryly.

  After all, Jenn had secrets of her own.

  *

  Riley felt uneasy during the rest of the ride. She wondered why she’d told Jenn all that about herself and her father.

  She hadn’t meant to let her guard down like that. But it was all too easy to forget that it wasn’t Bill who was in the car beside her.

  At least she hadn’t shared any damaging information.

  And it didn’t have anything to do with Shane Hatcher.

  Still, Riley decided that she’d better put her guard back up. For the time being, she just hoped that she and Jenn could work effectively together on whatever was going to happen next. After all, Jenn had just said that she had a gut feeling that the Russo kid was their killer.

  Riley’s own gut hadn’t told her much of anything just yet. But Jenn was a talented young agent. And if she was right, they might be on the verge of making an arrest.

  They soon pulled up to the house and parked. The Russos lived in a neighborhood much like the one they had just visited, with perfect lawns and small, comfortable, well-kept houses.

  Riley and Jenn got out of the car, walked up to the front door, and knocked. They were greeted by an anxious-looking woman wearing an apron. She was about Riley’s age. Riley and Jenn produced their badges and introduced themselves.

  “Are you Dustin Russo’s mother?” Riley asked.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I’m Rae Russo.”

  “Is Dustin at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d like to talk to him if that’s possible.”

  The woman looked uncertain for a moment.

  Then she said, “Come on in.”

  Riley and Jenn followed her into an immaculately tidy little home.

  The woman called her son’s name upstairs. No one answered.

  She called again, “Dustin, it’s the FBI. They want to talk to you.”

  Still no one answered.

  The woman shook her head worriedly.

  “He came home from school a little while ago and shut himself up in his room first thing, without saying a word to me. He’s been like that for days now—in a terrible mood, not like himself at all.”

  Riley’s nerves started to prickle.

  “We really do need to talk to him,” she said.

  “What about?” Rae Russo asked.

  Jenn said, “Are you aware that Katy Philbin was found dead this morning?”

  Rae’s eyes widened with alarm.

  “Oh, yes. It’s just awful. But surely you don’t think—”

  “We just need to talk to your son,” Riley said.

  Rae Russo nervously led them up the stairs. Then she knocked on the bedroom door.

  “Dustin, these people really need to talk to you.”

  Still there was no answer.

  Riley wondered—was he even in there? If so, might he be dangerous?

  Riley’s hand hovered near her weapon and silently signaled Jenn to do the same.

  She knew they had to be ready for anything.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riley managed to resist the temptation to draw her weapon.

  She said to Rae, “Open the door, please.”

  Rae hesitated, then nodded nervously and turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.

  It was a small dormer room, with the typical clutter of an adolescent occupant. Lying on the bed was a muscular teenager with a crew cut—Riley remembered Chief Sinard mentioning that Dustin was a football player.

  His eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to notice that anyone had entered. Riley quickly realized why. Even from the doorway, she could hear the blare of music he was listening to on a headset.

  His mother called his name again. His eyes snapped open and he sat up and took off his earphones. He looked at his visitors with a blank expression.

  “What’s up?” he asked in a dull-sounding voice.

  Riley and Jenn showed their badges and introduced themselves again. The boy scratched his head. If he was surprised, Riley could hardly detect it. He had a broad, bulky, immobile face with beady eyes.

  Riley silently gestured for Rae Russo to leave the room, which she did, closing the door behind her.

  Riley said to Dustin, “I take it you know about what happened to Katy Philbin.”

  “Yeah, kind of,” Dustin said, scratching himself idly. “Everybody was talking about it at school. Bummer.”

  Riley and Jenn exchanged glances.

  Jenn said, “You don’t sound too broken up about it. Weren’t you two dating recently?”

  He shrugged and said, “She broke up with me.”

  Jenn stepped toward him and spoke in a sharp voice.

  “Does that mean she deserved what happened to her?”

  Riley started worrying anew. Jenn sounded like she might be jumping to conclusions already. After their visit to the Philbins’, Riley knew that Jenn’s interviewing skills were limited. And Riley’s own weren’t exactly nuanced. Neither of them was likely to coax answers out of a reluctant witness.

  If only Bill or Lucy were here, she thought.

  Dustin’s face didn’t register any particular emotion.

  “Huh-uh,” he said. “What happened to her was awful. She was a really nice girl. She was …”

  He seemed to be searching for the right word.

  “Pretty,” he finally said. “Everybody liked her. I liked her a lot.”

  Then he sat staring again.

  Jenn asked, “Where were you on Wednesday night?”

  “What time?” Dustin asked.

  “All of it,” Jenn said, moving still closer to him. “From when school let out until the next morning.”

  Dustin shrugged a little.

  “Right here,” he said. “I don’t go out much anymore. I don’t feel like it. You can ask my mom.”

  Riley noticed Jenn glancing toward the dormer window. She knew what Jenn was thinking. It would have been possible for Dustin to slip out the window without his mother noticing. But the window faced the street. How likely was it that he could have gotten out unnoticed?

  In a sleepy neighborhood like this, Riley couldn’t discount the possibility.

  When Dustin spoke again, Riley heard a slight tremor in his voice.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “She was so happy, so much fun to be with. Then one day she was all different. I couldn’t tell whether she was angry or sad, but she didn’t want to be around me anymore.”

  Riley was slightly startled.

  Was Dustin still in denial that his girlfriend had been murdered?

  Or was something else going on here?

  Riley asked, “Do you think whatever was bothering her had anything to do with her murder?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I just don’t know.”

  Riley noticed that Jenn was staring at her. Riley guessed she was wondering whether they were going to arrest this boy, or at least treat him like
a suspect. Riley still hadn’t made up her mind.

  She said to Dustin, “So you don’t know why she changed?”

  “No idea,” Dustin said.

  “Do you know anybody who might know?”

  Dustin squinted with thought.

  “Yeah, maybe. Daisy Kinney and Taylor McGrath are—were—Katy’s best friends. She talked to them about pretty much everything.”

  “Where might we find them?” Riley asked.

  Dustin looked over at the clock on his nightstand.

  “Well, if you head over to the school right now, you might catch them. They’re on the soccer team, like Katy was. They’ve got a game this afternoon against Cobbtown High School. It ought to be wrapping up right about now.”

  Riley quickly assessed the situation, then made a decision.

  “Thanks for talking to us,” she said. “Let us know if you think of anything we should know. Meanwhile, we need for you to stay in town.”

  Dustin shrugged again.

  “I’ll be here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Jenn looked aghast.

  She wants to slap the cuffs on him here and now, Riley thought.

  But that just wasn’t going to happen.

  Riley turned to leave the room, and Jenn reluctantly followed.

  Before they got out the door, Dustin said, “If you’re going to talk to Daisy and Taylor, ask them if they know why Katy broke up with me. I really want to know.”

  As they headed toward the stairs, Jenn said in a whisper, “Riley!”

  “Not now,” Riley whispered back.

  Dustin’s mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking as worried as before. She seemed a bit relieved when Riley asked her for directions to Wilson High School.

  When they left the house and got into the car, Jenn spoke sharply.

  “Riley, what the hell are we doing?”

  “We don’t have anything on him,” Riley said. “We can’t arrest him.”

  Jenn started the car and started to drive.

  “Shouldn’t we bring him in for further questioning?” Jenn asked.

  “He won’t tell us anything else.”

  “Isn’t he a flight risk?”

  “He’s not,” Riley said.

  “How do you know?”

  Riley didn’t reply. The truth was, she didn’t have any rational reason to think Dustin Russo wouldn’t leave town the first chance he got. But somehow, she couldn’t imagine him going far outside of that room.

  “What do you make of him?” Jenn asked.

  Riley shrugged a little.

  “He’s a jock. Not an especially bright one. Other than that, I couldn’t say. What do you make of him?”

  Jenn shook her head uneasily.

  “Something’s wrong with that kid,” Jenn said. “His emotional responses were so inappropriate. He seemed a whole lot more upset about breaking up with Katy than he was that she’d been killed.”

  Riley couldn’t help but agree with Jenn’s assessment. Still, she had a different perspective on Dustin’s reactions.

  She said, “You haven’t spent a lot of time with teenagers, have you?”

  Jenn let out a scoffing laugh and said, “Well, I was one—and not very long ago. Not that that gives me any particular insights.” She fell quiet for a moment, then added, “I was certainly a pain in the ass.”

  Riley looked out the window, remembering what she’d been through with April, then Jilly, and what she might yet have to face with Liam. Although April and Jilly seemed pretty stable now, they’d both gone through turbulent and rebellious phases. There had been times when Riley had felt like motherhood was an impossible job and she’d half-wished she could just quit. And as much as she liked Liam, she still didn’t feel as though she knew him at all well.

  Riley said, “Well, based on my own experience, you can only be sure of one thing about teenagers—that you can’t be sure of anything at all. They’re all different, and they’re all mysteries, at least as far as adults are concerned.”

  Riley paused to think a little more. She remembered that odd tremor in Dustin’s voice.

  “Then one day she was all different,” he’d said.

  Riley said, “I can’t say I’m surprised when a teenager reacts to tragedy in an emotionally inappropriate way. Their emotions are all over the place and don’t make a lot of sense. A lot of the time they don’t know what they’re thinking or feeling themselves. Dustin might be grieving his heart out and not even know it himself.”

  “Or he might just be a cold-blooded killer,” Jenn said in a tight voice. “And a rapist too. Jesus, Riley. I don’t know. I think you might have made a big mistake back there.”

  Riley suppressed a sigh. This kind of thing often happened whenever she had to work with someone new. A new partner always had a hard time learning to trust Riley’s gut feelings.

  Worse still, Jenn’s doubts were starting to get to her.

  What if she’s right? Riley wondered.

  Riley’s instincts weren’t infallible, after all. She’d made some mistakes over the years.

  What if she’d made one just now, leaving Dustin unattended?

  Steady, she told herself. Keep your head in the game.

  If she let self-doubt kick in, she’d lose her ability to get a sense of the case. She couldn’t let that happen. If they were actually tracking a serial killer, more lives might well be at stake.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As Jenn pulled their car into the school parking lot, Riley felt unsettled by the sight of cheerful teenage girls climbing onto a yellow bus. The soccer game had apparently just ended, and the kids looked so innocent, so unsuspecting.

  Do they have any idea of the evil that’s out there? Riley wondered.

  Surely they had heard about Katy Philbin’s death by now. But Riley reminded herself that kids were like that. The horror wasn’t real to them. They were too young to grasp it. And their innocence made them all the more vulnerable.

  She saw that COBBTOWN HIGH was written across side of the bus, so she knew that the girls boarding it were on the visiting team. Jenn parked the car, and she and Riley walked toward the stands where spectators were still milling around. Although there were smiles among the group, they seemed subdued. It was obvious that the news was sinking in to the town’s collective psyche.

  The nearby Wilson High School looked old and quaint in comparison to the modern school where April went. The whole scene gave Riley the eerie feeling that she’d stepped back in time to the years of her own childhood, or maybe into some kind of 1950s sitcom. Everything seemed so wholesome. She didn’t even see any kids wearing kinky outfits or flaunting rebellious attitudes.

  As Riley and Jenn approached, some people gave them curious looks. For the moment, she considered it just as well that the whole town not know she and Jenn were FBI agents.

  So without identifying herself, she quietly asked a couple for directions to the home team’s locker room. Smiling pleasantly, they indicated a little brick building near the stands. Outside the building, a man wearing a coach’s uniform was still being congratulated by a few people. Riley and Jenn waited for a quiet moment to approach him.

  When they introduced themselves, the man let out a gasp of relief.

  “The FBI!” he said. “Oh, thank God! Chief Sinard told me he’d put in a call for you. He and his people feel so overwhelmed. You made here it in no time at all.”

  He shook hands with both Riley and Jenn.

  “I’m Judd Griggs, the soccer coach. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here.”

  He was a big, kindly bear of a man. Riley took an immediate liking to him.

  “We’re terribly sorry about the circumstances,” Riley said.

  “Yes,” Griggs said with faraway, sorrowful look. “I’m—we’re all—it’s just so hard to believe. Katy was such a wonderful, special girl—a real star in every way, a leader too. The other girls on the team just loved her and looked up t
o her.”

  He swallowed hard.

  Then he said, “I thought about canceling today’s game. But the girls wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted to play this one for Katy. They said they wanted to make her proud.”

  His voice sounded thick with emotion.

  “I was worried about how they’d feel if they had a bad game. It just seemed like so much pressure. But they were amazing. We tied Cobbtown one-to-one, and that’s a great team. It looks like we’ve got a chance at the playoffs this year. If only Katy could be here too …”

  His words trailed off.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is just such a terrible day.”

  Riley’s heart went out to him. He obviously cared a lot about the girls on his team. The pain of Katy’s loss must have been unbearable to him.

  Then Jenn said, “Mr. Griggs, could you tell us where you were and what you were doing on Wednesday night?”

  Riley winced.

  Is she going to treat every man she meets like a suspect? she wondered.

  Griggs seemed distraught enough to her as it was.

  Riley hastily said, “Mr. Griggs, I’m sorry—”

  “No, no need to apologize,” Griggs said. “You’re doing your job, I understand. I was home with my wife all evening, watching TV mostly. I don’t know if that’s very helpful. If there’s anything I can do to confirm that, I’ll do my best. I’ll do anything—anything—I can to help.”

  Jenn looked like she wanted to press him some more, but Riley quieted her with a frown. Jenn didn’t look happy about it.

  Riley asked Griggs, “Do you know a girl named Holly Struthers?”

  He thought for a moment, then asked, “I don’t think so. Is she a Wilson student?”

  “No,” Riley said. “She’s enrolled in Lincoln High.”

  “Then I probably wouldn’t have met her unless she plays on their soccer team,” he said. “I did hear something about a girl in town going missing. Is that the name?”

  “Yes, she has been reported missing.”

  “Do you think her disappearance had anything to do with …?”