Cole called up Twitter. He couldn’t remember the nonsensical handle of the follower he sought, but he knew where to find it. He found Andrea’s name and called up her Tweet history.
There it was, peppering her timeline.
Rabid Doc Lenten @ABrindleDocent
ABrindleDocent was an anagram for Rabid Doc Lenten. Neither of these phrases made a lick of sense to Cole. But maybe there was a third anagram that did. He reached into the recesses of his closet and unearthed an old copy of Scrabble. Blood quickening in his veins, he dumped out letters reading a-b-r-i-n-d-l-e-d-o-c-e-n-t and began rearranging them to see if they’d fit his suspicion.
The letters came together right away and Cole sat back on his haunches, sapped. ABRINDLEDOCENT = Rabid Doc Lenten = Benedict Arnold. Benedict Arnold = subject of a paper written by someone in Drick’s class.
Gavin.
Benedict Arnold = traitor
Traitor = Gavin
His best friend.
He felt as if he’d entered a highway doing eighty on an exit ramp. The truth was hurtling toward him head-on, just out of reach —
— in Teen Vogue.
The magazine that Andrea had discarded in Josh’s ICU lay at Cole’s feet. He picked it up. Sick to his stomach, afraid of what he might find, he flipped to the 1D love-match quiz. The quiz had been taken in pen. Answers were checked off. A tally scored. A match made. A boy-band boy circled.
Cole put the magazine down and held his head while everything went not-so-funhouse topsy-turvy. Everything was circumstantial. But it all fit. He only needed a single piece of hard evidence to prove his theory right.
He also needed to know why.
A while later, when he was sure he would not ralph, when he’d devised a plan of attack, when he was sure he could speak without screaming, he picked up his phone and selected a name from his contacts.
As the call connected, he made a mental checklist of the things that he’d have to do to pull this off. One of them he crossed off.
Call the cops
As sure as Cole was, there was still a chance he was wrong. A chance that the guilt and paranoia he’d nurtured for weeks had swelled beyond his control, like an exotic pet overgrown and mauling its master. If he involved the police and was wrong, he’d have ruined lives needlessly and made himself look even guiltier. If he involved the police too soon, his target might eel out of punishment. And if he left the police out of it altogether and was right, he could wind up dead.
Cole made a decision. He had started this. And he would end it. Alone.
Well, mostly alone.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Cole said. “It’s me.”
“I gathered that from the caller ID,” Gavin replied.
Cole didn’t beat around the bush. “I’m sorry about the things I said.”
Silence on the other end.
“I was a jerk. I haven’t been thinking straight. You stuck by me through everything and you deserve better than a friend like me.”
Further silence. This was not surprising. Gavin was unaccustomed to receiving apologies. Giving them was another matter.
“Apology accepted, I guess,” came his voice. “Is that what people say?”
“When they mean it.”
“Then I did it right. Sorry if I hurt your feelings,” Gavin said.
“Thanks. I was thinking about what you said.”
“Which part?”
“The getting back to normal part. I have to put everything behind me.”
Gavin agreed. “So what do you want to do about it?”
“Are you still going to that party?”
They made their plans to meet and Cole hung up. He had one more call to make. Lila answered on the first ring.
“Hallo, Cole. No longer avoiding me?”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Writing a story that implicates you in the murders of Scott, Winnie, and Drick. And you?”
“Taking you on a date.”
Cole could hear her sit up straight. “Excuse me? A date?”
“You can turn it into a story. Think of it as a human-interest piece. ‘My date with a killer.’ Even though we both know I didn’t kill anyone.”
“We do?”
“Meet me at the party tonight. You know the one. In the empty restaurant next to Benito’s. And do yourself a favor: Bring your digital recorder. You’ll want to get extensive quotes.”
Cole ended the call and quieted his vibrating insides. He felt calmer than he had in months. But he knew that wouldn’t last. In a couple of hours, one of three things would happen:
He’d be proven totally wrong and lose everything in the process.
He’d catch Winnie’s killer.
Winnie’s killer would catch and kill him — on the very day Wikipedia had foreseen it.
Cole couldn’t dwell on it anymore. His plan was in place. He’d see it through and hope for the best.
And in the meantime, he had baking to do.
Springfield Police Officer Larry Breslin checked his watch and flapped a sigh over his lips. Eleven p.m. Not even midnight yet. Just one hour into this godforsaken shift. Seven more to go. He did not know what he had done to rate this deathly dull assignment. The sergeant called it “suspect safekeeping.” Breslin knew that was just a fancy name for being reduced to glorified guard duty.
And what was he guarding the kid from? True, it was possible the family or friends of one of Truffle’s alleged murder victims might drop by to exact retribution, but what would be the point? Breslin looked in on the patient, asleep in his bed, scaffolded with casts, IVs, and wrappings. There was hardly anything left of the kid after his fall. He was Jell-O setting in a mold. Tip him too far any one way and he was likely to pour out.
Breslin wanted out. Night shift in the ICU was the worst. All these people with one foot in the grave. Gave him the shakes.
Nurse Janikowski was the ICU’s saving grace. She moseyed down the corridor carrying a cup of coffee from the pantry. It tasted like a puddle of diesel left to warm in the sun, but it kept him awake. And the company was friendly. Truffle was under orders from his lawyer not to talk to his minder, so the coffee visits amounted to the only human interaction Breslin got these nights — unless you counted Truffle’s night terrors. They descended on Josh every evening, a few hours after he nodded off. His slumber would swing from silent to full-on squall in an instant. His limbs would jerk and flop. If his arms and legs weren’t already broken, Breslin thought, he’d wind up breaking them again with all that thrashing. Janikowski had called on Breslin once or twice to help quell Truffle’s attacks. It was the only time he felt useful on his shift, even if it scared the bejeezus out of him, because the kid never remembered it the next day. Whatever was going on in the kid’s head, it was so bad he had to bury it.
Janikowski handed Breslin his coffee. “My gift to you.” She said it every time. “How’s the patient? Any sign he’ll treat us to one of his screaming fits tonight?”
“None yet.” Breslin sipped. “But it’s still early.” He sipped again. “Relatively early.”
“As if that kid doesn’t have enough problems to contend with,” she lamented. “Now he can’t get a decent night’s rest.”
“Neither can I,” said Breslin. “I go home at the end of these shifts and try to get some shut-eye but I can’t help wondering what’s going through his mind when he screams and judders. Keeps me up.”
Janikowski imagined Josh’s night terrors were directly related to his fall, probably a byproduct of PTSD. Breslin thought that was for soldiers. “It can happen to anyone who’s undergone a trauma. Going out a window and breaking one’s back definitely qualifies.”
Breslin wondered how that compared to committing three murders, but thought better of wondering it out loud. Instead he grinned and lifted his coffee cup. “Then I’ll be getting them the rest of my life, thanks to this swill.”
Janikowski was about to return the flirt when a spurt of
high-pitched beeps clamored from a room around the corner. An alarm sounded over the ICU loudspeaker: Code Blue in room 1009. “Oh no, Mrs. Osborn!” Janikoswki rushed off to join a flurry of nurses and doctors headed for the code.
Breslin had never seen Janikowski in action, and didn’t want to miss his chance. He took a last glance at Truffle, sleeping soundly, and loped after her. The ruckus went on, demanding the attention of all hands on deck.
No one saw the stranger enter Josh’s room.
No one saw the stranger close the door and shut the blinds, as Cole had, too.
No one saw the stranger disconnect Josh’s heart monitor. And because the ICU’s medical staff was performing heroic measures to save Mrs. Osborn’s life, no one was at the monitoring station to notice.
The stranger took out a small white packet of ammonia inhalant. “Time to rise and shine, Josh. I went to a lot of trouble to see you, even gave that old lady down the hall the wrong medication to make sure we wouldn’t be disturbed.” The stranger raised the packet to Josh’s nostrils and broke it open. “Don’t let her die in vain.” The smelling salts’ effect was almost instantaneous. Josh came to, his still-swollen eyes opened to slits.
“Was I having one of those fits?” he asked groggily. The stranger had moved opposite the bed to the television and inserted a DVD. It began to play.
“Nope. But this might do the trick.”
“What is it?” Josh asked, woozy. “I can’t see.”
“I can help with that.” The stranger produced two eye clamps, lifted from a storeroom, attached the first to the lids of Josh’s left eye, and spread, exposing Josh’s crimson eye and holding it open. Josh screamed.
“It hurts!”
“That’s the night terrors talking,” soothed the stranger, who took hold of Josh’s morphine drip and undammed it slightly. The drugs blanketed Josh as the stranger arranged the second eye clamp. “I thought you might appreciate a little clip show as I send you to your death. I think you’ll really enjoy this one. It’s your greatest hits. I pulled them right off Facebook.”
Josh had nowhere to turn, nowhere to look, but the TV screen. On it, he saw himself. The stranger narrated. “Here you are at your eighth birthday party. You sure did like cake. What a scamp you were.” The stranger turned up the morphine a notch. Josh tried to focus his googly eyes. There was a piñata that year. He’d moped when Cole broke it open first. “And here you are at eleven, on a class field trip to the zoo.” Josh had liked the lions best. He’d roared at them. “This is fourteen. Swimming at Ben Feldman’s. See how you and Cole and Scott dunked each other and played Marco Polo? Such friends, you used to be. What happened there?”
The stranger sat in a corner with the remote control, face veiled in shadow. The voice was familiar, though. Josh knew the voice from somewhere. “Who are you?” he asked.
The stranger supplied Josh with another bump of morphine. A bigger bump. “I feel like I’m floating away,” he murmured.
“I bet you do,” said the stranger. “Right down through the bowels of the earth. But stick with me. This is the best part. Here you are just a few months ago. At your favorite place in the whole wide world. The soccer field.”
It was the first game of the season. Josh scored three goals without assistance. He dominated the defense. The visiting players hung their heads when it was over, while Josh’s teammates lifted him into the air and carried him around, kinging him. It was the best feeling in the world, and he knew then it would go on forever.
“Now watch this,” said the stranger. The team lowered Josh to the ground, where a nymph waited.
“That’s Winnie,” said Josh. She put her arms around him in the video and kissed him. In the bed, Josh opened his mouth to smile, forgetting that he’d pulverized most of his teeth in the fall, leaving only a few lonely white Chicklets. But the morphine made it okay. The morphine made everything okay. Even the fact that he couldn’t close his eyes.
“I wanted you to see these things, Josh,” said the stranger. “I wanted you to have one last look at the things you’d never again do or have or be. I wanted you to die knowing it was all stolen from you.”
“Thank you,” Josh whispered. “That’s very kind. May I please …”
“May you please what?” asked the stranger.
“May I please have some more morphine?”
The stranger tittered. “You’re a greedy one, aren’t you?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said the stranger. “You can have all the morphine you want.” The stranger pushed Josh’s morphine as far as it would go.
Josh watched the screen as a euphoric blessing threaded through him. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and his tired heart surrendered. A last breath hissed out, and with it, Winnie’s name on his lips. The phantom stranger departed unseen, moments before the code team called an end to their efforts to save Mrs. Osborn’s life.
When Breslin returned, the movie was paused on the soccer-field kiss Josh and Winnie shared. Caught in the background of the shot, to the other side and behind Winnie was one other person, staring out at the happy couple. He was out of focus and nearly unrecognizable to the uninitiated, but Josh knew him, and died looking at him.
Cole.
Josh Truffle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
* * *
Josh Truffle was an American high school student and aspiring soccer star. His dreams of World Cup tournaments, a personal line of sneaks, and shin-guard glory were dashed when his lifelong pattern of thievery was exposed. He stole girlfriends, grades, and prestige, and it was never enough. But it was all stolen away from him in the end.
He died never satisfied, always wanting more.
It had grown late by the time Cole finished in the kitchen. He’d misjudged the time it would take to prepare his new variation on an old delight, but he was pleased with the results and knew the party would rage until whichever force arrived to break it up first, the crack of dawn or the police.
Cole stowed his treats in a bag, left a couple on a plate in the kitchen for his parents, and got to the business of escaping.
From his bedroom window Cole could see the police car squatting at the end of the street, dug in for the night. Cole picked up his phone and dialed 9-1-1.
“9-1-1, what is your emergency?” came the voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, someone is sneaking through my backyard right now and it doesn’t feel right.” Cole gave an address several blocks away, in the direction opposite his route. “I’m not certain but I think it’s a neighbor boy I’ve seen prowling around. Colton? Cole, maybe?” A moment later the call was relayed to the police car. It’s lights and engine came to life. The driver pulled a one-eighty and took off. Cole knew the police would come to the house as soon as they couldn’t track him down. His parents would insist he was asleep, but the police would insist on making sure. They’d find his bed empty and spread the word that a potential murder suspect was out and unaccounted for. It wouldn’t take long for them to come looking at the party.
He had to book it.
Cole climbed out his window, adrenaline overpowering a queasy sensation that via window was not his body’s preferred means of exit. He scaled the trellis, alit on the ground with nothing more than a thump, and took off through the night, submerged in a deepening freeze and swirling winds.
He heard the party coming long before he saw it. Muscular bass notes rocked the ground, sending vibrations up his legs as he emerged from the woods down the hill from Benito’s and the vacant restaurant. The party was just gathering steam when Cole ran up, sweating icicles. Benito’s had closed hours ago and the next-nearest structure was the empty high school, giving the revelry free reign for noise and devilry. Cars were parked up and down the road on either side, and more arrived by the minute, unpacking load after load of SHS students ready to channel the misery of the last few months into dance and drama.
Cole scouted the perimet
er of the restaurant, and felt eyes on him in return. The spectacle with Winnie and Josh had endowed him with an edge that drew sometimes jealous, sometimes horny stares. But there was another kind of watchfulness in the crowd. Somewhere in the cliques, ebbing and flowing into the restaurant and out of it, a person monitored with sinister intent. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he simmered goose bumps. Cole’s body knew how this hidden stare looked at him without his head even having to think it.
He was quarry.
His observer melted into the crowds, unrevealed. The feeling passed, but Cole knew it would be back again, and soon. He tried to swallow his fear but found he had no saliva. He’d had nerves before. This was different. This was knowing a target was painted on his back, and soon a knife might be sunk into it, too.
It would help if he didn’t feel so alone among the sea of faces. Gavin was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was inside already, busting out his best head bop. Cole readied himself and headed for the entrance.
Someone touched his shoulder.
Lila.
“Finally,” he breathed. “I was looking all over.”
“I’ve been here,” she said. “Waiting for you.”
Cole apologized. “No car.” Tonight Lila wore red coveralls under a plaid peacoat and train conductor’s cap. The clash was disorienting. “At least I won’t mistake someone else for you.”
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” She shivered as the wind pushed through her coat. “Besides freezing our Arsches off?”
Cole kept his voice down and his eyes up, on the lookout, as he spilled his guts.
Lila stared at him, slack-jawed. “Do you actually believe this?”
Cole nodded solemnly.
Lila computed. “It would make for a banging story. If it’s true.”
“It’s a pretty good story if it isn’t true, too. ‘Valedictorian Descends into Madness and Paranoia,’ or whatever. Either way, the exclusive is yours. But I need help. I need backup.” He could do better than that. “I need you.”
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