Текст книги "The 9th Girl"

Автор книги: Tami Hoag

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

37

“That’s not his MO,” Liska said.

“It is now.”

John Quinn stared at the photocopy of the note left on Dana Nolan’s windshield, frowning darkly. He needed a shave. Kovac had called him from the scene and asked to meet him downtown. Quinn had thrown on jeans and a sweater and drove in from his cozy home in the suburbs to join the madness.

Kovac didn’t want the press seeing Quinn at the scene. Or, more to the point, he didn’t want Quinn being seen on the news. Speculation would come quickly as it was. He didn’t want to pour fuel on the fire. Doc Holiday was sure to be watching the news. He hadn’t chosen Dana Nolan by accident. Kovac wanted as much control as possible over what went out over the airwaves. If Quinn thought it would be useful to include his name, that was what would happen. If he thought it was better to stay out of the spotlight, then so be it.

“I guess it’s safe to say he’s liking the attention,” Kovac said.

“Loving it,” Quinn replied.

They sat in the war room, surrounded by everything to do with Penny Gray’s case. They were going to need another room dedicated to Dana Nolan. They would have to reassign the manpower to divide their efforts between the two cases. Penny Gray was dead. To the best of their knowledge, Dana Nolan was still alive. There was a chance they were dealing with the same perp. If so, then one effort benefited both cases. They would have to shift the manpower to benefit the victim who was potentially still alive.

Quinn sat back against the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s taking it to a whole new level. With the others it was enough to dump the victim and then read about it in the paper. Now he’s getting cocky. The media has given him a name. He wants to be a star.”

“This is why I didn’t want to challenge him,” Kovac said. “I was afraid he would take me up on it.”

“What do we do now? Do we acknowledge him?” Kasselmann asked. He looked harried for the first time in all of this. “Do we keep the note to ourselves? If we let the media run with this, they’ll have the public in a panic. I can’t have that, and I guarantee that’s not going to fly upstairs.”

“It’s going to be bad enough as it is,” Liska said. “First we’ve got a dead zombie, then a missing girl, now this. One of their own snatched out from under our noses. The news media is going to connect the dots and come up with Doc Holiday anyway. They already have. They don’t need to see the note for that.”

“If you don’t acknowledge him, he’s going to get frustrated,” Quinn said. “Frustrated could be good.”

“Not for Dana Nolan,” Liska pointed out.

“Dana Nolan is dead,” Quinn said bluntly. “I don’t mean to be a pessimist here, but that’s a foregone conclusion. Unless you can find her within the next twenty-four hours or so, she’s dead. He kidnapped her to kill her. That’s what he’ll do. That’s where the payout is for him. The buildup is just foreplay.

“He might drag it out longer this time because he has a stage,” he said. “That’s the best you can hope for.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to be optimistic about,” Kovac muttered. “If we’re lucky, he’ll spend more time torturing her before he stabs her to death and beats her head in with a hammer.”

“It’s more time to look for her,” Quinn said.

“Yeah. If we had a freaking clue where to look.” Kovac turned to his boss. “I’ve got a small army canvassing Dana Nolan’s neighborhood. They’re knocking on every door that has a sight line to that parking lot and the street.”

“And you haven’t found anything to go on from the previous cases?” Kasselmann asked.

Kovac shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve got guys double-checking, triple-checking, quadruple-checking everything from each of those cases—every report, every statement. They’re calling the families of the victims. They’re reinterviewing the people who reported finding the bodies. Nothing.”

“He’s smart, he’s careful, he’s experienced,” Quinn said. “But he just changed the way he does things. That’s when these guys make mistakes. He’s always hunted victims of opportunity, but he singled this girl out. He knew where she lives. He knew her schedule.”

“He stalked her,” Kovac concluded. “He singled her out because of the coverage of the Penny Gray case.”

“This is his big moment to show the world he’s smarter than everybody.”

“So far,” Kasselmann said, “he is.”

“We’ve got to trace Dana Nolan’s every move over the last few days,” Kovac said. “If he was stalking her, someone might have seen him.”

“He might have even interacted with her in the days leading up to this,” Quinn said. “He was able to get right up to her in an otherwise abandoned parking lot. He’s either a master of the blitz attack or she didn’t feel threatened. And the only way she didn’t feel threatened in this circumstance was if he was somehow familiar to her.”

“So he’s probably not a scary-looking guy,” Liska said.

“Probably not. Probably average size or smaller,” Quinn said. “He’s probably friendly, smiling, familiar. He could be using a ploy, like he needs help with something or he needs directions, or something like that.

“I got that feeling looking at a couple of his older cases. The Rose Reiser case, in particular. She disappeared walking out of a convenience store, and no one saw anything, which means she didn’t struggle. He had to have gotten right up to her without causing alarm. Then he probably used a stun gun or some other quick way of subduing the victim.”

Kovac looked up at the wall and the photos of Penny Gray and thought about the video of her walking out of the Holiday station down the street from the Rock & Bowl.

“The Holiday station,” he said. “If he’s the one who snatched Penny Gray, that location probably wasn’t a coincidence either. It was probably this sick bastard’s idea of a joke. Doc Holiday snatches his victims from the Holiday stations of Minneapolis.”

“If he was the one who snatched Penny Gray,” Liska said. “I’m still not convinced she’s his ninth girl. And neither are you, Sam. We’ve got too many other red flags flying.”

Kasselmann looked like he needed an antacid tablet. “That’s all we need: two homicidal sadists. Who else are you looking at, Sam?”

“The girl had a complicated life,” Kovac admitted. “She wasn’t exactly Miss Congeniality. And she might have had a secret someone felt was worth killing her for.”

“We can’t drop that angle just because serial killers are more exciting in the news,” Liska said. She looked to Quinn and Kasselmann. “We think she might have been sexually abused by the mother’s fiancé. There’s some pretty strong indicators if you look at the timeline and the changes in the girl’s behavior over the last eight months or so. We have to look hard at him. She also had a run-in with his daughter and her boyfriend the night she went missing.”

“It’s a freaking shell game,” Kovac admitted. “And every time we stop and lift a shell, there’s a different killer under it.”

Kasselmann frowned hard. “Dana Nolan has to be the priority now.”

Liska sighed and looked away. “Great. Everybody else in Penny Gray’s life abused and abandoned her. Now we get to do it too.”

“Penny Gray is dead, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

“I understand that. I don’t have to like it. I feel an obligation to my victim, and to her mother. How am I supposed to tell Julia Gray that her daughter’s death isn’t as relevant today as it was yesterday? How would you feel if that was your child?”

“Maybe you’re too close to the situation,” Kasselmann said with a fine edge of steel in his voice.

“Yeah,” Tinks returned. “You’re probably right. If the department isn’t going to give a shit about these people, then it’s probably best to assign a detective who doesn’t care about them either.”

Kovac intervened before Kasselmann could draw breath to suspend her.

“The bulk of the manpower should go to Nolan,” he conceded. “There’s a chance we can still get to her before it’s too late. Tinks and Elwood should stay on Penny Gray. I’ll keep a hand in each.”

The captain looked at his watch. “I have to go upstairs and explain this to the chief. Keep me up to the minute on Nolan.”

Kasselmann left the room, taking none of the tension with him. Kovac felt like something huge had sunk its talons into his shoulders.

“He’ll look worse to more people if we don’t drop everything and chase after the missing news girl,” Liska said bitterly.

“Brass is brass,” Kovac returned. “Now tell me again how you want to go into management.”

“I’d rather eat my gun than be like that.”

“I’m glad to know it.”

Ignoring the office politics, Quinn had gone to the wall to scrutinize the photos from the New Year’s Eve scene. Kovac watched him take in the details as if he were looking at a Picasso exhibit, trying to make sense of the lines and the details.

“This was sloppy and careless,” he concluded. “If Doc Holiday didn’t do this, and the media has been trying to pin it on him, he might have taken Dana Nolan to prove a point.”

“And if that’s the case?” Kovac asked, dreading the answer because the only reason the media was blaming Doc Holiday was because he had told them to.

John Quinn looked grim. “Then God have mercy on her soul.”

•   •   •

“WE FOUND THIS video on YouTube late last night,” Elwood said, setting up his laptop.

Kovac had gone to organize the Nolan investigation. Elwood had arrived together with Sonya Porter, who was wearing the same sweater she had had on the night before, Liska noted.

“There are a bunch of them,” Porter said. “They all look like they were uploaded from her phone. So there could be more. Do you have her phone?”

“We don’t,” Liska said. “We don’t have her phone or her laptop. But my son, Kyle, says Gray was always shooting video with her phone.”

“Her mother told us she keeps everything on her laptop and she keeps her laptop with her,” Elwood said. “We found some notebooks with her writing in her room, but those were all a few years old. It’s safe to assume the laptop is either in her car, wherever that is, or the killer took it for his or her own reasons.”

He clicked the Play icon.

Penny Gray had chosen to shoot herself in profile as she looked down. She shot from the side where her hair was long and hung down like a curtain, hiding half her face. She moved the camera slowly as she spoke, bringing it around from one side of her head to the other, to the side where the hair had been shaved to the scalp and piercings rimmed the shell of her ear with wires and spikes.

The poem was entitled “Help Me.”

Refuge

Asylum

Safest place to be

Secrets

Hard truths

Soul laid bare to see

Comfort

Guidance

Shoulder. Lean on me

Seduction

Destruction

Help not meant to be

Silence

Shameful

Not to be believed

Don’t tell

Go to hell

There’s no one here for me

“That certainly sounds like abuse to me,” Sonya declared. “I say you go arrest the son of a bitch and string him up in public by his balls.”

“I told you why we can’t just do that,” Elwood said gently. “She doesn’t spell out what happened to her, let alone name names. And even if she did, we would need some corroborating evidence.”

“You should at least be able to drag him in here and scare a confession out of him,” she said stubbornly.

“Miss Journalistic Integrity,” Elwood said. “Would you write a story about it and present facts not in evidence?”

“No, but there’s no law against you lying to him in an interview, right? Tell him you have video of him molesting her.”

“I like your style,” Liska said. “But if we do that and he calls our bluff, we’re screwed. We have to be cagier than that. I want to go to Julia Gray first and plant some doubt. If we attack Michael Warner head-on, he’s going to call a lawyer, and he’s going to tell her to call one too.”

“Do you think she knows he abused her daughter?” Porter asked. “How could a mother know something like that and not do anything about it? And not only not do anything about it but also get engaged to the creep. That’s fucked-up!”

Her outrage pushed her out of her chair to pace back and forth with her arms crossed tight beneath her breasts.

“I’m betting the daughter never told her—or if she told her, she wasn’t believed,” Liska said. “Look what the girl wrote in that other poem—that she’s a burden, a liar, no one believes her.”

“What’s the matter with women like that?” Sonya asked. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. Women need to believe each other and stand up for each other in the face of sexist oppression. Men suck! Present company excluded, of course,” she added, smiling sweetly at Elwood.

“I understand your sentiment,” Elwood said. “Most violence committed against women is perpetrated by men. I once read a quote that the thing a man fears most from a woman is that she’ll laugh at him, and the thing a woman most fears from a man is that he’ll kill her.”

“I think Dr. Warner has more to fear than being laughed at,” Sonya said. “His whole existence is based on people trusting him with their kids. And if he molested her, his fiancée’s daughter had the ability to destroy him.”

“The day the girl’s wrist got broken, she was supposedly on her way home from an appointment with him,” Liska said. “He made out like he didn’t have much knowledge of the event, but Julia Gray gave the impression she included him in the decision making about a doctor.

“So what was Michael Gray doing the evening of the thirtieth?” she asked.

Elwood flipped back through his little notebook. “He and Mrs. Gray went to see the Joffrey Ballet company at the Orpheum, followed by dinner at Solera. He dropped Julia Gray off at her house between twelve and twelve thirty and says he was home when his daughter got in around one.”

“And the last we can account for Penny Gray is leaving the Holiday station between nine thirty and ten,” Liska said. “She doesn’t show up again until she falls out of the trunk of a car on New Year’s Eve. That’s a big chunk of time to account for. We need to know what Michael Warner, Christina Warner, and Julia Gray were doing all that time.”

“I’ve already spoken to Dr. Warner a few times,” Elwood said. “I can reach out to him again on the excuse of tying up loose ends.”

“We need to feel him out on the general issue of whether or not Penny Gray may have suffered abuse without him playing the patient confidentiality card. Maybe we can ask him if he thought she might have had someone else she would confide in.”

“You’d think the girl would have confided in somebody,” Elwood said. “A girlfriend, a counselor.”

“I don’t think she trusted anyone,” Liska said. “Kyle knew her. He said she didn’t have friends like most girls have friends. She pretended with one group of acquaintances that she had friends elsewhere, and vice versa.”

“She internalized everything,” Sonya concluded, looking at the pages of poetry Elwood had taped to the wall. “I get that. Her poetry was her outlet. That’s how creative people are. We bottle the feelings up inside until the feelings turn into words or images that have to come out onto a page or a canvas or a—”

“Tattoo,” Elwood said.

The two of them exchanged a look.

“If you put out raw emotion, people can reject you directly, personally,” Sonya said. “If you form that emotion into something else, then the thing you create can be rejected, but at least it’s once removed from you.”

“Everyone in this girl’s life found her to be an irritation, a problem, something they didn’t want to be bothered to deal with,” Liska said. “But something happened that night. She pushed somebody’s button one time too many.”

“Or Dr. Warner bought her silence with that car he gave her for her birthday,” Elwood pointed out. “Or she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Sam is working the wrong place / wrong time angle. We get to take a harder look at the people she knew. The last people we know who interacted with her were the kids at the Rock and Bowl. She said something to Christina Warner that made the Warner girl angry enough to lunge at her. I want to know what it was.”

“The Warner girl said Penny Gray attacked her,” Elwood said.

“She lied. Kyle was there. He saw it go down. I want to know why.” She looked at her watch. “PSI is having an assembly today for Penny Gray’s classmates and any other students who feel the need to attend. It might be our only chance to talk to any of these kids without a parent or attorney looking over their shoulders.”

She pointed a finger at Sonya. “You didn’t hear me say that.”

“Say what?”

“I’m not looking for anything to use in court. I’m looking for loose threads to pull to unravel the story these kids have woven together. Somebody knows exactly what went down. We have to find a way to make one kid want to tell us.”

“What about me?” Sonya asked. “Can I come?”

“Absolutely,” Liska said. “You’re known to these kids through social media. I want them to feel like they can contact you somehow if they have something to say but don’t want to say it to us. Can we make that work?”

“I’m in if the school will have me.”

Nikki smiled a nasty smile, thinking how happy Principal Rodgers would be to have Sonya Porter with her tattoos and multiple facial piercings address his students.

“Oh, they’ll have you,” she said. “I will take great joy in making that happen.”

38

“I can’t believe they’re making us go to this,” Jessie Cook said as they walked down the hall toward the assembly theater, Jessie shoulder to shoulder on Christina’s left, Brittany on Christina’s right. “Like any of us are traumatized because of Gray.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Please.”

Brittany said nothing. She hadn’t wanted to come to school at all. Ironically, her mother had made her come because of the assembly. She thought it was important for Brittany to be at school among her friends instead of home alone, brooding, and for them all to listen to the counselors and talk about what had happened and how they should try to deal with their emotions.

“Are you traumatized, XT?” Jessie asked Christina. They shared a knowing look, like it was the funniest joke in the world that they didn’t have any human feelings toward a girl they had known for years, a girl who had been killed and dumped in the road like a sack of garbage.

“How about you, Britt?” Jessie asked, leaning forward and looking at her past Christina. “Are you traumatized? You and Gray were such good friends.”

Brittany wanted to call her a bitch and tell her to go to hell, but none of those words came out of her mouth. The best she could manage was to say, “Yeah, Jessie, I happen to think being murdered by a serial killer is a traumatic event no matter who it happens to.”

“Britt’s right,” Christina said. “What happened to Gray is terrible. If you don’t think that’s terrible, Jessie, what kind of fucked-up person are you?”

Jessie frowned. “Well, I mean, of course it’s terrible, but it’s not like it happened to one of us.”

Brittany rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh.

Aaron opened the door to the theater and held it for them like he was a gentleman or something. They all went in and were herded down the stairs by a teacher to the lower third of the auditorium. A group of adults had gathered on the stage. Principal Rodgers looked fussy and unhappy as he discussed something with a petite woman with short-cropped blond hair—Kyle’s mom, who had come to school a few times for the antidrug program. With her was the big, burly detective who had come to Brittany’s room that first night anyone had realized Gray was missing. A younger woman with a sleek dark bob and tattoos peeking out of her sweater stood to one side of the big detective—Sonya Porter.

Emily leaned ahead in her seat on the far side of Jessie, looking down the row at all of them, and said, “That’s Sonya Porter from TeenCities.”

Behind them, Aaron leaned forward and put his hands on Christina’s shoulders and whispered something in her ear. Christina laughed.

Brittany squeezed herself to the far side of her seat, away from them, wanting to slink out and disappear. Christina leaned toward her, all loving concern, and put a hand on her knee. “Are you all right, Britt?”

“I’m fine,” Brittany said, avoiding eye contact. “I’ve got a headache, that’s all.”

“Do you want something for it?” Christina whispered as Principal Rodgers took the podium and the room began to quiet. “Aaron can get you something.”

“No, thanks,” she said, thinking there was no drug to help what was bothering her.

Principal Rodgers started droning on in his self-important, condescending way, telling them all what a tragedy had befallen their school and how their school would be here for them in their time of need. He didn’t have a clue what went on in his school. He didn’t have any idea who his students were. How much help could he possibly be? He had hated Gray, was always angry with her for the way she dressed, for the way she did her hair. Brittany had once seen him stop Gray in the hall and make her take out all but two of her earrings and give them to him right there.

Kyle’s mom took the podium next. Brittany had never actually met her, but she had seen her at school a couple of times and had been fascinated with the idea that she was a homicide detective. Kyle didn’t like to talk about it. To him, his mom was just his mom, who happened to be a cop, who happened to investigate murders.

“My colleague and I are here today to talk to you about what happened to Penny Gray,” she began. “I’m sure you’ve all seen the reports on the news. I know there are a lot of rumors going around. We’re going to be very honest and straightforward with you.

“Penny Gray was murdered. That’s upsetting. It’s disturbing. I know people would rather not have to hear about things like this, but it’s important that you know the truth. This isn’t a story about a stranger in some other place. This happened to a girl many of you knew, a girl who walked the halls of this school. Maybe you liked her, maybe you didn’t. That doesn’t matter. It’s important that you know what happened to her. This is real. This is as real as it gets. We want you to know the truth and we need you to tell the truth.

“If any of you have any information at all about Penny Gray, we need you to share it with us. Anything she might have said to you, rumors that you heard about her, anything at all—even if it doesn’t seem like it could be important. It’s impossible to know what impact even a small, seemingly insignificant detail might have.

“At this point we don’t know if Penny was abducted by a stranger or was victimized by someone she knew. We know she was at the Rock and Bowl on the evening of the thirtieth. We know she left that place and made a stop at a nearby convenience store. So far as we know, she was not seen again—except by her killer—until her body was found New Year’s Eve.

“We don’t know why Penny was killed,” she said. “We don’t know if she was a random victim or if she provoked someone. We don’t know if someone was angry with her or hated her for some reason, or if she knew something that was a threat to someone. This is why we’re asking you guys to help.

“I want you all to look around this auditorium this morning. You’re all individuals who are part of a community. Look at your friends. Look at the kids you don’t know or don’t like. Realize that other people are looking at you and thinking the same things. And I want you to imagine, what if you were Penny Gray? What if you found yourself in a terrible situation? You would hope the people who knew you would help. You would hope if someone could do something, they would.”

Brittany looked around the room. The seats were filled with students and teachers. One section had been reserved for parents. Some people were listening. Some weren’t. Some were on their phones, texting, playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends.

She glanced at the people sitting in her row—Emily, Jessie, Christina—and wondered what they would do. If I was missing, would they care about me?

The answer sat like a stone in the pit of her stomach.

Sonya Porter got up next and talked about social media and social consciousness and the obligation young people—and particularly young women—should have to one another.

Brittany watched her, taking in the avant-garde style, the piercings and the tattoos juxtaposed against the sleek haircut and the retro-chic outfit. She listened to Sonya Porter speak with passion and conviction. Gray might have turned out like this, she thought. She might have channeled her anger into passion and honed her self-expression into style. Gray might have grown up to be a Sonya Porter, but she would never have that chance.

“I want to finish by reading you something,” Sonya Porter said. She adjusted her cat-eye glasses and began.

“Fight

Struggle

Clash

Square peg, round hole

Force to conform

Blend in. Fall in line

Stifle

Smother

Hate each other

You’re red

I’m blue

I don’t want to be you

You don’t want to look at me.

Stop

Shift. Now. Change.

Look

See

Everybody be free

Open hearts

Open minds

See what’s real

Listen

See me

Unique

Special

Unlike another

Be who you are

Live

Acceptance.”

When she finished, she looked up, her gaze scanning from one side of the silent room to the other.

“That poem was written by Penny Gray,” she said. “This is who your school lost. This is who the world lost. Whether you liked her or not, approved of her or didn’t, she had a unique voice, and a unique talent, and a unique view of the world. Just like each one of you. You should be angry that someone took her away.”

Jessie Cook leaned into Christina, rolled her eyes, and whispered, “I wish someone would take her away.”

The two of them giggled under their breath.

Brittany gave them both a look of irritation. She wanted to get up and leave, move to another seat in another part of the theater. But she could imagine everyone looking at her, and she could imagine what would be said about her by Jessie and Christina and the rest of them.

Be who you are.

If she only had the courage. If only she could be more like Gray—the girl nobody liked.

The counselors spoke. People asked questions. Business cards were passed out. Phone numbers and e-mail addresses were posted on the projector screen.

Brittany counted the minutes until they were told they could leave. When that moment came, she popped out of her seat and started up the aisle, not even looking to see if Christina and company were behind her. Let them think that she wasn’t feeling well, that her headache was making her sick, that she had to go to the bathroom. She just wanted out and to be away from them.

She hurried to her locker, got her coat, grabbed her purse. It was lunchtime. They were allowed to leave the campus. Lots of kids did to go to the nearby restaurants and coffee shops. Brittany had no interest in lunch. As much as her mother thought it was the last thing she should do, she just wanted to go home and be alone and not have to pretend everything was all right.

She didn’t care that it was a cold, long walk. In fact, she thought it was all the better to feel cold, to feel the pain of numbing fingertips and tense shoulders hunched against the wind. Head down, she put one foot in front of the other and just kept going, away from school, across the parking lot, heading for the street.

“Britt! Brittany!”

She didn’t want to look up or acknowledge the person calling her. She didn’t want to be recognized. Of course, it did her no good to ignore him. If she knew one thing about Kyle, it was that he didn’t give up.

He caught up to her and fell in step beside her. She glanced at him. His cheeks were red from the cold, but he’d had sense enough to put on a gray watch cap with the letters UFC embroidered in red. He wore an old letterman’s jacket from some school in St. Paul over a gray hoodie. It irritated her that she thought he was cute.

“What are you doing here, Kyle?” she asked, annoyed. “I thought you were suspended.”

“I am,” he said. “But I got the text about the assembly. I wanted to come.”

“Your mom is investigating Gray’s murder. That must be weird.”

“Yeah. What part of any of this isn’t weird? Someone we knew was murdered. I can’t get my head around that, can you?”

“No.”

“Where are all your good friends?” he asked sarcastically.

“Don’t give me a hard time,” she said, annoyed with him for asking, more annoyed with herself for suddenly feeling like crying. She had no “good friends.” She was stupid for ever thinking otherwise.

“Want to see what Jessie was tweeting during the assembly?”

“No.”

“You get that it’s their fault, don’t you?” he asked, then corrected himself. “Our fault. You got her to go there. I didn’t stop her from leaving.”

Brittany stopped and faced him. “Yes. I get it, Kyle. It’s all I think about. Does that make you happy? I’m sick about it. I wish I’d never moved here. But what do you want me to do?”

He looked back toward the school. She had left. Literally. She had walked away from Christina and the rest of them. What more could he call her on?

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know either. I feel like we should do something. Go see her mom or something. Tell her we’re sorry.”

From the corner of her eye, Brittany saw the car approaching—Aaron Fogelman’s midnight-blue Lexus, cruising slowly toward them. The window on the passenger’s side ran down as the car came alongside them at the curb.

“Hey, Britt,” Christina said. “Need a ride?”

It wasn’t a friendly offer. There was accusation in Christina’s expression and her voice. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she thought—that Brittany had ditched them to meet up with Kyle.

Brittany hesitated. She didn’t want a ride. She didn’t want to be with those people another minute. And yet, there was a part of her that was afraid to say no. She hated herself for it, and she hated Kyle for putting her in this position.

Aaron put the car in park, got out, and looked at them across the roof. “Jesus, Hatcher, don’t you ever take a hint? Leave her alone. She doesn’t want to be with a loser like you.”

“Fuck you,” Kyle said. “I’m looking at the loser. You got your boyfriends in the car with you?”

“You’re so funny. You’re such a funny little shit,” Aaron said without a hint of humor. He came around the hood of the car, moving with a menacing swagger. His leather coat hung open, emphasizing the width of his shoulders and chest. “You’re living in quite a fantasy, faggot, drawing pictures like that one you put on Twitter.”