So Mrs. Heckler was a serial seductress, thought Luke as he lay on his bed, arms folded underneath his head and eyes glued to the ceiling. There was no way he was doing homework tonight. No way. Not after receiving a threat telling him to “watch his back.” And not after cracking Mr. Tadeckis’s robotic sheen and realizing that there was a living, breathing human underneath it. He was way too wound up. It was clear that men really did lose it over Mrs. Heckler.
But enough to kill her? He couldn’t imagine a girl having power over him to that degree. Sure, he liked girls, but could he really turn homicidal over them? He remembered Kelsey bringing Matt up in an attempt to make Oscar jealous. Some girls did mess with your head a lot, true. But who would really hurt someone like that? You’d have to be a sicko. Even if a girl was really being mean to him, Luke knew he would walk away rather than fight, although he had never been in love. Maybe love was the problem. That was why Dean Heckler couldn’t be ruled out. He was obviously in love with his wife, he’d obviously known she was cheating on him, and he was obviously bitter.
Was Oscar the type to lose it over a girl? Luke had never seen that side of him, but maybe he kept it hidden. Maybe Mrs. Heckler somehow got to him. How insane did you have to be to kill someone, wondered Luke? What did Mrs. Heckler do to the guy in the woods? She hurt Mr. Tadeckis’s pride, made him feel embarrassed, scorned him. But he seemed okay. The other guy was clearly not. Had she done something really bad to him, or was there something wrong with him from the start?
Luke’s mind sifted through all of the evidence, trying to focus on anything that would have revealed what Mrs. Heckler might have done to her lover. Did she call him a mean name? Was it just that she broke up with him? She was married; he must have known they had no future. Had she promised him a future? Maybe in Las Vegas, when they were at the pool kicking back some margaritas, she told him she’d leave her husband. Then changed her mind. Luke was getting increasingly frustrated trying to figure it out.
And what did Mr. Tadeckis mean about Mr. Hamaguchi being “consumed with murder”? How does that not make him the murderer? How could Luke find out?
“Sometimes you pick the wrong person to mess with,” Mr. Tadeckis had said. The words kept floating back to Luke, and he couldn’t figure out why. He thought of all those TV detectives, and how they’d always advise each other to “Put yourself in the killer’s shoes.” His mind continued racing.
He remembered that Ms. Johnson, the woman whose husband Joanna Heckler had stolen, had told them that Dean Heckler said Mrs. Heckler was stressed before her death, and that she was “surprised she grew a conscience.”
Luke shot up in his bed. It was simple. He shouldn’t have been focusing on Mrs. Heckler, but instead, her killer. Maybe it wasn’t something that Mrs. Heckler did to the killer per se; maybe it was something about him. And maybe Mrs. Heckler knew that, and that’s why she ditched him. Luke had a hunch.
Luke walked over to his closet and pushed aside all of his winter sweaters that were folded on his shelf. Behind them he had hidden the computer from the alumni office, which he still hadn’t returned to Tariq. He took it down and switched it on, waiting impatiently for it to boot up. When it finally did, he clicked on the Wi-Fi, sighing in relief as it came through strong. Maybe if he sifted through Mrs. Heckler’s search history, he’d find out something about the killer. Something that had made her “stressed and nervous.”
He went alphabetically, typing one letter at a time to see if anything showed up on the search bar. The first few letters brought no luck. Turns out Mrs. Heckler was a fan of celebrity blogs such as CrazyFamous.com and SceneYouSee.com, all of which seemed to focus on people on reality shows. Of course, it could have been Tariq running those searches, but Luke doubted it. When he got to the letter H, it started to get interesting. There had been a search for the Hard Rock Hotel. Luke clicked on the link, which brought him to the home website. That must be where she stayed in Vegas. He clicked through the pictures of the pool, and it all looked pretty glitzy. But unfortunately, there was no information about her reservation.
Luke was about to move forward when he distractedly clicked on Dining. Pictures of the various Hard Rock Café restaurants fluttered onto the screen. Luke’s eyes widened. The Taco Ranch. Holy moly. The restaurant from the Post-it Note. Oscar had said it was a restaurant in Los Angeles, but here it was in Las Vegas. Had he lied? Had Oscar been the one accompanying her to Las Vegas? Luke tried to rack his brain. When could Oscar have gone to Vegas? Over the summer? It was possible, but he certainly didn’t mention it. Maybe they had hooked up there, and then when they were back in school, Mrs. Heckler—or Joanna, as Oscar called her—slipped him a little Post-it reminding him of the good times they had at the Taco Ranch. Luke had the crushing feeling that he had been lied to. And now he was being avoided. Desperate to find more clues, Luke continued his search.
When he got to the letter P, he was about to keep going, but he noticed something that made him stop. Mrs. Heckler had done a search on psychopaths. Luke immediately clicked on the link. When the page came up there were almost three million results. But there was one result that was in a light shade of violet, which meant that it was the link that Mrs. Heckler had clicked on. And the title was “Are You Involved with a Psychopath?” Suddenly Luke remembered that Andy had referred to the murderer as a psychopath. And Ms. Johnson had said she would have killed Joanna but she “wasn’t a psychopath.”
The word was often used in a cavalier manner, but the true meaning was harrowing. It was a person with no conscience. Luke opened the article. The traits of a psychopath included “superficial charm,” “self-centered,” “prone to deception.” It stated these traits could often go undetected, but clearly Mrs. Heckler had noticed them. Someone had probably charmed her, and then become desperate when she learned he was dangerous. Luke knew he might be grasping, but for the first time he put himself in Mrs. Heckler’s shoes. He finally realized what kind of person he was up against, and it made him shudder. Was Oscar the psychopath that Mrs. Heckler feared? He appeared totally normal to Luke, yet if he was a true psychopath, he could have a twisted, evil side. Had Luke ever been in danger from Oscar? What would have happened if he had ever really pissed Oscar off? But maybe Oscar’s hidden rage, if he had any, was directed only at women. That was why he moved from one to the next so quickly, why he loved them and left them. At the same time that he was with Kelsey, he was smugly derisive of her and the fact that she was cheating on her boyfriend. Not to mention he was still flirting with every girl in sight. Oscar must hate women, right? Was that what happened?
But even if that was true, there had to be someone else, someone now on campus who had something to hide. The person who was leaving Luke notes and following him. Dean Heckler? Luke wasn’t sure.
Luke slipped out of his room and went to the radiator in the stairwell. The knife was still there. Maybe it would be a good idea to carry it with him. Just as a precaution.