Brian pushed his cart past the insurance guy’s office. He’d been told not to clean it. The police were still processing the scene. He laughed to himself, the sound turning into little green bubbles that danced around him. Sometimes his laughter was blue, and sometimes it was green. It didn’t really mean anything. He thought it was funny to know that they would find his fingerprints in the guy’s office, but it wouldn’t mean anything. They knew he’d been in there. He was the janitor. Invisible. Unseen.
When he got home, he lay on his bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. He couldn’t stop thinking about Paty Gomez. Her beautiful auburn hair that shone when she moved her head. Usually red was the trigger that made him kill. But not with Paty. Suddenly, red had become something else. Paty produced feelings inside him that he couldn’t explain. He just knew that he would never hurt her—no matter how red she became.
He kept going over the time he’d spent with her. Remembering how kind she’d been. How she’d showed him that she really cared. He’d come so close to telling her about what he saw and what made him different from anyone else. But at the last moment he worried that she might reject him too. He couldn’t stand thinking about that. He’d decided he couldn’t risk it.
If she finds out, she won’t have anything to do with you, a voice whispered in his mind.
“Shut up,” he said. “Just shut up. I don’t want to listen to you.” Brian covered his ears with his hands. “I need to get some sleep before work. Leave me alone. I mean it.”
Paty had given him a prescription for his medicine, but he hadn’t had time to get it filled. He was thinking about not taking it for a while. Sometimes he felt like he was sleepwalking after he took a pill, and he wanted to experience the emotions Paty stirred up in him.
Thankfully, the voice grew silent, and Brian closed his eyes, his warm blanket caressing him. He wondered what it would be like to be in Paty’s arms. Would it feel this good? Having a friend like Charlie was a good thing. A very good thing. Charlie was blue. Deep blue.
For some reason, his mind drifted to the people at the detective agency. Would they wonder about the insurance man? Would they investigate? Would they suspect him? They were orange. And their orange color was getting deeper. It was possible they would turn red someday. Not the good red like Paty. If they bothered him, they would become the bad red. And if that happened, he’d have to deal with them.
TONY FOUND IT INTERESTING how people’s phones reflected their lives. Jason had spent a lot of time texting people who never texted him back. And those who did? Glory, of course. Then there were texts from Chris and Kyle, although their calls eventually stopped as well. Chris because he disappeared, and Kyle because he was obviously trying to distance himself.
There was one guy who texted Jason more than anyone else. It didn’t take much research to pull up his mug shot and find out he’d been arrested multiple times for dealing drugs. Although Jason was careful not to say anything in his texts that mentioned drugs, it was pretty clear that’s what he was talking about. The dealer would email him places and times to meet him. There weren’t any texts from any of the teachers at the school. That didn’t mean they weren’t dealing drugs, but none of them appeared to be Jason’s dealer.
Tony had also found a girl who’d returned a few texts and then stopped a couple of weeks before Jason died. He clicked over to voicemail and found a message from her. Ashley.
“Look, Jason, until you make some changes, don’t call me. I don’t want any part of what you’re doing. I’ll always care about you, but I’m not going to watch you destroy yourself.”
Ashley sounded like someone who could have helped Jason if he’d let her. It was sad. Really sad.
Most of the other voicemails were from Glory trying to find out where he was. Telling him to come home. After a while, her voice sounded tired . . . flat. Had she finally given up on him?
“Anything interesting?” River asked.
“Nothing that pertains to the case. I checked his texts and his calls. Now I’m accessing his pictures. I know who his drug dealer was. We need to report it to the police. They may want this phone after we do.”
“You’re going to download his photos?”
Tony nodded. “Anything I think will help us.” As he scrolled through the photos, he saw pictures of Glory and her children. Jason had taken a picture of an old photo that showed him and Glory when they were younger. They were with an older couple, probably their parents. Maybe if they hadn’t died, Jason would have turned out differently. Glory was probably feeling a lot of guilt about what had happened. From her phone messages and texts, it was clear she’d loved her little brother.
Tony sighed. From reading his texts and remaining emails, it was clear that Jason wasn’t a nice person. He was foul-mouthed and, as Kyle had mentioned, he liked to make fun of people. Tony had heard once that hurting people hurt people. At the time, it sounded just a little glib, but in this situation, it seemed to fit. Jason was hurting from the loss of his parents. Somehow, he reflected that hurt back toward others.
It was odd reading messages from people who were dead. He felt as if he were getting to know Jason and Chris—but these comments were from ghosts. It was a little eerie.
He kept scrolling through the pictures. There were a few shots of a pretty girl with blond hair who smiled as her picture was being taken. Was this Ashley? One photo was inside someone’s living room. Another one was in a park, but there wasn’t a crowd. Maybe a picnic? None of the photos with the girl were taken at a concert. Tony noticed that as the pictures progressed, the girl’s smile began to fade. This was probably Ashley. Then her photos stopped. Again, Tony felt a deep sorrow for the boy who’d lost so much.
There were a few older photos of Chris. Tony recognized him from the pictures in his bedroom. A nice-looking young man with kind eyes and a genuine smile. But like Ashley, as time when on, his smile turned into a look of annoyance.
Selfies of Jason showed the deterioration that took place over time. His face became thinner. His eyes looked glassy and his smile sloppy. His hair grew longer, messier, and dirtier.
Tony clicked on another picture. A crowd scene in the park. It was the same park where Chris had disappeared. Was this what they were looking for?
“I think I’ve got something,” Tony said.
River got up from her chair and came over. “Yeah,” she said. “That looks like the amphitheater in Chesterfield. Where the concert was held.”
Tony had seen pictures of the amphitheater as part of his research about Chris’s disappearance. The distinctive stage was in the background. Tony checked the date of the photo. Sure enough, it was the same night Chris went missing.
“You’re right,” he said to River. “It looks like there are quite a few pictures here. I’ll send them to myself so we can look at them on my monitor. We’re going to need to enlarge them if we hope to make out the people in the crowd.”
River nodded. “Do it.”
It took him a few minutes to send all the shots, but once he finished, he put the phone down. “There are more photos I want to see before we give the phone to the police, but for now, let’s look at these from the concert.”
He pulled up his email and copied the pictures to his gallery. The first one was a selfie taken of Jason, Kyle, and Chris. They each had goofy smiles and looked genuinely excited to be at the concert. That night, it seemed that Chris and Kyle were determined to enjoy Jason’s company, no matter how irritated they’d become with him in the months leading up to the concert.
The next shot was of the amphitheater stage. A banner read The Eggheads. Tony had never heard of them. He quickly did a search.
“Some kind of alternative band,” he said. “Seems like their most popular song was titled ‘Love Hurts.’” He pulled up a picture of the band. There were three guys and one girl. They were dressed normally. Tony had expected black lipstick or lined eyes. They were maybe a little scraggly, but they looked like lots of other kids their age.
“I doubt Chris would be interested in some kind of nasty band,” River said. “Seems like the kind of kid who would be turned off by something like that.”
Tony grinned at her. “What do you consider a nasty band?”
She shook her head. “You know what I mean.”
“I think I do, but at some point, perhaps we should talk about the kinds of concerts you went to when you were a teenager.”
“I wasn’t allowed to attend rock concerts when I was a teenager,” she said. “My mother wouldn’t allow it.”
“And you never snuck out to go to one?”
River slapped playfully at his arm. “We can talk about that at some point, but not now.”
Tony chuckled and continued to scroll through the photos.
Even though she was trying hard to act normally, Tony could tell that she was concerned about the Strangler case. Tony was convinced they weren’t in any danger. Baker was violent and controlling. He wasn’t the kind of man who would share his power. Anyone who helped him would have to be easy to manipulate. Weak. Someone who wouldn’t act on his own. Even though Tony wasn’t afraid of him, he still hoped the FBI could find him. The women who were killed by Baker’s apprentice deserved complete justice, as did their families.
He turned his attention back to the pictures. At first, they were just of the three boys, but as the night grew darker, the crowd began to fill in.
“Look, we might not find a photo of someone staring at these boys in a threatening way, or doing something that will make us believe we’ve found the person who hurt them. It will take time to go through all of these pictures and separate them. We’ll use facial recognition to build some possibilities.” He sighed deeply. “This could be a lot of work. I did find a kid Kyle mentioned, as well as a couple of the teachers in Chris’s coded message.”
“Where did you find pictures to compare them to?”
Tony smiled. “It wasn’t hard. I copied them out of a high school yearbook.” He clicked a link that opened up a page with several photos.
“Okay. My next question is, how did you find a yearbook?”
“You can usually locate them online if you know where to look.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you could do that,” River said.
“I thought if we were going through the crowd, we would need to have some photos of possible suspects. These are pictures of Bonnie Kershaw, Marshall Meakham, Sherman Hadley, and Marilyn Bonners. Hadley was at the concert. And so was Kershaw.”
River looked carefully at the photos. “They don’t look like drug dealers, do they?”
“No, but drug dealers don’t always look like criminals. Remember that case we worked for the police in Davenport, Iowa?”
“Yeah, kids were dying from tainted drugs,” River said. “We wrote a profile that pointed to someone in a position of authority. Turned out to be their science teacher. As hard as we worked on that profile, I still didn’t think the dealer would be one of their teachers. When I was in school, we trusted our instructors.”
“I felt the same way,” Tony said, “but teachers are just people, you know. Besides, in the past several years, more and more of them have been arrested for illegal activity. Things change. The world is getting worse.”
“I guess so.”
Tony had just scrolled past another picture when River said, “Hey, go back. Look there.” She pointed to a kid who stood behind Jason. The look on his face was far from friendly.
“I found his picture in the yearbook. That’s Mark Loomis.”
River looked more closely. “He certainly doesn’t look happy to see these three guys.”
Tony nodded. “No, he doesn’t. Looks like we have another suspect.”