Sage awoke in a panic, and for a second or two he was convinced he was in his college dorm, but the layout of the room was all wrong. Then the last shred of his dream melted away, and he saw that he was in his Culver Creek apartment. As the dream disappeared, so too did Melodie. She had been about to say something, but he woke up too soon. He closed his eyes and tried to return to the dream, but that wasn’t the way dreams worked. With sleep and the dream out of reach, he rose from bed and wandered into his living room, where he had tacked up a map he’d sketched out of Lily Esposito’s neighborhood on butcher paper. It took up one whole wall of his not especially large living room.
The previous night before going to bed, he had cross-referenced all the witness statements taken after the murder with the addresses of each of the witnesses on the map. He had thought this monumental task would bring clarity to the confusing case, but as he studied his handiwork in the dim, gray early morning light, it all just looked like useless busywork. He was just spinning his wheels, nothing obvious was jumping out at him.
He had marked a star by one of the houses and now tried to remember why. The house was on a different street than Lily’s, but the backyards were nearly adjacent. He consulted the witness statements to refresh his mind as to why there was a star there, and then he remembered.
The starred house belonged to Raquel Walker, who had told police she saw a suspicious vehicle the day before Lily’s murder. It wasn’t much, but the house was close enough to Lily’s that maybe it might have been something. He felt like he was grasping at straws. Something about the description of the vehicle nagged at him. Raquel wasn’t sure of the make or model of the older blue sedan. “A real beater” was the phrase she had used to describe it.
Something about it seemed significant. Did it match the description of the vehicle belonging to Rick, Lily’s estranged father? He flipped through the papers from the old case that now filled every surface of his living room until he found the one with the information on Rick, but no, Rick drove a pickup truck.
There had been another description of a car like the one Raquel Walker had seen, wasn’t there? He was sure it was in the files somewhere. He wasted forty-five minutes combing through the mess of papers before he decided to shower and get ready for work. It was as frustrating as his dream.
It figured that the one morning he was late, his boss was there waiting for his arrival. Rayanne Lawrence didn’t need to glance at the clock or a watch as she stood beside his desk. He could read the disappointment in her eyes.
He stammered out an apology, but she cut him off.
“I need you to go down to the high school,” she said. “There was an incident last night.”
Before he had a chance to ask what sort of incident, she returned to her office. So, he learned the particulars from Principal Brim as they stood in front of a trophy case now taped over with plastic.
“There was glass everywhere,” Brim said, waving his arm to indicate the stretch of hallway. “I had the janitor clean it up first thing, for safety reasons.”
Sage pulled back a corner of plastic and peered into the display case. He hadn’t seen what it looked like before, but judging by the sparse contents, he guessed that more than a few trophies had been stolen. Crude graffiti marred some of the photos left behind in the case.
“Do you think it was students?” Sage asked.
“Former students,” Brim said. “I can give you their names and a copy of the security footage.”
Sage wondered why Lawrence had sent him here. This wasn’t something in need of any detective skills. He followed Brim back to his office, where the principal handed him the list of four male suspects and a USB stick with the security camera footage. Sage glanced at the list, and one of the names leapt out at him.
“Kevin Arlo,” Sage read. “Is he—”
“Steve’s son.” Brim nodded. “Steve’s a nice guy, but Kevin . . . well, let’s just say this isn’t the first time there’s been trouble with him.”
“When did he graduate?” Sage asked.
“A couple of years ago,” Brim said. “Since then he’s been hanging around this town going nowhere fast. Culver Creek’s not exactly awash in opportunities. The kids who don’t go away to college tend to spend their time getting drunk and acting like assholes.”
Sage almost said the description could probably apply to the kids who went away to college, too, but he didn’t want to make it sound like he was dunking on Culver Creek, because from his experience, the phenomenon was more of a universal thing.
Wisps of last night’s dream came back to him, and they blended with his actual memories of that weekend Melodie came out to see him at school. Sage might not have been breaking into high schools and vandalizing trophy cases, but like Kevin Arlo and his pals, he had been a drunken asshole. He could see the look of disgust in his sister’s eyes, and it felt like someone was taking a knife and stabbing him in the gut.
With a start, he realized Brim had asked him a question.
“Sorry, what?” Sage said.
“Can you arrange for them to be given community service hours?” Brim asked. “It’s about time they started giving back in some way.”
“That’s all up to the judge,” Sage said.
When Sage found Kevin Arlo hanging out in his buddy’s backyard in the trailer park out by the highway, the young man denied everything.
“You’re on camera,” Sage said.
“So,” Kevin said. “Do you know who my father is?”
“Yeah, I do,” Sage said. “You want me to call him and have him come down here?”
“You can’t do that,” Kevin said. “I’m an adult.”
So that was the kind of logic he was dealing with. Sage had better things to do with his time than deal with oversized juvenile delinquents, and he knew it was only because Kevin was Steve’s son that he was even here in the first place. He really wasn’t in the mood to deal with this today.
He hated Kevin Arlo because he was the sort of loser who contributed nothing to society, but that wasn’t it. What he really despised was how much this arrogant, self-centered jerk reminded him of himself.
“If you don’t wake up soon, someone’s going to get hurt,” Sage said. “You want that on your conscience?”
“Are you threatening me?” Kevin asked as he leaned forward and fixed Sage with a defiant stare.
“Would it make a difference if I was?” Sage wished someone had been there to give him a wakeup call, but he realized that was exactly what Melodie had been doing there. The problem was he had been as thick and senseless as Kevin Arlo. “Look, it will make things easier all around if you just come down to the station with me.”
“What, now?” Kevin asked. “I’m in the middle of painting my truck.”
He waved a hand at the pickup parked behind him, covered in a still-wet coat of gray primer. Sage blinked at Kevin’s truck, but he wasn’t really seeing it. What he was seeing were police notes in Bill’s not quite illegible hand, a car with a homemade paint job, an empty can of gray primer spray paint found beside a driveway. The car hadn’t jumped out at him when he reread the notes this morning because the color was wrong.
“Come with me now or I send your father back here with a warrant to arrest you,” Sage said. “It’s your choice.”
Kevin jumped up from the plastic lawn chair and practically ran to Sage’s car.
That night at his apartment, Sage flipped back through the old case file. He lost track of how many pages he had gone through before he found it, but his heart skipped a beat as he read the information scrawled there: 1986 Pontiac Grand Am, belonging to a Mr. Bud Ivan.
Sage went over to his hand-drawn map to locate Bud Ivan’s address.
“Bingo,” he said aloud in the empty apartment.