PATTY RHODES STOOD taller than Bethany by several inches, all skin and bones and legs. Gangly, she called herself, and although Bethany always shut up her rants of self-pity, she didn’t disagree. Not that Patty was ugly by a long shot. She was just developing. Braces, long stringy brown hair, a few hard-fought pimples, no chest—what could she say? Not ugly at all, but not the girl she wanted to be.
That would be Bethany, the girl with straight teeth, long flowing hair, and skin as clear as the day she turned six. Oddly enough, Bethany didn’t really want to be Bethany.
They walked down Barton Creek Boulevard toward the Saint Michael’s campus around the next bend, Patty with a copy of Youth Nation stuck in her face.
“You’re going to fall over, reading that trash,” Bethany said.
Patty flipped a page. “You know, not all the girls in here look like they belong. Check her out.” She shoved the page at Bethany just long enough for her to see a quite plain blonde dressed in a red T-shirt, but then the catalog was in front of Patty’s face again. “I suppose so all of us lowlifes can identify and buy the clothes, huh?”
“Give me a break,” Bethany said. “It’s all stupid anyway.” She stuck out her hand, and Patty plopped the catalog into her palm with a sigh.
“Yeah, well, anytime you want me to join you in stupid New York, just say the word. Stevie ask you out for homecoming yet?”
“Fat chance. I’m not going this year.”
“What? Don’t be an idiot.”
“Serious.”
Her friend frowned, no doubt burdened by the complications faced by any sixteen-year-old these days.
“You honestly don’t see it?” Bethany asked. “All this stupidness?”
“What stupidness? I don’t see what the big deal is, and you’re starting to annoy me with all your stupidness talk. Okay, you’re freaking out with the realization that you’re going to be famous. You got guys hitting on you in the halls, you got freaking New York calling you every day, you have a mother who gives a rip. Wow, so tough. Hard life there. So you’re freaking out because it’s all so stupid. Well, forgive me for not getting it.”
The mother bit stuck in Bethany’s head. Patty’s father had left her and her sister when they were much younger and her mother had gone off the deep end. She’d gotten all the money she needed, enough to send them to private school and live in the neighborhood, but left alone, she’d drowned herself in alcohol.
“You’re right, I should be thankful. And I suppose I am. I mean, you see me turning the cover down? But like… it’s all pretty shallow, you have to admit, Patty. I don’t know, it’s not like I need the money. I don’t want the attention.”
“The guys?”
She felt her face flush. “Okay, so I don’t mind that.”
“So quit fooling yourself. You’re just playing it to the hilt.”
“Please.”
“Okay, so Broadway Bethany would never do that, I get it. But you do like having all those boys watch you strut your stuff across the campus headed to theology class, don’t you kid me, baby.”
Her mention of the class derailed Bethany’s train of thought. Theo class and Youth Nation had a lot in common, actually. Both sold fantasy based on something larger than life.
“Call me Sister Bethany,” she said.
“Even better. They could dress you up like a nun for the front-cover shoot.”
“Dreams of the afterlife, enter if you dare.” Bethany snapped her fingers and hit a few beats. The words from one of Brianna’s singles rolled off her tongue. “Sister, sister, what you doing tonight?”
“Makin’ love and till the morning light,” Patty sang, joining her friend in a slinky but surprisingly supple move. “Bring it on, baby!”
They laughed and turned into the back parking lot.
Bethany dropped the bomb then, while Patty was distracted by her own sexiness. “You really wanna go with?”
“To homecoming?”
“To New York.”
Patty gasped and pulled up hard. “You serious?”
“They said I could—”
But Patty didn’t need to hear more to know that Bethany was dead serious. She uttered a short shriek, then shoved her hand over her mouth and glanced around to see if anyone had seen her in her moment of uncoolness.
“Sorry.” She promptly forgot her blown cover. “Serious.”
Bethany gave her a grin.
“When? This is so cool. You think they’ll let me, you know”—she batted her eyes—“show my stuff?”
“I doubt that’s what they had in mind.”
“But it’s me, right? You’re taking me.”
“You think I’d take”—she thought better of mentioning any names that might come back on her—“who else?”
“That’s freakin’ awesome, girl!”
“On one condition.”
“ ’Course.”
“You don’t tell anyone until we leave.”
“What? No basking in the glory?”
“And you quit all this stupidness about being famous. Just play cool.”
“Coolness. I swear.”
Bono began to sing “Beautiful Day” on her iPhone. Mother’s ringtone. Bethany tapped the screen and angled for the main entrance.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Hello, angel. You’re headed back from lunch?” Their rental house was close enough to the school for Bethany to sneak off for lunch now and then, as Patty and she’d just done.
“He called?”
“No. But I talked to his base commander, and he’s in the country. I asked Burt to come over for dinner tonight. You okay with that?”
Bethany had learned about Ryan’s call five days earlier and been confronted with the prospect of his immediate return. Something about him having a change of heart, Mother had said. He needed a break from the war. He’d had a close call, that’s all she knew. But she had to agree with Celine: too little too late.
Ryan represented everything that was wrong with life. It had come to Bethany in a moment of clarity as she showered the next morning. Her father was a false hope.
He occupied the place of savior, but he’d failed miserably as savior and, although he wasn’t a terrible person, he wasn’t what he stood for, not at all.
He wasn’t lover to Celine or father to her. As such he was a kind of enemy. Celine needed someone close to her during this time, when she felt threatened by that enemy.
“Of course,” she said. “What time?”
“Six o’clock. You walking home tonight?”
“Why not; another five minutes of exercise never hurt.”
“I thought we’d make chili.”
“Sounds good. Don’t worry, Mom. He might be a deadbeat, but he won’t hurt us.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He’s not the kind.”
“I’d feel better with Burt there, just the same.”
One small benefit of Ryan’s sudden announcement that he was coming home was that she and Mother were on the same side of an issue for once. Bethany thought she could grow used to the feeling.
“What if he comes this afternoon?” she asked.
“I don’t plan on being there. You have practice till six, right?”
“Right.”
Her mother paused. “I’m going through with it this time, Bethany. If he shows up, I’m going to tell him.”
“I think you should. Don’t worry, Mother. Go make a call to one of your friends or something. Take your mind off it.”
“See you tonight.”
She hung up thinking it might be nice to see the DA again. He was a snake; even Mother could see his shiny scales. But Celine was attracted to snakes, and at least this particular one was well-behaved, caring, and successful. More important, her mother seemed crazy about him.
“She’s going through with the divorce?” Patty said.
And with those words Bethany’s world darkened, as if her friend had flipped a switch. It was the word divorce, she thought. It suddenly reminded her just how pointless all of this nonsense about New York really was.
All the cool clothes in the world didn’t cover up a black heart. For a passing moment Bethany hated herself for going along with Celine’s dreams for a modeling career. Did her mother think fancy dinners and trips to New York could make up for her and Ryan’s own sickness?
For that matter, the whole world was sick, Bethany included.
Seeing her darkening mood, Patty shrugged. “It’s not like he’s around anyway, right?”
“Right.”
But none of it felt right.
Despite the fact that she was the envy of half the school, Bethany felt as low as she could remember feeling. Which in and of itself was a pretty sick thing.
——
FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD how much of the best investigative work depended on intuition. There was the patience required to sift though mounds of data or to sit for hours in a car, waiting for something to happen. There was the eye for detail to ascertain which minutiae were askew, what oddity or normality was out of place. There was the logic required to string together dots on a graph to form a meaningful picture. Intuition could point you to where none of the other evidence pointed. Evidence became the case. Sometimes, intuition was the voice that whispered a suggestion or two when all else failed.
After eight days back on the case, intuition was telling Ricki Valentine that her failure to produce new evidence that would implicate Phil Switzer in the BoneMan case wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But she knew by the tone in his voice that her boss, Mort Kracker, wasn’t a happy camper.
She nodded at Derek Johnson, a junior investigator she’d worked with a couple of times, and knocked on Kracker’s door.
“Come in.”
Ricki stepped in and closed the door. “Afternoon, sir.”
“Have a seat, Agent Valentine.”
She sat and crossed her legs. Kracker sat behind his big oak desk facing her with his large, square head. She could swear someone had taken a cricket bat to the man’s forehead when he was a kid. They’d missed his bulbous nose but flattened the top of his head proper.
Kracker set his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together to form a large teepee. “The ruling just came down from the judge,” he said.
Ricki’s heart skipped a beat. “Already.”
“Exactly.”
Meaning a quick decision meant a definite decision in a case that felt anything but definite to both of them.
“And?”
Kracker put a large hand on a sheet of paper and slid it next to a neatly stacked pile on his meticulously arranged desk. “He threw the whole thing out.”
Ricki blinked. She’d half expected this to happen. It wrenched her gut to hear that the case she’d spent over a year on was just tossed out because of a judicial hearing on the evidence. The possibility of planted lab specimens.
“Switzer’s going free,” Kracker said.
“When?”
“Now. He’ll be out before nightfall.”
Ricki nodded. She wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected, but judging by his steady gaze, he wasn’t pleased. A few foul words appropriately expressing her rage at such a terrible turn of events might serve her career well. But she wasn’t feeling enough rage to work up the words.
“You look crushed,” he said.
“I’m tired. Just tired.”
“You don’t look tired. You look… fine.”
“I’m not.”
“Good. Neither am I. We just had our faces rubbed in it, in case you hadn’t figured it out.”
“That I’m okay with,” Ricki said. “What bothers me more is that BoneMan is free. Whether or not Switzer’s guilty.”
He nodded once, very slowly.
She added to her assessment. “Unless, by chance, he just happened to get picked up for another crime.”
Kracker’s lips formed a meaty frown. “I’m receiving some pressure to take you off the case. I hope you can understand that.”
“I can, sir. The public has to be fed someone, why not me?”
“This isn’t about appeasing the public. It’s about your failure to put or keep the right man behind bars.”
“Then reassign me. Put someone better on the case. Some junior agent who knows more about BoneMan than I do. Heck, tell the whole city that they can now sleep easy because the one agent who is best equipped to nail BoneMan to the wall has been removed from the case so the FBI can save face.”
“I wouldn’t put it so succinctly, but I see you get the point.”
“And I suppose the DA would love you for it.”
“I wouldn’t know; I haven’t talked to him since I heard.”
“I thought you two shared all your secrets.”
He went on without a hint of offense. “We work closely, yes. It’s better that way. And one way or another, we’re going to get to the bottom of this case. The only question right now is whether we do that with you or without you.”
Ricki stood and walked to the window, hands on hips, aware of her black skirt hanging delicately just above her knees, her black power heels that looked too prissy, too refined. At times like this she wouldn’t mind being a foot taller and six inches broader in the shoulders. A few extra parts in the right places wouldn’t hurt either.
She faced Kracker. “Your call, obviously. But you know that it’ll take any other investigator a month, best case scenario, to settle on the same understanding I have of this case.”
“What understanding, Ricki? What exactly do you know?”
“For starters, there is a better than even chance that we do have the wrong guy,” she snapped, pointing out the window at some imaginary suspect. “The evidence fits, yes, and with the blood dangling in front of us we made sure of that. But the evidence also fits a thousand other men walking the streets. Don’t tell me you’re sure we have the right man.”
“I didn’t say we did. But yes, I believe we do.”
“There’s two ways you can approach this. You can either spin your wheels, scouring the evidence from one of the three cases we didn’t try Switzer for so we wouldn’t get hammered by double jeopardy—be my guest. Or you can assume that BoneMan’s out there, snickering at all the foolishness in the papers. At the very least, let me lead a new investigation. Let me pick up where I left off two years ago.”
“Pick up where? You don’t have another body.”
“No.” She crossed her arms. “But I have some new thoughts.”
His brow arched.
“Just thoughts, that’s all they are now.”
He waited.
“Okay.” Ricki paced back and forth in front of him. “The last thing I was working on before the blood evidence surfaced was a standard military-issue KA-BAR knife we found in the barn at El Paso and another at the murder scene on Fourth Street. The first one couldn’t be linked directly to the El Paso case, but we were quite sure the second knife had been used to sever one of the cords that held the girl.”
“The evidence proved useless.”
“Yes, at the time it did because we honed in on Switzer and found no connections between him and the knives or the military. Could have been anyone who picked them up at any army surplus store, right?”
“Go on.”
“Assuming that Switzer’s not our man, I’m left wondering what kind of military man might have killed seven women in the space of six months and then disappeared.”
“And?”
“And I can’t help thinking its someone who isn’t killing in Texas because he’s not in Texas.”
“Because he’s been deployed for the last two years.”
“It’s a thought.” Ricki shrugged. “We don’t know. The point is, until we get off Switzer and start looking at other possibilities, we’ll never ask the right questions. I should be talking to the military instead of trying to get permission to do my job. My only priority should be to stop him before he kills again.”
“Assuming he hasn’t.” Kracker blew out some air. “Now you have me talking like you.”
“If I’m wrong? What’s the downside?”
They both knew there was none.
Kracker spread his huge hands on the desk and padded the surface with thick fingers. “Okay, Valentine. Go chase this ghost. But if the evidence even sniffs Switzer’s way, I want to know about it.”
She started toward the door. “You should know that one of the threads I have to track back to the source is the blood evidence.”
“No, Ricki, I don’t believe I do know that.”
“Someone planted the blood, sir. I need to know who.”
“You’re assuming that someone planted the evidence.”
“I’m assuming that Switzer’s not the guy, which means someone set him up. Knowing who did could lead us—”
“Leave it alone, Valentine. If someone from inside this office planted evidence, I’ll deal with it. But that’s my call, not yours. I don’t want you sniffing around my operation, you got that?”
Ricki lifted both hands in a sign of surrender. “Got it. No sniffing around our beloved FBI. I swear it.”
She pulled the door open.
“Or the DA’s office,” Kracker said.
But she was already walking down the hall and was in no mood to ask for any clarification.