by Amy Ross
None of this feels real yet. My brain doesn’t know what to do with the image of Danny Carew, beaten and bloody on that slab. I don’t think I’ve even fully registered that he’s dead. I want to go back in time, to that moment when my biggest problem was that my sometimes-maybe-boyfriend flew the coop the first time we had sex. I want the space and time to be angry at Jek about that, and hurt, and to think about whether I can stand to speak to him ever again. But I can’t focus on anything like that with Danny’s murder on my mind, and knowing that Jek might be implicated in Hyde’s savage act...and me along with them, now that I’ve obstructed justice by taking that phone.
It’s all too much to process right now. I feel disjointed and unreal, and without quite knowing what I’m doing, I find myself turning into the school parking lot. I’m overcome by the need to be around normal people who know nothing of what has happened. To surround myself with their obliviousness.
The school is silent as I walk the main hallway except for the wind screeching through the gaps in doors. It’s the middle of third period, and everyone is in their classrooms. I consider going to my third period calculus class, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself by entering late. I decide to head straight for my fourth period class and wait there for it to begin. But that’s not where my feet take me. Instead, I find myself walking down a different hallway entirely, and I don’t know why until the bell rings and Camila walks out of her classroom.
Camila. Of course. She’s exactly who I need to see right now. She’ll help me figure out what to do.
To my surprise, Camila’s neutral expression turns to dismay as soon as she sees me, and I wonder to what extent today’s trauma is written on my face.
“Lulu,” she says, “I’m so sorry.” She pulls me into a tight hug.
“Oh,” I say, bewildered. “You’ve heard. News travels fast in this town.”
“I found out first thing this morning from Karina, Lane’s sister. I called her to see if she wanted a ride to school, and she broke down. When I saw you weren’t in school today, I figured you’d heard, too.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to clear away the fog from my brain. “I can’t really believe it,” I say into her shoulder. “Poor Danny. He never did anything to hurt anyone.”
Camila pulls back from our hug and gives me a strange look. “Danny?” she says.
“Danny Carew,” I tell her, hardly considering my words. “He was murdered this morning in the park.”
I realize my mistake when I see Camila’s eyes go big.
“Holy shit!” she exclaims. “What the hell happened? How do you know?”
I shush her quickly—clearly whatever happened to Danny isn’t public knowledge yet, and I don’t want to be the source of any wild rumors. “Come on, in here,” I say, pulling her into a nearby bathroom. I check the stalls for potential eavesdroppers before telling her about my early-morning phone call from the cops, and my trip down to the morgue to identify Danny’s body. I don’t tell her about spending the night with Jek—it’s not relevant to the issue at hand. At least, I want to believe it isn’t.
“Christ,” she says once she’s heard me out. “Danny Carew, of all people. He could be annoying, sure, but who would kill him? Everyone loves Danny. Do the cops have any leads?”
I’m about to tell her about the witness description and how I led the cops to Hyde’s trailer, but at the last moment I bite my tongue. It seems wiser at this point to keep some information to myself. No point in having gossip and conjecture floating all over town before the cops have even started their investigation. I shrug and shake my head, but Camila knows me too well to let that slip by. I see her eyes narrow, and I rush to cut off any more questions.
“I don’t understand, though,” I say. “If you didn’t know about Danny, then what were you babbling about when I ran into you?”
“Oh,” says Camila, suddenly reminded of the other drama of the morning. “That was about Lane! You mean you haven’t heard? I thought for sure you would have, you’re better friends with him than I am.”
My heart seems to still. “What happened to Lane?”
Camila hoists herself up on the bathroom sinks. “No one knows, really,” she says. “He left the house early this morning. Woke his sister up to ask her where their dad keeps the bolt cutters, then told her that he had to run an errand. Next thing she knows, her mom’s getting a call from the highway patrol. They say they found him just outside town, near that old grain elevator. He was sitting in his car by the side of the road, and the trooper figured he must have a flat tire or engine trouble, so he pulled off to check on him. But he was totally uncommunicative. He wouldn’t roll down his window or even look up. Just kept mumbling incoherently to himself.”
I shake my head, unable to make sense of this information. It doesn’t sound like Lane at all. “What...” I begin, my mouth dry. “What happened to him?”
“The cops said they sent a couple of officers to the spot to see if they could find any clues in the area, and they came up with a recently used syringe. So they’re thinking it must be drug related.”
I gasp and Camila fixes me with a look.
“Come on, Lulu. You can’t act like you didn’t know Lane was a druggie.”
“What? No, I...of course, I guess he was, yes.”
What I don’t say is, but he didn’t have a problem. Shooting up? That’s what the kegger-circuit kids are getting into, not my friends. Lane was a dabbler, an experimenter...not an addict. But then, maybe I’m not the best judge of that anymore. I think of the box of spilled hypodermics I saw in Jek’s sink. At the time, I just assumed they were for transferring chemicals or something. Maybe my familiarity with Jek and his little experiments has made me blind to what addiction looks like.
Still, it’s hard to wrap my head around.
“Lane, shooting up? Alone? I’ve never seen or heard of Lane doing anything like that.”
“Well,” says Camila, “obviously he had let things get further than any of us realized. I don’t know what drove him to it, but for now, he’s a real mess. They’ve got him in the hospital under observation.”
“Is he going to be okay? When are they going to let him out?”
“I don’t know,” she says, giving me a sympathetic look. “All I’ve heard is that it’s too soon to tell.”
That’s all the info Camila has, so we head back to class. But I’ve hardly had time to seat myself when an announcement comes over the PA saying that we’re to be dismissed early due to the tragic loss of one of our fellow students, Danvers Carew. All around me I hear expressions of shock. Just wait until they find out it was murder, I think grimly to myself.
Camila texts me about going over to her house, but I just want to be alone right now, so I go straight home. I lie down on my bed, trying to shake off the horrors of this morning by losing myself in sleep, but every time my eyes close, Danny’s bashed-in head appears in my mind, vivid and gruesome. When I try to force myself away from that image, my thoughts turn to Jek and how he disappeared just when I most needed him. Then I think about the fact that I still haven’t heard anything at all from him, so I can’t tell if I should be more furious or worried. Then there’s Lane and his mysterious breakdown this morning—the image of him, all alone on the highway and babbling incoherently to himself, chills me to the bone. And from that, my mind has no place to go but back to Hyde and my conviction that somehow he must be to blame for all the ways my once-predictable world has been shattered.
It’s all too much. I feel like a bubble is about to burst inside me, so I shove it down as far as I can and focus on the only thing I can find to calm my nerves right now: the facts. Everything I’ve learned this morning is jumbled together in my head and it’s making me feel crazy. But if I can just pull it all apart and look at the individual pieces, the way I do with the busted electronics in my
bedroom, then maybe I can find the pattern.
I sit up on my bed and force myself to think. It can’t be coincidence that Lane went nuts, Carew got murdered and Jek ran out on me all on the same day, can it? But what does it all mean? And how is Hyde mixed up in everything?
I keep sifting through all the data, but it doesn’t add up. My fingers slip into my purse and draw out my phone—maybe some old texts can help jog my memory—when I catch a flash of gold and remember that I impulsively snagged Hyde’s phone from the crime scene.
I still can’t quite believe I did that. I was convinced that something on this phone would incriminate Jek, but what if it’s just the opposite? What if the information on this phone would exonerate him completely, and I put him at further risk by taking it? I stare down at the phone in frustration.
There’s only one way to know for sure.
I swipe the screen. As I expected, there’s a passcode required to get any further. But hanging out on tech forums has taught me a few things. Hacking it would be a little tricky, but doable. A half hour’s work, and I could get access to Hyde’s address book, his messages, his emails, his texts...
The phone shifts in my fingers and I realize my hand is sweating. This shimmering gadget holds the key to all my questions—not just about what happened this morning, but everything that’s been going on between Jek and Hyde for months, and everything Jek’s been hiding from me. The mystery has been gnawing at me for so long, my mouth is dry at the very idea of seeing it all spelled out for me in glowing pixels.
I raise the phone and tap it against my lips. What I’m thinking of...it would be crossing a major ethical boundary. I’ve told Jek before that I believe he’s entitled to his secrets; hacking into Hyde’s phone to read their private messages would be a huge breach of trust. Of course, the murder investigation does change the situation a bit. If Hyde has texts on here that talk about what happened with Danny, that evidence could be vital to the murder investigation. Even if not, there’s sure to be a record of Hyde’s various other crimes that might interest the police.
But no...no matter how I spin it, the idea is indefensible: the real reason I want to look through the phone is to satisfy my own curiosity. There’s no way I can justify that. The only ethical choice is to hand the phone back to the police right now and let them deal with whatever is on there.
CHAPTER 18
Later that evening, I finally hear from Jek: a brief text thanking me for the tip earlier. That’s it.
My relief that he’s okay and not in police custody wins out over my anger at him for running off this morning, but I know it’s time for us to have a serious talk about everything going on, so I tell him I’m coming over. Jek may still be grounded, but I know Puloma won’t bar their door to me.
When I get there, I find Jek looking flustered, his hair in wayward spirals as if he’s been clutching and tugging at it, but otherwise all right. He keeps swooping around his room, fiddling with his materials and instruments in an aimless sort of way.
“Watch out,” he says sharply as I start to cross toward him. I freeze and look at him expectantly. “Broken glass,” he explains. “Had a little accident.”
I look down and, sure enough, shards of clear glass are scattered across the laboratory floor. At first I assume Jek just dropped a beaker or flask in the course of an experiment, but this time it appears that his great glass cabinet was the casualty. One of the panes near the center has been thoroughly smashed.
“Oh,” I say. “How did it happen?”
Jek shrugs. “Accident,” he repeats. “Haven’t had a chance to clean it up yet. Today’s been kind of busy.”
I look back to him. I’m not at all sure how to broach the conversation we need to have, so I decide to just play it by ear. “The cops,” I say, because it seems as good a place to start as any. “How did that go?”
Jek gives up on whatever he’s doing and collapses on his couch, so I sit beside him. He rubs a hand over his face. “Okay, I guess,” he says. “Considering. They questioned me a long time, but at least they didn’t arrest me.”
I keep a close watch on his face. “But they do think you had something to do with Danny’s murder?”
Jek shrugs uneasily. “Well,” he says, “they had their reasons—my name on that trailer, and they figured out that the murder weapon was my bike lock. Then they found my bike abandoned just outside town.”
“Guess that didn’t look so good.”
He glances over at me a little nervously, as if just picking up on my mood. “No,” he admits. “But they had a description of the murderer, and I didn’t fit.”
“No,” I agree. “They’re looking for Hyde. But they must know that you and he were close.”
Jek nods. “They wanted me to tell them everything I knew about him, and my connection to him.”
I hold my breath, but Jek doesn’t elaborate. “So what did you say?”
Jek shoots me another nervous look, then stands up and returns to sorting his lab equipment. After a moment, he mumbles something I can’t make out.
“I’m sorry?”
He sighs and reaches out one hand to stabilize a wobbling beaker. “I told them...” Jek takes a breath. “I told them we were lovers,” he says simply, his hand still on the beaker. “Just like you said. That he talked me into setting him up with his own place. But I didn’t know much about him, really, and he ran out on me.” He looks up and turns a steady gaze on me. “I told them that he played me for a fool.”
I nod slowly. “And they bought that?”
Jek shrugs and looks back down at his glassware. “Seemed to.”
“But it’s not true,” I say, my voice quiet but firm. “Is it?”
Jek looks up, startled. I pull the pink-gold phone from my purse and sit there, idly flipping it over and over between my fingers.
“What...?” he tries after a moment. Then his eyes focus on my fingers. “That’s Hyde’s phone.”
“So it is.”
Jek swallows. “What are you doing with it?” he says.
I stand and cross the room to lean against the counter. I put the phone down between us, feeling an icy thrill that, for once, I have caught him off guard.
“I took it from his trailer.”
Jek stares at me. “With the police standing right there? Why?”
“Because,” I say, keeping my voice cool and even. “I thought there might be something incriminating on it.”
Jek turns away from me, bristling. “What, so now you’re trying to protect Hyde?”
“No, Jek,” I say firmly. “I’m trying to protect you. If Hyde texted you about drug deals, or some secret he was blackmailing you with...or if he called you after Danny’s murder. You could be held as an accessory.”
Jek inhales sharply. “That was quick thinking,” he says after a moment, returning his attention to his glassware. “Thank you, I guess. But you don’t have to worry. There’s nothing like that on the phone.”
“No,” I agree. “There isn’t.”
Jek’s hand slips. A test tube rolls along the counter and shatters on the ground.
“If you ever talk to Hyde again,” I continue, keeping my voice as steady as possible, even as my blood is buzzing, “you might give him some advice about tech security. Someone with Hyde’s kinds of secrets should really have better protection than the standard lock-screen.”
Jek looks up, ignoring the broken glass. “You hacked into Hyde’s phone?”
“And I searched his messages. Texts, call logs, browser history, emails. I found records of all kinds of illegal activities. Not to mention some seriously depraved messages...to me, to Camila, to almost everyone we know. Hyde definitely got around, and he earned every bit of his reputation.” I lean back a little, resting my hands lightly on the counter. “Funny thing, thou
gh,” I say. “In all those texts, there’s not a single exchange with you. No calls, either. No emails. You guys were supposedly great friends, but you never talked.” I look him directly in the eye. “Weird, isn’t it?”
Jek doesn’t move a muscle. “I can explain,” he says at last, his voice slightly hoarse.
“I really wish you would. I’m starting to think I’m going crazy.”
Jek turns away and takes a long moment to rub a beaker with his shirt cuff. Then he puts it down and turns back to me. “Hyde was my dealer,” he says at last, his voice now clear and confident. “Most of what we talked about was drug related. I made him delete all our conversations as a matter of course.”
I watch his face, thinking this over. Hailee told me ages ago that Hyde was dealing Jek’s wares for him. I’d seen the evidence myself when I was in Chicago. But as I look at Jek before me, something clicks and I realize that’s not what he’s saying.
“You don’t just mean he dealt your drugs for you,” I say. “Hyde was your supplier.”
Jek presses his lips together, then nods and lets out a long slow breath.
“God,” I say, closing my eyes as the pieces start to fit themselves together in my brain. “This explains so much. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier. But you’ve always been the guy other people come to for drugs...it never occurred to me that you would get hooked on someone else’s stuff.”
I open my eyes and nod for him to go on.
“Hyde had access to something more powerful than anything I made in my experiments,” Jek says, leaning back against the sink, his arms crossed over his chest. “I thought I could handle it, because I was experienced in these things. But every time I tried to quit, he kept tempting me back.” He looks down, his shoulders tense. “I hardly recognized myself.”
My brain is reeling from this new information, and I move back to the couch to sit down. “This morning,” I say, half to myself, “when Camila told me about Lane...until then, I’d never thought about drugs as a problem for anyone in our crowd. Even then, I didn’t make the connection to what you’ve been going through.”