The whole case was just weird. From the fact that Senator Malley’s office had assigned her to the case, despite her relationship to the town and lack of jurisdiction, to the fact that the people of the town didn’t really seem that upset that someone was beheading their friends and neighbors. Glen had been interviewing cops, and neighbors and friends of Shannon’s for days, and everyone was cooperative and pleasant. Too cooperative. Too pleasant. Their interviews almost seemed…rehearsed.
What was also interesting, actually amazing, was that no one in the town would speak to the press. Not a word. Usually, especially in small towns like Clare Point, citizens were fighting for their one minute of fame. Typically in these cases, old school photos of the victims were plastered in newspapers and on the evening news. Everyone wanted to talk about what a good man or woman the victim had been or what good grades he or she had gotten in spelling in the third grade. But Clare Point had been so tight-lipped after the previous murders that local TV stations hadn’t even bothered to send a crew when Shannon was killed. There had been nothing more than an inch of column space in the state’s largest paper.
And the good citizens of Clare Point weren’t the only ones keeping their mouths shut. Fia was remaining very closemouthed about how her interviews were going. She was the one making the calls in the case, deciding each day who would interview which people. He couldn’t help getting the idea that she was trying to keep him away from certain members of the town; her uncle the police chief, an old codger named Victor Simpson, and Jim Kahill, her father, of all people.
“Thanks for the tea and brownies.” Glen smiled at Mary Kay as he made a beeline for the swinging kitchen door, captured tray in his hands. As he entered the dining room, he spotted Fia on the floor scooping up papers. She had her cell phone to her ear.
“Because I can’t say for sure I can make it,” she said curtly. “Next week would be better.”
Glen set the tray on the end of the dining room table and went around the other side to help Fia collect her notes on the floor. She shook her head at him, but he ignored her.
“I really can’t talk right now.” On all fours, she glanced at Glen. “See what you can do for next week.”
“Who was that?” he asked when she hung up. They were both still collecting the papers scattered on the floor.
“Um…hair appointment.” She gave a little laugh, not looking up. “Standing appointment. Forgot all about it.”
She wasn’t a very good liar. Why would she lie about the call?
Glen watched her out of the corner of his eye.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “I’m such a klutz.”
He got to his feet, two folders stuffed with notes in his hands. “Fee, what’s going on?”
“Going on?” She frowned. “Nothing’s going on. That’s the problem. I’ve been going over my interviews and not a single person seems to have seen Shannon after she left work. Not until she was walking up the driveway to her house before she was murdered.”
“You think she was with someone?” Glen didn’t want to make accusations and certainly didn’t care who the waitress did or didn’t sleep with, but she’d come on pretty strong with him a couple of times. Surely it had crossed Fia’s mind that she was probably having sex with someone, a pretty girl her age. Maybe more than one guy. Maybe it was someone’s husband or boyfriend. “Someone who doesn’t want to admit to it?”
“It’s possible. But that kind of stuff usually comes out pretty quickly in small towns like this.”
There was no small town like this one, except in a Stephen King novel, Glen wanted to say. But, following Fia’s cue over the last couple of days, he kept his mouth shut.
“I brought you some tea. Brownies. I know how you are with your chocolate. Want me to pour you some?” He set the folders on the edge of the table, resisting the impulse to glance at her handwritten notes. She wasn’t really sharing much of what she’d learned from her interviews with him. But his notes were half the volume, no, a third of hers. He wasn’t getting much more than name, rank, and serial numbers from the men and women he’d been talking to, the people who had been at the pub the night Shannon died.
So what was Fia writing down? And what were the lists of names he’d seen her stuff into one of the file folders?
“Tea? Ah, Glen, that was nice of you.” She picked up her cell phone, glancing at the screen. “But I have to run. I’m meeting Kaleigh and her friends for breakfast at the diner.”
“Breakfast? It’s almost noon.”
She grabbed the folders and stuffed them into the side pocket of her laptop bag. “But breakfast time for teenagers. I imagine the girls are just now dragging themselves out of bed.”
“No school?” He grabbed a brownie. Someone had to eat them.
“In-service day or some such nonsense.” She shut down her laptop.
She seemed eager to go. Way too eager to have fried eggs and hotcakes with a bunch of teenaged girls. He wondered who the phone call had been from. If Fia really was going to meet Kaleigh.
Then he felt guilty. What was making him so suspicious? Fia had done nothing that wasn’t aboveboard. So maybe she was acting a little strangely. He would too, if he were investigating a murder on the block where he grew up.
He chewed on his brownie, not quite sure where to go from here. Fia was so different from Stacy. So much harder to get a fix on. So much more intense. “So you’ll be back later?”
“Yeah. That cook is back in town. The guy from the Hill who went to his cousin’s wedding in Connecticut. I’m going to talk to him after I see Kaleigh. Then…I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of other things I want to do. Want to just meet me at the Hill tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Like eight?”
That was a lot of time. What things did she have to do? “Sure. See you at the Hill at eight. I’m just going to go over my notes, make some phone calls. Maybe watch some soaps with Mary Kay.”
“Catch you later.”
Fia didn’t smile, but what bothered him more was that he didn’t either.
“That all you’re going to eat?” Fia asked as the waitress walked away.
Kaleigh, dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, looking as if she had just rolled out of bed, sipped her black coffee. She appeared hungover. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them and she looked haggard. Tired. Not her usual pretty self.
Fia wondered if she’d been out drinking with “the guys” last night, but decided this wasn’t the time or the place to lecture Kaleigh on the dangers of vampires overindulging in alcohol.
“So neither Katy nor Maria could make it, huh?” Fia folded her hands on the table. Even though it was lunchtime, there were only a few patrons in the diner; all sept members. The hostess, Mary Ann, who was also the waitress this time of year, who was also the owner of the diner, had seated Fia and Kaleigh in a booth on the far side of the room. From their vantage point, it seemed as if they were the only ones there.
Kaleigh stared into the coffee mug she cupped between her hands. “They had stuff to do.” She lifted a thin shoulder inside her sweatshirt. Let it fall.
Fia studied the teen across the table. “I guess you already know why I wanted to see you. Why I wanted to talk to all of you.”
Kaleigh didn’t respond.
Fia’s phone vibrated. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket, looked at the ID screen and tucked it away. It was Joseph again. He just wasn’t going to let it go, was he?
“You can answer your phone if you want,” Kaleigh said. “I don’t care.”
“I’ll take care of it later.” Fia shifted on the bench, refocusing. “I’m interviewing all the sept members in the town, trying to create a database of humans we come directly in contact with.”
“Must make things interesting. Your partner in the official investigation being a human.”
Fia stared at the young girl for a moment. Kaleigh was awfully perceptive for a teen who had not yet been able to develop
her mental telepathy. Curious, Fia opened her mind and shot a thought in Kaleigh’s direction, something that would surely get a fourteen-year-old’s attention if she was listening.
You’ve got something stuck between your front teeth.
The teen lifted her cup and took another sip of coffee, not looking up. “What’s his name?” she asked. “Special Agent Duncan, right? Glen. The other girls think he’s hot. I think he’s old.”
No reaction to the telepathy. So maybe Fia was wrong. Some of the other sept members Kaleigh’s age had already begun to cultivate their extrasensory abilities, but Kaleigh’s development, or lack thereof, wasn’t really unusual. Like humans going through puberty, it hit them at different ages. Over her last couple of life cycles Kaleigh had been a late bloomer.
“I guess Glen is kind of hot,” Fia said, thinking she might try a different tack. Maybe Kaleigh would be more open to her if she just saw Fia as “one of the girls.” “He’s got a fine ass. I’ll give him that.”
“You sleeping with him?” Kaleigh looked up at her over the rim of her mug.
Fia frowned.
“Just asking. I mean, you could if you wanted to. You’re freer to sleep with who you please than most of us are.”
“He’s a human, Kaleigh.”
“So was Ian.” Again, the look over the edge of the coffee cup.
“Ah, so you remember Ian now?”
“Not much.” The same shrug. “Mostly just images. Gair says he’ll fill in the gaps when I’m ready. But he says I’m not ready yet.” Her last words were all teenager, full of sarcasm and resentment.
“So back to the reason why I wanted to talk to all three—”
“I told you.” Kaleigh interrupted her resentfully as she sat back to allow the waitress to set down a plate with a toasted English muffin on it. “They had stuff.”
“I need you to tell me who your friends are at school.” Fia pulled a legal pad and pen from her laptop bag. Mary Ann left a plate beside her with a turkey club, chips, and a pickle. “Tell me about your human friends at school.”
Kaleigh rolled her eyes, sitting back on the booth’s bench. “I don’t have friends. You know what weirdos everyone thinks we are? There’s just Maria and Katy.”
“Okay, then. Tell me the names of your human acquaintances. I’ve already got Derek Neuman’s name. And let’s see—the two friends I’ve met are John Wright and…Michael Poors.” Kaleigh remained silent so Fia went on. “I ran the boys’ records. They’ve all been arrested. Once for a B and E. That’s breaking and entering. And John Wright has a DWI on his record.”
“So? The football team was messing with the soccer team so the soccer team got them back. It’s not like they robbed banks or something.”
Fia flipped the page back on the legal pad. Honestly, the charges didn’t really mean anything in FBI terms. The B and E had involved stealing a chair from another student’s house, some schoolkid prank, as Kaleigh had suggested. And the DWI was, unfortunately, a frequent event in a county with little for teens to do and no public transportation.
“Another interesting tidbit,” Fia continued, “is that your boyfriend apparently lied to you. He did just have his birthday, but he’s eighteen. Not sixteen. And according to the high school admin office, he dropped out last year. Only the other two boys are students. Which means you were telling a little fib, as well. You don’t go to school with Derek.”
Fia glanced up at Kaleigh. To her surprise, the teen’s eyes were full of tears.
“We broke up,” she blurted out. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
Fia waited.
“I found out he was screwing this slut in my biology class and when I asked him about it, he said if I wasn’t giving him any, he had a right to get it somewhere else.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “So I broke up with him. Last week.”
Fia’s heart went out to Kaleigh. Her first broken heart. At least the first she knew of. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Are you?” Kaleigh looked up through teary eyes, then down again, into her coffee cup. “You wanted me to break up with him anyway. Everyone wanted us to break up. Now you have your way. I’m not seeing him anymore. Never. He’s a jerk and an ass. Katy and Maria broke up with John and Mike, too. They were all jerks.”
Fia wanted to smile, albeit sadly. “This probably isn’t terribly comforting right now, but in a couple of years, Rob will—”
“Rob is like old and toothless.”
This time Fia smiled. “I know. He is now. And I know you can’t remember, but he won’t be that way much longer. And after he dies, after he’s reborn—”
“Are we done here?” Kaleigh pushed her untouched muffin toward the middle of the table. “Because if we are, I have geometry homework and a stupid project on Bosnia to do for social studies.”
Fia looked down at her notes. “When did you say you broke up with Derek?”
“Last week.” She stared at the table. “Like…more than a week ago.”
“And before you broke up with him, I don’t suppose you ever had any conversations…about the sept.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Kaleigh snapped, rubbing her eyes with her sleeve.
“No, I don’t think you’re stupid. Just young.” Fia inhaled. Exhaled. “So you don’t care if I go by his house? Talk to him? Maybe his dad?”
“Could you arrest him, instead?” Kaleigh slid out of the booth. “I gotta go. You know where to find me if you need me. Like for the next million years….”
Chapter 21
Fia had no intention of going to the appointment Joseph had set up with Dr. Kettleman. There was no way she could do it today, or even this week. By the time she got to Philly, went to the appointment, and drove back, she’d be lucky to make it to the Hill to meet Glen by eight. She was also concerned Glen would be suspicious if she didn’t have anything to produce for the hours she supposedly had been interviewing. He was already acting suspicious.
But after another more heated phone conversation with Joseph, after she left the diner, she decided to go to the appointment, have it out with him, and be done with it. The last couple of days, between interviews, she’d been doing some research on the Internet and she’d found some interesting information she doubted Joseph would want her or anyone else to know about. It might just be the leverage she needed to get him out of her jurisdiction and her life.
After going to the police station, chatting with Uncle Sean, and then using the computers to access some information she couldn’t reach with her laptop, Fia made a point of mentioning that she was going to interview some human teens who lived in the area. That way, if Glen happened to stop by the station and ask for her, the officers or Uncle Sean would provide a feasible alibi. Fia hated the idea of letting her personal life take precedent over her job, even for a few hours, but she wasn’t putting anyone at risk by taking a few hours off. And if she didn’t get rid of Joseph, it was entirely possible he could interfere with her job.
Fia was in Philly by five-fifteen. She ran by her apartment to check on her cat, who Betty was keeping an eye on. She stopped at Betty’s to see if the elderly woman needed anything, and then went to Dr. Kettleman’s, hoping she might be able to get a word in with the psychiatrist before Joseph arrived.
He beat her there and, because Dr. Kettleman’s previous appointment had cancelled, Joseph was already seated on the cozy couch inside her office, chatting about some reality TV show about fashion designers they both watched.
“Fia.” Joseph’s face lit up as he rose to greet her, arms outstretched as if they were lovers, or at least old friends. She considered him neither.
The look on Dr. Kettleman’s face told Fia that he already had her hoodwinked. She was at once disappointed in the doctor. So what if Joseph was charismatic? A psychiatrist should be able to see past the thousand-dollar suit and tooth veneers to the black rot of a man’s soul.
“Joseph.” Fia greeted him coolly, averting
his embrace. “Dr. Kettleman.” She nodded.
“Glad you could make the appointment after all,” the psychiatrist said, crossing her legs. “I think this is a step in the right direction. So let’s get started.” She gestured to the couch.
Fia sat on the far end, as far from Joseph as she could get.
Dr. Kettleman clasped her hands. “Now, Fia and I have been discussing, over the last couple of weeks, her concern about the two of you living in such close proximity. How do you feel about that, Joseph?”
“I think Fia is making way too much out of this.” He raised his manicured hands innocently. “Years have passed since our relationship ended. We’ve both matured. We—”
“You promised you would go and never come back, Joseph. You swore to me.”
Dr. Kettleman looked from Fia to Joseph. “Did you make that promise, Joseph?”
His smile grew taut. “I did, but that was a long time ago. I had no idea I’d become a plastic surgeon of such renown. No idea my partner and I would feel the need to expand beyond California.”
“You can’t stay here,” Fia said.
Joseph whipped around. “And why not!” he shouted. “Why not?”
Fia was so astounded that he had dropped his cool facade that it took her a moment to recover. This was the Joseph she knew. Not a Joseph she feared, but one she knew well enough to fear for others. “Because of my job. Because I know you and I know your habits.”
He scowled.
Fia lifted her chin in the psychiatrist’s direction. “Tell Dr. Kettleman why you’re leaving California.”
“I’m opening a new office.”
“The truth.” She stared at him.
He stared back and she was relieved to find that she no longer felt even a hint of desire for him. She hated him. She hated herself for what he was. What she had made him.
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