The Lost Causes

by Jessica Koosed Etting

  “Danielle and Catherine were in the car with Amy and the two boys that night. That’s Danielle,” Kaya said, pointing to a punk-looking girl in the middle. She had short bleached hair with streaks of blue and a gold hoop through her nostrils. Even through the silly face she was making, there was something tough about her, as if she could handle anything. In one photo, she had her arm around Amy, like a protective big sister.

  Kaya pointed to the other girl in the photo. Out of the three, she was hamming it up for the camera the most, holding up a chubby middle finger in one photo and flashing her bra in another. “That’s Catherine. She was quite a handful, according to Nina — Amy’s mom.”

  “A handful how?” Z asked.

  “From what I gathered, she didn’t have much of a filter,” Kaya answered. “Nina tried to throw her out of the house once when Catherine said some derogatory things to her about her addiction. When I brought it up to Amy, though, she was immediately defensive. She told me everything Catherine said to Nina was true and it was nice to have someone honest around. Amy made it very clear that these new friendships were not up for discussion.”

  Were the three of them Lost Causes or just three girls who became fast friends? “Do you know where they were going the night of the accident?” Z asked.

  “I’m not sure. Neither is her mother. There was a storm that night and the streets were flooding. That’s part of why I thought it was strange. Amy would’ve known better than to get on that bridge. I used to live down in those parts years ago. Everyone around there knew how slick that particular bridge would get in the rain, and everyone knew alternative ways to get around it.”

  “The police said that’s what happened?” Sabrina asked. “That the car skidded and went over the bridge?”

  “That’s what they said, but there wasn’t much of an investigation. It took them two weeks to find the wreckage, and even then, it was just” — Kaya steadied her voice — “parts of bodies. They weren’t able to test for drugs or alcohol in Amy’s system, which they assumed was one of the reasons it happened. But she never touched that stuff. Not with her mother the way she is. It had to have been something else. Maybe that’s why Amy is appearing to you. She wants you to know the truth.”

  Sabrina was nodding effusively, but Z knew they still had zero in the proof department. “Was there anything different about Amy leading up to the accident?” Z asked, trying another angle.

  Kaya cocked her head at Z curiously. “A few weeks before Amy died, Nina went to rehab and I stayed with Amy at their house. And yes, there was something different. Amy’s aura had always been reddish brown. Some days it was cloudy, some days it was clear. But when I saw her then, her aura was bright white like it was beaming off her.”

  Z inwardly groaned. A change in Amy’s spiritual aura wasn’t the hard evidence they were searching for. She was getting impatient but tried not to be rude. “What about the way she was acting? Was there something different about that?”

  “Yes, her behavior mirrored her aura. She was always dark. Troubled. Western medicine might diagnose her as bipolar. And usually when Nina went to rehab, Amy was despondent. But when I was down there, there was a lightness to her. Like I said, she suddenly started hanging out with a new group of friends. But it was more than that. It was a bit like she was looking at the world through different eyes.”

  Sabrina leaned forward. “So, she suddenly seemed less depressed? Like it almost happened overnight?”

  Kaya paused, thinking it through. “Sort of. The depression might have faded, but something melancholy still lingered inside her. She became obsessed with this news story about a missing girl from Albuquerque.”

  Something stirred inside of Z. A missing girl?

  “It was all incredibly morbid, but Amy wouldn’t stop talking about it. So much so that I had to ask her to please stop bringing it up because it was so upsetting. Every word out of her mouth was about finding this little girl. Sam something-or-other.”

  Z’s heart stopped. “Sam Carpenter.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Nash sat at his desk at Cytology and checked the feed from the security cameras around Cedar Springs High just as school was letting out. His unease over sending the five of them in to gather intel had only increased on day two of this operation. He searched for a glimpse of Sabrina, whom he hadn’t spotted all day. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything, considering the scattered camera placement around the school.

  But Nash was worried. She was acting strangely that morning, and Nash couldn’t figure out what to make of it. Was she cracking under the pressure? It didn’t seem likely. Nothing seemed to break her.

  Maybe she realized he had lied to her.

  No. It was impossible for her to know the cameras outside her house were working perfectly. Telling her he needed to adjust them was the only plausible excuse for a random visit, other than telling her the truth — which he was having a hard time admitting even to himself.

  The truth was that he just wanted to see her.

  But instead of leaving her house with relief that she was safe, he was more unsettled than ever. There was something Sabrina wasn’t telling him. Something was worrying her more than just the obvious.

  That intuitive feeling he’d had before flared up again. Some dangerous piece of the puzzle was still hidden, waiting to show its face when they were least expecting it. Did Sabrina have that same feeling? Is that why she was acting strangely?

  He turned his eyes away from the school security feed and back to his laptop. Wincott and Greenly were the remaining suspects, but Greenly was at the top of the list because of his connection to Robert Carpenter. Patricia was headed to meet the flight attendant who had confirmed Robert’s alibi on the night Lily was murdered. Maybe she was Robert’s girlfriend and was lying for him, or maybe she was just someone Robert paid to lie for him about being on that plane. Patricia wanted to see for herself.

  A call from FBI Albuquerque field director Carl Plouffe rang through on his computer, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Agent Nash,” Plouffe said, his icy blue eyes almost piercing the screen.

  “Yes, sir,” Nash replied. “Patricia isn’t back yet.”

  “Yes, I know. I wanted to get a read on how you thought the case was going. Patricia seems quite certain you’re close to locking it down and finding the serum.” Nash understood the subtext: Plouffe wanted Nash to verify that Patricia wasn’t sugarcoating their results.

  Nash nodded. “I hope so. We’ve vetted all the teachers and administrators. The ones who were at the retreat and received the windbreaker. And since then, our suspect pool has significantly narrowed. We’re extremely close to homing in on who has the serum so we can get it safely back to FBI hands.”

  “Patricia updated me on how you whittled it down. That’s the other reason I’m calling.” Plouffe shifted in his chair. “I assigned a few Albuquerque agents to back you up on the investigation of Wincott and Greenly.”

  Nash knew this was the type of thing that other agents hated, convinced that the extra “help” was a slap in the face, affecting their ability to solve the case or at least get the credit for it. But Nash had never been ruled by his ego that way, especially now when his five assets could potentially be in danger. “Did they find anything else on either suspect?”

  “Nothing substantial yet. But they did discover three part-time staff members who were also at the teachers’ retreat that you never accounted for.”

  “Really?” said Nash. That meant that there were three more people than he’d originally thought who had received the green jacket. Three more suspects to add to the pool, just when they were getting so close.

  “I’m sure most will alibi out, but I wanted to let you know,” Plouffe added. “I’ll email you the list. We’ll keep looking on our end, too.”

  “Thanks for the help,” Nash said.

 
“Like I said, I’m sure it’s nothing. The Greenly lead you managed to dig up sounds extremely promising.”

  “That one wasn’t me,” Nash replied honestly. “The five assets are responsible for most of our leads.” Nash was astounded at how far they’d come in such a short time. He had to hand it to Patricia.

  Plouffe’s forehead creased in confusion. “What assets?”

  It took a half second for Nash to understand. Plouffe had no idea that the five of them existed. He had never authorized any of it.

  “How did Patricia tell you we got the lead about the windbreaker?” Nash asked carefully.

  “The two eyewitnesses you found who were camping near the Springs. She said their accounts of that night matched up with the evidence.”

  “So you don’t know anything about the five kids?”

  Plouffe’s look remained blank and Nash’s anger at Patricia flared. From day one Nash had thought this assignment was inordinately bizarre and irresponsible. But his training, steeped in the philosophy of rank and hierarchy, had kept him from questioning it. He’d been assigned other cases with ethical boundary issues before. Now he could kill his former self for not asking more questions. Patricia had put the group in even more danger than he possibly imagined.

  “Five kids?” Plouffe narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Andrew’s brain was spinning like a hamster on a wheel … if the hamster had just ingested amphetamines. Sabrina and Z had come directly to his house from their road trip and filled him in on what they found out from Amy’s aunt, Kaya.

  “So you’re both absolutely convinced that Amy was a Lost Cause now?” Andrew jumped up from his bed and started pacing. Theories were bouncing around his head like pinballs.

  “Definitely,” Z replied. “First of all, she was bipolar but all her symptoms went away almost overnight. Second, she had no friends until all of a sudden she was inseparable from these other four people from her class —”

  “All who had some kind of mental or behavioral issue, according to that newspaper article,” Sabrina interjected. “And if that’s not enough proof that they were another group of Lost Causes, Amy keeps appearing to me and telling me not to trust Patricia and Nash.”

  Sabrina was looking through the box of Amy’s possessions. She’d asked Kaya if she could hold on to it for a few days if she promised to send it back. She wanted all of them to check through it — especially Gabby. Hopefully Gabby would have a vision from something of Amy’s and make sense of everything once and for all.

  “Okay. So the working theory is that Amy and her friends were another group of Lost Causes,” Andrew said. “Patricia and Lily gave all of them the serum to help the FBI solve a case.”

  “But not just any case,” Z cut in. “The Sam Carpenter case. Amy was obsessed with her disappearance. I looked back to that article about Amy’s car accident to check the date. Her car went over that bridge the day after Sam’s body was found. Their assignment from the FBI must have been to try to find her.”

  Sabrina nodded. “But we know they didn’t actually find Sam because her body was discovered in the mountains by those hikers.”

  “So the big question now is whether it was a crazy coincidence that the other group of Lost Causes died that day or whether that accident wasn’t really an accident,” Z said, though Andrew knew it was no question in her mind.

  “Let’s say their death wasn’t an accident,” Andrew proposed. “Who would want them dead?”

  “The person who abducted and killed Sam, for one,” Sabrina answered. “If Amy and the others were getting close, he could’ve been trying to stop their investigation.”

  “I’m not letting Patricia off the hook for this either, though,” Z replied. “It could’ve been the FBI who killed them and made it look like an accident.”

  “Why would the FBI want the five of them dead while they were working on this case?” Andrew asked.

  Z responded with a morbid tone to her voice. “Maybe once Sam’s body was found, they felt like they didn’t need them anymore.”

  “So they killed them?” Andrew asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah. Maybe they thought it was cleaner that way. So that no one could expose the program. That could’ve always been the FBI’s plan,” Z answered.

  The theory momentarily paralyzed Andrew. He didn’t want to believe the FBI was behind all of this. They couldn’t be. He’d already spent the last few nights teaching himself coding so that he’d have a leg up when he took the entrance exam to become an analyst. The FBI had changed his life.

  He’d never stopped to wonder if it was all too good to be true.

  He looked at Sabrina and Z in a daze. “If the FBI is behind the death of the other group of Lost Causes, what does that mean for us?”

  The fear in Sabrina’s eyes was a reflection of his own. “Where are Justin and Gabby? I thought they were supposed to be here by now.”

  “Justin had to pick up some game film from Coach Brandt,” Andrew answered. “They should be here any second.”

  “You still have our phones, right?” Sabrina asked. Andrew nodded and took them out of his desk drawer. He’d grabbed their phones from their lockers after school and brought them to his house. That way, if Patricia and Nash were tracking them, they would think Sabrina and Z were at Andrew’s and not in Taos.

  Z started rummaging through the box with Sabrina. She pulled out a yearbook and flipped through it. “Looks like this is from Amy’s junior year, the year they all died. There’s a memorial section in the back. There’s a page for each one of them.”

  Andrew sat next to Sabrina and Z on the floor to take a look. There was a short blurb underneath Amy’s photo that said she played the piano and did her school community service at a nearby animal shelter. The last thing on the page was a Margaret Atwood quote. Underneath it, a small caption explained that it was the quote Amy had chosen to go along with her photo in last year’s yearbook. It took Andrew a second for the sad realization to sink in that they all must’ve died before they could turn in their quotes for this yearbook.

  Sabrina flipped the page and pointed to the girl in the next photo, Catherine Freeman. “She was one of the girls Kaya told us about. Supposedly she had no filter.”

  “The only thing it says about her is that she won the science fair in sixth grade,” Andrew read. “They couldn’t come up with anything more recent that she did? It doesn’t even list her interests.”

  “According to Kaya, it didn’t sound like she was an easy person to be around,” Z answered.

  Like me before the serum, Andrew thought.

  “Me, too,” Z said to him. “Sorry, your thought just popped into my head loud and clear.”

  Kevin Beswick was the next photo, and he looked like a stereotypical meathead. Andrew wondered what exactly made him a lost cause. It listed his interests as basketball, football and hockey. His yearbook quote was a lyric from an Eminem song that Andrew had never heard of.

  On the next page, Danielle Wenkie stared back at them, her multiple facial piercings glinting from the flash of the camera. She had punk rock hair and bright pink lips. There was a Ramones quote underneath her photo about how life was an adventure.

  “She looks like someone I would be friends with,” Z said sadly.

  The last photo was Christopher Jarvis, an overweight guy with an army-style buzz cut who stared defiantly at the camera. Something about his face made Andrew pause. He scanned Christopher’s minimal interests — ATVing, camping — then got to his quote.

  Andrew’s throat went dry as he read it: “Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.”

  “You guys,” he croaked out and pointed to the quote.

  “No way,” Sabrina said, jaw dropped.

  It was the same Shakespeare line that Devon Warner’s ghost had repeated to S
abrina.

  Z jumped up. “Holy crap. Do you think Christopher Jarvis is related to Devon Warner? Could they be brothers?” Even she had to know it was a stretch. But how could this be a coincidence?

  Andrew studied Christopher’s face again.

  Then he finally saw it.

  He snatched the yearbook from Sabrina’s hands so he could get a better look. He was right.

  Above Christopher Jarvis’s left eye was a small scar.

  “What?” Z pressed. “What do you see, Andrew?”

  “That’s not Devon Warner’s brother.” Andrew finally looked up at them. “That’s Devon Warner.”

  Sabrina looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What are you talking about? That’s not possible. This guy was in the car with Amy. He died just like she did.” She grabbed the yearbook back to look closely, and Z practically climbed on top of her.

  But Andrew, who had spent so many hours looking at Devon Warner’s face when he researched the driver’s licenses, knew he was correct. “Take fifty pounds off Christopher Jarvis, age him ten years and give him shoulder-length hair.”

  Andrew pulled out the ID photo he’d printed of Devon Warner. “See the scar?”

  “He’s right,” Z whispered. “That’s Devon Warner as a teenager.”

  This was the Devon Warner whose body they found in the Springs. The Devon Warner who assaulted Sadie Webb. The Devon Warner who killed people and took their identities. All so he could hide who he really was. Christopher Jarvis.

  Sabrina rubbed her eyes. “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen Amy, I know she’s dead. And they found parts of the car in the river, too, and the bodies.”

  “But not all of their bodies, remember?” Z broke in. “Kaya said they only found parts of bodies. He must have survived somehow. And no one realized.”