The Lost Causes

by Jessica Koosed Etting

  Sabrina nodded, slowly accepting the explanation. “If Devon — Christopher — was an original Lost Cause, that would explain his connection to Lily. That’s how he knew she had the serum. And how he knew the value of it.”

  As his eyes ran over the other four photos, a gruesome thought entered Andrew’s head. “We know Devon’s a killer. Could he have killed the other four? Maybe he was the one who caused the accident.”

  A crazy sound escaped from Sabrina that made Andrew think she must have seen a ghost. But she was staring at the memorial photo a few pages before Christopher’s, her face frozen. “Kevin Beswick.”

  Andrew looked at the meathead with the Eminem quote. “What about him?”

  “He’s still alive, too.” Sabrina jumped to her feet and lunged for her phone. There was panic in her eyes. “Andrew, where did you say Justin is right now?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “Sorry I’m late, Coach,” Justin said to Coach Brandt.

  Gabby stood next to him, anxious to get to Andrew’s house, but it was also nice to meet the famous Coach Brandt at last. He wasn’t exactly what she’d expected. With his towering height and broad shoulders, he seemed intimidating, but then he smiled this huge smile and it was like looking at a completely different person.

  “My head’s been all over the place,” Justin added.

  “I wouldn’t know it from the way you’ve been playing lately,” Coach Brandt said, smiling. “Sometimes when life is going good with one thing, it helps you get focused on everything else. Something tells me we have you to thank for that, Gabby?”

  Gabby exchanged a quick look with Justin. If Coach Brandt only knew.

  He handed Justin an iPad. “This is my personal one. I downloaded all the practices and games to it. Take it for the next few weeks.”

  “Are you sure?” Justin asked.

  “Absolutely. I want you to be ready when that scout comes,” Coach Brandt answered. “Which reminds me. There’s one more thing I have to give you.”

  He walked over to a desk awkwardly set up in the middle of the living room as if he hadn’t known where else to put it. The small bungalow was the kind of bachelor pad that needed a woman’s touch. All the furniture seemed mismatched and out of place, and the real deer head protruding from the wall made Gabby pretty sure no wife or girlfriend lived there.

  Coach Brandt pulled out a Florida State pendant from the desk drawer. “Why don’t you hold on to this for Justin, Gabby? I have a feeling he’s going to need it in a few weeks.”

  Justin beamed as Coach Brandt handed her the pendant. Gabby’s fingers grazed the ring on his bear-size hand.

  Her eyes twitched, then fluttered shut.

  She was outside, but it took her a second to adjust her eyes in the darkness.

  I know this place.

  Everything about the moment felt familiar. The biting chill in the air, the complete isolation as though there was no one around for miles. When had she been here?

  And then she looked down and saw him.

  Devon Warner, lying in the dirt, blood pooling under his body as he desperately gasped for air.

  She was right. She’d been in this exact place, in this exact moment before, but she’d been in Devon’s body. Now she was in his killer’s.

  She felt herself gingerly kneel down beside Devon.

  Devon whispered, “ ‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.’ You were my only one.”

  “I’m sorry it had to end like this.” Gabby braced herself. She remembered that right after Devon spoke those words, the killer took the serum.

  Right on cue, her hands — the killer’s hands — reached out to grab it from Devon’s pocket. That’s when she saw it. The ring on his right hand.

  Gabby’s eyes flew open, her mouth agape, as she looked at the ring on Brandt’s hand. The same ring.

  “Gabby?” Justin asked worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

  She tried to speak. She wanted to run. She had to tell Justin.

  “Isn’t it obvious, Justin? She just had a vision about me,” Brandt said, his voice eerily calm.

  Justin stepped in front of her protectively. “How the hell do you know about that?”

  Something suddenly beeped, and it took Gabby a moment to realize it was coming from her hand. She was still clutching her cell phone. She looked down and saw the text from Z. Her knees buckled as she read it.

  “Because he was a Lost Cause. He was in that car with Amy Hanson,” Gabby whispered. She looked back up at Coach Brandt in disbelief. “Kevin Beswick. That’s your real name.”

  Brandt nodded, his face still eerily calm, though Gabby noticed his shoulders tensed.

  “There really was another group of Lost Causes?” Justin asked, as shell-shocked as Gabby was.

  Brandt exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath for a year. “Patricia, or whatever she’s calling herself now, does she know you’re here?”

  “She can track us with our phones,” Justin answered uncertainly.

  “You can’t trust her,” Brandt said gravely. “And you won’t after I explain everything to you.”

  He wasn’t hovering over them or threatening them in any way, but that didn’t mean they could trust him, either. She just watched him kill Devon Warner — or Christopher Jarvis, according to Z. And he had something to do with Lily’s murder, whether he pulled the trigger or not. What kind of explanation could he have for murdering two people?

  “I don’t understand,” Justin stammered. “If you were in that car with Amy —”

  Brandt held up his hand to stop him. “Text Sabrina, Z and Andrew back and ask them to come here. Then turn your phones off. I’ll tell you all everything.”

  Gabby quickly typed out the text under his watchful eye. Though every bone in her body told her not to do it, she powered off the phone. Justin did the same.

  Brandt took three strides toward them, towering ominously over Gabby. When he spoke again, his voice was deep and harsh. “Now sit down and don’t move.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Nash had been sitting alone at the conference table at Cytology for a half hour, stewing and waiting for Patricia to return. She was on her way back from interviewing the flight attendant who alibied Robert Carpenter the night of Lily’s murder.

  Finally, he heard the beeping sounds of numbers being plugged into the keypad upstairs. Patricia was back. Nash clenched and unclenched his fists. He needed to stay levelheaded through this conversation if he was going to get anywhere with her.

  “The woman stuck with her story that Robert was on the flight, but I still think we need to step up the surveillance on him,” she announced upon entering. She sounded jittery and frazzled, her clothes rumpled from the drive back. “Andrew really pulled through on that lead.”

  Nash steadied his voice as best he could. “Why doesn’t Plouffe know about them?”

  She stared right at him, frozen in place as though she’d been turned to stone. “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know about them now?” She asked the question slowly, as if she was trying to prolong the time until she had to hear the answer.

  “No,” Nash lied. He had no idea how Patricia would react if she knew Plouffe had a team en route to deal with her. Or that it was Plouffe who was running the case now. “Unless you give me a very good reason why Plouffe is in the dark, I’m picking up the phone right now and telling him everything.”

  She ran her tongue along the top row of her teeth nervously. “It’s not what you think.”

  “You have no idea what I think. Start talking. Now.”

  Patricia sighed and dropped into the chair across from Nash. When she finally started speaking, her voice was strained. “I didn’t tell Plouffe about the five of them because I wasn’t authorized to use the serum again.”

>   He tensed. “What do you mean, ‘again’?”

  She avoided his gaze, staring down at her hands. “Lily and I used this serum on a group once before. Ten years ago, around the time we first developed it.”

  “Why wasn’t I briefed on that?”

  She paused as if trying to decide whether she was going to divulge everything. The look he gave her made her realize she didn’t have a choice.

  “We had a fair amount of leeway whenever we were pioneering a new experiment back then, so we were able to move forward without getting official approval from anyone above us.”

  “In other words, you weren’t authorized to do this the first time, either. What on earth made you and Lily think it was a good idea?”

  “We didn’t have time. We were desperate for answers.” She stood up and looked at him, her eyes pleading. “Don’t you understand? Lily and I recruited that group to help us find Sam.”

  * * *

  The cold leather of Brandt’s couch crinkled underneath Sabrina as she sat between Gabby and Z. Justin and Andrew were perched on the arms of the couch on either side of them, as Brandt had instructed as soon as they’d entered his house. He’d immediately confiscated their phones, refusing to tell them his story until they handed them over. He said they couldn’t trust Patricia and they couldn’t risk her tracking them to Brandt’s. Sabrina hadn’t wanted to do it, of course. Whatever kinship she felt to Brandt as a fellow Lost Cause didn’t change the fact that he was a guy they now suspected of multiple murders. Was he really trying to protect the Lost Causes from Patricia? Or was he planning on doing the same thing to them that he did to Devon Warner, Lily Carpenter and whomever else he’d killed? But they needed answers and this was the only way they were going to get them.

  She fidgeted in her seat and Brandt turned to her, icily. “Don’t move, Sabrina. None of you.”

  He sat down on the ottoman across from them, though it didn’t make him any less menacing, with his huge frame taking up the entire cushion.

  “If I learned one thing from Patricia, it’s not to trust anyone,” he told them. “And you’re the only five people in the world who know who I really am.”

  “We won’t tell anyone,” Andrew quickly said.

  “I want to believe that, Andrew,” Brandt said as a weird smirk crossed his face. “I do. But I don’t know if I can …”

  He let the sentence hang and Sabrina shivered. What would he do to them if he decided he couldn’t trust them? Would he kill them?

  Justin’s eyes flickered and Sabrina could tell he was debating hurtling Brandt across the room. They wouldn’t get the answers they were after, but at least they’d be alive. She sat forward, preparing herself to run if need be.

  But Brandt suddenly growled, “Don’t even think about it, Justin.”

  Justin looked up at him with an innocent shrug. “What?”

  “You’re not the only one with special abilities,” Brandt warned him in a low voice. “And I’ve been living with mine a lot longer than you. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

  Sabrina’s realization that they were completely trapped was tempered only by her surprise. She hadn’t considered the fact that Brandt still had his ability from the serum. Was it psychokinesis, like Justin? Or something more dangerous? And deadlier.

  Brandt surveyed the group. “I did promise you some answers, though. And unlike Patricia, I’m not a liar.” It was an odd point of pride, considering he was now holding them captive, but Sabrina wasn’t about to argue it.

  Instead she decided to appeal to the common ground that the Lost Causes shared with Brandt. If she could convince him they were all on the same team, maybe he would be sympathetic toward them. “We think we’re in the same boat you were in,” she told him. “We didn’t ask for this to happen to us. But it did, and now we’re trying to understand it.”

  Brandt was silent and Sabrina took it as permission to continue. “You were part of the group Patricia and Lily first gave the serum to ten years ago. You, Amy Hanson and the other three people in the car that night.”

  “I’d be surprised you were able to piece it together if I didn’t know firsthand the abilities the serum can bring you.” Brandt turned to Gabby. “I knew you were having a vision earlier when I saw your eyes flutter like that. Amy used to have them, too.”

  He gave an odd smile to Gabby as if to let her know that he understood her experience. Sabrina took it as a good sign. Maybe he was softening.

  “And the case you were assigned was Sam Carpenter’s disappearance,” Sabrina pushed forward.

  “That’s right. Except that in all Patricia and Lily’s explanations of how the serum worked and what the case was, they never once mentioned that the girl we were trying to find was Lily’s daughter. Which wasn’t surprising since they really didn’t tell us anything about themselves.”

  For a brief second, Sabrina allowed herself to think about Nash. What did she really know about him?

  “Before we knew the truth, we were all into helping them,” Brandt said. “It was better than the alternative. For me, it was either meet up for the case after school or go home, where my stepdad would beat the crap out of me if I gave him the wrong look.” He met eyes with Justin. “I wasn’t lying when I said I could relate to you. I’ve always wanted to help you, Justin.”

  Justin looked down silently.

  “Anyway, I think what we liked the most was that we mattered when we were working on the case,” Brandt continued. Patricia and Lily needed us. They wanted us there. The case gave us purpose. A little girl was counting on us to save her.” Brandt’s eyes became so haunted that Sabrina got the chills. “And then we found Sam’s body.”

  “Wait,” Andrew said. “You guys found Sam? I thought hikers did.”

  “Well, you thought wrong,” Brandt snapped quickly, a wild look suddenly in his eye that set Sabrina on edge. After a beat, he looked away and began speaking again, his voice grim. “Patricia and Lily came up with some story afterward about hikers, but that was a lie like everything else. We led them there. The five of us. I was sixteen at the time. To find the dead body of an eight-year-old girl while her mother stands right beside you was …” He trailed off, lost in the moment, until he shook his head suddenly, as if trying to remove the image from his mind. “We didn’t know at the time who’d done it. It took the police a few years to trace the prints to that handyman. A serial child predator. But even back then, as soon as we saw Sam’s body, we all knew it was the work of a monster. Plain and simple.”

  “The car accident that you all got in happened the day after Sam’s body was discovered …” Andrew began. “Was it really an accident?”

  Brandt shook his head, his face reddening in anger. “It was not.”

  Sabrina’s stomach lurched. He might be a murderer, but she knew in her bones he was telling the truth. Even though she wasn’t so sure she wanted to hear it now.

  “What really happened?” Z dared to ask.

  Brandt stood up, leaving a massive imprint in the threadbare ottoman. He stretched his legs and stared out the window into the darkness. The only sound for a moment was his knuckles cracking. It wasn’t hard imagining him overpowering Lily or even Devon.

  “We were all pretty messed up after we found Sam. It’s like it finally hit us just how screwed up this entire situation was. We were a means to an end to the FBI and they didn’t give a damn about what happened to us along the way.”

  Sabrina looked over at Z. It was as they’d suspected. Were they to be just as easily discarded as Brandt and company had been? Sabrina had been so caught up in what she was gaining from the serum — getting her old self back — that she didn’t think about what part of herself she was giving up in the process. What bargain had she struck by agreeing to this? Brandt’s experience with the case had clearly messed him up. When Sabrina and the others had time to process all this,
would they become as damaged as Brandt?

  If they even made it out alive.

  “We met with Lily and Patricia the day after Sam was found. All five of us wanted out. We weren’t going to be their lab rats anymore. But Lily and Patricia wanted us to keep going, to find whoever did this to Sam. We said no, that we’d go to the police or the papers and tell them what was going on if they didn’t leave us alone.”

  “Why didn’t you just take the antidote?” Z broke in. “Would they not inject you with it or something?”

  Brandt tore his eyes away from the window in a cold stare that made Sabrina’s breath catch in her throat. “What antidote?”

  He glared at Z, motioning for her to speak. “Patricia told us she had one,” Z said, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. “That we could take it at any time.”

  Brandt eyed them all suspiciously, as if he was making some kind of decision, then abruptly took his eyes off of Z. “She didn’t have one back then,” he finally said. “Not that she told us about, at least. She sure wouldn’t have wanted us to take it, anyway.” He moved away from the window, walking toward the deer head on the wall, its eyes frozen in fear and shock, the exact emotions Sabrina was feeling at that moment.

  “After we told Lily and Patricia they could go to hell, we all drove away in Amy’s car. It was pouring outside, coming down in sheets. After we’d been driving for a few minutes, Amy saw that Lily’s car was right behind us. Patricia was in the passenger seat.” His eyes became black, like bottomless pits. “It wasn’t until we got on the bridge that they rammed our car for the first time. But it was after the third time they hit us that we finally went over the railing.”

  “But why?” Andrew gasped. “Because you wouldn’t help them find Sam’s killer?”

  “I think they were petrified we were going to expose them. Killing us made more sense. For all I know, that was the FBI’s plan from the start. Get us to solve the case, then eliminate us. Probably why they picked five kids whose parents didn’t care enough to do a lot of digging around about their deaths.”