Betrayal (14 page)

“This isn't right, Colton,” Hayley said.

Colton fixed his dark eyes on her. “I don't like Brianna, but yeah, it
isn't
right.”

“I don't really know her,” Hayley said. She didn't ever want people to think she was two-faced, a trait she considered among the worst a person could have. “I feel kind of sorry for her.”

Colton nodded. “How can they say all that about her?”

“My dad says that there isn't anything the media loves better than a pretty killer. The media is dog-piling on her because she didn't act sad when the camera was watching.”

“Yeah, but her behavior
is
kind of weird, to say the least,” Colton said. “Given what's going on.”

Hayley couldn't argue that, not much anyway. “Stupid, wrong, whatever,” she finally said. “That doesn't mean that she killed Olivia.”

Colton pushed a little. “She had that cut on her hand—remember? We saw it at school.”

Hayley nodded. “But it was a small cut and the police didn't find much blood on her. If Olivia fought back, Brianna's injury would probably have been bigger and she would have been splattered with blood.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Colton said, his mind now back to the first time he noticed the scars on his mother's palms. She'd lied to him that she'd fallen though a plate glass window, but he later found out they were from the time she'd been attacked in the Safeway parking lot while he was in his car seat watching everything, but not really seeing enough of it to understand what was going on.

At least never admitting to it.

As Hayley and Colton surfed the web, they discovered that most of the tabloids and webzines portrayed Brianna as intentionally hyping up the drama for a potential book or movie deal. Nobody had seen her or Drew since her dad and stepmother had returned to town, and until the pair surfaced, all the daily rags had was the same, tired footage that they kept replaying over and over.

The first was the Flip cam video that the
North Kitsap Herald
reporter took at the crime scene. The second was the surveillance footage from the Victoria's Secret shopping trip the afternoon after Olivia's murder. The last one was a grainy black-and-white make-out video taken by the surveillance camera in the elevator at the Silverdale Beach Hotel.

And then there was the
Inside Edition
piece. The reporter for the tabloid TV show had called it a “scoop,” but in reality it was an ambush on Port Gamble's police chief.

Annie Garnett had taken a short walk to the General Store and back to clear her head when the
Inside Edition
cameraman and reporter—a young man with fake, tanned skin that made him look like a Cheeto with bushy eyebrows—scurried over to grab a few sound bites outside the police department.

“Isn't it true that Brianna Connors was doing yoga in the hall right after the murder?” he asked.

“I don't really want to get into that,” Annie said, feeling very uncomfortable. She moved her large hands out of view.

The reporter cocked a caterpiller brow and went on. “Isn't it true that she's no longer cooperating in the investigation?”

Annie's unflappable composure sank a little more, though she hid it well. She was pissed off. Big-time. She wasn't about to lose her cool, however. Not then, not there with that twit from tabloid TV.

“It is true that Ms. Connors and Mr. Marcello have declined for now, but we're hoping we can schedule something soon,” she said, stepping away.

“Wait a second! I have something to show you,” the reporter said.

A second later, he thrust his cell phone in her face and played back a video.

“This will air tonight,” he said.

The camera zeroed in on Olivia's parents as they sat on a sofa in some posh Seattle hotel. A floral arrangement of ice-blue hydrangeas and creamy-white gladiolas the size of a Mini Cooper provided the backdrop.

“Sources tell
Inside Edition
,” the interviewer on the video said in a breathless voice, “that your daughter's murder might have been some kind of a game gone wrong.”

Eager to make his point, Edward Grant nearly lunged at the camera to get closer to the lens. “Our daughter was slaughtered by a soulless girl and her boyfriend. I don't have any idea what they were doing that night, but I can tell you that Olivia was not a willing participant. This was no game gone wrong. No girl as smart as our Olivia plays a game to lose her life.”

Mrs. Grant dabbed at her eyes when the interviewer turned to her.

“I just can't comment. I really couldn't. I'm not a judgmental person. I will say—and I hope this doesn't offend anyone because the people here have been rather kind—but I really do wish that the police would do something.”

After ditching the reporter, Annie Garnett sighed. She felt upset and disappointed. Things were spiraling out of control. She wondered who told the TV reporter about the yoga. She didn't want that out. It was a piece of the puzzle—and an inflammatory one at that.

Once inside the safety of the station, Annie was greeted by Tatiana bearing licorice spice tea, the chief's favorite.

“I saw that through the window. You could use something to calm you down,” she said.

Annie allowed a slight smile to cross her face. It was as fake a smile as she'd ever given.

“What I could really use now is a Xanax,” she said.

Tatiana shook her head. “Just drink the tea. You're gonna need it.” She held out a slip of paper.

“What's that?”

“Brianna's dad. He's mad, mad, mad. Says that Brianna ran away because of you.”

“Ran away? What do you mean?”

“The father says that his daughter is missing. She's not returning his calls,” Tatiana said, passing the slip of paper across the desk. “He's a real jerk too.”

Annie nodded. That he was.

IF THERE COULD BE A SUBJECT that trumped Olivia's murder in the halls of Kingston High School as fodder for incessant gossip and
Criminal Minds
—type speculation, it was the sudden disappearance of Brianna Connors and Drew Marcello. One minute they were the focus of a police investigation for a murder and what they may or may not know about what happened Halloween night. The next, they'd morphed into the dreaded “persons of interest” category. And then, just as quickly, they were gone.

Beth Lee, Colton James, and Hayley and Taylor Ryan sat across from the library and tried to piece it all together.

“You run when you're guilty, right?” Beth said.

Colton unzipped his hoodie. “Or if you think you've been framed,” he said.

“Guilty, I say,” Beth repeated.

Taylor tapped the screen on her phone. “Neither one of them has posted anything on Facebook or Twitter for like sixteen hours.”

“My guess is that they are dead,” Beth said, testing the strength of her spiked hair by pressing her fingertips gently against each point. “Who can go without posting for sixteen hours?”

“Or sixteen minutes,” Taylor said.

“Let's think about it a little,” Hayley said, always approaching an issue or problem with logic. “Any number of things could have happened to them. Flight doesn't mean they went willingly.”

“What are you getting at?” Beth asked.

“Maybe they were kidnapped by the real killer?” Colton asked.

“Possible, I guess,” Hayley said, though she didn't think it was likely. Even so, she wanted to back up her boyfriend's theory.

“Like maybe they got in a car accident or something?” Taylor said, realizing that the minute she gave voice to the idea it was probably the lamest suggestion anyone could come up with.

“I'll stick with my original theory,” Beth said. “You run because you're guilty.”

LATER THAT DAY, the
Seattle Times
updated its website, moving the story of a police cadet who got drunk and rolled his car into a school playground from the top of the page to:

Brian Connors was not only a braggart, a spotlight-seeker, and an egomaniac.

He was also right.

Chapter 15

HAYLEY AND TAYLOR WERE CLEARING the dishes after dinner when another message from Text Creeper arrived on their phones like electronic slime:

If Text Creeper's first text had spooked Hayley and Taylor on Monday, this second message had them jumping out of their skin. Both girls knew they had to ignore it, but that was going to be far from easy.

“Nobody deserves to die like that! What does it mean?” Taylor asked as she turned off the stream of hot water that ran over the dishes in the sink.

Hayley shook her head. She didn't know. Who could?

Taylor reached for a paper towel. “Should we tell Mom and Dad?”

“Tell me what?” Kevin Ryan asked, popping his head into the kitchen. The call of the coffee pot had brought him back to the kitchen. It was a much-needed break from writing his latest book,
Killer Smile,
about a handsome serial killer from Iowa who charmed women into posing for a “classy” nude calendar before bludgeoning them to death. The real killer was neither charming nor handsome, but his publisher insisted that's what readers wanted to read.

“The tip-off, girls,” he had told Hayley and Taylor when he had started the project that summer, “is that there is no such thing as a ‘classy nude' calendar. If a photographer suggests that you or your friends should pose for one, report him to the police pronto. Don't even think about it. You'll save a life, for sure.”

“It's about Olivia's murder,” Hayley said, pouring soap into the sink.

“People are . . . saying stuff about what happened. We're all freaking out big-time,” Taylor said. “Have you heard anything?”

Kevin dropped into a seat at the kitchen table. “I don't really have any inside info,” he said. “You'll probably find out more on Twitter or Facebook.”

The sisters knew that their father was probably spot-on in some ways, but they weren't really seeking specifics about the case. They were looking for reassurance.

“Do you think whoever killed Olivia might kill someone else?” Taylor asked. “Maybe another student at the high school?”

“Maybe that's what's happened to Brianna and Drew. Maybe they've been murdered?” Hayley added.

Kevin understood how fear enveloped people whenever a terrible crime occurred. A crime like what happened to Olivia was the scariest, most paranoia-inducing of all. At the moment, there was no telling if anyone else was in danger or not. Olivia's murder might have been random, which was potentially more terrifying than thinking that it had been premeditated.

The idea of a serial killer lurking around Kingston and Port Gamble hadn't really occurred to any of the Ryans until that moment. Kevin's first thought had been that some kid had gotten high and went berserk—a drug-addled killing. If not that, then maybe it was one of Brianna's father's clients? Someone who wasn't happy with his defense and sought revenge? Both scenarios had been in the news in the past couple of days. Kevin looked at his watch. It was 12:45 p.m.

“Let me see what I can find out,” he said. He knew that Annie Garnett would be in line at the Gamble Bay Coffee stand in exactly four minutes. Annie, who'd grown up with nothing that even closely resembled the consistency of a normal life, had forged her own with the regularity of a church chime. She ate lunch by the park, walked to the coffee place, and later strolled around the entire perimeter of the business district. She did that every single day, including weekends, at exactly the same time.

“Thanks, Dad,” Hayley said.

STILL JOGGING EACH DAY—and still unable to shake off those last ten pounds—Kevin “ran into” Annie at the coffee stand that filled the spaces by the pumps of Port Gamble's defunct gas station.

She was there, getting her coffee, as he predicted.

The police chief smiled wearily when she saw him.

“Hey, Annie,” he said, fishing for change in his jacket. “Surprised to see you here.”

“I'm here every day at this time,” she said. “Like you didn't know that.”

Kevin shrugged and placed his order—a triple tall one Splenda latte.

“I guess I did. Anyway, I wanted to get your take on the Grant case,” he said.

She sipped her coffee. “Open investigation, Kev. You know I can't talk about it.”

“My girls are scared. All the girls in town are. They think there's a crazed serial killer out there. I just wanted to, you know, put them at ease.”

The police chief narrowed her gaze. “This isn't for a book, is it?”

Kevin shook his head, a little too vigorously. “No. I'm not that kind of crime writer. You know that.”

She took off the annoying plastic lid and drank some more. “Right. Off the record?” she asked.

“You know you don't have to ask that,” Kevin said.

“I was just burned by
Inside Edition
.”

“I won't lie to you, Annie. I saw it. Just so you know,
everyone
gets burned by
Inside Edition
. But, yeah, this is only for me. I'm not working on anything. Besides if I ever betrayed your trust, Annie, you'd find ways to ticket me every single day for the rest of my life.”

“You know me too well.” Annie took a breath. The November air had chilled, and a white puff of vapor came from her bright red lips. “It's interesting you mention that people are scared there's a serial killer on the loose. My best guess is that this killer is not a stranger but someone much closer to the situation.”