Deadly Cool (22 page)

“Maybe you could try the window?”

“Locked. And fitted with an alarm.”

“Dude.”

“I know.”

“Okay, how about this . . . wait until she goes to sleep, then just sneak out the front door.”

“She doesn’t go to bed until after one. I need to meet Andi at midnight.”

“So, sneak out the back door? She can’t watch both at once, can she?”

“The backyard floodlights are on. I’d be a sitting duck as soon as I stepped outside.”

I heard Sam sigh on the other end and pictured her bangs flying upward. “Sorry, that’s all I got. You’ve reached the limits of my sneakiness.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“Lemme know how it turns out, okay?”

I nodded at my empty room. “Will do.” Then I hung up and dialed another number. While Sam might score a three on the sneaky scale, I had a pretty good idea that someone else I knew was at least an eleven.

“Not done yet” was the greeting Chase gave as he picked up the phone. “Sorry, I had to go back to school to meet with the paper’s adviser, then had to edit tomorrow’s copy, then there was dinner with the fam. But I’m almost there now. Just going through the last few pics.”

Good to know.

“Actually I need your help with something else,” I said. Then I told him about my meeting with Andi.

“I’m going with you,” Chase said when I was done.

“No!”

“Remember what happened last time?”

All too well.

“Look, Andi is harmless. And no one else knows I’m meeting her. It’s perfectly safe.”

He paused. “I’m almost done here. I’ll follow you and hide. She won’t even know I’m there.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Too late. It’s a done deal. I’ll follow you with or without your permission.”

I bit my lip. If Andi was going to all this trouble to meet privately, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate an audience. “Fine,” I said. “I’m meeting her at one a.m.” I held my breath, closed my eyes, and crossed my fingers.

“Great. I’ll be there at one.”

I let out a silent breath, thanking the gods of lies that for once I’d been able to pull one over on him. If I were lucky, by one a.m., I’d be safely tucked in my bed and the killer would be on his way to Raley’s jail.

“Fine. Now, how am I going to get out of here?” I asked.

He was quiet on the other end for a moment, contemplating his options.

“Your mom is downstairs?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Okay, if she’s down, you should go up.”

I looked up at my ceiling. “Meaning . . . ?”

“You have an attic?”

I shrugged. “I guess so,” I answered. “There’s a hole in the ceiling in the laundry room.”

“Okay, so climb into the attic, then find the vent, and get out that way.”

“Out onto . . . ?”

“I dunno. The roof? You figure it out. I gotta go so I can finish checking the photos.”

And he hung up on me.

I stared at the silent phone. He made it sound so easy. Just climb out onto the roof. Clearly he’d never been a girl with a precarious sense of balance and a slight fear of heights.

However, he had a point. Mom would not be expecting me to go out that way.

I spent the next two hours trying to come up with another way. Unfortunately by 11:15, no lightning bolt of genius had struck me. Up and out it was.

I threw on a pair of old jeans, a black hoodie, and some sneakers, and made for the bedroom door. I cracked it open and stuck my head out.

I could hear Mom watching TV, strains of her DVR’d
The Biggest Loser
filtering up the stairs. I glanced down the hallway. At the very end, near her bedroom, sat the laundry room.

I quickly scuttled from my room, half expecting laser alarms to trip as I passed her bedroom. Luckily, Mom hadn’t gone that far (yet), and I made it to the laundry room without incident. I carefully slid in and closed the door behind me.

So far so good.

I looked up at the rectangular cutout in the ceiling above the washing machine. I’d never been up there. Call me crazy, but I wasn’t a particularly big fan of dark, creepy places. I hopped on top of the washing machine, cringing at the sound of the metal creaking, and stretched up, pushing the rectangle, sorta expecting nothing to happen.

It gave way easily, sliding up and over to reveal a big black hole.

I stood up straight, my head poking into the attic. More blackness. I took out my phone and opened it. The display cast a bluish glow, allowing me to see wooden beams stretched out over a sea of pink insulation. To the right sat a collection of boxes labeled “Christmas Decorations.” To the left, a couple of broken chairs and a dresser missing three drawers. And straight ahead was a metal vent, just a hair larger than I was, a thin strip of moonlight visible through the slats telling me that Chase was indeed correct about it offering a way out.

I should never have doubted his nefarious nature.

I set my phone down on the nearest beam, letting the blue light fill the room as I balanced my hands on the lip of the ceiling for leverage and jumped. Two tries later I had enough upper arm strength to pull myself up into the attic. Once there, I carefully replaced the rectangle of ceiling below me, covering any evidence of my escape route.

It also served to effectively cut my visibility in half, forcing me to completely rely on my cell to light the beam in front of me, though it didn’t quite afford enough light to hit the corners of the attic.

I had given up believing in the boogeyman when I was seven. But, if he really did exist and all Mom’s lies about him being imaginary were for naught, I had a feeling he probably lived in one of the corners of our attic. They were dark, full of cobwebs, and totally creepy. I put mental blinders on, focusing on the round vent on the far wall gable.

Praying I didn’t disturb a nest of spiders (which was right next to heights on the list of things I loved), I hopped from beam to beam, avoiding stepping in the squishy pink insulation. One painstaking step at a time, I finally made it across the room to the vent. I could feel cool air coming in from the outside. A good sign.

I pushed, testing just how sturdy it was. It wiggled. I shoved. It wiggled again but didn’t budge. I balanced on one foot on the wooden beam and kicked. This time a corner came loose. I repeated the procedure, hoping that Mom didn’t hear the noise. Or just figured we had very big rats. On my second try the vent tilted outward, making a clanging sound that echoed through the attic. I froze, holding my breath, praying the next sound I heard wasn’t Mom, investigating.

One second.

Two.

By four Mississippi, I decided she hadn’t heard it, and I was safe.

I peeked out the vent opening. Below me was the roof of the garage.

I pushed my head and shoulders through the vent hole, the splintered wood scraping off against my hoodie as I squeezed through. I hunched my shoulders as much as I could, finally getting one arm out to brace myself on the roof below as I wriggled out the other arm, a hip, and one leg. Finally both feet slid out, hitting the shingles.

I took a deep breath, again freezing for the requisite four Mississippi to make sure Mom hadn’t heard.

So far so good.

As long as I didn’t look down.

Which, of course, was the first thing I did.

Holy effing . . .

That was a long way to fall. I watched the ground kind of sway in front of my eyes, the asphalt of my driveway looking particularly hard and bone breaky from this vantage point. I took a deep breath, told myself to
really
not look down this time, and carefully replaced the vent.

Or tried to. It kinda hung askew, but I figured Mom wasn’t about to come inspect the roofline tonight. I turned.

And felt my foot slip on the shingles.

I quickly sat down on my butt, adrenaline rushing through me. I took a couple more deep breaths, then scooted to the edge of the roof. The top of Mom’s minivan was two feet below me.

I slid until I was as close as I could get, said a silent prayer, willing all my worldly possessions to Sam if I didn’t make it, and jumped.

I landed with a thud on the top of the mom mobile, grateful for once for its big, blocky shape.

I slid on my belly to the back of the car and climbed down feetfirst over the spare tire, never having been so grateful in my life to feel my feet hit the ground. I took a moment to catch my breath, looking around the empty street as I crouched behind the car.

For once, Raley was
not
parked by our front curb. In fact, the entire street was eerily deserted. The lone window lit up was our living room’s, where Mom was keeping vigil over her stumbling-upon-dead-bodies-prone daughter, or so she thought.

As I looked back at the house, I had a moment of guilt for sneaking out on her. But just a moment. Hey, she’d made me eat dog-food chili. I think we were even.

I turned my back on the window, ducking my head and setting off down the street.

It was time to see a blackmailer about a video.

TWENTY-ONE

I JOG WALKED THE ENTIRE WAY TO SCHOOL, A STRONG
sense of déjà vu washing over me as I passed one empty shop after another, dark storefronts and vacant parking lots signaling that all good people were home in bed at this hour. Part of me wished I was, too, but unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life under house arrest, “good” was something I couldn’t afford to be tonight. Instead, I slunk through the night, going over my plan once more.

It was simple: I would look at the video Andi had. If it was any good, I’d call Sam, who, after much pleading, had already convinced Kevin to come pick me and Andi up, and we’d all go straight to the police station, where someone would drag Raley out of bed. (Hey, it was the least I could do, considering he’d burst into my bedroom, gun drawn—dramatic much?—Saturday night.) Then he’d arrest the bad guy, and Kevin would drive me back home before Mom even knew I was gone.

It was a good plan. A solid plan. One that of course depended on Andi actually having some incriminating footage of the killer. But on the off chance that she was either (A) blowing smoke, or (B) trying her hand at some new sort of blackmail scheme, the plan was even simpler: tell her to go to Hades and hightail it home before Mom realized I was gone. (You’ll notice that both plans involved Mom never knowing I had snuck out. Very important to the success of either. And my future happiness.)

By the time I reached Main Street, I was feeling confident. I slipped around the mausoleum-looking main building to the back of the school, where I passed a line of portables. While they were supposed to be temporary classrooms, anyone who had grown up in the California school system knew the trailers were the most permanent temporary structures around. I was pretty sure ours predated MTV. I skirted the pool, where the Wildcats practiced water polo, and made my way out to the football field beyond.

Which was, predictably at this hour, deserted. I looked down at my cell—11:47. I was early. I shoved my hands into the front pocket of my hoodie and sat down on the metal bleachers to wait for Andi.

I closed my eyes, listening to the quiet night. An owl hooted at the far edge of the field. Sprinklers in the quad went off. The hum of the freeway in the distance rumbled behind me.

A loud beeping filled the air, making me jump so high I almost fell off the bleachers.

My cell calling out from my pocket. I took a deep breath. Good thing I wasn’t jumpy tonight or anything.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, fully expecting Andi’s number to light up my screen, telling me she was a no-show. (This was totally the last time I agreed to meet someone with mysterious info at midnight. Couldn’t anyone be mysterious at a reasonable hour?) However, instead of Andi’s number, it was Chase’s that came up. I flipped my phone open. He’d sent me a picture message.

I scrolled down and read the text:

got it! b4 n after. check whats missing.

Beneath the text two pictures were attached. The first was half a frame of the bumper of Chase’s car with a corner of the street behind. I could make out a white truck and a silver sedan. I eagerly moved on to the second photo. I squinted down at the image. Again, Chase’s bumper was visible, this time from a different angle, lower, looking up at the dent. The background was slightly out of focus, but I could make out the same stretch of street as the first picture, the truck again parked at the curb. Only in this one the sedan was missing.

I felt my pulse quicken. This was it! I checked the corner of the photos for a time stamp. I longed for a nice big computer monitor, but I held the phone up, squinting at the corner. The first one read 2:34. The second 3:17. The time fit perfectly. The sedan owner had to be our killer!

I looked more carefully. Unfortunately, the pictures showed nothing of the owner, just the car itself. Nondescript, no vanity plates that I could make out, the only visible digits on the plate at all a 5, a 7, and a G. I was about to give it up as another dead end when something dangling from the rearview mirror of the car in picture number one caught my eye.

I leaned over, squinting at the screen. It was fuzzy, tiny, and not the best-quality photo to begin with. But as I tilted my head and leaned back, it took shape. A heart. A shimmery purple heart dangling on a silver chain.

I sucked in a breath.

I knew that heart. I’d seen it before a dozen times. And I knew who it belonged to.

Suddenly everything fit, all the random bits of information that had been floating around in my head falling into a perfect pattern. A perfectly sinister pattern, I realized with a shiver, as I now knew exactly who had killed Courtney. And Kaylee. And who had framed Josh to take the fall for everything.

I switched screens and quickly pulled up Chase’s number, my hands shaking.

“Hey,” he answered on the first ring. “You get the pics?”

“Yes! And I know who it is.”

“Yeah, the sedan.”

“No, I know who owns it.”

“Really?” he asked. I could feel him leaning forward, body as tense as mine was, rigid with tension. “Who?”