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“But you didn’t think about that when you took off your gloves.” Roger Bix’s rage was brutal. He had been looking for someone to shred and now he believed he had found the culprit.

“Roger,” Platt tried to interrupt him.

“We’ll need to test you.” Bix was unrelenting. “See just what the hell you’ve been spreading.”

The woman started sobbing again. When Detective Racine brought her in the small office, the woman’s face was already red and blotchy. Racine hadn’t left and no one suggested she do so. She stood quietly aside, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Platt didn’t think she was comfortable with Bix’s approach, either.

“What the hell were you thinking,” Bix continued and this time Platt stepped in between the two.

“Ms. Carter, I’m Dr. Benjamin Platt.” He left out the “colonel.” No sense in putting this poor woman more on edge. “We’ll need to take a couple of test samples from you. Is that okay?” They’d need both blood and stool samples, but he’d tell her that later.

She pulled a tissue from somewhere up her sleeve and blew her nose. He could hear the rattle inside her chest. But it sounded like typical cold or flu symptoms. Nothing that would give almost seventy children such immediate nausea and diarrhea.

Platt didn’t look at Bix. He wanted him to know he was cutting him off, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the man’s face was as bright as his orange hair. Platt couldn’t help wondering what had Bix wound so tight, much too tight. He was treating this woman like a terrorist with a bomb strapped to her chest. Yet last night when Platt had suggested a kitchen worker might be the culprit, Bix had dismissed the idea.

“I’m going to have someone come and take a few samples. Is that all right with you, Ms. Carter?” Platt waited for the woman to nod.

“Hell, I’ll take the samples myself.” Bix was at it again.

“No, Mr. Bix,” Platt said, leaning into Bix until the man had to look him in the eye. “We’ll send someone in.” He looked over at Racine. “I saw some paramedics earlier. Are they still here?”

“I’ll go check.”

“We’ll be right back, Ms. Carter. Can I get you anything?”

She shook her head as Platt grabbed Bix by the elbow and escorted him out of the room. He kept walking, pulling Bix along until they were halfway down the hall.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Platt asked. “Last night you told me this could
not
be a norovirus from improper food handling. You implied it had to already be in the food. Now you unload on that poor woman like she planted the bacteria in every lunch she served. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Doesn’t it make you a little mad when food handlers are so negligent?”

“So you feel better now after lecturing her? Because we both know that unless she has some highly contagious virus or sprayed contaminated body fluids over seventy kids’ meals, she did not cause this.”

Bix shoved at Platt’s hand, though Platt wasn’t even holding on to him anymore. He stood up straight, threw back his shoulders, stretched his neck, and stared at the ceiling. Then he released a sigh and looked at Platt. But still there appeared to be no urgency to explain.

Platt just shook his head. “You’re going to tell me later whether you want to or not. Right now we should start retrieving whatever we can. Before it’s gone.”

“Except we don’t know what we’re looking for at this point.”

“Yes, we do. Undoubtedly, these kids got sick after having lunch in the cafeteria. So let’s go see what we can find of today’s meal even if it means scraping it off the hallway floor and the bathroom stalls.”

TWENTY-FIVE

NEBRASKA

Maggie needed to get to North Platte for the autopsies, so this next interview would have to be her last of the day. That was if Skylar didn’t strangle her before they got there.

“What the hell were you thinking?” The red-faced sheriff had blasted her as soon as they got back to the car.

“The girl’s high. Probably marijuana. That’s why she has the incense burning. Her eyes are bloodshot and dilated. Her coordination is off. I can’t believe you didn’t see that.”

“She’s been through an incredible experience. Of course she’s not herself.”

“Why didn’t you ask her about drugs? You told Dawson Hayes that you knew why they were out in the forest.”

“Amanda’s not a suspect.”

“Neither is Dawson.”

“He had a Taser. A Taser that had been fired.”

“But we don’t have a victim who’s been shot with a Taser.”

“Not that we know of.” Skylar wouldn’t relent.

“Look,” Maggie said, calming herself and her tone, “next time you decide someone’s a suspect, please inform me.”

“Next time you decide to insult the daughter of one of our community’s most respected business owners, please inform me.”

She shook her head and left it alone for the drive to the Boshes’. It was thirty-five minutes away. The kids lived in different towns but all attended the same high school; one high school for the entire county.

The Boshes’ two-story Colonial, which sat on a huge lot that backed to the city park, predicted what Maggie could expect from this interview. She didn’t need to ask whether Skylar believed this boy was a suspect. Before visiting the Griffins’ house the sheriff had already told her that Johnny B had recruiters from five major NCAA teams at the last football game. But he was going to make them all proud by staying in Nebraska and playing for the Huskers.

“Might even start as a freshman quarterback,” Skylar had gone on. “He’s something to watch. Got an arm on him and man, that boy can scramble. He can get himself out of every kind of mess.”

So Maggie would need to either steel herself for another kid-glove interview or make a decision to take over this investigation.

Mrs. Bosh was waiting outside the front door when they got out of the sheriff’s SUV. She was an attractive woman with a pinched, worried face. She wore slacks, a white silk blouse, and leather pumps. Perhaps she had taken off work early or she had dressed for her son’s interview.

Before they reached the front steps she called out, “He isn’t here.”

Skylar turned to look at the red Camaro in the driveway but before he could ask, Mrs. Bosh continued, “He was here when I came home for lunch. I just got back a few minutes ago and I can’t find him anywhere.” She held up a cell phone. “I checked with a couple of his friends. They haven’t seen him today.”

Maggie realized she hadn’t been sympathetic enough. These kids just lost two friends. Here she was arguing with Skylar about whether they should treat them like suspects or witnesses, when all of them—until the evidence said otherwise—were victims.

Mrs. Bosh came down the steps rather than invite them in. She looked over her shoulder as if worried someone would see her.

“I’m worried he may have taken some of my pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

Another glance over her shoulder.

“Painkillers. For my back when my car was rear-ended last spring.”

“I doubt the boy would take something like that, Mrs. Bosh.” Skylar patted her arm.

“What kind of painkillers?” Maggie wanted to know.

She hadn’t worked narcotics but had read about teenagers raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets for drug parties. If these kids were using salvia and Amanda was high in the middle of the afternoon, there was a good chance they had been experimenting with other things.

“There weren’t very many left. I just noticed the empty bottle this morning.”

“Mrs. Bosh, do you remember the name of the painkiller,” Maggie insisted.

“Yes. It was OxyContin.”

Now Maggie was worried. Experimenting with OxyContin could be fatal. It was a time-release medication, but chewing or crushing it caused rapid release and a lethal amount of the drug could flood the system.

“What was Johnny like this morning? Did he seem depressed or upset about last night?”

“Agent O’Dell, Johnny is an athlete,” Skylar said before Mrs. Bosh had a chance to answer. “This is a kid who’s going to be a number-one recruiting choice.” He was giving her the same look he had when they left the Griffins’ house.

“He seemed really nervous and sort of jumpy.” Mrs. Bosh ignored Skylar and spoke to Maggie. Her eyes kept sweeping up and down the street. “He wasn’t himself.”

“Did he talk about what happened last night?”

“No. He wouldn’t talk about it. And my husband said we shouldn’t make him.” Then her attention got distracted and she tilted her head and walked to the edge of the sidewalk. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

They listened. Other than a train whistle in the distance, Maggie heard birds, a wind chime, nothing more. Then suddenly she did hear something. A soft whimpering.

Mrs. Bosh headed around the side of the house, hurrying through a flower bed instead of going around it. Maggie and Skylar followed. At the back of the house a dog laid on its belly, whining.

“Rex, what’s wrong?” But Mrs. Bosh didn’t go to the dog. Instead she stayed back, standing stock-still.

“Does he belong to you?” Maggie asked.

“The neighbor’s. He comes over and Johnny plays ball with him. They’ve been playing since Johnny was a boy.”

Maggie approached the dog carefully. He didn’t appear injured. He focused on something under the porch. Maybe a toy had gotten lodged or an animal was trapped underneath. But the dog’s whine sounded more urgent than playful.

“There’s a crawl space,” Mrs. Bosh said. “It goes all the way under the house but we put a board down there so animals couldn’t hide.”

Maggie pulled the penlight from her jeans pocket and kneeled down, coaxing the dog to move enough for her to take a look underneath the porch.

“Johnny used to crawl all the way under there when he was a little boy. He usually did it when he was in trouble and didn’t want to be found.”

That’s when Maggie noticed a small, torn piece of fabric snagged on a nail.

“What was your son wearing this morning, Mrs. Bosh?”

TWENTY-SIX

Maggie remembered that the reason she had a rental car, now stuck in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was because she refused to get on a twin-prop airplane. She understood it wasn’t an actual fear of flying so much as a fear of being without control, which was often the crux of most fears. If you had control over a situation, there was nothing to fear. That’s what Maggie kept telling herself as she crawled through the dirt underneath the floorboards of the Boshes’ house, using her elbows to pull forward.

There was, at most, two feet from top to bottom, which kept her on her stomach. Some areas were tighter. Cords and cobwebs hung from the two-by-fours, getting tangled in her hair. A loose nail had already bit into her shoulder, tearing away a piece of skin and fabric just as it probably had with Johnny.

They had tried to shine a high-powered flashlight through the opening but support beams blocked their view. Mrs. Bosh called to the boy but no one answered. When Maggie suggested one of them go in after him, she swore she could see the color drain completely from Skylar’s face. Now, as the smell of mold and dirt filled her nostrils and dust mites floated in the flashlight streams, she questioned her own judgment.

The tightness squeezed around her, support columns scraping against her shoulders. Memories of being trapped seeped into her consciousness. This was not so much a memory as a distinct feeling that suddenly washed over her body. She had to stop, catch her breath. She tried not to panic when that breath filled her lungs with musty particles that threatened to block her intake of air.

It had been several years ago when a killer threw her into an empty chest freezer. She could remember clawing at the inside door, her fingernails broken, the tips of her fingers raw and soon numb. Most times the only overpowering memory was the cold, so deep and unbearable that her mind had shut down. Eventually her body, too, had collapsed from hypothermia.

She closed her eyes for a minute. Told herself to slow down.

Breathe through the mouth. Deep, steady breaths.

She couldn’t start hyperventilating or she would be in trouble. She shoved the memory aside. It was cold down here but not freezer cold. This was different. She wasn’t trapped. She had control.