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  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.

  She crawled and wiggled her way ahead. As the passage began to narrow, she started wondering how she would turn around.

  Stop thinking about it.

  Mrs. Bosh’s voice became more and more muffled.

  Skylar had set up the high-powered flashlight at the opening under the porch, but the shaft of light couldn’t bend around corners or through support columns. At this point all she had was her penlight.

  Something skittered on her left. Fur brushed her hand. Maggie jerked and cracked the top of her head against a two-by-four. It was just a mouse, she told herself. Too small for a rat. But she still shivered.

  Not a rat. Stop thinking about rats.

  She stopped and readjusted, giving her elbows a rest.

  “Johnny? It’s Agent Maggie O’Dell. Do you remember me? From last night?”

  She paused. Listened. Nothing. Except now she thought she heard a voice. Garbled but definitely coming from somewhere in front of her.

  “Johnny. We’re just worried about you. You’re not in any trouble.”

  Her penlight couldn’t show her what was beyond the next support column, this one thicker, the width of two rows of cement blocks. She must be at the center of the house. The sound came from the other side of this column.

  She palmed the penlight and held up her fist so that she could see the path ahead of her as she crawled. There was more space here, at least an additional foot higher. The narrow stream of light caught glimpses of objects in the dirt. On closer inspection Maggie recognized discarded toys, a Star Wars action figure, candy wrappers, and crumpled soda cans.

  She pulled herself even with the support column and rolled to her side. She realized she could actually sit hunched over. She leaned against the cold cement blocks and took a few seconds to bat the cobwebs out of her face and hair. One swipe with the penlight and she saw him.

  He was sitting with his back to her, less than ten feet away, slouched sideways and leaning against another column. She could hear him mumbling.

  “Johnny?”

  No response.

  If he was tripping on OxyContin or more salvia, he migh
t be incoherent.

  “Johnny?” She tried calling to him again.

  She could move on hands and knees here as long as she stayed low. Still, her back scraped against wires stapled to the floorboards. Her shirt caught on another stray nail. This time she ignored the rip of fabric and kept going. She came up beside him but he didn’t acknowledge her presence. She put a hand on his shoulder, trying not to startle him as she dragged herself around.

  In the halo from the penlight she saw his eyes and she knew immediately. She could see the earbuds and the dangling cord. The mumblings she had heard came from his iPod, not from Johnny.

  They were too late.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Julia Racine had never really understood what Maggie O’Dell saw in Benjamin Platt. He seemed too disciplined, too spit-and-polish, too much of a play-by-the-rules type of guy. Though she did have to admit he had a nice ass.

  Of course, she still noticed stuff like that. When it bugged her partner, Rachel, Julia would usually say, “Hey, I’m gay, I’m not dead.”

  Truthfully, she’d always imagined Maggie going for someone who was a bit more adventurous, a little unpredictable and passionate. Someone a little more like … okay, someone a little more like Julia.

  She followed Platt out to the school parking lot after offering to help.

  “At least there’s no camera crew set up back here,” Platt said while his head swiveled around to make sure. “I couldn’t believe they beat me to the scene.”

  Julia actually could believe it. The vultures always somehow found their way. Now she was living with one of them. Just a year ago if someone had told her she’d fall for a card-carrying journalist she would have said they were crazy. And maybe she was nuts. For the second time in about an hour she caught herself hoping Rachel hadn’t been the one to tip off the vultures.

  She followed Platt to the Dumpster in the corner of the lot. It was surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence, closed with a padlock.

  Platt slapped at the lock. “How bad are things when we start locking up our garbage?”

  “Makes it more difficult to dump dead bodies.”

  He glanced at her like he hadn’t thought about that before. Funny, it was the first thing that popped into Julia’s head. Too many times she’d had to help fish some poor victim out of a Dumpster—usually a woman. Men rarely got thrown in with the garbage. In fact, one of the last cases Julia and Maggie had worked on together included a decapitated woman whose head Julia had found in the victim’s own kitchen trash bin.

  “This is a little messier than you bargained for,” Platt said, giving her an easy out.

  It made her smile. He definitely had no idea what kind of messes she had been exposed to in the past. But he did have a point. It was Julia’s day off. She didn’t need to do this. She didn’t even need to be here.

  Maybe she was simply curious about Benjamin Platt. She used to have a big-time crush on Maggie but then somewhere along the line they had become friends. The two of them had more in common than either wanted to admit. Both had lost a parent during childhood. Both of them had to fight their way up the ranks of male-dominated careers. They trusted very few people and allowed even fewer in their lives, so friendship was not a term either threw around lightly. Fact was Julia respected the hell out of Maggie and maybe she wanted to see who this guy was that had snagged her attention.

  Julia watched as Platt took off his jacket and carefully placed his wallet and cell phone in one of the jacket pockets before folding it and setting it on the concrete. She kept from rolling her eyes as he turned up the cuffs of his shirt in perfect folds that matched on both sides. Then he surprised her and scaled the fence in three moves.

  Julia stood back, hands on her hips. Okay, so that was not expected. Maybe he was a bit more adventurous than she gave him credit for. But of course, he was athletic. You’d have to be blind to not notice his lean physique. She just didn’t expect him to get his trousers dirty or his polished leather shoes scuffed.

  “I can toss some of the bags over,” he said.

  “No, don’t bother.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. They’ll break.”

  She knew without looking that there would barely be room to stand between the fence and the Dumpster. She could hear him shoving open the lid and immediately smelled the garbage.

  She took off her jacket and laid it next to his, not folding hers quite as nicely as he had. She decided to keep her shoulder holster on. Then she followed him over the fence, almost as smoothly except for the splinter that ended up in the palm of her left hand. Sharp and deep—it took biting her lower lip to keep her from releasing a string of expletives. She had been trying to watch her mouth around CariAnne, after the little girl kept riding her about her overuse of the “f-word.” Nothing like having a nine-year-old lecturing you on manners. After all, Julia could just tell her to fuck off like she would if it was anyone else.

  “So what exactly are we looking for?”

  She handed Platt a pair of latex gloves. She had grabbed several from the kitchen. Habit. Platt looked surprised to see them but immediately started putting on a pair.

  “Anything from today’s menu.”

  “They didn’t just leave us some leftovers in the fridge?”

  “That’d be too easy.” He smiled as he yanked a piece of paper from his back trouser pocket and unfolded it. “They had something called a taquito. Any idea what that is?”

  “CariAnne loves those. They’re her favorite school cafeteria meal. It’s sort of like a burrito but fried.”

  “Beef or chicken?”

  “Either, but she likes the ground beef better. They also have cheese, onion, some kind of sauce. We’ve tried to duplicate them at home but, according to CariAnne, there’s something we keep missing.”

  “I forgot to ask, is she okay?”

  “She puked all over my shoes, but she’s resting at home now with her mother who knows when she’s sick even without CariAnne having to tell her.” Silently Julia told herself to shut up. Why did it bother her that she hadn’t automatically seen that the little girl hadn’t been feeling well? She couldn’t be expected to know that, right?

  “I guess that’s a special mother talent the rest of us don’t have,” Platt said, as if reading her mind, but he wasn’t joking. Instead, Julia thought he looked … if she wasn’t mistaken, she thought he looked sad.

  “Do they make them or are they premade and frozen?” He was back to digging in the garbage.

  For a second Julia had forgotten what they were talking about. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking they’d have to be premade and frozen. No way they could make hundreds of those by hand in a morning.”

  Platt looked at the list again. “They also had lettuce salad and oatmeal cookies.”

  Julia’s stomach growled. Platt raised an eyebrow. The rancid smell had not dissipated, nor had the flies.

  “Missed lunch,” Julia said without apology. Digging through garbage didn’t gross her out any more than scraping brains off a wall or watching a medical examiner crunch through a rib cage. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. Except today she still couldn’t shake the smell of the kids’ vomit.

  Thankfully Platt didn’t make a big deal of it. Instead, he grabbed one of the top bags and, keeping it inside the Dumpster, started unwinding the plastic tie.

  Julia took a bag and simply ripped open a hole. She yanked out a handful and suddenly found her gag reflex starting to betray her. She hated that she actually had to swallow back the bile. Damn, she never got nauseated. Why now? Especially when she didn’t want Benjamin Platt going back and telling Maggie that her tough-as-nails friend flipped her cookies over a pile of schoolkids’ leftovers.

  “Do you want any of the bags the lettuce came in?” She tried to concentrate on the task at hand. The discarded lettuce bags were the only things she was holding that she could recognize. Everything else was a mish-mash of brown sludge that already sme
lled bad.

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  Platt set aside his own garbage bag to take one of the lettuce bags.

  “There are codes printed on the seam.” He pulled a bag apart and showed her. “The produce companies put these codes in place after the spinach recall in 2006. Let’s see if I can remember how this works. This bag’s code is P227A. The first letter identifies the processing plant, the 227 is the two hundred and twenty-seventh day of the year, and the last letter usually refers to which shift bagged it. Now they keep records at the plant so we can track which supplier and hopefully even which field provided that day’s lettuce.”

  “We’ve got like forty or fifty empty lettuce bags here. Do you want all of them?”

  Julia swore she saw his shoulders slump at the enormity of the project. He shoved his shirtsleeves up above his elbows not noticing that he had gotten some of the brown sludge on them. His eyes scanned the sky as if looking for answers.

  Finally he shrugged and said, “We have to start somewhere.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  NEBRASKA

  Maggie hadn’t thought about what she’d say to Johnny Bosh to convince him to leave his safe haven. She also hadn’t given much thought to how she would drag his six-foot, 180-pound frame back through the tight squeeze. Now none of that mattered, at least not to the point of urgency. She’d leave it to the paramedics or rescue crew to figure out.

  She sat with him for a good ten minutes, all too conscious of the fact that she was more comfortable with dead victims than with the living. She hadn’t had a single answer for Dawson Hayes back at the hospital when he proclaimed that she should have left him to die with the others.

  She should have predicted that after such a tragedy, the survivors would have a difficult time. If she hadn’t predicted it as a profiler of human behavior, she should have known from personal experience. How many times had she survived at the hands of a killer while others had died?