JILLIANE P. HOFFMAN

Pretty Little Things

HarperCollinsPublishers

For Rich, as always, my rock And for the not-so-little lambs, Manda-Panda and Monster, who continue to inspire and amaze me

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The small, portly man in the white suit, deep purple shirt and patent slipons ran around the stage with a microphone in hand, reaching out to touch any one of the hundreds of sweaty hands that waved back and forth before him in the Unity Tree of Everlasting Evangelical Life church auditorium. He slicked back a thick band of gelled gray hair that had broken form and swooped down across his forehead and over his eyes. The amazing camera work practically let you count the fine lines in the preacher’s full face, the beads of perspiration that rolled off his red cheeks and down through layers of neck fat.

‘Now when Moses went to meet the Israelites after their victory over the Midianites,’ the preacher boomed as he worked the stage from one end to the other, ‘he had all the princes and the priest, Eleazar, with him. And he sees what? What does he see that the Bible tells us made Moses so incredibly angry? He sees women!’ The crowd, which looked to be made up of mostly females, booed loudly.

Seated in his worn La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, the man nodded along with the church audience, watching the drama unfold on the television screen as though he had not already seen this video a hundred times before.

‘The Israelites have saved the women!’ the preacher boomed. ‘And Moses, well, he says, “So you’ve spared all the women? Why? Why, when they’re the very ones who have caused a plague to strike the Lord’s people! Why did you spare them?”’

Somewhere in the church audience, a female yelled, ‘Because they were men!’

The preacher laughed. ‘Yes! Because they were men. And because they were men, they were weak to the ways of women! To the smell of a woman and the taste of a woman and the feel of a woman!’

The man wiped his sweaty palm on the recliner’s worn armrest, nodding enthusiastically at the preacher’s words.

‘They were weak!’ the preacher continued. ‘And so these weak men spared these vile women who had wreaked havoc on their tribe. But Moses is not just upset, ladies and gentlemen. He doesn’t just say, “That was a stupid thing to do!” and leave it at that. No. Moses knows what will happen now that these vile women have been saved. Their delicious scent and their warm skin and their soft curves will soon sway their captors. Wickedness takes on many forms, folks. Many forms.’

The preacher summoned a young woman in the church audience then by pointing at her. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. ‘Come on, child, come on up here.’ Encouraged by her parents and the enthusiastic crowd, the girl hesitantly climbed on stage. ‘Look at how beautiful she is,’ the preacher said, walking around the slight figure with his arms outstretched, as if she were an animal on a pedestal in the circus and he was the ringmaster introducing her to them. He sniffed exaggeratedly at her and smiled. ‘She smells good. She sure looks good. She doesn’t seem evil. What man would not be tempted?’ He turned back to the crowd. ‘Like many of us in our everyday lives, Moses must make a difficult decision. A terrible decision. One that many will find objectionable, but yet Moses – well, Moses knows it is necessary. A difficult choice, but a necessary one.’

A pregnant hush came over the crowd. ‘What does he tell them?’ the preacher asked his flock, staring as he did right into the eye of the camera, speaking to the thousands of lost sheep all across the country who waited on his every word. ‘What? He tells them – and this is right out of the Holy Bible, folks – he tells them, “Slay, therefore, every male child and every woman who has had intercourse with a man. But you may spare and keep for yourselves all girls who had no intercourse with a man.” What does that mean, folks? “Only the young girls who are virgins may live,” Moses says. “Only the virgins can live amongst your people. Only the virgins, those who are pure in thought and deed, can be saved.” Why? Because they are pure. They have not been corrupted.’ He looked back at the young girl on stage and bellowed, ‘Tell us, young lady, are you a virgin? Are you pure in thought and deed? God is watching you! Remember that! We are watching you! Are you pure in both thought and deed?’

The girl nodded as tears ran down her cheeks. She smiled at the preacher and then out at her parents. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I am pure.’

The crowd went wild.

The man wiped his palm again on the easy chair. The preacher certainly was mesmerizing. He had the crowd eating out of his hand. Had the young virgin not been so pure, he would have had no problem rousing the masses to stone her, if that was what he so wished.

It was inspiring.

The man hit rewind on his remote, and while the tape noisily chortled in the VCR, he unfolded the brown canvas bag on his lap. He ran his fingers over the soft brush tips inside, finally selecting a flat bristle and his dull painting knife. He picked up his artist’s palette from the side table and slowly mixed his palette of carefully selected paints. The heavy scent of the oils was intoxicating. The tape started again from the beginning. As the preacher took to his stage, the people hailed him as though he were a general coming back from war. As if he was the Messiah himself.

The man listened to the sermon one last time as he worked the final touches on his latest piece, finding the raw energy of the preacher’s words to be as soothing and stimulating as a surgeon might find listening to classical music in the OR.

Like many of us in our everyday lives, Moses must make a difficult decision. A terrible decision. One that many will find objectionable, but yet Moses – well, Moses knows it is necessary. A difficult choice, but a necessary one. What does he tell them? What?

When he was done, the man turned from his work and put his brush into the turpentine mixture to soak. Next to the TV was his computer. He got up from the La-Z-Boy and moved to the swivel desk chair. His hands were shaking just a little as he rubbed a stubbly five o’clock shadow with fingers that were still wet with paint. On the screen before him, the pretty girl sat on her pink bed in her pink bedroom, surrounded by movie stars, pirates, and vampires, chatting on the phone while she tried to paint her toenails.

He tells them, ‘Slay, therefore, every male child and every woman who has had intercourse with a man.’

The man licked his lips and swallowed hard. For just a second he felt ashamed, wondering why it was he thought the things he thought. But it was too late to get a conscience. Neither his thoughts nor his deeds were pure. His soul was already damned.

But you may spare and keep for yourselves all girls who had no intercourse with a man.

He typed something on the computer and hit ‘send’, then watched as the pretty girl hopped off the bed and hurried with a smile across the room to her computer.

It was a simple question, but it had certainly gotten her attention, hadn’t it?

It always did.

r u online?

1

Lainey Emerson nibbled on the ragged nub of Crazy Glue and broken press-on nail that was still stuck to her thumb and stared hard at the computer. With her free hand on the mouse, she guided the arrow across the screen. Her palms were melting, and her heart was beating so hard and so fast it felt as if it was gonna push right out of her chest. The thousands of butterflies trapped in the pit of her stomach furiously fluttered their wings as the arrow approached the ‘send’ box. All she had to do was just hit the button. Hit the button and send the stupid two-sentence email that’d literally taken her – she looked at the clock in the bottom right corner of the screen and grimaced – hours to word just right. And still she hesitated, rolling the mouse back and forth in sweaty fingers.

You should never put anything in writing or in pictures that you wouldn’t want to see or read on the front cover of the New York Times, Elaine.

The ominous words sounded so loud and so clear in her head, Lainey could swear she smelled the stink of cigarettes on her mom’s breath as she preached them. She pushed back from her desk, shook the dire, ‘Don’t learn things the hard way like me!’ Parental Advisory Warning out of her brain and looked around her now almost-dark bedroom. Long shadows blacked out the faces on the dozen or so movie posters that covered her walls. Outside, all that remained of the late afternoon sun as it sunk into the Everglades were a couple of faint orange ribbons.

6:12? Was it really that late? She suddenly heard the quiet and realized the boisterous shouts from the roller-hockey game that’d been playing in the street all afternoon had stopped –the players and cheerleaders all long gone home to dinner and homework. Two things Lainey still hadn’t even started yet. And Bradley? She hadn’t heard from her little brother in a while, either. A long while, now that she thought about it. She chewed the inside of her lip. Usually a good thing, but so not a good thing now that her mom was gonna be home soon …

The front door opened and Lainey prayed it wasn’t her mother. It closed with a slam. Thirty seconds later gunfire erupted in the living room as Brad resumed blowing away cops on Grand Theft Auto, the dumb video game that he had to play at full blast just to annoy her. Anger quickly displaced relief and she regretted wasting a good prayer on her brother’s obnoxious wellbeing. At least he was home and she hadn’t lost him. She raised the volume on her Good Charlotte CD to drown out the screams and machine-gun fire and turned her attention back to the computer. She so needed to stay in the moment or she’d never be able to do this.

The picture on the screen glowed in the dark room, waiting impatiently to be shot off into cyberspace. A pretty girl she barely recognized, with sleek dark hair and smoky eyes, smiled provocatively back at her. A pretty girl Lainey still sheepishly thought looked nothing like her. Tight jeans and a midriffbaring T-shirt showed off a slim but curvy shape. Full, glossy red lips matched equally glossy, long red fingernails, which were posed confidently on her hips, like an America’s Next Top Model contestant – her friend Molly’s idea. Normally Lainey didn’t like how she looked in any picture, but, then again, normally she didn’t look anything like she did in this picture. Normally her waist-length unruly chestnut hair was pulled back in a low ponytail or put up in a clip, her boring brown eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses. Normally she didn’t wear any make-up or jewelry or high heels or long red fingernails. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she wasn’t allowed.

But besides looking a little older than she was – and a little, well, sexy – Lainey rationalized that the picture wasn’t that bad that she wouldn’t want to see it in the newspaper. Some MySpace photos were a hell of a lot worse than this. It wasn’t like she was naked or doing porn or anything. The most you could see besides her stomach and the fake belly-button ring was the pink outline of the padded bra she’d stolen from her older sister Liza, under the white T-shirt that she’d also stolen from Liza. Maybe the jeans were kinda low and the shirt kinda tight, but …

Lainey shook the creeping, noisy doubts out of her head. She’d already taken the picture. She’d already broken the rule. And the truth was, she looked pretty hot, if she did say so herself. The real worry at this point was, what would Zach think when he saw it?

Zach. ElCapitan. Just the thought of him made Lainey’s hands sweat. She looked at the picture taped to the side of the computer screen. Blond hair, bright blue eyes, the quirkiest, sweetest smile, and just the cutest shadow of face gruff. And muscles … wow! She could see them even through his Hollister T-shirt. Nobody she knew in seventh grade had even the hope of either a muscle or a hair on their scrawny bodies. Since she’d met Zach a few weeks ago in a Yahoo chat room for the new Zombieland movie, Lainey had been forming a mental picture of what he might look like. This fabulous, funny guy who liked the same movies – even the really bad ones – listened to the same music, hated the same subjects, distrusted the same type of plastic people she did, had the same problems with his own parents. It would be too much to ask for him to be anything more than a geek with bad acne and even worse hair and an uncle who’d pulled strings to get him on the varsity football team. But then last Friday Zach had finally sent her a picture, and the very first thing she’d thought was, ‘Oh my God, this guy could model for Abercrombie & Fitch!’ He was that amazingly good looking. And what was even more amazing was that this totally cool, freakin’ captain of the football team with model looks liked her. That’s when she knew reciprocating with a snapshot of her own boring self just wasn’t gonna happen, especially since that self was still three years away from the sixteen she’d told him she was. A small fib that would definitely matter to a senior in high school being scouted by colleges. She knew he’d never be into that, and their friendship – or whatever it was that was happening between them – would be over before she could hit the reply button to his Dear Jane email. If he even bothered to send her one.

She nibbled off the last chunk of nail and spat it in the garbage. The entire fake set had taken her and her best friend, Molly, hours to put on last Saturday for the ‘photo shoot’, and only a few short seconds to rip off this morning in gym class. The nails were her favorite. Long and pointy and oh-so red. More than the shoes or make-up or wearing Liza’s clothes, it was those nails that had made her feel so … glamorous. So grown-up. She loved tinking them on glasses and rolling them impatiently on tables. It’d taken her the whole weekend to figure out just how to pick up a piece of paper! And now, like Cinderella’s ball gown and crystal coach, they were just a memory. At least Cindy got to keep a glass slipper as a memento of her time as a princess. All Lainey got was a chunk of chewed acrylic.

And, of course, a picture.

She stared at herself on the screen. That was it. If she thought about it any more she’d never do it. She closed her eyes, said a prayer and clicked the mouse. A little envelope zipped across the monitor.

Your message is on its way!

The cell phone in her back pocket buzzed and Gwen Stefani belted out ‘The Sweet Escape’. Molly. She blew out a long held breath. ‘Hey, M!’

‘Did you send it?’ an excited voice asked.

Lainey sighed and flopped back on her bed. ‘Finally, yeah.’

‘And?’

‘I haven’t heard back yet. I just sent it, like, two seconds ago.’

Molly Brosnan had been Lainey’s best friend since way back in kindergarten, and everyone – teachers, coaches, friends, parents – everyone always said, if the two of them looked even a little bit alike, they’d be identical twins. That’s how close they were. Or used to be, anyway. It was no coincidence Molly had called at almost the precise moment Lainey had clicked ‘send’. Things like that happened all the time – Molly thinking what she was thinking and vice versa. That’s what made this year suck so much. No matter what her mom said, different schools meant different lives. She picked the fuzz off her alien-green shag pillow. ‘I’m so nervous, M.’

‘What took you so long to send it?’

‘I’m a chicken.’

‘You have to call me the second you hear from him, Lainey.’

‘I will, I will. What do you think he’s gonna think?’

‘I already told you. You look hot. I mean it. He’s gonna love it.’

‘You don’t think I look fat?’

‘Please!’

‘Stupid?’

‘I wish I looked that dumb.’

Lainey sat up and stared at the computer across the room. ‘If I don’t hear back from him soon, M, I’m gonna freak! This waiting sucks.’

The bedroom doorknob suddenly began to violently jangle back and forth. ‘Lainey!’

‘Get lost, Brad! I mean it,’ Lainey yelled. ‘Get out of my room!’

‘You’re not allowed to close the door! Or lock it! Mom says!’

‘G’head and tell Mom, you tattle-tale! Lotta good it’s gonna do you, ’cause she’s NOT HERE! And I can’t wait till I tell her about you playing that video game you’re not supposed to play till after you’ve done your homework!’ she added as she fell back down hard on the bed.

‘Is that The Brat?’ Molly asked. ‘What’s he doing in your room?’

‘He’s not. He’s just outside the door. I can hear him breathing heavy through the crack. I wish I had some bug spray.’ Lainey squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I hate him sometimes, M. I swear it.’ Molly had a little brother, too, but hers was nice. Most of the time.

‘What’d he do now?’

‘He went through my books again. He drew mustaches on all of my Betty and Veronica comics and ruined them. Totally ruined them. He’s such an asshole.’

‘Did you tell your mom?’

‘Like that’ll do any good. Please. She probably gave him the comics and the marker ’cause the poor baby was bored.’ She sat up and reached for the bottle of nail polish on the cardboard box that was supposed to be a nightstand. She shook it and started to paint her toes.

‘You should tell her,’ Molly sniffed. ‘He shouldn’t be able to go into your stuff.’

‘She’s not home. She’s still at work.’

‘What about Todd?’

Todd was her stepdad and an entirely different story. If her mom babied Bradley, Todd definitely played favorites, which made sense, since Bradley was, after all, his kid and she wasn’t and that was life. ‘He’s not home yet, either, thank God. I’m babysitting.’ Lainey looked over at the door with a frown. ‘Not that he listens to me.’

‘Babysitting? Oooh. That means you’re in charge. My mom told Sean that corporal punishment is legal in Florida, which means she can use her hairbrush on his ass and you can beat Bradley’s with a belt.’ They both laughed.

‘If the prince gets a single bruise on his milky-white butt cheeks, I’ll be grounded till high school. Nice idea, but I’m just gonna IGNORE HIM while he breathes under my FREAKIN’ DOOR like a FREAKIN’ WEIRDO!!!’

The computer melodically blurped. An incoming IM.

Lainey looked over at the computer, her heart suddenly racing once again. She knew right away who it was.

ElCapitan says:
r u online?

‘Oh my God, M!’ she whispered into the phone. ‘He just IM’d me. What do I do?’

Molly laughed. ‘Tell him hello!’

‘Yeah, but that means he must’ve got the email.’

‘No it doesn’t. Maybe he’s IMing you from his BlackBerry.’

‘He doesn’t have a BlackBerry,’ Lainey stated defiantly, then added after a second, ‘at least, I don’t think he does.’

‘Whatever. You get my point. You don’t know he’s seen the picture.’

Lainey stood up and paced the room. ‘He wants to know if I’m here.’

‘Just say hi, you dork. Do it. Do it now.’

‘OK, OK …’ Hitting letters on the computer had never taken so much darn energy before. It felt like someone had poured lead into the tips of her shaking fingers.

LainBrain says:
hi

Deep breath. Stay calm. ‘OK, M. I did it.’

The computer blurped again.

ElCapitan says:
just got home. practice ended late. Coach still pissed over last weeks game.

‘What? What’d he say?’ Molly whined. ‘Tell me!’

‘Nothing. He said he just got home from football practice. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he didn’t get it?’ She paused for a second. ‘Or maybe he got it and he hates it! M!’

ElCapitan says:
Got ur mess

Lainey held her breath.

‘What’d he say? Lainey!’

ElCapitan says:
Nice pic☺

Lainey let the air out all at once, as if someone had popped her screaming lungs with a pin. ‘He said nice pic, M! You think that’s good?’ Even asking the question, she couldn’t help but grin.

‘You’re a moron. I told you you looked hot. You better not let your mom see that picture. She’ll freakin’ flip. Speaking of flipping moms, mine’s downstairs having a breakdown. I gotta go eat. Say hi to Bradley Brat for me.’ She laughed. ‘Not.’

‘I’ll call you later.’ Lainey hung up the phone and stared at the words on the screen. She’d never felt this good before in her whole entire life. She wanted to scream. Then, another sentence appeared with a blurp.

ElCapitan says: | even better than I pictured, and I have a great imagination …
ElCapitan says: | want 2 c even more of u

Lainey felt her cheeks light up as she looked around the bedroom. There was, of course, no one there but her, but she still felt strangely embarrassed. What should she say to that? What would Liza say? Did he mean that the way she thought he meant that?

The door to the garage opened with a loud creak. ‘Brad? Elaine? Hello? Where is everyone? Why is this video game on?’ The sound of her mom’s irritated voice echoed through the house, along with the click-clacking of her high heels on the ceramic tiles. She heard Bradley run down the hall and into his room. Coward. Lainey mouthed the next words out of her mother’s mouth.

‘Elaine!’

‘I’m in my room!’

‘Get off that computer. Did you even start dinner?’

And it was back from the ball once again. Back to reality.

LainBrain says:
GTG. P911.

IM quick-speak for ‘Got to go – a parent is coming.’

ElCapitan says: | who?
LainBrain says: | mom
ElCapitan says: | Damn! And we were just about 2 get on my favorite subject …

The funny, uncomfortable feeling was back, and she pushed it aside. Why was she always such a baby? She had to get over that.

ElCapitan says: | thought she worked late mondays
ElCapitan says: | or is that fridays?
LainBrain says: | fridays and every other monday. sorry about coach

‘Elaine! Did you hear me? Off that friggin’ computer now!’

LainBrain says:
☺LTL. she’s pissed.

LTL meant ‘let’s talk later’. Lainey opened up her Social Studies book to make it look like she’d been studying and crumpled a few pieces of notebook paper for effect, just in case her mom headed this way. Now it was time to boil hot dogs and listen to twenty minutes of shit as to why it was irresponsible of her to allow the aspiring psycho in residence to gun down cops and steal cars for two hours on the video game that his own dad had given him for Christmas. ‘Practice for the real world,’ Lainey wanted to say when the interrogation finally got started. ‘Let’s face it, Mom, Brad’s career options are gonna be limited.’ But that remark would probably get her smacked.

Just as she opened the door, the computer blurped again. She ran back over to the desk and stared at the words on the screen.

ElCapitan says:
FYI. Pinks definitely your color ☺

2

‘I don’t know if all of you have Halloween on the brain, but these test grades were not what I wanted to see,’ Mrs McKenzie said, her voice withered with both age and perpetual disappointment, as she walked down the aisles of the classroom handing out papers. When she got to Lainey’s desk, she paused. Not a good sign. ‘Ms Emerson, I expected more from you,’ she sniped without even attempting to lower her voice. Then she dropped the paper as if it was covered in dog poop and she couldn’t stand to touch it any more. A big red D+ landed face-up on the desk.

Another D. Damn … Lainey could feel her cheeks flame up. She couldn’t remember any of the As she used to get ever being so large. Or so red. She quickly shoved the test into her book bag, avoiding eye contact with any of the twenty-three gawking, smirking strangers around her.

‘Report cards are going out next week, people,’ Mrs McKenzie warned with a shake of her poofy, margarine-colored head as the bell rang and a mass of bodies rushed past her into the hall. ‘I know there are a couple of you who aren’t going to be happy to see the mailman!’

It was a safe bet that she was one of those people, Lainey thought, feeling the acid churn like cement in her stomach as she slowly made her way through the noisy crowd to the lunchroom. And her mom was sure to birth a cow when she opened that envelope – Algebra probably wasn’t the only class she was getting a D in. Serves her right, Lainey thought, bitterly; she’d never wanted to switch schools anyway. All her friends were still at Ramblewood Middle, while she was completely lost here at stupid Sawgrass with absolutely no one. No one. Zero. Zilch. No one to study with. No one to walk home with. No one to eat lunch with, she thought miserably as she made her way past the tables of cheerleaders and dorks and jocks to an empty seat in the back of the cafeteria. She still didn’t see why they’d had to move, either. The old house was fine and it was, what? A mile away from the ‘new’ one, which was a lot smaller and didn’t even have a pool. But, as usual, no one bothered to ask for her input on anything before turning her life upside down. The only future she’d heard her mom and Todd worry about was Bradley’s. Her and Liza weren’t even a thought. Not that Liza gave a shit. The girl was never home anyway, and seeing as she didn’t have to change high schools and all her friends drove, not getting to see them was never a worry. Plus Liza was almost seventeen – just a couple of years from getting out on her own. Lainey, though, was just plain stuck.

‘Hey,’ a voice said softly behind her as she unpacked a flattened peanut butter and jelly sandwich from her book bag. It was bad enough she had to brown-bag it, but her sandwich was downright embarrassing. It looked like a bled-through Band Aid. A girl she vaguely recognized stood over her, lunch tray in hand. ‘You’re in Algebra with McKenzie, right?’ the girl asked.

Great. The whole stupid school knew she was flunking Algebra. ‘That’s me. Hope I’m not too famous,’ Lainey replied with a short, nervous laugh that sounded a lot like a whoop.

‘I got a shitty grade, too,’ the girl replied casually. She looked around the table. ‘You alone?’

Lainey shrugged. Was it that obvious? God, she felt like such a loser. ‘Yeah,’ she replied, shifting in her seat. ‘Just me.’

‘Can I sit? I just switched to this lunch period and don’t know anyone yet.’

Lainey moved the stack of books she’d placed in front of her to make it look like she was busy doing work. ‘Sure.’

‘I’m Carrie,’ the girl said, popping a straw into her juice box. ‘You new?’

‘Yeah. I was at Ramblewood, but we moved and now I’m zoned here, I guess.’

‘Your name’s Elaine, right?’

‘My friends call me Lainey.’

‘I’m new, too. My dad got transferred in August. I moved here from Columbus, Ohio.’

‘Wow … Ohio. Do you like Florida?’

Carrie shrugged. ‘I never had a pool before, so it’s cool. My friends back home are, like, so jealous. They all say they’re gonna come visit when it gets cold up north. They wanna go swimming in January. That’ll be fun.’

Lainey felt a pang. It’s not as easy as it sounds, she wanted to tell the girl. Her own friends lived less than a mile away and she practically never saw them any more. ‘My best friend still goes to Ramblewood,’ she said softly as she nibbled on her sandwich. ‘Actually, all my friends still go to Ramblewood.’

‘Ramblewood, is that a good school?’

Last year Lainey probably would’ve said, ‘It sucks,’ because all schools do. But she finished a sip of disgusting warm milk before replying, ‘It’s a great school. The best.’

They chatted about bad teachers and too much homework and riding the bus. She wasn’t Molly, but it was someone to talk to. ‘I like your backpack,’ Carrie said as she packed up her lunch, nodding at Lainey’s book bag. ‘I must’ve seen Twilight, like, fifty times. Taylor Lautner is so hot.’

Lainey smiled. ‘I like Robert Pattinson. Can you tell?’ On the cover flap of her black-and-white shoulder book bag was a picture of Edward Cullen, the teenage vampire played by Robert Pattinson in Lainey’s all-time favorite movie. ‘What if I’m not the hero?’ was silk-screened across the front. Her mom refused to buy fancy backpacks or lunchboxes, because, she said, ‘those celebrities already have enough damn money,’ so Lainey had saved up all her birthday cash and bought it herself. She’d gotten the very last one at Target the day before school started. She’d worried at first that maybe it was too young for middle school, but Melissa had one and Molly wanted one and Liza hadn’t made fun of it when she saw it, which was definitely a good sign.

‘I want to see New Moon the day it comes out, like the very first show. That would be so cool. Hey, maybe we can go together!’ Carrie offered.

‘Sure,’ Lainey replied with a smile. ‘That’d be fun. November nineteenth. I’m so there.’

‘Do you think your mom would let you maybe go to the midnight show?’

Lainey shrugged. ‘I’m not sure …’

‘Mine can be like that, too,’ Carrie said with a roll of her eyes. ‘She treats me like such a baby sometimes. It’s just a freaking movie.’

‘I got Twilight on DVD for my birthday. I’ve watched it like a hundred times already. I really love the part when Bella asks Edward how old he is and he says, “Seventeen.” And then she asks him, “How long have you been seventeen?”’

Carrie nodded. ‘And he just answers, “A while.” And the way he looks at her when he takes her up in the tree.’ She bit her lip and sighed. ‘Those eyes … Then she pointed at the science notebook in Lainey’s hand. ‘Hey! Who’s that?’ Carrie asked suddenly.

Taped across the cover of the notebook was the picture of Zach from her computer monitor. Lainey tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. ‘Oh, that’s my boyfriend,’ she replied quickly, as the blood 911’d to her cheeks, lighting them up, she was sure, like a Christmas tree. She swallowed the large lump that was now blocking her airway.

Time stopped. Lainey could hear her heartbeat whooshing in her burning ears.

‘Oh,’ Carrie finally said, with a slow, but unsure smile. ‘He’s cute!’

Thankfully the bell rang before Carrie could fire off another question. Lainey quickly shoved the notebook in her bag, slung it over her shoulder and waved goodbye, disappearing into the stampede headed out of the cafeteria.

Boyfriend? Jeesh … where did that come from? The word had just totally slipped out of her mouth. She hadn’t planned on saying it. She’d never thought about saying it. She’d never even pretended it was true in the privacy of her own room when no one was looking, like she had on occasion with movie stars. She felt really embarrassed — like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t — but oddly enough, really happy. Like she’d finally been let in on the biggest secret in the world.

She had a boyfriend.

There it was again. After all, when you thought about it, that’s what Zach sort of was, wasn’t he? She bit back the smile as she made her way through the crowd. She suddenly didn’t feel as alone as she had all morning. Or like such a loser. Because she had a boyfriend.

The more she thought about it, the more comfortable the word sounded in her head. Lainey had never had a boyfriend before. Unlike Molly and Melissa, she’d never been asked. But Zach was more of a boyfriend to her than Peter Edwards had ever been to Molly. All they did when they were ‘going out’ last year was talk in the hall in between classes and a couple of times on the cell phone for, what? A few minutes? True, Molly’d kissed him – but that was only ’cause Peter had jammed his tongue in her mouth as his friends were walking down the hall, just so they could see him making out with her. Molly had almost bit it off, she was so surprised and so completely grossed out. She said it was like getting frenched by Stubbs, her uncle’s bull dog. Lainey had laughed, but she’d felt so jealous of Molly when she’d said that. Not because she liked weird Peter Edwards or wanted to get tongued by him or anything, but because, well, because Molly had. And Lainey was still stuck on the other side of the fence, as usual, looking in. Waiting for her boobs to show up. Waiting for her period. Waiting to have a boyfriend. Waiting to catch up, it seemed, with what everyone else was already doing. But now, today, this past weekend, these past couple of weeks – things were different. Unlike Molly and Peter, Lainey talked to Zach every night. And even though she hadn’t met him in person yet or heard his voice, they’d sent each other pictures. Plus, Lainey knew he liked her like that. Like a girlfriend. If she wasn’t totally sure before, she definitely knew from his IMs yesterday. He wanted to see more of her. He liked pink. He liked her picture. It was better than what he’d imagined. Which meant that he was imagining what she looked like. He was thinking about her. And Molly could never, ever say that about Peter.

She followed the last of the hall stragglers past Ms Finn, her Language Arts teacher, who stood in the doorway impatiently tapping her orthopedic shoes and checking her watch even though the bell hadn’t rung yet. Ms Finn didn’t tolerate latecomers. The second the bell rang, the door to her class closed and short of either a fire, terrorist attack or medical emergency – and that did not include having to pee – she wouldn’t open it again till the bell rang at the end of the period. ‘LIT PACKET DUE TODAY’ was scrawled across the blackboard.

It felt like someone had popped her new balloon. Lainey had completely forgotten about the Wuthering Heights assignment. That now all-too familiar icky-loser feeling enveloped her once again. It didn’t take a genius in Algebra to average out her grades in English – one more D for the mailman to deliver. Her mom was gonna totally freak.

She slid into her seat and slunk down low to avoid Ms Finn’s steely, missile-guided eyes. Next up was probably a pop-quiz. Oh joy. She rubbed her finger across Zach’s smiling face on her notebook. It was all gonna be OK, she told herself. Everything was gonna be OK. Screw this stupid school and the nasty teachers who delighted in giving tests and extra homework. It was only a dumb grade in a dumb class about a dumb old book, right? In the grand scheme of life it all meant nothing. What was really important was staring her right in the face with his sweet smile, and she knew he didn’t care if she got a D. Zach had already told her he was flunking Spanish. Everything was gonna be OK because she had a boyfriend now. Someone who cared about her. She smiled to herself as Ms Finn slammed the door closed and the next fifty minutes of hell started up.

Everything was gonna be better in her life. Prince Charming had finally arrived.

And she couldn’t wait to get back to her computer to talk to him.

3

Florida weather could be so freaky, Lainey thought as she watched the blob of black to the west slowly make its way over the Everglades and toward Coral Springs. Just twenty minutes ago there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky. She hurried across the patch of brown grass that led to the duplex where Mrs Ross, Bradley’s after-school sitter, lived. The warm afternoon breeze had degenerated into cool gusts that made the palm trees rustle and bow. Thunder rumbled in the not-so-far-off distance. The storm was getting closer. She wondered what the weather in Columbus, Ohio was like. If it ever rained on only one side of the street, or poured when the sun was shining. She wondered what it felt like to play in snow …

A zimmer frame with two tennis balls stuck on its front legs sat just outside the screen door on the cement step-up. Taped above the doorbell was a tiny piece of paper with the number 1106 scribbled in old lady chicken scratch. Hopefully Bradley had his stuff ready to go, Lainey thought as she rang the bell and looked at her cell. If he didn’t have practice, Zach was home by five. ‘Hi, Mrs Ross,’ she said sweetly when the door opened. A cat ran out between the old woman’s legs and scurried into the bushes.

‘Sinbad, you get back here, now!’ Mrs Ross scolded in her soft, shaky Southern twang.

Bradley’s elementary school got out an hour and a half before Lainey’s middle school, so Mrs Ross served as the afternoon pit stop until Lainey could come get him. Her mom used to let Bradley just go home alone, but one of the new neighbors threatened to call the Department of Children and Families and report her, so now she had Mrs Ross watch him. In Lainey’s opinion, Bradley would have been better off on his own. Mrs Ross was nearing what looked to be a hundred and couldn’t see, hear, or remember very well. And her house always smelled like pee and boiled eggs. ‘Hello there, Elaine,’ she said. ‘Come on in, now.’

‘Do you want me to get him for you, ma’am?’ Lainey asked.

‘Who?’

‘Sinbad.’

There was a pause. ‘The cat,’ Lainey added.

Mrs Ross looked around. Then the light snapped on. ‘Oh, no, no. Just let him be. He’ll come on home, I suppose. That’s where the food is.’

Bradley popped out from behind the door that led to the living room. His face was pale. ‘A severe storm warning’s been issued. They’re saying tornados are possible.’

Uh-oh. Her brother could watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Saw IV back to back, but ever since Hurricane Wilma had taken out his bedroom window a couple of years ago, five minutes with the Weather Channel sent Bradley into a complete tailspin. The weather alert must’ve broken into his cartoons.

‘Maybe we should wait it out,’ he said, his eyes wide with fear. Mrs Ross gummed her lip and looked back and forth at the two of them. Obviously she wasn’t too worried about tornados. She wanted her TV back. Oprah beckoned.

‘Don’t freak. It’s not even raining yet,’ Lainey replied calmly.

‘I don’t know … They say tornadoes sound like a train.’

‘We have to go Brad. Come on.’ She looked over at Mrs Ross. ‘We can’t stay here.’

Mrs Ross shrugged.

‘Don’t know …’ he muttered again.

‘Look, we’ll run home together before the rain starts. I’ll race you.’

Bradley looked past her. Another rumble of thunder sounded and his lip began to tremble.

Lainey sighed. The sight of her normally totally obnoxious brother melting into a pile of tears should make her smile, but it did just the opposite. She actually felt bad for the kid. He looked terrified. ‘You can hold my hand, Brad,’ she said quietly, crouching down on her knees to look him in the eye. ‘It’ll be OK. I promise. But we gotta go, like, now.’

Just as they rounded the corner of 43rd Street on to 114th Terrace, hand in hand and at full speed, God turned on the faucet. And the thunder. A huge boom that sounded as if it was right above their heads set off three car alarms. By the time they made it inside the house three blocks later, they were both soaked right down to their underwear, which made a now completely freaked-out Bradley chuckle for a split second.

She stood right outside the door and waited while he changed into dry clothes, then she led him back into the family room, closed the blinds and popped Resident Evil into his PlayStation. A video game meant no more weather alerts, and the screaming zombie victims took care of the thunder. She watched him from the kitchen until the rain band had passed over and it was clear Bradley was more concerned with a cannibal finding him in a closet than he was about a twister taking out the family abode. In twenty minutes the storm would be over, he’d be back to his old self and she wouldn’t feel bad any more. There wasn’t much time.

While he jumped on the couch in his Spiderman jammies, killing zombies left and right, she quietly slipped out of the room and headed down the hall into her bedroom.

Then she locked the door behind her and turned on the computer.

4

Before the screen had even warmed up, the computer blurped. An IM. While she changed out of her wet clothes, she clicked on the flashing orange tab.

ElCapitan says:
r u online?

It was like he knew she was there. Like he sensed her presence. That was so cool!

LainBrain says: | hi! was just guna rite u
ElCapitan says: | sup?
LainBrain says: | tried to beat the rain & lost
LainBrain says: | I love storms, but its nasty out
ElCapitan says: | does that mean you’re soaking wet?
LainBrain says: | pretty much
ElCapitan says: | ooohhh. I like
LainBrain says: | drying my hair
ElCapitan says: | What happ on math?
LainBrain says: | don’t ask
ElCapitan says: | u wont be 1st to fail algebra
LainBrain says: | didnt fail. D
ElCapitan says: | (::[]::)
Lainey smiled. |
LainBrain says: | thanks 4 the pity
ElCapitan says: | been there. HATED trig. Got a C.
LainBrain says: | moms gonna scalp me. prob grounded 4 life
ElCapitan says: | 2 bad. I like ur hair
ElCapitan says: | & ur pretty head

She blushed, absently stroking a damp piece of hair that had escaped her towel turban. He was so easy to talk to.

ElCapitan says:
have to meet u

Lainey stared at the screen. She totally wasn’t expecting that.

ElCapitan says: | what about Friday nite? Wanna c Zombieland?
ElCapitan says: | we can grab sum food 2

Oh my God. He was asking her out. Wait – was this a date? She looked around the room, as if hoping to see an audience there who could corroborate what she’d just read and interpret exactly what it meant. Where the heck was Molly when you needed her? Of course it was a date … Movies meant date. Food meant date. Movies and food definitely meant date. A real date. She was just asked out! Then the complete joy that had her jumping up and down in her room, squealing like a piglet, stopped as quickly as it had come on, replaced by icy, realistic panic. What was she doing? There was no way her mom was gonna let her go. No freakin’ way. Especially if she knew Zach was seventeen. She nibbled on a nail. Shit. She didn’t want to tell him no. What if he didn’t ask again?

ElCapitan says: | hello?
LainBrain says: | Hmmm … I definitely want 2 see that.
ElCapitan says: | will ur mom b cool?
LainBrain says: | dont know. specially after today
ElCapitan says: | then dont tell her

Lainey stared at the computer as if it were alive, watching her carefully through its blinking curser. Her stomach twisted with both unease and excitement.

ElCapitan says:
what she dont know cant hurt her

She looked around the empty room. A strange tickle itched the back of her throat, as if something had gotten stuck halfway down and wasn’t budging any more. That could work. She could tell her mom she was going to the movies with that new girl, Carrie. It’s not like she’d ever check, anyway. Liza was the problem child, not her. And short of, ‘Did you have a good time?’ she knew there’d be no questions asked. There never were.

LainBrain says: | I cant b home 2 late though
ElCapitan says: | ull b home by 10. I have practice @ 8
ElCapitan says: | thats AM!!!

Lainey chewed on her lip. Her brain was a mush of thoughts. What should she do?

ElCapitan says: | u still there?
LainBrain says: | ummm … thinking
ElCapitan says: | I’ll pick u up at school. weve played CS High b4. Stay late and meet me @ 5:30 in the parking lot in back by the baseball field. Ill b in a black BMW
LainBrain says: | 5:30?
ElCapitan says: | cant get the car till Dad gets home. CS is a hoof

That’s right. Zach lived in Jupiter, which, according to MapQuest was, like, an hour away. He was gonna drive an hour just to see her … Lainey took a deep breath. Her heart was pounding. She’d never done anything wrong before. Besides the picture, she’d never gone against the rules. But her mom would just say no for the sake of saying no, and because she had these dumb, arbitrary rules about how old you had to be to do certain things. Twelve for make-up, thirteen for group dates, fifteen for car dates. A knee-jerk reaction to Liza’s screwed-up adolescence. If she didn’t go on Friday, when would she ever meet Zach? Never, that’s when.

LainBrain says: | k. sounds like fun
ElCapitan says: | cool. keep it low. I don’t want ur mom or step to trip. Find a theater near u where its playin
LainBrain says: | k
ElCapitan says: | cant wait to finally meet u
LainBrain says: | me 2

She leaned back in the chair. Her brain was spinning. She not only had to figure out how she was gonna get herself across town on Friday afternoon to Coral Springs High – which she’d never even been to before – she also had to figure out how that self was gonna look like the girl he thought she was when she got there. Then an icy thought gripped her, causing a race of goosebumps to ripple across the back of her neck.

What if it didn’t work? What if he saw right through her and knew she was thirteen? What would he do then?

The computer blurped.

ElCapitan says:
dont worry. ull b safe w/me

She smiled. It was as if he’d just read her mind. Again.

ElCapitan says:
im no psycho

5

When the last bell rang on Friday afternoon, Sawgrass Middle exploded like an overfilled cake pan in a hot oven. A thousand bodies simultaneously poured out every door, scrambling for a school bus or the car rider pick-up line, hurrying to unlock bikes or meet up with friends for the walk home. Homework, tests and projects were three long days off. For a half-hour, deafening chaos ruled the crowded schoolyard.

And then it was over.

Perched on her tippy toes atop the hand dryer in the girls’ bathroom, Lainey watched out the tiny crank window as the last of the packed yellow buses pulled out of the roundabout, and the crazed chatter of fifty or so screaming voices slowly faded away. Crumpled pieces of paper and empty snack bags dotted the deserted schoolyard, rolling like tumbleweeds across the parking lot and football field. There were no after-school activities, club meets or conferences on Fridays at Sawgrass – even the teachers left when the last bell sounded. By now, the halls were as lifeless as the parking lot.

Lainey exhaled the breath she’d seemingly been holding all day – all week actually – and climbed down from the dryer, grabbing her book bag from the handicap stall, where she’d hidden out since the bell rang. With her bus long gone, she was now one step closer to going through with this. She checked her cell – it was 4:10. She had time, but not too much, considering she still had to put on make-up, get dressed and catch the 5:10 bus up on Sample Road that would take her over to Coral Springs High. Then she had to find the baseball field parking lot. Not too much time was good, she told herself, as her stomach started to flip-flop again. She didn’t want any downtime to think about what she was doing or why she shouldn’t be doing it, because she knew that she’d probably chicken out. That was one reason why she hadn’t told a soul about meeting Zach tonight. Not even Molly. Because she didn’t want anyone talking her out of it. The other was more of a personal safety net. If, God forbid, Zach didn’t show up – if, say, he stood her up – well, then no one would ever have to know about that either and she wouldn’t have to feel like such a total loser for the rest of her life every time she got with her friends. ‘Remember Lainey’s first date? Not!’

She shook the voices out of her head. She’d come this far and she wasn’t turning back. Just wait till she told everyone about her date with her football player boyfriend. That he took her to the movies. And dinner! And he didn’t just have a car – he had a BMW! Jeesh! She’d have to figure out a way to get him to take a picture with her with the car on her cell just so she could show everyone, she thought, as she changed into Liza’s prized jeans and a cute Abercrombie T-shirt. She’d wear her sneakers for the walk to the bus stop, then change into Liza’s BCBG booties when she finally got to the high school. She dumped the plastic sandwich bag full of makeup that she’d pilfered from Liza’s dresser into the sink next to hers. If her sister knew she’d raided both her closet and her drawers she’d go postal, so everything had to be back in its proper place by midnight, which was when Liza got off work at the bowling alley. She picked through the pile of compacts and lipsticks, before settling on a brown and green eye-shadow palette. She hesitated for a moment, swirling a finger over the shimmery powders. Besides Halloween and the occasional lip-gloss, Lainey had never really put on makeup before. She hoped she could remember what stuff Molly had used on her face last weekend and in what order she’d used it. She didn’t want to look like a clown.

A half-hour later she stepped out of the bathroom and smack into the janitor, almost landing face first in the oversized yellow mop-bucket he was pushing. They both gasped. Then the janitor looked around frantically, like he’d recognized Lainey from an FBI wanted poster, yelling something that she didn’t need to speak Spanish to understand.

Time to go. She walked as fast as she could without running for the main doors, praying that the rule of no one sticking around the school on Friday afternoons applied to those warm bodies in Administration as well.

It was a good thing she’d worn her sneakers. By the time she made it to Sample, she was completely out of breath and had to run to catch the bus. She settled into a front seat, all the while avoiding the stare of the disheveled old man across from her who was slurping an orange and eyeing her carefully. She wiped her hands on her jeans and quietly asked the driver to let her know when her stop was, then watched out the window as the string of stores, banks and restaurants slipped past in a blur. Places she’d eaten at or shopped at dozens of times, but today, she thought, trying to restrain the smile that threatened to commandeer her whole face, it was like she was seeing them all for the very first time.

6

From his parking spot in front of the two-storied Allstate office building, he watched as the slight figure with the long chestnut hair stepped off the bus and looked around, like a tourist taking in New York’s Empire State Building for the very first time might – with awe, wonder, and excitement.

No doubt. It was definitely her.

She was pretty, in her tight blue jeans and cute, funky T-shirt, a book bag slung clumsily over her shoulder. She had a really nice figure – not too curvy, not too straight. He didn’t like the Kate Moss waif look, but he also didn’t like a voluptuous hourglass figure, either. Too many girls tried too hard to look like something they were not. First came the padded bras and shaping underwear, then the breast implants, liposuction, nose jobs, botox. What you saw was not necessarily what you got. It was nice to see someone as yet unaffected by the Barbie bullshit spouted in fashion magazines and paraded about on MTV. Someone whose beautiful body was still … pure. He watched anxiously as she stopped in front of the main double doors of the school and hesitated, looking around. He feared for a moment that she might try and go in. Although he didn’t think anyone was still around, he didn’t want to find out he was wrong. That would ruin everything. He felt his heart beat a bit faster. But after a few seconds, she turned and trotted through the deserted parking lot, heading over to the baseball field in the far back of the school to wait.

For him.

His mouth suddenly felt as though he’d swallowed a jar full of cotton balls and he rubbed his hands together to stop them from shaking. It was a bad habit – a quirk was what his mother called it. His hands would shake whenever he got too excited. His quirk always made meeting new people quite difficult. Especially pretty girls.

He looked down at the photo on his lap one last time. Then he slipped it into the glove compartment and started up the engine. The sun had just dipped under the horizon and night was officially here. He looked at the clock. 5:29. Right on time.

So nice, he thought as he pulled out of the parking lot. So very, very nice.

He liked a girl who was punctual.

7

The bus pulled away from the curb, leaving Lainey behind in a noxious cloud of diesel fumes. Across the street, Coral Springs High loomed imposingly under the umbrella of an enormous ficus tree. She checked her cell. 5:23.

No time to think. No time to dawdle. No turning back.

The football field looked like it was over to the left, so she figured the baseball field was probably in the back of the school. She hurried across the street and cut through the empty parking lot. It looked like no one stuck around here on Friday afternoons, either. Shadows sliced through the trees and across the broken asphalt. In a few minutes the sun would be down. Lainey loved the fall and Halloween and Thanksgiving, but she hated the shorter days. By the time December got here, you were down to what? An hour of daylight after school? She followed the chain-link fence to the back of the school, and there it was. The baseball field. No cars in this parking lot, either. No players on the field. It was as deserted as Sawgrass, which was good. Seeing other teenagers eye her like she was an imposter would drive her nerves completely over the edge.

She sat down on the curb and changed into Liza’s boots, throwing her sneakers into her book bag. Damn! Time to panic. Why’d she bring her stupid Twilight bag? She’d meant to switch to Liza’s old silver knapsack. She put a hand over Robert Pattinson’s handsome face. This could ruin everything. She’d have to keep that covered up or out of sight somehow – if Zach saw it she’d be so embarrassed. He’d definitely know then that she wasn’t sixteen. Maybe she should say her book bag broke this morning and she’d had to borrow her little sister’s from last year? Another couple of lies, including a sibling she didn’t have. A pang of guilt hit her. She’d told so many the last couple of days. It was getting real hard to keep track of them all …

She stood up and walked around the parking lot, trying to force her conscience on to another subject and adjust to Liza’s heels. If the Twilight bag wasn’t a dead giveaway she was a fraud, kissing the movie theater steps sure would do it. She popped a piece of gum in her mouth and put on another coat of berry-flavored lip-gloss, shaking her hands out to stop them from sweating. The very real thought occurred to her then that Zach might try to kiss her tonight.

Her first kiss …

That was it. She flipped open her cell and speed-dialed Molly. Pacing the parking lot, she spun her book-bag strap around and around, until it was all twisted.

It went straight to voicemail.

‘Hey, M, it’s me,’ Lainey began excitedly. ‘You’re probably at piano, but I wished you’d picked up! I have something so – you’ll never freakin’ guess where I am! Never!’

The car had pulled up behind her so quietly, the loose gravel on the asphalt had not even crunched. It was his voice she heard first.

‘Lainey?’

She literally jumped in her sister’s boots. There was no time to finish. No time left to think. The moment was finally right here, right now.

‘I gotta go,’ she whispered quickly into the phone. ‘Look, don’t call me back. I don’t want the phone to ring. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.’

Then she licked her lips to make them shiny, snuck a deep breath and spun around to meet the totally awesome guy she’d literally been dreaming about these past few weeks.

Cindy was finally going to meet her prince. Let the ball begin.

8

‘Hey!’ she said into the half-open car window, trying to nonchalantly unspin the tangled book bag. It was almost dark and the windows were tinted black, like a limo. It was hard to see inside. ‘I didn’t hear you drive up.’

‘S’up?’ he replied softly. His face was obscured in part by the baseball cap on his head and dark sunglasses, but she caught the flash of his mega-watt smile, and her knees shook just a little. His light blond hair spilled out from under the cap, barely touching his shoulders. Dressed in a tight long-sleeved black T-shirt, and dark jeans, the rest of his body blended like a chameleon with the all-black interior. He waved a hand toward the door. ‘Hop in.’

And so she did.

She slid into the passenger seat, which was buttery soft and smooth, but ice cold. The car smelled like new leather and old smoke. And Paco Rabanne, Todd’s favorite cologne. She pushed that thought right out of her head. Her stepdad was the last person she wanted to be thinking about.

‘Nice car,’ she said with a smile as she closed the door. She bent over and casually tried to rearrange the book bag at her feet so that Robert Pattinson was flipped face-down on the floor. She could shoot herself for forgetting to switch it out.

‘Thanks,’ he replied.

The window slid back up, and he turned up the radio. Lainey recognized the song from the movie Thirteen Going on Thirty. It was Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.

That’s a weird song, she thought. Who the hell listens to Michael Jackson that wasn’t, like, her parents’ age? She would have expected maybe Linkin Park or The Fray, Zach’s two favorite bands. Maybe he was playing it in the spirit of Halloween – as a build-up to the movie. God, she thought, please, please don’t let him be a geek. Or a weirdo. ‘Zombieland’s playing at a couple of places,’ Lainey said. ‘The next showing is six-ten at Magnolia, which is just up the road. Or we could go to the seven-fifteen at the mall.’ There were a couple of other theaters within driving distance, but those were the two she knew didn’t care if a kindergartner walked by himself into an R movie, as long as he bought himself a ticket.

‘OK.’

… You start to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it …

Michael Jackson crooned and squealed on the radio. ‘You want to go to the seven-fifteen? Then, um, make a left out of the parking lot. I can take you the way I always go, but I have to be on Atlantic Boulevard to get there.’ She giggled and looked around the dashboard. ‘I hope you have a navigation system on this thing. My friends always say I’m geographically challenged. I have a hard time finding my way back to my locker after lunch.’

Embossed in metal on the steering wheel was a raised, scripted L. Lainey recognized it from Molly’s dad’s car. He had a Lexus.

… Cause this is thriller, Thriller Night! And no one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike …

She wanted to ask him why he wasn’t driving the BMW, but that sounded shallow. And it was shallow. A Lexus was just as nice. Nicer, maybe. She fidgeted with the mood ring on her finger. She hoped making conversation wasn’t gonna be this hard all night. Molly was the conversationalist, not her.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked as they pulled out of the lot and made a right on to Rock Island. ‘We can go to the food court at the mall, if you want.’ That would be perfect, she thought. There was a really big chance that she’d see someone from Ramblewood there. Maybe even Melissa or Erica.

‘Sounds good,’ he said softly.

The creepy-sounding old guy started to rap on the radio. Vincent Price, the horror movie king from, like, a thousand years ago.

Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand …

‘I really liked your picture,’ Zach said, but he didn’t look at her. She watched as a single drop of sweat trickled down the side of his neck, disappearing into his shirt.

His arm was on the armrest, his hand dangling casually off the edge. Rough fingers tapped the gear shift. Wiry black hairs sprouted from the flesh above his knuckles. Lainey’s eyes slowly moved up his arm. Coarse black hairs stuck out of his cuff, like spindly spider legs.

She suddenly felt incredibly cold. Prickly goosebumps raced across her flesh. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the car.

Zach was blond.

… And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver …

He turned into an empty lot where a bunch of power station lines were. Across the street was a park. Molly’s mom had taken her and Molly there once before. It had a nature reserve running through it. The mall was in the other direction.

For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller …

She reached for the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The king of horror broke out into maniacal laughter. The song was over.

The cloth came across her face with lightning speed even as the car was still moving. The wicked taste burned her eyes and closed her throat. It was hard to breathe. Then he punched her hard in the head. She felt her face smash against the glass. She felt the warm blood trickle from her forehead, running past her eye and down her cheek. She felt her hands fall to the floor, her legs twitch and just stop working, as everything went to black.

The horror king just kept on laughing.

9

The hall clock started to chime. Debbie LaManna could hear it, even over the blare of the television. Even two rooms away. It chimed every quarter-hour, then dang in the number of hours at the top of every hour. It took five fucking minutes just to get through midnight. She cracked off a smoke ring. The ornate grandfather clock and a bank account with $3,714.22 in it was what her mother had left her nine years ago when she’d died of lung cancer, an oxygen tube strapped to her nose and a pack of Newports in hand. Of course the money was long gone, but damn it if that hideous Mack the Knife moon-face clock was still here – dragged along behind her from husband to husband, apartment to apartment, rental to rental. Toasting each lost hour of her life with a loud, distracting clang. One of these days she was gonna call the Salvation Army to come haul it away.

Debbie counted as the dings hit eleven. Just to be sure, she looked at her watch. She was gonna kill Elaine. Really kill her. Who the hell did she think she was, staying out till eleven at night? She crushed out her cigarette. This was how it all started with Liza. Breaking curfew, coming home stoned. Smelling like a fucking bottle of Bud. If that kid thought for one second that she was gonna get away with half the shit her older sister had pulled, she had a cold, hard reality check coming. What was that saying her own mother used to love to say? Fool me once, shame on you, Debra. Fool me twice, shame on me. And Debbie was no fool. Not any more. Elaine Louise was so gonna have her ass handed to her when she walked through that door. That was for certain. She swallowed a big chug of her Mich Ultra and tried to concentrate on the news.

‘Is she home yet?’ Bradley called out from his bedroom down the hall. His voice had the twisted smirk of a kid who was happy that his sibling was gonna be in a shitload of trouble.

‘Brad, if you don’t close that damn door and go to sleep in the next five minutes, there is no Laser Tag tomorrow with Lyle. I can promise you that!’

The door closed with a thud and Debbie tried to focus once again on the news. Listening to everyone else’s tragedies seemed to help for a little bit. A local fire. A bank robbery. Nine dead in an Iraq suicide bomb. Then her thoughts came around again. This time they landed on Todd, who was also not home yet. He was the real reason Debbie was so pissed off. Where the hell was he?

An after-work beer with the boys, honey. Just unwinding from a long, hard day of making money to feed your kids.

My ass, Debbie thought, bitterly. She knew he was probably drunk and fucking that new girl from the office in some sleazy Lauderhill motel or on a beach towel in the backseat of his car. The receptionist named Michelle that he swore up and down didn’t work at his office, even though that’s who’d answered the phone yesterday when Debbie had called to check.

Debbie rubbed her throbbing temples and lit another cigarette. She looked around the family room, littered with crap the kids hadn’t cleaned up, including petrified cereal bowls leftover from breakfast, video games, clothes and stacks of crumpled school papers pulled out of book bags and thrown wherever. When Liza did feel like coming home, she loved to dump whatever she didn’t want to wear or carry anywhere she felt like it. And then there was the other prince in the house, Bradley. Thanks to his dad’s testosterone-fueled edict that housework was a woman’s job, he didn’t lift a finger to pick up his shit, either. After working another nine-hour shift, this is what Debbie got to come home to – a messy house, a rat-bastard husband, kids who drained every last bit of energy from her body. And of course, no respect. Now, after she’d just gotten through what she hoped was the worst with the oldest, Elaine was gonna try and give her patience a run for the money. She shook her head and slapped the newspaper off the couch. This was not how life was supposed to have turned out. On cue, her mother chimed in down the hall.

Rosey, the kids’ Golden Retriever, walked in with a big bear stuffed in her mouth, and nuzzled her head on Debbie’s lap. Rosey stole every loose sock and stuffed animal in the house. This time it was Elaine’s ratty, old, teddy bear, Claude. She must have pulled it off Elaine’s bed. Lainey never went to sleep without him. She was thirteen going on thirty, maybe, but she still needed her teddy to go to sleep. Debbie pushed back the bad thoughts that kept trying to force their way into her head. She fingered the numbers on the cordless beside her, wondering if maybe she should call the police. But then she remembered from her escapades with Liza what life was like once you got the cops involved. Once they were in your fucking business, they never got out. Never. Instead, she tried Todd’s cell again. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ she barked when her husband told her to leave a message at the tone and he would get back to her as soon as he was able.

As soon as I’ve dismounted my invisible receptionist with the great boob job whose name is not Michelle, I’ll be sure to call you back. Beeeeeep.

She probably slept over that new friend’s house, Debbie told herself. What was her name? The one Lainey went to the movies with? Carly? Karen? That was probably it. Maybe she’d even told her she was gonna be sleeping over. It was so crazy this morning, trying to get them all out of the house and herself off to work, she probably just didn’t remember Elaine telling her, is all. And the reason she’s not answering her cell? That one’s easy. Because she never fucking charges it, that’s why. No surprise there.

Debbie pulled Claude from Rosey’s mouth and wiped the dog spit off on the cuff of her robe. She finished off the last of her beer with a single swallow and cracked open another from the portable cooler next to the couch. Then she turned up the volume on the TV, absently rocking the mangy teddy in her arms just as Conan O’Brien started his monologue and the clock began to count down yet another half-hour of her life.

This is the way nightmares begin. Or perhaps, end.

Rod Sterling, The Twilight Zone

10

The rumble of a lawn mower going right past his bedroom window was what woke Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Special Agent Supervisor Bobby Dees from the weird dream he’d finally slipped into. For a few seconds his exhausted brain scrambled to reconcile the sound with the strange golf game he’d been playing with his dead dad. A groundskeeper mowing distant swales on the eighteenth, perhaps? A low-flying jet? The rumble slowly faded off, a hush grew over the excited crowd, his dad lined up the putt …

Then his neighbor turned the John Deere back around.

It was no use. Bobby lifted a lid. The sun streaks that squeezed through the drawn blinds were tinged a soft pink. He looked over at the nightstand clock: 9:03 a.m. That was when he remembered it was Sunday.

He rolled over with a grunt and the new John Grisham he’d fallen asleep reading slipped off his chest, hitting the floor with a thump. His wife’s side of the bed was warm, but empty. He heard the door to the bathroom shut softly with a click. The shower turned on a few seconds later. LuAnn’s shift at the hospital didn’t start till ten, but especially on weekends she liked to get in a little early, have a cup of coffee and read the paper in the cafeteria before taking on an ER still chock-full of Saturday-night drunks and car-crash victims.

Bobby pulled a pillow over his head and lay there with his eyes closed for a few minutes, reluctant to accept the fact that he was now awake. The last time he remembered looking over at the clock it had read 5:49 a.m. The rumble of the mower slowly faded away like the ending of a song on the radio, the crowd on the green quieted once again and he started to drift back off …

Then his Nextel rang.

Ugh. He grabbed the cell off the nightstand and pulled it under the pillow with him. ‘Dees,’ he grumbled.

‘Man, you sound like shit,’ replied the familiar voice on the other end with a chuckle. ‘What’s up there, brother? Somebody piss in your cornflakes?’

‘What’s up? Why don’t you tell me what’s up at, ah, nine-fucking-o’clock on a Sunday morning, Zo?’

Lorenzo ‘Zo’ Dias was the recently promoted Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FDLE Regional Operations Center in Miami – aka: Bobby’s boss. ‘Hate to tell you this, but last night was Daylight Savings. Fall-back,’ Zo returned. ‘It’s eight-fucking-o’clock.’

‘Where’s my gun?’

‘Don’t tell me you ain’t up yet …’

‘I sure as hell am now.’ Bobby sat up and rubbed his head. ‘There goes your overtime budget, Boss. I’m officially back on the clock.’

‘What if I wanted to see if you were up to hitting a few on the Blue Monster this morning?’

Bobby yawned. ‘Now I know I’m coming in. Your balls couldn’t find a hole with a map, a flashlight and a personal guide. When was the last time you played golf?’

Bobby and Zo had been good friends long before Zo had begun his lonely ascent up the FDLE chain of command. They’d met in the FDLE agent academy almost a decade ago – Zo had retired early from the Miami Beach Police Department to become a special agent; Bobby had decided he’d had enough of New York and the bullshit politics of the NYPD and had headed south for better weather and a slower change of pace, which was rather ironic, considering hurricanes had become almost as commonplace as thunderstorms in South Florida and his caseload in the Crimes Against Children squad was double what it was as a Robbery detective in Queens. But he and Zo had stayed close throughout the years and the titles, and even through all the crazy administrative bullshit of the past few months. Zo was one of very few guys Bobby had met in his career who had successfully managed becoming a good boss while remaining a good friend. Most people, he’d found, turned into assholes before the ink dried on their promotion paperwork, throwing colleagues under the bus just to show some stuffed shirt in Tallahassee that they could. Of course, Zo had only been an ASAC for six months …

Zo sighed. ‘You got me. I’d rather have my teeth cleaned than chase balls smaller than my own around a big green lawn. G’head and call me un-American. I’ll see you in thirty.’

‘What’s up?’

‘We got a kid gone missing after school Friday,’ Zo replied, growing serious. ‘Thirteen-year-old Elaine Louise Emerson out in Coral Springs. Looks like a runaway, but we’re dotting I’s and crossing T’s. Springs PD asked for assistance. You know the drill.’

Unfortunately, that was true. Bobby did know the drill. Missing kid. Parents call in the locals. Locals call in FDLE. FDLE calls in him. First twenty-four hours is critical, which meant they were already way behind schedule. He rubbed his eyes. Bobby had gotten the same phone call too many times before. Nobody knew better than he that with missing kids nothing was routine and rarely did things ever turn out ‘looking like’ everyone had said they would. ‘Has anyone called the Clearinghouse?’ he asked, referring to the Missing Child Information Clearinghouse.

‘Party’s waiting on you. Mom just called it in late last night. Waited almost two days for the kid to get home from some sleep-over. Says she figured her daughter was maybe staying over a friend’s house.’ Zo sighed with annoyance. ‘Don’t ask me why she waited till almost midnight to call the kid’s friends and find out whose house she was fucking sleeping at. Unfortunately, brother, ya don’t need a license to be a parent.’

There was a brief, uncomfortable, silence.

‘You know what I’m saying,’ Zo tried when Bobby didn’t say anything.

‘Where am I going?’

‘Let’s meet at the house. You can talk to the parents, get a feel. If you don’t like what you hear, call it in. It’s 11495 NW 41st Street. FYI, that’s Section 45.’

‘Section 45’ was code for ‘Shitsville’. Coral Springs was a sprawling suburb stuck out in the middle of what was not so long ago considered nowhere. Kissing the Everglades twenty miles to the west of Fort Lauderdale and forty-five miles northwest of Miami, Coral Springs’ dirt roads had all been paved over into four-lane highways and its bean farms replaced with gated communities, office parks and, of course, a Starbucks on every corner. Voted one of the top places in the US to live by Money magazine, like any growing city, Coral Springs also had its share of problem pockets and rough neighborhoods that town commissioners would rather see annexed to some other city’s limits. ‘Section 45’ was one of them.

‘All right,’ Bobby said, reaching for the People magazine on LuAnn’s nightstand and jotting down the address across John Travolta’s forehead. ‘I’ll be there in a half. What? You don’t have anything better to do on a Sunday than hang with me? Does misery love company that much?’

‘Trent asked me to go along, since the Springs chief called him in special. Like I said, they’re saying runaway, they just want us to dot their I’s and cross their T’s for ’em. You know, they’re not in need of any more bad publicity out there.’

Trent was Trenton Foxx, the new FDLE Miami Regional Director – aka: The Really Big Boss. ‘All right,’ Bobby replied with a yawn. ‘It’ll be like old times, Boss. I’ll pick up the coffee.’

‘Make it three cups. Another FYI, Veso will be meeting us there, too.’

Bobby pretended he didn’t hear that last bit of news and hit the ‘end’ button before he said something to Friend Zo that Boss Zo wasn’t gonna like much. Frank Veso was just the latest in a string of green agents that had transferred down to Miami from some other bum-fuck part of the state to take a stab at his job. Not that he had anything against Veso personally – hell, he didn’t even know the guy – but it was growing real old real fast having to teach the lines to all the understudies gunning for his position as Special Agent Supervisor. It was no secret that the new regional director wanted ‘a change’ in Crimes Against Children – namely SAS Bobby Dees out and an ‘as yet to be named’ replacement in. But the reality was, no matter how good the raise or prestigious the title, in the end, no one really wanted Bobby’s job, and Bobby, Zo and the director all knew it. To date, all the wannabes who had headed south to try their hand at a new job description had high-tailed it right back to the FDLE Regional Operations Center they’d transferred in from. Because while working Crimes Against Children might get your face on TV more than running down unscrupulous accountants, it was always for a really bad reason. Beaten kids. Exploited kids. Abused kids. Missing kids. Dead kids. For most cops, the carrot at the end of an investigation was knowing justice had been served – the bad guy caught and locked up tight behind bars, the case closed nice and neat. Car stolen. Car returned. Defendant off streets. Victim happy. But with child predators, often you opened your investigation with one victim and ended it with a few dozen. And even when you sent the scumbag to jail for a couple of decades and the case was closed out and put in a box on a shelf, you never really felt it was over. You could never be sure you got all the victims. And because kids generally made for crappy witnesses, and parents didn’t want their babies to have to go through any more trauma, sometimes a cop never tasted the carrot at all – a slap on the wrist and long-term probation was the only justice being served on the courthouse menu. Working Crimes Against Children was like pulling off a Band-Aid and debriding what you thought was a scratch – only to find out under the scab was an infection that was a hell of a lot worse than anything you’d ever imagined. The layers of healthy flesh it had rotted away, unchecked, was horrifying. Only then did you begin to understand just how pervasive evil really was. Only then did you understand that for the smallest and most innocent of victims, the nightmare that would last a lifetime was only just beginning. And at the end of the day or the apprenticeship, few cops could handle that reality, no matter how much bigger the paycheck or how bright the limelight shone down on their careers.

Bobby got out of bed, opened the blinds and looked out the window. Outside, his wooly-chested, red-faced neighbor, Chet, was dragging the mower back into the garage. In another driveway he spotted a purple jogging stroller and a determined new mom stretching her Achilles against a curb. The twin toddlers next door were probably popping fistfuls of Cheerios, their wide eyes glued to Sponge Bob. If he stuck his head out the window, he could smell the bacon frying and the coffee brewing on this sunny Sunday morning. Inside his own home, the shower had turned off, and the silence was almost deafening.

Good morning, Suburbia. Bobby watched with a bitter twinge of contempt as everyone’s life went on as usual, as if nothing at all was wrong in the world. Rising gas prices, falling stock prices and a war being fought six thousand miles away by kids they didn’t know anyway, were just mildly worrisome headlines in the morning’s paper. Then it was on to the sports page for last night’s stats and the travel section for some fun ideas on next summer’s vacation.

Snug in their lucky little cocoons, where really bad things only happened to somebody else. Or better yet, to really bad people who really deserved them. Unaware and completely unaffected by the cold fact that somebody else’s child had just gone missing among them.

11

‘I thought you were gonna try and sleep in,’ LuAnn said into the mirror, mouth open and mascara brush in hand, when he stepped into the bathroom.

‘Try’s the magic word. Who the hell can sleep through that?’ Bobby grabbed the tube of Crest off the counter, watching as LuAnn went back to finishing her face. Her short robe clung to the curves of her damp body, glistening with freesia-scented lotion. Against the stark white cotton, her muscular legs looked even more tan than they normally did. The robe was slightly open in the front, tied loosely at the waist, exposing the pale curve of one of her breasts, her flat, toned stomach. At thirty-nine, his wife still had an incredible body. Just looking at her standing there, doing her make-up, stirred things in him, both emotionally and physically. LuAnn always had that power over him, from the moment they’d met under the blinding fluorescents of Jamaica Hospital’s trauma room. It was her face that had calmed him, her words that had made sense as he lay on that cold, steel table, bleeding out from the gunshot wound that had severed his brachial artery. Bobby hadn’t remembered much when he’d woken up days later in a hospital room full of anxious buddies in NYPD blue jackets, still groggy from all the drugs and weakened by the infection that had routed his body, but he couldn’t forget her – the dark blonde with the Midori green eyes and light, melodic Southern drawl. He could still hear her whispers in his head, the bright lights of the trauma room backlighting her head like a halo.

Officer Dees …

Dees …

Bobby, come on, now.

Don’t be going nowhere on me, Bobby …

Just stay right here … right here … with me … stay …

He knew her the instant she walked into his room the morning he was being discharged. She had an angelic face that perfectly suited her name, he’d thought. LuAnn Briggs, the tag on her uniform read. LuAnn – sweet, simple, soft, Southern, delicate, bubbly, delicious. When she’d sat on the edge of his hospital bed and explained how she wasn’t even supposed to have been working the night he was brought in, how it was only her second day in the ER, how she’d checked on him every night when he was in the coma, he knew his life would forever change. He proposed three months later. They were married that same year, ten days before Christmas. This December would mark eighteen years. He shook the distant memories out of his head and turned back to the sink.

‘You should talk to Chet,’ LuAnn said, waving the mascara brush in his direction. ‘I have to get up, but you don’t. It’s not right on a Sunday, especially with your insomnia.’

He squirted a gob of Crest on to the brush. ‘Helen told me he’s OCD.’

‘That’s no excuse.’

Bobby nodded in the mirror, staring at his own reflection. He looked like shit. The silver hairs in his morning gruff looked like they were beginning to outnumber the brown ones. And the laugh lines that feathered out from his blue eyes had apparently decided to take up permanent residence – whether or not he had anything to laugh about. What turned distinguished into disheveled? He was forty by, what? A couple of months? Daily five-mile runs and twice weekly trips to the gym kept the stress at bay and the pounds off, but he knew the mileage was definitely starting to show. It was only a matter of time. The fact that he just didn’t sleep any more wasn’t helping. The past year alone had aged him ten.

LuAnn dropped the mascara into her make-up bag, and leaned against the sink, pulling her robe closed and folding her arms across her chest. ‘Any reason you’re all dressed up?’

Even on that rare Sunday Bobby did go to church, it was usually in jeans and a T-shirt. The pressed black slacks, white dress shirt and gray silk tie slung around his neck were a clear indication something was up. No one had died and nobody was getting married – it wasn’t too hard to figure out he was headed to a scene. He wiped his mouth on a hand towel, reached for the shaving cream and turned on the hot water. Steam fogged the mirror. ‘I gotta go in,’ he said quietly.

‘I thought you were taking some time off this week,’ she tried.

‘I was. But I gotta go in.’

She stared blankly at him in the mirror, her face blurring from the steam, waiting for the rest of the explanation that he knew she didn’t want to hear.

He turned to face her. ‘There’s a kid,’ he explained softly. ‘She didn’t come home from school Friday.’

LuAnn said nothing. She just kept staring straight at him. Through him. Like the lyrics go from a bad song, there once was a time when he could feel himself getting lost in those green eyes. Eyes that just made you want to kiss her when you looked at them long enough. Now they stared at him, cold and empty. Concealor barely hid the dark circles and the stress fractures that feathered out from the corners. They were standing only a couple of feet apart, but there might as well have been a mountain between them in that small bathroom.

‘It looks like a runaway.’

‘Oh,’ she muttered with a blink and headed past him into the bedroom.

He shaved while she got dressed in silence. He stepped back into the bedroom just as she was tying her shoes on the bench by the foot of the bed. He finished buttoning his shirt and doing his tie, then slipped his badge around his neck and clipped the gun belt to his side. Out of respect, he waited until she went back into the bathroom and out of sight before he unlocked the gun safe, took out the Glock and slid it into the holster. He knew it got her upset to see it. It always had, even when he’d gone back into uniform after his shoulder had healed. He was probably the only guy on the NYPD back then whose girl wasn’t turned on by the fact that her boyfriend was a cop. It wasn’t that LuAnn hated guns or was a gun-control nut, it was just that she hated to see him with a gun. She said it reminded her what he had to do all day, and why it was he needed a gun to do it.

He slipped on a sports jacket and walked back into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the mirror just staring at the image before her. As he came up behind her, she started to mechanically brush her wet hair. His hand found her shoulder and rubbed it gently. ‘Don’t work too hard. See you tonight, Belle,’ he said into the mirror, then kissed her softly on the cheek.

Belle, for Belle of the ball. His sweet Southern Belle. LuAnn just nodded and kept brushing. Her skin felt cold and slightly damp, like the inside of a window pane on a snowy day.

He walked out of the bathroom, grabbed his car keys and cell off the nightstand, and headed down the hall, past the framed family pictures that covered practically every inch of the honey-colored walls. The last door at the end was slightly ajar, a battered street sign affixed to it warned ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. Inside the bubble-gum pink room, the morning sun warmed the dozens of teddy bears posed neatly atop a metallic silver comforter. A stack of laundered, folded clothes sat on the desk chair, still waiting to be hung up. He stopped to pull the door closed, his hand lingering on the cold doorknob for just a second. A million thoughts rushed him and he quickly pushed them back out of his head.

As he rounded the banister and hurried down the stairs, he licked his dry lips. They tasted salty. That’s when he knew for sure she’d been crying.

12

No media trucks, no mob of flashing patrol cars, no flock of hovering ’copters.

That was the first thing Bobby noticed as he pulled his Grand Am in front of the tired white ranch. Atop a sagging roof, a faded blue tarp flapped in the breeze, a bike lay propped against a plastic car port. Down the block, a group of kids laughed and joked as they skateboarded into air off home-made ramps. Obviously the failure of some teenager to come home after a weekend of partying was not on anyone’s radar.

‘Hey there, Dapper Dan,’ Zo called, tapping on the car’s back window. He walked up to the driver’s side and leaned in, a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth, his eyes hidden behind Ray-Bans. He wore khakis and a light blue dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the collar open and tie loose, like he was about to work on a car or deliver a baby. It was obvious Zo felt more comfortable in flip-flops and shorts. He fingered the lapel of Bobby’s sports jacket. ‘That real polyester?’

‘Very funny. I’d lie and say it’s Armani, but the joke would be lost on you. What’s with the stick, Kojak?’ Bobby asked, opening the door and stepping out.

Zo sighed. ‘I quit smoking.’

‘Yeah? Since when?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘I thought you were trying to quit drinking.’

‘Nah. I gave up on that. Camilla said she’d rather have me drunk than dead of cancer. I’ve been told I’m a lot of fun at a party.’

‘I’ll second that.’

‘I’ve eaten a whole fucking box since last night. Not a single butt, though.’ Zo spit the gnawed toothpick to the ground and popped another one into his mouth.

‘What about those patches? They’re supposed to work.’

Zo pushed up the sleeve of his shirt. Three flesh-colored squares dotted a muscular bicep the size of Bobby’s thigh. The silver hair on Zo’s buzzed head might betray his forty-five years, but his body sure as hell didn’t. He trained the new agents in tactical defense, headed up the Special Response Team – FDLE’s version of SWAT – and was very much a physically commanding and intimidating presence both in the office and out in the field. When Zo said, ‘Jump!’ most guys simply asked, ‘How high, sir?’

Bobby shook his head. ‘In other words, don’t fuck with you today.’ He looked at the house. ‘OK. What am I walking into?’

‘Just got here myself. Haven’t been inside yet. Waiting on Veso. By the way, don’t hang up on me again,’ Zo said, with a frown and a wag of his finger as he pulled out a notepad from his pocket. He leaned back against the hood of Bobby’s car. ‘Elaine Louise Emerson. DOB, 8/27/96. Brown hair, brown eyes, five feet tall, about ninety-five pounds. A seventh grader at Sawgrass Middle.’ He held up a color copy of what was obviously a school portrait of a young, lanky girl seated behind a desk, her hands folded in front of her, with long, frizzy hair the color of coffee ice cream. Light brown eyes were hidden behind glasses that were just a little too big for her face. She was smiling, but didn’t show her teeth, which probably meant she either hated them because they were crooked, or she had braces. She didn’t necessarily look like a geek, but she was definitely in that awkward adolescent stage of not being a little girl any more, and yet still years away from becoming a woman. ‘That was the fax that came in this morning,’ Zo finished, handing him the copy.

‘August twenty-seven, huh?’ Bobby said. ‘That’s my birthday.’

‘And what a party we had. I think you stayed out till, what? Eleven?’

‘Is this recent?’ Bobby asked, ignoring the jab. ‘She looks young for thirteen.’ ‘That’s from fifth grade, I’m told.’

‘Elementary school? Two years is a world of difference at this age, ya know.’

‘Mom’s looking for something more recent.’

Bobby thought of LuAnn and the pictures she covered every wall in the house with. The library of photo albums that she kept in the family room. If you stacked them all together and flipped through them fast enough, it would probably run like a flip-book movie of their daughter, Katy’s, whole life. There would be no missing pieces. No empty gap of memories for two years that she’d have to go searching for …

‘I’m told she’s inside and she’s pretty pissed off,’ Zo added.

‘At who?’

‘The kid, the cops, the husband – you name it. You’re up next,’ he warned. ‘Debra Marie LaManna, age thirty-six. She works at Ring-a-Ling Answering Service in Tamarac.’

‘Dad?’

‘Stepdad, aka hubby number three. Todd Anthony LaManna, age forty-four. CarMax Salesman of the Month,’ Zo said, raising an eyebrow. ‘In fact, he’s working right now.’

‘I’m guessing he’s not too worried about little Elaine,’ Bobby said.

‘I’m thinking that’d be a good guess.’

‘Real dad?’

‘California somewhere. No one’s heard from him in a couple of years. Mom’s got three kids: Liza Emerson, age sixteen, Bradley LaManna, son of our used car salesman, is eight, and Elaine, the one who’s missing, is thirteen by, as you can attest, a couple of weeks. Latch-key kids.’

‘Anyone call the hospitals?’

‘Done. Nothing.’

Bobby looked over at the weathered and faded cardboard boxes stacked up along the side of the house. Moving boxes. ‘How long have they all been living here?’

‘Both Mom and Step changed their DL address to this house in June. They’re renting. Records place them before that in another rental in Ramblewood, a couple of miles from here.’

‘Any history?’

‘Not with this kid. But cops have been out to both houses a few times. Once for a domestic and a few times for the sixteen-year-old. She’s been in trouble for drinking, marijuana possession, truancy. The latest last month was a burglary. It was dropped to trespassing on school property.’

‘Ouch. A bad apple?’

‘Spoils the whole friggin’ barrel,’ Zo replied. ‘Sis has also hit the road before. Miami-Dade picked her up on an NCIC missing juvi report a few months ago down in Little Havana, hanging with some boys from the Latin Kings at two in the morning.’

NCIC stood for the National Crime Information Center, a nationwide criminal information system for law enforcement. ‘That’s not good company to be keeping,’ Bobby replied, kicking the curb. The lawn was overgrown by a couple of weeks. The edging longer than that. ‘Who’s working it inside?’

‘Springs GIU responded last night when Mom finally decided to call it in.’ GIU stood for the General Investigations Unit, an all-purpose detective squad. ‘Bill Dagher and Troy Bigley. You know ’em?’

Bobby shook his head. He knew most every cop in South Florida who worked Crimes Against Children or Special Victims. The fact that he hadn’t heard those two names before probably said more than if he had.

‘They peg the kid for a runaway. The Springs chief called Trenton this morning for assistance to clear it. You know, after the shit storm that hit last year with that Jarvis girl, CYA is the name of the game in this town.’

CYA as in Cover Your Ass. Bobby nodded. Normally, only endangered missing kids (i.e. snatched) were investigated by FDLE, not runaways. With fifty thousand kids hitting the pavement each year in the state, there just wasn’t enough manpower to go looking for every kid who didn’t want to be found. The locals usually handled their own, calling in FDLE and the Clearinghouse for assistance on abductions, endangered runaways and exceptional cases. But then came the Jarvis debacle.

Makala Jarvis was fifteen when she was first reported missing to the Coral Springs PD by her grandmother. Two days after cops took the report, Mom called, claiming Makala had returned home. Without verification, the case was closed and Makala’s name was removed from NCIC as a missing juvenile, even though Grandma kept insisting Makala hadn’t really come back home. It was two years before a school resource officer finally listened to the old woman and put Makala’s name back into NCIC. Within a month, the skeletal remains of a young female found stuffed in a suitcase and floating in the St John’s River eighteen months prior were finally identified. Makala Jarvis had died from blunt-force trauma to the head. The subsequent homicide investigation revealed that Makala had been scheduled to testify against Momma’s boyfriend in a domestic violence case just two weeks before Grandma initially reported her missing. A conviction would’ve violated boyfriend’s parole and sent him back to Florida State Prison for twenty years. Mom didn’t want to lose her meal ticket, and since cops don’t go looking for people who aren’t missing, Makala’s name wasn’t even on the list of possible victims back when her body was fished out of the water. She sat, unidentified, in a black evidence bag on a shelf at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Duval County for almost two years.

The fallout from Jarvis was bad. The reporting Coral Springs detective was fired, virtually the whole General Investigations Unit was reassigned to road patrol, and the department took a beating in the press. And a new departmental policy was instituted: Cover Your Ass. But for that new policy, most likely Bobby would never have even heard the name Elaine Emerson. ‘Assistance to clear it’ was code for ‘we already investigated, just sign off on the report already.’

‘Where was stepdad on Friday?’ Bobby asked.

‘Out with the boys. Or girls. The Mrs says he stumbled home around three. Stumbled was actually my word. Pulling from personal experience, I think most people are stumbling when they get home at three in the morning.’

‘Anybody interview him yet?’

‘Not yet. He got home too late last night and left too early this morning. Given the shit he’s had to put up with from stepdaughter numero uno, maybe he’s expecting the same from this one, and thinks, “Fuck that, I’m going to work and getting the hell out of Dodge.”’

‘One rotten apple …’ Bobby said softly.

‘Spoils the whole friggin’ barrel.’ Zo flipped his notebook closed.

Bobby looked at the overgrown lawn, the overflowing garbage, the house in need of a paint job. Didn’t look like Todd LaManna liked to come home much at all. ‘Your boy Veso’s late, Boss,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘’Fraid he’s gonna have to hear what he missed out on at briefing,’ he called out as he started up the cement walk. ‘The morning’s getting away from us and I wanna find out where the hell this kid is.’

13

‘I think her name was Karen or Carla.’ Debra LaManna shifted on the mauve sectional, and reached for another Marlboro, even though there was a crushed butt still smoldering in the ashtray on the cushion next to her. A thin haze of blue smoke hung in the modest, but cluttered, family room. ‘It was only a movie she was going to, for Christ’s sake,’ she added with a roll of her eyes. ‘Sorry if I didn’t think to get the kid’s social security number she was going with.’

Bobby studied the slight woman with the bony, freckled cheeks and mistrusting stare across from him. Her pin-straight, long brown hair was pulled off her face and into a low ponytail, which she draped over her shoulder and absently stroked like a cat’s tail. She looked tired and stressed, but for a mom whose kid’s been MIA going on two days, what she didn’t look was sad. No red-rimmed eyes. No messed-up make-up from crying rivers of tears. No look of rabid panic or fear. Just plenty of anger, which radiated from her thin frame like a force field. The message was clear: Boy, was little Elaine gonna get it – if and when she finally decided to come home.

‘Sometimes it’s the one question that wasn’t asked,’ Bobby replied, looking around the room. Bill Dagher, the Coral Springs detective, stood over by the kitchen, texting on his cell. As far as the locals were concerned, this investigation was over: the report had been taken and Elaine Louise Emerson’s name entered into NCIC as a missing juvi. The kid didn’t want to come home, plain and simple, and one look at the mom and the history on the sis gave them a pretty good idea why. It was up to a social worker with the Department of Children and Families to fix what made her want to leave in the first place. ‘Did she tell you what class they were in?’ Bobby asked. ‘Where the girl lived? A last name? Did she maybe mention a theater or the name of the movie they were going to?’

Debbie blew a plume of smoke in his face. ‘No, no, no and no.’

The more questions Debbie LaManna didn’t know the answer to, the more she felt judged as a shitty mother, the more she clammed up. Not quite the distraught, ‘I’ll do anything I can to help you find her’ reaction one might expect, but then again, if ten years heading up Crimes Against Children had taught Bobby anything, it was that there was no ‘right’ way to behave when a kid disappears. He’d watched perfect moms sob perfectly on national television, begging for help in finding their babies, only to cuff the same cold-hearted bitches a few hours later in an interrogation room. He’d also seen the polar opposite – the reserved, seemingly heartless mother who can’t cry. The one whose indifference is viewed as most suspicious in the eyes of the public-at-large. The one who holds every emotion tightly in check because, Bobby knew, like a shattered vase gingerly held together with glue, if you removed just one piece, just one, then all the others would collapse and you’d never be able to put it back together again. So no reaction – or lack thereof – was ever ‘normal’ in these investigations. But even if he wasn’t necessarily reading ‘sinister’ in Debra LaManna’s overt hostility, it still wasn’t a good feeling to dislike the parent of the kid you were looking for. In this instance, it just made it that much easier to see why the girl might’ve left in the first place.

‘And none of Elaine’s friends who you’ve contacted’ – he looked down at his notepad to read back the names – ‘Molly Brosnan, Melissa and Erica Weber, Theresa M. – none of them know this girl Karen/Carly or how to get in touch with her?’

Debbie sighed loudly. ‘Like I said, it’s a different school than last year. Melissa, Erica, Molly – those girls are Lainey’s friends from the old house.’

‘Lainey? That’s Elaine’s nickname?’ Zo piped in from his seat on a fold-up chair next to the couch where he’d been sitting quietly for most of the interview.

Debra shrugged. ‘Her friends call her that.’

‘New house, new school, new friends. How’d Lainey feel about all that change?’ Bobby asked.

Debra rolled her eyes again. ‘Please. She wasn’t happy about it. Is that what you wanna hear? That she was unhappy? OK. She was unhappy. Drama, drama, drama. It’s all about the drama at this age. She had to leave her friends a few miles away and change schools, but we all have to make sacrifices. If that’s the worst shit she had to face as a kid, then she’s damn lucky.’

‘What about boyfriends?’ Bobby asked.

‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend.’

‘You’re sure? Is there a boy she likes, maybe?’

Debbie cut him off with a dismissive wave. ‘I’m very sure.’

Behind where she sat on the couch Bobby could see into the kitchen. Empty beer bottles dotted the countertop and spilled out of the top of the garbage can. He’d already spotted the portable cooler next to the couch. ‘Does Elaine do any drugs? Drink alcohol?’

She stared at him like he had three heads. ‘Look, if you just call some of the girls in her new school, you’ll find her. Just do some police work and call the principal and have him give you a class list or something. I can even look it over and see if I recognize the name or something. You know, maybe I’ll recognize it if I see it? I’m sure Elaine is at that girl’s house, I’m sure she’s not doing crack or drinking, and I’m sure I can deal with her once she’s back home. I just need some help in getting those names, you know?’

Even with an older kid who’d run amok, the lady was still wearing a sturdy pair of parent blinders. She might not have come out and said it, but if Bobby had a buck for every time he heard a parent tell him, ‘My kid wouldn’t do that,’ he’d be a millionaire. My kid wouldn’t have sex at fourteen. My kid wouldn’t do meth. My kid wouldn’t smoke. My kid wouldn’t drive drunk. My kid wouldn’t shoplift. Statistics say 80 per cent of teens have screwed up in at least one of the above categories, but not My Kid. Like the invisible ghost ‘Not Me’ who wreaked havoc in the Family Circle comic strip, it was always Somebody Else who was a fuck-up or a bad influence. There wasn’t much more he was going to extract from the lady.

‘Where’s your husband?’ Zo asked.

‘Work.’

‘Where was he Friday night?’ Bobby asked.

‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Debbie replied icily. ‘And I’m thinking that’s none of you all’s business, seeing that Elaine’s the one who didn’t come home.’

Ouch. He’d definitely hit a nerve, but Debra LaManna wasn’t giving up anything to the cops without a fight, including dirt on her cheating spouse. ‘We’ll need to talk to him,’ Bobby replied, closing his notebook. Then added, ‘I’m not gonna beat around the bush, Mrs LaManna. I know you’ve had some problems with your older daughter, so let me ask you, is there a reason why Lainey might not want to come back home?’

Debbie’s eyes flared like a cornered animal. ‘You cops are something else! I don’t know who the hell you think you are. Because my older daughter’s a piece of shit means my younger one is, too? Means I’m a horrible mother and the kids just can’t wait to get away from me?’

The grandfather clock started to chime the hours down the hall and no one said anything.

Debbie stroked the ponytail, eyes focused on her lap. She sucked in a sniffle. It was the closest thing to an emotion Bobby had seen besides pissed off. ‘Just find her. Please,’ she said finally in a small voice.

‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Bobby replied softly. ‘Does Elaine have access to a computer?’

‘In her room. Todd gave her his when we moved.’

‘What’s her email address?’

‘Damned if I know. I don’t email her.’

‘Does she have a MySpace? Facebook? An AOL networking account?’

‘What?’ she asked. It was obvious Debbie didn’t know what he was talking about. Most parents didn’t. Obviously, no one had asked her that question yet. But then, Bobby suddenly caught a flicker of something other than confusion in her brown eyes. A flash of fear, perhaps, like the mother of a toddler who’s wandered out of sight in the backyard suddenly remembers that her neighbor has an in-ground pool. MySpace, Facebook, AOL. A creepy mental picture had popped into Debra LaManna’s head, perhaps from newspaper articles she’d read or Dateline segments she’d caught, expounding the dangers of the internet for kids. ‘No, no,’ she said, defiantly, catching herself, not letting her thoughts go there. ‘Elaine’s allowed to use the computer for homework, and some video games – that’s it.’

‘Do you mind then if we take a look at the computer, as well as her room?’ Bobby asked.

She shrugged again. The fear was dismissed as quickly as it had surfaced. The lone tear had dried up. My Kid wouldn’t do that. My Kid knows not to go in the pool when an adult’s not around. ‘G’head. It’s a mess. She’s a slob, you know.’

‘Thanks for your cooperation, Debbie,’ Bobby finished, rising.

‘Third room on the left,’ she answered without looking up, as she crushed out another cigarette.

14

Thumb-tacked posters of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner from Twilight movie fame, Jesse McCartney and most of the cast from the TV show Heroes covered light pink walls. The twin bed was not just unmade – it was everywhere, as if it had exploded when the alarm clock went off. Cardboard boxes filled with books, comics, trophies and what looked like miscellaneous junk were pushed against the walls. Clothes spilled from others. Obviously Elaine had not completely unpacked yet from her move. The drawers were not emptied, but Bobby knew it would be pointless to ask Mom what, if anything, was missing.

The computer sat on a cluttered desktop. Back when Bobby was in high school, the telephone and good, old-fashioned note-passing were the communication methods of choice. Now it was all about email, texting, IMing, blogging. All you ever wanted to know about most teens could be found either in their cell phones or somewhere on the hard drive of their computer. And, more specifically, usually on a MySpace or Facebook page – social-networking sites which allow subscribers, notoriously teens and young adults, the opportunity to have their own ‘space’ on the World Wide Web. A place where they could post pictures, ‘blog’ their thoughts, voice their worries, pontificate on politics or global warming or yesterday’s hangover, identify their hobbies, list their friends and name their enemies. It was all there – down to addresses, birthdays, telephone numbers, schools, places of work and where they’d be hanging out on Friday night. A treasure trove of information – you just had to know where to look. Which was the problem with most parents – they didn’t have a clue. Technology had stepped on the gas in the last fifteen years and left most of them way behind, still fiddling with the ‘start’ button on their Windows Explorer.

He flipped on the computer and sifted through the pile of papers on the desk as it warmed up: Poems, math problems, science worksheets, a Social Studies test with a big D on it, doodle sheets filled with red hearts. Finding a printout with Elaine’s email address would sure make life a lot easier than a search-and-guess game. Colored pencil drawings of pandas and ferrets decorated the inside of the desk’s hutch. Pretty impressive, Bobby thought, for a kid who’d just turned thirteen. If school continued to bottom out, all hope wasn’t lost; the girl had serious potential as an artist.

No email info in the stack. He opened the browser on her internet engine and pulled down the list of sites visited; www.myspace.com popped up first. That meant it was the last site visited. That meant she had an account. On the MySpace homepage he fiddled with name combinations under the search button. He was pretty good at what he did; after only a couple of tries he found what looked like her under her nickname.

*LAINEY*

Headline: | VAMPIRES AND FERRETS RULE!!!!
Orientation: | Straight
Here For: | Friends!
Gender: | Female
Age: | 16
Location: | Coral Springs, Florida.
Profile Updated: | October 22, 2009

The wrong age didn’t faze him. To join MySpace you had to promise you were fourteen or older and enter a birthday accordingly. There were no stats, but he’d be willing to guess that a good chunk of the ‘teens’ on MySpace were closer to eleven or twelve. He’d interviewed kids as young as eight or nine who’d had MySpace pages, with profiles that claimed they were thirty-five. He clicked on Lainey’s profile. It wasn’t set to private, which meant anybody surfing MySpace could see it, member or not. Gwen Stefani’s ‘The Sweet Escape’ started to play. Brilliantly colored butterflies served as wallpaper. Pictures of young teenage girls, who he guessed were friends from Ramblewood, decorated the site – laughing, kissing the camera, making goofy faces, giving the finger, trying to look way too sexy for thirteen-year-olds. Cigarettes dangled from the slight fingers of a couple of girls; others toasted the camera with strange-looking drinks. A girl with long, brown, coffee-colored hair was in a few of the group shots. A girl who looked a lot more grown up than the lanky, awkward fifth grader in the photo Bobby held in his hand. Each picture was captioned with insider-jokes:

Molly B. & the ferret bandits!

No one home … LAINBRAIN

Bite me, please!!!

E and M pre-concert jelly-jollies …

Was I just at the bathroom and then at the stairs?

He looked at his notepad: Molly Brosnan, Erica and Melissa Weber, Theresa – Last Name Unknown. He glanced around the room. Vampire movie posters adorned the walls. Sketches of ferrets decorated the inside of her hutch. He definitely had the right site.

Tiny picture icons of Lainey’s favorite movies, rock bands and books covered half of the first page. Blogs, angst and general teenage drama filled the next two. Akin to a lot of MySpace pages, her site read like a diary, supplemented with postings and comments from her fellow MySpace friends. Three pages told Bobby more about Elaine Emerson than her mother could manage to communicate to police over the past eight hours.

‘Whatcha got?’ Zo asked, standing over his shoulder.

‘She’s got a MySpace. Last time she logged in was Thursday, the day before she went to the movies with the unknown friend. Hates school. Can’t stand bro, stepdad’s an asshole, mom’s a bitch and sis is pretty cool. Loves animals and her BFFs. Typical shit. Wishes she could, quote, “just get the hell away from here”. Endquote.’

‘Sounds like that’s just what she did,’ Zo muttered. ‘So much for, “my daughter wouldn’t do that.” Damn, you’re quick. Are we out of here, then?’

‘Not yet. She’s got twenty-four names on her friend space, but only six in her top,’ Bobby said, hitting the print button. MySpace was a membership-only social networking site, which meant that to communicate with somebody on MySpace you had to have an account yourself. Like a magazine, the more subscribers MySpace could boast having, the more it could charge its advertisers. Members were encouraged to continually boost the number of friends in their ‘personal networks’, and the number of friends someone had was automatically posted on the ‘Friend Space’ part of their webpage – like a sophomoric bragging list of sexual conquests. Some members were known to have hundreds, even thousands, of ‘friends’ – most of whom they’d never even chatted with. A lot of friends in Lainey’s network would potentially mean a lot of legwork tracking everyone down if the kid didn’t resurface. ‘Let’s see who Mom can ID from that. And let me look for a more recent picture of our girl.’ Under ‘start’ he ran a Find Files search to look for jpegs – electronic photos – on the computer’s hard drive.

‘Whoa,’ said Zo, as dozens of tiny pictures swarmed the screen.

‘Whoa is right,’ Bobby said as he clicked on one of the images. A picture of a girl dressed in tight jeans and a midriff-baring, see-through, white T-shirt, a sexy smile on her bright, red lips filled the screen. Her long brown hair, the color of coffee ice cream, was blown sleek and straight. Her big, brown, made-up eyes flirted coyly with the camera. Long red fingernails beckoned Bobby and Zo to come a little closer.

‘She sure don’t look thirteen,’ Zo said with a low whistle.

‘That’s the idea,’ Bobby answered. ‘There’s about thirty of these on here.’

‘A photo shoot?’

‘Yup.’

‘For who?’

‘That’s the question that needs an answer.’

‘The boyfriend Mom insists she doesn’t have?’ Zo asked.

‘Bingo.’

‘Great,’ Zo said with a chuckle. ‘I’ll let you be the one to tell her that she doesn’t know shit about her daughter. She already doesn’t like you.’

‘She’s in good company. Let me look at those MySpace friends again.’ Bobby went back to the first page of Elaine’s MySpace. Most of the names under her top six were recognizable as friends from the neighborhood that her mother had told him about: Molly B., Melly, eRica, Teri, Manda-Panda. Each had a picture of a teenage girl accompanying the name. Only one name on the top six was missing a picture. Only one name stood out from the rest and caught his attention.

‘I think we might have found our boyfriend,’ he said slowly, spinning the chair around to face Zo. ‘Looks like little Lainey’s been making nice with The Captain.’

15

Lainey’s head hurt so bad. It felt like someone was inside her skull, pounding away with a hammer on the bone, just trying to get the hell out. The more aware she became of it, the worse the pain got.

Tap, tap, tap.

Louder, louder, louder.

Bang, bang, bang.

Somewhere, someplace not too far away, she could hear the sound of humming. Pleasant, do-the-dishes humming. And a TV. The chatter of a TV. Louder, louder, louder, as if someone were turning up the volume very slowly.

The Israelites have saved the women! And Moses, well, he says, ‘So you’ve spared all the women? Why? Why, when they’re the very ones who have caused a plague to strike the Lord’s people! Why did you spare them?’

Then, the shuffle of heavy footsteps across the room. Across creaky wood floors. Coming closer. Coming towards her.

Lainey lay very, very still. Could the person see her? Where was she? She tried to open her eyes. They were so heavy.

… She smells good. She sure looks good. She doesn’t seem evil. What man would not be tempted? Like many of us in our everyday lives, Moses must make a difficult decision. A terrible decision …

She tried again. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Her eyes would not open.

Was she dreaming? Was she blind? She reached to touch them and couldn’t. Her arms would not move. She struggled, but they would only tug. She felt the burning in her wrist and realized her arms were bound.

She was tied up.

… He tells them, ‘Slay, therefore, every male child and every woman who has had intercourse with a man. But you may spare and keep for yourselves all girls who had no intercourse with a man …’

She could sense the flashes of bright light and she heard the familiar click of a shutter lens. Over and over and over. Someone was taking pictures of her.

‘Help me,’ she tried, but only a croaked whisper escaped, her words were as heavy as her eyelids and her throat burned. The footsteps slowed, circling her. Closer, closer. Like a cat might approach a wounded bird, studying it, watching it.

Playing with it.

The shaking started first in her knees, then like a fast-moving electrical current, the fear traveled up her spine, to her arms, her neck, her head, her teeth, until her whole body was trembling uncontrollably. She thought of the time in fifth grade when she had caught the flu and couldn’t stop shivering even under a dozen blankets. Her mom had let her watch Scooby-Doo cartoons all day in her bed, and gotten her wonton soup from the Chinese restaurant.

Mommy, Mommy, I’ll be good, I swear. I won’t do anything bad ever again. Ever. I’ll take care of Bradley. I’ll never complain. I’ll get straight A’s again. I’ll listen. Just let this stop. Make it all go away, Mommy, please, please, please …

… please let me wake up!

She felt him standing there, maybe inches away, maybe a foot or two at the most, watching. Then he sat down next to her, and the mattress or cushion she was on sunk just a little under his weight. The smell of his cologne was nauseating. Paco Rabanne again. Was it Zach? Her mind raced. Was it the same person from the car? Could there be more than one? Could there be more than one person in the room right now, watching with him? Who had taken the pictures? She could hear him breathing hard but trying not to, the feel of his warm breath as it fell on her face. His breath smelled like … SpaghettiOs? She wanted to turn off her senses, just hear and smell and feel nothing. She wished everything were black again. She wished she could cry.

The TV began to scream. Remember that! We are watching you! Are you pure in both thought and deed?

Then his hand reached out and gently stroked the hair off her forehead. His trembling fingers were moist and warm.

‘Ssshh now, pretty girl,’ said the devil in a sing-song voice. ‘You’re home now. Right where you belong.’

16

It was his gut that told Bobby something was wrong. More wrong than just a troubled teen from a dysfunctional family not wanting to come home any more.

No one knew the stats better than him. Every forty seconds in the US a child gets reported missing. That’s 800,000 kids a year; 2,185 each and every day. Most of them – as high as 92 per cent – were runaways. Alarming numbers, no doubt, until you realized that those were just the kids lucky enough to be reported missing. The National Runaway Switchboard put the actual number of runaways – often called ‘throw-aways’ because nobody cared if they didn’t come home – closer to somewhere between 1.6 and 2.8 million a year.

Faced with overwhelming statistics like that, it wasn’t too far a leap to the conclusion that Elaine Emerson had run away from home. She fit the classic profile: a dysfunctional family, a history of running away and truancy by an older sibling, a family history of alcohol and drug use, a recent drop in grades and cutting classes, a recent relocation away from friends, and a tumultuous relationship with her parents, one of whom was a step. Her disappearance had taken Mom almost two days to finally get herself worried enough about to call in, which – translated into cop language – meant this was probably not the first time little Lainey had decided not to come home. Add in the sexy photos and a web space where the kid rants about her ‘asshole’ stepdad, ‘bitch’ mom and how she wants to ‘get the hell away from here’, and the missing juvi classification in NCIC was certainly justifiable. Statistically speaking, little Elaine should be walking back through that front door in the next twelve to twenty-four hours.

But then there was the other 8 per cent. And that was what was troubling him.

Bobby rubbed his temples. The skateboard contest down the block had moved and was now in the street right outside Elaine’s bedroom window. Given the neighborhood, he figured one or more of the kids had recognized the Crown Vic, Taurus and Grand Am as undercovers and had edged the game closer to see what was happening. Maybe they knew about the troubles with Liza Emerson. Maybe they knew of some troubles with Lainey. He made a mental note to talk to them as soon as he finished up with the computer.

Of the 800,000 children reported missing each year, almost 69,000 of them – or 8 per cent – were classified as ‘abductions’. Familial abductions, such as when a parent takes off with a child in violation of a custody agreement, accounted for 82 per cent of those cases. But the remaining 12,000 were identified as victims of non-familial abductions. Non-familial, as in when the child is taken by an acquaintance, a family friend, or, sometimes – in the more remote and more terrifying cases for the public-at-large – a complete stranger. Plucked off of school buses or snatched from busy malls. Those were the cases that instantly made headlines and triggered AMBER Alerts. And for good reason. While the stereotypical kidnapping was statistically rare, it was almost always deadly.

With the explosive growth of the internet and social-networking websites, non-familial abductions had risen dramatically within the last ten years. Bad guys didn’t need to lurk around corners any more, or peek in windows in the middle of the night. Now they walked straight through a kid’s front door in broad daylight. Right past Overprotective Mom and Drug Czar Dad and into junior’s bedroom via the computer. There they could exchange pictures, chat, play video games and discover all sorts of neat things about the ‘distant’ teen whose parents didn’t understand him. The World Wide Web had spawned a new hunting ground for predators. Trolling kiddie chat rooms and adolescent networking sites at their leisure, they picked off their prey from the millions of profiles offered on MySpace and Facebook, where smiling victims provided as much scrumptious detail about themselves as dinner entrées on a restaurant menu. Sitting behind a keyboard and monitor, this new breed of predator could pretend to be anyone: An eighteen-year-old boy; a twelve-year-old girl; a talent agent; Jay-Z’s best friend. They took advantage of the naiveté of kids and the ignorance of their parents – gaining the former’s trust, and then slowly, carefully exploiting the relationship, subtly grooming their victims for the ultimate, devastating high: a face-to-face meeting. And then, with just the simple click of a button, disappeared forever back into the black abyss of cyberspace once lives were destroyed and the police were finally called in.

Bobby looked around the pink bedroom with its typical teenage décor. Lainey hadn’t lived here long, and she’d moved under protest, but she had hung up her posters and wall art, which meant she considered this room home. She was definitely a slob, but although her clothes spilled haphazardly out of drawers and boxes, they hadn’t been packed up into a suitcase. It would be hard to figure out what was missing, but, perhaps more importantly, if anything was missing. And then there was the faceless photo in her friend space. Bobby was willing to bet the bank ElCapitan just might be the intended recipient of all those sexy pictures. And of course, perhaps the most troubling fact that he kept coming back to was also the most innocuous one: The girl hadn’t logged back on to her MySpace since the day before she’d disappeared. He knew that, for teenagers, MySpace was their social lifeline. A kid wouldn’t just abandon it for a few days – unless she physically couldn’t check it.

Obviously, with 2,185 kids reported missing every day, not every face got slapped on a milk carton and not every kid got his or her physical description launched on traffic message boards across the nation via an AMBER Alert. The system would be critically overloaded within minutes, and people would quickly grow desensitized and indifferent to the plight of yet another kid gone AWOL. AMBERs were reserved for the most urgent of situations. To have one issued, a cop had to meet a strict, three-pronged criteria: 1) a reasonable belief the child was abducted; 2) a reasonable belief he or she was at imminent risk for serious bodily injury or death; and, 3) sufficient descriptive information about the child, the suspect, and the abduction so that a public broadcast would actually help find the kid. Bobby tapped his notepad. He didn’t have enough to meet any one of the prongs with Elaine Emerson. He just had that familiar, heavy feeling in his gut.

Somewhere in between the panic-mode AMBER and the runaway code-word ‘missing juvi’ entry in NCIC was a Missing Child Alert. In cases where you didn’t have an abduction, but you had enough information to believe the child was in imminent danger, you could request a Missing Child Alert. While it didn’t spark the same urgent, national ‘Oh Shit!’ response as an AMBER, it did trigger notifications to the local media, neighborhood businesses and community law enforcement agencies. But again, other than his agita, Bobby had no concrete reason to believe Elaine was in danger. An alert would definitely be a stretch. And based on the info they had right now, it would be much easier to just OK the missing juvi report that Coral Springs had put into NCIC, grab his golf clubs and call it a day.

‘Veso just showed up,’ Zo said, popping his head back into the room from the hall, where he’d disappeared for the past ten minutes. ‘Fucking numb-nut got lost.’

‘Obviously a great detective,’ Bobby replied, not bothering to look up from the screen.

‘Be nice.’

‘Fuck that. You be nice. I don’t need a pet. Or an understudy.’

Zo shook his head. Diplomacy was a tough tightrope to walk, and he was a shitty acrobat. ‘You almost done here?’ he tried. ‘I got tickets to the Dolphins game at four.’

‘Just writing down a few things. I’m gonna try talking to some of these friends while I’m out here. And the step, too. See what the hell’s up with him.’

‘OK, bro. You’re the expert.’

Bobby couldn’t resist. ‘Can you tell your boss that, please?’

Zo stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He waited a long moment before he finally spoke. ‘I don’t know how you deal with,’ he started, looking around, ‘this shit every day. Every fucking day. Let me be honest with you, Bobby, my friend. I don’t know how you do it. Especially after Katy. I don’t know how you can fucking function. It’s like you’re locking yourself in a freaking torture room every second of every day and forcing yourself to look at all the shit on the walls. It ain’t healthy.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited till the pregnant silence caused his friend to finally look over at him. ‘None of these cases, none of them, have a happy ending, man. None of them. You know that better than anyone. You bring ’em home, Shep, that’s true, all these … these kids. Dead or alive you bring ’em home, but what kind of life is that? I mean, what kind of career is that? ’Cause it’s never a happy ending, even when it’s supposed to be. And you know it. It’s just the beginning of years of therapy for those who do make it home. I’ve worked a lot of squads, you know, in my years, a lot of different cases. Violent Crime, Terrorism, Narcotics, Organized Crime. You name it, and I’ve probably worked it. And I’m not saying they’re easy, but you know, when you’re working something like homicides – it sucks, there’s blood and brains and bad shit – but at least you know the guy you’re working for is dead. I mean, there’s never any hope of finding him alive. It’s depressing and all, and it’s a dead body, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you never get that fucking hope ripped out of your chest, like you do in these kid cases. Over and over and over. What I’m saying is, why don’t you look at the changes Foxx wants to make as a way out? As a long-overdue, I don’t know … vacation? A chance to move on? Ain’t nothing wrong with pushing some paper and taxiing governors around when they come to town. I know you don’t want it. Hell, we all know – the director included and every suit in Tallahassee, too, as well as the freaking Fibbies – we all know that no one else can do this job as good as you. You’re the best at what you do, Shep. But – well, fuck the Vesos of the world and Foxx if you think they’re trying to squeeze you out – but, for LuAnn, for your own sanity, let someone else try, man.’

Bobby said nothing. The whoops and hollers from the skateboard contest filled the strained silence. ‘Look, you brief the guy if you want to,’ he replied finally. ‘I already know he’s a fuck-up and I don’t want him in here.’ Then he turned his attention back to the screen.

Zo let out a slow breath. ‘Whatever. I’ll meet you outside when you’re done.’

After Zo walked out, Bobby leaned back in the desk chair and rubbed his tired eyes.

Not all of them. I don’t bring them all home, Zo. And that’s the problem. That’s why I don’t sleep any more. I don’t bring them all home and we both know it …

He flipped open his cell and dialed.

‘Missing Children Information Clearinghouse. Travis Hall.’

‘Hey there, Travis, it’s Bobby Dees down in Miami.’

‘Hey, Agent Dees. I haven’t heard from you in a while. I thought you wasn’t working these cases no more, after, you know, well, after what, um, happened …’ Travis’s voice had slowed and stumbled off, like he’d just gotten the memo that it wasn’t such a hot idea to be saying what he was saying.

‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Travis.’ Bobby sat up. ‘I’m still alive and well down here in the Conch Republic.’

‘Glad to hear it. You doing OK, Bobby?’

Bobby ignored that question, because any idiot with half a brain and knowledge of the hell he’d been through the past year wouldn’t have asked it in the first place. ‘Listen, Travis,’ he said dismissively, fingering the two pictures of Elaine Emerson he had printed out on the desk. Before and After. The Geek and the Lolita. Stretch or not, he’d learned over the years to listen to his gut. It was the one partner that never let him down. ‘I’m gonna need you to put out a Missing Child Alert on one Elaine Louise Emerson. White female, date of birth 8/27/96 …’

17

‘So you don’t have any idea where she might be?’ Bobby asked the skinny girl with the mop of wet, dark blonde curls. Just past the sky-blue foyer where he stood, an arched entryway led into the home’s kitchen. Plastic grocery bags were piled on the countertop and he could see something was boiling on the stove. The house smelled like meatloaf and onions.

‘Nuh-uh,’ the teen replied, rubbing her head with a Scooby-Doo beach towel. The mirror image standing next to her in the same exact bathing suit and shorts just shook her head.

‘Her mother called here last night at almost eleven o’clock looking for her,’ Mrs Weber added with a frown. ‘I told Debbie I didn’t think the girls had seen Elaine in a couple of weeks. They were at their dad’s all weekend and they had a swim meet this morning. They just got home.’ She rubbed the shoulders of either Melissa or Erica. Bobby couldn’t tell the difference. ‘Do you think she ran away? Is that it?’

‘Do you think that might be the case?’ Bobby countered.

Mrs Weber shrugged. ‘Elaine’s mother parents differently than me, let’s just say that. Her older sister is a mess, you know. A mess. Drugs and boys. That’s why I don’t like the girls over there. There’s no supervision. Elaine is very sweet, but …’

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