Billy wiped his face again and shook his head. “She didn’t turn up. I guess her parents stopped her, maybe. She was gonna sneak out.” He looked around the circle of grim faces and seemed to realize what they were thinking. “No. No, you don’t get it. It wasn’t Bri’s fault. It wasmine—”
Diggs put his hands on Billy’s shoulders and squeezed warningly. “I think that’s enough. My client—”
Billy ignored him and tripped over his words as he sped on. “If I hadn’t argued with Drew, if I’d gone back to the cabin with him, it would have been okay. It wasmyfault. Bri’s not some sort of pervert, not some sort of creeper. I know her.”
The indignation in his voice cracked with adolescent certainty. Cloister remembered when he’d been that sure about things. Sometimes he’d been right, but never about the things he wanted to be right about. Javi glanced up at Diggs and traded a reassuring look with him when he reluctantly backed off a step.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Javi said patiently. The tone made Billy glare at him and hunch his shoulders defensively. “But we need to check. You understand that, right?”
Lara squeezed his knee. “He does, of course,” she said firmly. “Whatever you need, he’s going to tell you. If this… person… took Drew, they’ll have kept him… safe, right?”
Alivewas the word she meant but didn’t want to say. The shitty hope at the bottom of the box that whoever took your kid had their own twisted reasons to keep them breathing. No matter what else had happened. With Birdie’s tight, sunken face still fresh in his mind, the tiny bones of her wrists looking breakable, Cloister wasn’t sure they even had that.
“I’m sure they will, Lara,” Javi said. “We’re still looking for him.”
She stared at his face for a second and visibly decided to believe him. She dipped her chin in a nod and pushed Billy’s shoulder. “So you tell them,” she said. “Everything this person told you.”
“Bri,” he said stubbornly. “Her name’s Bri. She’s not some old perv. I’d have known. I’m not stupid. We’re friends.”
“Do you know where we can find her?” Javi asked.
Billy opened his mouth and closed it again. He twisted his hands in Bourneville’s ruff again, worrying her hair into nervous elflocks. “She… her dad hasn’t bought a house yet,” he said. “They had one, but it fell through. They’ve been staying in hotels with friends and stuff.”
“What does her dad do?” Javi asked. He sounded interested, almost casual.
“Building,” Billy said promptly. He looked relieved to have a question he could answer. “He’s a developer. That’s why it’s funny he can’t get a house. You know?”
Javi just nodded. “Do you have a contact for her?”
“On my phone,” Billy said. “We talked on Skype and Facebook mostly.”
Still hovering behind the couch, Ken frowned. “That’s not possible,” he protested. “We have access to his social media accounts. We check them once a week, make sure everything is aboveboard.”
Lara took a deep breath. “Don’t be stupid. He had another account, didn’t he? One we didn’t know about?” She looked at Billy and waited for an answer. Instead of giving her one, he hunched over and tucked his chin in guiltily. When that was all she got, Lara turned a flinty expression to Javi. “He’ll give you the code to his phone and his secret accounts. Everything.”
It took two sides of a sheet of a paper for Billy to scribble down all his passwords. He underlined the last string of random words and numbers, which bisected the back half of the page, and held it out.
“You’ll see,” he said defiantly. “Bri’s real. She’s sent me pictures and everything.”
It was almost poignant and definitely enough to make Cloister feel even worse for Billy. The quick flash of knowing heat that passed between Diggs and Javi—the sly looks of people who had naked pictures—almost didn’t bother him at all.
An hour later, in Javi’s office, the contents of the phone opened up across the curved screen that had higher definition than Cloister’s TV back in the trailer. Bysent, it turned out Billy meant uploaded to a friend’s locked Instagram account.
On Javi’s computer the pretty blonde girl grinned out of the screen, stared pensively into the distance, crossed her eyes, and stuck her tongue out over a Starbucks cup. Shiny, delicate earrings sparkled in her ears in every picture, and she had freckles that death had scraped off.
Apparently the ’80s had been back in fashion ten years ago too.
“Why use her?” Cloister asked as he leaned his arm on the back of Javi’s chair. He could smell the sharp gingery smell of Javi’s skin, the hint of lemon caught in his dark, dense hair. It tickled the back of his tongue and made his mouth dry, but he tried to ignore it. “If Billy had shown that to his father, there’s every chance that Ken would have recognized her. Even though he was older than her, Birdie dated his cousin and then disappeared. It was memorable.”
Javi snorted. “He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Billy was already lying to his parents about his use of the internet. He wasn’t going to snitch on himself just to show his dad a picture of a girl he liked.”
He tapped his finger on the mouse, flicked one picture aside, and pulled up another—a landscape. The caption claimed it was a “site my dad’s going to buy!” The picture was a familiar mix of half-finished and rundown buildings.
Technically Birdie was in that picture too. Cloister picked out the building they’d found her sad little corpse in.
The grim mockery of it made both men fall silent for a second.
After a moment Javi closed the files. “Taking everything else into consideration,” he said. “The risk might have been the point. Until we know more about the other effects found in the house, we can’t say for sure, but I think it’s obvious that the Hartleys weren’t chosen at random.”
