Expecting to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Pescoli thought of the huge footprint Farnsby, the supercilious Sasquatch-believing tech, had discovered and even now was probably casting. It wouldn’t be long before the story got out.

Pulling her small recorder from her pocket before the girl could protest again, she said, “Let’s get started, so we can get you home.” She hoped she sounded affable, but she wasn’t quite able to hide the sarcasm in her words. Too bad. “So, Simone, why don’t you tell me what you were doing up here at around two in the morning?”

Her mother winced.

Good.

“Just hanging out. With friends,” the girl said, some of her attitude dissipating.

“What time did you get here?”

“I dunno. Maybe a little after midnight?” she said slowly, eyeing her mother for her reaction. Mary-Beth’s tight mouth seemed to pinch even tighter.

“Were you alone, or did you come with someone?”

“With Lindsay,” she admitted, blowing air through her nose as if disgusted with herself.

“Lindsay?”

“Lindsay Cronin.”

“The girls are best friends,” Mary-Beth cut in. “Good girls. Simone even volunteers at the hospital.” She placed her hands over Simone’s shoulders, her fingertips clenched in the girl’s T-shirt, as if she were trying to silently and subtly warn her daughter to tread carefully.

Of what?

A cop they’d known forever? Pescoli remembered a time when Simone, all of four, had been on a playdate with Bianca after preschool, where Simone had played dress-up and tried to master Candy Land. Even then, Pescoli had caught the little girl cheating, if she’d even understood what she was doing, which Pescoli hadn’t believed.

Now, in the middle of the hot August night over a decade later, she considered that maybe she had.

The rest of the interview didn’t go well, no surprise, nor did any of the others.

As it was: Nobody knew nothin’.

At least that’s what all the teenagers who’d been rounded up wanted the cops to believe. But Pescoli wasn’t so sure. She figured they were more interested in covering their asses than finding out the truth. Most of them smelled like a brewery, and talking to any of them to get any relevant information was like pulling teeth from a cement jaw.

Madison Averill, who’d probably been instrumental in getting Bianca to come up here in the first place, had been sullen and clinging to TJ O’Hara, “Teej” to the kids. TJ had tried to shrug Madison off, but she’d wrapped her fingers tightly around his arm and looked at him with doe-soft eyes.

Teenage angst on display. At a tragedy. Pescoli had trouble dealing with it.

TJ had been polite enough, but had kept his answers short and had avoided eye contact with Pescoli. In fact, he’d kept tossing looks across the parking lot to a spot where Lara Haas was engaged in a whispered conversation with both of her parents. She was hard to miss with blond hair, and a tight, white T-shirt and shorts, not exactly the kind of outfit one would wear trying to hide in the game of hide-and-seek that Bianca had described.

The girl was a knockout with a body the stuff of teenage boys’ wet dreams; a porn movie producer’s opinion of a “real woman.” Huge breasts, nipped-in waist, and a rounded butt above legs that wouldn’t quit.

No wonder TJ was throwing surreptitious glances in her direction. Most of the boys were, including the Bell kid, who had been belligerent, almost defiant, just like his old man and older brother, Kip. In the Bell brothers’ case, the bad apples certainly hadn’t fallen far from the rotten tree.

Some of the girls had been crying and couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them anything,

Lindsay Cronin’s histrionics had apparently taken over her ability to speak coherently as she’d looked up at the sky and sobbed, only to be comforted by TJ’s brother, Alex. Older than TJ by a couple of years, Alex O’Hara was also taller and heavier, a football-lineman type. He had his arm around the wailing Lindsay while Simone Delaney, standing a few steps away and still with her mother, took in the scene and scowled darkly. Something was definitely going on there, Pescoli thought and made a mental note.

It didn’t look like those “besties” were all that close, at least not as tight as Mary-Beth Delaney wanted Pescoli to believe.

The worst of the lot, Pescoli thought, was Austin Reece. He was smart and privileged and wasn’t about to be intimidated by the authorities.

“I don’t have to talk to you without my lawyer present,” he first told Detective Sage Zoller, a bit of a thing with a tight, gymnast’s body, springy curls and a bad-ass attitude. Now he was giving Pescoli

the same song and dance all served up with a smug, frat-boy smile. “I know my rights.”

“We’re just trying to find out what was going on.” She was attempting to hold on to her patience, but it was growing thin . . . fish-line thin.