Michael’s Porsche was a remnant of his life before the program.
Watching him behind the wheel, it was easy to picture the person he’d been then, the trust-fund brat bouncing from one boarding school to another, summering in the Hamptons, jetting out to Saint Barts or Saint Lucia for a long weekend.
It was easy to picture that Michael bouncing from girl to girl.
Lia sat in the front seat beside him. She was leaning back, the leather seat caressing her cheek, her long hair whipping in the wind. She’d rolled down her window and showed no signs of wanting to roll it back up. Every once in a while, her gaze flitted over to Michael. I wished I could read the inscrutable expression on Lia’s face. What was she thinking?
When she looked at Michael, what did she feel? Michael kept his eyes locked on the road.
As hard as I tried not to profile the two of them, I kept thinking that Lia was the one who’d asked Michael to join us on this ill-advised outing, and that he’d agreed to help her. Why?
Because opportunities for trouble were not to be missed. Because he owed her. Because as much as Michael enjoyed jabbing at Dean, he didn’t like watching him bleed. The answers flooded my brain, and Michael caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. He’d told me once that when I was profiling someone, my eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.
“We’ll want to make a quick detour,” Lia said. Michael glanced over at her, and she gestured with the tip of one dark purple nail. “Pull off at the next exit.” She glanced back at me. “Enjoying the ride?”
She was in the front seat. I was in the back. “I’m not doing this for enjoyment,” I told her.
She let her gaze trail from me to Michael and then back again. “No,” she agreed. “You’re not doing this for enjoyment. You’re doing it for Dean.”
Lia lingered on Dean’s name just slightly longer than the other words in that sentence. Michael’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel. Lia wanted him to know I was doing this for Dean. She wanted him dwelling on that fact.
“Gas station,” Lia directed, her hair whipping in the wind. He pulled in and threw the car into park. Lia smiled. “You two wait here.”
It was just like her to stir things up and then leave. No matter how well he masked it, I knew Michael was sitting there asking himself what—exactly
—had led me to do this for Dean. The same way I’d spent the ride wondering why Michael had said yes to Lia.
“Ta,” Lia said, sounding fairly satisfied with herself. In an impressive feat of flexibility, she snaked her body out the open window without ever opening the door.
“This is a bad idea,” I said as Lia sauntered toward the mini-mart. “Almost certainly,” Michael agreed. From the backseat, I couldn’t see his
face, but it was all too easy to imagine the unholy glint in his eyes.
“We snuck out of the house to go to a frat party,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure this isn’t a dress.”
Michael turned around in his seat, took in the view, and smiled. “Green’s a good color for you.”
I didn’t reply.
“Now it’s your turn to say something about the way this shirt really brings out my eyes.” Michael sounded so serious that I couldn’t help cracking a smile.
“Your shirt is blue. Your eyes are hazel.”
Michael leaned toward me. “You know what they say about hazel eyes.” Lia opened the passenger door and flopped back into her seat. “No,
Michael. What do they say about hazel eyes?” She smirked. “Did you get what you needed?” Michael asked her.
Lia handed a brown paper bag back to me. I opened it. “Red Gatorade and cups?”
Lia shrugged. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When at a frat party, drink questionable fruit punch out of a red Solo cup.”
Lia was right about the punch. And the cups. It was dark enough in the dimly lit frat house that no one noticed that our drinks were a slightly different shade of red.
“What now?” I asked Lia over the deafening music.
She began to move her hips, and her upper body followed suit in a way that made it fairly clear that she’d excel at limbo. She eyed a trio of boys at the edge of the room and shoved Michael toward a blond girl with red- rimmed eyes.
“Now,” she said, “we make friends.”
A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party….
An hour later, Michael had identified the people in the room who seemed hardest hit by the murder that had rocked the campus. We’d found a few partyers who were upset for other reasons—including, but not limited to, unrequited crushes and backstabbing roommates—but there was a certain
combination of sorrow, fascination, and fear that Michael had zeroed in on as marking someone a person of interest.
Unfortunately, most of our persons of interest had nothing interesting to say.
Lia had danced with at least half the boys in the room and spotted at least three dozen lies. Michael was playing sympathetic ear to the female half of the student population. I stuck to the edges, nursing my fake punch and turning a profiler’s eye on the college students crammed into the frat house like jelly beans in a Guess How Many jar. It felt like Colonial’s entire student body had showed up—and based on the general lack of sobriety, I was certain that none of them were drinking Gatorade.
“People mourn in their own ways.” A boy sidled up next to me. He was just shy of six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. There was a hint of a goatee on his chin, and he was wearing plastic-rimmed glasses that I deeply suspected weren’t prescription. “We’re young. We’re not supposed to die.
Getting wasted on cheap alcohol is their misguided attempt at reclaiming the illusion of immortality.”
“Their attempt,” I said, trying to look like I found him intriguing—and not like I was thinking that there was a 40 percent chance he was a philosophy major and a 40 percent chance he was pre-law. “But not yours?”
“I’m more of a realist,” the boy said. “People die. Young people, pretty people, people who have their whole lives in front of them. The only real immortality is doing something worth remembering.”
Definitely a philosophy major. Any second, he was going to start quoting someone.
“‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’”
And there it was. The challenge to getting information out of this guy wouldn’t be getting him to talk; it would be getting him to actually say
something.
“Did you know her?” I asked. “Emerson Cole?”
This guy wasn’t one of the students Michael had picked out, but I knew before he responded that the answer would be yes. He wasn’t mourning Emerson, but he’d known her all the same.
“She was in my class.” The boy adopted a serious expression and leaned back against the wall.
“Which class?”
“Monsters or Men,” the boy replied. “Professor Fogle’s class. I took it last year. Now I’m the TA. Fogle’s writing a book, you know. I’m his research assistant.”
I tried to catch Lia’s eye on the dance floor. Professor Fogle was a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. He taught a class on serial killers. And somehow, his teaching assistant had found me.
He likes being the pursuer, I thought, watching Lia dancing her way through the frat boys, listening for lies. Not the pursued.
“Did you know her?” the boy asked, suddenly turning the tables on me. “Emerson. Did you know her?”
“No,” I said, unable to keep from thinking of the lengths Dean had gone just to learn her name. “I guess you could say she was a friend of a friend.”
“You’re lying.” The boy reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. It took everything in me not to pull away. “I consider myself an excellent judge of character.”
You consider yourself excellent at everything, I thought.
“You’re right,” I said, fairly certain those were his favorite words. “I don’t even go to school here.”
“You saw the story on the news,” the boy said, “and you decided to come check it out.”
“Something like that.” I ran through everything I knew about him and settled on playing to his supposed expertise. “I heard that the professor’s a person of interest because of that class he’s teaching. Your class.”
The boy shrugged. “There was one lecture in particular….”
I took a step forward, and the boy’s eyes darted down to my legs. The outfit Lia had picked for me left very little to the imagination. Behind him, I caught sight of Michael, who pointed at the boy and raised his eyebrows. I didn’t nod to tell him that I had a promising lead. I didn’t have to. Michael saw the answer in my face.
“I could show you the lecture in question.” The boy lifted his gaze from my legs to my face. “I have all of Professor Fogle’s slides on my laptop.
And,” he added, “I have a key to the lecture hall.” The boy dangled said key in front of me. “It’ll be just like sitting in on the class. Unless you’d rather stay here and drown your sorrows with the masses.”
I met Michael’s eyes over the boy’s head.
Follow me, I thought, hoping he’d somehow manage to read my intention in the set of my features. This is too good to pass up.
