Last Seen Leaving (26 page)

“She said she would think about, and then she got killed!”

“And you think there's a connection.” It was a statement, flat and stark, and the way Garcia said it made it impossible for me to answer yes without looking nuts.

“I'm not saying they're connected for sure, I'm just saying that it happened,” I explained with some difficulty, annoyed at having to deny what felt obvious. “Did she come forward, though? Did she report the rape?”

Garcia sighed. “Listen, Flynn, I can't give out infor—”

“Look, I just want you to take this seriously, okay?” I was aware immediately that my outburst had cost me some credibility. “I think that the guy who raped January is the one who killed her. Maybe she told him she was pregnant, or that she was going to make a report about it. I mean, it can't be a coincidence that the only other person who knew about it just turned up dead, too!”

“Look, I promise you that we take all of our leads seriously, and we know how to do our jobs. Leave the speculation to us.
If
there's a link between the deaths, we'll find it.” After this reassurance, Garcia added, “And don't let anyone tell you there's no such thing as a coincidence. They happen all the time.”

And he hung up. For a minute, I sat and stared out my window at the trees that ringed our backyard, feeling powerless and annoyed. That couldn't be the end of it. I kept seeing Reiko's face, puffy and wet with tears, just before she vanished back into the theater.
I'll think about what you said
. How could her death be a coincidence?

My phone buzzed again on my desk, and I saw that the call was from Kaz. I was so anxious for someone to agree with me that I decided to—temporarily, at least—ignore how hurt I still was by his rejection. I answered immediately. “Did you hear what happened?”

“Of course!” He sounded hushed, like he was trying not to be heard. “I couldn't believe it. It
is
the same girl, right? Not a different Reiko, maybe?”

“Same girl,” I said. “Listen, I told the police about the rape, and it barely seemed like the guy cared! I left out names, but I'm starting to think maybe I should just go ahead and implicate Mr. Walker after all.” Kaz tried to interrupt me; irritated, I talked over him. “I'm going to write it out so they can see it all together, and they won't be able to pick the story apart while I'm telling it to them and make me look like a paranoid wack job.”

“Flynn!” Kaz finally exclaimed. “You have to listen to me, man! I've been doing some research, and I found out … well, you really need to hear this.”

I frowned. “What?”

“Look, based on what you figured about the hatch marks, we're thinking the assault must have happened right around the last week of September, right?” he asked rhetorically. “That's when January's strange behavior really started: quitting her job, dropping out of the play, blowing off her friends. Well, here's the thing: I got this idea to check out the calendar of events on Jonathan Walker's website, and … Flynn, he wasn't even in Michigan at the end of September.”

“Huh?”

“He was in D.C. for almost two weeks on some campaign-related tour, getting endorsements from political big shots and having his picture taken at important-sounding charity functions.” There was a pause. “He couldn't have done it.”

I was thrown completely off-balance. “But … just because the trip was on his calendar doesn't mean he actually went, Kaz.”

“There are pictures online confirming each of the appearances listed.”

“D.C. is only a couple of hours away by plane,” I returned stubbornly, “and it's not like he doesn't have the money to charter a private jet. He could have come back to Ann Arbor at any time and then returned to Washington without being missed!”

“You think he made a supersecret emergency trip back home just to rape his stepdaughter?” Kaz sounded even more doubtful than Detective Garcia.

“Maybe we're wrong about the time frame! Maybe it happened earlier … like, a couple of weeks earlier, and the trauma just didn't set in—”

“Flynn?” He cut me off decisively. “Face it. It doesn't sound like Jonathan Walker could've been the one who raped January, which means he had no reason to kill her.” He let out a breath. “I don't think he did it, Flynn. I think Jonathan Walker is innocent.”

 

TWENTY-TWO

IT DIDN'T MAKE
any sense, and for a long while I couldn't internalize what I was being told. I started arguing back, talking about the alibi screwup, reiterating all the points I was going to make in the theory I'd planned to submit to the police, but my case against Mr. Walker was taking on water faster than I could bail it out. Calmly, Kaz pointed out that even if Jonathan
had
lied about where he was the night January disappeared, it didn't mean anything without a motive. He could have been having an affair, or tying one on in a nudie bar or something, and simply didn't want his wife—or the media—to know about it. What I had against him was a house of cards, which was starting to look flimsier with every passing moment.

After I hung up, I sat listlessly in my room for a while, feeling worked up and unable to concentrate on anything. To avoid my mom's constant checking in to see if I was “okay,” I grabbed my skateboard and went to the park, where I could work on my ollie in private, hoping that maybe Micah would show up so we could talk. He didn't, though, and I remained alone with the tumult of my frustrated thoughts, attempting the same stunt over and over again and expecting different results. The sun faded in and out through a bank of clouds, a cold wind blasting through the inadequate insulation of my sweatshirt, but I scarcely noticed any of it.

I still wanted to believe Mr. Walker could be guilty, that the hatch marks were meaningless after all, and that the assault could have taken place either before or after his trip to D.C.; but “after” didn't sync with January's sudden behavioral changes, and “before” fell within a time period that January and I had still been talking pretty regularly. If she'd gone through something so traumatic, I was positive I'd have noticed. As it was, she'd only managed to hide it from me by icing me out.

But if it hadn't been Jonathan Walker, then who? The obvious runner-up, to me, was Anson; he was a pervert with anger management issues, and I could easily imagine him forcing himself on a girl. Add to that his habit of lurking and spying, and the fact that January was afraid to be alone with him, and you had another compelling—if circumstantial—case for a potential rapist-slash-murderer.

The possible details coagulated in my thoughts like drying blood as I picked up speed on my board, wheels rattling loudly over the uneven pavement—and my distracted concentration cost me when I launched into the air. My takeoff was clumsy, and I came back down on all fours when my skateboard and I had a difference of opinion about where to land. I brushed myself off, savoring the sting of a skinned elbow, brooding.

Anson
. Violent and impulsive, he would have killed January without thinking twice and panicked afterward about how to clean it up. An explanation for why the clothes had been removed from January's body occurred to me, and it made my stomach revolt as I kicked my board up into my hand: What if Anson had decided to dismember her to make the remains easier to hide? I could picture it with terrifying ease, and it would explain why she still remained unfound; maybe that's what “mutilated” meant—an aborted attempt by Anson to do the same thing to Reiko. However, if he'd killed January, why had he waited until everyone else believed she was dead before ransacking her room for treasure? Why was he still looking for her phone, which she always,
always
had with her? And there was also the matter of how he could have known about Reiko in the first place, unless
she'd
been the one to go to
him
. And if she'd known anything about Anson, heard any of the stories January had to tell, she wouldn't have dared do something like that alone.

I shoved myself into the air again, managing to keep my skateboard underneath me this time as I sailed over a set of shallow steps, but my mind still wasn't clear; the board shot sideways when it hit the ground, and I stumbled hard for several feet, struggling to catch both my balance and my breath. Cursing, I pulled myself back together and mounted the steps again, wrestling with the same oppressive question the whole time:
If it
wasn't
Anson, then who
else
could it have been?

Eddie Sward? He was yet another foaming-at-the-mouth rage monster—but while I definitely believed he would stop at pretty much nothing to protect himself and his client, I didn't think he would have actually assaulted his boss's stepdaughter. He wasn't like Jonathan, who was powerful enough to buy away the consequences of his actions; and he wasn't like Anson, either, who routinely got away with whatever he wanted, because the rules literally didn't apply to him. Eddie would have had too much to lose. And again, I couldn't fathom any way he'd have become aware of the knowledge Reiko had been privy to, or what she might have been planning to do with it. For her to have confronted Eddie, she'd have had to track him down first, which would have involved phone calls to campaign personnel, which would have created an official record so easy for the cops to follow that Eddie would have to be an idiot to think he could kill Reiko and get away with it.

A car horn blared as I landed hard again, my skateboard careening out from under me and into the road, escaping certain doom beneath the wheels of a speeding SUV by mere inches. The driver flipped me off, shouting something hateful and indistinct through his closed window, and I jumped back to my feet with just enough time to return the favor as he raced away. My knees were both scraped raw from my collision with the sidewalk, and I was almost certain that I was bleeding under my clothes; I ignored the pain as I started across the street to retrieve my board, too consumed by my dark meditations on the subject of January's disappearance to care.

Who else was left? Tammy? She certainly wasn't January's rapist, and with Jonathan all but excused from that particular role as well, I was now even further from a convincing motive for her than ever. Protecting the security of Mr. Walker's campaign? Not likely. Having a pregnant, unmarried, teenage daughter was no longer political kryptonite, as Sarah Palin had so adeptly proved, and—after all—news of the pregnancy had come out anyway. I'd invoked Munchausen syndrome as a joke on Tuesday, but I couldn't quite see it as a real possibility; Tammy's grief might have arrived with an unappealing side order of
why is this happening to me?
—but as the wife of a promising senatorial candidate, she was already getting plenty of attention even before her daughter went missing.

After six more miserable attempts at the ollie, each one a slightly more embarrassing failure than the last, I finally acknowledged that my head and feet were not going to work together and gave up. In a black mood, I sat down on the edge of a low brick wall and watched some kids play soccer while I struggled to think.

More than ever, I wanted to believe that January was still out there somewhere—that her body hadn't been found yet for the very simple reason that there
was
no body. Maybe her rapist had been some Dumas dipshit, a random, low-life asshole whose name I'd never even heard. Maybe, caught in the tailspin of trauma and weighed down by her dismal home existence, January had simply decided to cash in her chips and leave town; she could have faked her death so no one would search for her, and fled to someplace where she believed she could start over again.

Only that tempting fantasy had more holes in it than a silhouette at a gun range. The blood that drenched her hoodie, confirmed to have been hers beyond question, was no mere “trace evidence.” To shed so much of it, she'd have had to injure herself seriously; she'd have been weak and dizzy, dehydrated and possibly confused, by the time she'd lost enough blood to stage the scene we'd stumbled across in the meadow—and then she'd have had to stop the bleeding and close the wound before it was too late, and then rest for hours to recoup the strength she'd need to proceed to step two. She was too smart to hazard such extreme risks just for a little set dressing.

And then there was Reiko, who absolutely had not faked being “stabbed and mutilated” after considering going public with January's secret. Any daydreams about my ex-girlfriend's survival hit a hard brick wall as I tried to mentally navigate them around the gruesome killing of her only friend and confidant at Dumas. I couldn't pretend, even to myself, that the pink-haired girl's death did not comprise the most obvious and likely blueprint for what had become of January.

After hours of thinking, I was still left empty-handed, confused, and utterly depressed. It wasn't like I'd developed some kind of hero complex, determined to solve the mystery myself, but with everything in my life seeming to collapse all at once, having the answer to January's disappearance fall apart as well was too much to accept. I had poked at my ex-girlfriend's life for over a week, and found myself with nothing but a bouquet of loose ends to show for it; maybe it was time to start over.

*   *   *

Micah was still avoiding me on Monday—and now Tiana was, too, presumably because she felt awkward about being in the middle—and I felt the silent, painful erosion of my spirit as I began to accept that things might never again be the way they had been. With some effort, I decided to redouble my investigative endeavors, hoping that might distract me from my melancholy.

My plan involved cadging another ride out to Dumas after school, but a monkey wrench was introduced to the machinery in the form of Ashley Sobol, a popular-clique girl who unexpectedly sat down next to me in fourth-period study hall and gave me a ravenously inquiring look. “Flynn, is it true that you're gay?”