“I don’t think so. Then there was this sort of sizzle. You know like when you first throw a hamburger on the grill.”
Skylar winced at the comparison. If she wasn’t mistaken, Maggie thought the girl seemed pleased by his reaction.
“What made that sound?” Skylar asked. “Did it come from above? Did it seem like it was coming from the lights?”
This time Maggie had to stop herself from wincing. He was offering too much information. Why was he leading this girl?
Amanda simply shrugged and tried to put the cap back on the bottle. She missed. Looked down and tried again. Maggie noticed the girl’s hands were steady. There was no shake or tremble from nervousness. She didn’t see any of the signs of fear in Amanda that she had seen in Dawson’s eyes. In fact there seemed to be nothing uncomfortable about recounting the incident, and Maggie realized it had nothing to do with her lack of coordination.
“Did you see what happened to your friends?”
This time she looked like she was actually thinking about the event for the first time.
“When the flashes went off, me and Courtney were sitting to one side. I got up and then I sort of pointed at the fireworks. It looks so pretty I can’t take my eyes away. I didn’t see Trevor and Kyle. Johnny was with us and he was sort of stumbling around because, you know, he’s looking up at the lights, too, and we’re all oohing and aahing.”
Maggie wished she had suggested they record the interview. She lost track of how many times the girl switched from past tense to present and back. Forensic linguistics was about as scientific as criminal profiling, but each had undeniable benefits. To find a probable truth in someone’s statement you analyzed not only their choice of words but also the tense. When describing an event from memory most people used past tense. If they switched to present at any time when telling the story, that part was more likely to be a fabrication than the truth. Amanda had switched tenses several times and without pause. She also managed to do so without giving them any details, so that her mingling of fact and fiction didn’t much matter.
“She needs to get some rest,” Amanda’s stepfather said from the doorway, and Maggie wondered how long he had been standing there. She hadn’t heard him come up the hallway. “Mandy wasn’t even supposed to be there last night.”
“That right?”
“She was supposed to be at Courtney’s studying. She’s been tired a lot lately. Too many demands on her time.”
Maggie watched Amanda while the men talked about her as if she wasn’t there. She caught the girl rolling her eyes. Both men missed it. Her stepfather seemed a bit too proud that Amanda was so popular that it would exhaust her this early in the school year. He sounded more worried about her overextending herself than about the fact that she had lied about her whereabouts. Either he didn’t know about her extracurricular activities outside of school or he didn’t want to know.
Griffin’s concern evidently was enough for Skylar. He flipped his notebook closed, satisfied to call it quits. When he stood up he saw Maggie still standing by the bookcase. He looked like he had forgotten about her.
“I think we’re done here. That is unless Agent O’Dell has any questions for Amanda.”
“Just one,” Maggie said and she patiently waited for Amanda’s eyes to flit back up to her. “Do you usually get high this early in the day?”
CHAPTER 23
NEBRASKA
The girl was lying.
Maggie tamped down her impatience. She was beginning to think these interviews were a waste of time. She glanced at her watch. Maybe the autopsies would reveal more. She leaned against the bedroom wall next to a bookcase topped with stuffed animals belonging to a much younger version of the girl they were now talking to, although her mannerisms seemed to slip into little-girl mode as the questioning progressed.
Sheriff Skylar’s kid-glove treatment of Amanda Vicks was in stark contrast to what he’d put Dawson Hayes through. Yes, Dawson had been in possession of a Taser, but there was no evidence, as of yet, to prove any of the teens had been shot with the gun. And Dawson had been severely injured. Amanda only had a bite mark on her forearm that she couldn’t seem to explain beyond her declaration at the scene that “He bit me.”