Skylar turned to look at the red Camaro in the driveway but before he could ask, Mrs. Bosh continued, “He was here when I came home for lunch. I just got back a few minutes ago and I can’t find him anywhere.” She held up a cell phone. “I checked with a couple of his friends. They haven’t seen him today.”
Maggie realized she hadn’t been sympathetic enough. These kids just lost two friends. Here she was arguing with Skylar about whether they should treat them like suspects or witnesses, when all of them—until the evidence said otherwise—were victims.
Mrs. Bosh came down the steps rather than invite them in. She looked over her shoulder as if worried someone would see her.
“I’m worried he may have taken some of my pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
Another glance over her shoulder.
“Painkillers. For my back when my car was rear-ended last spring.”
“I doubt the boy would take something like that, Mrs. Bosh.” Skylar patted her arm.
“What kind of painkillers?” Maggie wanted to know.
She hadn’t worked narcotics but had read about teenagers raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets for drug parties. If these kids were using salvia and Amanda was high in the middle of the afternoon, there was a good chance they had been experimenting with other things.
“There weren’t very many left. I just noticed the empty bottle this morning.”
“Mrs. Bosh, do you remember the name of the painkiller,” Maggie insisted.
“Yes. It was OxyContin.”
Now Maggie was worried. Experimenting with OxyContin could be fatal. It was a time-release medication, but chewing or crushing it caused rapid release and a lethal amount of the drug could flood the system.
“What was Johnny like this morning? Did he seem depressed or upset about last night?”
“Agent O’Dell, Johnny is an athlete,” Skylar said before Mrs. Bosh had a chance to answer. “This is a kid who’s going to be a number-one recruiting choice.” He was giving her the same look he had when they left the Griffins’ house.
“He seemed really nervous and sort of jumpy.” Mrs. Bosh ignored Skylar and spoke to Maggie. Her eyes kept sweeping up and down the street. “He wasn’t himself.”
“Did he talk about what happened last night?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk about it. And my husband said we shouldn’t make him.” Then her attention got distracted and she tilted her head and walked to the edge of the sidewalk. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
They listened. Other than a train whistle in the distance, Maggie heard birds, a wind chime, nothing more. Then suddenly she did hear something. A soft whimpering.
Mrs. Bosh headed around the side of the house, hurrying through a flower bed instead of going around it. Maggie and Skylar followed. At the back of the house a dog laid on its belly, whining.
“Rex, what’s wrong?” But Mrs. Bosh didn’t go to the dog. Instead she stayed back, standing stock-still.
“Does he belong to you?” Maggie asked.
“The neighbor’s. He comes over and Johnny plays ball with him. They’ve been playing since Johnny was a boy.”
Maggie approached the dog carefully. He didn’t appear injured. He focused on something under the porch. Maybe a toy had gotten lodged or an animal was trapped underneath. But the dog’s whine sounded more urgent than playful.
“There’s a crawl space,” Mrs. Bosh said. “It goes all the way under the house but we put a board down there so animals couldn’t hide.”
Maggie pulled the penlight from her jeans pocket and kneeled down, coaxing the dog to move enough for her to take a look underneath the porch.
“Johnny used to crawl all the way under there when he was a little boy. He usually did it when he was in trouble and didn’t want to be found.”
That’s when Maggie noticed a small, torn piece of fabric snagged on a nail.
“What was your son wearing this morning, Mrs. Bosh?”
CHAPTER 26
Maggie remembered that the reason she had a rental car, now stuck in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was because she refused to get on a twin-prop airplane. She understood it wasn’t an actual fear of flying so much as a fear of being without control, which was often the crux of most fears. If you had control over a situation, there was nothing to fear. That’s what Maggie kept telling herself as she crawled through the dirt underneath the floorboards of the Boshes’ house, using her elbows to pull forward.
There was, at most, two feet from top to bottom, which kept her on her stomach. Some areas were tighter. Cords and cobwebs hung from the two-by-fours, getting tangled in her hair. A loose nail had already bit into her shoulder, tearing away a piece of skin and fabric just as it probably had with Johnny.