Valerie answered Nic’s knock. Each day, her face looked more haggard. “Wayne’s out with the searchers,” she said. “He can’t take sitting at home.” She called upstairs. “Whitney! The lady from the FBI is here to talk to you.”
Whitney bounced down the stairs. She was in that awkward stage of adolescence, springy and skinny, her limbs like rubber bands. Her hair was as dark as her sister’s was blonde. Wasn’t there a fairy tale about two sisters, one dark and one fair? Snow White and Rose Red, maybe that was it.
Valerie led them into the living room and then left.
Whitney kicked off her flats and curled her legs under her. She was dressed like all girls were these days—skinny jeans, a turquoise camisole long enough to show underneath a striped T-shirt, and a dark green hoodie. It was pretty much what Makayla wore, only because this girl was four years older, she had more of a figure. She looked at Nic with curious dark eyes.
“So tell me about Katie,” Nic said gently.
“She’s three years older than me. We haven’t gone to the same school for a long time. But she’s really smart. Every teacher that had her thinks I’m going to be as smart as her. But I’m not.”
“It sounds like she casts a long shadow.”
Whitney stared at Nic, a little puzzled, and then her brow smoothed out. “You mean is it hard being Katie Converse’s little sister? It’s not. She’s nice to me. She gave me this manicure.” Whitney spread out her pink-tipped fingers, but half of them had been nibbled on. She flushed and slipped her hands under her thighs. “She helps me with my homework, and sometimes she lets me borrow her shoes. We wear the same size.”
Nic thought of the dozens of boxes in Katie’s room.
“Do you think your sister could have run away?”
Whitney’s face scrunched up. “Where would she go? Sometimes we see kids on the streets downtown, but Katie would never live like that. You’d get really dirty. She likes to be clean. Besides, she really wanted to go back to the program. She said that she could go to bed whatever time she wanted, and eat whatever she wanted.” She glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice. “See, our mom’s kind of strict.”
“Did you talk to her that morning?”
Whitney bit her lip. “She was still asleep when I went to school. I didn’t see her at all.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. She exhaled shakily. “That’s what I don’t understand. Why did she have to take Jalape?o for a walk?”
“What do you mean? Because you had already walked him that morning?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I did walk him that morning. But Jalape?o’s my dog, not Katie’s. I’m the one who takes him for walks. She doesn’t even like him that much.”
Nic felt a bolt of electricity race down her spine. The Converses had mentioned earlier that the dog was Whitney’s, she was sure they had, but the meaning of it hadn’t hit her until now.
The day Katie disappeared, she hadn’t been walking the dog to give it some exercise.
She had been walking the dog to give herself an excuse.
But an excuse to do what?
CHANNEL FOUR
December 18
Cassidy sat in the basement of the TV station, logging the tape she and Andy Oken the cameraman had shot this morning.
After the rally last night, they had rushed to the car to get the tape back for the eleven o’clock news. Except there had been a teensy problem. Cassidy’s car was gone.
“I told you not to park here, Cassidy,” said Andy, a weathered man who was really a little too old to be toting around such heavy equipment. He gave her a smug look. “But you said no one would notice. You said they would be too busy trying to find a bad guy to give a rat’s—”
Cassidy cut off his rant with one of her own. “It wasn’t really that close to the fire hydrant. And it’s not like this is the time of year they have to worry about fires anyway.”
“Well, we’re in deep doo-doo. There’s no way we’ll get the tape back to the station in time.”
Cassidy didn’t waste her breath answering. Instead, she ran out into the middle of the street and forced a huge car, so old it had fins, to lurch to a stop. The driver leaned out to yell at her in a foreign language. But through a series of hand gestures in which she repeatedly pointed at the Channel Four logo on the camera and then at her watch, Cassidy managed to impress upon the guy, a fiftyish Russian immigrant—at least she thought he was Russian—that she and Andy needed to get back to the station and that it was an emergency.
“TV?” the driver asked with a grin, pointing at both Cassidy and Andy.
“TV,” agreed Cassidy, pointing at just herself.