Then came pages of reports in Reece’s blocky print. I glanced through them, surprised by their brevity. Sparse of detail and sterile in content, several dates and conversations were missing. Nothing about my escape from school the night of the play. Nothing about our conversation under the bleachers. Nothing about my trip to the hospital to see Posie, or our conversation by the airport after we’d fled the museum.
I flipped past them, thumbing through toxicology and autopsy reports. A handwritten note, time-stamped early this morning, confirmed they’d found ketamine residue in Kylie’s body last night.
I flipped past the lab reports to a stack of photos. Dozens of them.
I was captured over and over again in grainy black-andwhite images. Me, walking to school. Me, at the Bui Mart buying my newspaper and laughing with Bao. Me, getting into Jeremy’s car. Me, holding Reece’s hand in a dark alley. Me, dancing with Vince DiMorello. Lonny Johnson whispering in my ear. Me again, barefoot and laughing, slung over the shoulder of a dark-haired boy with a close-shaved head. Oleksa. Oleksa had carried me to the alley?
. . . an undercover cop claims he saw you before the time of Kylie’s murder, and verified that you were inebriated and unconscious . . .
I dropped the file. The contents sprawled like wreckage across the floor. Bodies lay tangled among them. Naked arms with haunting markings . . . all of them numbers. And—a periodic table.
I stood quietly, the lumpy sofa squeaking with release.
It’s personal. I’ll put it all on the table for you. That was the clue under the bleachers.
I reached for the periodic table. Reece had circled five elements in blue. The sides of the cube snapped together inside my brain.
Ten, the atomic weight of the element Neon. Abbreviation Ne.
Next had been Marcia Steckler. She’d been 18, Argon. Abbreviation, Ar.
I stopped when I reached Posie Washington, straining to make out the blistering mark in the photo, but I remembered it as clearly as I remembered the smell of her flesh burning. Element number 3. Lithium. Li.
I set Posie down, the photos like headstones laid out in a neat row.
Teddy was marked in stars, element number 5. Boron. B.
And now Kylie. I knew her number. And the fifth element had already been circled on the table. Number 76. Osmium. Abbreviation, Os.
Reece had solved the puzzle. It was so simple. I’d been reading into it too deeply, making it more complicated than it needed to be. Thinking only of the ink message on my chem lab table, and the carved one in physics. Assuming there was some complex hidden meaning in those messages I had missed. I’d never told Reece about the messages on my lab tables at school. When he saw the clue under the bleachers, his mind probably jumped to the only “table” he associated with me. The one we’d been studying together. The periodic table of elements.
Each victim’s number represented the atomic weight of an element on the periodic table. And together, in order, the pattern became clear.
Ne + Ar + Li + B + Os = me.
The killer was spelling my name with the bodies of my own students. And he wasn’t finished yet.
Are you clever enough to find me in time.
“Did you find the pizza?” I jumped at the sound of his voice. Reece rubbed a towel through his wet hair, his white T-shirt pink where it stuck to his skin. His eyes followed my guilty glance to the disassembled file on the floor. The towel stopped moving. “What are you doing with these?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” My voice was shaking. “This is a confidential police file. How did you get it?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t look at it. “I borrowed it.”
“Why?” I already knew the answer. It hung in the silence between us. “You said it yourself, you know it’s a set-up. You’re concealing evidence. Why?”
His brow pulled down.
“They’re going to arrest me, aren’t they?” I threw a pointed finger to the pile of loose photos and reports on the floor. Photos of a pretty girl with long legs and wavy hair and a gorgeous boyfriend. A girl who tangled with drug dealers at illegal parties and wore provocative clothes. A girl with too many secrets. And now everything was spelled out so clearly. “This—my name—is all the reasonable doubt they’ll need, isn’t it?” My knees felt watery and the room wavered.
I lunged for the door. Reece grabbed my hand, his emotions slamming into me. But my own were too jumbled and I couldn’t untangle the mess of feelings and scents in my head. He pulled me toward him, grabbing my face in his hands.
“Don’t touch me!”
Reece jumped back, palms held high. I braced against the wall, warning him off with my eyes.
“Give me a reason.” He eased forward, speaking in a low voice. “You’re always telling me not to touch you. What are you so afraid of ?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Bullshit.” He inched closer. “You said something in the alley. That you can find the killer because you can feel him. What did you mean?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me anyway.”
“I’ll believe you. I want to help you.”
I turned my face to stop him from coming any closer.