”
“Yeah,” Emma stammered, trying to cover her confusion. “I know. Come on, let’s go.”
They started walking again. Across the graveyard, Celeste and Garrett’s voices were still audible, cutting tensely back and forth. Emma’s head spun. Why had he said that she barely knew Nisha?
I didn’t know either. But something told me Emma had better figure it out quickly. Garrett obviously had a short fuse, and Emma didn’t want to be caught in the blast zone if he went off.
3
ALONE AT LAST
The next afternoon, Emma and Ethan walked up a bare, hilly trail at Tucson Mountain Park. Emma tightened a gray cashmere scarf around her neck, shivering at the cool wintry air. The rocks glowed reddish gold
in the late-day sun, and Emma and Ethan clasped hands as they walked, their fingers interlacing.
Emma liked the barren landscape. She’d felt as if someone had been following her since the moment she arrived in Tucson, but there wasn’t much cover on this wide expanse of trail. Sutton’s killer would
have a hard time sneaking up on her here.
As they walked she told Ethan about the Mercers’ family meeting. He listened carefully, his eyes ahead on the path. “They’re going to look for me, Ethan, and it’s not like I covered my tracks.” She
thought about every CSI episode she’d ever seen. It was ridiculously easy to trace peoples’ whereabouts, if you had an Internet connection and a witness or two. “I don’t know how long I have before they
figure it out. And if they do, I’ll be the number-one suspect. The killer has made sure of that.”
They reached a promontory with a covered picnic area looking over the park. A fat raccoon glanced nonchalantly up from a McDonald’s wrapper as they approached, then waddled off into the underbrush. Emma sat
on the top of the picnic table, rummaging in her backpack for a bottle of water. She took a long sip, then handed it to Ethan.
“All of us are in danger.” She looked up at him miserably. “You, me, my family. We have to solve this, and fast.”
He slid an arm around her and pulled her against his side protectively. She rested against his shoulder, breathing in the clean-laundry smell of his flannel shirt.
“Okay, so we’ve ruled out Laurel, Thayer, Madeline, Charlotte, Mr. Mercer, Becky, and the Twitter Twins,” he said, ticking Sutton’s friends and family off one by one. “Are we totally sure it’s not, like
. . . a random crime? I mean, maybe it was a drifter or something?”
Emma shook her head. “The killer knows too much about Sutton for it to be random. Where she lives, what her schedule is, the importance of her locket . . . the killer took it right off her neck and left it
for me, knowing that I wouldn’t be a realistic stand-in unless I was wearing it.” She shivered. “This murder was personal.”
Ethan nodded. “I guess you’re right.”
“You know who we haven’t looked into?” Emma said quietly. “Garrett.” She filled Ethan in on Garrett’s comment that she “barely knew” Nisha, and Laurel’s revelation that Garrett had a temper with
Sutton.
“Wow.” Ethan rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “I don’t really know much about Garrett. We had AP History together last year, but we don’t really move in the same circles. I know he was out a lot for some
kind of family emergency in the spring, but I never found out what the story was.”
Emma chewed on her thumbnail. On the one real date she’d had with him, Garrett had mentioned something about his sister. Charlotte was there for me during everything that happened with Louisa, he’d said. At
the time she hadn’t been able to come up with a subtle way to ask what he was talking about. “What about Louisa? Do you know her?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not that well. She kind of keeps to herself.”
“I’ve seen her with Celeste. I guess they’ve hit it off.” Emma took another sip of water and sighed. “Garrett doesn’t strike me as the mastermind type, though. Whoever did this has had to orchestrate a
pretty complicated alibi—hiding Sutton’s body and her car, getting me to come to Tucson, watching me to make sure I was playing along. But Garrett couldn’t even pick a restaurant when we went out. He let
me decide everything.” She twisted a lock of hair around her index finger so tightly it cut off the circulation. “Then again, maybe he’s just a really good actor. Isn’t that the thing with psychopaths?
They’re manipulative, really good at putting up a front.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know my girlfriend was an expert on criminal psychology.”
Her lips twisted into a wry smirk. “If I wasn’t before, I will be by the time this is over.” Another thought popped into her head then, one that made her sit up straight. “You know, I haven’t been able