As hard as I tried not to profile the two of them, I kept thinking that Lia was the one who’d asked Michael to join us on this ill-advised outing, and that he’d agreed to help her. Why?
Because opportunities for trouble were not to be missed. Because he owed her. Because as much as Michael enjoyed jabbing at Dean, he didn’t like watching him bleed. The answers flooded my brain, and Michael caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. He’d told me once that when I was profiling someone, my eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.
“We’ll want to make a quick detour,” Lia said. Michael glanced over at her, and she gestured with the tip of one dark purple nail. “Pull off at the next exit.” She glanced back at me. “Enjoying the ride?”
She was in the front seat. I was in the back. “I’m not doing this for enjoyment,” I told her.
She let her gaze trail from me to Michael and then back again. “No,” she agreed. “You’re not doing this for enjoyment. You’re doing it for Dean.”
Lia lingered on Dean’s name just slightly longer than the other words in that sentence. Michael’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel. Lia wanted him to know I was doing this for Dean. She wanted him dwelling on that fact.
“Gas station,” Lia directed, her hair whipping in the wind. He pulled in and threw the car into park. Lia smiled. “You two wait here.”
It was just like her to stir things up and then leave. No matter how well he masked it, I knew Michael was sitting there asking himself what—exactly—had led me to do this for Dean. The same way I’d spent the ride wondering why Michael had said yes to Lia.
“Ta,” Lia said, sounding fairly satisfied with herself. In an impressive feat of flexibility, she snaked her body out the open window without ever opening the door.
“This is a bad idea,” I said as Lia sauntered toward the mini-mart.
“Almost certainly,” Michael agreed. From the backseat, I couldn’t see his face, but it was all too easy to imagine the unholy glint in his eyes.
“We snuck out of the house to go to a frat party,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure this isn’t a dress.”
Michael turned around in his seat, took in the view, and smiled. “Green’s a good color for you.”
I didn’t reply.
“Now it’s your turn to say something about the way this shirt really brings out my eyes.” Michael sounded so serious that I couldn’t help cracking a smile.
“Your shirt is blue. Your eyes are hazel.”
Michael leaned toward me. “You know what they say about hazel eyes.”
Lia opened the passenger door and flopped back into her seat. “No, Michael. What do they say about hazel eyes?” She smirked.
“Did you get what you needed?” Michael asked her.
Lia handed a brown paper bag back to me. I opened it. “Red Gatorade and cups?”
Lia shrugged. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When at a frat party, drink questionable fruit punch out of a red Solo cup.”
Lia was right about the punch. And the cups. It was dark enough in the dimly lit frat house that no one noticed that our drinks were a slightly different shade of red.
“What now?” I asked Lia over the deafening music.
She began to move her hips, and her upper body followed suit in a way that made it fairly clear that she’d excel at limbo. She eyed a trio of boys at the edge of the room and shoved Michael toward a blond girl with red-rimmed eyes.
“Now,” she said, “we make friends.”
A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party….
An hour later, Michael had identified the people in the room who seemed hardest hit by the murder that had rocked the campus. We’d found a few partyers who were upset for other reasons—including, but not limited to, unrequited crushes and backstabbing roommates—but there was a certain combination of sorrow, fascination, and fear that Michael had zeroed in on as marking someone a person of interest.
Unfortunately, most of our persons of interest had nothing interesting to say.
Lia had danced with at least half the boys in the room and spotted at least three dozen lies. Michael was playing sympathetic ear to the female half of the student population. I stuck to the edges, nursing my fake punch and turning a profiler’s eye on the college students crammed into the frat house like jelly beans in a Guess How Many jar. It felt like Colonial’s entire student body had showed up—and based on the general lack of sobriety, I was certain that none of them were drinking Gatorade.
“People mourn in their own ways.” A boy sidled up next to me. He was just shy of six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. There was a hint of a goatee on his chin, and he was wearing plastic-rimmed glasses that I deeply suspected weren’t prescription. “We’re young. We’re not supposed to die. Getting wasted on cheap alcohol is their misguided attempt at reclaiming the illusion of immortality.”