“Don’t worry, you can do no wrong in his eyes,” he once heard Mom telling Rick, laughingly, when they were behind closed doors talking about how Rick had grounded Casey for a week. As his new stepfather, Rick was afraid Casey was going to hate him for the punishment, but was adamant about teaching him a lesson.
Casey can no longer remember what he’d done. Not that time, anyway. He only remembers that no one ever caught him doing anything that was truly wicked, like stealing a pocket knife from Kmart and using it to skin small, furry animals. Live ones. Well, not live for long. His hand, back then, wasn’t nearly as steady as it is now.
But I was much too smart to get caught. Smarter than Mom and Rick, smarter than Derek and Liam and Erin, smarter than the teachers . . .
Just like I’m smarter than the police. Even Sullivan Leary.
The thought of the redheaded detective jars him back to the present.
The tub is filled with steaming water.
Casey turns off the tap just in time to hear a car pulling into the driveway. She’s just in time.
He smiles, pleased, and takes out Rick’s cell phone to make a quick, final call.
Biting into a flaky apple pastry dusted with cinnamon and sugar, Sully forgets, momentarily, about the disturbing screenshot, and about the homicide, and even about bagels. Good bagels, bad bagels . . . who needs bagels? She could live here, and subsist on this pastry.
“That’s not lunch,” Stockton points out as he unwraps a ham and cheese sandwich on a croissant. “That’s dessert.”
“It’s not lunchtime,” she replies with a shrug. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with dessert for lunch. Especially when it’s mid--afternoon and you had absolutely no appetite when you placed your order.
But the secretary stationed outside Colonomos’s office had encouraged her and Stockton to order something when she’d passed around a menu earlier. “It’s going to be a long day.”
Every day is a long day where they come from, but in the few hours they’ve been here, they’ve become well aware that the Mundy’s Landing police force isn’t accustomed to this intense state of overdrive. They’re efficient, but small. From what Sully gathers, they deal mostly with petty crimes, parking tickets, and crowd control during the summer festival.
Now they’re dealing with not one, but two missing teens. They identified a high school kid who was reportedly stalking Brianna Armbruster, only to have him slip away before they could question him.
“Mick Mundy?” Sully echoed, when she heard the name. “As in . . . Mundy’s Landing?”
“Right. His dad’s family is descended from the first settlers here.”
That they were executed as accused murderers wasn’t lost on Sully, but Colonomos assured him that Mick Mundy is a good kid from a good family.
Theoretically, all he did was give a girl a -couple of gifts. Sully would be inclined to believe it was totally innocent if one of the beads hadn’t been etched with the word Redhead.
Even that might be innocent; a coincidence.
Brianna Armbruster aside, it’s hard to imagine that a sixteen-year--old small--town kid—-regardless of what his ancestors might have done three hundred and fifty years ago—-is responsible for the heinous serial murders. Too bad he took off before he could be questioned and cleared.
Her cell phone rings as she takes another bite. She hurriedly chews and swallows when she sees that the call is from the precinct.
“Detective L—-”
“Sully.” Jin again. “He called back. Can I patch him through?”
She doesn’t have to ask who. “Go ahead.”
“Okay. And he says it’s urgent. Life or death.”
Yeah, whose? Sully wonders, and then he’s on the line.
Stepping through the back door into her sister’s kitchen, Noreen is aghast.