“There’s pay phones in the hall by the game room,” said Carlos.
“I’ll still have to look up her number,” said Brooke. “How much does an Internet session cost? Five bucks?”
“Four dollars for a half hour of low bandwidth,” said Carlos. “Ten dollars for movies and stuff.”
“If we give you four dollars cash,” said Brooke, “can you use your card to get us online?”
Carlos stared at us through narrowed eyelids. “You’re not going to look up porn or whatever, are you? I get in trouble if that gets traced back to me.”
“News and search engines only,” I said, and I dug out one of my stashes of cash. I counted out four ones and held them up. “Four dollars.”
“Pretty please?” asked Brooke.
Carlos looked at us for a moment, then rolled his eyes and took the cash. He called over his shoulder as he walked to the end of the counter. “Carla, be back in thirty seconds.”
“Carlos and Carla?” asked Brooke.
“It’s not funny,” said Carlos. We followed him to the computers, where he swiped his card and set up a short session. “This’ll kick you off in thirty minutes exactly,” he said. “No warning or nothing, so watch this timer in the bottom corner. And no porn.”
We nodded, and he walked back to the front. I sat down, Brooke pulled over a chair, and we searched for “Dillon murder.”
“Thomas Dillon,” said Brooke, reading the top Wikipedia link. “A serial killer?”
“He hunted men like deer,” I said, remembering him from some crime reenactment show. “He shot five that we know of.” I scrolled past that, looking for current news, but none of the links looked recent enough to be about a murder from last night. I tried a new search for “Dillon murder news” and got another string about Thomas Dillon, and a few more about a murder in Dillon County, but that didn’t look like the same place, and it was at least a year old. I tried again with “Dillon murder Derek,” and got a hit. I clicked it and read the article, but it was just an announcement from the same news show we’d seen on the TV, with no new information. Last night’s kill was too recent for anyone to know much about it.
Four minutes gone from our Internet session.
“Derek Stamper,” said Brooke, reading over my shoulder. “I never knew his last name. It says he was their only child.”
The article didn’t say anything about other, similar murders, so I started searching for other towns we’d been in: “Baker murder.” “Baker cut to pieces.” I tried every combination I could think of, for every town we’d visited or traveled through, all the way back to Fort Bruce. “Fort Bruce murder,” unsurprisingly, got a ton of hits, but they were all for the deaths we already knew about. There didn’t seem to be any murders that fit the right profile, or indeed any profile, in any of the places we’d visited. Eighteen minutes gone. I checked the phrase “cut to pieces,” to see if it turned up any similar crimes, but all I got was a quilting blog and a bunch of murders in other countries.
Twenty-two minutes gone.
“There’s nothing,” said Brooke.
“Or nothing people know about,” I said. “Maybe he hides the bodies.”
“Derek was killed in his living room,” said Brooke, shaking her head. “He’d been there for at least an hour when his parents came home and found him. That’s plenty of time to hide the body if the killer had wanted to, but he didn’t.”
I glanced at her, surprised. Brooke didn’t usually talk so crisply about dead bodies.
I looked back at the screen. “Why so many pieces?” I asked. Nearly a hundred, the news had estimated, but the forensics team was still on the site. “Maybe the killer took some.”
“Gross,” said Brooke.
“We won’t know if anything’s gone until they do a full autopsy, and try to … put him back together.”
“Look for missing persons,” said Brooke. “If the other bodies were hidden, the stories we’re looking for will just be about runaways or kidnappings or something.”
I nodded and ran more searches for all the places we’d been, but none of them were reporting missing people, either.
Three minutes left.
“This doesn’t make sense,” said Brooke.
“So we look at what does,” I said. “The town of Dillon has no violent crime, no untimely deaths, and no real problems whatsoever for decades. Some high school kids getting drunk at a bowling alley, some graffiti in the abandoned movie theater, and that’s it. And then two days after we show up someone gets brutally, horrifically murdered.”
“So we’re the inciting factor,” said Brooke.
I shot her another glance; she was speaking more coherently than usual and the terror she’d shown earlier had been replaced with a calm professionalism. Was Brooke gone again? Who’d come in her place? And how long had it taken me to notice?