“Sorry,” he said. “Feels too weird to make like I’m a preacher. I’ll just talk loud and you let me know if you can’t hear me in the back. My name is Officer Davis and I’m heading up this investigation. I recognize that this crime is a horrible thing, a lot more horrible for you folks than it is for us; any death is heartbreaking, but you knew this boy, and you worked with him and played with him and taught him in school and so on. So I know this is hard, and we’re doing our best to get it over with soon and to give you all some closure and some sense of safety again. But there are two things we need from you that are going to be a huge help, and we appreciate your cooperation. The first is that you stay calm. Don’t freak out, don’t cause any trouble that might hinder our efforts, and whatever you do, don’t accuse each other. A small town like this can go completely insane if you start looking sideways at your neighbors, and you’d be surprised how quick a simple suspicion can turn into a mob or a witch hunt. So be careful.”
I’d seen some of that mob mentality in Clayton, when the killing started all those years ago and we’d thought it was serial killer. The town had been ready to lynch some of the people they thought were behind it. I’d been worried at the time that everyone would accuse me, because I was the weird kid obsessed with death, but that’s the kind of thing kids think when they don’t understand the world very well. They think it all revolves around them. Most of the people in Clayton didn’t even know who I was, and if they did, they didn’t think twice about me. But now I was a visible outsider.
I needed to trim my hair, and try to look as clean-cut as I could.
And I needed to figure out Corey’s game before he hurt us with it.
“The second thing I need you to do is a little at odds with the first,” said Officer Davis, “but it’s a vital part of the investigation. I need you to talk to us—not here, not in a public forum, but privately, in our office at the police station or on the anonymous tip line that we’ve set up. Fliers with that information are by the door and posted around town, plus I’ll be here in Pastor Nash’s office for a bit after this meeting. If you know anything—anything at all—please tell us. We’re starting pretty much from scratch on this one: there are no witnesses and no security cameras, so we have no description to start building a profile or even a sketch. We’ve collected a huge pile of forensic evidence from the crime scene itself, but that takes a lot longer to process than the TV makes it look, and it might not turn up anything useful. What’s going to help us crack this open are your observations. If you see anything suspicious, or especially if you find any knives or blades discarded around the town, come to us immediately. I’m not asking you to accuse your neighbor because you think he’s acting shifty, but I am asking you, if you know something concrete, to have the courage to come to us. More often than not these kinds of criminals are caught when someone close to them gets involved. We can protect you, we can keep you anonymous, we can do whatever you need us to do, but you have to come to us or we can’t do anything.”
He was walking a dangerous line in his speech, and I looked around the room to see how people were reacting to it. He was right about criminals being caught by the people close to them. Somewhere in this town, someone had ended their Monday night covered with blood, and that meant that somewhere there were bloody clothes, or even just a gap in somebody’s closet. If it was Corey, catching him might be as simple as his mother wondering where that one pair of jeans ended up, or finding a crust of blood around the drain in the shower. Could I get into Corey’s house? Would I even know what to look for? Not as well as his family would, but if he’d hidden his tracks well, they might not even look.
By the same token, coming right out and saying “family members of the killer are the best ones to catch him” would put those family members in immediate danger. If Attina was masquerading as a simple teenager, and he thought someone in the house suspected something, he might kill them to try to cover his tracks, passing it off as just another random attack. Even if Attina decided to skip town, he might hurt his pretend family on the way out, to stop them from sharing any more helpful information.
I looked at Corey, and found him looking at me. How much did he really know?
A tall man with slightly graying hair raised his hand. He spoke with a kind of angry confidence. “Do you think this killer’s going to strike again?”
“It’s too early to say,” said Officer Davis. “And I urge you not to speculate on this—we can extrapolate a lot of probable details, but when we start extrapolating beyond our data points, all we get is baseless paranoia.”