“So what’s his plan?” asked Marci.
“I have no idea,” I said, shrugging helplessly. “Maybe it’s a message to us, or to someone else, or … well, it’s definitely about us somehow. Two murders in a peaceful town coinciding perfectly with our arrival is not a coincidence. We need to talk to his parents today, and maybe Brielle.”
“Seriously?” asked Marci. “Her sister was just murdered.”
“Of course,” I said. “You’re right. Maybe Paul, then.”
“It’s going to be hard to talk to anyone if the whole town’s in terrified mourning the whole time we’re here,” said Marci. She grimaced. “How many more do you think he’s going to kill?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.… Wait.”
“What?”
“There’s another correlation,” I said. “We’ve been here three days, and we talked to people on three days, but people were only killed on two of them.”
“Because he was still forming a plan on the first day,” said Marci. “Like you said.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe there’s another common factor we haven’t considered. What did we do on the second and third days that we didn’t do on the first?”
“We … were here during the daytime,” said Marci. “We went to … oh crap.” She looked me right in the eyes. “We went to church.”
I nodded. “Both days.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” said Marci.
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe it does.”
“We have to deal with stuff we can understand,” said Marci, frustrated. “Actual clues we can actually follow, instead of just guessing at shadows.”
“What, then?”
“We should … go look at last night’s crime scene,” she said. “There might be soulstuff, or claw marks, or some other evidence that the police won’t know is evidence because it’s too weird to be part of a standard murder.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We’ll see if we can get close; it might be taped off still. And either way, I think we need to visit the cops.”
“You want to bring them in on this?” asked Marci. “I liked Officer Davis, but he won’t believe a word we say if we try to tell him this was a supernatural monster.”
I shook my head. “I just want to find out what they know—I can’t look at the bodies anymore, like I used to back in Clayton, so we’ve got to get our info some other way.”
“The cops won’t tell you anything.”
“Not on purpose,” I said. “That’s why we’re going to tell them something—they asked everyone who knows something to talk to them, so we’re going to go do it. We’re going to offer ourselves as witnesses to yesterday’s encounter between Jessica and Glassman. And while we’re in the building, we’re going to eavesdrop on every conversation we possibly can.”
“You’re crazy,” said Brooke. “They’ll ask for ID.”
“And we won’t have any to give them,” I said. “That doesn’t make us suspects, and whatever it does make us they’ll be too busy with the killings to bother figuring out who we really are.” I wavered back and forth, grimacing as I thought. “I’m 99 percent sure we won’t be suspects.”
Marci raised an eyebrow. “Are you willing to risk that 1 percent?”
“To kill a Withered?” I asked. “I’ll risk a lot more than that.”
“We can’t be on camera, though,” said Marci. “This is going to be national news, now more than ever, and we can’t be seen.”
“I know.”
Marci folded her arms intently. “If we get to the station and they have a camera, we come right back. We can’t risk anyone back home seeing us.”
“Obviously,” I said, then paused. “It’s a smart plan, but … you seem more emotional about it as well.”
“The sooner Brooke’s body gets recognized,” said Marci, “the sooner I might get evicted from it.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
We set out to look at the crime scene only to find it already swarmed with people pressed up against the line of police tape, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of anything they could. Marci and I worked our way to the front, but other than some plastic tarps that were almost certainly covering blood stains, we couldn’t see anything. A handful of state police were on the scene, working more to keep people out than to actually examine the evidence, and I wondered if they were already done or if they were trying to keep the scene clean for an incoming forensics team. Two grisly child murders in half a week was national news; we might get FBI. I wondered if it would be anyone I knew.