Jessie Humphries: Killing Ruby Rose

“What are you talking about?” Careful approach. “I don’t have a boy .”

“Liam Slater, Rubik’s Cube . Don’t play stupid with me. I know better. I gave him your number last week, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to text you tonight. And in case you feel like blowing him off, too, just know…he’s going to ask you to Homecoming.” Roundhouse kick to the temple .

Click .

She hung up on me.

I pulled Big Black into an empty beach parking lot along Bonfire Row, my ears still ringing from both the imagined blows and the real news.

Could I believe it? Mr. Elusive, Mr. Preseason Favorite for Most Beautiful Eyes of the Senior Class, Mr. Too Cool for School was going to ask me, Miss Too School for Cool, to be his Senior Homecoming date?

Surely not. Alana had to be messing with me. Liam and I had barely spoken about anything other than equations or our Advanced Calculus teacher’s “sexy comb-over.” I didn’t even have Liam’s cell number. Sure, I’d been crushing on the guy for almost two years. And yes, the boy had impeccable taste in shoes. But since my dad died, I hadn’t been in the mood for flirting. Or anything else that required the pretense of happiness.

Plus, I thought he was going to ask Taylor Jennings, the cheerleader not-so-secretly voted Nicest Rack. She’d been hanging her aforementioned lady parts all over him a lot lately. It wasn’t enough that she was my sole competitor for the valedictorian race—she also had to compete with me for everything else, including the only boy I not-so-secretly liked.

I hoped he was smart enough to withstand her and her considerable assets. He seemed smart. He was on last year’s honor roll. But, then again, he’d probably paid for his grades with touchdowns and devilish grins. Not that I hadn’t benefited from the way his smile could light up the room. These days, the thought of Liam’s eyes on mine was sometimes the only thing that brought me back to school at all.

My phone vibrated again, but this time it was a text from an unknown number:

Hey Ruby :) It’s Liam. Could you meet me at 366 Water Street as soon as you can? There’s something I want to ask you.

He was texting me already?

Flourishes of goose bumps scuttled up my arms. Part of me felt ecstatic, thinking about the possibility of more than his eyes being on me tonight. Maybe his hands, maybe his lips—

But then little red flags began flying across my over-analytical brain. Actually, they were more like red flares lighting up the night sky in my mind.

Red flare: The mere thought of Homecoming! I’d have preferred for Liam to just ask me out to dinner without the rented tuxes, slutty sequin dresses, and group-sex parties. I didn’t believe in high school dances. Beyond all the forced awkwardness of pinning corsages and posing for cheesy pictures—and never mind all those pesky statistics about higher rates of drunk driving and sexual assault—the whole idea of high school dances gave me anxiety.

Then again, how long had I been dreaming about spending any amount of time with Liam Slater? He could’ve asked me to go swimming with the sharks, and I’d have considered it.

Red flare: Water Street. Such a strange location. The old shipping harbor was hardly romantic. I hadn’t pegged Liam as one of those guys who asked girls out in an overly dramatic way. Just today in English class my eyes had almost rolled right out of my head when Alana told me about a boy asking out a girl by having her name and the word “Homecoming” written in the sky. Gag.

But there was no way Liam would stoop to that level. He was the complete opposite of gaggy.

Red flare: “As soon as you can.” The team should still be in the locker room celebrating, showering, and patting each other in inappropriate ways that only athletes are allowed to do. Had Liam already left for Water Street? I hoped he’d at least managed a quick shower, because I never pictured sweat as part of my fantasy make-out sequence with him. Though even that wouldn’t be a deal breaker, considering it might mix with the drizzling rain running down our bodies, and we could have one of those epic kisses straight out of The Notebook …

Red flare: I already had plans—tailing Charlie LeMarq, one of the most prolific child abductors and murderers in my dad’s profiles. My own kind of “ killer after-party.”

Sure, I knew that stalking criminals was a bizarre after-school activity for a seventeen-year-old girl. But ever since SWAT Sergeant Jack Rose (aka my fallen father) was killed “in the line of duty,” I’d needed an outlet. A way to honor his memory. A challenge to focus all my efforts on. And yoga wasn’t doing the trick.

Since the Department wasn’t talking, or releasing any information on the “continuing investigation” into his death that seemed more like a “discontinued investigation,” I had to do something to overcome the gnawing need for justice that never came. Obsessing over catching a predator my dad had hoped to put away had become that something. It wouldn’t bring Dad back from the dead, but it had brought me back from wanting to die. I could no longer afford to be the helpless little girl who cried herself to sleep every night. I had to find a reason to live.

And Sergeant Jack Rose hadn’t made me a weapons specialist and combat expert for nothing. For as long as I could remember, he’d trained me to be able to defend myself and protect others. Between sparring lessons and shooting practice, a spooky sound track had played in my head as he went on and on about what a dangerous world we lived in.

Nowhere was safe.

He and my mother had enemies because of their high-profile positions.

I should prepare myself for the day I’d be tested.

Somewhere around age fourteen, I turned off the broken record. The only threat I’d ever faced in my sheltered life was the threat of being suspended from school for fighting. So much for being prepared to defend myself when it was the very thing that got me into trouble! Which was the exact argument Mom always used with Dad after she got home from arbitration meetings with my principals.

But he’d stuck to his guns, or “our” guns, as they actually were, and never stopped training me.

Sometimes I chalked it up to his undiagnosed post-traumatic stress from his time as a Marine, or the violence he saw every day in law enforcement, or simply that I took the place of the son he never had. Whatever the reason, he kept on with my training—and I took to it.

Like a fish to water.

Opening the false bottom of my console, I looked down at the shimmering weapon—aka Smith, my .38 Special Revolver with built-in laser sight that I’d gotten for my Sweet Sixteenth. Gleaming underneath Smith was the accompanying laminated concealed-weapons license that Dad had personally signed for me two weeks before his death. As I ran my finger over his signature, I couldn’t help wondering (for the umpteenth time) what he’d think of seeing his little girl and her gun now. Surely, he’d never envisioned his young scholar turning into a vigilante stalker.

Yeah, well, I never saw him being ripped from my life without any answers, either. So, whatever.

I grabbed the manila file labeled “LeMarq” and flipped through the pictures, timelines, and notes, focusing on my target instead of my sorrow. I knew almost everything about the sicko by now.

He liked prepubescent girls. He liked violating them, choking them, and leaving zero forensic evidence behind. Some of his cohorts called him Cherry Charlie, not only because of the string of cherry tattoos he sported on his left forearm, but also because of what each cherry represented: the theft of a young girl’s innocence—and, inevitably, her life.