Brian Freeman - The Bone House

'I left right after the girl did. My shift was over. I locked up, and I cleared out.'

'What about before she arrived? Did anyone go past you out to the beach during the half-hour you were cleaning up?'

Trask stared at the sky, as if he was hoping he would remember someone, but he came up blank. 'I didn't see anybody.'

'So you were the only other person out there with the girl who was murdered.'

'Hey!' he barked. 'I'm telling you, I left. I didn't follow her, and I didn't see anybody else. The clerk behind the desk saw me leave through the lobby. You can ask her. Hell, you've got hotels up and down this beach. Anybody could have done this.'

Cab knew that Trask was right. That was what worried him. Beach bodies meant thousands of suspects. If you didn't get lucky with forensics or witnesses, it was almost impossible to make a case. He thought about Glory Fischer on the beach. And about Mark Bradley. He'd hoped Trask would have spotted Bradley outside, or at least mentioned someone matching Bradley's description. He could have prompted Trask by mentioning the yellow tank top, but he guessed that the bartender would take that tidbit of information and spit it back the way jail-house informants do, to give Cab whatever he wanted to hear. Yellow tank top? Yeah, come to think of it, I did see someone out there wearing something like that.

'Did you recognize the girl?' Cab asked Trask.

'What do you mean?'

'She was at the hotel for several days. Had you seen her before last night?'

He nodded. 'Actually, yeah.'

'You sound pretty sure. This place was crawling with teenage girls this week.'

'Well, she almost knocked me over.'

Cab cocked his head. 'When was this?'

'Friday night. I was bringing a case of wine to the pool bar from the restaurant, and out of nowhere, this girl sprints past me. I mean, there I was big as life, but it was like she didn't even see me. I almost dropped the bottles. Pissed me off. You want to shout at these kids sometimes, but the hotel won't let you do that.'

'Why was she running?'

'I don't know.'

'Did anyone else run after her?'

Trask shook his head. 'Nope. There were people milling around down by the event center, hitting the bathrooms, going outside to smoke, that kind of thing. No one paid any attention to the girl, as far as I could tell. She just came at me down the corridor past the outside windows like some bat out of hell.'

'She came toward the lobby from the event center?'

'Yeah.'

'That's where they were doing all the dance competitions, right?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'Did she stop and talk to you when she ran into you?'

'No, she kept going. I dodged out of the way, and she didn't apologize or anything. She looked really freaked.'

'Excuse me?'

'Freaked,' Trask told him. 'Scared. She was crying. It was like she'd seen a ghost.'

'Oh, man,' Amy Leigh announced. 'Did you see this?'

Amy sat in the next-to-last row of the Green Bay team bus. The window beside her was cracked open, and Amy could smell exhaust fumes as the bus sputtered through the foothills of southern Tennessee. Unlike the Wisconsin campus, where winter had barely loosened its grip, the trees and mountains here were lush green.

When her roommate kept typing on her laptop without responding, Amy nudged the girl with her shoulder. 'Hey, look at this.'

Katie Monroe glanced away from the screen impatiently. 'What? I've got to get this article done. I need to email it to the paper by three o'clock.'

'Yeah, but check this out,' Amy insisted.

She held out her iPhone to her friend, who squinted at the online news feed. After reading the first couple lines of the story, she took the phone from Amy's hand and scrolled to the next paragraph. 'Wow. Is that where we were?'

'Yes, that was our hotel. A girl was murdered there last night.'

Katie blew the bangs out of her eyes with a quick puff of breath. 'It says here she was drinking on the beach in the middle of the night. Jeez, not smart.'

'It still sucks.'

'Of course it does. Life sucks.'

Katie handed back the phone and returned to the document on her laptop. Amy wanted to talk more, but when her roommate was writing, you didn't interrupt her. Amy reclined her head against the musty foam of her seat cushion and stared into space down the dimly lit aisle of the bus. Her body jolted with the bumps of the road. Her eyes felt heavy, but she couldn't sleep, unlike most of the other girls, who were draped over the seats. It had been an adrenaline-packed week, and she hadn't come down to earth yet. Her dance ensemble from Green Bay had taken first runner-up in the competition — almost the winners, but not quite. She figured they would nail the prize next year, because the hotshot team from Louisville that beat them would be losing most of its first-string girls when they graduated in June.

Amy was a junior. One more year to go.

She tried to clear her mind, but the image of the girl dead on the beach outside their Naples hotel intruded on her brain. That was who Amy was. She was a psychology major, always analyzing people and trying to figure out what made them tick. When she thought about the girl, she imagined the world through her eyes, seeing the empty stretch of Gulf sand. Here was a teenager four years younger than Amy was, alone, assaulted, killed. Katie was right; it was dumb to go off by the water and drink in the middle of the night. But Amy had done stupid things too.

'Hey.' Her roommate waved a hand in front of Amy's face, breaking her trance. 'You OK?'

'Yeah.'

'You still thinking about it?'

'Yeah.'

'You can't take on the whole world's problems, you know,' she chided her.

'I know.'

'So knock it off.'

Katie was the reporter, who looked at the world like a black-and- white encyclopedia of facts. Amy was the eye candy with the soft center, the one who felt too much, laughed too much, and cried too much. She secretly believed that her roommate would make a better therapist than she would herself, because Katie didn't let people get to her. She kept her distance, cool and objective. Amy dove in head first.

'She was from Wisconsin,' Amy said.

'Who?' Katie asked, dragging her eyes away from her article. She'd tugged along with the team to write about the competition for the Green Bay newspaper. It made for a free spring break trip, with the

paper picking up the hotel tab and her parents not worrying about what they didn't know.

'The girl. Glory Fischer. The one who was killed. She was from Wisconsin.'

'OK.'

'Door County,' Amy added. 'That's not even an hour away from us.'

'Where are you going with this?'

'I don't know.'

'Did you know her? Was she on one of the dance teams from the other schools?'

Amy shook her head. 'No.'

'Then what's up with you?'

'It's just a feeling.'

Amy took out her phone again and ran a Google search to see if any other newspapers had picked up the story. She saw that the Milwaukee paper had already filed a report on the murder. Local girl killed on vacation — that was big news back home. The Journal Sentinel reporter had tracked down a yearbook photo of Glory Fischer that was posted with the article. Amy stared at the dead girl's face, and her sense of unease grew. She told herself that she'd made a mistake and that she was confusing Glory with someone else, but she didn't think so.

Glory was the girl she'd seen. The one Gary was talking to. She'd seen them together that Friday night.

'What's wrong?' Katie asked.

'I recognize her,' Amy said.

'The girl who was killed?'

'I saw her. I remember her from the hotel.'

Katie looked dubious. She grabbed Amy's phone again and eyed Glory's picture herself. 'Are you sure? Yearbook pictures make everybody look like everybody else.'