Meg Cabot - Safe House

My jaw sagged. "Oh, my God," I said. "You checked on my alibi? You didn't wake Mrs. Wilkins up, did you? Tell me you didn't call Rob's mom and wake her up. Jill, how could you? Talk about embarrassing!"

"Frankly, Jessica," Special Agent Smith said, "your embarrassment doesn't concern me at all. All I am interested in is finding out the truth. How did you know Heather Montrose was in that house? The police searched there twice after learning another girl had disappeared. They didn't find anything. So how did you know to look there?"

I glared at her. Really, it was one thing to have the Feds following you around and reading your mail and tapping your phone and all. It was quite another to have them going around, waking up your future mother-in-law in the middle of the night to ask questions about your dinner with another boy, who wasn't even her son.

"Okay, that's it," I said, folding my arms across my chest. "I want a lawyer."

It was at this point that the door to the little interrogation room—a conference room, Special Agent Smith had called it, but I knew better—opened, and her partner came in.

"Hello, again, Jessica," he said, dropping into a chair beside me. "What do you want a lawyer for? You haven't done anything wrong, have you?"

"I'm a minor," I said. "You guys are required to question me in the presence of a parent or guardian."

Special Agent Johnson sighed and dropped a file onto the tabletop. "We've already called your parents. They're waiting for you downstairs."

I nearly beat my head against something. I couldn't believe it. "You told my parents ?"

"As you pointed out," Special Agent Johnson said, "we are required to question you in the presence—"

"I was just giving you a hard time," I cried. "I can't believe you actually called them. Do you have any idea how much trouble I'm going to be in? I mean, I completely snuck out of the house in the middle of the night."

"Right," Special Agent Johnson said. "Let's talk about that for a minute, shall we? Just why did you sneak out? It wasn't, by any chance, because you'd had another one of your psychic visions, was it?"

I couldn't believe this. I really couldn't. Here Rob and I had done this fabulous thing—we'd saved this girl's life, according to the EMTs, who said that Heather, though she was only suffering from a broken arm and rib and some severe bruising, would have been dead by morning due to shock if we hadn't come along and found her—and all anybody could do was harp on how we'd known where she was. It wasn't fair. They should have been throwing a parade for us, not interrogating us like a couple of miscreants.

"I told you," I said. "I don't have ESP anymore, okay?"

"Really?" Special Agent Johnson flipped open the file he'd put on the table. "So it wasn't you who put in the call to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU yesterday morning, telling them where they could find Courtney Hwang?"

"Never heard of her," I said.

"Right. They found her in San Francisco. It appears she was kidnapped from her home in Brooklyn four years ago. Her parents had just about given up hope of ever seeing her again."

"Can I go home now?" I demanded.

"A call was placed to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU at approximately eight in the morning yesterday from the Dunkin' Donuts down the street from the garage where Mr. Wilkins works. But you wouldn't know anything about that, of course."

"I lost my psychic abilities," I said. "Remember? It was on the news."

"Yes, Jessica," Special Agent Johnson said. "We are aware that you told reporters that. We are also aware that, at the time, your brother Douglas was experiencing some, shall we say, troublesome symptoms of his schizophrenia, that were perhaps exacerbated by the stress of your being so persistently pursued by the press...."

"Not just the press," I said, with some heat. "You guys had a little something to do with it, too, remember?"

"Regrettably," Special Agent Johnson said, "I do. Jessica, let me ask you something. Do you know what a profile is?"

"Of course I do," I said. "It's when law enforcement officers go around arresting people who fit a certain stereotype."

"Well," Special Agent Johnson said, "yes, but that's not exactly what I meant. I meant a formal summary or analysis of data, representing distinctive characteristics or features."

"Isn't that what I just said?" I asked.

"No."

Special Agent Johnson didn't have much of a sense of humor. His partner was much more fun … though that wasn't saying much. Allan Johnson, it had often occurred to me, just might be the most boring person on the entire planet. Everything about him was boring. His mouse-colored hair, thinning slightly on top and parted on the right, was boring. His glasses, plain old steel frames, were boring. His suits, invariably charcoal gray, were boring. Even his ties, usually in pale blues or yellows, without a pattern, were boring. He was married, too, which was the most boring thing about him of all.

"A profile," Special Agent Johnson said, "of the type of person who might commit a crime like the ones we've experienced this week—the strangulation of Amber Mackey, for instance, and the kidnapping of Heather Montrose—might sound something like this: He is most likely a white heterosexual male, in his late teens or early twenties. He is intelligent, perhaps highly so, and yet suffers from an inability to feel empathy for his victims, or anyone, for that matter, save himself. While he might seem, to his friends and family, to be a normal, even high-functioning member of society, he is, in fact, wracked with inner misgivings, perhaps even paranoia. In some cases, we have found that killers like this one act the way they do because inner voices, or visions, direct them to—"

That's when it hit me. I'd be listening to his little speech, going, Hmmm, white heterosexual male, late teens, sounds like Mark Leskowski, highly intelligent, inability to feel empathy, yeah, that could be him. He's a football player, after all, but a quarterback, which takes some smarts, anyway. Then there's that whole "unacceptable" thing.

Only it can't be him, because he was with me when Heather was kidnapped. And according to the EMTs, those wounds she'd sustained were a good six hours old, which meant whoever had done it—and Heather still wasn't talking—had attacked her at around eight in the evening. And Mark had been with me at eight....

But when Allan got to the part about inner voices, I sat up a little straighter.

"Hey," I said. "Wait just a minute here...."

"Yes?" Special Agent Johnson broke off and looked at me expectantly. "Something bothering you, Jessica?"

"You've got to be kidding me," I said. "You can't seriously be trying to pin this thing on my brother."

Jill looked thoughtful. "Why on earth would you think we were trying to do that, Jess?"

My jaw dropped. "What do you think I am, stupid or something? He just said—"

"I don't see what would make you jump to the conclusion," Special Agent Johnson said, "that we suspect Douglas, Jessica. Unless you know something we don't know."

"Yes," Special Agent Smith said. "Did Douglas tell you where you could find Heather, Jessica? Is that how you knew to look in the house on the pit road?"

"Oh!" I stood up so fast, my chair tipped over backwards. "That's it. That is so it. End of interview. I am out of here."

"Why are you so angry, Jessica?" Special Agent Johnson, not moving from his chair, asked me. "Could it be perhaps because you think we might be right?"

"In your dreams," I said. "You are not pinning this one on Douglas. No way . Ask Heather. Go ahead. She'll tell you it wasn't Douglas."

"Heather Montrose did not see her attackers," Special Agent Johnson said lightly. "Something heavy was thrown over her head, she says, and then she was locked in a small enclosed space—presumably a car trunk—until some time after nightfall. When she was released, it was by several individuals in ski masks, from whom she attempted to escape—but who dissuaded her most emphatically. She can only say that their voices sounded vaguely familiar. She recalls very little, other than that."