Follow Me Down Read online

The one thing I knew for sure was that this wasn’t Lucas’s phone.

  There were four saved text message exchanges. A few between “Me” and “Mom.”

  ME: What for dinner, starving!!

  MOM: Come downstairs and you’ll find out

  One with “Me” and a girl he was badly sexting.

  ME: Ur head is gonna slam into the headboard when I stuff all four of your holes

  JESSICA: Where’s the fourth hole?

  ME: Oops. I mean three. HAHA. Send me a pic of UR boobs

  JESSICA: Seriously, BOOBS?

  ME: Fuck u then

  Then another between “Me” and “Rooster.”

  ROOSTER: U suck!

  ME: WHATEVER, U suck dick

  ROOSTER: LOL. Ya ur mom’s dick

  ME: WHAAAT??? U wish homo

  This pointless exchange went on for a while. I scrolled down. Looked at the last couple of one-sided texts sent to “Oz,” two hours apart.

  ME: Hey BIATCH u out of bed yet? Haas pissed you missed practice. U getting benched!

  ME: BAHAHA.… Rooster called you a PASTA PUSSY

  ME: Yo. U awake yet??? Gonna send u tasty pic.

  ME: FUUUUUCK … Haas knowsssrghjk%

  All communication dropped off. The date of the last text between Me and Oz was January 17. There was no other activity on the phone past that date.

  I went back to the pictures. I didn’t have Me’s name, but I had his face, or least the face that showed up in most of the other pictures in the photo gallery. Rooster, Oz, and Me made sure their faces were not in any of the assault pics. Me looked how he sounded: shaved blockhead, thick neck, a menacing smile. A teen movie bully from central casting.

  From my phone, I called the numbers listed under Rooster and Oz; both were disconnected. I called Me’s home number. A woman answered in a clipped voice. A child whined at her. “Stop—Mommy’s on the phone.… Hello?”

  I was about to say, I have your son’s phone, but then thought, Why would I tip them off? That I had this phone, these pictures.

  “HELLO?”

  I pressed End.

  Haas knows. Lucas coached these boys and knew about the pictures. What did that mean? If he did, why wouldn’t he have turned the phone over to the police or even to the school administration? Why was it in his apartment? Joanna could have told on these fuckers anytime for sexually assaulting her and catching it frame by frame for her full humiliation. Did they kill her because she threatened to do just that? Did it mean they’d killed Lucas to get the phone back, but he’d hidden it?

  At this moment was he in a ditch off some back road or in a shallow grave in Dickson Park and just hadn’t been found because no one was looking for his body? Maybe this was why airports and bus stations and border control had yet to intercept him. Something else was going on. He’d kept this phone for a reason. Maybe to protect her?

  But there was the hair. The red, wavy hair. Why did he have Joanna’s hair? Had he seen these pictures and flown off into a violent rage and somehow, what? Killed her for getting too drunk and making herself susceptible to assault? It didn’t make sense. That wasn’t Lucas.

  I sent the texts and the photos of Joanna to my own phone. When I was done, my phone buzzed. It was Garrett asking me to come down to the police station. There was a hit on Lucas’s ATM card.

  * * *

  Chief Pruden was waiting for me by the front vestibule. Someone had ordered in Chinese for lunch, and the whole station reeked; fried batter and sweet and sour sauce tickled the back of my throat. He grunted a hello and made no eye contact, his face blank. I tried to read him, see if I could detect what this ATM hit meant, if it was good or bad for Lucas. Pruden motioned me to follow him. I felt queasy. He led me to the same interview room I’d been in a couple of days ago. Empty white boxes were stacked at the end of the table, and a pile of fortune cookies was gathered in the middle.

  “Wait here,” he growled, his thumbnail picking at his bottom teeth.

  Garrett was already in the room. “Glad you could get here so fast.”

  I sat down across from him, feeling inexplicably guilty about my night with Eric. Nights. Like Garrett could tell what I’d been up to by looking at me. Another Haas crossing some student/teacher line, even if it was retrograde. I don’t know why I cared. “Of course. What’s with Officer Friendly?”

  “Pruden? He’s just a little pissed about the article.”

  “Article?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t read it yet. I guess us ‘bored, overzealous small-town cops with too much time on their hands’—that’s a direct quote, by the way—have all the time in the world to sit around reading the Minneapolis StarTribune.”

  I’d forgotten about the article. Shit. This was a bad time to irritate the police, now that there’d been an ATM hit, now that I’d discovered the phone, now that I really wanted us all to get along and work together.

  “Oh? It was just supposed to be an article about Lucas, his character. Anything else must’ve been at her own, I guess, creative discretion.”

  “Hunh. Right. Well, it’s not important anyway. How are you doing?”

  I motioned to the room in a how-do-you-think-I’m-doing gesture. Garrett nodded, gave me a sympathetic half smile, half wince, like he knew all about how I was feeling. “Just wanted to make sure you were, y’know, holding up OK. You look … weighed down. You can talk to me—you know that, right?” He was about to say something else, but Pruden was back with an open laptop. He set it down and took a seat next to Garrett. The screen was on screen-saver mode, and a little WPD badge bounced around.

  “Who does Lucas know in Springdale, Arkansas?” Pruden asked.

  “Arkansas? No one.”

  “Before you answer, I want you to take a minute to think.”

  “I don’t need to think. We don’t know anyone in Arkansas. We’ve never even been to Arkansas.” I ran my hand through my hair.

  Pruden frowned at me. “Lucas withdrew everything from his account. All six hundred and eighty dollars of it. What do you think of that?”

  I didn’t know what to think. I felt queasy and angry and confused, and I just wanted to see the video. See if it was him. “I don’t know.” My voice sounded dry.

  “The footage we have was caught in Springdale.” Pruden scowled at me. “You sure Lucas doesn’t have anyone down there that might want to help him out?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. But it’s possible that Lucas could have a friend there that you don’t know about? Someone he went to college with? Or even someone he met more recently?”

  “I mean, it’s possible, but I don’t think so. Can I please see the video?” I looked at Garrett, who just sat there, giving me this empty expression.

  “Hey, don’t look at him. I’m the one asking questions right now,” Pruden snapped.

  “And I answered you. He doesn’t know anyone in Arkansas!” I shouted, and immediately regretted it, because Pruden smirked. He liked that he’d got me to react like this. Was it because of the article, or because he thought he had me rattled and was a few questions away from getting me to blab about Lucas’s escape plan?

  Pruden grabbed the laptop, logged in, and pushed it toward me. “All you need to do is tell us if you recognize the person, or if anything is familiar about the person on this tape.” He got up, walked around the table, stood behind me, and pressed Play. I took in a deep breath and held it.

  The footage was dark and grainy; the time said it was just after 1 A.M. Whoever it was had on an oversized hood that concealed most of his face, except for a couple of glimpses of his chin.

  “I can’t tell. It’s not Lucas. I don’t know who this is.”

  Pruden kept reaching over me and replaying the footage—“Have another look”—like it was some kind of numbers game and I’d magically see through the hood after x number of views. “Is it anyone you recognize? A friend of Lucas’s? A friend of a friend?” I could feel and smell Pruden’s salty breath on th
e top of my head.

  “I have no idea who this is.” I felt a mix of relief that it wasn’t my brother and panic because the chin was mostly hairless. That could be due to meticulous grooming or because whoever this was, he was still in high school. A hockey player.

  Pruden made a frustrated sound at the back of his throat.

  I pulled the phone out of my pocket and slid it across the table, past the laptop. “I found this in Lucas’s apartment today.” They both stared at it.

  “Whose phone?” Pruden asked. He went around to the other side of the table, hovered over the phone like it might try to get away. Garrett’s back went very straight.

  “One of the hockey players on the Westfield Bulldogs. There are pictures on it of Joanna Wilkes being assaulted. Have a look. It will certainly make you rethink your dogged investigation into my brother.”

  Pruden left and returned with gloves for himself only, which seemed to annoy Garrett.

  “Where did you find this?” Garrett asked. “We thoroughly searched Lucas’s apartment.”

  “It was behind the bookshelf.” Garrett made a face, turned his attention back to the phone.

  They both sat across from me, huddled over the phone. Pruden did the scrolling, making disgusted noises in the back of this throat. Garrett chewed at his thumbnail. Finally Pruden stood, left with the phone. He didn’t explain.

  Garrett pulled his chair in again, leaned across the table. His face somber. “Mia, why do you think Lucas had this phone?”

  “He likely confiscated it. Who is he? What’s his name?” I could see Lucas coming into the locker room, standing behind Rooster and “Me,” and seeing what they were looking at as they tapped through their catalogue of pics to send to Oz. Me noticed who was behind him, tried to send out a warning to Oz before Lucas wrenched the phone from him (causing the streak of gibberish at the end of “Haas knows”). Me fell to the ground whimpering as Lucas smacked him around.

  “It won’t take much to find out who Rooster and Oz are. I know who the other kid is, but I can’t tell you. We need to follow this up first. Plus they’re minors. Listen, why do you think Lucas wouldn’t have turned the phone in earlier, when Joanna was missing and almost the entire town was looking for her? Why would he hold on to this?”

  “He was probably being sensitive to her humiliation? Not to mention, he didn’t trust anyone here after being harassed by you guys and thought it would just be buried as you tried to build a case against him and only him.” I couldn’t think of a single good reason why Lucas wouldn’t have turned this phone over to the police, but there had to be one.

  “You have to admit that it’s strange to hang on to it when it could have helped his case and, for all he knew, helped find Joanna. If this happened in January, then he’s had nearly five months to turn it over.”

  I shrugged; my hands went up a little too wildly and dropped back heavily into my lap. I tried very hard not to get angry, not to lose my temper. Scream, Fix this. “We need to find him so we can ask him. Right? I want to find my brother. I feel sick. I mean the text ended with ‘Haas knows.’ Don’t you think that’s a little ominous? And now some guy has my brother’s ATM card? Lucas could be badly hurt or dead, and you guys are trawling Greyhound stations when maybe there should be search parties in Dickson Park looking for him. He went missing the same day Joanna was found. It has to be connected and not in the way you guys think it is.”

  An image of Lucas being struck in the back of the head with a shovel by Rooster in full hockey gear shuddered through me. I could hear it, the sound of his skull splitting. I dropped my head into my hands. My hands smelled like plum sauce from the table. I looked up again. “Do you know that even Joanna Wilkes’s sister believes Lucas is innocent?”

  “You’ve been talking to Madison Wilkes?”

  “She’s been at the apartment block, using the pool. She waved me down and told me exactly that. ‘Mr. Haas and Joanna were never together. He did not kill my sister.’” OK, so Madison didn’t say this exactly but I needed to make my point.

  “I don’t think Madison knows what she believes or thinks these days. She’s fourteen years old and just lost her sister.” Garrett gave me a look that made me feel unreasonable. “We’ll talk to the players and go from there. Mia, this is definitely a new piece to the puzzle that we need to explore. If something has happened to Lucas, if he’s been harmed in any way, we’ll find out. I agree with you that this could change things, but I also don’t want to get your hopes up that it means Lucas is no longer a person of interest. Maybe this can be chalked up to bad luck for this poor girl. A coincidence. I don’t know. But I promise you, I’ll do everything I can to find Lucas. I’ll call you as soon as we have more information. Here.” Garrett slid a fortune cookie across the table at me, his lips twitching up with encouragement. “Maybe there’ll be some good news in it.”

  I pocketed the cookie and left.

  * * *

  Still in the parking lot, I called Wyatt and popped an Adderall. I needed that impenetrable tunnel vision to find Lucas, without the interference of a lingering hangover and go-to-pieces heartache. As assistant coach, he had to have known about Joanna Wilkes’s assault by three of his players. Why wouldn’t he have said anything to me or the police?

  Someone picked up before it even rang on my end. A long silence full of heavy, wet breathing. “Hello?” No response. I asked to speak with Dad. In the background I could hear the catty shredded voices of a reality show blaring and a boy crying “Owie” over and over. I pictured Carolyn draped on the couch, trying to shut it all out. Whoever answered hung up.

  I decided to try Wyatt at his work instead. Eden Green was its own low white-stuccoed building, with green shutters and a large plastic green dewdrop with a smiley face next to the entrance. Across the street was Rita’s Glazed Buns, a name that had always amused us as kids.

  The secretary was on the phone, looking bored as she recited the virtues of lawn aeration.

  She covered the receiver. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Wyatt?” But then I saw him crossing the hall behind her, in a green golf shirt and cargo shorts with a brown paper bag in one hand, tossing an apple up into the air with the other. He looked up, then quickly away, as if he hadn’t seen me. As I followed him into what was obviously the lunch room, the receptionist called after me, “Miss?”

  “Oh hey, Mia, it is you, thought I was seeing things. How are you?” He made a point to look up at the clock on the wall, brow furrowed like a bad impersonation of a worried, time-is-money businessman. The smell of spicy baloney emanated from his paper bag.

  “Who’s this kid?” I had my phone out already, flashing the Opie-looking blockhead in front of Wyatt’s face.

  Wyatt glanced at my phone. “Um, why?”

  “Just tell me. I know you know.”

  “He’s one of my players. Well, he will be again this fall.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Wyatt took a bite of his apple, followed by slow, measured chewing. “Cody Jackson, goalie. A really good goalie. Nice kid. Why?” I suddenly remembered Wyatt acting in a school play. He’d been as stiff and obvious as he was now.

  “He assaults girls.”

  Wyatt swallowed, sat down at a table covered with Eden Green flyers; his leg jittered under the table. “Now, why would you go and say something like that?”

  “He took pictures; the police already know. Lucas knew and took his phone away. I know he would have talked to you about this.”

  “He didn’t. It’s Joanna Wilkes, isn’t it? The girl you’re saying Cody assaulted?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Midseason Lucas just up and kicked Cody Jackson and two other players off the team—good, vital players. He wouldn’t say why, just that they weren’t working hard enough, which wasn’t true. Of course that didn’t go over too well with the parents or the school administration, but the players said they agree
d with Lucas, and that was that. Lucas was so tight-lipped about the whole thing. After each game we lost, I kept asking him to put those boys back on the team, but Lucas just said the same thing over and over—they didn’t deserve to be part of the team. I knew he had to have something on them. One player moved out of state to play on another team, and Westfield dropped to the bottom three last season.”

  “He must have told you something.”

  “He didn’t, really he didn’t. I don’t know why he wouldn’t have told me or said anything to the admin. I mean, other than he was banging his student. He took serious flack for kicking those boys off the team.”

  “What are the names of the other players?” Wyatt shook his head, no.

  “I don’t want to get involved in this. I’ll be coaching two of those players next year.”

  “So hockey is more important to you than Lucas? Than finding out who really murdered Joanna Wilkes?”

  “If the police want to come here and ask me questions, I’ll talk to them.”

  “But not to me?”

  Wyatt shrugged.

  “Why?”

  “Unlike Lucas, I want to take the proper channels with something like this. You’re just telling me these boys assaulted Joanna. I’d like some proof first.”

  I could have pulled my phone out and showed the disgusting images to Wyatt, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t make any difference. I already had one of their names, and that was enough. “You know what, Wyatt? You’re a shitty friend.”

  “Oh, and like you’re such a great sister. Where’ve you been? You never came back to help him out with your mother.”

  I had nothing to say to that. It was true. “I’m here now. That’s what matters. And I’m not leaving until I find my brother. You know what? I think you’re enjoying this a little, Lucas’s downfall. How long have you been his sidekick for? Huh, Wyatt? Finally, after all these years, you get to be the head coach, the main guy. Maybe even now your wife can stop fantasizing it’s my brother when the lights go out.”

  “Get out.”

  * * *

  A search on a reverse phone lookup, and I was sitting outside Cody Jackson’s house. A faux chateau made of plastic on a treeless street. It was Wayoata’s newest housing development, a gap-toothed cluster of McMansions built circa 1996. It was the kind of property Lucas had always pointed out that I could afford here. I’d harbored fantasies on the way over that Garrett and Pruden would already be there, leading this Cody kid out in cuffs. Something blunt and bloodied dangling in a plastic Ziploc from one of their hands. Case closed.