"I didn't see her, I swear it." Was the detective even listening? "I didn't see her, and I didn't hurt her."

Harriman's mouth twisted, and he heaved a sigh. "Everyone snaps. Everyone has a breaking point. You were coming home from SAR, all keyed up, you had your knife with you, you saw this girl, you offered her a ride, and she said no. Or she said yes and changed her mind."

With his deep voice and wrinkled face, Harriman reminded Nick of a pit bull. Weren't those the dogs that grabbed on and didn't let go?

"It wasn't me! I swear it! Bring me a stack of Bibles." This was like those nightmares where, whatever you did, however hard you tried to escape from the killer or the kidnapper or the rising floodwaters, it failed. Tears p.r.i.c.ked his eyes, but he blinked them back.

Harriman heaved a sigh. "Look, I like you, Nick, I really do. If you tell me the truth, then I can try to help you. You're a minor. You may need counseling, maybe medication. Believe me, you don't want to get sentenced to adult prison. But I can't help you if you don't tell the truth."

"If you really liked me, you would believe me."

The words just seemed to bounce off the detective. "We have your computer. We know you searched for information about Lucy Hayes online, over and over. Trying to figure out what we knew. Well, I'll tell you what we know, Nick. We know now that you did it." Harriman's sad hound-dog eyes never left his face.

"How did you get my computer?"

"We searched your room."

Nick froze. What had they found? Did his mom know?

CHAPTER 31.

NICK.

FRIDAY.

YOU'RE NOT FOOLING US.

"I'm going to give you a moment to think about things." Harriman tapped the table with one hand. "And when I come back, you need to tell me what really happened that night."

Not trusting his voice, Nick nodded. He didn't know what to do, what to think. Harriman believes I did it. He knew Nick, had talked to him a half-dozen times, easy, and he still thought Nick was a killer. Even though there was an explanation for everything the detective had talked about, Nick hadn't done a very good job of making things clear. He needed to calm down. To stop freaking out about whether the police had told his mom about his stash of girly magazines.

When Harriman reappeared, Nick wasn't sure how much time had pa.s.sed. There were two other people with him. One was a tall man with an athletic build. He looked Italian. The other was a young dark-haired woman towing an office chair.

"Rich Meeker," the guy said with a curt nod. "Homicide." He looked at Nick as if he were something he had sc.r.a.ped from the bottom of his shoe, then he leaned against the wall next to the door and crossed his arms.

In contrast, the woman smiled as she stretched out a slender hand. "h.e.l.lo, Nick, I'm Officer Rebecca Hixon. But you can call me Rebecca." Something about her was familiar, but Nick couldn't quite place her.

He was not going to call her anything. When he shook her hand, he held it as lightly as possible. What if he squeezed too hard and she decided it meant he was aggressive?

She sat down in her chair. "Detective Harriman asked me to join you because he thinks he might have been overreacting a little earlier. He realized he needed another opinion. A more neutral one. He's asked me to help him figure out the truth."

Harriman looked down at the carpet and nodded. Maybe he had gotten in trouble for how he had treated Nick. Maybe someone on the other side of the camera Nick had spotted in the corner had told Harriman that he was crazy, that there was no way Nick could have done it.

"Okay," Nick said. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, worried he looked defensive.

"Let me start by asking-did you know Lucy Hayes?" she asked.

"No. He already asked me that."

"Have you ever seen her before?"

"No." But she had lived in his neighborhood. What if Nick was lying and didn't even know it? "If I have seen her, like in a crowd or something, I don't remember it. I didn't recognize her photo when he showed it to me."

She nodded. "Now, this girl you may or may not have known-"

Nick interrupted. "I already said. I don't know her."

Her gaze flashed over to Harriman, her face unreadable. "Anyway, what I've heard is that she had a thing for younger guys."

Was that true? And even if it was, would a girl like that go for someone like him? "Oh, right. Like a girl that pretty is going to be interested in me." Couldn't they see how ridiculous the idea was?

"We've also heard that she liked to tease men," Harriman said.

The lady cop nodded. "She probably went too far this time, flaunting herself, and just set some poor guy off."

"I've heard this girl was a fighter," Harriman said. "Take what happened in the bar earlier that night. She attacked some poor guy she was convinced was her boyfriend, as well as this completely innocent girl."

Nick stayed silent. Were they telling the truth about what had happened that night-at least as far as Lucy Hayes was concerned?

"I remember what it was like when I was sixteen." Harriman looked up at the white tile ceiling. "Women and girls all around you, but you weren't allowed to touch them."

"Have you ever had a girlfriend, Nick?" the lady cop asked. She rolled closer. Too close.

He wanted to lie, but did they have ways to check? "Not really. No." It wasn't for lack of trying. He had kissed a girl and maybe done a little more than that playing Seven Minutes in Heaven in the coat closet at Trevor Kennedy's party that one time last spring. But afterward, Lark Munroe wouldn't even look at him or answer his texts, let alone talk to him.

"Did something happen that night and maybe get out of hand?" she asked softly.

Nick had known there was something about the lady cop, and now he figured out what it was. She was slender, a couple of inches shorter than him, with shoulder-length brown hair framing a heart-shaped face.

It was no accident that she was in this room. She was the same general physical type as Lucy Hayes. Did they think he would snap and stab her, too, s.n.a.t.c.h the pen tucked behind her ear and attack?

"I'm not going to dislike you." She c.o.c.ked her head. "Why don't you tell me what happened?"

Like he cared what she thought of him! Although part of him did care, or at least care what Harriman thought. "Nothing happened. I just drove down that block-that's all! On my way home from SAR!"

"Nick, come on, you're just fooling yourself." Her voice was soft, reasonable. "And I don't think that's working. Because you're not fooling us, that's for sure." She pulled the second evidence box over and opened it. Inside was a stack of pages. "We also have your drawings. They reveal a lot about you. About the way you think."

Nick's face flamed. It was as embarra.s.sing as having someone walk in while you were using the bathroom. "Where did you get those?" he demanded.

"From your locker and your house."

"You had no right to do that!" Did Mrs. Weissig know? Because if she did, soon everyone else at school would.

"I'm afraid we do, Nick. We got permission to search from both your mom and your school." She picked up the top drawing and turned it toward Nick. It showed a woman, limp in a muscular man's arms, her head hanging back. "Look at this girl." She tapped her finger. "She's dead, isn't she?"

"No, she's not. He's carrying her because she's hurt." It was too embarra.s.sing to say it was a fantasy Nick often had, a fantasy of being a hero. Of being big instead of scrawny.

"Is that how you carried Lucy? After you stabbed her?"

"What? No!"

"Then how do you explain this?" It was the drawing he had made Wednesday night in SAR. "A guy dragging a woman's body from under the arms. With blood dripping from the back."

"I was thinking about it. That's all. Trying to figure out what happened."

"Or reliving it?" She raised her hand before Nick could answer. "We found page after page of drawings of people bleeding and dying." She riffled through them. "Dismemberments, torture, stabbings, and shootings. Sometimes captioned with the person begging or screaming."

Nick drew scenes from movies or from graphic novels (although he was nowhere near as good as the real ill.u.s.trators). Sure, sometimes his drawings grossed people out, but he didn't mind. Not if it meant they were paying attention.

But this was definitely not the kind of attention he'd wanted.

He looked from one face to another. Harriman looked sad. Meeker looked angry. The lady cop regarded him with twisted lips and narrowed eyes. When his mom looked at him like that, it meant she thought he was lying.

"None of you are here to find out the truth. You guys all think that I did it."

"It's past that time," Meeker snapped. "We know that you did it, Nick." He stalked over to Nick and started to raise one hand.

Nick shrank in his seat, but Harriman yanked Meeker back by the arm. Then he turned to him as if nothing had happened. "So why don't you tell us about it. Tell us what really happened. We're just trying to understand."

"There's nothing to understand, because nothing happened. I rescued a little girl with Search and Rescue, I drove home, and I went to bed."

Ignoring the other two, Nick stared right into Harriman's shadowed eyes. "How can you even think this about me? You know me! You know what I do. Why would I volunteer with SAR to save people if I secretly wanted to be a killer?"

"I don't know, Nick." The detective sounded weary. "Why don't you tell me?"

Nick gritted his teeth. "What? That doesn't even make sense. How am I supposed to explain something that doesn't make sense? If I killed her, then why did I help find evidence?" He sat back with a sense of satisfaction. Finally! Something they couldn't refute.

Harriman didn't seem rattled at all. "That's the thing, Nick. When you showed up on Monday, you weren't there to help, were you? That footprint you planted your hand on, that was no accident. Did you do even more than that? Did you spot something you had left behind and pocket it?"

CHAPTER 32.

NICK.

FRIDAY.

NOT DEAD.

"No! Of course I didn't take anything at the search," Nick told Harriman and the other two cops. "We're shoulder-to-shoulder. How am I supposed to do that?" Something inside him dwindled. He could see how it looked. Who knew better than someone on the team how evidence searches worked?

"Nick!" The lady cop raised her eyebrows. "Don't be lying to us, now."

"I'm not! I'm not lying."

She scooted her chair even closer and put her hand on his knee. "We know that you did it, Nick. We just want to know why."

He stared at her hand. If he pushed it away, would she let him? What if she resisted? Would she take that as just one more piece of proof that he had done it? He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the light pressure of her fingers the way he was ignoring the continued buzzing of his cell phone.

"We know it's hard to admit it, Nick, and we appreciate that." Her voice was softer now. Every patient syllable made him want to punch her in the face. "We know what happened, but we don't know why. And we're trying to give you a chance to explain. If you're sorry it happened, Nick, you can help fix this. If you explain, then we can understand."

She leaned ever closer, even though there was no room for her. Nick shrank back, tried to make himself smaller.

"Did you come up behind her?" She was practically whispering in his ear. "Did she fall? Did she trip onto the knife? What happened, Nick? I don't know."

"I don't, either. Because-" Because I didn't do it, he started to say.

Meeker stepped forward and held his hand in front of Nick's face like a traffic cop. "No! Stop! Don't give us any bull. Tell us what really happened."

"I'm telling you guys the truth. I don't know what happened."

"Nick." The lady cop's soft voice was full of disappointment. "Why can't you accept responsibility for what you did?"

"Because I didn't do it!" He lowered his voice. "And it's horrible being accused of something I didn't do."

"We're not accusing you of anything." Her mouth twisted in disappointment. "We already know you did it."

He took a deep breath, tried to calm himself. There was no way they could arrest him. There was nothing linking him to the girl who had died. Nothing. "I never touched that girl. I never even saw her. You should be out there looking for the real killer. Not someone who's going into the army."

"And what are soldiers, Nick, but killers. Killers with a reason." She tilted her head. "Did you feel like you had a reason that night? Did she give you a reason?"

"Stop coddling him." Meeker slammed his hand into his fist.

Nick shook his head. It was as if they all had scripts and they were going to stick to them no matter what he did.

"Did she turn on you?" she asked. "Did she not leave you any choice? Was she asking for it? Did you kill her because you were afraid?"

"It doesn't matter what I say to you guys." He ran his hands through his hair, his fingers snagging on a knotted curl. Everything had gone south so fast. He felt dizzy. "You don't believe me. What's the point?"

"Nick," Harriman said. "I just want to help you. Just explain it to me. Did you do this with someone? Is that why there was a brick and a knife? Maybe they stabbed her and made you hit her, made you help hide her body. It's okay, Nick. If you tell us who else was there, we can protect you. We can work something out with the judge if you help us out."

"But I didn't do it." He was nearly whispering.

"Look, Nick. The evidence is too strong for anyone to deny." The lady cop ticked it off on her fingers. "Lucy Hayes was killed in your neighborhood. You've already admitted that you were there, on that very street on that very night. You collect knives. And Lucy was killed with a knife." Nick noticed it was "Lucy" now that she was no longer trying to pretend she was on his side. "We hear you like to play first-person shooter video games, extremely violent ones, ones where you can stab people for extra points! You draw women who are dying, people getting stabbed. Your teachers say you often draw during cla.s.s when you should be doing work. They say"-she pulled a notebook from her jacket pocket and turned back a few pages-"that your drawings are frightening. And we had a therapist look at them. He said"-another pause-"that you were rehearsing the murder, as evidenced by your obsessive drawings."

Harriman leaned forward. "And you were the first person from SAR at the search scene. You showed up to grill me about what we knew before the rest of them were even there."

"Mitch.e.l.l gave me permission to come separately. Ask him. He gave it."