“For what?” he asked.
I looked at Rachel. She looked at me. I didn’t have an answer. Jared Lowell wasn’t missing. He wasn’t in danger. He was, it seemed, a jerk, but that didn’t make him in need of rescue.
“Why did you stop communicating with Ema?” I asked again.
“None of your business.”
Again his eyes drifted toward Rachel, and when they did, a cold realization entered my brain.
“Oh man,” I said.
“What?”
“When did you first see a picture of Ema?”
“What?”
A small seed of anger began to grow in my chest. “When did you first see what Ema looked like, Jared?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“No?” I said. “So maybe—wild guess here—it was around the time you decided not to talk to her anymore?”
“I told you. We never talked.”
“E-mailed, texted, whatever. You know what I mean. Is that when you first saw her picture?”
But I saw something churning behind his eyes. “Yeah? So what of it?” He grabbed my arm and pulled me away from Rachel. He spoke in a soft voice.
“Dude, do you really blame me? I mean, look at the girl you’re with.”
I was actually cocking my fist when I remembered that his mom was still at the front door.
“Jared?” she called out.
“I’ll be there in a second, Ma.” He leaned close to me and kept his voice low. “Look, okay, maybe I should have told her better. Maybe I should have made it clearer, but really, it wasn’t a big thing.”
“It was to her.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Yeah, Jared, it is.”
“What? Are you going to hit me, big man? Defend Ema’s honor?”
Man, I wanted to. I wanted to smack him good and hard. “You have no idea what a great person Ema is.”
“Then why don’t you date her?” He grinned. “I’d be happy to take Rachel off your hands.”
Rachel put her hand on my shoulder, her way of telling me to stay calm. “Not worth it,” she whispered.
“Look,” Jared said, “I’ll e-mail her, okay? I’ll let her know. You’re right about that. But, Mickey? You better get out of my face now, because one thing is for sure: This is none of your damned business.”
Chapter 30
I called Ema, but it went straight into her voice mail. I sent her a brief text: Found Jared. He’s safe. Call if you have any questions.
“I blew it,” I said to Rachel.
“How?”
“Got too aggressive.”
“You were mad.”
“It’s just . . . when I think of Ema waiting by her computer . . .”
Rachel smiled. “You’re sweet.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even ask him the important question.”
“That being?”
“Why is Jared home? Why isn’t he still at school?”
“We didn’t come to change his life,” Rachel said. “We were supposed to find him. Mission accomplished.”
I knew that she was speaking the truth. Jared had vanished—and we had found him. Period. The end.
But something felt very wrong about it.
When we arrived back home, I got a text from Brandon Foley: Anything new on Troy’s test?
I thought about it. I simply was not buying that Buck’s mother would suddenly be granted full custody and that he would have to move away. Sure, I had heard of some pretty strange arrangements in cases of divorce, but who would move a kid when he was seventeen years old and already into his final year of high school?
It might make sense in a vacuum—if that was all that had happened. But at the same time Buck decided to leave, his best friend and cohort in crime, Troy Taylor, failed a drug test.
Coincidence?
I didn’t think so. Troy insisted that he’s innocent, and most of the guys on the team seemed to believe him. I started drawing little lines in my head, trying to make things connect.
My brain started to hurt.
I needed more information, so as soon as I made sure Rachel was home safe and sound, I decided that it was time I had a heart-to-heart with Troy.
I was going to text him, but I didn’t have his number. I guessed that I could ask Brandon for it, but I was already in the neighborhood. One of the few things I had learned was that there is no substitute for face-to-face. No, I’m not going to bemoan the smartphones or how we all constantly text or check social media. It is what it is. But when you want information, when you want to see whether a person is telling the truth or lying, there is nothing better than to look them in the eye and watch their body language.
At least, that was what I thought.
When I arrived at Troy’s door, I hesitated before knocking. I had been here before. Sort of. Rachel had “distracted” Troy—ugh—so that Ema and I could break into Chief Taylor’s home office off the back kitchen. Ah, good times. Now I was knocking on his front door, like a real visitor.
Suppose Chief Taylor answered the door?
No “suppose” about it. Two seconds after I knocked, the door opened. Chief Taylor, still in full uniform, appeared. His eyes narrowed when he spotted me on the stoop. “Mickey Bolitar?”
“Hi, Chief Taylor,” I said too cheerfully.
“What do you want?”
“Is, uh, Troy home?”
Chief Taylor frowned at me a few more seconds. Then he stepped aside and said, “Troy is in the basement.”
“Thank you.” I wiped my feet a few hundred times on the welcome mat and stepped into the house. He gestured toward a door across the room. I opened it and started down the steps.
“Troy?”
Nothing.
The room was dark and silent. I kept moving down the stairs. An eerie glow started providing some illumination. When I reached the bottom step, I saw what it was. A video game with plenty of blood and guts was playing on the big-screen television. I spotted Troy lounging on a gamer chair. Headphones covered his ears. His finger danced across the game controller.
He still didn’t know I was here. He was lost in the game, shooting, dodging, changing weapons. I had never gotten into the video game craze because when we were overseas I didn’t have access to it. When we first moved back to the United States earlier in the year, I had tried to play them, but I wasn’t very good. Like anything else, video games took practice. I’d started playing too late, and maybe this was a weakness of my own, but I didn’t like to do things I wasn’t good at.