Mind Games

“And you helped us. Now we’re here to ask for your help again.”

“I had a lot of doubts about coming here, coming to you,” Musk began. “I pushed you pretty damn hard after your parents died, and you just a kid. You’ve got plenty of reasons to resent that. I hope you can put it aside. There’s a fifteen-year-old girl whose life might depend on it.”

“I know why you pushed, so I can’t resent it. But I don’t understand. What girl?”

“Her name’s Shiloh Durning. She was abducted two days ago on her way home from school. She’s on the track team, and she stayed after school to run. Somewhere between the school and home—less than a mile away—someone took her.”

“She’s the fourth girl taken this way over the last sixteen months,” Howard continued. “All between fifteen and sixteen, all blondes with slim builds. He keeps them for four days, and he hurts them, Thea. On the fourth day, he kills them and dumps their bodies.”

“We have a task force working it,” Musk told her, “and we’ve got the FBI involved. We know he must know the area, that he must have a place private enough to keep them. We believe he’s a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five, meticulous, organized, who lives alone.”

“Our profile gives us a picture of him, but not a physical one. Shiloh’s time’s running out, Thea.”

“I still don’t understand what you want from me.”

Howard took a small evidence bag from his pocket. “These are her lucky earrings. Little lightning bolts? She only wears them when she’s in a race. Maybe you’ll get something from them.”

Instinctively, Thea crossed her arms, hugged her elbows. “I don’t do that here. Nobody here knows about what I have.”

Nobody who counts, she corrected.

“And I don’t know if I can … see that way.”

“If you could just try,” Musk began, but Howard put a hand on his arm.

“It’s fucking unfair, I know it. Coming here like this, asking you. But that’s what we’re doing. Three girls are dead because we can’t find him. We don’t want Shiloh to be the fourth. She’s fifteen. You’d have gone to the same high school if your life hadn’t changed. She has a younger brother, like you. She has parents who love her, like yours loved you.”

She kept the window closed here, she thought. Closed and locked. She’d made that deal with herself after Asher had crushed her.

She’d kept the deal for three years.

Just another college student, going to class, sweating over assignments, going to parties, flirting with boys.

But that lock had already slipped, she realized, because she could feel the frustration, the desperation, the cold anger from the two men who sat across from her.

“Do you have a picture of her?”

Musk pulled out his phone, brought one up to show her.

“She’s a pretty girl. So were the others. Chrissy Bates, fifteen; Harley Adamson, sixteen; Michaela Lowe, two days shy of sixteen.”

“I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can help.”

But she held her hand out for the earrings.

“No, let me take them out. I’ll take them out. Keep the picture on the phone. And be quiet. Just be quiet.”

Before she opened the bag, she thought of her grandmother, who’d taught her how to open, how to close. How to look, how not to.

She took the earrings out, held them in her palm. Looking at the photo, she stroked her fingers over the little gold lightning bolts.

And threw open the window.

Oh, so much blew in.

Her dorm mates, their voices, their feelings, their hopes, their fears.

Not now, not now. Not your minds, not your fears.