articles on the Web version of the local paper. But this felt like a story. Maybe the one she’d been looking for. Maybe she’d ended up with this apartment because this was the true-crime book she was supposed to research and write.
Something had taken the coeds away.
Girls didn’t go missing for no reason. Not four from the same small college within an eighteen-month period. Not four enrolled in the same classes.
Kristi bookmarked a page as she heard steps on the staircase. A second later the doorbell rang, and she rolled her secretary’s chair away from the desk, crossed the small room to peer through the peephole. Through the fish-eye she saw a scruffy man in his early twenties or late teens standing under the single dim light mounted on the landing of the staircase meant to be her porch. Damp and dripping, his dishwater blond hair was plastered to his head. He was carrying a toolbox in one hand and wearing an I’m-pissed-as-hell expression that was meant to suggest authority.
No doubt the missing Hiram.
“Who is it?” she called just to be certain.
“The manager. Hiram Calloway. I need to check your locks.”
Oh, now he needed to check the locks? Way to be on it, Hiram.
He looked as pathetic as she’d expected with his thin beard, ancient bad-ass T-shirt from a Metallica concert, grungy camouflage pants, and sullen ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit attitude.
She opened the door a crack, leaving the chain in place. “I already took care of the locks.”
“You can’t just go doing all kinds of stuff to the place, y’know. You don’t own it. I’m supposed to fix things around here.”
“Well, I couldn’t find you, so I handled it myself,” Kristi stated with finality.
He frowned. His lips, half hidden in what he clearly was hoping would be a beard someday, curved petulantly over slightly crooked teeth. “Then I’ll have to have the key. I mean a copy. My grandma…Mrs. Calloway owns this place. She has to have access. It’s in the lease.”
“I’ll see that she gets one.”
“That’ll just take more time. She’ll give me a copy anyway. I have to have a key to every apartment in this building. I might have to get into the unit, you know, if something goes wrong or you lose your key or—”
“I’m not going to lose my key.”
“It’s for your protection.”
“If you say so.” She wasn’t counting on it.
“Jeez, why are you being such a—” He bit off the epithet at the last moment.
Kristi’s temper flared. “I called you and it took you three days to respond. All the locks in the unit were broken or loose and I heard that one of the girls who went missing from the campus lived here, so really, I thought I’d better take the situation into my own hands.”
His mouth dropped. “Anyone ever tell you to lose the attitude?”
“Like they’ve told you?” she snapped back.
He actually blushed and she felt a jab of regret. The kid, though incompetent, seemed to be trying to do his job. Even though he was failing, she really didn’t want to tick him off.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” he mumbled.
Kristi inwardly sighed. “Okay, let’s start over. Everything’s cool here, okay? I fixed the locks. I’ll give your grandmother, Mrs. Calloway, a key and she can see that you have one, though, I assume that you won’t come barging in here unless you give me notice…I think that’s in the lease, too.” She slid the chain out of its latch and let the door open wider, then stepped onto the small porch. “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot with you, Hiram. I’m just a little nervous, hearing that one of the missing girls lived here last term. Your grandmother didn’t mention it and it’s a little weird.” He stared at the floorboards of the landing. He didn’t look a day over seventeen. Hardly man enough to be a manager of any kind. “So, did you know her? Tara?”
“Not really. We talked. A little.” He lifted his eyes to meet the questions in Kristi’s gaze. “She was nice. Friendly.” He didn’t have to say “not like you” but the unspoken accusation was there in his dark, murky stare. His features stiffened almost imperceptibly, but enough so that Kristi noticed the tightening of his jaw, the nearly involuntary pinching of the corners of his mouth. In that instant Kristi knew she’d been fooled by his youthful appearance. There was something sinister smoldering in his night-dark eyes, something she didn’t like. This was no boy at all, but a man in a boy’s gawky body. She hadn’t noticed it through the peephole or in the slit of the door when the chain was engaged, but now, face to face with Hiram Calloway, she realized she was standing next to a complex and angry man.
She lifted her chin. “So, what do you think happened to her?”
He glanced over the railing toward the campus. “They say she ran away.”
Kristi said, “But no one really knows.”
“She did before.”
“Did she tell you about it?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “Nah. She kept to herself.”
“You said she was friendly. That you talked.”
A funny smile played upon those half-hidden lips. “Who knows what happened to her? One day she was here. The next, gone.”
“And that’s all you know?”
“I know that her old man is in prison somewhere and that she stiffed my grandmother.” He met her gaze deliberately. “Owed her back rent. Grandma says she’s a ‘flake’ and a ‘crook like her old man.’ Grandma figures she got what she deserved.”
“Got what she deserved,” Kristi repeated slowly, not liking the sound of that. Far away, laughter crackled through the night.
Hearing his words repeated made Hiram frown. “I’ll tell Irene you’ve got a key for her.” And with that he was gone, trudging down the steps and carrying his tools. Kristi stepped back into her apartment and slammed the door shut. She locked the dead bolt and chain and felt her skin crawl. Irene Calloway’s “good kid” of a grandson gave Kristi a major case of the creeps.
CHAPTER 4
BANG!
A sharp gun report blasted through the thick dark night, the smell of cordite overriding the earthy odor of the wet grass, the horrible crack reverberating through Kristi’s skull.
In horror, she watched as Rick Bentz went down, falling, falling, falling…near the thick stone wall surrounding All Saints College.
Blood flowed. His blood. All over the street. Staining the concrete. Spraying the grass. Running in the gutters. Draining from him.
“Dad!” she screamed, her voice mute, her legs leaden, as she tried to run to him. “Dad, oh, God, oh, God….”
Lightning
