gave the girl a smile, a small one, appropriate to the mood. “Like me. But you need to break down sometimes to be stronger later. You understand that? I’ll bet your mom cries later.”
“She—” Jazz gulped air and looked more thoughtful. “Sometimes, I guess. She closes the door. I hear her crying, but only when things were really bad at work or something.”
“Well, today, they’re really bad at work and she’s afraid for you, too. So give her a break. Let her take care of you, okay?”
Jazz nodded. Her body language was slowly uncoiling from the wire-tight posture it had been, and Katie breathed a cautious sigh of relief. The last thing the kid needed was to bottle all this up. It was traumatic, and Jazz was—like all Athena students—advanced for her age. A recipe for emotional disaster.
“You feel like telling me the story now? One last time?”
Jazz bent her head and sat up again, hands braced on either side on the cold concrete bench. Her voice was soft, and still a little unsteady, but Katie heard every word. “We decided to go to the movies. It was—we had the day off.”
“Why didn’t you ask for transportation? Call a cab?”
Jazz didn’t look up. “We wanted to walk. It was a nice day.”
Girls her age didn’t want to walk, they wanted to get where they were going fast, and have fun even faster.
“Jazz, if you lie to me, you’re putting Teal and Lena in danger. You know that, don’t you?”
Jazz’s head jerked up in outright astonishment. Katie raised an eyebrow and waited as Jazz found words. “I didn’t lie!”
“I’m afraid you did. And you lied to your mother, and to the police, and now you think you can’t change your story. But you can, Jazz. Nobody thinks you’re at fault here.”
“But—”
Katie let a little hardness creep into her voice. “You weren’t going to the movies. You didn’t take the school transportation service because you didn’t want anybody to know where you were going, and you didn’t take a cab because you didn’t want any record. Right?”
Jazz looked as bewildered as if Katie had just pulled a rabbit out of her ear. “How—?” She swallowed the question and flushed pale pink under her matte-tan skin. “I didn’t lie. We would have gone to the movies. We were planning to do it late afternoon.”
“So where were you going in the morning?”
“It’s supposed to be a secret. Teal made me promise.”
“Teal made you promise.”
Jazz nodded slowly. “There was someone from the school in trouble. She needed help. Teal and Lena promised to meet her. I wasn’t really supposed to go along, but I followed them and caught up after I overheard. Besides, I wanted to go to the movies.”
Precocious didn’t half cover it, Katie thought. She wondered if she’d been so difficult at Jazz’s age, thought back and decided that it was entirely possible. “Where were you going? And who were you meeting?”
“We were going to the mall. It’s only a couple of blocks away. I don’t know who we were meeting, it was a secret. Teal and Lena didn’t want to talk about it.”
This didn’t sound nearly as innocent as Jazz probably thought it did. “Could it have been boys? Somebody they met in town, maybe?”
“I— No. No, they told me it was somebody from the school.”
“There are men working at the school.”
Jazz shook her head. “They said she.”
It couldn’t be an accident that Teal and Lena had been off-campus and picked off so neatly; somebody had set it up. Somebody had set a place and a time for them to be, and they’d walked right into it. Jazz had been an unexpected ride-along. No wonder they’d allowed her to escape.
“Okay, walk me through what happened. You were walking—”
Kayla returned midway through the recitation of the facts, but that was all right. The secret had been revealed, and Katie could see from the kid’s body language that she had nothing more to conceal. She’d told everything she knew.
Nevertheless, just for clarity, Katie walked Jazz through the rest of the story, start to finish, stopping her for details that seemed unimportant but might be vital later on. She made illegible scribbles in her own fluid abbreviations and listened for any false notes.
Nothing.
When silence fell, Katie checked her watch. It was sliding toward evening, and the chill was getting sharper in the air. The desert didn’t hold in the heat poured over it during the day, and it was going to get bone-shaking cold tonight. “Right,” she said. “I think that’s it, Jazz. You’ve been wonderful. I’ll check in on you when I can, okay?”
“Wait.” Jazz caught her hand. “You’re going to find them, right? You promise?”
Katie Rush never promised. It was unprofessional; it was hurtful and it added complications the job didn’t need. She’d learned that hard, and she never broke the rule.
She did now. “Yes,” she said. “I promise. They’re coming back safe.”
She walked off a little distance with Kayla, who was anxious and trying hard not to look it. “Anything?” Kayla asked.
Katie didn’t answer directly. “I need to go up to the school. Can someone give me a ride?”
“Of course. I’ll take you—”
“No, you need to take your daughter home. I’ll keep you fully briefed on what I find out—if anything. Be with Jazz right now.” She remembered the tall detective they’d passed, who’d looked at Kayla with such outright concern and longing. “And…anybody else you might need to see.”
Kayla flushed, just like her daughter. “It’s my case, I can’t just drop it!”
“It’s not your case,” Katie said and turned to face her. Cold air blew over them, reminding them that night was falling, that darkness was coming. “Your daughter was an assault victim. Two of her friends are missing. Nobody in their right mind is going to keep you in charge of this case, you know that. Phoenix PD is going to follow their own course. But me, I’m independent. I can follow leads they can’t, especially leads that come up inside of the Academy. Let me do this for you.”
Katie stared her down. It took a long time, but then Kayla always had been strong-willed, tough-minded and determined.
But she knew when to quit.
“All right,” she said. “But you keep me in the loop. Daily. Hourly, if there’s breaking news.”
“Of course. Now go home.”
“Not before I get you a car.”
It took more than that, of course, but it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before
