"Jess," he said when he saw me. "Oh, my God. I heard what happened last night. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I said. I didn't slow down. I walked right past him.

Rob, falling into step beside me, went, "Mastriani, what's the matter with you? Where are you going?"

"There's something I have to do," I said. I was walking fast, so fast that I was pretty sure I had lost Special Agents Johnson and Smith somewhere back in the crowd in front of the buses.

"What do you have to do?" Rob wanted to know. "Mastriani, why are we here?"

Here was the football field, off to one side of the student parking lot. It was under the metal bleachers surrounding the field that Ruth and I had ducked, that day last spring when we'd been caught in the storm. The storm that had changed everything.

It didn't look much different, the football field, than it had that day, except that now it was in use. Coach Albright was standing in the middle of it with a whistle in his mouth, as his players streamed out from the locker room for practice. Most of the cheerleaders were already there. They were holding auditions for Amber's position. It was sad and all, but what were they supposed to do? They couldn't do a pyramid with just nine girls. They needed a tenth. The bleachers were crowded with girls eager to take Amber's spot. When they saw Rob and me, they stopped chatting amongst themselves and stared. Maybe they thought I was there to try out. I don't know.

"Jess," Rob said. "What is the matter with you? You're acting really weird. Weirder than usual, even."

Coach Albright noticed us and blew his whistle. "Mastriani," he yelled. He knew me only too well from my many altercations with his more fractious players. "What are you doing here? Are you here for the tryouts?"

I didn't answer him. I was scanning the field, looking for one person and one person only.

"If you ain't here for the tryouts," Coach Albright yelled, "get off the field. I don't need you around, making my boys nervous."

I saw him, finally. He was just coming out from the gym, his shoulder pads making him look bigger than he actually was . . . though of course, he was pretty big without them. The bright sun shone down on his bare head as he hurried, helmet in hand, toward the rest of the team.

I headed toward him, meeting him halfway.

"Jess," he said, in some surprise, looking from me to Rob, who stood just behind me, then back again. "What's up?"

I held out my hand. The hand that wasn't clutching Claire's sweater. I held out my hand and said, "Give them to me."

Mark looked down at me, a half smile on his face. He was playing it cool.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"You know," I said. "You know good and well."

"What's going on here?" Coach Albright demanded, stomping over to us. He was followed by most of the rest of the team—Todd Mintz, Jeff Day—and more than a few of the cheerleaders. It wasn't every day a civilian walked out onto the field and interrupted practice.

Especially one who wasn't even part of their crowd.

"Mark, this girl giving you a hard time?" Coach Albright asked.

"No, Coach," Mark said. He was still smiling. "She's cool. Jess, what's going on?"

"You know what's going on," I said, in a voice that didn't sound like mine. It was harder than my voice had ever been. Harder and, in a way, sadder, at the same time. "You all know." I looked around at the other ball players. "Every last one of you knows."

Todd, blinking in the strong sunlight, went, "I don't know."

"Shut up, Mintz," Jeff Day said.

Coach Albright looked from me to Mark and then back again. Then he went, "Look, I don't know what this is about, but if you got a problem with one of my players, Mastriani, you bring it to me during office hours. You do not interrupt practice—"

I stepped forward and sank my fist into Mark Leskowski's gut.

"Now give me," I said, as he dropped to his knees with a gasp, "your car keys."

Everything happened at once after that. Mark, recovering with amazing quickness, lunged at me, only to find himself in a headlock, courtesy of Rob. I was yanked off my feet by Jeff Day, who planned, I think, on hurling me over the nearest goalpost. He was stopped by Todd Mintz, who grabbed him by the Adam's apple and squeezed.

And Coach Albright, in the middle of the fray, blew and blew on his whistle.

There was a jingle, and something bright fell from Mark's waistband into the grass. Rob snatched it up and said, "Mastriani." By that time, Jeff, unable to breathe with Todd crushing his larynx, had dropped me. I reached up and caught the keys on the fly, one-handed.

And then I turned around and started for the student parking lot.

"You can't do this," I heard Mark bleating behind me. "This is illegal. Illegal search and seizure. That's what this is."

"Consider yourself," Rob said, "under citizen's arrest."

They were following me. They were all following me, Rob and Mark and Todd and Jeff, Coach Albright, and the cheerleaders. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, leading the village children to their doom, I led the Ernest Pyle High School football team and pep squad to Mark Leskowski's BMW, which was parked, I saw when I got to it, just a little bit away from Ruth's Cabriolet and Skip's Trans Am.

"Oh, my God," Ruth said, when she saw me. "There you are. I've been looking all over for you. What's . . ."

Her voice trailed off as she got a look at what was behind me.

"This is bullshit," Mark bellowed.

"Mastriani," Coach Albright yelled. "You put those keys down. . . ."

Only I didn't listen to him, of course. I walked right up to Mark's car and put the key in the lock to the trunk.

Which was when Mark tried to make a break for it. Only Rob wouldn't let him. He reached out almost casually and grabbed hold of the back of Mark's shirt.

"Let me go," Mark screamed. "Lemme freaking go!"

Only he didn't say "freaking."

I turned the key, and the BMW's trunk popped open.

And that's how Special Agents Johnson and Smith found us, a minute or so later. With the entire in crowd of Ernest Pyle High School crowded around Mark Leskowski's BMW, while Rob Wilkins hung onto Mark, and Todd Mintz hung onto Jeff Day (who'd also tried to get away at the last minute).

And me half-in, half-out of Mark Leskowski's trunk, trying to get Claire Lippman to start breathing again.



C H A P T E R

20

"Well, that certainly sucked," Claire said, later that evening.

"Tell me about it," I said.

"No, I mean, really. Like, I was sure I was going to die."

"You looked dead," Ruth pointed out.

"Really?" Claire seemed very interested in this piece of information. "How, exactly, did I look?"

Ruth, sitting on the windowsill across from Claire Lippman's hospital bed, glanced at me, as if unsure whether or not to answer the question.

"No, really," Claire said. "I want to know. So in case I ever have to do a death scene, I'll know how to look."

"Well," Ruth said, hesitantly. "You were really pale, and your eyes were closed, and you weren't breathing. But that was on account of the tape over your mouth."

"And the heat," Skip pointed out. "Don't forget the heat."

"It was a hundred and ten inside that trunk," Claire said cheerfully. "That's what the EMTs said, anyway. I would have died of dehydration way before Mark got around to killing me."

"Uh," Ruth said. "Yeah. About that. That's the part I'm not real clear on. Why did Mark want to kill you, again?"

Claire rolled her pretty blue eyes. "Duh," she said. "Because he saw me talking to Jess."

Ruth looked over at me, where I was sitting between the dozens of huge floral arrangements people had been sending to Claire ever since she'd been admitted. She was due to be released in the morning, so long as the results of her CAT scan confirmed she had not, in fact, suffered a concussion. But still the flowers kept coming.

Claire Lippman was actually a lot more popular than I had ever realized.

"Explanation, please," Ruth said.

"It's really very simple," I said. "Amber Mackey got pregnant—"

"Pregnant!" Ruth cried.

"Pregnant!" her twin brother echoed.

"Pregnant," I said. "And she told Mark she wanted to keep the baby. In fact, Amber wanted him to marry her, so they could raise their child together, be a little happy family. That's what they were talking about that day at the quarry, when Claire said she saw Amber and Mark keep going off together, alone. Amber's pregnancy."

"Right," Claire said. "Only a pregnant girlfriend was not part of Mark's plan for the future."

"Far from it," I said. "Getting married, or even paying child support, was going to totally mess up Mark's football career. It was, in his book, 'unacceptable,' So, near as we can figure it out—and he hasn't confessed, mind you—Mark beat Amber up, in the hopes that she'd change her mind, and left her somewhere—probably in his trunk. They're checking it for fibers now. When that didn't manage to convince Amber to see things his way, he killed her and tossed her body into the quarry."

"Okay," Ruth said. "I can see all that, I guess. But what about Heather? Wasn't Mark with you when Heather disappeared?"

"Yes," I said. "He was. That was the point of Heather's attack. Mark was starting to feel the heat, you know, with the Feds breathing down his neck, so he figured if another girl got attacked at a time during which he had a rock-solid alibi, he'd be in the clear."

"And what's more rock-solid," Skip said, "than the fact that he was with the FBI's friend, Lightning Girl."

"Right," I said. "Well, more or less. And you know, it worked. When Heather disappeared, no one suspected Mark."

"Except you," Claire pointed out.

"Well," I said, a little guiltily. "I didn't exactly suspect Mark." Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd been convinced no one as hot as he was could be a criminal. Stupid me. "But that house … I knew there was something up with that house. So when I started asking around about it, Mark got scared again and had Jeff Day—the same guy who'd kidnapped, and then later beat up, Heather—make some threatening phone calls. And then, when that didn't seem to be working, Mark and Jeff broke into Mastriani's, poured gasoline all over the place, then lit a match and burned the place down."

At least according to Jeff Day, who'd started crying like a baby the minute the cops arrived, then spilled his guts like a squashed caterpillar.

"Mark's biggest mistake," I went on, "was enlisting the help of someone like Jeff Day in getting him out of his little jam. I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense, since Jeff is used to taking direction from Mark, on account of Mark being the team quarterback and all. But Jeff needs a lot of direction. He was always coming up to Mark and asking him what to do … especially right before the first class of the day, homeroom."

"Where Mark sat in front of me," Claire said. She was taking her role as victim very seriously, and waved her arm, the one with the IV in it, as much as possible, to bring attention to her infirmity. "So of course this morning, when he and Jeff were whispering before the bell rang, something about the way they looked … so sneaky . . . triggered something. I just knew. I can't say how I knew. I just put two and two together. But you can't go to the police, you know, with a hunch. But I figured I could go to Jess—"

"But when she tried," I said, "Mark caught her. And she was so startled—"

"I ran," Claire said gravely. "Like a startled fawn."

I wasn't so sure about the fawn part. Claire was kind of tall for a fawn. A gazelle, maybe.

"But Mark went around the side of the building," I said, "and caught up with her, and—"

"—hit me right back here," Claire said, touching the back of her head, "with something heavy. And when I woke up again, I was in his trunk."

"My guess is he was going to take her to the house on the pit road," I said, "and do to her what he'd done to Amber...."

"So what," Ruth asked, "is going to happen? To Mark, I mean?"

"Well," I said. "With the help of Jeff's testimony—which I'm sure he'll give in exchange for a reduced sentence for his part in the whole thing—Mark's going to prison. For a long time."

Which was really going to mess up his plan for getting drafted right out of college by the NFL.

Before anyone could say anything in reply to this, Claire's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Lippman, came back into the room.