“Oh, yeah. We have our work cut out for us. A lot of legwork, but maybe we’ll get a break.”

Will’s phone rang and he reached across Carina’s desk to answer it.

“Will Hooper.”

“It’s Patrick. Are you at your computer?”

“Two feet away.”

“Log on to Angie’s MyJournal page ASAP. Seems Angie’s friends have paid a tribute to their dead friend, and you’re not going to like it. I’m on hold with MyJournal security because Angie’s journal needs to be taken down. Immediately.”

He walked down the street, around the corner, and down two blocks to the Quik-Stop. He bought a newspaper, a thirty-two-ounce Coke, and a breakfast burrito, using the store’s microwave to heat it.

He sat at a picnic table at the park across the street, eating as he turned to the obituaries.

There it was. Angie’s memorial service: Thursday. Six p.m.

He’d learned a lot from his mistakes with Angie. She was the first, and of course it wasn’t perfect. That’s why the end wasn’t satisfying. He’d kept her too long, for one. The excitement of that first night gave way to fear of being caught, an urgency that he couldn’t fulfill.

Last year he’d made a mistake, and it had taken him a full year to plan and gather the courage to go through with his idea.

He should have killed Randi, but he’d been too nervous to go through with it. Fortunately, he’d scared her into silence, and she’d since moved away.

He’d taken Randi to dinner and a movie. She was perfect. Shy, quiet, timid. All he wanted was to fuck her. They’d been dating for several months and it had been time.

They’d eaten dinner at a nice restaurant, seen a movie, did all the things they usually did on a date. Then he took her to a wooded park up in the San Diego hills with a distant view of the ocean and kissed her. She let him, her mouth soft and warm, tentative. They’d kissed before, but he wanted more. Needed more.

At first she gave him what he sought. Her breasts. Her neck. She let him touch her through her pants, but when he unzipped them she grabbed his wrist. “I’m not ready.”

She was out of breath.

“We both want this. You know it.”

“I thought…but no. I can’t. Just kiss me. I like that.”

So he kissed her and heated up. Kissed her and wanted more. He pinned her down in the dirt with his body-he was bigger than she-and she protested again. This time, he didn’t stop. He unzipped her shorts and she began to squirm and cry.

“Please, stop! I don’t want to do this.”

“I want to.”

And shouldn’t that have been enough? She was here, she liked him, she kissed him, and she wouldn’t let him fuck her? There was something very wrong with that, and he wasn’t going to let her get away with it.

He held her down, his body rigid, and she screamed. She screamed so loud he thought every person in town could hear. They would come and take him away.

It stunned him into stopping.

Randi was sobbing and he rolled off her. They were both covered in dirt and leaves.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he warned her. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.”

“I won’t,” she whispered. “No one.”

He took her home in silence. They never spoke about that night, never spoke again for that matter. She transferred to another school two weeks later.

After she found her dog dead.

Still, he’d been nervous for months. But his fears gradually began to subside. Randi hadn’t told anyone what happened that night. And besides, what had happened? It was all a misunderstanding.

But he’d never let another woman scream.

What he’d learned from Randi he’d applied to Angie. What he’d learned with Angie, he would apply to the next whore.

Jodi.

He had lots of planning to do before Angie’s funeral, and he couldn’t afford to miss class today even though listening to a boring lecture was the last thing he wanted to do. But missing class would be a mistake and he didn’t make mistakes. Not anymore.

He definitely wouldn’t make any mistakes with Jodi.

TWELVE

NICK PULLED HIS LAPTOP COMPUTER from the bottom of his overnight bag. He wasn’t a computer expert by any stretch, but it was the twenty-first century and he’d broken down and bought one a couple years ago.

He glanced at Steve’s closed bedroom door. His brother had come in late the night before while Nick tried to sleep on the couch. He didn’t let on that he was awake, and Steve quietly went into the bedroom and shut the door. It sounded like he was still asleep, which was good. Nick wanted to do this alone.

He set up his laptop on Steve’s desk and hooked in the Internet connection.

There was a family picture on the desk. Nick, Steve, their parents. Paul Thomas had his arm around Steve’s shoulders, Miriam Thomas had her arm around Nick’s. That’s how Nick always remembered the family. Nick was the outsider to his father. It must have been evident from the day he was born because his mother overcompensated when his father left for his monthly reserve duty.

But when Dad was around, the world revolved around Steve, and Nick was a distant star falling deep in Steve’s shadow. It had bothered him a lot when he was a kid. Except that Steve had always been good to him.

Nick poured coffee he’d brewed earlier, then opened the sliding glass door to let in the ocean breeze. He breathed in the unfamiliar salty air and listened to the squawk of the seagulls. They were loud scavengers, but they never pretended to be anything but.

The rhythmic ebb and flow of the waves rolling over the sand and even the annoying birds were somehow relaxing, so he left the door open and sat at his laptop. He didn’t have Angie’s Web address, but he knew it was part of the MyJournal community, so he started there.

After a half-dozen searches he found it. An entry dated today popped up and he frowned at the “Tribute.” The more he read the more uncomfortable he became. He wondered if the detectives had seen this.

He also wondered if one of the “S’s” was Steve. The older man. Coincidence? Maybe. But if the entry really was written by the victim’s friends, they would be here in San Diego. Nick didn’t believe it was a coincidence.

“I don’t make it a habit dating girls at the college. Angie was the only one.”

Nick’s heart sank as he realized Steve had probably lied to him. He hadn’t fully believed him at the time because Steve hadn’t looked him in the eye, but the evidence in front of him was still a blow.

Nick read as much of Angie’s journal as he could stomach, skimming most of it, until he found a few paragraphs in the middle of a long commentary about a variety of subjects. His heart twisted at the anguish in the few short lines.

I just received my first quarter report card. 4.0. That’s perfect. No one is surprised because I’ve always been a straight-A student. I couldn’t be anything but, right? I mean, people see what they want and we give them what they want to see.

Sometimes I want people to see the real me, to hear what I really say. But they don’t. This journal is a perfect example. Is this me? No, it’s not. It’s what you think I am, so I give it to you.

I don’t know me. I don’t think I ever have.

Hopeless. She sounded desperate and begging for something that even she couldn’t name. Her friends hadn’t seen it, and the men who lusted after her sexy writing certainly didn’t see it. Had Steve? Or had he been as blind as everyone else?

Nick focused next on the comments left by visitors to her site. Steve believed Angie’s killer had frequented her Web page. If that were the case, would he have commented? Positive or negative? There were several men who wanted her phone number. Some who wrote lewd descriptions of what they wanted to do with her. And many were downright mean.