"Can you spare me another minute?" Maggie asked.
Frowning, Sally sat down where Kevin had been. Maggie sipped her beer and kept her eyes on Sally. The girl watched her nervously. When Maggie put the mug down, she put a hand over Sally's on the table. Sally looked at her, confused and afraid. The feisty jealous girl was gone.
"Do you want to tell me about it, Sally?" Maggie asked quietly.
Sally tried to act surprised. "I don't understand. Tell you what?"
"Come on," Maggie said. "Kevin's not here anymore. Your parents aren't around. It's just us girls. You can tell me."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Maggie gripped her hand tightly now. "Something happened to you. I mentioned the barn, and you practically fainted. You've been there, haven't you? Look, I'm not judging you. But if you were out there and someone took advantage of you, I have to know."
Sally shook her head. "It wasn't like that."
"You don't need to make excuses for me. I'm a sister, okay? I know what men can be like."
"I don't want to get anyone in trouble," Sally said. "I never thought it was anything important. I mean, I'd pretty much forgotten about it. And even when they said Rachel's bracelet was found at the barn, well, I didn't think there could be any connection."
"Tell me what happened," Maggie urged her.
Sally sighed. "I never told Kevin. I never told anyone."
"That's okay. You can tell me. I can help, you know?"
She watched the tangled emotions in the girl's face. "Do you really think it could be important?" Sally asked. "It's just too crazy."
Maggie wanted to tear the words out of the girl's throat, but she patiently caressed Sally's hand and waited.
Sally's lower lip trembled. "About six months ago, I was biking out in the countryside north of town. I drive out there sometimes and park, so I can bike on the back roads. It's always really deserted on Sunday mornings, so I thought it would be all right."
Maggie leaned forward. Oh, God, it wasn't a boyfriend. It was a psycho. Damn, damn, damn. She thought about Kerry McGrath, and she tried to let her eyes communicate the message. That was stupid, girlie.
"And?" Maggie said.
"My bike busted a chain. Someone picked me up."
"Someone?"
Sally nodded. "I mean, I knew him, so I wasn't scared."
"You went with him voluntarily?" Maggie asked.
"Yeah. I was miles from my car."
"Did he try something on you?"
Sally hesitated. "Sort of. Well, no, not really. But he stopped at the barn."
Bells began going off in Maggie's head. She could feel goose bumps rising on her skin, the way they always did just before a case blew wide open. Finally, finally, they were going to get answers.
"What happened, Sally?"
Sally swallowed hard. She stared down at her hands folded in her lap. Suddenly, she seemed very young. It was strange, Maggie thought, how these teenagers could pretend to be so adult and mature, and then when you scratched the surface, they became children again.
"We were just talking. He told me how nice I looked. He said it was a really hot outfit I was wearing, that I was obviously in great shape. He just seemed way too-serious, I guess. It started out harmless, but after a while it got creepy."
Maggie nodded. "Okay, what happened next?"
"Well, we were getting near the road that led to the barn. He asked me if I'd ever been there. I said no, I hadn't He was teasing, saying we should check and see if anyone was making out there. And then he really turned. He started heading there. I was freaking out."
"Did you say anything?"
Sally shook her head. "I was too scared."
"So he drove you to the barn," Maggie said.
"Yeah. He pulled in behind it. I was ready to run. But he didn't try anything. He just kept talking, small talk, you know. It was like he was trying to decide if he was going to make a move on me."
"Were you afraid he was going to rape you?" Maggie asked.
"I don't know what I thought. I mean, it was really weird."
"But nothing actually happened."
Sally nodded. "Another car pulled in behind us. So he took off. It was like he didn't want to be recognized, you know? He hardly said a word to me the rest of the way, just took me back to my car and dropped me off. That was it."
"Nothing actually happened between you?"
Sally shook her head. "No. Like I said, I was sure he was going to try something. But after it was over, I began to think I was just being stupid."
Maggie took one of Sally's hands. "I really need you to tell me who it was."
"I know," Sally said. "I thought about coming forward before, but-I didn't really think it was important. I guess I had just convinced myself I was crazy, you know? He didn't really mean anything."
"Now you don't think so."
"I don't know. I really don't know."
"Okay," Maggie said. "Did anyone see the two of you together? Did you recognize the car that came in behind you?"
Sally shook her head. "We were out of there so quickly."
"Tell me, Sally. I won't let him hurt you. Who was it?"
Sally bent closer and whispered a name in Maggie's ear.
Maggie immediately pulled her cell phone out of her coat and dialed Stride's number.
16
Stride left city hall and stopped by the hospital on Monday night, but he discovered that Emily Stoner had been released an hour earlier, accompanied by Dayton Tenby. He wasn't surprised when he heard of her suicide attempt. He knew this was the most dangerous time, right after a parent or a spouse found out the truth, after weeks or months of fruitless longing for a miracle. The reality, hitting like a wrecking ball, sometimes was too much to bear.
He chose not to visit the Stoner household that night. There was nothing more he could tell them now, and he assumed the doctors would have ordered Emily straight to bed. He had already told Graeme by phone of the one significant discovery at the barn, a piece of bloody fabric that might be linked to Rachel.
He headed for home.
The roads were thick with slush. Snow had been falling all day, piling up on the streets and in the woods surrounding the city. The search at the barn continued, but at an agonizingly slow pace. His officers worked with ice hanging from their mustaches and cold seeping into the leather of their boots. They dug, scratched, and cursed the snow. They had begun another, more ominous search, too. Working with a cluster of volunteers from the surrounding area, they began fanning out into the woods around the barn, searching for Rachel's body. They penetrated the snow with ski poles and dug down whenever they found something unusual hidden below. Using walkie-talkies, they communicated their progress to Guppo in the police van. He mapped out a new search grid on a laptop.
Stride held out little hope they would find anything. The vastness of the northern woods worked to the benefit of murderers, who had thousands of square miles of forest in which to dispose of a body. Most of the time, the victims disappeared, and that was that. Like Kerry McGrath. They were out there somewhere, either buried or simply dumped far from the nearest road, easy targets for the animals that would come and desecrate their corpses. He shuddered to think of Rachel suffering the same fate. But the scope of the land and the crush of snow made him doubtful that they would ever find anything except that one scrap of white cloth to prove that Rachel was dead.
Stride pulled out his cellular phone. He noticed the battery was nearly gone. He had forgotten to take an extra battery from his desk, but he was almost home anyway. He punched in the number for his voice mail and listened to his messages.
The first one was from Maggie, at about two o'clock in the afternoon. It was short and sweet. "You suck, boss."
He laughed, imagining how her interviews at the high school had gone.
The second message was from the lab, about an hour earlier. They had confirmed the stain on the fabric was human blood, and they had matched it to type AB, Rachel's blood type. The DNA tests were still to come.