1st Case Read online

  I was actually only two months into a graduate master’s program in Computation for Design and Optimization. But I thought it better not to point that out. The less we talked about it, the sooner I’d be out of there.

  Then again, my mother doesn’t tolerate being ignored any better than I do. I had to say something.

  “I don’t think this program was right for me,” I told her.

  “That’s bull crap,” Hannah blurted out. “You said this program was made for you.”

  “Yeah, exactly,” I said. “As in, I could teach this stuff.”

  That part was true. I’m not an egotist, but I’m not afraid of facts, either.

  The facts were that I’d been one of the three youngest people admitted to the Boston Mensa chapter when I was four years old. I’d graduated high school with a 4.5 GPA, and I’d sailed through my undergrad years at Carnegie Mellon. I hadn’t been retested for IQ since I was twelve, but the number back then was 180 on the nose. That doesn’t make me a better person, but it’s not something I try to hide, either.

  “So you get yourself thrown out?” Mom said. “This is the solution?”

  I just looked at her. She knew it was more complicated than that, even if I wasn’t sharing the particulars. I hated leaving Mom so far out of the loop. It was just that the alternative—going into all the gory details of my academic demise—was an even more embarrassing prospect. Maybe I could come a little cleaner after the smoke had been clear for a few days. But in the meantime, I was all about making the quickest possible exit.

  And before I had to manufacture anything else to fill that increasingly uncomfortable silence, the door to the hall banged open. My suite mate, A.A. Wang, was standing there now, heaving for breath like she’d sprinted the length of MIT’s famous Infinite Corridor.

  “I just heard,” she said. “What the f …” She trailed off with a flick of her eyes in Sylvie and Hannah’s direction. “Hi, girls. Hi, Mrs. Hoot.”

  “A.A., thank God you’re here,” Mom said. “Could you please shed some light? My charming daughter seems to be suffering from some kind of selective amnesia.”

  “She doesn’t know any more than you do,” I lied. “Leave A.A. alone.”

  A.A.’s birth name is Melanie, but she’s a gigantic Winnie-the-Pooh fan, which is also to say an A.A. Milne fan. She took the name for her own in second grade, and it just stuck. My sisters absolutely idolized her, from the tips of her tattooed eyeliner to the toes of her fabulous shoe collection. Truth be told, I idolized her a little myself.

  “Why are you just standing in the hall?” Sylvie asked.

  Which is when I got the signal that A.A. had been not so subtly sending my way.

  “Mom?” I said. “Can you and the girls take these last boxes down? I’ll bring my bike and meet you at the car.”

  Mom begrudgingly accepted the box I held out, but her eyes were still on A.A. “She tells you anything, you call me,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” A.A. answered. She and my mother were practically friends on their own, for better or worse. I loved them both to pieces. Just not always in the same room at the same time, when they could gang up on me.

  “See you downstairs, Lisa,” I tried, and hip-checked her toward the door.

  “A mother cares,” Mom said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  A.A. said her own good-byes then, but the smile she gave the girls never quite reached her eyes. She just waited until Mom, Sylvie, and Hannah had cleared out, then closed the door and turned to face me again.

  Here it came.

  “What the hell, Angela?” she said. “You just shot your own career in the head.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “And it’s all my fault,” A.A. went on.

  “Wrong again,” I said. “Nobody did this but me. And that asshole deserved everything he got. I regret nothing.”

  She looked hurt.

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but I’ll only be a few minutes away.”

  A.A. didn’t answer. I guess I wasn’t the only one who could wield a strategic silence, because I was feeling guiltier by the second.

  “Has he texted you?” I asked.

  “Only about eighteen times,” she said.

  “And?”

  “I didn’t answer,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Knowing him, it’ll only take another thirty-two tries before he gets it.”

  “He’s really pissed, you know,” she said. “He had to replace his whole hard drive.”

  I could tell A.A. was fighting between tears and laughter at that point, but her face darkened when she met my eyes again. I stared back, waiting for the inquisition, part two.

  “What’s wrong with you, Angela?” she said. “Real question.”

  “Where should I start?” I asked, but A.A. didn’t even crack a smile. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “No. You’re not, and don’t try to tell me you are,” she shot back. “You’re crazy like a rooster in a cage, and I don’t get it.”

  A.A. knew me well. Sometimes too well. It’s the cost of a real friendship. The whole thing was like a giant paradox, because everything really was fine, and everything really was a complete mess, all at the same time.

  “I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Just not today. Okay?”

  “Angela—” she said before I kissed her. Not on the cheek. On the mouth, just to shut her up. It was either that or we were both going to start crying, and one of the many things A.A. and I shared was a complete distaste for cheap drama. So I kept things moving instead.

  “I’ll talk to you soon,” I said. Then I grabbed my bike off the wall and wheeled it out the door.

  “Hey!” she called after me. “You left your crew shirt.”

  “Keep it,” I said just before the door swung shut behind me.

  CHAPTER 5

  THAT VERY EVENING, I was summoned to Eve Abajian’s town house for what I could only assume would be a world-class dressing down. Eve was the person I most dreaded talking to about the MIT “situation,” even worse than telling my parents. I didn’t know how she’d already heard about it, but Eve always had a lot of ears to the ground.

  “What in the blue hell, Angela?” she said over the intercom at her front door.

  “I brought food!” I answered. Eve and I shared a certain obsession with the fried chicken and ginger waffles from Myers and Chang, not far from her place in South Boston. It was like bringing a water pistol to a gunfight, but it was all I had.

  When I didn’t get any answer, or even a buzz-in, I beeped myself through with the keypad and headed inside to face the music. I knew this had to happen, sooner or later. Emphasis on the sooner. Eve Abajian was not one to be kept waiting.

  Eve was also the one who got me into MIT in the first place. I’d met her when I was sixteen, at the summer robotics program there, where she taught coding and applied theory as a volunteer instructor. Ever since, she’d been a mentor to me, steering me toward Carnegie Mellon and then putting in a strongest-possible word with the graduate admissions committee back at MIT after that.

  In other words, everything Eve had spent the last six years helping me accomplish had just gotten rerouted straight down the toilet. I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation.

  As I came up and into the town house’s main living space on the second floor, I saw that Eve was parked behind her four-screen array. I could barely see her for all the equipment, which was just as well. Even the sound of her keyboarding was angry.

  I paused there, not really sure how to proceed. When the silence stretched on for an uncomfortably long time and I still wasn’t sure what to say, I took the food into the kitchen and started plating it up. Maybe I could still ply Eve with a little sweet and salty deliciousness.

  “Do you want to hear my side, or just yell at me first?” I called out from the safety of the galley kitchen.

  “You know you could
have had your pick of jobs in two years?” Eve said. “With a fat paycheck, too.”

  “Yeah, doing incident response for some Fortune 500 company,” I said. “Making sure the employees at GE stay off the porn during the workday. No, thank you.”

  “Excuse me, but you don’t get to be the smartest one in the room. Not tonight,” she said. She still wouldn’t even look at me when I glanced out toward her workspace. Another silence settled over us, and I was starting to feel genuinely guilty now.

  But then, when Eve deigned to speak again, the conversation took an unexpected turn. In the best possible way.

  “Lay off the garlic sauce with dinner,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said. We were both complete devotees of that garlicky concoction. “Why would I ever do that?”

  “Because you have an interview tomorrow morning at eight thirty, and nobody wants to smell garlic at that hour,” Eve said.

  My mind spun, processing this new information, or at least trying to. Eve was one of the few people on the planet who always managed to stay a step or two ahead of me.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, loading two plates with a little of everything, one of them minus the sauce. “Where am I interviewing?”

  As I carried the plates out to the living room, she sat back in her black Aeron chair and really met my eyes for the first time.

  “At my office,” she said.

  “Your office?” I asked. “As in the Boston field office of the FBI?”

  It was a dumb question, and she didn’t bother to answer it.

  “You’ll be meeting Assistant Special Agent in Charge Billy Keats, and I’m not sure who else. But you need to be ready.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. Dumb question number two. It was just such a surprise. “I mean … wow. I mean …”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a little early for any happy dances, but this was amazing news.

  “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “It’s not a job. It’s an internship,” she said.

  “Paid?” I asked.

  “Don’t push it, but yes,” Eve answered. “It’s supposed to be reserved for active students, so you’re welcome for that, too.”

  “Will I be working with you?” I asked. This was getting better by the second.

  “I’m only there a few more weeks before Guatemala. Then I go out on maternity,” she said.

  Eve was waiting on the birth of a little girl in Guatemala City, through an international adoption agency out of Phoenix. Within the month, she was going to be a first-time mom. I guess when she didn’t meet Mr. Right On Time, she did what people like us always do: she hacked a solution.

  It seemed safe enough to approach the rest of the way now. I finally put a plate of chicken and waffles in front of her and sat with my own in one of the guest chairs.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” I asked.

  “I’m not doing it for you,” she said. “This is to make sure that ridiculous brain of yours gets put to good use in the world. And I don’t mean making lattes at Starbucks.”

  I smiled around a bite of waffle. Eve’s praise was like gold: valuable and rare. She’s not the touchy-feely, hug-it-out type, but neither am I. It was embarrassing, how much I wanted to be exactly like her.

  “Thank you, Eve,” I said. “Really.”

  “You can thank me by not screwing it up,” she said. “This is your last favor, and probably one more than you deserve.”

  “So, you’re saying I have to settle for a spot at the FBI?” I asked, still grinning in spite of myself.

  “I’m saying I got you in the door,” she told me. “But you’re starting somewhere back of square one. Disciplinary action at MIT doesn’t exactly bolster your application.”

  “I’ve got this,” I said.

  She didn’t contradict me, and I looked down at my food just to keep from showing her how freaking excited I was already. I think I still owed her a little back payment of contrition, but that could come later.

  “What exactly am I going to be doing, anyway?” I asked.

  Eve went back to her keyboarding.

  “Probably just basic penetration testing to start,” she said. “But mark my words, Angela. You play your cards right at the Bureau, and things could get very interesting for someone like you, very fast.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WITHIN AN HOUR of arriving at the scene of the Petty murders, I was holed up in the Mobile Forensic Laboratory, or the M-LAB, parked on the curb. It’s just a big white van on the outside, but inside it’s a state-of-the-art facility.

  I was still getting used to the whole “Angela Hoot at the FBI” role. Part of me was waiting for one of the “real” grown-ups to open the van door and shoo me out of there. But in the meantime, I’d get down to work.

  I started with a basic search, looking at incoming and outgoing calls, texts, and saved images on my copy of Gwen Petty’s phone. I also checked her contact list, bookmarks, and surfing history, but it didn’t turn up anything relevant.

  The next step was a full physical extraction of any hidden, deleted, or corrupted files on the operating system. That was going to take a significantly longer time than the first pass, but it was also an automated process, which meant I could start multitasking my way through this.

  Once I got that scan going, I set aside the phone and did a basic social media analysis on Gwen. That’s where I could really start to get an idea of who she was. Or at least what kind of tracks she’d left behind.

  The email associated with her phone turned up active accounts on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Kik, and Pinterest. Besides the usual selfies, I saw a lot of the same friends in her photos—on the bus to a field hockey game, on the beach at the Cape, dressed up for prom. There was no boyfriend, as far as I could tell, except for a guy who showed up in a spate of tagged photos from the previous summer, a kid named Drew Pintone. I stared at his picture for a long time. Could this ordinary-looking kid be the monster we were looking for? It seemed pretty unlikely. Then again, so did everything that had happened in the Petty home that night. I wrote the boy’s name down for Keats, in any case, and pressed on.

  It was a shitty feeling, going through all of Gwen’s stuff like this. I understood the necessity, but what teenage girl wants her private life pried open for the world to see? I couldn’t change what had happened. In fact, I reminded myself over and over, I was at least helping to do something about it. But still, I felt racked with guilt and finally let myself cry for a few minutes. Right up until Keats came out to check on me.

  “What have we got so far?” he asked. I had my back to him at first and made a quick swipe at my face before I turned around. If he noticed my red eyes, he didn’t say so.

  I gave Keats a quick lowdown and explained that it was going to be several hours before I’d have a full finished scan of Gwen’s phone. I also told him about Drew Pintone, just in case.

  “Yeah, we know about that kid,” Keats said. “He’s a nonstarter, been living in Michigan since September. What we’re actually looking for is an adult male. Someone at least in his twenties, if not older.”

  “Does that mean you have a suspect?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

  But my brain was already spinning around this new piece of information. There had to be a reason Keats knew something about who he was looking for. And in fact, I realized, it was probably what had brought the FBI—federal authorities—to this crime scene in the first place.

  “This isn’t the first case, is it?” I asked.

  I couldn’t tell if Keats was annoyed, impressed, or both. But he nodded.

  “Binghamton, Albany, and now here,” he said.

  Even as the words came out of his mouth, the gravity of the situation registered in my gut. This meant more murders. More dead families. And maybe more to come, too.

  “Angela?” Keats’s voice pulled me back, and I looked up again. “Eve said she thought you could
handle this. It’s your call, but you should tell me now if you can’t.”

  Out of respect for the Petty family, I didn’t give a knee-jerk “I’m fine” in response. I really did think about it and took my time answering.

  “I can do this,” I said. “Also, I want to.”

  “Good,” he said, and turned to leave.

  “Did you say Eve recommended me?” I asked before he could slip out of the mobile unit. I’d suspected Eve had put in a good word after my interview, but it was nice to get the confirmation.

  “Don’t let your head get too big,” Keats said. “She also told me you had a checkered history at MIT.” I could tell he was trying to lighten things up by getting a rise out of me. I appreciated it.

  “And you still trust me?” I asked, half joking.

  “I trust Eve,” he said in all seriousness, and I could tell the moment of levity had passed.

  In other words, I was still proving myself here. Not that I minded. I was just glad to know where I stood.

  It was time to get back to work.

  CHAPTER 7

  BY THE END of the day, I’d finished everything there was to do at the Petty home in Lincoln and leapfrogged back to my little gray cubicle in the field office downtown. There was still a mountain of work to do, given all the electronics they’d pulled out of the Petty home, and I threw myself into it. Day stretched into night. And night stretched into late night.

  I wasn’t naive about the work they did at the FBI. But even so, I felt like I was staring into some unknowably dark abyss. What sort of monster killed entire families?

  The whole thing made me want to call my mom, like I was a homesick college freshman all over again. It was probably just as well that it was one in the morning by then. So instead I called A.A., who I knew had Red Bull running through her veins.

  Sure enough, she answered on the first ring.

  “What’s up, Piglet?”

  “Hey, Pooh Bear,” I said.