B00B9FX0F2 EBOK (17 page)

T
here was an argument when it emerged that Troy wanted to go see Sully alone. “You didn’t even know Lacey,” he said, “and Sully will freak if a stranger shows up asking questions about one of his videos. Let me handle this.”

Jason told Troy he wouldn’t even know about the video if it weren’t for him, and besides, he had a right to know why Jenna was manipulating him. Troy scoffed at this line of reasoning, and then Jason bluffed. “You think Sully’s the only one with a camera phone? Jenna said following you was worthless unless we got proof.” He removed his phone from his pocket and held it under Troy’s nose. “Unless you want the entire Internet to see you crying like a child, Rakesh and I are coming along.”

Troy begrudgingly agreed after that, and Jason made a note to try blackmail again sometime.

And then they were in Troy’s car, barreling toward Brighton at fifteen miles above the speed limit. They picked up a pizza on the way, the hot cheese burning the roof of Jason’s mouth as he tore into it. Food kept the dizziness at bay, and filling his stomach provided a second wind.

“Who’s
we
?” he shouted over the B.o.B blasting from Troy’s speakers.

“What?” Troy answered.

“
We.
Jenna said ‘
we
needed your help’ in her text message. Who is she talking about?”

“I thought we agreed homegirl is crazy,” Rakesh said from the backseat. “She probably means Lacey. Or maybe she’s referring to an imaginary friend.”

Jason chewed, hesitant to voice his theory lest Troy throw him out of the car. But it was coming together in his mind. Luke and Jenna made the perfect team. They knew everything there was to know about Lacey. They had access to her history, her photographs, even what she was wearing when her body was found. Luke had known about Lacey and Troy, so he’d murdered Lacey and framed her boyfriend to get revenge. Jenna was jealous that her best friend was secretly dating the guy she’d been after since they were in middle school.

But Jason kept running up against the fact that Jenna didn’t seem capable of violence. That wasn’t misguided affection for her talking; he sensed deep in his gut there was something they were all missing. Jason was convinced that piece would explain his involvement, because so far nothing else had even come close to helping him understand what Jenna and Luke wanted with him.

Jenna’s messages kept creeping back into his head.
I’m so sorry, we needed your help. There was no other way.
No other way to what? His impulse to call her and hear her out may have been crazy, but it wasn’t going away.

“What did Sully say?” Jason asked, reaching into the backseat for another slice. “When you asked him about the video.”

“I told him I knew about the footage from the summer and I wanted to see it all. He texted me back and said I should come over.”

“Did he say ‘come over,’ like, ‘we’re friends, and I’ll show you anything you want to see,’ or was it, ‘come over,’ like, ‘come
over so I can tell you to your face why I’m not gonna give you the video?’”

“It was ‘come over’ like it was a text message. Look, when we get there, you have to relax with this Sherlock Holmes business. And unless you want to get beat up again, you better not say anything to him about Luke — Sully’s small, but he’s vicious.”

The food and darkness lulled Jason into a disoriented daze, and he couldn’t have said whether it was minutes or hours that passed before they arrived in Brighton. Climbing out of the car, he couldn’t believe it had only been this morning that he’d sprinted out of Jenna’s room; only two nights ago that he’d bonded with Jenna as they watched Troy. Like so many other things in Jason’s life, time had twisted into an unfamiliar force with questionable intentions.

Sully’s house was larger than Jenna’s, almost palatial. The three boys marched past a black BMW parked in the driveway and then the silver Lexus hidden behind it. John Sullivan. It was the sort of name that should have a number after it, and Jason guessed he probably did. When they reached a door in the back, Troy opened it without knocking and then turned to Jason and Rakesh and held a finger to his lips. They followed him up two dark staircases, Jason clutching the banister to guide him. When they reached the brightly lit third floor, a stocky guy in sweatpants and a Giants T-shirt looked up from the enormous TV he was sprawled in front of.

“Who are they?” he asked, nodding in Jason’s direction. His voice was instantly recognizable from the video.

“Jason, Rakesh, this is Sully.”

Sully lumbered to his feet and surveyed them. Jason tried to picture how he must look through someone else’s eyes: His hair, he was sure, was sticking out in a million directions, and his bruised face couldn’t be helping with his credibility. Next to him, Rakesh, slender, striking, held his shoulders back and stared Sully down defiantly. Sully didn’t flinch.

“What can I do for you, Troy?” he drawled, eyes lingering on Rock.

“Where’s the video?”

“Now, what video could you be talking about?”

“Sully, I swear, don’t mess with me. I saw the video you made from that night at Luke’s. I want to know what you did with it.”

“Oh, you mean the video where you humiliate Luke’s sister in front of all of his friends? That one?”

“I never humilia …” Sully’s face lit up with glee at the response, and Troy composed himself, shoving his hands into his pockets. It reminded Jason of the person he’d seen in Sully’s home movie — all controlled fury, none of the weepiness Troy had displayed so unabashedly. It was like with Jenna: You think you see someone, and then the light shifts, and they have a whole new face. “What’d you do with it?”

“How about you explain something to me first? Did you really think no one was gonna find out? That using that Max kid was going to work as an excuse forever? Please. You think you and Lacey were being so stealthy, but
everyone
knew.”

“What do you care?”

“That’s my team, man! Gray was going to find out, and he was going to kill you, and it was going to kill our season.”

Typical
, Jason thought.
A girl is dead, I’m being stalked by a psycho, and he’s talking about lacrosse. Glad we’ve all got our priorities straight
. But Troy was unfazed. “What’d you do with it?” he asked again.

“I should be asking you the same question.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t have the video, Troy. I haven’t had it since I lost my phone. So do you want to tell me how you somehow managed to watch it? Let me guess, it has something to do with these clowns.” He sneered at Rakesh, but it was Jason who answered him.

“When’d you lose your phone?”

Sully took a step toward him. “September.”

“What happened?”

“I left it in my book bag during practice, and when we were done, it was gone. Probably Hugo.”

“Who’s Hugo?”

“The retarded janitor.”

“Jesus, Sully.” Troy rolled his eyes exasperatedly. “Hugo’s not retarded. And he didn’t steal your phone.”

“Because you did?”

Jason interrupted again. “Who else had access to the locker room? Did anyone know what was on there?”

For the first time, Sully actually looked him in the eye. “Other than Hugo and the coaches, no one goes in the locker room while we’re in practice. Except sometimes the coaches give their keys to the captains. Like Palmer here.”

“Or like Luke Gray?” Jason had ignored Troy’s warning not to ask questions, and now he was violating the second rule. “Could he have stolen your phone?”

“Relax, Jason,” Troy said sharply as Sully’s face darkened with anger. “You, too, Sully.”

“Don’t freaking tell me to relax. You bring this tool into my house, you let him talk about Luke like this. Seriously, who are you?”

Now he got in Jason’s face, and Rakesh quickly stepped in. “Your boy Luke caught me by surprise yesterday, but if I’d seen him coming, he’d be a dead man right now. You will, too, if you step to my friend again.”

Jason felt a surge of gratitude, followed by an urge to laugh. Rakesh was always talking about fighting guys, but until yesterday, Jason was pretty sure it had never actually happened. Strangely enough, Sully retreated, though he continued to glare at Jason.

“Dude, I’m not trying to fight you,” Jason said. “And I mean no disrespect, but I found the video in Luke’s glove compartment — and …”

“Oh, you’re the one who broke into his car?” Sully started toward him again, but Troy restrained him.

The words kept spilling out of Jason’s mouth. “If you care about Luke and your
team
at all, you’ll tell me what you know, because otherwise I’ll go to the police and tell them Luke killed his sister, and your season will be over.” It was a wild bluff, but Jason’s poker face was getting better. Sully looked nervously from Troy to Jason, briefly at Rakesh, and then back to Troy.

“Is that what happened?” He was starting to break, Jason could tell.

“What aren’t you telling us, Sully?”

He sank into the couch and placed his hands on his knees.

“He didn’t need the video, man. He already knew.”

“What do you mean?”

Sully’s eyes kept darting between his visitors, like a trapped animal looking for an escape route. “I tried to cover for you,” he said to Troy. “I told him I heard something about his sister and that punk Max. I mean, I thought you were going to hit it and quit it like everyone else did.” Troy charged toward him, and Sully leapt to his feet, ready to fight, but he was quickly overpowered. Troy’s fist hovered in the air while he used his other hand to hold Sully down.

“Say another word about Lacey, and I’ll make sure you never walk again, you smarmy little daddy’s boy.” His voice was quiet, but sharp enough to cut glass. “Now tell me when you talked to Luke about it.”

Sully stared up at him defiantly. Troy knocked his head against the floor and growled, “
When?
”

Beaten, Sully muttered, “The day before Roxy Choi’s party.”

The buzzing from Jason’s pocket was right on cue. Jenna. Again. He pressed ignore, but a minute later it started to ring again. Rakesh couldn’t keep the smugness out of his voice when he asked Troy whether he still believed Luke was innocent. Troy shot him a withering glance and then released his grip on Sully and stood up.

“You think it was Luke?” he asked.

The phone in his hand flashed that Jenna had left another voice mail. Sully lumbered to his feet. “When did you replace your phone?” Jason asked quietly.

He scoffed. “The day after I lost it. I can’t live without a phone.”

Jenna’s words came back to him.
John Sullivan … He’s on the lacrosse team and he’s always got his camera out. It’s so annoying.

“Did you film anything the night of Roxy’s party?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean you don’t remember?”

He laughed drily but no one joined him. “That night was kind of a blur.”

Troy smacked him on the back of the head, and Sully’s hand shot out in a jab, but Troy was out of the way.

Rakesh and Jason exchanged an uneasy glance. Rakesh voiced the question for both of them. “Yo, is drinking some sort of capital crime in Brighton?”

“During the season it is,” Troy answered, still glaring at Sully.

“Well, can you check? Would you still have it?”

“I never delete anything.” He moved to the gleaming monitor in the corner. “After my phone disappeared, I started backing everything up.” Sully clicked through his hard drive, and asked Troy if he remembered what night the party had been.

“October fourth,” he said quickly.

“What do we have here?” Sully said. He opened the video, and they assembled behind him, attention fixed on the screen.

At first it was a party, like any other party. A few kids told Sully to piss off, someone gave him the finger, and from the side of the frame, you could see him returning the gesture. “Hate that kid,” he muttered. The air went out of the room the moment Lacey appeared on the screen. She’d looked so happy and alive in the other video, but here her expression was tired and drawn, distress visible in all of her movements.
What was she so upset about?
Jason wondered. She fingered her
necklace distractedly as her eyes wandered around the room, and then Troy was at her side. He leaned over and said something into her ear, then she strode off as he followed closely behind her, looking around him to make sure he wasn’t being watched, somehow missing Sully and his camera.

“This was right before she told me we had to tell Luke,” Troy explained. “We went up to the balcony to talk.”

Sully began to wander around the house. In the living room, he focused on a couple, apparently underclassmen, kissing on the sofa. Rakesh burst out laughing as the girl looked up, mortification all over her face. “Turn that off,” she protested, but Sully just laughed and walked away.

“Classy,” Jason said sarcastically.

Sully held up his hands defensively, “Hey, I wasn’t the one going at it on someone else’s couch.”

And then suddenly Jenna was on camera, in a doorway, checking her phone. She looked up and saw Sully coming toward her. “Hey, have you seen Lacey?” she asked.

“Yeah, she went upstairs with
Troy
,” he slurred.

“Why are you always trying to start something?” She reached out and batted the camera away. “Turn that thing off.” For whatever reason, Sully complied.

“That must have been right before she came upstairs,” Troy said.

“Yeah, but did you see how confused she was when Sully was trying to tell her you guys were together? I don’t think she knew.” Hope flickered inside of Jason. He wanted so much to be wrong about Jenna.

“Maybe Lacey told her when they were alone.”

Jason tried to focus. There was something off about it. “Sully, is there more?”

“Yeah, I have two other videos from that night. Now I sort of remember taping that one, but the rest of that party is pretty hazy. I have no idea what happened.”

“Let’s find out.”