Sketchy Behavior (17 page)

“Can you turn on the radio?”

He flipped it on and it was tuned to the local country station, and I had to wonder about the detective’s musical tastes. This wasn’t cool country like Rascal Flatts.

This was old-school country, like whatever the guy’s name was who had the long, gray hair and wore old blankets around.

Dad started humming along and settled back in his chair contentedly. “See? This was the era of good music.”

“Agreed,” Detective Masterson said.

I looked at my mom, who was rolling her eyes. Mom tends to be very modern-day with her musical choices. She worked out to the Black Eyed Peas and Justin Timberlake.

I told Maddy that and she’s thought my mom was the coolest mom ever since then. Apparently, her mom doesn’t work out and the only music she ever listens to is the commercial medleys between talk show hosts.

Mom always said that the eighties were a period of horrific hairstyles and much-too-short shorts for men, so why in the world did anyone assume that those same people who created those styles could create quality music? Her case in point was Madonna, but I would have used someone like Boy George.

He was just plain weird.

Two hours later, we were passing the signs for Columbia, Missouri, when Detective Masterson put his blinker on and exited the freeway.

I perked up. I’d been staring out the window without really watching the scenery, trying to block out the old-timer country music.

We were going to Columbia?

He kept driving through the town and turned right on a tiny two-lane road that went on and on for miles. All around us were trees, hills, and more trees. And the trees got thicker the farther we drove.

Detective Masterson made several more turns and finally
stopped in front of a tiny house in the middle of a clearing that was pretty much in the middle of a forest.

“Welcome to your hopefully temporary home,” Detective Masterson said, putting the Yukon in park and turning off the engine.

The house looked creepy. I stared at it through the windshield. It was small and square and looked like it could have been the hideout for the Unabomber at one point.

Everyone climbed out, and I stepped out of the car onto a carpet of pine needles. The trees were ginormous and I wondered at what point the little house had last seen daylight. Between the thick trees, hardly any sun made it through to the ground.

Birds were chirping, but other than that, it was totally silent.

I shivered, creeped out again.

Dad picked up his and Mom’s suitcases, and Detective Masterson grabbed his and mine before heading up to the front porch of the house. He unlocked the front door, and it squealed in protest as it opened.

“Come on in,” he said, leading the way and flicking on lights as he went.

The house was tiny. There was a living room and kitchen directly off the front door. Then a short hallway and three miniature bedrooms. Orange shag carpeting covered everything but the kitchen. Detective Masterson set my suitcase on the creaky twin bed in the last bedroom. “Might as well get comfortable, Kate.”

I looked around the room. Everything had dark wood paneling covering it, even the closet doors. The bedspread on the bed was an ivory-colored quilt. There was a short dresser in the room and no other furniture.

I walked back into the family room, where Detective Masterson was talking quietly on his cell phone.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” He saw me come in and waved to me. “I’ll tell her, sir. All right. Bye.” He closed the phone, pocketed it, and
looked at me. “I need to show you something that this house has.” He pointed to the kitchen, and I followed him in there.

The kitchen was old. Old orange linoleum, old appliances, old dark wood paneling everywhere.

Detective Masterson knelt down in front of the sink. “See this?” he pointed up under the countertop. I bent over.

A small white button was there.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s a silent alarm. There’s one in every bedroom, two in here and two in the living room. If you push that button, a team from the FBI will be here in the next four and a half minutes.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“If anything feels even off to you, you come find me. If you can’t find me for whatever reason, you push that button. Got it?” He was looking at me very seriously.

I nodded again. “Got it.”

“I’ll show you where all the buttons are.”

He took me on a tour around the house and pointed out every hidden button. I never would have seen them if they hadn’t been pointed out to me.

“How often do you guys use this house?” I asked.

“This is the first time our department’s ever had to use it,” Detective Masterson said when we got back into the living room. “But it’s open to all police and FBI in the Missouri area.”

“And when was the last time someone thought about updating it?” I asked, poking at one of the yellowing lace curtains over the front window.

He grinned. “You don’t like it?” He looked around, smiling. “I guess it could use a little sprucing. Hopefully we won’t be here long enough to pull out the home décor books though. And really, it is pretty up to date.” He pointed to the window. “All the glass in here? Bulletproof. And the alarm system, of course. And there’s a sensor that tracks body heat that is within the five miles surrounding this place. All those gadgets are in my room.”

“What about bears?” I asked.

“What about them?”

“Do they come close to the house?”

He shrugged. “They’ve never hurt anyone if they do.”

Not quite the answer I was looking for. I’d seen a documentary on TV one time about a man who tamed bears and fed them on his land, and he was trying to tell the world that they really were just nice, cuddly creatures, but I had a hard time believing him.

Sort of like when people have told me that rats make good pets. I just don’t believe them. Rats are disgusting.

I sat down on the olive green and orange-striped couch and looked at the TV. It had a dial on it.

Dad and Mom came out into the living room then.

“Wow, I haven’t seen a TV like that since college,” Dad said, excitedly. He reached over and twisted a knob, and the TV blinked a few times and then came on to pure static.

“Yeah, about the TV,” Detective Masterson said. “I think since we are so thick into these trees, only a few channels make it through.”

Dad twisted the knob around, and Mom joined me on the couch.

A couple of minutes later, a baseball game flickered through the static. Dad was overjoyed.

“Look at this, Claire!” he said, sitting down next to Mom. “Kate, this was what TV was for us when we were little kids. None of this flatscreen HD madness. Just good old-fashioned rabbit ears.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said. I was a little distracted by the pitcher’s head moving from right to left across the screen without bringing his body with it.

I got up from the couch and went to get my sketchbook. The only place to draw was on the kitchen table, so I sat down and pulled out my rubber-banded pencils.

Detective Masterson was standing in the kitchen, checking out the contents in the fridge.

“No food?” I asked.

“Oh, there’s food. The guys in Columbia stocked it for us before we got here.” He pulled out a big jug of chocolate milk. “Want a glass?”

I couldn’t even remember the last time I had chocolate milk. Probably since before Mom’s big health kick. I started nodding.

He poured two glasses and then sat down at the table with me, passing my cup over.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

I shrugged. I had been working on his face, but I’d left that sketchbook in Deputy Slalom’s office. “I don’t know,” I said. Maybe I’d draw my parents now. Or the pitcher with the wavy head.

“So, I got you something,” he said. “Before I knew we were coming here, but I did pack it in my suitcase, so hang on a second.”

He disappeared down the hallway and came back with a thin box. Sitting back down at the table, he passed it over to me.

NIV Bible
.

I frowned. It seemed like the box holding the Bible might be spell-checked more carefully. What in the world was a “Niv”?

“You don’t have to read it,” he said, watching my face. “I just thought with some of the questions you’ve been asking me, and your mom trying to get you guys to go to church more, that you might need a Bible.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What’s a ‘niv’?”

“A niv?” he parroted confusedly and then looked at the box. “Oh! NIV? That means New International Version.”

“Oh,” I said. I opened the box and the Bible was thin and on the smaller side, covered in soft, buttery-smooth brown leather.

It was nothing like the incredibly bulky and heavy Bibles I’d seen at South Woodhaven Falls First Baptist.

“Thanks, Detective Masterson,” I said, smiling at him.

“You’re welcome. And I would start in Luke, by the way,” he said. “This isn’t like a normal book where you start at the beginning and work your way through.”

I nodded.

Dad stood up. “Okay, his head is making me crazy,” he said, fiddling with the rabbit ears on the back of the TV.

Now the pitcher’s head was standing still, but his body was moving back and forth.

“HD TV is looking pretty good right now, huh, sweetie?” Mom said, and I could hear the mocking grin in her voice.

It could be a long time in this tiny house.

F
IVE DAYS PASSED VERY SLOWLY. BY THE END OF THE SECOND
day, Dad had rigged an entire coat hanger system over the TV, and we then had about fifteen more channels than we originally had and no more fuzzy heads.

Mom had paced the short length from the front living room window to the back kitchen window two hundred and seventeen times. Then she started doing lunges from the back window to the front window.

Detective Masterson spent most of the time reading. I’d discovered he was a Clive Cussler fan. The only thing I knew about Clive Cussler was that the movie
Sahara
with Matthew McConaughey was based on one of his books.

I wasn’t really a Matthew McConaughey fan. He was shirtless too much of the time.

I alternated between working on pictures of Mom and Dad while munching on Chips Ahoy and taking naps, since I still wasn’t sleeping at night.

The house was starting to feel smaller and smaller.

Wednesday morning at two fifteen, I was still staring up at the ceiling with bleary eyes. When we’d first gotten there, the room had been pitch black at night, because there weren’t any streetlights like at home to give a comforting glow to the room.

After the first night of no sleeping, Detective Masterson handed me a night-light to plug in.

I felt like a wimp for needing a night-light to sleep. I was, after all, sixteen years old, and night-lights were typically used with what? Two-year-olds?

Next thing I knew, I’d be asking for a blanket and a binky.

The night-light helped though. Obviously I still wasn’t sleeping, but at least I wasn’t laying in bed with my heart pounding wondering if there was someone in my closet or not.

I slept with my closet doors open too.

I looked at the clock again. Two seventeen.

Yay. Two whole minutes had passed.

Sighing, I reached over for the ancient Tiffany-style bedside lamp and turned it on, blinking into the sudden burst of light. My eyes felt raw and dried out, sort of like week-old grapes that probably just needed to be tossed.

The Bible that Detective Masterson had given me was laying on the bedside table. I hadn’t read anything in it so far.

Start in Luke, he’d said.

I picked it up and opened it. The pages were super thin, like tissue paper. Maybe owning a Bible wasn’t a good idea for someone like me who tended to accidentally rip things.

I turned the first pages until I got to the table of contents and found the listing for Luke. Page 847.

The Bible was a lot bigger than I’d figured it was.

I flipped over carefully and ended up in a section called Psalms on my way over to Luke.

There were a lot of chapters in Psalms. I was looking at Psalm 112 and there were still a bunch after it.

One line caught my eye. “They will have no fear of bad news; their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the Lord.”

I wasn’t sure who “they” were, but I found myself wishing that I could be like them. You know, the whole not fearing bad news.

At this point, my life was all about fear.

I read a little further in the Psalm and some of it sounded like the songs we’d sung at church last Sunday.

I wondered what it would be like to be like Justin or Detective Masterson. Both of them seemed so set that everything that was happening was God’s plan. And for some reason, that made everything okay.

Everything was not okay, though. I’d already been shot at once, and now the guy who I put in prison was likely out there looking for me.

I shivered and looked at the closed blinds covering the bulletproof window. My life had been reduced to a tiny house in the middle of the woods of Missouri.

I spent the next three hours reading in the Psalms. By the time I reached over to turn off the bedside lamp to try and get a few more hours of sleep, I could hear the birds starting their morning chirping.

I slept until almost eight, which was really good for me. I walked out into the living room after I brushed my teeth and found Mom and Dad pulling on their sneakers.

“Morning, Katie-Kin. We’re going for a quick walk,” Mom said, doing a couple of stretches. “Want to come with us?”

I watched Mom do a few lunges and shook my head, yawning. I might be going stir-crazy, but I wasn’t about to go power walking with Mom. Mom took her walks far too seriously.

I was actually amazed that Dad was going to go with her. He mocked her mercilessly about how she walked.

He must be really bored.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Have fun.” I sat down on the couch.

“We’ll be back soon,” Mom said, kissing the top of my head.

“I’ll tell Kent we’re leaving,” Dad said.

I looked around. “Where is he?”

He shrugged. “Something about the motion sensor. I think he’s working on it in the shed out back.”

They left and I went to pour a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, one of the
many contraband items in our house that was luckily in plenty of supply here. Detective Masterson walked in as I was pouring the milk over them, listening to the happy sounds of chocolate snapping.

“Good morning, Kate,” he said, backhanding his forehead and reaching for a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Hot outside?”

“Stuffy in the shed,” he said after gulping half the bottle. “Anyway, I’ve got to finish working on this thing.” He unclipped his cell phone and set it beside me on the table. “If you need anything or anything even seems off, push 4–6–3. That will buzz my pager.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“It shouldn’t take me too long. And I’m just behind the house.”

I nodded again. “Okay.”

“Have a good breakfast.”

He left and the house suddenly felt very quiet.

Quiet, dark, and small.

I ate my Cocoa Puffs in crunching silence, reading the back of the box as I ate. Apparently, Toucan Sam had a friend who was crazy for this cereal.

I put my bowl in the sink when I finished and found my sketchbook. My parents’ heads were coming along, but I wasn’t quite done yet.

I sat down on the couch.

Nothing like an orange and olive green–striped couch sitting on orange carpeting and surrounded by dark wood paneling to get the inspiration rolling.

I stared at my parents’ half-finished heads for about fifteen minutes before I finally just flipped the page over and started drawing something else.

Last night, one of the Psalm chapters, the first one I think, had mentioned something about someone sitting under a tree or being like a tree or something like that. That was one of the last ones I
read, so it was a little fuzzy to me. But looking out the front window and seeing just a mesh of trees made me think of it.

I usually liked to stick to people but I started sketching the forest. I drew the window frame I was looking through, complete with the wood paneling on the sides of it. Then, through the window, I drew the trees.

The sound of Detective Masterson’s phone ringing startled me and I jumped, my pencil making the limbs on one tree look more abstract than real.

I walked over to the table and looked at the cell. He had one of those phones that rang and vibrated at the same time, so it was jangling and turning in a circle on the table.

He hadn’t told me what to do if his phone rang.

I picked it up and looked at the screen.

Slalom
.

I should probably answer it if it was the deputy calling.

“Hello?” I said, my voice all mousy. I hated how I seemed to always talk an octave higher on the phone.

“Who is this?” Deputy Slalom demanded.

“Um. Kate, sir. Kate Carter.”

“Kate, why are you answering Kent’s phone?”

“Um. Because he’s out working in the shed.” Now, not only was I talking an octave higher, I was stuttering and a tattletale.

Today was going to be a great day.

“Get him. NOW!”

I nearly dropped the phone when he yelled. “Uh, yes, sir,” I managed, fumbling with the phone and running for the front door. My stomach was flip-flopping like I had a dozen or so wide-mouthed bass swimming around in there.

Maybe they’d caught John X!

I shoved my feet in some flip-flops and ran out the front door, leaving it slightly ajar, and onto the porch. The birds were singing, there was a slight breeze, and the sun was shining through the trees in small patches all over the pine-needle-blanketed clearing.

The shed was in the back. I hadn’t been to the back yet since I was pretty content to stay inside, all things considered.

“Did you find him?” Deputy Slalom barked at me.

“Uh, not yet, sir.”

“Good grief, Kate, the house is tinier than my aunt Gladys’ kitchen! Find him now!”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”

I tripped over the natural landscape and found myself thankful for the manicured lawn Dad cared so much about. I didn’t even have to worry about stubbing my toe in his grass.

Not like I was ever allowed to walk on it.

I finally saw the shed a few feet back from the house and I hurried as quickly as I could toward it, phone smashed to my ear, trying to avoid all the fallen branches, rocks, and probably snake holes around.

I had one thing in common with Indiana Jones, and that was that we both hated snakes. Other than that, we were total opposites.

It was my goal to lead my life in relative obscurity.

Which obviously was not happening right now.

I looked up at the shed and saw someone coming out of it, closing both the doors behind him.

It was DJ.

“DJ!” I shouted, waving and smiling.

“DJ?” Deputy Slalom yelled in my ear.

“Hi!” I said.

He waved back and started walking in my direction.

“Kate! Listen to me — run! Get as far away from DJ as you can!” Deputy Slalom yelled.

I stopped about halfway between the house and the shed, frowning. “What?” I said. “It’s DJ. The guy from your police force?”

“Kate, get in the house! Get back in the house
now
!”

I didn’t try to argue with him, but I couldn’t help thinking how ridiculous it was for me to be running back to the house when I’d just waved at DJ.

DJ had lived with us for the last month. What did Deputy Slalom think he’d do? Hug me in greeting?

“Kate!” DJ yelled behind me, and I could hear him crashing through the brush. “Kate, hold on!”

I tripped up the front steps and into the front door, closing it and locking it behind me right as DJ rammed into it, grabbing the knob. “Kate!” he shouted again.

What if DJ had news about John X? What if he knew something and had driven all the way out here to tell us?

“Are you in the house?” Deputy Slalom was still yelling at me.

My heart was pounding. I just stared at DJ through the window on the front door. “Yes, sir.”

“Do not open that door, Kate. Do you hear me? Do
not
open that door!”

DJ pounded on the door. “Open the door, Kate! Don’t listen to him!”

“Deputy, what —?”

“You left your sketchbook here,” Deputy Slalom shouted.

I went into the kitchen to get away from DJ’s pounding on the door. “Okay.”

“You left your sketchbook here and one of the guys we brought up from St. Louis started looking through it.”

A sketchbook isn’t the same thing as a journal, but for me, it can be. I felt myself getting a little offended. “He what?”

“He looked through it and saw the picture you did of DJ.”

My heart started beating a little faster. I watched as DJ paced the front porch, staring into the house, shouting at me.

“Open the door, Kate!”

“Kate. He recognized him. From a case about four years ago.”

Surely Deputy Slalom meant that DJ had worked on the case. He must have worked in St. Louis.

I couldn’t get a full breath into my lungs. They felt cramped, like there suddenly wasn’t enough room in my rib cage.

“Kate, a man matching DJ’s exact description was an accomplice in John X’s first murder.”

And just like that, my heart stopped pounding. I sank to the kitchen chair, shock making it impossible for my kneecaps to hold the standing position.

“But he … how …?”

“We hired him exactly three and a half years ago. He had no police record, we didn’t know anything about any of this. But the cop from St. Louis brought up the case records from the first murder.” Deputy Slalom sighed and I could picture him rubbing his forehead. “Kate, it’s him. I don’t know the whys and I really don’t understand the hows, but it’s him.”

“Kate! Open the door!” DJ yelled, pounding on the front window.

I looked at him, and the fear took over. I shook from head to toe. DJ? The same guy who slept outside my room on an air mattress for the last four weeks? The guy who panicked when Officer DeWeise was shot, the guy who tried to make me laugh when he could tell I was getting freaked out?

He, of all people, was working with the man who was trying to kill me?

DJ looked and sounded angry. His eyes were bloodshot, his face was bright red, and he was yelling constantly.

I started worrying about my mom and dad. And Detective Masterson. I’d seen DJ coming out of the shed. What if he’d killed Detective Masterson and my parents?

I started shaking harder. Tears were gathering in the corners of my eyes, and I felt like all of my muscles had turned to overcooked noodles.

“Stay on the phone with me, Kate,” Deputy Slalom said. “I’ve got the FBI headed your direction.”

“Kate! Kate!” DJ started banging both fists on the window, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Kate!”

I don’t think I even realized what happened at first.

One minute I was holding the phone, Deputy Slalom talking in my ear about how the FBI was on the way, the next minute the phone was gone and I was face-to-face with a man whose face I knew better than my own.

“Hello, Kate Carter from South Woodhaven Falls.”

It was John X.