I looked at the mug shots on his wall. The ones I’d written on were still there. “I want you to test me.”
Faraday stopped rocking in his chair, and those eyes narrowed again. “Test you?”
“You don’t believe that I can see what I can see, right?”
Faraday tapped the arm of the chair. “You mean about the deathdates?”
I nodded.
“No,” he said bluntly. “I think you’re full of it.” Glancing over his shoulder to the wall behind him he added, “I think that was a neat trick, though. What I can’t figure out is if your uncle put you up to it, or if you came up with it on your own.”
I smiled. It was good to have that out in the open. “Okay. You don’t trust me or believe me. Then how about if you design the test? That way you’d see I’m telling the truth.”
“Test you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Faraday snorted. “And how can I test you, Maddie? Until someone dies, there’s no way to prove you see what you say you can.”
“Sure there is. Show me any photograph of any person you know who’s died, and I’ll tell you the exact day they passed away. And make sure the photos don’t come from anybody famous or that you think I could access online. Make me look at only those photos of people you’re sure I couldn’t know. And time me.”
Faraday pursed his lips. I could tell he was intrigued. “Time you?”
“Yeah. Give me a nice, thick stack of photos, and only, like…five minutes to get through them all.”
Faraday seemed to think on that for a bit. “I’d want to watch you while you went through them,” he said, as if that was something I’d balk at.
I made sure to look him in the eye. “No problem.”
“And you’d have to give me all your electronics,” he added.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the new cell phone Donny had gotten for me. Placing that on his desk in a silent challenge, I sat back in the chair and waited for him to decide.
“I’ll want to film it, too, and if you get one date wrong, Maddie, you lose and I get to use this little demo in court.”
I held his gaze. “Deal.”
Faraday sat forward. “Okay,” he said, and I could see that he thought he finally had me exactly where he wanted me. It made me a little nervous, because I didn’t know what tricks the feds could pull to make me look guilty, but I was in it now, and no way was I backing out. “Give me until this afternoon to pull it all together. Let’s say around three.”
I reached out for my phone to check the time. It was ten A.M. “See you at three o’clock, Agent Faraday.” And then I left him to his task.
I HUNG OUT AT THE Grand Haven Library for a few hours, then at a coffee shop down the street from the bureau offices, my knee bouncing the whole time. I was anxious to get the test over with, and as customers came in, I found myself staring at their foreheads, making sure I could see every single deathdate. I could, of course, but it still reassured me in spite of the macabre nature of it all.
At two forty-five I left the coffee shop and headed back to the bureau. The receptionist told me that Faraday had told her to walk me back when I arrived, so I followed behind, even though by now I knew the way. Faraday was on the phone, his back to us, and from his posture, I could tell he was angry. “Jenny,” he growled, “if he wants to live with me, then he can live with me!”
The receptionist came up short and looked around uncomfortably. She cleared her throat, but Faraday didn’t seem to hear her. “Then I’ll get a bigger place,” he barked. “The custody agreement says we have joint physical custody, and if he no longer finds living with you to be the pleasurable experience I remember, then of course he can move in with me!”
I glanced around. From what I saw, everyone within twenty feet of us could hear Faraday going off on what appeared to be his ex-wife, and they were all carefully keeping their gazes averted, pretending not to hear. It was a joke.
The receptionist cleared her throat very loudly once more, and Faraday’s posture stiffened. He peeked over his shoulder at us and said, “I gotta go. We’ll talk about this later.” As he was setting the phone down in the cradle I could hear the high-pitched voice of his ex yelling at him through the receiver. I felt sorry for their kid caught in the middle.
“You’re back,” he said as if he hadn’t been expecting me to be on time.
The receptionist smiled awkwardly and said, “Agent Faraday will take it from here.” She then made a hasty retreat back down the corridor.
“If you’re not ready…” I said.
“It’s fine. Come in.” Faraday motioned me forward, and I walked into his office, noticing that most of the items on his desk had been removed. What had been a surface cluttered with paper and files and picture frames was now clear of everything except the computer monitor and a stack of papers about a quarter-inch thick. On the top sheet of paper was a color copy of an old man, surrounded by balloons. He seemed to have a slight resemblance to Faraday.
On the far side of the room were several photo albums, some looked quite old, and on a tripod was a camera aimed right at the desk. I ignored the camera and started for the chair but Faraday held up his hand. “Your phone, Maddie?”
I pulled it out of my back pocket and handed it to him. Then I stood with raised eyebrows until he motioned for me to sit down. Once I took my seat I looked around the desk. “I need something to write on. And something to write with.”
Faraday turned his computer screen all the way around so that the back was facing me before he reached into his desk and pulled out a set of sticky notes and a pen. “Write the date on the sticky note and put it on the photo,” he instructed. He then held up his phone and said, “Do you want me to count it down?”
Taking up the pen and setting the pad of stickies in front of me, I couldn’t help but smile a little. “Sure.”
“Three…two…one.”
I got to work.
The stack was interesting. Most of the pages were color copies of what I assumed were family photos. Some of them contained more than one person, but within that group there was always at least one person circled, and I knew that was who Faraday wanted me to focus on. I didn’t spend more than five seconds per photo—that’s all it took. I simply looked and wrote down the date. Toward the middle, I saw that Faraday had tried to trip me up by circling the photo of a mature woman—taken at least several decades before—who was still alive. And would be for three more years. I wrote down her date, and next to it I also scribbled Nice try.
Other than that, only one photo really stood out. It was the image of a boy around ten or eleven with a big gap between his two front teeth. He was grinning ear to ear and wore a shirt with an oversized collar. His deathdate was 1-21-1974. There was something eerily familiar about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, and as I was worried about the time, I forced myself to move on.
After clearing through the deck I set the pen down and stood up. Faraday seemed surprised. He looked down at his phone. “You still have two minutes.”
I shrugged. “Don’t need them.”
He eyed the stack of photos with sticky notes neatly attached, like he didn’t quite know what to do next.
“I’ll wait in the lobby while you grade the photos.” And without another word I moved out of his office and headed to reception.
Faraday left me to sit there for a very long time; nearly an hour and fifteen minutes went by before he came down the hall looking for me, and when he did, he seemed stunned. I had to be very careful to hide the satisfied smirk that wanted to work its way onto my lips.
He crooked his finger at me, and I followed him once more to his office. There he shut the door and sat down. I noticed at the top of the stack of photos was the picture of the young boy with the gap in his teeth. “How’re you doing it?” Faraday asked after a long pause.
I shrugged. “It’s something I’ve always been able to see.”
He squinted at me, those eye
s so focused, like he wanted to figure out the magic trick.
“It’s not a trick,” I told him. “It’s real.”
Faraday sat back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve been over it and over it, and there’s no way you could know these dates,” he said. “I mean, some of these family members died eighty years ago in Ireland.”
I shrugged. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Faraday picked up the photo of the young boy. “Know who this is?”
I shook my head.
“He’s my little brother.”
That shocked me.
“He drowned when I was thirteen. We didn’t even know he’d gone to the pond that day. He wanted to play hockey like me. He got onto some thin ice and fell through. I was the one who found him.”
I squirmed in my chair. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded absently and set that photo aside only to pick up the next, which was the photo I’d called him out for—the one of the woman who hadn’t died yet. “This is my great-aunt Ginny. She lives in Dublin. She’s ninety-seven, and she’s always said she wants to live to see a hundred. You have her dying on the eighteenth of March, twenty seventeen. That’s the day after her one hundredth birthday, and it’d be exactly like Aunt Gin to check out the second she’s made an appearance. She does that at parties, too.”
I couldn’t help give into the smile that quirked at the edges of my lips. “So now you believe me, right?”
Faraday scratched his head, still staring at the two photos on his desk—the ones of his brother and his aunt. “I watched you like a hawk,” he said softly. “You never even looked up. You went through a stack of forty photos of people I know you’ve never heard of or seen before, and you couldn’t possibly have researched any of them, and still you didn’t miss a single photo. Ginny was supposed to trip you up, Maddie. And if she didn’t, then I pulled pictures out of other agents’ family photo albums, too. Even if you had researched my entire family, I know you couldn’t have randomly guessed the dates of these other people.”
Faraday then pointed to the camera. “We had an expert in body language watching you, too,” he said. “An FBI profiler in D.C. who’s the best in the business says he can’t explain how you could do that, but your body language suggests you’re not writing down these dates from memory. He says there would have been a momentary pause as you went through each photo to recall the face and the date from your memory—and you didn’t pause once except with Aunt Gin, and he thinks that’s because you realized I’d tried to trip you up.”
Faraday reached down to pull out a folder and laid it on the desk. Flipping it open I could see several photographs—many of them were of Stubby and me from the Jupiter game. “It’s never quite fit,” he said, scratching his chin. “Agent Wallace and I have been round and round on this. From the first interview with Mrs. Tibbolt, she claimed that you never actually came out and threatened her or her son, only that you had predicted he’d die the following week.
“And we interviewed several other clients of yours, too, Maddie. It’s taken us a few weeks to compile a list of them, but the one that really bugged us was Pat Kelly. Remember him?”
I nodded. He was a man I’d read for only a few days before all of this started. He’d been very nice to me, even after I’d given him the bad news.
“He says that he’d come to see you on the twelfth of October. His name was right before the Tibbolts’ in your notebook, which is why we were interested in talking to him. We asked him what you’d said, and he told us how you’d predicted he’d die in May. He then told us that he’d just come from his doctor who’d given him six months to live. Kelly swore he didn’t tell you or in any way hint to you that he had pancreatic cancer. I looked him over real good, Maddie, and I couldn’t tell that he was sick. The guy seemed healthy as a horse.”
As Faraday spoke, I didn’t interrupt. I simply let him work through it, waiting for the moment when he’d finally tell me that he believed me.
Faraday pivoted a picture to me, and I saw it was of me and Stubs, sitting in the stands at the Jupiter game, both of us smiling broadly and looking so happy. I realized either Wallace or Faraday had taken the photo from their seats in the stands, and they’d inadvertently captured the last time Stubby or I had been that carefree.
“Truthfully, Maddie,” Faraday continued, “you and Arnold don’t fit the profile for two serial killers.”
Faraday’s admission left me stunned. “Then why have you been so focused on us?” I demanded.
He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. “We have to follow the evidence,” he said. “And there was a lot that pointed to the two of you.”
“But there has to be stuff that points away from us, too,” I insisted, and for emphasis I waved my hand at the stack of photos that proved I’d been telling the truth all along.
Faraday shrugged, then nodded. “The same guy in D.C. who watched you zip through the photos sent me the psychiatric profile this afternoon of the person he thinks killed Payton Wyly and Tevon Tibbolt, and I’ve just had a chance to read it,” Faraday continued, and he reached for a manila folder at the side of his desk and opened it. “The report says that Wyly and Tibbolt were definitely killed by the same person, and that person was likely to be a lone white male between thirty and fifty-five. A guy with a whole lot of repressed rage. A guy with sick fantasies but above-average intelligence. He’s likely to be adept at keeping secrets, and is very good about hiding in plain sight. He likely has a good steady job, one he’s had for years but secretly hates. He’s someone who has a distorted view of himself, a guy who thinks he’s above most people, and he has a hard time making lasting social connections. He takes his rage out on kids in their teens because he seems to have some sort of sick vendetta against them. They represent some sort of trigger for his anger, and he vents that anger at them by torturing and killing them. My profiler ends the report by saying that it’s highly unlikely either you or Arnold is the murderer.”
I felt rush of relief, but I didn’t want to say anything more to stop the momentum Faraday was building, so I simply let him continue.
Faraday put the file down and lifted another photo. “I keep coming back to this,” he said. The image showed me squinting at Payton, a look of shock on my face, and next to me, Stubby was gazing at the pretty cheerleader with shy fascination and adoration. His cheeks were flushed, and he had this hopeful smile on his face. He looked boyish and sweet—not sick in the head. Faraday tapped Stubby’s image. “He doesn’t look like anything but a love-struck kid,” he said, mirroring my thoughts. “We had a psychologist sit with him, and nothing about that interview came back with any hint of violence or repressed rage. Just the opposite, actually. According to our guy, Arnold’s IQ is at genius level, but he’s humble about his intelligence. And although he struggles a little socially, he doesn’t seem to hold it against anyone. So either Schroder’s the greatest young con man we’ve ever met, or he really is a shy, smart kid who tried to warn a pretty girl that she had a date with death on her birthday. And maybe he’s also a good friend who wants people to believe in you so that mothers don’t have to bury their sons.”
I found myself nodding. “I swear,” I told him. “That’s all it was, Agent Faraday. Stubby would never hurt Payton or Tevon. He’s the nicest kid you’ve ever met. He was trying to find a way to save them both.”
Faraday reached back into his drawer and pulled out another file, this one secured with a thick rubber band. “I have to turn this over to your uncle today,” he said. “It’s all the evidence we’ve collected against Arnold. One of the biggest pieces of evidence we found at both Tevon Tibbolt’s crime scene and Payton Wyly’s is a set of size twelve boot prints. It’s pretty muddy on the banks of the Waliki River, and we found those boot prints all over the place, leading up to the road.
“It’s always bothered me that Schroder wears a size nine shoe, and we searched his closet. He owns four pairs of sneakers and one pair
of leather loafers. No boots. I thought we had him when we found his dad’s boots in his mom’s closet, but they’re the wrong size, too, and the wrong tread.”
I nodded; Donny had told me the same thing. Plus, Stubby would never wear any shoe he couldn’t skateboard in. I said that to Agent Faraday and he grunted, tapping the folder on the edge of his desk like he was thinking deeply. Then he set it flat on his desk again and pointed to it. “This also includes a copy of that file your uncle gave us—the one of the kid in Willow Mill who was murdered. Guess what was found there?”
“Boot prints?” I guessed.
Faraday nodded. “Yep. Size twelve. Hell, even my guy in D.C. admitted to me on the phone today that he thinks it’s the same killer for all three kids. Cigarettes found at the scene of Carter’s murder match the type found at the other two scenes, but the DNA on all the cigarettes rules out both you and Schroder.”
I blinked. “I thought it would take a long time to get the DNA back?”
Faraday lifted his eyes from the folder. “Carter’s case was submitted back in August. The results came in last week, so we had the cigarettes from the other two murders expedited through the federal lab, which isn’t nearly as backed up as the city labs. The results came in while I was grading your stack. Turns out none of the DNA matches you kids, or the blood on the knife, which turns out to be Schroder’s. And yet, all the cigarettes were used by one lone individual who apparently has never had a criminal record, because his DNA isn’t in our system.”
I closed my eyes. I felt a mixture of relief and also anger. “Why?” I whispered.
“Why, what?” Faraday replied.
I opened my eyes. “If you knew all of this, why are you still keeping Stubby in jail?”
Faraday sighed, but at least he had the courage to hold my gaze. “We had to be sure, Maddie. And like I said, a lot of this just came in, and so much of the early circumstantial evidence pointed to you two.”