Burning Blue

down, but I was on the boards.

The Clarion reported that the police were angry the emails had gotten out to the public, as this was an ongoing investigation. Whatever. Anybody who has seen two episodes of The Shield knows that if a perp isn’t identified in the first forty-eight hours, the likelihood of nailing him is cut in half. After ninety-six hours, your chances drop to twenty-five percent, and so on. Six and a half weeks since Nicole was burned, and the police hadn’t made a single arrest? That’s not an ongoing investigation. The detective running this thing was a joke, whoever he was. They were holding that information back, for some reason. I’d invested most of the previous night’s hours into hacking for a name, but I couldn’t find anything. The police were working undercover.

I got a little more play with some of the other news sites, smaller local outfits. They were calling the attacker the Recluse, a spider that wasn’t much in the size department, but it packed a sick bite. The fanging itself was so light as to be unnoticeable, but the venom was devastating. The necrosis was comparable to a third-degree burn in some cases. The recluse spider only attacked when provoked. Maybe Schmidt was right. Maybe the Recluse was a woman, jealous of Nicole, her perfection. How many women would be capable of that kind of envy? The answer to that was a question: How many women had seen Nicole’s face?

The Recluse had to be keeping tabs on the press’s coverage of the investigation. I scrolled through the readers’ comments, mostly sympathy for Nicole, anger that the cops weren’t doing enough. I searched for “bitch deserved it” and the like and of course came up empty.

I checked my suspect list: “jealous classmates” was too unfocused a target to dig into without a lot more information. I’d added Rick Kerns after he’d gone all Mr. Volta-Shock with the lightning bolt Mohawk, but I’d knocked him off the list almost immediately. The lightning bolt was too obvious if you really were the acid thrower, and I didn’t see anything on Facebook that led me to believe he had a beef with Nicole. That left me with Schmidt, Mr. Sabbatini, Dave Bendix, and Mr. Sager.

Sager did have a military record, honorable discharge, literally a Boy Scout as a kid and now a troop leader. He had two kids he doted on, never missed his child support payments, worked a second job as night security to pay for his daughter’s violin lessons. He met the woman he was seeing, Isabella1801, through a dating site for the divorced. She was a nurse, spotless record. Their credit card statements showed nothing suspicious. A night at a Catskills motel that billed itself as Lovers’ Lane was as crazy as they got. I still couldn’t imagine why he needed all that muriatic acid, but would he keep that much around if he really was the acid thrower? I kept him on the list as a weak maybe.

My eyes ticked to Dave Bendix’s name. If I was going to invest precious hours into turning him inside out I would have to overcome the fact that I was-again-light on motive, seriously so. Dave was headed for big things. He was a great athlete, had perfect grades, came from money. Why would he risk all that to burn his girlfriend? On the other hand, even if he didn’t throw the acid, he knew not to touch her. Biggest of all was the tiff in Schmidt’s office. What did Dave Bendix ask Nicole Castro to lie about?

My phone vibrated with a text. It was in my backpack. I ripped the zipper so fast I broke it. Starbucks Cherry: Heya, rave lame. Still wishing you were here though.

My mind flickered to Nicole, drenched with rain, the bandage tape beginning to peel away from her cheekbone. Then back to Cherry. Raves we don’t want to go to, movies we don’t want to see, pushing her castaway car through the mall parking lot after we can’t get it started, up to the gas station, begging the mechanic to give us a battery jump. Bowling. Those fungus-ridden rental shoes. Back to Nicole, the left side of her face. What was under the bandage? Or what wasn’t? How much had she lost? How much was she still losing? Bursting into tears like that, on the side of the road? Where does that kind of fear drive you? She had made herself get out to the stables, to socialize, but she was constantly looking around, waiting for the next media hit, maybe even the next acid attack. How long can you keep living in fear of turning every corner, before you give up and hide out in your house for good? Back when I was doing home school, I had to force myself out of the apartment, food shopping, the Laundromat. Falling into that pit of self-imposed isolation didn’t take long. I wasn’t exactly out of it yet, either. Sometimes I went the whole day without speaking to anybody.

My cell vibrated again. I let it. Two calls from Starbucks Cherry two minutes apart? Now I knew how Nicole felt Thursday afternoon in CVS: like I was being stalked.

TWENTY-ONE

From Nicole’s journal:

Saturday, 23 Oct-

AP chem tutor quit today. “You’re not concentrating. You’re wasting your father’s money and my time. If you fail, I fail. That goes down as a stain on my reputation.” A stained rep. Wow. How will you face the day, Lance? Possible real reason for Lance’s leave-taking: The check Mom wrote him bounced-again. I checked the accounts. The one has plenty of money, the other twenty bucks, so Mom cuts Lance a check from the empty account? She’s losing it. Has she slept a single night since this happened? She won’t let me past the village gates. Feel like I’m six again. Have to get out of this house. I’m stir-crazy. Skype w Dad tomorrow. Possible ride with him, if Mom says cool to go out. They’ll fight over it. Awesome. New painkiller hard on my stomach. Email from Jay: Sorry I was an idiot. Hopefully I’ll see you at Schmidt’s. A polite blow off. Totally sucks. Need a new plan. Emma still sick. Please don’t let this be the end.

TWENTY-TWO

The rest of the weekend passed without any word back from Nicole. This didn’t stop me from trying to catch her attacker. I may have been doing it as much for me as for Nicole. I couldn’t accept that such a malevolent crime might go unpunished.

Mondays were slow at The New Jersey Clarion-I remembered that much. After my mother was killed, my father would pick me up after school and take me with him to his office. You don’t get a lot of homework in fourth grade, and I didn’t have anything to do except make mini snowmen with my earwax. This guy Pete Keller worked the local news desk back then. He was a good reporter, could have been better if he weren’t such a boozehound. Uncle Pete, he wanted me to call him, and after a while I did. We played a lot of Nerf hoop. Every day at four o’clock Pete took me with him to the diner next door. The Clarion is across the street from the precinct, and Pete liked to buy the cops ending their eight-to-fours a pony beer or two. For the ones coming in for the four-to-midnight, he’d spring for takeout coffee. Sometimes the detectives dropped him a line on how an investigation was going. Uncle Pete was too old to be chasing NJPD through Newark alleys now. He’d moved into the obituary pit, my father told me, but I was betting he was still on the Friendlies list of a gold badge or two.

I stopped off at the bodega and grabbed a six of Becks. With my height and my absolutely unimpeachable fake ID I never got shut out. I didn’t like to drink myself-not that I could, with my meds-but some of the computer shows required you to be twenty-one to get in. Uncle Pete was hung over. That didn’t stop him from cracking a beer. “I’ll give you twenty bucks, you go get a haircut,” he said.

“Gimme twenty bucks then.”

“If I had it. You keep looking at your phone.”

“Three forty-five. Thought we could hit the diner.”

“Little Jay-Jay Nazzaro, what happened to you? And what are you up to?”

“Who’s on the Castro case?”

“The acid thing? PD doesn’t want to let that information out just yet.”

“So the paper says.”

“They don’t want the Recluse to see them coming.”

“Of course not.”

“Wouldn’t you rather brick some Nerf?”