The Sixes

see if anything jumps out for you?”

Wesley shrugged his shoulders before he’d even looked but then glanced down and moved his eyes along the page.

“Sorry, nope,” he said after not more than a cursory glance. “I mean, it’s all just the stuff I told him.”

“There must be something significant in the underlined parts,” Phoebe said. “Mr. Hutchinson looked over a set of notes I took after my first meeting with you, and he highlighted the exact same things. It’s uncanny, but the two sets of notes are almost identical. All the details are the same—nearly word for word. It’s, well—”

And then, as she said the words, the truth seemed to charge into her brain, like someone flinging open a door and bursting into a room. The same. The two sets of notes were exactly the same. Every single detail given to Hutch had been repeated to her—an entire year later. Glenda’s words from the other day echoed in her head: “A liar’s story is often just a little too pat.”

Phoebe now knew what Hutch had discovered through the notes. Wesley had made up the story. Because, she thought, without understanding the reason, Wesley was the killer.

She forced a smile, but she could feel how lopsided it was on her face. Can he tell? she wondered as terror mounted inside her. Can he tell I just figured it out?

“Well,” she said feebly, “if nothing occurs to you, I’d better scoot and let you close up.” She looked down, hoping he couldn’t see her fear, and tucked the notes back into her purse. She saw that her fingers were trembling.

“Where’re you headed?” he asked. When she forced herself to look back up at him, she saw that he’d slapped a smile on his own face, but it was ugly and mean.

“I thought I’d just stay in with a book tonight,” she said. Fear had turned her voice into only a whisper. “Well, good night.”

“You really think I’m going to let you leave now?”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

“You know why I’m saying that, right?” he said. “I just saw you figure it out in your head. Or kind of, right?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

She started to turn around and aimed for the door, but he took a giant step with her and blocked her way.

“Don’t make me fly into a rage, okay?” he said. His voice was different now, surly and low. “That’s what Gramps did.”

“I won’t make you mad,” she whispered. “I promise.”

“That Gramps,” he said, shaking his head back and forth as if someone had turned up the speed on him. “He thought he was so damn smart. Didn’t that irritate the hell out of you?”

Humor him, she told herself. Until you can figure out what to do. “Did—did Hutch call you about the notes?”

“Well, I told you he called me—so I could make it seem like I’d shared the stuff about Blair. But he’s too much of a busybody to just call.” Wesley snickered. “He dropped by here last Saturday afternoon. I was outside the lawn care barn, and he pulled up in his truck. Took me a second to recognize him. Said he was sorry about not taking my case seriously before, and he was finally trying to follow up with me. He showed me the notes he’d taken, and then he whips out the notes from you. And all of a sudden he starts to go all Lenny Briscoe on me. He asks in this mocking way if I don’t find it funny that every detail is the same. And then he says that when someone’s telling the truth, they tend to forget certain details or recall them a bit differently. But liars often repeat it word for word because they’ve rehearsed it. The whole time he’s not accusing me, just insinuating in this sly way, like he’s the hotshot cop and I’m just some idiot.

“Then he tells me he’s used the computer to check me out at school, and he’s figured out that I was in a bunch of classes with Lily Mack.”

“A bunch?” Phoebe recalled that Wesley had told her he was in one.

“I took three classes with that bitch. I was freaking in love with Lily. We were in a class together last fall, and we started sharing notes and having coffee together, that sort of thing. We had a connection, you know. But then she totally messes it up—she starts dating that flaming asshole, Trevor. I tried to make her see what a jerk he was, but she just didn’t get it. So I made sure he was out of the picture and bided my time.”

Even in her panic, Phoebe could see the pieces beginning to fit in her own mind.

“But before you killed Trevor, you decided to throw yourself into the river—so that his drowning would seem like part of a pattern?”

“Why not, right? I mean, there’d already been one drowning, and I’d read about these other cases on the Internet.”

“How did you kill him?”

“It was so easy, it was kind of sick. I knew he hung out downtown, and one night at Cat Tails after I’d bided my time for a few months, I stood near him at the bar and put GHB in his drink. And then, after a while, I asked him if he wanted some weed. He was the kind of guy who called me Fathead behind my back, but he wouldn’t turn down that kind of offer—plus he was pretty out of it by then. I told him to meet me in the parking lot by the river so no one would see us, and then I drove him up the road.”

“Across from the Big Red Barn?”

“Yup. It was a piece of cake to just push him in.”

“But then his body was never found.”

“Yeah, I know. Can you believe that freaking luck? But it worked out in the end. Everybody thought he just took off. Which made him look like an even bigger asshole.”

“But Lily still didn’t want to date you.”

“At first she was just too upset to do anything. I figured I’d just wait till she came back after the summer. But then we get together one day, and I finally tell her how I feel, and she says she never wants to be anything other than my fucking friend.”

He twisted his mouth as he said the word friend, as if it filled him with disgust. Phoebe could barely look at him, but she knew she had to, had to keep him talking and calm.

“And then you killed Lily, too—because she didn’t love you?”

“No,” he snapped. “The problem was, she started to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“That I killed Trevor,” he said, even fiercer now. “What the fuck else do you think?”

“Okay, I got it,” Phoebe said. She commanded herself to breathe slowly, to fight her fear.

“I was still keeping tabs on her sometimes. I thought she might finally see what I could offer her, you know. I was watching her that night she went down to Cat Tails. I parked my car and went inside a few minutes later, like it was just a coincidence. I grabbed a beer and was hanging out near her, but trying not to crowd her. And then these guys came in who knew Trevor, who were around the night he disappeared, I guess, and she got upset once she started talking to them. She asked them about that night and if he gave any reason for wanting to just bail. And then out of the blue one of them looks over at me and goes, ‘You talked to him a little bit that night, didn’t you, Hines? Did he say anything to you?’

“Well, I guess that freaked her out. She finished her beer real quick and left. I drove up the street looking for her and convinced her to hop in my car so we could just talk. Of course, she wanted to know why I’d never told her about talking to Trevor, and I said it was because I hadn’t wanted to upset her about what he’d confessed. I said he’d told me he didn’t want to hurt her but he didn’t love her and he just wanted to make a break for it.”

Wesley was growing more and more agitated as he spoke, twisting his neck as if the shirt were choking him.

“I could see that she was becoming suspicious, that she knew a guy like Trevor wouldn’t be confiding shit to me. I figured that she might go to the cops and they’d check my car and find that asshole’s DNA in it or something. You know what’s funny? There was a minute when I thought she was going to just bolt from the car and there was nothing I could do. But she was trying to figure out the truth—be the little investigator like you—and she kept talking to me. I had some coffee in a thermos, and I offered it to her while we were talking. I dropped the drug in