who need to blow off steam. Live music, a little drinking and drugs, just fun.”
“So you don’t know everyone who’s there?”
“Personally, no, of course not.”
Panetta slid over a piece of paper. “These are the other three party locations where a young woman was killed during a secret party. Were any of these your parties?”
Josh looked at the paper. Then he sighed in what sounded like relief. “Only the party in the Bronx, at the factory. My group only has them in warehouses and factories.”
“Do you know who organized the other two parties?”
“Manhattanville-the one right near the university. I heard it was a frat party, not very big, maybe two hundred people. Broke up early. The one in Harlem, can’t say. But there’s one person who knows more about secret parties than anyone in the city. Wade Barnett.”
Panetta leaned back, recognition crossing his expression. Suzanne didn’t know the guy.
“Did Jessica tell you about any threats she may have received?” Suzanne asked. “Maybe a regular at the parties she attended who paid her too much attention?”
“No. But-” He hesitated.
“Go ahead,” Suzanne prompted.
“She seemed kind of jumpy lately. I don’t know why, but she didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Would she have confided in her roommate?”
“Lauren?” he asked. “No-Lauren didn’t approve of the parties, didn’t like it when Jess came back wasted.”
“Was there anyone Jessica would have confided in? Maybe a friend, a co-worker, or someone at the college?”
Josh said, “She was close to this girl who was from out of town. Ashleigh. I don’t know her last name, only met her once or twice. A month ago, maybe longer, she stayed at Jess’s place when Lauren went home to visit her parents.”
“Do you know where Ashleigh lives? How we can reach her?”
“No, sorry.”
“Was she in town on Saturday?”
Josh thought about it. “Maybe. Jess didn’t say she was coming, but like I said, she was jumpy and weird.”
Panetta said, “We may have additional questions, so we need your contact information.” He handed over his notepad.
Josh wrote everything down and walked them to the door. “I’ll ask around to some people I know were there.”
“Why don’t you give us their names?” Suzanne asked.
“Because they won’t talk to you. They’ll deny they were there, and then shut me out completely. I want to help, really-Jess and I were good friends. I promise, if I find someone with information, I’ll send them to you, okay?”
Suzanne reluctantly agreed. They could get a warrant for the names later if the evidence pointed in that direction.
They left, and she said to Panetta, “We need a full background check on him.”
“Consider it done.”
She asked Panetta, “Who’s Barnett?”
“Twenty years ago this summer, Douglas Barnett was killed in a horrific factory accident outside the city. Five men lost their lives. The company paid out a huge settlement to the families. The oldest Barnett son is a financial whiz kid. Turned a couple million into tens of millions, or more. Runs a foundation and donates a lot of money to charity. Wade is his younger brother. He’s always written up on the social pages. Real spoiled-rich-kid type.”
“Are you putting him on the suspect list?”
“For what reason? Spoiled nouveau riche kid planning raves? Doesn’t make him a killer.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I don’t know him.”
“So let’s introduce ourselves.”
“It might get messy.”
“Scared?” she teased.
He deadpanned her. “Politically messy. The Barnetts are connected. We’d better know what we’re doing.”
“We do.”
EIGHT
Lucy didn’t talk to Sean the entire drive to Woodbridge.
She was angry with him, but even angrier with herself. She’d wallowed in misery since getting the letter from the FBI, and that wasn’t like her. So she wasn’t FBI material. She had to accept it and move on. Deal with it. Grow up.
But anger suppressed the sting of not being good enough.
She had decisions to make, among them whether to stay in D.C. or move back to San Diego. Whether she should go back to school and get her law degree, which several of her professors had encouraged her to do. Or she could follow in Dillon’s footsteps and go to medical school to become a psychiatrist.
She hadn’t exactly fit in at college, which was why she’d focused so intently and had excelled in her studies. She hadn’t been the typical eighteen-year-old college freshman, and she didn’t want to return at twenty-five, even if the students in postgraduate school would be similar to her in age.
She’d interned with the Arlington County Sheriff’s Department for a year and decided that she didn’t want to be a local cop. She was far more interested in the types of crime the FBI investigated than she was in being a beat officer. She’d interned in Congress as well, but she’d never go back there. And the morgue? That had been the most interesting of the three internships, but she didn’t want to work with the dead for the rest of her life.
The FBI had been perfect, with a key priority in her area of expertise-cybercrime. She also had a master’s in criminal psychology, which would help her working in any of the FBI squads.
If Lucy had been in limbo waiting for the FBI letter, she felt even more unsettled now.
She was also ready to move out of her brother’s house.
She’d lived with Dillon and his wife Kate for more than six years, ever since she’d moved to D.C. to attend Georgetown. She’d never lived on campus; that first year it had been difficult to just go out alone. The week she’d graduated high school, she’d been raped and grossly humiliated when her attack had been aired live on the Internet. Though she’d put on a brave face for her family, it had taken Lucy a lot longer to compartmentalize the pain than she’d let on. Moving in with Dillon and Kate had saved her from the watchful eye of her family, and the distance had helped her piece together her life and dreams.
She didn’t honestly know whether she was still living with them because of her publicly stated reason that after Quantico she would go wherever the FBI sent her and get her own place then (so why spend the money now on her own apartment?) or because she was too scared to live on her own.
The fact that her nightmares had returned five weeks ago had been weighing heavily on her. She’d been spending less time with Sean because she didn’t want him to know. She’d dealt with bad dreams before, on her own. She’d do it again.
But everything was crashing down
And if she were really being honest, she wanted to feel sorry for herself. She replayed the FBI interview over and over in her head, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. Driving to the Virginia suburbs outside D.C. with
