Hunter
In a flash of dark hair,pale skin, and tartan, Laney was gone.
My body froze, fury erupting in my stomach as my veins filled with fire. For a moment I couldn’t even breathe as I replayed our conversation in my head, over and over.
Murderer.
Filthy fucking murderer.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself, jerking my head upward as something suddenly occurred to me.
I may have just made a terrible mistake.
When Laney first showed up at RFA, I thought she’d gone out of her way to apply for a scholarship so that she could smugly parade herself around the campus and the town, right in front of my family. The family whose daughter she shoved right off a building a year ago.
I thought she got some sort of sick pleasure from being around us, knowing that even if I—or anyone else—ever suspected anything about her involvement in Lindsay’s death, it didn’t matter, because we didn’t have any solid evidence and the death was never treated as a suspicious case anyway.
When I promptly added her to the blacklist, I thought she would eventually break down and realize how unwelcome she was in my town. Then she would slink back to the little Silvercreek shit-hole she came from.
Now I knew better.
For one, she didn’t clamor for a scholarship here at all. My dad fucking handed one right to her, for god knows what reason. Secondly, she had absolutely no idea that I suspected her involvement in my sister’s death. Not until I told her two minutes ago.
That was my big mistake.
Now that I’d called her a murderer right to her face, confirming that I knew all about it, she might think I actually had solid evidence against her. The sort I could take to the cops.
That meant she could be getting ready to run right now. Not just back to Silvercreek with her tail between her legs—she could be going anywhere.
Fuck.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. If I actually had solid evidence, I would’ve taken it to the cops already and had her ass hauled off to jail months ago. What I needed was a confession, and that was what I’d been working towards, slowly but surely.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and mentally ran through everything I had on her so far. My family’s private investigator, David Burgin, had referred to it as ‘flimsy and circumstantial at best’. No point taking it anywhere until we had something solid.
I understood what he meant—that Laney would probably get off easily if we tried pinning anything on her right now—but I knew she was guilty as sin.
The first bit of evidence against her belonged to my sister.
After her death was ruled a suicide, I spent months trying to figure out why she did it. I blamed myself, I blamed others, and I even went through a brief angry stage where I blamed her. Then I finally realized why I was so twisted up and confused. It wasn’t because I couldn’t figure out why she did it. It was because it didn’t make any fucking sense. Lindsay had her issues, sure, but she wasn’t suicidal.
I was aware that a lot of family members said that after a loved one committed such an act, because it was such an unbelievable shock, but this was different. I felt it deep in my bones; that sudden, jolting awareness that something else happened to my sister that night. Something evil.
After that, I couldn’t rest until I knew the truth. I needed to find out what it was that led to Lindsay’s death. Who it was.
I started by going through her old phone in search of anything that could point me to her killer—any threats in messages, conversations with friends about people she was feuding with, photos of guys she was seeing, text and call logs which showed who she spoke to in the days leading up to her death.
There was a lot to get through. She was a popular girl with just as many enemies as friends.
After a whole week of going through the phone with a fine-tooth comb, I learned that a few hours before her death, she used one of the phone’s web browsers to log into a chat site, where she spoke to a user she seemed to be friendly with. Laney01. She asked Laney01 if she wanted to meet up in person, seeing as she only lived half an hour away in Silvercreek, and she put her cell number at the end of the message.
About an hour after that, a call from an unsaved number registered in my sister’s extensive phone log—one that lasted forty-seven seconds. I had the investigator trace the number, and guess who it belonged to?
Laney Collins of 15 Forester Road, Silvercreek. Date of birth: August 28th, 2001. Our maid Ava’s teenaged daughter.
The investigator was also able to get a copy of her phone’s location data, and it showed that she was in Royal Falls on the night of my sister’s death.
Based on that, it seemed like she was probably one of the last people to see or speak to Lindsay.