Hunter
4yearslater
Alton University Campus, NewHampshire
“What do you think?”
Laney did a dramatic twirl in her graduation cap and gown, smilingwidely.
I raised a brow, lips twisting into a teasing smirk. “I think I prefer what’sunderneath.”
“Asshole.” She giggled and did another twirl. “Seriously, though, does it lookokay?”
“It looks perfect.” I grinned and stepped closer to her before leaning down to plant a kiss on her forehead. “But why are you trying it on so early? We don’t graduate for another fiveweeks.”
“I know, but I thought I’d order everything early so that I have time to make sure it all fits, because the next few weeks are going to fly by.” She let out a wistful sigh and glanced around the college apartment we shared. “I can’t believe we’re nearly done already. It honestly feels like yesterday that we graduated fromschool.”
It really did. It seemed like we’d only walked across the stage at Royal Falls Academy to get our high school diplomas last week, when in reality, four years of college hadpassed.
We both made it to Alton in theend.
Laney’s fake essay prank had dampened my chances at acceptance for a while, but once the ‘misunderstanding’ was cleared up, everything was fine. It didn’t hurt that everyone knew me as one of the two students who’d taken down the Network schoolgirl sex trafficking ringandsolved a murder during senior year. Elite colleges were practically clamoring to have me attend them after that newsbroke.
It was the same for Laney, but she didn’t even need that fame to have every college begging her to enroll. Despite all the shit she went through in senior year, she graduated at the very top of the class, and her mailbox was flooded with full-ride scholarship offers as a result. She chose Alton for its prestige—it was the top university in the whole country, beating out MIT, Yale and Harvard every year—and also because she knew it was my dream school, and she wanted us to be together while we went tocollege.
She was about to complete a double major in political science and human rights studies. After graduation, she planned on heading to law school. She would still be studying at Alton, but we were moving out of our apartment and getting our own place in Manchester, seeing as the campus housing was for undergraduate studentsonly.
She didn’t know it yet (she thought we were getting another small apartment downtown) but I’d bought a house for us as a post-graduation surprise in an upscale northern neighborhood. We’d driven past it a few months ago, on our way to a weekend hiking trip, and she’d turned all starry-eyed, saying she wished she could have a nice big house with a huge yard and forest behind it, just like thatone.
I bought the house a weeklater.
It was twenty minutes closer to Royal Falls, where her mom still lived with her new partner Robert—and Mignon the terrier, of course—so once we moved in, we’d be able to visit them moreoften.
Trina was helping me decorate everything on the inside, seeing as she had a much better eye for that sort of stuff than I did. When she wasn’t doing that, she was attending her own undergrad course at another university in New Hampshire as a film and media major. She also took special effects makeup classes on the side to learn new techniques, and she regularly practiced on Laney. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d come home after a lecture to have her pop up from behind the kitchen counter in full zombie or swamp creaturemakeup.
She’d joke that I deserved the scare for forgetting to take the trash out, and I’d tell her that she looked better as a swamp creature than she usually did. We were always like that—teasing each other and joking around. Our apartment was filled with laughter and warmth all the time, and our house would be thesame.
“I ordered your cap and gown too,” Laney said, turning to the side to gesture toward a large cardboard box. “I’m pretty sure I got the right color andsize.”
“I’m sure youdid.”
I wouldn’t be walking across the stage at the same time as her on graduation day, because we were in different courses, but I knew she’d be watching me and cheering, just like I was going to do forher.
I’d chosen to study a double degree—criminal psychology and computer science. It was a shit-ton of work, but I had bigplans.
I wanted to help people who’d lost their loved ones to violent crime, particularly in cases where the trails had gone cold and the police had stopped looking foranswers.
I knew from my search for the truth in my sister’s case that one of the most important parts of any investigation was communication with as many people as possible. I’d also learned in my studies that many cases were hindered by lack of communication between law enforcement agencies and issues relating to jurisdiction. There were also issues with people simply not being listened to or taken seriously byinvestigators.
To help with that, my friend Kairo and I had worked together to build a sort of support forum with a companion app for people who’d lost their loves ones and never received closure. It wasn’t just for emotional support—it was also a means for them to crowdsource information on the case and make new connections, even when law enforcement had ruled it unsolvable or deemed it an accident orsuicide.
Just like Lindsay’scase.
It was a bit like a web-sleuth forum, with one major difference. It also had a built-in AI that was capable of scraping and pulling any possibly-related information from various sources across the internet and ‘deciding’ to place it in relevant files a hundred thousand times faster than a human could manage. For example, earlier this year, we’d assisted with a case where a woman had lost her thirty-year-old daughter in a car crash in 2017. At the time, the case was ruled an accident, even though weather and road conditions were perfect, and the woman was sober and known to be very competent atdriving.
It wasn’t a surprise when it was ruled an accident, as it genuinely seemed to be one, and there was no evidence of foul play. It really seemed as if the young woman had skidded off the road into a ravine in a tragic drivingmishap.
Her mother never believed that, though, and I knew exactly how she felt. Hardly anyone believed me when I thought Lindsay was murdered, including my parents and the police, and I wound up feeling as if I was losing my mind. In the end, my gut instincts turned out to be right, and because of that experience, I knew this woman’s instincts could be righttoo.