Private

Chapter 89

JUSTINE HAD BEEN seesawing for days between mindless optimism and gutless despair. If the e-mails Sci and Mo-bot had found on Jason Pilser's computer could be trusted, the Street Freeks were going for another kill in just days. They had to be stopped somehow.

She could just about picture their target: a teen girl who was either cocky or naive, but either way, vulnerable to being talked into a careless rendezvous, and then, possibly, her death.

Justine's head hurt thinking about it. She felt she was so close to the killer, but she knew she might fail anyway.

On the other hand, Christine Castiglia was a force for good. There was reason to believe that she could help Private get ahead of the killers before Monday, before another girl died.

Justine parked her car on the busy block on Melrose where she and Christine had agreed to meet. She was ten minutes early.

Traffic was heavy, and the air quality was poor. Justine dialed up the air conditioner, then she took her BlackBerry out of her handbag and put it on the dash.

She sca

None of them was Christine.

As noon passed, Justine had a bad thought that started to grow. Christine had defied her mother by asking for this meeting. It had been courageous to do that. But had the girl changed her mind? Or had something happened to Christine?

By twelve fifteen, Justine was sure of it.

At twelve thirty, she called Private and checked her voice mail. There was no message from Christine.

Justine tossed the phone back onto the dash. Her headache was making spidery inroads into both hemispheres of her brain.

She really wanted to talk to Jack. But there was a danger in seeing him outside the office. Coffee with him at the Rose Cafe had pulled hard on old feelings, made her wistful and sentimental about what they'd once had.

They had both been so stupid in the past. For her part, she'd thought she could get him to open up and tell her his feelings. But Jack apparently couldn't do that kind of intimacy, and Justine couldn't do without it.

She'd bought him a mug with a happy face and lettering on it that read: "I'm fine. Really. How are you?" Jack had laughed and used the mug, but he still kept big parts of himself locked away from her. He never saw why talking about his i

Jack was gorgeous and he knew it. Women flattered him, flipped their hair, touched him, gave him their phone numbers. Jack was always modest about his good looks, probably because he could be.

She and Jack had fought, made up spectacularly, fought again, and when they broke up the third or fourth time, Jack had slept with an actress. So she and Bobby Petino had spent a memorable night dealing with their own purely sexual tension-and Jack had found out. Of course he had-Jack knew everybody's secrets.

She and Jack had another reconciliation, but both had brought so much past hurt to the party, the relationship could only fail. They'd broken up again a year ago, and now any thoughts of getting back together came with the knowledge of how the relationship would end…

She was startled by a tap on the window.

Christine Castiglia, pale in a black hoodie and jeans, looked nervously up and down the street, then opened the car door and got inside.

"Dr. Smith, I had this idea?" Christine said. "We should go to the coffee shop where I saw those boys that time?"

Justine smiled at Christine. Hope spread its great, wide wings and soared. "What an excellent idea," Justine said.

Chapter 90

THIS WAS WHERE it had all started, wasn't it? All of the murders so far.

Becki's House of Pie was a hole-in-the-wall eatery on Hyperion. It was gloomy, and it smelled of coffee and the disinfectant a busboy was using to mop the floor. There was an electric clock on the wall above the cash register. It made a loud tick every time the second hand moved.

Justine wondered what the Schoolgirl killers were doing right now, at this very second.

"This is where we sat," Christine said, pointing to a red vinyl booth with a table scarred by decades of blue-plate specials.

A picture window alongside the booth faced onto the lunch hour traffic streaming up and down Hyperion. A motorcycle farted through a yellow light, the rider's fat ass slowly moving away.

Christine said, "I sat here. My mom sat there. I can still see it."

The waitress had bushy gray hair, a pinafore over her blue velvet dress, and a name tag reading "Becki." She looked as though she'd been in the house of pie for fifty years.

Justine ordered coffee, black. Christine asked for tuna salad, then said, "To be honest, Dr. Smith? I wouldn't want to get someone in trouble if I'm not sure."

"Don't worry about that, Christine. Your word alone can't hurt anyone. We'll still need proof. It's not that easy to convict somebody of murder."

"The van stopped in the middle of the road," Christine said, pointing to the cross street. "I looked away, and when I turned back? These two guys were swinging the blond girl into the van."

"Would you like to look at some pictures for me?"

"Sure. If it will help."

Justine got the three heavy yearbooks out of her briefcase, then pushed the short stack across the table to the girl.

Justine sipped her coffee and watched Christine scan the pages. The girl paused to examine not just the portraits, but the group and candid photos too. For a few long moments, she stared at a black-and-white group shot under a heading "The Staff of The Wolverine."

"What do you see?" Justine finally asked.

Christine stabbed the photo with a finger, pointing out a boy in a line with nine or ten other kids.

Then Christine exclaimed, "It's him."

Justine turned the book around and pulled it toward her.

The caption identified the yearbook staff and their graduating classes. She checked the caption against the students' faces, then flipped to the portraits of the class of 2006.

The boy Christine had stabbed with her chewed-up fingernail had dark hair, a nose that could be called pointy, and ears that might be described as sticking out.

Suddenly Justine was so wired, she felt as if she could run electricity for all of East Los Angeles off her mood.

Was Christine's memory this good? Or was she just trying to please Justine like her mother had said she would?

Justine said, "Christine? It was nighttime, right? The van stopped for a minute, and the kids were moving. Are you sure this is the boy you saw?"

Christine was a bright girl, and she understood the potential problem instantly.

"I worried that I wouldn't be able to recognize him? But I do. Like I said the first time, Dr. Smith, I'll never forget his face."

"Okay, Christine. Great job. And now that face has a name. This is Rudolph Crocker."