Страница 82 из 98
Bo
“Lauren should be home any minute now. She’s off school today, of course,” Bo
They were sitting at a red-and-white chrome-and-Formica dinette set. Like everything else about the row house, the kitchen seemed a 1960s vintage. The only things that brought it into the present were a small white microwave and an electric can opener. It was clear that the Semanskis were Lauren’s grandparents, not her parents.
“Did Lauren call home at all today?”
“No,” Bo
“You said on the phone that she left the house around eight this morning?”
“Yes. That’s about right.”
“Do you know where she was headed?”
“She went to visit with some friends,” Bo
“Do you know their names?”
Bo
“Where are her mom and dad?” Jessica asked.
“They were killed in a car accident last year.”
“I’m sorry,” Jessica said.
“Thank you.”
Bo
“Can you tell me what happened to her parents?” Jessica asked.
“A week before Christmas, last year, Nancy and Carl were coming home from Nancy’s part-time job at the Home Depot. They were hiring for the holidays, you know. Not like now,” she said. “It was late and really dark. Carl must have been going a little too fast around a turn and the car slid off the road and went down into a ravine. They say they didn’t linger in death.”
Jessica was a bit surprised that this woman didn’t tear up. She imagined that Bo
“Did Lauren take it very hard?” Jessica asked.
“Oh yes.”
Jessica scribbled a note, noting the time line.
“Does Lauren have a boyfriend?”
Bo
“What do you mean?”
“They’re always coming around. All hours. They look like homeless people.”
“Do you know if anyone has threatened Lauren lately?”
“Threatened?”
“Anyone she might have had a problem with. Someone who may have been bothering her.”
Bo
Jessica jotted a few more notes. “Would it be okay if I took a quick look at Lauren’s room?”
“Sure.”
Lauren Semanski’s room was at the top of the stairs, at the back end of the house. On the door was a faded sticker that said beware: spun monkey zone. Jessica knew enough drug terms to know that Lauren Semanski was probably not out “visiting friends” in order to organize a church picnic.
Bo
Mercifully, Bo
On the desk were a series of photographs in inexpensive frames. A school shot of Lauren at about nine or ten. One was of Lauren and a scruffy teenaged boy, standing in front of the art museum. One was a magazine shot of Russell Crowe.
Jessica poked through the drawers in the dresser. Sweaters, socks, jeans, shorts. Nothing significant. Her closet yielded the same. Jessica closed the closet door, leaned against it, surveyed the room. Think. Why was Lauren Semanski on that list? Other than the fact that she attended a Catholic school, what was in this room that would fit into the puzzle of these bizarre deaths?
Jessica sat down at Lauren’s computer, checked the bookmarks on the web browser. There was one call hardradio.com, dedicated to heavy metal, one called snakenet. But the one that caught her attention was a site called yellowribbon.org. At first, Jessica thought it might have been dedicated to POWs and MIAs. When she co
Was I this fascinated with death and despair when I was a teenager? Jessica thought.
She imagined she was. It probably came with the hormones.
Back in the kitchen, Jessica found that Bo
“I need to ask you a few more questions about the accident last year,” Jessica said.
“Okay,” Bo
“I promise I won’t keep you too long.”
Bo
Jessica was organizing her thoughts when a look of gradually dawning horror came over Bo
Lauren Semanski was standing on the back porch. Her clothes were ripped; her knuckles were bleeding and raw. There was a long contusion on her right leg, a pair of deep lacerations on her right arm. On the left side of her head, a large patch of scalp was missing. Her left wrist appeared to be broken, the bone protruding through the flesh. The skin on her right cheek was peeled back in a bloody flap.
“Sweetheart?” Bo
Lauren looked at her grandmother, at Jessica. Her eyes were bloodshot and burnished. A deep defiance shone through the trauma.
“Motherfucker didn’t know who he was dealing with,” she said.