Immoral Read Free

that.”
    “You told Mr. Stoner that she made a date with you.”
    Kevin bit his lip. “She asked if I wanted to see her on Saturday night. She said I could pick her up at seven, and we could go out. But she wasn’t there.”
    “It was a game to her,” Sally repeated. “Did she tell you to call me on Saturday and lie to me? Because that’s what you did.”
    Stride knew he wasn’t going to get any more out of these two tonight. “Listen up, both of you. This isn’t about who kissed who. A girl’s missing. A friend of yours. I’ve got to go talk to her parents, who are wondering if they’re ever going to see their daughter again, okay? So think. Is there anything else you remember from Friday night? Anything Rachel did or said? Anything that might tell us where she went when she left here or who she might have seen.”
    Kevin closed his eyes, as if he were really trying to remember. “No, Lieutenant. There’s nothing.”
    Sally was sullen, and Stride wondered if she was hiding something. But she wasn’t going to talk. “I have no idea what happened to her,” Sally mumbled.
    Stride nodded. “All right, we’ll be in touch.”
    He took another glance out at the looming blackness of the lake, beyond the narrow canal. There was nothing to see. It was as empty and hollow as his world felt now. As he pushed past the two teenagers and headed to the parking lot, he felt it again. Deja vu. It was an ugly memory.
     
     
     

Chapter 2
     
     
    Fourteen months had passed since the wet August evening when Kerry McGrath disappeared. Stride had reconstructed her last night so many times that he could almost see it playing in his head like a movie. If he closed his eyes, he could see her, right down to the freckle on the corner of her lips and the three slim gold earrings hugging her left earlobe. He could hear her giggle, like she had in the birthday videotape he had watched a hundred times. All along, he had kept an image of her that was so vivid, it was like she was alive.
    But he knew she was dead. The bubbly girl who was so real to him was a hideous, flesh-eaten thing in the ground somewhere, in one of the deserted acres of wilderness they had never searched. He only wanted to know why and who had done it to her.
    And now another teenager. Another disappearance.
    As he waited at a stoplight, Stride glanced into his truck window and found himself staring into the reflection of his own shadowy brown eyes. Pirate eyes, Cindy used to say, teasing him. Dark, alert, on fire. But that was then. He had lost Kerry to a monster, and a different kind of monster had claimed Cindy at the same time. The tragedy deadened the flame behind his eyes and made him older. He could see it in his face, weathered and imperfect. A web of telltale lines furrowed across his forehead. His black hair, streaked with strands of gray, was short but unkempt, with a messy cowlick. He was forty-one and felt fifty.
    Stride swung his mud-stained Bronco through potholes to the old-money neighborhood near the university where Graeme and Emily Stoner lived. Stride knew what to expect. It was eleven o’clock, normally a time when the streets would be deathly quiet on Sunday night. But not tonight. The blinking lights of squad cars and the white klieg lights of television crews lit up the street. Neighbors lingered on their lawns in small crowds of spies and gossips. Stride heard the overlapping cacophony of police radios buzzing like white noise.
    Uniformed cops had cordoned off the Stoner house, keeping the reporters and the gawkers at bay. Stride pulled his Bronco beside a squad car and double-parked. The reporters all swarmed around him, barely giving him room to swing his door open. Stride shook his head and held up his hand, shielding his eyes as he squinted into the camera lights.
    “Come on, guys, give me a break.”
    He pushed his way through the crowd of journalists, but one man squared his body in front of Stride and flashed a signal to his