Whoever that counselor was, he or she would be getting a visit from Rafe soon.
“How well do you know the Skinleys?” Rafe asked.
“Well enough to form the opinion that they’re too easy on the son and too protective of the daughter.”
Rafe’s opinion also. “How about Brittney Travis? Are you familiar with her?”
“Lee’s my insurance agent. Brittney is a bright girl, school comes easy for her. She didn’t always apply herself, though. Likes the boys. Her parents kept taking her car away trying to get her on the straight and narrow.”
Nothing Rafe hadn’t already heard, but he was surprised by how much information Sam Senior had. The man still had his finger on the pulse of Scorpion Ridge High.
“Adobe Hills Community College is a bigger venue—more kids, more things to do—and that attracted Brittney like a moth to flame,” Sam continued.
“Who would you say Brittney’s friends were?”
Before Sam Senior could answer, the main auditorium door opened and a student poked his head through. He looked undecided about entering, but whoever was behind him wasn’t undecided. The door opened and students careened forth.
A few minutes later, standing before the graduating class, Rafe said the words he’d said for almost a decade, but he felt as if he was in a vacuum.
Brittney should be in the audience. She should be poised to bolt into her future, make all the mistakes and have all the successes a teenager is supposed to make and have. Amanda Skinley should be in the audience, too. Something wasn’t right in Scorpion Ridge, and Rafe needed to find out what. A sea of graduating seniors, now and in the future, depended on him.
Which meant he had to distance himself from Janie, stop thinking about her 24/7 and start thinking about the case 24/7.
As he reached the auditorium door, he switched his cell phone back on. A message beeped.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour,” Nathan complained.
“Now you can appreciate how I felt on Tuesday.”
Rafe wasn’t sure how to read the silence that followed. Nathan was usually a straightforward, let’s-not-waste-time kind of guy. At least, when he wasn’t sending get-out-of-my-jurisdiction signals.
“We found something in Patricia’s apartment during our investigation, and I recently finished going through it. It’s Amanda Skinley’s art book.”
“It would have been nice to hear about this sooner,” Rafe said.
“Patricia had more than two hundred student art books in that house. It took us a few days to go through them. Amanda’s appears to be newer than the rest. I also want to impress you with the fact that we can find an art book and not lose it,” Nathan said drily. “We’ve had time to look through Amanda’s book, at the drawings and words. Probably with as much care as you gave Derek’s art book.”
Rafe recognized a dig when he heard one.
Nathan continued, “The last few pages are the most interesting. They’re a fairly detailed description of Brittney’s death.”
Rafe didn’t believe it. He’d sat with Amanda as she drew their only investigative lead. She wouldn’t have failed to mention that she’d also drawn the crime scene.