nail polish, and stale candy; the girls’ incessant chatter, their lives like some corny soap opera filled with jealousy, gossip, and betrayal from which she felt excluded.
“My dad thinks that Ed Staton’s murder was some sort of gay revenge killing,” Amanda told her grandfather before he left.
“What’s he basing that theory on?”
“On the baseball bat shoved—you know where,” Amanda said, blushing to her roots as she thought of the video she’d seen online.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Amanda. There’s still a lot we don’t know.”
“Exactly. Like, how did the killer get in?”
“Ed Staton was supposed to lock the doors and set the alarm when he started his shift,” said Blake. “Since there was no sign of forced entry, we have to assume the killer hid in the school before Staton locked up.”
“But if the murder really was premeditated, why didn’t the guy kill Staton before he drove off? He couldn’t have known Staton intended to come back.”
“Maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Maybe someone sneaked into the school intending to rob the place, and Staton caught him in the act.”
“Dad says that in all the years he’s worked in homicide, though he’s seen murderers who panicked and lashed out violently, he’s never come across a murderer who took the time to hang around and cruelly humiliate his victim.”
“What other pearls of wisdom did Bob come up with?”
“You know what Dad’s like—I have to surgically extract every scrap of information from him. He doesn’t think it’s an appropriate subject for a girl my age. Dad’s a troglodyte.”
“He’s got a point, Amanda. This whole thing is a bit sordid.”
“It’s public domain, it was on TV, and if you think you can handle it, there’s a video on the Internet some little girl shot on her cell phone.”
“Jeez, that’s cold-blooded. Kids these days are so used to violence that nothing scares them. Now, back in my day . . .” Jackson trailed off with a sigh.
“This is your day! It really bugs me when you talk like an old man. So, have you checked out the juvenile detention center, Kabel?”
“I’ve got work to do—I can’t just leave the drugstore unattended. But I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
“Well, hurry up, or I might just find myself a new henchman.”
“You can try! I’d like to see anyone else who’s prepared to put up with you.”
“You love me, Gramps?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither,” Amanda said, and flung her arms around his neck.
Blake Jackson buried his nose in his granddaughter’s mane of frizzy hair, which smelled of salad—she washed it with vinegar—and thought about the fact that in a few months she would be off to college, and he would no longer be around to protect her. He missed her already, and she had not even left yet. He flicked through fleeting memories of her short life, back to an image of the sullen, skeptical little girl who would spend hours hiding in a makeshift tent of bedsheets where no one was admitted except Save-the-Tuna, the invisible friend who followed her around for years, her cat Gina, and sometimes Blake himself, when he was lucky enough to be invited to drink make-believe tea from tiny plastic cups.
Where on earth does she get it from? Blake Jackson had wondered when Amanda—aged six—first beat him at chess. It could hardly be from Indiana, who floated in the stratosphere preaching love and peace half a century after the hippies had died out, and it wasn’t from Bob Martín, who had never finished a book in his life. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” said Celeste Roko, who had a habit of showing up unannounced, and who terrified Blake Jackson almost as much as the devil himself. “Lots of kids are precocious at that age, but it doesn’t last. Just wait till her hormones kick in, and she’ll nosedive to the usual level of teenage stupidity.”
But in this case the psychic had been wrong: Amanda’s intelligence had continued to develop throughout her teenage years, and the only impact her hormones had was on her appearance. At puberty she grew quickly, and at fifteen she got contact lenses to replace her glasses, had her retainer removed, learned to tame her shock of curly hair, and emerged as a slim young woman with delicate features, her father’s dark hair, and her mother’s pale skin, a young woman who had no idea how beautiful she was. At seventeen she still shambled along, still bit her nails, and still dressed in bizarre castoffs she bought in thrift stores and accessorized according to her mood.
When her grandfather left, Amanda felt, for a few hours at least, that she was master of her own space. Three months from now she’d graduate from high school—where she’d been happy, on the whole, despite the frustration of having to share a dorm room—and soon she’d be heading for Massachusetts, to MIT, where her virtual boyfriend, Bradley, was already enrolled. He’d told her all about the MIT Media Lab, a haven of imagination and creativity, everything she had ever dreamed of. Bradley was the perfect man: he was a bit of a geek, like her, had a quirky sense of humor and a great body. His broad shoulders and healthy tan, he owed to being on the swim team; his fluorescent yellow hair to the strange cocktail of chemicals in swimming pools. He could easily pass for Australian. Sometime in the distant future Amanda planned to marry Bradley, though she hadn’t told him this yet. In the meantime, they hooked up online to play Go, talked about hermetic subjects and about books.
Bradley was a science-fiction fan—something Amanda found depressing; more often than not science fiction involved a universe where the earth had been reduced to rubble and machines controlled the population. She’d read a lot of science fiction between the ages of eight and eleven before moving on to fantasy—imaginary eras with little technology where the difference between heroes and villains was clear—a genre Bradley considered puerile and pernicious. He preferred bleak dystopias. Amanda didn’t dare tell him that she’d read all four Twilight novels and the Millennium trilogy; Bradley had no time for vampires and psychopaths.
Their romantic e-mails full of virtual kisses were also heavily laced with irony so as not to seem soppy; certainly nothing explicit. The Reverend Mother had expelled a classmate of Amanda’s the previous December for uploading a video of herself naked, spread-eagled, and masturbating. Bradley had not been particularly shocked by the story, since some of his buddies’ girlfriends had made similar sex tapes. Amanda had been a little surprised to discover that her friend was completely shaven, and that she’d made no attempt to hide her face, but she was more shocked by the hysterical reaction of the nuns, who had the reputation of being tolerant.
While she messaged Bradley online, Amanda filed away the information her grandfather had managed to dig up on the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat, along with a number of grisly press cuttings she’d been collecting since her godmother first broadcast her grim prophecy. The kids who played Ripper were still trying to come up with answers to several questions about Ed Staton, but already Amanda was preparing a new dossier for their next case: the murders of Doris and Michael Constante.
Matheus Pereira, a painter of Brazilian origin, was another of Indiana Jackson’s admirers. But their love was strictly platonic, since Matheus devoted all his energies to his painting. Matheus believed that artistic creativity was fueled by sexual energy, and when forced to choose between painting and seducing Indiana—who didn’t seem interested in an affair—he chose the former. In any case, marijuana kept him in a permanent state of zoned-out bliss that didn’t lend itself to amorous schemes. Matheus and Indiana were close friends; they saw each other most days, and they looked out for each other. He was constantly harassed by the police, while she sometimes had problems with clients who got too fresh, and with Deputy Chief Martín, who felt he still had the right to interfere in his ex-wife’s affairs.
“I’m worried about Amanda,” Indiana said as she massaged Matheus with eucalyptus oil to relieve his sciatica. “Her new obsession