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“How not great?”
“I dunno. I kinda hurt all over. My arm and shoulder and leg, but this”—she pointed to her chin—“it’s sooo awful. I mean, I might have to have plastic surgery.”
“I doubt it.”
“You don’t know. Mom, I can’t have a scar, not on my face!” Bianca was nothing if not a drama queen.
“Let’s not go off the deep end, okay. Wait until it heals. It could add character to your face. You know, like Harrison Ford.”
“He’s a man, Mom. An old man.”
“That ‘old man’ is still a bona fide heartthrob, let me tell you.”
Bianca rolled her eyes. “It’s going to take forever to look okay, if it ever does!” She was texting again.
“How’s the ankle?”
“It hurts! Bad!” But Bianca hadn’t really mentioned it until her mother brought up the subject. A good sign.
“Take care of it, okay? I have to go to work.”
“You know, Mom, I’m pretty sure that girl was Destiny.” Her lips folded over themselves as she tossed the idea through her brain. “I mean, I can’t be a hundred percent, but I thought about it last night—I couldn’t stop thinking about it—and I saw her face, the way it was in the water all, you know, rotting, the flesh falling apart.”
She shuddered, finally dropping the phone into her lap as she met Pescoli’s eyes. “And I think it must be her . . .”
Pescoli navigated her way over a river of strewn clothes to take a seat on the end of the bed. “You’re right. About the girl being Destiny, I mean. Alvarez texted me earlier this morning. The ID was confirmed by her parents.”
Bianca blanched. It was one thing to conjecture, another to learn the truth and have reality hit. “Oh, God.” She blinked, then bit her lip. “So . . . what happened to her? Was it—? Did someone kill her?”
“Don’t know yet. That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Absently rubbing one forearm with her fingers, she asked, “Do you . . . do you think it was one of the kids, the ones that were there?”
“Have no idea. But we do know that whatever happened to her didn’t occur last night. Time of death’s all wrong. It was sometime before, but we haven’t really pinned it down yet. Long before your party got started anyway. Whose idea was it to meet up at Reservoir Point?”
She lifted a shoulder. Eyed her phone as a soft ding alerted her to the fact that another text was arriving. “One of the boys. I don’t know. Probably Austin. He’s kind of in charge.”
The ring leader. “What about the Bell kid?”
“Kywin?” She shook her head as her phone dinged again and she glanced at the screen. “He does what the others want. Goes along, you know. Never has an original thought.”
“TJ?”
“Oh, geez. I don’t know, Mom,” she snapped, then a little more contritely. “What . . . what if she wasn’t killed by a human?”
“We’re not certain her death is a homicide.”
Bianca sent her a look that said, Yeah, right. “But what if it was something else that murdered her?”
The monster again. They were back to that. “Like?”
“You know, whatever it was that chased me.”
“We still haven’t figured out who that was.”
“Not ‘who,’ Mom, but ‘what’?”
“Okay.”
