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I grinned. Thanks, Piper. “Yeah, we’ve hooked up a few times,” I said with a shrug. “But it’s nothing serious. I see other girls too.”
“Don’t worry, your love life is not our concern,” the man said, voice tinged with amusement. “Our only concern is Ms. Warnock’s recent antics.”
My heart froze in my chest. “What do you mean?”
“You’re aware that she ran away from home recently, aren’t you?”
“Oh.” I breathed a short sigh of relief. “Yeah, I know all about that.”
“We have it on good authority that the police interviewed you the morning she ran away. You told them you didn’t know anything about her plans to leave town.”
I nodded. “That’s true. She didn’t tell me anything about running away. It was just as much of a shock to me as it was to the Prescotts.”
The masked man took another step forward. “Here’s your mission details,” he said. “We need you to go to the police station tomorrow. Tell them that you’ve just remembered something.”
“Remembered what?” I asked, pulse racing again.
“At the cave party you attended with Amerie a week ago, she made a few comments about wanting to run away because she hates this town. Tell the police you were drunk on the night this occurred, so you didn’t remember right away, but it’s finally come back to you now.”
I frowned. “So you want me to lie to the police.”
“That’s right.”
“Does that mean Amerie didn’t really run away?” I asked. “I mean, why else would you want me to make up that story for the cops?”
The third-degree members were all silent for a moment. The one on the far right finally stepped forward. “Ms. Warnock did run away. But she was looking into our society for a school paper article,” she said. “Were you aware of that? Given that you both work on the paper.”
After a brief moment of hesitation, I decided to be semi-honest in my response. I’d often heard that the best lies were those that were sprinkled with the truth.
“Yeah, I knew about it,” I said. “Amerie actually asked me about the society when she told me about the article. I told her it was just a stupid urban legend, and that she shouldn’t waste her time writing about it.”
“That was the right thing to do. Other members told her the exact same thing,” the middle guy said. “Unfortunately, we discovered that Amerie was still working on that article, despite all the attempts to dissuade her.”
The woman on the right cut in. “Even though we all know she’s run away from home because of her drug problem, we’re worried that some of the local police officers might find it a little suspicious that she disappeared while writing about us,” she said. “Can you see the problem there?”
Fucking liars. “Yes,” I replied, nodding sagely. “They might start to think the society is real and open an official investigation into her disappearance.”
“That’s right. But if we have a witness statement from one of Amerie’s close friends confirming that she was considering running away, they’ll drop all inquiries into her disappearance.”
I nodded slowly. “So the mission is just to make a potential problem go away.”
“Exactly. It would be much easier if we had every single member of the police force in town on our client list, but alas… we only have a couple. So there’s only so much we can do. Hence we need your help to tie up the loose end.”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, weighing up my options. Something had just occurred to me.
Amerie and I had never considered reporting everything to the Vanderwild Bay police, because we knew at least one of them was a Rosmerta client, so we had no idea which ones could be trusted as a result of that.
However, if I went to the police as instructed by the society tonight, it wouldn’t actually be difficult to figure out which cops weren’t corrupt. All I had to do was find one without kids. There was no way he or she could possibly be a Rosmerta client, considering what the society traded in. So, once I knew who was safe to contact, I could figure out a way to leak Rosmerta information to them.
With an uncorrupted officer or detective on her side, Amerie might stand a chance at escaping the Playground sooner rather than later.
“So, Jensen,” the masked man in the middle went on, eyes gleaming from the flickering candlelight. “Do you accept the mission?”
I smiled thinly and dipped my chin in a curt nod. “I accept.”
Jensen
I set my jaw and walked through the front entrance of the Vanderwild Bay police station. The lobby was a bustling hub of activity filled with the sound of voices, ringing phones, and doors opening and closing. A large front desk stood in the center, manned by a uniformed officer.
