Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(59)

By that logic, refusing to sweep Luke’s past behavior under the rug was a good thing. A healthy thing.

A good thing according to Dylan, she thinks. And who is Dylan again exactly?

The thought makes her jump. Luke flinches at the sight of it.

Maybe he wasn’t a real psychiatrist. Maybe he was able to deceive her because he spoke with the authority of someone who understood darkness; not because he had studied it, but because he’d lived through it himself.

She closes her eyes.

Too much. It’s too much to think about Dylan right now.

“Hey,” Luke says softly.

It’s a mistake, looking into his eyes. A mistake to wonder if his pain, his contrition, is making him even more attractive to her. And it’s true now, she realizes, that his insults, his bullying, hurt more than they would have if they’d been inflicted on her by someone who had seemed less confident and less comfortable in his own skin, despite his recent admission to the contrary.

“I didn’t kill anyone on that farm.” Her vision mists. She’d hoped a good night’s sleep would help keep her emotions in check, but no such luck. “I was seven. I never even saw any of the victims.”

Luke nods. “I know,” he says quietly, “and I’m sorry if I ever made anyone think otherwise.”

It’s exactly what she needed to hear. It’s exactly what she’s always wanted to hear from him.

She’s on the verge of asking for a tissue, but when she blinks a few times, the tears don’t spill.

“And if there’s anything I can do,” Luke says, and it’s clear he’s rehearsed this part, “to make up for it, let me know.”

“Tell me what’s going on with your brother,” she says. “You looked like you got hit by a truck when I asked about him.”

“It’s messy,” he says slowly, then takes a slug of beer.

“And the rest of this isn’t?” She smiles, hoping it’ll take some of the edge off her words. It does, apparently, because he smiles back and studies her for a second or two with an expression she’d describe as almost wistful.

“My brother hacks computer systems the way some of us have too much to drink on Saturday nights,” he says. “You know that, right?”

“I remember some . . . antics, yes.”

“Yeah, everyone remembers that prank he pulled, hacking the Copper Pot’s phone lines and sending calls to that manure store, but since then he’s graduated to bigger stuff.”

That’s not all of it, or else Luke wouldn’t be clearing his throat and studying the wall behind her and shifting his weight from one foot to the other as though the whole story’s trying to worm its way out of his stomach like bad gas.

Charlotte says, “So is that really all there is—”

“He was taking classes at a small community college down in LA. Night classes, mostly. Business administration, that kind of thing. I guess the idea was he was going to go do something with computers, but legit, you know? Like start his own consulting business or something. Anyway, one day the dean of the school up and disappears, and he takes most of the tuition money with him. School’s so broke they have to shut down. I mean, it wasn’t a big operation to begin with, but it was what Bailey could afford. It was the best most of the students could afford. Cheap enough that they didn’t have to take out loans, but expensive enough that they had to work a bunch of jobs first and save. But the whole thing turned out to be a racket, and the dean was planning it for years.

“When Bailey called he was furious, angrier than I’d ever heard him. It was like he’d made this attempt to be an honest, upstanding person and this asshole fucked him over, along with all the other students who’d already paid for the year. I tried to calm him down. Told him he could come up to San Francisco and crash with me for a while, just until he figured things out. And he did come up for a visit. But he only stayed for a day and it was . . . Well, now I see it was kind of his way of saying goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Charlotte asks.

“He said he was going to do some traveling, try to figure out what he was going to do next. That I probably wouldn’t hear from him for a while. The last time I got on his ass about hacking, I didn’t hear from him for months, so this time I held my tongue, told him to do what he needed to do. A few weeks later, they found the dean of that school living under an alias in Australia. I didn’t connect the two until . . .”

“Until what?”

“My final FBI interview.”

She was starting to put the pieces together, but she didn’t want to put words in Luke’s mouth, so she kept silent, nodding to indicate her understanding.

“So my first interview goes well, I think. I mean, why shouldn’t it? I’m crazy qualified. And I’m exactly what they need. Someone proficient in multiple languages. I figure I’m a lock. But then this agent I’ve never seen before walks into the room and orders everyone else out. Agent Rohm. That was his name. Big guy. Deep voice. Southern accent. Kinda like Foghorn Leghorn. He tells me I’ve only got a thirty percent chance of making it to the academy at Quantico, but there’s a real easy way for me to make it ninety percent. Or he thought it was easy, at least.”

Charlotte just nods.

“He said I could inform on my brother, who was now one of the most wanted cybercriminals in the United States.”