Every Last Fear(53)

Harper chewed on her lower lip. “There is one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“After we heard about the accident, Toby Lee came to find me. He said Mags had asked him for help before she left for Mexico.”

“Toby’s a classmate?”

“Yeah. He said she was trying to track down someone’s phone. Toby’s a computer guy.”

Tracking a phone? That was unusual. “Did he help her?”

“I think so. He can give you the details. But he thought it was weird.”

Keller wanted to shout, So why didn’t either of you tell anyone? But such was the teenage brain.

Keller thanked Harper for her help, asked her not to tell anyone what they’d discussed, and sent her back to class.

Alone for a moment, Keller felt her jaw clench as she realized that one of the last experiences a seventeen-year-old girl had on this planet was an upsetting incident with a boy. Harper said his name was Eric Hutchinson. Keller checked her watch. She needed to talk to Toby Lee about this phone-tracking business. But there was no way she was going to let what happened at that party die with Maggie Pine.

The principal returned to the office.

“I’d like to speak with Toby Lee,” Keller said. “But first, bring me Eric Hutchinson.”





CHAPTER 34





Eric sat up straight, arms folded, a scowl on his handsome face. He wore a shirt that had a picture of crossing lacrosse sticks and read EAST COAST DYES. His father—a ruddy-faced man with the build of a former athlete—sat next to him in a similar pose, chewing gum and glowering at Keller.

When Eric had been called down to the office, he’d refused to speak to Keller without his father there. A wise move, all things considered. It was always the affluent, the well-educated, who lawyered up—or in this case, parented up. They’d been exposed to lawyers, or studied Miranda in their AP Government classes, or had been schooled by America’s biggest educator on police procedure and the Bill of Rights, Law & Order.

Though not every kid. Danny Pine hadn’t been so worldly-wise. If he had just asked to speak to a lawyer, he’d probably be a free man. Keller had watched the video of his interrogation several times, and it turned her stomach. That didn’t mean the interrogating officers were corrupt. They were small-town Nebraska cops with little training. And the scant interrogation instruction they’d received—a method known as the Reid Technique—had one critical flaw: it often resulted in false confessions. The great strides in DNA had not only freed many innocents, but had proven, contrary to conventional wisdom, that people did in fact confess to crimes they did not commit, especially juveniles.

A couple years ago, Keller had attended an interrogation best practices workshop and she’d been shocked at the number of false confessions. Keller remembered her instructor, a renowned expert in interrogation techniques, saying, “We used to teach you to look for signs of lying, like bad eye contact, fidgeting, but that’s just what kids do when they’re uncomfortable. We used to teach you to prod the suspect with a few details of the crime, but we found out that kids just parrot the words back. And we used to teach you to employ minimization techniques and tell kids that if they told the truth they could go home, but we found out that kids often jumped at the chance and confessed, believing that their innocence would be straightened out later.” The instructor closed the session by saying, “I interrogated a fifteen-year-old who falsely confessed and spent eleven years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s my goal in life that it never happens again.”

That didn’t mean Danny Pine was innocent. He was an obvious suspect. He’d dated Charlotte, and the truth of the matter was that it was rarely a stranger who killed you; it was usually someone you held dear. As Keller knew too well, the sheep spends its life worried about the wolf, only to be eaten by the farmer.

Keller looked at the wolf—no, wolves—sitting across from her.

“What’s this about?” Eric’s father said to Keller. “And I do not appreciate the school letting our kids being grilled by a federal agent without a parent present.” His glare landed on Principal Flowers, who insisted on being present at the meeting.

Keller didn’t flinch. She never had trouble with alpha males. She’d grown up with one, and understood that the alpha-ness was born of their own insecurities. These men who loved to tell women to stop being so emotional were in fact the ones who let their emotions control them. She handed the kid’s father a printout of some of the messages that had been sent to Maggie Pine.

“What’s this?” Mr. Hutchinson said.

“That’s what we wanted to ask your son.”

Mr. Hutchinson looked at Eric. His son’s face showed the first break in the facade.

“Why were you and your friends sending these messages?” Keller asked.

Eric was about to say something when his father extended an arm across his son’s chest like a shield.

“Whoa, hold on, lady. I don’t see my son’s name on any of these messages. And if I need to get our lawyer here, I—”

The principal spoke, trying to take things down a notch. “Agent Keller is here about the Pine family. She didn’t fly across the country about teen cyberbullying. But as part of her work”—the principal nodded at the printouts—“the FBI uncovered these messages targeting Maggie Pine just before her death.”