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inclined to grant Shannon Connor any benefit of the doubt, either.
The hedges had a gate, which Kayla swung open and motioned her through. The other side was cool and green and open—a community garden, pretty and peaceful, xeriscaped with desert plants. Secluded.
A young lady slumped, hands folded, on a concrete park bench under the skeletal branches of a large tree. She looked up as Kayla and Katie approached, and got to her feet quickly.
Kayla’s daughter, Jazz, looked taller than Katie remembered, but that was the way with kids…. They grew while you weren’t watching. Jazz looked much more mature, though. She’d always been self-possessed, but the time at the Athena Academy had given her even more of that. Except for a hint of nervousness in the quick way she glanced at her mother, she looked as cool as ice.
She was dressed in blue jeans and a pink top, long-sleeved and hooded. Warm enough for a walk, but not for sitting on a cold bench. She was shivering.
“Officer,” Katie called and got an instant response from one of the uniformed cops near the gate. “Can you lend me your jacket?”
He slid it off and handed it over; Katie draped the police-issue jacket around Jazz’s thin shoulders. “There,” she said. “Better?”
“Yeah,” Jazz agreed softly. “Thanks. Hi, Katie.”
“Hi, honey. So, bad day, huh?”
“Pretty bad.” Jazz swallowed hard and glanced again at her mother, who was watching her with so much love and concern it made Katie’s heart turn over. “They almost got me, but Teal and Lena, they made sure I got away. I didn’t want to leave them, Katie. I didn’t!”
“I know you didn’t. Here. Sit with me.” She took a seat on the cold concrete bench and patted the empty spot next to her. “Maybe your mom can get you something to drink? Some water?”
It was a pretext, but a necessary one; she couldn’t just tell Kayla to leave, and Kayla needed an excuse to go. When Jazz nodded gratefully, the two women exchanged a quick glance, and Kayla reached down to hug her daughter before walking off in search of refreshments.
Katie waited until she was sure Kayla was out of earshot.
“You don’t have to be brave with me,” she said, and Jazz crumbled, sobbing against her. Katie put her arms around her, wincing as Jazz hugged back, but she bit her lip and stood the pain. She stroked the girl’s soft, silky hair with slow movements. “You’ve been brave all day, haven’t you?”
“I had to.” Jazz gulped. Her voice was more like a little girl’s now, shaking and high-pitched. “Everybody was counting on me. I had to remember, and tell people, and—”
“And you did that, you did. But you were scared, too, and that’s okay. It’s okay, you understand?”
Jazz pulled back, eyes swollen and streaming tears. She gave Katie a pleading look. “Mom never is.”
“Your mom is scared a lot, but she tries not to let it show.” Katie gave the girl a smile, a small one, appropriate to the mood. “Like me. But you need to break down sometimes to be stronger later. You understand that? I’ll bet your mom cries later.”
“She—” Jazz gulped air and looked more thoughtful. “Sometimes, I guess. She closes the door. I hear her crying, but only when things were really bad at work or something.”
“Well, today, they’re really bad at work and she’s afraid for you, too. So give her a break. Let her take care of you, okay?”
Jazz nodded. Her body language was slowly uncoiling from the wire-tight posture it had been, and Katie breathed a cautious sigh of relief. The last thing the kid needed was to bottle all this up. It was traumatic, and Jazz was—like all Athena students—advanced for her age. A recipe for emotional disaster.
“You feel like telling me the story now? One last time?”
Jazz bent her head and sat up again, hands braced on either side on the cold concrete bench. Her voice was soft, and still a little unsteady, but Katie heard every word. “We decided to go to the movies. It was—we had the day off.”
“Why didn’t you ask for transportation? Call a cab?”
Jazz didn’t look up. “We wanted to walk. It was a nice day.”
Girls her age didn’t want to walk, they wanted to get where they were going fast, and have fun even faster.
“Jazz, if you lie to me, you’re putting Teal and Lena in danger. You know that, don’t you?”
Jazz’s head jerked up in outright astonishment. Katie raised an eyebrow and waited as Jazz found words. “I didn’t lie!”
“I’m afraid you did. And you lied to your mother, and to the police, and now you think you can’t change your story. But you can, Jazz. Nobody thinks you’re at fault here.”
“But—”
Katie let a little hardness creep into her voice. “You weren’t going to the movies. You didn’t take the school transportation service because you didn’t want anybody to know where you were going, and you didn’t take a cab because you didn’t want any record. Right?”
Jazz looked as bewildered as if Katie had just pulled a rabbit out of her ear. “How—?” She swallowed the question and flushed pale pink under her matte-tan skin. “I didn’t lie. We would have gone to the movies. We were planning to do it late afternoon.”
“So where were you going in the morning?”
“It’s supposed to be a secret. Teal made me promise.”
“Teal made you promise.”
Jazz nodded slowly. “There was someone from the school in trouble. She needed help. Teal and Lena promised to meet her. I wasn’t really supposed to go along, but I followed them and caught up after I overheard. Besides, I wanted to go to the movies.”
Precocious didn’t half cover it, Katie thought. She wondered if she’d been so difficult at Jazz’s age, thought back and decided that it was entirely possible. “Where were you going? And who were you meeting?”
“We were going to the mall. It’s only a couple of blocks away. I don’t know who we were meeting, it was a secret. Teal and Lena didn’t want to talk about it.”
This didn’t sound nearly as innocent as Jazz probably thought it did. “Could it have been boys? Somebody they met in town, maybe?”
“I— No. No, they told me it was somebody from the school.”
“There are men working at the school.”
Jazz shook her head. “They said she.”
It couldn’t be an accident that Teal and Lena had been off-campus and picked off so neatly; somebody had set it up. Somebody had set a place and a time for them to be, and they’d walked right into it. Jazz had been an unexpected ride-along. No wonder they’d allowed her to escape.
“Okay, walk me through what happened. You were walking—”
Kayla returned midway through the recitation of the facts, but that was all right. The secret had been revealed, and Katie could see from the kid’s body language that she had nothing more to conceal. She’d told everything she knew.
Nevertheless, just for clarity, Katie walked Jazz through the rest of the story, start to finish, stopping her for details that seemed unimportant but might be vital later on. She made illegible scribbles in her own fluid abbreviations and listened for any false notes.
Nothing.
When silence fell, Katie checked her watch. It was sliding toward evening, and the chill was getting sharper in the air. The desert didn’t hold in the heat poured over it during the day, and it was going to get bone-shaking cold tonight. “Right,” she said. “I think that’s it,