CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

On the way to weight training, Justin met Gabby at her locker. She had PE with Coach Colfax at the same time, so they could walk together — something they’d been trying to do as much as possible since they’d realized it was a teacher who’d killed Devon Warner — and most likely Lily Carpenter.

“Any word from the Scooby-Doo crew?” he asked. He still thought it was insane for Sabrina and Z to have trekked down to New Mexico in the hopes of finding out more about Amy Hanson.

“All I’ve heard so far is that Sabrina is apparently now a fan of beef jerky.”

He guided her down the hallway, where a group of sophomore cheerleaders was staring at them as though they were on a freaking red carpet.

“Hey, Gabby!” Hannah Phelps exclaimed. “How are you?”

“Um, good,” Gabby replied, fidgeting.

Justin slung a protective arm around her. As if she was going to go back to being friends with Hannah after the girl had ditched her years ago? And why was she suddenly talking to Gabby now? Because he, a football player, was walking down the hall with her? As odd as Z and Sabrina could be, Justin at least knew they were real friends.

He dodged the crowded flight of stairs inside the hall, instead opening the door to the secluded back steps outside of the building. It was the longer route to the gym, but at least it gave them a little privacy.

“How was Fields’s class? Anything come up?” Justin asked her. Besides the chemistry connection and the conference he’d been at with Lily, Z heard him lying about where he was the night Devon was killed.

He couldn’t have seen me that night. No one saw me.

Dr. Fields was hiding something. If he had killed Devon, those thoughts made perfect sense.

“There was one small weird thing,” Gabby answered. “Nothing major. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, though.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t wearing his lab coat.”

“That is strange,” Justin said. Gabby looked at him as if she couldn’t tell whether he was kidding. “I’m being serious. I’ve never once seen the guy not in it.”

“It was more than that, though,” Gabby said. “He seemed frazzled. Off his game somehow.”

They walked down the stairs hand in hand, passing the faculty parking lot.

Justin slowed as Dr. Fields’s shiny new red Mustang came into view. It bugged him as much as it had the day before. What was the school chemistry teacher doing with that car? He looked around. No one was in sight.

“What are you thinking?” Gabby asked nervously.

He inched closer to the car, stretching to look inside the window. A gym bag sat on the passenger seat. What was that peeking out of the side pocket? He took a step closer. It was a cell phone.

An old Nokia phone, though … not the iPhone Justin saw him talking on the day before. Strange. Why did he have two phones?

“Justin,” Gabby warned. He looked up. A few students walked by and he moseyed closer to Gabby as they passed.

“There’s a cell phone in there.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Patricia and Nash said not to do anything out of the ordinary. You want to do what they explicitly warned us not to do?” Gabby asked. She was nervous, but a hint of amusement played around her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”

“In and out. I’ve gotten so much better. It will take me ten seconds to unlock that door, I bet,” he said.

Gabby looked around them. It was still quiet. The bell was about to ring, and most students had already made their way into class. “Okay. Try for a few seconds, then. If anyone comes, we’ll stop.”

Justin grinned and positioned himself in front of the door, focusing on the car lock. He beat his own record. It took only a few seconds for the lock to pop up with a click.

Quietly, he pulled on the handle and opened the door, sliding the cell phone out of the bag as fast as he could.

“Let’s go,” he said, pressing the lock back down as he shut the door.

He and Gabby speed-walked over to the back of the bleachers, partially hidden from the rest of campus.

“Take a look,” he said, tossing the phone to her. “I’ll make sure no one’s coming.”

A moment later he heard a shriek from Gabby.

He swiveled around. “Are you okay?”

She dropped the phone as if it was radioactive. “Oh my God, oh my God …”

“What?” he said. “What did you see? Something that ties him to the murders?”

Gabby shook her head. “Boobs,” she squeaked.

He couldn’t have heard her right. He picked up the phone and was assaulted by the same image Gabby had seen. A selfie of a woman flaunting her cleavage in a bathing suit and attempting to look at the camera seductively. But not just any woman.

Dr. Pearl. The school psychologist who’d awarded all of them demerits when Gabby and the others tried to tell her about that first group-therapy meeting with Patricia and Nash.

He gagged, only half kidding. “Why did you let me look at that?”

“There are hundreds of texts between the two of them, too. Planning what motels to meet at. What to tell their spouses about where they were going …”

It all made sense. That angry phone call they’d overheard yesterday? Probably his wife wanting to know where he’d been. The brand-new midlife crisis sports car. The secret phone he used just to talk to Dr. Pearl. Dr. Fields wasn’t a murderer … he was just a sleazeball having an affair.

Justin quickly pulled out his own phone and tapped out a text about it to Nash. Sabrina and Z thought they couldn’t trust him, but Justin figured they should keep him in the loop.

Then he quickly sent another text out to the rest of the Lost Causes.

Fields is boning Dr. Pearl. Don’t vomit up your beef jerky, Sabrina.