Dangerous Girls

“Still . . .” I turn around and feel a sudden shiver of panic. Juan is behind us in the crowd, twenty feet away, but closing fast. “Elise,” I hiss. “He’s following us.”

She doesn’t turn. “Ignore him. He’s just some weirdo, what can he do?”

I’m not so nonchalant. I walk faster, dragging her along with me until we reach the rest of the group, waiting outside the store. “Hey.” Tate slings an arm around my shoulder. “Where’d you guys go?”

“Nowhere.” I glance back again, but there’s no sign of Juan. I exhale a slow breath.

“You okay?” Tate frowns.

“Sure.” I force a grin. “It’s nothing.”

• • •

We head back across the street to the beach house, toting groceries and new toys between us. Elise dances on ahead, telling the others the story of how she got her new bracelet.

“You sure you’re okay?” Tate checks again as we reach the house. AK unlocks the front door, and the others head inside, their chatter loud and carefree.

“What? Oh, yeah, fine.” I look behind me one last time, and freeze.

Juan is standing across the street, watching us.

“Anna!” Elise barrels back outside and grabs my hand. “Where did you leave your iPod? We need some tunes for this party!”

“Um, on the dresser, I think.”

When I turn back, Juan is gone. Maybe he was never there to begin with. I shiver and follow the rest of them into the house. The door slams shut behind us.

THE TRIAL

“Officer Carlsson, you were a member of Judge Dekker’s investigative team on the murder, were you not?”

My lawyer leafs through a couple of the papers on his table, and then strolls closer to the witness stand. Carlsson is young, in his twenties, maybe, with cropped blond hair and an earnest expression. In a police precinct full of suspicious scowls and icy glares, he was a rare friend to me: the one to check if I needed water, or a bathroom break, or to simply speak to me like a decent human being instead of screaming at me for hours, the way Dekker did. Now, on the stand, he sends me a sympathetic smile before he answers.

“Yes. I was assigned to the case the morning after the body was found.”

“So you worked alongside the prosecutor, evaluating evidence and assessing leads, from the very start?”

“That’s right.”

“So you were present during Miss Chevalier’s questioning when she told you about this incident with . . . I’m sorry, I don’t have a surname for him. The incident with the man known as Juan?”

He clicks his pointer, and Juan’s photo goes up on the display screen overhead. It’s a mugshot, sullen and dark-eyed, and there’s a faint hiss of breath as the courtroom inhales. He looks dangerous.

“I’m sorry,” my lawyer adds to the judge, sounding anything but. “It’s the only photo we have on record for the man.”

Judge von Koppel doesn’t look impressed. She waves a hand, as if to say, “continue.”

“Officer Carlsson?”

Carlsson nods. “Yes. Miss Chevalier told us about meeting Juan at the market, and how he followed them back to the house. She said he was angry when Miss Warren rejected him.”

“An angry man, following the victim home . . .” My lawyer pauses for effect. “And you didn’t think this warranted any follow-up?”

“Yes, I did.” Carlsson looks from us over to where Dekker is sitting behind the prosecution table. “I believed we should have named him a prime suspect in the investigation.”

“Because of his threatening behavior?”

“Yes, but there was more,” he adds. “There were several break-ins in the area in the weeks leading up to the murder. Juan matched a description of a man seen fleeing one of those robberies.”

I look hopefully to the judge again, but she’s scribbling notes, her expression unreadable.

“So you believed him to be a criminal, known for robbing the houses along the beach. Houses like Mr. Kundra’s.” My lawyer pauses again. “Did you try to track him down?”

“Yes. I canvassed his known associates and asked around the neighborhood, but he had disappeared.” Carlsson shrugged. “It looked like he’d left the island.”

“He fled. So you stopped looking for him?”

“No,” Carlsson gave Dekker another glare. “I filed a request for more resources, to liaise with police departments on neighboring islands, and have a team go through surveillance video from the harbor and ports.”

“But this request was denied.”

“Yes. I was told it would be a waste of time.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” My lawyer is grandstanding, but I don’t mind, not when he’s doing it for my benefit. “Here you had a suspect linked to other break-ins—like the one that accompanied Miss Warren’s murder—and you were told not to pursue him?”

“Dekker said it was irrelevant.” Carlsson looks back to me with regret in his expression. “He’d decided that the break-in was staged, that someone from the group had killed her and just smashed the doors afterward. He ordered me to drop the Juan investigation and focus on Miss Chevalier and Mr. Dempsey. I tried to go over his head,” he added, speaking directly at Judge von Koppel. “I thought he was making a mistake. I still do. But they all just shut me down. He was fixated.”

Fixated.

My lawyer leaves the word hanging in the courtroom for a moment, and I have to keep myself from smiling. Carlsson was transferred to a precinct on the other side of the island two weeks after they charged me, Dekker and his team did everything to try to keep him away from the trial, but we got him here, and just having him up on the stand feels like a victory—for once, someone not talking about my mood swings, and jealousy, and obvious guilt.

“Let’s talk about that crime scene.” My lawyer clicks his pointer again, and the image goes up on the screen of Elise’s trashed room. He clicks on, to a close-up of the balcony doors and the constellation of shattered glass spread on the floor. “The prosecution has presented experts who testified that the window was broken after the attack, from the inside. Did you agree?”

“It’s possible,” Carlsson says reluctantly. “There was glass out on the balcony, too, which would fit with it being broken from the inside. But there was glass everywhere,” he adds. “People in and out of the room for hours. These photos weren’t taken until after the paramedics left. There’s no way of knowing how much the scene was contaminated.”