Free The Bone House by Brian Freeman

driver's mirror. She saw his pupils glow the way a cat's eyes shine at night,
and she felt a shiver of fear as their eyes met. He reached up and turned off
the light above him.
        'My
room was next to his,' Amy said.
        'Yeah,
so?'
        'I
couldn't sleep last night. I was awake sometime after three in the morning, and
I heard footsteps in the hallway. I didn't look out, but I heard Gary's door.
He was going back into his room in the middle of the night.'
    ----
        

Chapter Eight
        
        Cab
sipped a Starbucks iced latte through a straw and watched Tresa Fischer and
Troy Geier behind the window of the interview room. It was late afternoon on
Sunday, and the police headquarters building on Riverside was uncomfortably
warm, the way it usually was. The counselor who had been with the two teenagers
for most of the day had departed ten minutes earlier, leaving them alone. Cab
had received word that Delia Fischer, Glory's mother, had landed at the Fort
Myers airport, and he wanted a chance to sit down with Tresa and Troy
individually before Delia arrived. He knew that once the victim's mother was in
the building, the two kids would be more guarded with their answers.
        He
took his coffee into the interview room, where Tresa and Troy waited in
silence, ignoring each other. Tresa sat at the interview table and drank a can
of Diet Sprite. Troy, who was a fleshy sixteen year old, drank root beer and
leaned against the wall. To Cab, the silence between them felt hostile. They
weren't friends.
        'Your
mom's on her way,' Cab informed Tresa. 'She'll be here in an hour or so.'
        Tresa
didn't look happy with the news. Cab guessed that the girl would bear the brunt
of guilt and blame when Delia arrived. As the older sister, she'd failed. I
trusted Glory with you, and now she's dead.
        'Troy,
I'm going to ask you to wait outside,' Cab told the boy. 'Hang around, though,
because I need to talk to you, too. Ask one of the officers to fix you up with
some chips or a sandwich if you're hungry.'
        Troy
grunted and pushed himself off the wall. He put down his empty bottle of root
beer and left the room without a word. Tresa's eyes followed him, and Cab
thought his first impression about the two of them was correct. Tresa didn't
like her sister's boyfriend.
        Cab
sat down at the interview table opposite Tresa and gave the girl a reassuring
smile. At nineteen, Tresa still had a naive way about her that made her look
younger than she was. She was extremely skinny for her height, which made Cab
wonder if she had an eating disorder. She played with her straight red hair
between her fingers and stared vacantly at the wooden table. Her pretty blue
eyes were rimmed in red, and her face was marked with streaks of tears. Talking
with her earlier, Cab had found her to be painfully shy, a loner without a
support network of friends. He'd offered to ask some of the other dancers from
River Falls to stay behind with her, but Tresa hadn't given him a single name
of someone who was close to her. It was also obvious in her answers about her
family that her sister Glory got most of the attention from their mother.
Tresa, who was clearly artistic and smart, had been left to live in her own
world.
        'I
know it's been a long day,' he told her. 'I appreciate you being patient with
us. It probably seems like we cover the same stuff over and over, and you know
what? We do. But that's usually how we find the details that help us figure out
what really happened.'
        'Do
you have any idea who did this to Glory?' Tresa asked. Her voice was barely louder
than a whisper.
        'I
wish I could say yes, but we don't, not yet,' Cab admitted. 'I'd like to make
sure that we haven't missed anything important. OK?'
        Tresa
nodded without enthusiasm. 'OK.'
        'You
came down on a university bus from River Falls with the rest of your team last
Monday and Tuesday, is that right? And Troy