Free Waking Nightmare by Kylie Brant Page B

town, and I see more men on campus every day than I do in the pageants.”
    As the girl had said, she’d given this a lot of thought. “So let’s talk about those guys on campus. The notes say you recently broke up with a long-time boyfriend.”
    “Chet didn’t have anything to do with this.” Amanda’s voice was sharp. “He’s not the kind of person who would deliberately hurt someone. I know the detectives have been all over him about this, and I feel bad about that. This isn’t his fault. And neither was the breakup. I just wanted to date other people.”
    Which was enough incentive for some people to turn to violence. But Chet Montrose was alibied for the night in question. He’d been taking a chemistry final at the time Amanda had been snatched.
    “Since this is a multiple offender and the other victims aren’t affiliated with the pageant or the college, I don’t think either is integral to his pattern.”
    “Maybe he just saw me in the paper or on TV. There’s been a lot of coverage since my win, and as we geared up for the state pageant.”
    Entirely plausible, Abbie thought, but that possibility led nowhere. “I have copies of your interview with the police. Detective Robel took you over the two weeks prior to the assault, your routine, normal hangouts. I’m going to ask you to think back further than that. Maybe a month or six weeks prior to the attack. Even two months. Can you think of places you might have stopped that you don’t normally?”
    Amanda’s brows were furrowed. “Stopped for what?”
    “Anything. Coffee. A different dry cleaners. A place to get pictures developed. A market you usually don’t shop at, or a mall you don’t often frequent.”
    “Hard to remember that far back,” Amanda murmured, but it was clear from her expression that she was trying. In the end she was able to recall six or seven new places she’d stopped with friends, although she couldn’t be certain how long before the rape she’d visited them.
    “How many people knew about your grandfather’s beach house?” Robel had covered the question in his interview, but something about the location of the rape still nagged at her.
    Amanda shrugged. “Of my friends, you mean? All of them. I . . . had a key made a couple years ago. My grandparents don’t use it that much. I’ve had some parties there. You know how it goes. People I know bring people I don’t. Seems like my entire dorm has been there at one time or another.”
    And even if they had only heard mention of a party, it would be easy enough to discover the home’s location, given the owner’s name.
    “It all comes back to this, doesn’t it?”
    Something in the girl’s tone drew Abbie’s attention. She looked up from the pad she was writing on. “What’s that?”
    Amanda’s lips trembled before she attempted to firm them. “I just can’t stop thinking about it. Like maybe there’s some guy I never paid much attention to. Not someone I turned down for a date or anything. I told the detective about them. But I feel like it’s someone I’ve missed somehow. Or discounted. Like maybe I hardly even spoke to him or noticed him at all. And for a long time he harbored this resentment toward me because of that . . .” Her voice hitched.
    Abbie could hear Amanda’s mother in the hallway. Their time together was almost up. “Well, there, see, that’s where you’re wrong.” She got up and fetched a Kleenex to hand to the girl, who wiped her eyes swiftly before balling the tissue in her palm.
    “How do you know that?”
    “None of the other victims are associated with beauty pageants or go to the local college. You aren’t the same age and you have little in common. But somehow you all came to this guy’s attention. Which tells me it probably isn’t something you did or didn’t do to someone you barely know. This guy is preying on women because they meet some criteria that only makes sense to him. And the sooner we figure out that