Free Justice for Sara by Erica Spindler Page A

don’t do that shit anymore.”
    “Go on.”
    “If we’d been found out I would have been charged with contributing, at the very least. So I convinced her to keep her mouth shut.”
    Luke drummed his fingers silently against the desktop. Teenage girls didn’t keep secrets. They gossiped, confided, wrote in their journals. She had to have told somebody.
    “Even after she was arrested,” Luke said.
    “I never saw her after that. Never spoke to her.”
    “Why’s that?”
    He looked surprised. “Are you kidding? I didn’t want anything to do with that. Plus, I figured she did it.”
    It was Luke’s turn to be surprised. “You thought she was guilty?”
    “She hated her sister. Wished she was dead. I thought maybe they got in a huge fight and she … did it.”
    “Because that’s just one small step. Between talking and doing?”
    “Yeah. I suppose.”
    It wasn’t. It was a huge step, one most people would never make. “But she wasn’t guilty.”
    “According to the jury.”
    “But you think they got it wrong?”
    He lifted a shoulder. “Maybe. Yeah, I do.”
    Luke tapped the pen against his thumb, thoughts racing. “If that’s true, why did she come back? And why accuse you of doing it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Luke kept his gaze trained intently on the other man’s even as he maintained an almost casual tone. “Let’s say she is innocent. Why would she think you had something to do with murdering her sister?”
    “Again, I don’t know. Maybe she’s playing a game with me. Punishing me for dumping her. Maybe she thought I did it for her.”
    “Why would you?”
    “What?”
    “Do it for her?”
    “Why, exactly. It makes no sense.”
    He leaned forward. Luke decided schoolboy earnestness didn’t play well on Ryan Benton. Came off smarmy.
    “Here’s the deal with me and Kat. I figured she was my ticket out. She was going to be rich. At eighteen she’d get a chunk of cash, then the rest of it at twenty-one. She was pretty, fun and a good lay. I was in for the long haul.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “She was arrested for beating her sister to death with a baseball bat. I didn’t want any part of that.”
    “Even after she was acquitted?”
    “Like I told you, I thought she was guilty. Would you want to live with a chick who could do that?”
    “Lots of teenagers hate their folks, wish they were dead. But they don’t kill them. Seems you two had a pretty good thing going, sneaking around. Why would she kill her?”
    He shook his head. “Her sister had found us out. They fought about it and she forbade Kat to see me again. Next thing I hear, Sara McCall’s dead.”
    “Earlier you said no one knew about you two.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But Sara knew.”
    “She’d just found out.”
    “Maybe someone told her?”
    “I don’t think so. Kat thought she may have seen us. Or maybe found something in her room. A note, her diary or something.”
    He was lying. And not well, at that. “Nothing like that ended up as evidence.”
    “I don’t know what to tell you, man.”
    “But you did see her again?”
    “Pardon?”
    “After her sister forbade her to see you.”
    “Yes, once.”
    “And she told you about the fight?”
    “Yes.”
    “How did you respond?”
    “Why does that matter?”
    Luke smiled easily. “Just filling in the blanks.”
    “I told her to be cool, everything would be okay.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    “And she believed you? Just calmed right down?”
    “I thought so at the time. Until I heard her sister was dead.”
    “Let me just throw this out there, Ryan. Maybe you two talked about it, made a plan. She let you in the house and you beat Sara McCall to death. So the two of you could be together. You said it, she was your ticket out.”
    He flinched slightly. His tone changed. “No way, man. See, I didn’t care that much. I wasn’t about to put my neck on the line for a piece of ass.”
    “Or her bank account? You could have had the