Free The Competition by Marcia Clark Page B

parents who haven’t found their kids are all waiting at the local rec center. That should give us a pretty accurate missing list.”
    “Not necessarily. Not all of the parents are there, and even those that are keep coming and going. Like Sonny and Tom. Plus, some kids got taken to the hospital by other kids’ parents. Some kids went on their own. And I’ve heard some just ran to friends’ and relatives’ houses. It’s pretty crazy.”
    So even if students were reported missing, that didn’t mean they really were. “The fastest way to find out who’s really unaccounted for is to go public with the fact that the shooters are still at large and ask all students to check in at the local police station. But that’ll tip off the killers—”
    “Not to mention cause a riot,” Bailey said. “But we’ve got to do something or it’ll take us days to figure out who’s missing—”
    “And we don’t have days.” I rubbed my forehead. “We’re going to have to let it out pretty soon no matter what.”
    “If it doesn’t get leaked first.”
    “I just wish we could get the killers ID’d before we go public with it,” I said. “At least we’d be able to tell everyone who to look out for.”
    Bailey leaned back and sighed. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”
    The waiter brought our drinks, and I raised my glass. We clinked and drank, but two more miserable toasters would have been hard to find.

11
    Tuesday morning, October 8
    Bailey left early to go home and change. Though she had a drawer of clothing in my dresser, she didn’t have anything that was warm enough for this weather. The clothes Bailey still had at my place were left over from the time she’d moved in to help me deal with a psychopath who’d nearly succeeded in killing us both.
    That psychopath, Lilah Bayer, was responsible for at least three murders and she was still at large. Though not a serial killer, Lilah was an “ends justify the means” kind of person, and if those means happened to include murder, so be it. But generally speaking, other than the ax murder of her husband—a crime for which she, incredibly, had been acquitted—she’d left the messy work for her employees. And if it was messy important work, she gave it to her main guy, Chase Erling.
    Bailey and I had managed to nail Erling, but when Lilah found out that he was in custody, she hired an inmate to kill him. He’d always been loyal to her, but she couldn’t be sure that loyalty would last when he was facing a sentence of life without parole. A Nazi Low Rider serving a lifetime sentence shanked Erling.
    Certain that Erling would soon be sleeping with the fishes, Lilah hopped a private jet to parts unknown. But right before takeoff, she’d texted me with information about my sister. Reports that might prove Romy, who’d been abducted more than twenty-five years ago, was still alive. The text was Lilah’s way of saying that if I left her alone, she might get me more information on Romy’s whereabouts. But if I kept after her…well, whatever form her retribution took, it was almost guaranteed to be lethal for Bailey and me.
    But I one-upped Lilah: Erling had survived the attack, barely. He was in a coma. I answered her text with a photo of him in the hospital. I left out the part about him being in a coma, the better to make her sweat.
    Graden had checked out the reports she’d sent me about Romy and found they were legit. But they were more than twenty-five years old and so far there’s been no further trace of my sister. Nor has there been any trace of Lilah, though both Graden and the district attorney investigators have been actively hunting for her.
    If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have had any concerns about my personal safety, though I certainly would’ve been pissed off that a criminal had escaped justice. But Lilah was a whole different story. Bailey says she’s got a bizarre obsession with me. I can’t argue. At one point, Lilah followed Graden to a