“Not really. We talked. A little.” He lifted his eyes to meet the questions in Kristi’s gaze. “She was nice. Friendly.” He didn’t have to say “not like you” but the unspoken accusation was there in his dark, murky stare. His features stiffened almost imperceptibly, but enough so that Kristi noticed the tightening of his jaw, the nearly involuntary pinching of the corners of his mouth. In that instant Kristi knew she’d been fooled by his youthful appearance. There was something sinister smoldering in his night-dark eyes, something she didn’t like. This was no boy at all, but a man in a boy’s gawky body. She hadn’t noticed it through the peephole or in the slit of the door when the chain was engaged, but now, face to face with Hiram Calloway, she realized she was standing next to a complex and angry man.

She lifted her chin. “So, what do you think happened to her?”

He glanced over the railing toward the campus. “They say she ran away.”

Kristi said, “But no one really knows.”

“She did before.”

“Did she tell you about it?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “Nah. She kept to herself.”

“You said she was friendly. That you talked.”

A funny smile played upon those half-hidden lips. “Who knows what happened to her? One day she was here. The next, gone.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“I know that her old man is in prison somewhere and that she stiffed my grandmother.” He met her gaze deliberately. “Owed her back rent. Grandma says she’s a ‘flake’ and a ‘crook like her old man.’ Grandma figures she got what she deserved.”

“Got what she deserved,” Kristi repeated slowly, not liking the sound of that. Far away, laughter crackled through the night.

Hearing his words repeated made Hiram frown. “I’ll tell Irene you’ve got a key for her.” And with that he was gone, trudging down the steps and carrying his tools. Kristi stepped back into her apartment and slammed the door shut. She locked the dead bolt and chain and felt her skin crawl. Irene Calloway’s “good kid” of a grandson gave Kristi a major case of the creeps.

CHAPTER 4

B ANG!

A sharp gun report blasted through the thick dark night, the smell of cordite overriding the earthy odor of the wet grass, the horrible crack reverberating through Kristi’s skull.

In horror, she watched as Rick Bentz went down, falling, falling, falling…near the thick stone wall surrounding All Saints College.

Blood flowed. His blood. All over the street. Staining the concrete. Spraying the grass. Running in the gutters. Draining from him.

“Dad!” she screamed, her voice mute, her legs leaden, as she tried to run to him. “Dad, oh, God, oh, God….”