For the first time since Claire Kennedy died last week, there wasn’t a police officer guarding the site of her murder.

Kayla peered out from behind the boarded-up beauty salon. Seeing no one, she hoisted her backpack and set out, kicking stones, her gaze fixed on the ground. She was careful to walk slowly. If you ran, grown-ups paid attention. Kayla hated it when they paid attention. She liked being invisible.

Until her mom was murdered last year, Kayla had always been invisible. But now it wasn’t just the other kids who whispered behind her back, calling her weird or—in grown-up language—“an odd little thing.” Adults did, too. It wouldn’t help if they found her sneaking into the place where her mom had been murdered.

Kayla knew the rear door would be locked. She had lock picks from her Junior Detective kit, but they were just toys. She knew a way in, though. A boarded-up window on the first floor with a gap big enough for a nine-year-old to squeeze through. Concrete blocks scattered behind the building made a good stepladder.

She pushed her backpack in first. It hit the floor with a thump.

As she hoisted herself through the window, she avoided the broken glass she’d cut herself on last time. Grandma had flipped out and taken her to the clinic. Grandma was like that. She worried a lot. After Mom died, Kayla thought Grandma would have less to worry about. No such luck.

She dropped to the floor and rummaged in her backpack for her flashlight. Plastic, of course. She’d considered asking Grandma for a real one for her birthday, but hadn’t figured out yet how to explain why she needed it.

Kayla shone the flashlight around. Empty. No, that was the wrong word. The building was only empty of people. Abandoned.

There was tons of crap here, all of it dirty and old and broken, but Kayla barely needed the flashlight to get where she was going. She’d been here five times since her mom had died. She’d recorded every visit in her notebook. There hadn’t been much to see, though. By the time she thought of coming, the police had cleared the place out.

This time it would be different. If Claire Kennedy had been killed here just over a week ago, there had to be a connection to the murder of her mother and her mother’s best friend. There just had to be.

She opened the basement door and shone her light into blackness. She went down one step, then stopped, working up her nerve as she always did, before shutting the door and letting the darkness of the basement envelop her, her plastic flashlight barely strong enough to cast a pale, distant circle.