Page 48 of The Girl on Hallow's Eve

“You know, something Sam and I both noticed when we were watching the news at night was that you didn’t look exactly excited to be there at the beginning,” I say. “Were you looking forward to that particular project?”

“I’ll level with you, Agent Griffin. I was absolutely dreading doing that piece. I was angry at Amy for assigning it to me and thought she should have given it to one of the fluff reporters. I have done far more important work on this topic and I hate being belittled in my work. But I have to admit, it worked out for me,” he says.

“Worked out for you?” Sam asks skeptically.

“Absolutely. This experience is going to open doors for me. I’ve already been getting offers to do the talk show and late-night circuits. Maybe I’ll write a book. Then I can transition to doing my own crime show. This could be the key to everything I’ve ever wanted,” he says, sounding almost gleeful.

Sam looks distinctly less gleeful when we head back to the car.

“Did you hear him? That was disgusting. It absolutely sounds like motive to me,” he says.

“Not to kill that many people. I just can’t believe that he would go to that extreme to give his career a potential leg up. He’s absolutely taking advantage of it and will probably get tremendous benefit. He’ll make a lot of money from this for probably a good while. It’s revolting, but it doesn’t mean he’s a murderer,” I say.

When we get home, I immediately go back to my notes. They’ve absorbed me. I’m obsessing over every word, scouring every still and frame from the security cameras. Sam sits a cup of coffee beside me.

“What’s the focus now?” he asks.

He knows me well. He’s familiar with how my brain tends to fixate intensely on one issue, bordering on obsession, and then it can just as quickly jump to something else and sink away into that. I’m constantly searching for that lost puzzle piece, for the single key that will unlock critical information to lay bare the truth behind the most complex and gruesome of criminal acts.

“The fire,” I tell him.

“The fire?” Sam asks.

“When we asked why there were only two police officers in place at the mall and no others arrived later, Glen told us that there were two other calls that night that took all of their manpower. There was a fight at a bar. And a fire on an abandoned piece of land. Those two incidents happened close enough together to require basically the entire on-duty police force as well as a couple of off-duty officers to respond to them. I have a feeling things like that don’t happen very often in that area.”

“Do you think they were staged?” Sam asks.

“Possibly. Maybe they were decoys. Planned events to get the police away from the mall so that they wouldn’t be there to stop anything.”

“Do you have someone particular in mind?”

“I keep going back to Joshua Lawrence. I know he said he would never hurt anybody, that he was only involved in peaceful protest. But even the most peaceful of demonstrators can be pushed to the edge. I think we need to look deeper into these events and make sure we have alibis for all of the protestors.”

“I know they’ve already gathered statements from almost everybody who was involved in any of the biggest demonstrations,” Sam says.

“Were they at the bar?” I ask.

“Some of them were,” he says.

I get up and gulp down my coffee. “Come on. We need to go talk to the bar manager.”

As we’re walking out of the house, the phone rings. I run back to the kitchen to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Emma Griffin?” an unfamiliar voice asks.

“Yes, this is Agent Griffin,” I say.

“I think you were looking for me. This is James Morris.”

“My brother Frank was one of the best guys anybody could ever know. He was nice to anybody. Would give you the shirt off his back. I know it’s all cliché, but with him, it was true. He really was that kind of guy. And he was a hard worker. But he had gotten into kind of a tough spot. He met a girl who he fell head over heels for and she got him into drugs and hard drinking. Then she got wrapped up in some other guy and left him.

“After the divorce, Frank was a mess. I couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t take care of himself. He leaned even more into the drugs and the alcohol just to drown away everything he was feeling. I can recognize the bad choices my brother made. I can stand here and tell you he did things he shouldn’t have done and put himself into some really bad situations. But he was still my brother. He was still a really good guy.

“And that’s what I told him. I told him he was better than all that bullshit he was doing, and better than letting some woman mess him up that way. If she wasn’t going to recognize that she had the best she could ever get when she was with him, that was her loss. He didn’t need to throw away his life for somebody like that.”

“What did he say to that?” I ask James Morris as we sit right outside of the crime scene barriers around the mall.

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