Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois Read Free Book Online Page A

stood her up—not roughly, but in a way that left no ambiguity as to what she was going to do. Andrew wanted to punch the guy in the face. He wanted to hold Lily and Anna and let them weep into his shoulders and tell them he would protect them always. But he knew he couldn’t. And he knew that a scene like that would terrify all of them. It would feel like a goodbye, which this certainly was not. They would see Lily very soon. Hysteria invited hysteria. There was nothing to be gained from it.
    “We’ll see you in seven days,” said Andrew. He gave Lily a hug that was warm, but without any undertones of apocalyptic clinging. “Your mother will be here.”
    “I love you,” she said.
    “We love you,” they said.
    They walked out into the hallway, leaving Lily behind them. When Andrew turned back to look at her, her head was down again, her long greasy hair obscuring her face. And she didn’t look back up at them, even though they waved to her all the way down the hall.

CHAPTER TWO
February
    Eduardo Campos was not sure until he saw the pictures. Later, people would ask him—informally, socially—when he knew. Be honest with us, they’d say. We won’t tell. We knew when we heard about her Facebook page. We knew when we heard about her cartwheel. We knew when we saw the footage of her with the condoms—that cold, seductive look she gave the boy, and only hours after that poor other girl was knifed to death. That’s when we knew Lily Hayes was guilty. When did you know? And Eduardo would laugh and say that of course he never knew, that he still didn’t know. His job was just to make the case for the state, and the state’s case, one had to admit, was ironclad. But the truth was he did know, and he had first known when the judicial police brought him Lily Hayes’s camera.
    The crime scene had not surprised him. Nothing surprised him, really, though there was certainly an incongruity between the upscale neighborhood and the well-kept house and the young American woman dead in a vast swamp of her own blood. It had taken Eduardoyears to get used to how much blood one body could produce. But he was used to it now, and he studied the scene with his practiced dissociative attitude, reminding himself that the best way to help this young woman now was to pay very close attention.
    She was lying on her stomach with her face to the side, hunched in the characteristic awkwardness of the dead. There was substantial bruising along her inner thighs. It was overwhelmingly likely that she had been sexually assaulted.
    Eduardo followed the police with his notepad. He did not touch anything. In the kitchen, they found a knife, which was collected. In the victim’s drawer, they found a half-empty packet of Skin Skin condoms, which was also collected. In the bathroom, they found three discrete spots of blood and an unflushed toilet, all of which were photographed, then sampled. In the garden, they found Lily Hayes, who had discovered the body (according to her) moments before running across the lawn with blood on her face (according to the driver who was now shakily smoking a cigarette in front of his delivery truck). Lily Hayes was white, late teens or early twenties, with a squarish jaw and auburn hair and high, vaguely witchy eyebrows; she appeared to have already washed all of the blood off her face. She was standing morosely next to a very young man in suspenders. Behind them, the bald double pates of San Telmo Pedro gleamed in the distance. Lily Hayes was not crying. She was pale, but perhaps she was always pale. She kissed the boy once, somewhat chastely, and then again, a little less chastely. She looked, Eduardo decided, harassed. Inconvenienced. If she looked anything at all. There was a stillness to her face that would probably seem perverse under any circumstances, but especially these circumstances, and which could only be intentional. Eduardo let himself think the thought, and then he let it pass. He’d been at this