we ever did was fuck around and smoke a couple of bowls.”
“You ever meet at her place?”
He shook his head. “She always came to me.”
Of course figuring out her address couldn’t be that easy. “You ever see her with anyone
from another society?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. Look, Lance and T were dealers; they got the best weed
I’ve ever had, like the lushest, greenest shit you’ve ever seen. But I didn’t keep track of
who she hung out with.”
“I asked if you saw her with anyone.”
He lowered his head more. “Why are you being like this?”
“Hey,” she said softly. She squeezed his shoulder. “You know you’re not in trouble, right? You’re going to be fine.” She felt some of the tension ease out of him.
“You’re being so mean.”
She was torn between wanting to slap him or put him to bed with his favorite binky and
a cup of warm milk.
“I’m just trying to get some answers, Tripp. You know how it is. Just trying to do my
job.”
“I feel you, I feel you.” She doubted that, but he knew the script. Regular guy, Tripp Helmuth. Working hard or hardly working.
She gripped his shoulder more firmly. “But you need to understand this situation. A girl
died. And these people she ran with? They aren’t your friends and you aren’t going to stay
hard or not rat or any of that crap you’ve seen in movies, because this isn’t a movie, this is your life, and you have a good life, and you don’t want to mess it up, yeah?”
Tripp kept his eyes on his shoes. “Yeah, okay. Yeah.” She thought he might cry.
“So who did you see with Tara?”
When Tripp was done talking, Alex leaned back. “Tripp?”
“Yeah?” He kept staring at his shoes—ridiculous plastic sandals, as if summer never stopped for Tripp Helmuth.
“Tripp,” she repeated, and waited for him to raise his head and meet her eyes. She smiled. “That’s it. We’re done. It’s over.” You don’t ever have to think about that girl again. How you fucked her and forgot her. How you thought she might give you a good deal if you made her come. How it got you off to be with someone who felt a little dangerous. “We good?” she asked. This was the language he understood.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to let this go any further, I promise.”
And then he said it and she knew he wouldn’t tell anyone about this conversation—not
his friends, not the Bonesmen. “Thank you.”
That was the trick of it: to make him believe he had more to lose than she did.
“One last thing, Tripp,” she said as he made to scurry back toward the dining hall. “Do
you have a bike?”
Alex pedaled across the green, past the three churches, then down to State Street and
under the highway. She had about two hundred pages of reading to do if she didn’t want to
fall behind this week, and possibly a monster hunting her, but right now she needed to talk
to Detective Abel Turner.
Once you were off campus, New Haven lost its pretensions in fits and starts—dollar stores and grimy sports bars shared space with gourmet markets and sleek coffee spots; cheap nail salons and cell-phone hubs sat next to upscale noodle shops and boutiques selling small, useless soaps. It left Alex uneasy, as if the city’s identity kept shifting in front of her.
State Street was just a long stretch of nothing—parking lots, power lines, the train tracks to the east—and the police station was just as bad, an ugly, muscular building of oatmeal-colored slabs. There were dead spaces like this all over the city, entire blocks of
massive concrete monoliths looming over empty plazas like a drawing of the future from
the past.
“Brutalist,” Darlington had called them, and Alex had said, “It does sort of feel like the buildings are ganging up on you.”
“No,” he’d corrected. “It’s from the French, brut. As in raw, because they used bare concrete. But, yes, it does feel like that.”
There had been slums here before, and then money had poured into New Haven from