We all shake our heads. It’s not like any of us are Facebook friends with him.
Adrien pulls out her phone, and within minutes, she glances up at us, a victorious glean in her eye.
“Found him. Looks like he stopped teaching in 2018. Online property records shows that he’s the full owner of a ranch in”—she squints at her screen—“a town called Rollowong.”
Kyan raises an eyebrow in her direction. “That was quick.”
“I’m a defense attorney. Digging up dirt on people is part of the job,” she says with a half smile, but it still sends a shiver down my spine.What could she find on me?
“Rollowong,” Declan repeats, his brogue making the town sound even more foreign. “I remember that name. Wasn’t it close to Jagged Rock?”
Adrien’s back on her phone. “Looks like it’s just outside it actually.”
Nick Gould went back to where Phoebe was killed.
I think of all those crime shows I used to watch with my mother, when the plot was pure entertainment, not something that could actually happen to me. In them, the police were always talking about how perpetrators went back to the scene of the crime, to relive their experience. Is that what Nick has been doing?
“Interesting,” Kyan says, “that Hari still kept in touch with him even though he moved so far away.”
“Wow,” Adrien says, her finger still scrolling on her phone.“There’s this Reddit thread all about him. It says he got fired from Hamilton, that he attacked a student.”
Kyan leans closer to Adrien, reads over her shoulder.
“Attacked?” I ask.
Kyan nods. “Says he lost his shit on some kid, hit him so badly that the student ended up in the ICU.”
We all sit with that information for a moment. If Nick lost control on a student once, what’s stopping him from having done it before?
“Maybe we could go there and talk to him,” Josh proposes.
No.
The word skitters around my head.
Apparently, my expression isn’t the only one radiating disgust.
“Whoa, okay,” Josh says, raising his hand as he looks around the group. I immediately try to fix my face. “It was just a suggestion.”
“We should just leave it to the police,” Adrien says.
“I don’t know,” Ellery says slowly, as if warming to the idea. “Josh kind of has a point. I mean, the AFP made it pretty clear that we’re their main suspects.”
I think back to Villanueva’s proclamation. How she’s focusing the investigation on those of us who participated in the Adventure Abroad program.
“Did they mention Nick Gould to any of you during our interviews?” I ask, a thought budding.
The others shake their heads.
“This is the Australian Federal Police, though,” Declan says. “It’s not like we’re dealing with the Jagged Rock cops who couldn’t solvea crime if the perpetrator break-danced in front of them. The AFP are the real deal. I’m sure they’ll investigate Nick too.”
But I’m not. Especially if they don’t have reason to suspect Hari’s overdose wasn’t an accident.
And I start reconsidering. Maybe going back to Jagged Rock isn’t the worst idea. If Nick really is behind this—if he killed PhoebeandHari—and we can prove it, it will take any suspicion off me once and for all. My name would be cleared.
Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about it.
“It could be nice, actually.” Ellery says. “A way to memorialize the reunion. Maybe we could even swing through Jagged Rock. See if the place has changed at all. I didn’t plan anything for tomorrow anyway, since I didn’t know how long the police interviews would take.”
