The Devil Inside

14: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Calla sat in a familiar, featureless interrogation room with her arms folded and head bowed. Across from her, Detective Beitch stared down at his notepad, as if the answers he sought would somehow come flying off the page.

Every once in a while, he would pick up his pen and circle one of the names on that piece of paper. Over and over and over again, until the ink had begun to bleed through, destroying the pages behind it.

VENUS UPTON

"You mean to tell me," Detective Beitch started, the harsh lines of his face thrown into stark contrast by the overhead light, "that there is nothing at all familiar about this scene?"

He slid a glossy picture across the table. Calla had seen it already, had seen it when he'd first shoved it under her nose to try and elicit a reaction from her. And she had reacted—with huge, heaving sobs, blubbering about Rachel and Cory and how this nightmare would never end.

Detective, Detective. Haven't you heard? I already know how to play this game.

She stared at the photograph, her eyes swollen from the hysterical tears that had only just abated. She idly wondered if her mother had any eyedrops back home—they were starting to itch something fierce—before forcing herself to focus on the task at hand.

Calla tore her eyes away from the photograph, as if unable to stand the sight of it. "Of course it's familiar."

She'd immediately recognized where the photograph had been taken: in the parking lot outside of the highschool gymnasium, at the bottom of the steep staircase that Calla herself had walked a thousand times before. Venus Upton's body had been found there, her skull cracked wide open. In the photograph, her legs were bent at an unnatural angle from the fall and blood painted the concrete beneath her, trailing down the steps like some sort of macabre waterfall.

A nasty fall, they were calling it, the news circulating through the town like wildfire. A tragic, terrible accident.

Except—had it been an accident? Detective Beitch didn't seem to think so. After all, what had a girl like Venus Upton been doing at the highschool at two o'clock in the morning? And how had she slipped and fallen to her death?

The "new and improved" security system the school had installed last year had apparently failed in preventing this particular tragedy. The detective had been rather tight-lipped on the logistics, but somehow, the cameras hadn't caught a thing. At least, that was the working assumption. Why else drag them in for questioning?

The detective tapped his pen against the notepad. Tap, tap, tap. "Where were you last night?"

Calla rubbed her left eye with her fist. "I told you. I was at home."

Truth.

"And were you alone?"

"No. I was with Vincent and Cooper."

Lie.

Detective Beitch drew another circle around Venus Upton's name. "And they were with you all night?"

"Yes."

Lie.

"And what were you three doing?"

And on and on it went. Calla knew the risks of lying to the detective, but the moment the sheriff had delivered the news, she'd known that nothing good could come of the truth.

Why else would the sheriff pay them a visit ahead of the rest of the police force? Calla thought of the picture she'd found in the sheriff's office. He must have known that the hammer was about to come down on them—on Cooper—and had taken steps to prepare them, if only by the skin of his teeth.