“Mimi?” Wanda scoffed softly. “Mimi got along with everyone. She was just that kind of girl. Warmhearted and accepting.”

“Too accepting,” Harold said. He glanced at his wife before continuing. “We never really cared for her best friend. What was her name?”

“Janelle,” Wanda said, her expression hardening slightly.

“Janelle York?” I asked. “They were best friends?”

“Yes, for a couple of years. That girl was wild. Too wild.”

After a quick glance to give Cookie a heads-up, I scooted forward and said, “Janelle York died in a car accident last week.”

Their shocked expressions confirmed they’d had no idea. “Oh, my heavens,” Wanda said.

“And did you know Tommy Zapata?” In small towns, everyone seemed to know everyone. Surely they’d known our dead car dealer.

“Of course.” Harold nodded. “His father worked for the city for years. Landscaping and whatnot, mostly at the cemetery.”

This was going to sound bad, but again, I needed them to know. I needed to find out what was going on. “Tommy Zapata was found dead yesterday morning. Murdered.”

Their shock morphed into disbelief. They were genuinely stunned.

“He was a year older than Mimi,” Harold said. “They went to school together.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Wanda said, her voice laced with despair. “Anthony Richardson died last week, too, Tony Richardson’s boy. He committed suicide.”

Cookie scribbled down the name as I asked, “Did he go to school with Mimi as well?”

“He was in her class,” Harold said.

Someone was cleaning house, tying up loose ends, and Mimi was obviously on his radar. Surely the Marshals knew something. Surely something had happened in high school that would pinpoint the root of all of this.

“Mr. and Mrs. Marshal, when Mimi was in high school, she moved from Ruiz to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother. Why?”

Wanda blinked back to me, her brows furrowed in thought. “She’d had a fight with Janelle. We just figured she wanted to get away.”

“Did she tell you they had a fight?”

“No,” she said, thinking back. “Not really. They were best friends one day and enemies the next. They just seemed to drift in different directions.”

“We were not upset by that fact,” Harold added. “We’d never approved of Mimi’s friendship with her.”

“Did anything happen in particular to cause the rift?”

They glanced at each other and shrugged helplessly, trying to think back.

“Whatever happened,” Wanda said, “it caused Mimi to go into a deep depression.”

“We would catch her crying in her room,” Harold said, his voice despondent as old memories, painful memories, resurfaced. “She stopped going out, stopped eating, stopped bathing. It got to the point where she would claim to be sick every morning, beg us not to send her to school. She missed almost three weeks straight at one point.”

Wanda’s face saddened with the memory as well. “We took her to a doctor, who suggested we schedule an appointment with a counselor, but before we could arrange it, she asked to move to Albuquerque with my mother. She wanted to go to Saint Pius.”

“We were thrilled that she was getting interested in her studies again. She was always a straight-A student, and Saint Pius is an excellent school.” Harold seemed to need to justify his letting her move away. I was sure they didn’t take the decision lightly.

Wanda patted his knee reassuringly. “Quite honestly, Ms. Davidson, as bad as this will sound, we breathed a sigh of relief when she left. She completely turned around when she got here. Her grades improved, and she excelled in extracurricular activities. She was her old self again.”

Cookie was scribbling notes as the Marshals talked. Thank goodness. My handwriting sucked.

“From what you’ve told me,” I said, “it sounds like her worries in Ruiz were based on more than a falling-out with her best friend, like Mimi was being bullied, possibly even threatened. Or worse,” I added reluctantly. Rape was a definite possibility. “Did she mention anything? Anything at all?”

“Nothing,” Wanda said, alarmed with my conclusion. “We tried to get her to talk about what was bothering her, but she refused. She started to turn hostile every time we brought it up. It was so unlike her.”

Warren had used those exact words to describe Mimi’s behavior before she disappeared. So unlike her.

“We should have been more diligent,” Harold said, his voice brimming with guilt. “We just assumed it was Janelle. You know what high school is like.”

I did indeed.

Chapter Nine

UPON THE ADVICE OF MY ATTORNEY,

MY SHIRT BEARS NO MESSAGE AT THIS TIME.

—T-SHIRT

Two hours later, Cookie and I sat in her office, marveling at what we’d found via the class rosters and the Internet. In the last month, six former students of Ruiz High had either died or gone missing. The casualties included a murder, a car accident, two apparent suicides, an accidental death by drowning, and a missing person: Mimi.

“Okay,” Cookie said, studying her list, “every one of these people not only matriculated from Ruiz High, but they had all been within one or two grades of one another.”

“And we could be missing someone. We don’t have any married names on the women.”