“What?” Pip and Ravi said together, eyes swivelling to find each other.
Pip shook her head. “That’s not possible,” she said.
“Well, it is.” Luke smirked, clearly enjoying their shock. “I was messaging Layla that night, agreed to meet her at Lodge Park parking lot, and who was there waiting for me? Jamie Reynolds.”
“B-but, but…” Pip’s brain stalled. “You saw Jamie? You met him, just after midnight?” The exact time, she was thinking, that Jamie’s heart rate had first spiked.
“Yep. Fucking freak clearly thought he was being clever, having one over on me. Pretending to be a girl to lead me on. Maybe he did it to try take Nat away from me, don’t know. I’d kill him if he was still here.”
“What happened?” Ravi said. “What happened in the parking lot with Jamie?”
“Not much,” Luke said, running a hand over his close-shaved head. “I got out of the car, called Layla’s name, and it’s Jamie instead who walks out of the trees.”
“And?” Pip said. “What happened, did you talk?”
“Not really. He was acting all weird, like, scared, which he should’ve been, fucking with me.” Luke licked his teeth again. “Had both his hands in his pockets. And he only said two words to me.”
“What?” Pip and Ravi said together again.
“I can’t even remember exactly what it was, something strange. It was like ‘child broomstick’ or ‘child brown sick,’ I dunno, couldn’t really hear the second part. And after Jamie said it, it was like he was watching me, waiting for a reaction,” Luke said. “So obviously I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and when I said that, Jamie turned and bolted, without another word. I chased after him, woulda killed him if I caught him, but it was dark, I lost him in the
trees.”
“And?” Pip pressed.
“And nothing.” Luke straightened up, cracking the bones in his gray- patterned neck. “Didn’t find him. Went home. Jamie goes missing. So I’m thinking someone else he was fucking with got to him after. Whatever happened to him, he deserved it. Fucking fat loser.”
“But Jamie went to the abandoned farmhouse, right after meeting you,”
Pip said. “I know you use that place to pick up your, er, business items. Why would Jamie go there?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there that night. But it’s isolated, secluded, best place in town for conducting any private business. Except now I have to find a new drop-off point, thanks to you,” he growled.
“Are…,” Pip said, but the rest of the sentence died before she even knew what it was.
“That’s all I know about Layla Mead, about Jamie.” Luke dipped his head and then raised one arm, pointing down the corridor behind them. “You can
go now.”
They didn’t move.
“Now,” he said, louder. “I’m busy.”
“OK,” Pip said, turning to go, telling Ravi with her eyes to do the same.
“A week today,” Luke called after them. “I want my cash by next Friday and I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Got it,” Pip said, two steps away. But then the broken thought floating around her head rearranged and reached its end, and she doubled back.
“Luke, are you twenty-nine?” she asked.
“Yeah.” His eyebrows lowered, reaching for each other across the bridge
of his nose.
“And do you turn thirty soon?”
“Couple of months. Why?”
“No reason.” Pip shook her head. “Thursday. I’ll have your money.” And she walked back down the hall and out the front door Ravi was holding open for her, an urgent look in his eyes.
“What was that?” Ravi said, when the door was firmly shut behind them.
“Where are you going to get nine hundred dollars from, Pip? He’s clearly a dangerous guy, you can’t just go around and—”
“Guess I’m accepting one of those sponsorship deals. ASAP,” Pip said, turning to look at the lines of sun skimming across Luke’s white car.
“You’re gonna give me a heart attack one day,” Ravi said, taking her hand, leading her around the corner. “Jamie can’t be Layla, right? Right?”
“No,” Pip replied before she’d even thought about it. And then, after she had: “No, he can’t be. I’ve read the messages between the two of them. And the whole Stella Chapman thing. And Jamie was on the phone with Layla outside the calamity party; he had to have been on the phone to a real person.”
“What, so maybe Layla sent Jamie there, to meet Luke?” Ravi said.
“Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s what they were talking about on the phone.
And Jamie must have had the knife with him when he met Luke, probably in his hoodie pocket.”
“Why?” Lines of confusion drew across Ravi’s forehead. “None of this makes sense. And what the hell is ‘child broomstick’? Is Luke messing with us?”
“Doesn’t seem like the kind to mess around. And remember, George heard Jamie on the phone saying something about a child too.”
They headed toward the train station, where Pip had parked her car earlier, so her mom wouldn’t see it if she was driving up and down Main Street.
“Why’d you ask his age?” Ravi said. “Looking to trade me in for an older model?”
“It’s too many now to be a coincidence,” she said, more to herself than to Ravi. “Adam Clark, Daniel da Silva, Luke Eaton, and even Jamie too—only because he lied about his age—but every single person Layla has spoken to is twenty-nine or recently thirty. And more than that, they’re all white guys, with brownish hair, living in the same town.”
“Yeah,” Ravi said, “so Layla has a type. A very, very specific type.”
“I don’t know.” Pip looked down at her sneakers, still damp from last night. “All those similarities, asking lots of questions. It’s like Layla’s been looking for someone. Someone specific, but she doesn’t know who.”
Pip looked at Ravi, but her eyes escaped from her, breaking away to the side, to someone standing right on the other side of the road. Outside the new Starbucks that had opened there. Neat black jacket, messy blond hair falling into his eyes. Sharp, angled cheekbones.
He was back.
Max Hastings.
Standing with two guys Pip didn’t recognize, talking and laughing in the street.
Pip emptied out and refilled with a feeling that was black and cold and red and burning. She stopped walking and stared.
How dare he? How dare he stand there, laughing, in this town? Out where anyone could see him?
Her hands tightened into fists, nails digging into Ravi’s palm.
“Ouch.” Ravi escaped her grip and looked at her. “Pip, wha—?” Then he followed her eyes across the road.
Max must have felt it, her gaze, because at that exact moment, he looked up, over the street and the idling cars. Right at her. Into her. His mouth settled into a line, pulling up at one end. He raised one arm, his hand open palm-out in a small wave, and the line of his mouth was a smile.
Pip felt it growing inside her, sparking, but Ravi exploded first.
“Don’t you look at her!” he screamed at Max, over the top of the cars.
“Don’t you dare look at her, you hear me?”
Heads turned in the street. Mutters. Faces in windows. Max lowered his arm, but the smile never once left his face.
“Come on,” Ravi said, retaking Pip’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
—
Ravi lay on Pip’s bed, throwing a pair of her balled-up socks in the air and catching them. Throwing always helped him think.
Pip was at her desk, laptop asleep in front of her, digging one finger through her small jar of pins, letting them jab her.
“One more time,” Ravi said, his eyes following the socks up to the ceiling and down to his hand.
Pip cleared her throat. “Jamie walks to the parking lot in Lodge Park.
He’s carrying the knife. He’s nervous, scared, his heart rate tells us that. Layla has potentially set this up, told Luke to be there. We don’t know why. Jamie says two words to Luke, studies him for a reaction, and then runs off. He then goes to the abandoned farmhouse. His heart spikes higher. He’s even more scared, and the knife somehow ends up in the grass by the trees. And Jamie’s
Fitbit is removed, or it breaks or…”
“Or his heart stops.” Catch and throw.
“And then his phone is turned off a few minutes later and never turns on again,” Pip said, lowering her head so her hands could take its weight.
“Well,” Ravi began, “Luke wasn’t exactly quiet about wanting to kill Jamie, because he thinks he’s the one who catfished him. Isn’t it possible he chased Jamie to the farmhouse?”
“If Luke was the one who hurt Jamie, I don’t think he would’ve talked to us at all, not even for nine hundred bucks.”
“Fair point,” Ravi said. “But he did lie initially; he could have told you about seeing Jamie when you first talked to him and Nat.”
“Yeah, but, you know, Luke went out there to cheat on Nat, and Nat was sitting in the room with us. Plus, I’m guessing he prefers not to be associated with missing people, given his line of work.”
“OK. But the words Jamie said to Luke, they have to be important somehow.” Ravi sat up, squeezing the socks in his hands. “They are the key.”
“Child broomstick? Child brown sick?” Pip looked at him, skeptical.
“They don’t sound very key.”
“Maybe Luke misheard. Or maybe they have another meaning we can’t see yet. Look them up.” Ravi gestured toward her laptop.
“Look them up?”
“It’s worth a try, Grumpus.”
“Fine.” Pip pressed the power button to awaken her laptop. She double- clicked on Chrome, bringing up a blank Google page. “OK.”
She typed in child broomstick and pressed enter. “Yep, as I suspected, we’ve got a lot of Halloween costumes for small witches and Quidditch players. Not very helpful.”
“What did Jamie mean?” Ravi wondered aloud, sock-ball back in the air.
“Try the other one.”
“Urgh, fine, but I’m telling you now, I’m not clicking on images for this one,” Pip said, clearing the search bar and typing in child brown sick. She pressed enter and the top result, as expected, was a website about kids’ health, with a page titled Vomiting. “See, I said this was pointle—”
The word got caught halfway up her throat, stalling there as Pip’s eyes narrowed. Just below the search bar, Google was asking her: Did you mean: Child Brunswick.
“Child Brunswick.” She said it quietly, sounding out the words on her lips.
They felt familiar somehow, pushed together like that.
“What’s that?”
Ravi slid off the bed and padded over as Pip clicked on Google’s suggestion and the page of results changed, replaced by articles from all of the large news outlets. Pip’s eyes skimmed down them.
“Of course,” she said, looking at Ravi, searching for the same recognition in his eyes. But his were blank. “Child Brunswick,” Pip said, “that’s the name the media gave to the unnamed kid involved in the Scott Brunswick case.”
“The what case?” he asked, reading over her shoulder.
“Have you not listened to any of the true-crime podcasts I’ve recommended?” she said. “Practically all of them have covered this case, it’s one of the most notorious in the whole country. Happened, like, twenty years ago.” She looked up at Ravi. “Scott Brunswick was a serial killer. He killed
children. And he made his young son, Child Brunswick, help him lure out the victims. You’ve really never heard of this?”
Ravi shook his head.
“Look, read about it,” Pip said, clicking on one of the articles.
HOME > TRUE CRIME > AMERICA’S MOST INFAMOUS SERIAL KILLERS > SCOTT BRUNSWICK “THE MONSTER OF ROCHESTER”
By Oscar Stevens
Between 2000 and 2001, the city of Rochester, New York, was struck by a string of horrific child murders. In the space of just thirteen months, six children disappeared: Jessica Moore, age 11; Megan French, age 10; Edward Keller, age 9; Patrick Evans, age 9; Charlotte Long, age 10, and Emily Nowell, age 8. Their burned remains were later discovered buried along the shore of Lake Ontario, all within one mile of each other. The cause of death in [1]each case was blunt force trauma.
Emily Nowell, the youngest and final victim of the Monster of Rochester, was found three weeks after her disappearance in March 2001, but it would take police two more months to track [2]down her killer.
Police zeroed in on Scott Brunswick, a 41-year-old forklift driver [3] who had lived in Rochester his whole life.Brunswick was a close match to a police composite sketch released after an eyewitness saw a man driving late at night in the area where the bodies were [4] later found.His vehicle, a white Toyota van, also matched the [5] witness’s description.Searches of Brunswick’s home uncovered [6]trophies he had kept from each of the victims: one of their socks.
But there was very little forensic evidence tying Brunswick to the [7] murders.And when the case was brought to trial, the prosecution relied on circumstantial evidence and their key witness: Brunswick’s [8]son, who was ten years old at the time of the final murder.
Brunswick, who lived alone with his only child, had used his son in committing the murders; he directed the boy to approach potential victims in public places—a playground, a park, a public swimming pool, and a shopping mall—and to lure them away on their own, to [9] [10] [11]where Brunswick was waiting in his van to abduct them. [12]The son also assisted in the disposal of the bodies.
The trial of Scott Brunswick began in September 2003 and the son —nicknamed Child Brunswick by the press at the time—now 13, gave testimony that was essential in securing a unanimous guilty [13] verdict.Scott Brunswick was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. But just seven weeks into his sentence at the maximum security Sullivan Correctional Facility in New York state, [14] [15]Brunswick was beaten to death by another inmate.
For his role in assisting the murders, Child Brunswick was charged by a juvenile court to serve a five-year custodial sentence in a [16] juvenile detention center.When he turned eighteen, a parole board decision recommended his release on lifetime probation.
Child Brunswick was given a new identity under a witness- protection-style program and a worldwide injunction was imposed on the media, preventing the publication of any details about Child [17] Brunswick or his new identity.The attorney general stated that this was because there was a risk of “vigilante-type retaliation against this individual if his real identity became known, because of [18]the role he played in his father’s horrendous crimes.”
