The Bone House - Brian Freeman [23]
'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Bad dream.'
'Take it easy, Amy,' he said. 'We'll be stopping for a break soon.'
'Good.'
'Great job in Florida. You were a star.'
'Thanks,' she said.
Gary winked. He continued toward the front of the bus, and she watched him go. She wondered if he knew how much she disliked him. He'd been the dance coach and a physical education instructor at Green Bay ever since she'd arrived at the school three years ago from her high school in Highland Park. He knew his stuff, and as a coach he had an eye for what worked and what didn't in their routines. But that wasn't the only thing he had an eye for. The girls on the team all talked about it in the locker room. The coach was a flirt. A lech. He was in his middle forties, widowed, with a head of thinning brown hair that she knew he colored. He biked. He stayed in shape, and he made sure everyone knew it with his tight shirts and jeans. He was the kind of teacher who never made an overt pass, because the university frowned on teacher-student relationships, but you got the signal in his attitude and his grin. She'd felt the come-on when she was a freshman in the way he looked at her and touched her. If you wanted more, he had more to give.
Gary sat down near the driver and glanced back down the dark aisle of the bus and saw Amy watching him. Something in her expression obviously made him uncomfortable. Normally, she had warm blue eyes and an easy, infectious laugh, but not now. He looked as if he were about to come toward her again, with a question on his lips. Instead, he turned away and sank into his seat.
'What is it?'
Amy glanced at her roommate, who had awakened and was staring at her. It's nothing, Amy told herself.
But she didn't think it was nothing.
'I saw Gary talking to the girl who was killed,' she murmured.
'Gary? Are you sure? When?'
'Last night. Late, around eleven o'clock. I saw them on the terrace of the hotel. At first, I thought it was one of the Green Bay girls, but then I realized it wasn't.'
'Did you hear what they were talking about?'
'No, but Glory looked upset.' Amy shook her head. 'If it was really her. I just don't know.'
'All the coaches talk to the girls from different schools,' Katie reminded her.
'But this is Gary.'
'I know you don't like him, but that doesn't mean anything. I profiled him in the paper last year. He didn't seem like such a bad guy.'
'What about the thing with his wife?' Amy asked.
'Wasn't that an accident?'
'There were rumors.'
'I think you're getting paranoid.'
'There's more,' Amy said. 'There's something else.'
'What?'
Amy could see the back of Gary's head. A reading light bounced off the pate of his skull. It was almost as if he could feel her stare, because he looked up into the driver's mirror. She saw his pupils glow the way a cat's eyes shine at night, and she felt a shiver of fear as their eyes met. He reached up and turned off the light above him.
'My room was next to his,' Amy said.
'Yeah, so?'
'I couldn't sleep last night. I was awake sometime after three in the morning, and I heard footsteps in the hallway. I didn't look out, but I heard Gary's door. He was going back into his room in the middle of the night.'
* * *
Chapter Eight
Cab sipped a Starbucks iced latte through a straw and watched Tresa Fischer and Troy Geier behind the window of the interview room. It was late afternoon on Sunday, and the police headquarters building on Riverside was uncomfortably warm, the way it usually was. The counselor who had been with the two teenagers for most of the day had departed ten minutes earlier, leaving them alone. Cab had received word that Delia Fischer, Glory's mother, had landed at the Fort Myers airport, and he wanted a chance to sit down with Tresa and Troy individually before Delia arrived. He knew that once