The Hunted Girls by Jenna Kernan (best book club books for discussion txt) 📕

Beside her, Juliette shouldered a large duffel and grabbed her fishing pole.

“Okay. I won’t pry. But I’m here if you want to talk.”

“We’re all here. Aren’t we?”

April Rupp, the owner of the adjoining town house and their new landlady, stepped out on her landing for the fifth time since handing over the keys to Demko.

It annoyed Nadine that Mrs. Rupp had decided that Demko was the leader of this group. The woman was chatty, and Nadine suspected she used her front gardens as a means to gossip with neighbors.

The woman wore oversized sunglasses and her broad-brimmed hat made it impossible to see anything of her hair. She had an athletic figure and Nadine judged her to be in her mid-sixties. From the snatches of conversation she overheard, Rupp was from South Carolina’s Lowcountry, was recently widowed and lived with two elderly dogs and one new kitten. She had brought her dogs out to meet Molly, and all three seemed to be getting along in a blur of sniffing and tail wags.

Nadine had left it to Demko, the presumed leader, to furnish the information he wished without revealing anything that could not be blathered about the neighborhood. The agreed-upon story was that they had a short-term contract with the state, surveying infrastructure.

Nadine thought Juliette extremely brave to put Jack-Jack’s cage on the landing so that the dogs could get acquainted with the cockatoo. But when Radar, Mrs. Rupp’s dachshund, got too close, Jack-Jack nipped his nose, and Nadine recognized she’d underestimated the bird, who did not need defending. Radar yipped and retreated.

Tina wisely carried her gray-and-white tabby cat, Muffin, into the room that she and Juliette decided to share so that the study with the sleeper sofa could be used as a work area for all of them.

Nadine left the unpacking for later and hooked her laptop to the Ethernet in the study, diving back into her work, interrupted around suppertime by the enticing aroma of fried food.

In the kitchen, she discovered Clint setting out paper plates and Tina and Juliette unpacking containers as Molly watched the proceedings with interest.

Nadine thought that communal living might not be so bad after all.

“Mrs. Rupp stopped by again. Brought brownies,” said Tina.

“She said, ‘The normal kind’!” Juliette laughed. “Gave her a chance to snoop around. Took me almost twenty minutes to get her out the door. She’s harder to get rid of than bedbugs.”

Despite everything, despite the fact they were only all here because a killer was directly trying to access Nadine, she felt oddly safe and happy with her friends about her. The fact that the town house had a security system didn’t hurt.

Although things were smooth on her living situation, the strain continued with Demko. Tina and Juliette did their best to ignore the tension.

They were all keenly aware that another day had passed with no sign of Linda Tolan.

The badly decomposed body, found in the water outside Fort McCoy, remained unidentified, but no women had gone missing.

Juliette had told her that a backlog at the ME’s office had pushed the autopsy until next week.

Her team members were not the only ones frustrated. Skogen and his team seemed to think she could magically identify their unsub from the information they’d collected.

“It’s like having a family,” said Tina, passing the brownies and bringing Nadine out of her thoughts.

Her comment struck Nadine hard. None of them had normal families. All were complicated: Nadine and Demko adopted by aunts, Juliette adopted by the same DA who convicted her mother, and Tina spending her teen years in foster care.

After the brownies had made their rounds, Juliette passed out what looked like a DNA bar graph to each of them.

“What’s this?” asked Tina.

But Nadine knew. It was the enzyme sequence testing that would show if they had the genes that might indicate a predisposition to violence and murder. Juliette already had their results.

“How’d you get this so fast?” asked Demko.

“Polytech is close by and I went to school with a guy that works there.”

Polytech was at least ninety minutes away, but Juliette had obviously found the time. Nadine realized that with the initial victims’ bodies now released to their families for burial, Juliette might not have very much to do.

“These are our tests?” squeaked Tina, studying the printout. “What does it say?”

“Let me preface this by saying the relationship between violent offenses and this sequence is in dispute by experts,” said Juliette.

Tina gave her a blank look.

“Researchers don’t agree because the study’s subject pool was exceedingly small and from an all-male prison population. So please don’t place too much weight on the results.”

“What are the results?” asked Nadine.

Juliette read from a sheet of copy paper. “Juliette Hartfield, positive.” She glanced at them. “That means, yes, I have this sequence.” She returned her attention to the sheet. “Arlo Howler, positive.”

Nadine sucked in a breath. Demko scowled at Nadine.

“He gave permission,” she said.

Juliette continued. “Clinton Demko, negative. Tina Ruz, negative.”

Tina sagged, head down. Demko turned his worried expression on Nadine.

“Nadine Finch, positive.” Juliette lowered the page.

“Fifty-fifty,” murmured Demko. “Me, no. You, yes.”

Nadine’s head sank. Both she and Arlo had the gene repeats. Both carried the genetic marker for violence.

Juliette placed a hand on Nadine’s knee. “You’re a good person, Nadine. Don’t let this make you doubt that for a minute. These really don’t mean anything.”

But it did matter. She never believed she could be completely good.

Nadine’s phone vibrated with a text. She’d been sitting alone in her room, processing her thoughts around the gene sequencing. It confirmed all her worst fears. And what could it mean for her and Demko?

She returned to her friends, still seated at the kitchen table, to read them the text.

“Skogen wrote: ‘Orlando Star asked me to confirm that Dr. Nadine Finch is our lead profiler.’”

The word was out. And there was no more hiding for Nadine.

Seventeen

SUNDAY

Nadine was the lead headline the following day. Skogen had given no comment. But the paper had confirmation from an anonymous source.