The high school had been a dead end. She’d known it would be, even as she made the appointment to talk to the principal. Mandy Jansen had graduated almost ten years earlier. Whatever had led to the moment of her hanging in her mother’s basement almost certainly had nothing to do with her years on the cheer squad.

The only reason Juliet O’Hara could find for taking the investigation all the way back to high school was the fact that she was found wearing that uniform. But as a clue that seemed like less than a long shot.

Even as she’d sat waiting outside the principal’s office, she knew she was wasting her time. And everyone she’d met over the next two hours seemed to prove her right. The principal had only been in the school for two years, and there had been three others since Mandy’s day. He was able to pull up her records on the district’s computer, but there was nothing there but the transcript of Mandy’s good, not great, grades. Mandy’s guidance counselor couldn’t place the name; she’d been one of a thousand students over the last decade. Even the coach of the cheerleading squad only remembered Mandy as a “nice girl, legs like springs.”

But O’Hara had needed to visit the high school, because she didn’t have anywhere else to turn. All the evidence seemed to suggest-to insist-that Mandy had taken her own life. There had been no signs of an intruder in the basement apartment, no signs that anyone besides Mandy had been down there in weeks.