Lisbon had a bad feeling about Justin Halprin from the moment she first saw him.

She first caught sight of him at the school, craning his neck to see past the horrified onlookers at the crime scene. Unlike the rest of the crowd, his expression was devoid of fear or revulsion. His eyes bright with curiosity, he looked avidly, openly on.

A chill ran down her spine at the sight of him. You couldn't arrest someone for morbid curiosity, though, and they hadn't even finished examining the crime scene yet. There would be plenty of time for following up with murder scene groupies later. She turned back towards the body. Jane, opposite her, saw him, too. He tracked the boy's movements with his eyes, his expression troubled. Sensing her own eyes on him, he redirected his focus to her. He met her gaze. She raised her eyebrows in silent inquiry. He gave her a slight shake of the head and turned back to the body, which she interpreted as an indication that he would tell her whatever it was that he was thinking later, when there were fewer people around to overhear. Sighing, she forced her gaze back to the unpleasant scene before them.

They'd learned a bit of background before they arrived on the scene. Blake Hoffman had been a good student, particularly excelling at chemistry and possessing a record of competent, if not spectacular, performance in the school debate club. He was personable, well-liked by both his peers and the teaching staff. He was a junior, sixteen years old with a girlfriend he'd been with for eight months. A fan of baseball and cheesy eighties sci-fi movies. A nice kid. At least, he had been, before his body had been found eviscerated in front of his locker.

The crime scene was messy beyond belief. The floor sticky with blood. The forensics techs collected the samples they needed with grim expressions on their faces. Lisbon was glad Partridge hadn't been on call when she'd called the techs. She didn't think she could stomach his cheerful dissection of a scene like this.

The local PD had done a terrible job cordoning off the crime scene. The case had come to the CBI through a quirk of jurisdictional regulations—the school was on state land. Local PD had arrived on the scene first. They were less than thrilled to lose the case to the CBI. Lisbon wasn't sure if their failure to follow basic crime scene protocols was an expression of sulkiness or merely incompetence. Seeing one of the officers constantly turning his head back to stare at the body when he was supposed to be holding back the crowd, Lisbon was inclined to suspect the latter.

This was difficult enough without half the school pressing forward for ring side seats. She snapped at Rigsby to ride herd on the local PD so they would get their asses in gear and clear the scene properly. Rigsby, a little green about the gills, looked relieved to have a task that didn't involve examining the guts on the floor too closely.

Lisbon couldn't blame him. She had to admit she was relieved, too, when the techs finally finished and she could release the body to the coroner's office. Murder was one thing, but this level of savagery was rare and disturbing, even in her line of work.

The girlfriend was the first to fall under suspicion. Examination of her phone records revealed a text message sent from her phone at four o clock the previous day, urging the victim to meet her at the school at ten pm that night. Since the coroner's initial estimate pegged the time of death sometime between ten and eleven the night before, every sign indicated that Blake Hoffman had responded to her summons and walked straight to his death.

"What do you think?" Lisbon asked Jane in a low voice after Cho had completed his questioning and left the girl sobbing in the empty classroom they had commandeered as a makeshift interrogation room.

Jane shook his head. "She didn't do it. I could buy her snapping and killing someone in a moment of jealous rage, but not gutting him like that. That takes time and determination this girl doesn't have."

Lisbon was inclined to agree with him, though the text was a fairly damning piece of evidence. The girl's insistence that she never sent any such message hardly seemed credible at first. Before long, however, she alibied out. Van Pelt discovered a video clip on a social media account of one of the girl's friends that showed the girl vamping for the camera at a party halfway across town at the time of the murder.

"Why didn't she just mention that in the first place?" Lisbon said when she found out, exasperated.

"Too distraught," Jane said wisely. "I think she really loved him. She's not thinking clearly. Plus, now she feels guilty for sneaking out to go to this party while her boyfriend was being cut up into pieces."

Lisbon shook her head and told the team to move on. That text still bothered her, though.

They looked at the girl's ex-boyfriend next. The girlfriend had filed a complaint with the police two months before claiming the young man had been stalking her. The boy denied it, but a judge had found the evidence compelling enough to grant the girl a restraining order. Several acquaintances confirmed the boy was definitely the jealous type.

"That kid has a great future as a peeping tom," Jane commented after they brought the boy in for questioning.

Lisbon sighed. "He doesn't seem like he'd have the stomach to rip someone's guts out either, does he?"

"So to speak," Jane agreed. He went on to pontificate for several minutes about how the boy idolized the objects of his affection like perfect princesses in a tower. According to Jane, the gruesome details of murder were far too grounded in reality to appeal to such a person.

Lisbon half listened. She noted that for someone who hated psychologists, Jane was always happy to psychoanalyze anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. At least in this case he was confining his analysis to relevant suspects, rather than using this skill to volunteer far more information than she ever wanted to know about the dating choices of Susan from Accounting. Regarding the would-be stalker, she happened to agree with him, so she let the kid go and the team turned their attention elsewhere.

Their eyes landed next on the victim's father. They discovered he'd practically grown up in his father's butcher shop. His exposure to his father's chosen profession indicated he had intimate knowledge of anatomy and presumably a more than passing understanding of how to remove intestines from a body. He also happened not to have an alibi anyone could confirm, claiming he'd been home at the time of the murder. He was a single father, his wife having passed away when Blake was a small child, so there were no other members of the household available to vouch for his whereabouts. According to him, Blake had left the house without permission and he hadn't even realized he was gone until the next morning.

"He looks good for it," Cho commented as they left the man's house. "No alibi, plenty of time."

"But what's the motive?" Lisbon countered. She glanced back through the front window. Mr. Hoffman hadn't moved from where they'd left him sitting in the living room. His shoulders slumped and his head in his hands, he stared unseeing at the carpet. "Blake's girlfriend told us that he and his father were close. There's no indication they had argued lately."

"It wasn't him," Jane said with certainty. "His son was the center of his whole life. Why would he destroy that for no reason?"

"Uh, guys," Van Pelt said, coming around from the back of the house with Rigsby, where they'd had permission from Hoffman to conduct a preliminary search. "We found something." She held up a plastic evidence bag. It held a hunting knife with browning blood caked on it. "This was in the shed in the back."

Lisbon examined it. It did seem to be a fit for the murder weapon. She handed it back to Van Pelt. "Run it through forensics. If the blood's a match, we'll have to come back and arrest him."

"Where'd you find it?" Jane asked Van Pelt.

"There's a kind of workbench in the shed," Rigsby said. "It was in one of the drawers."

Jane frowned. "Pretty crappy hiding place," he said. "If you had just murdered your son in one of the most horrible ways imaginable, wouldn't you do a better job of hiding the evidence?"

"Not everyone is a criminal mastermind," Lisbon reminded him. "Sometimes people are just sloppy."

Jane shook his head. "Not Hoffman. Did you see that house? Neat as a pin. If he'd committed murder, he'd do a better job cleaning it up. He would have at least cleaned off the weapon properly so it wouldn't immediately arouse suspicion if someone stumbled across it."

Lisbon looked at him. "You think someone's trying to frame him?"

"That's my guess," Jane confirmed.

"Okay," Lisbon said. It was a little odd that he wouldn't bother to clean off the weapon before tucking it away. "We'll keep it in mind. In the meantime, you three head back to the office and get that to forensics. Jane and I will head back to the scene and see if we can find anything else worth looking into."

The team agreed, and they separated.

Jane and Lisbon drove back to the school. It was mid-afternoon, so the students were all in class, leaving the hallways deserted. Lisbon paced in front of the victim's locker, studying the ground where Hoffman had bled out. The floors had been cleaned, so there wasn't much to see at this point, but she kept staring at it anyway. There was something off about this whole case. She just couldn't put her finger on it.

Behind her, Jane jimmied open the boy's locker and started sorting through its contents. "This doesn't make sense," he muttered, leafing through a chemistry notebook filled with notes in Hoffman's untidy scrawl. He set the notebook down and opened the locker door wider. "Look at this."

Lisbon looked. Hoffman had decorated the inside of his locker with three pictures. A photo of his girlfriend, smiling at the camera, a picture of Machu Picchu, and a picture of Albert Einstein making a silly face and sticking his tongue out. "So?"

"This was a nice kid. A bit nerdy, but not the bottom of the social ladder, either. People liked him. This was the kind of kid who would grow up to be successful professional with 2.5 children and a happy home life. Who would want to kill him?"

Lisbon thought about his father in the living room with his head in his hands. "I don't know." She stared at the ground where Blake Hoffman's body had been found once more, then shook her head. "Come on. Let's go talk to the principal. Maybe he can tell us something we've missed."

The principal, Mr. Ackerman, ushered them into his office when they stopped by, still as pale and shaken as he had been when they'd first met him. "Agent Lisbon. Mr. Jane," he greeted them. "Come in, come in. Take a seat."

Lisbon and Jane took the two guest chairs opposite his desk. "How are you holding up?" Lisbon asked him, concerned. His color really did not look good.

He shook his head. "To be honest, it's been a nightmare. I still can't believe this happened to one of my students. On campus, no less! I feel sick every time I think about it. I'm sure you can imagine the kinds of calls I'm getting from parents. Not to mention the press. We're looking at increasing security measures, but I've been over it an over it in my mind and I don't know what could have been done to prevent this."

"You said the other day that the school doors are locked at night," Lisbon said. "Do you have any idea how Blake and the killer got in?"

"No idea," he said. "You told me it didn't look as though the door had been forced, so that would mean it would have to be someone with a key, don't you think? But the only people with keys to that door are me, the custodial staff, and Mike Vaszary, the swim coach. The swim team practices early in the morning, you see."

"Mr. Vaszary was the one who found the body, wasn't he?" Lisbon asked.

"Yes," Mr. Ackerman answered. "But he called 911 right away, and I don't think he even knew Blake. Surely you don't think he could have been the one who did this?"

Lisbon shook her head. "We looked into the possibility, but his girlfriend confirmed that it was their anniversary the night before. They were out downtown at the time of the murder. We're still verifying alibis for the custodial staff, but so far we don't have any reason to suspect them."

"We don't need to waste time worrying about how Blake got in," Jane said. "That much is obvious. The thing we need to figure out is how the killer got hold of a key."

Mr. Ackerman frowned. "How did Blake get in, then?"

"The killer knew he was coming. Once he got in, he unlocked the door for him and laid in wait," Jane explained. "The perfect ambush."

"You think the killer sent that text message from the girlfriend's phone," Lisbon realized.

"I'm certain of it," Jane said. "Why else would Blake go to the school at that hour? The girl told us she had drama club after school that day. It would have been easy for someone to grab her phone for a few minutes and send the message. And then delete it after he replied so she wouldn't notice it."

"Makes sense," Lisbon agreed. She turned back to the principal. "Mr. Ackerman, is there anyone else you can think of who might have had a conflict with Blake Hoffman? Someone who might have been angry with him for some reason?"

Mr. Ackerman knit his brows together. "Well… Blake did get into an argument with another student a few weeks ago, now that you mention it. But it seemed fairly innocuous at the time. I didn't think much of it."

"Tell us about it," Lisbon urged. "Please. It could be important."

"It was something to do with Amy," Mr. Ackerman said. "Blake's girlfriend. From what I gather, this other student was hitting on her, and Blake got angry. He told him off in front of a group of other students. I remember being surprised because he used some very strong language, and that was unusual for Blake. I'm not saying he was a complete angel or anything, but he wasn't the sort to make a habit of cursing in front of teachers, and this was during a break period, so there were a lot of people around."

"What did you do about it?" Jane asked.

Mr. Ackerman shrugged. "Not much. They didn't get into any kind of physical altercation, so there was no need to suspend either of them. I called them into my office and spoke to each of them separately. I let their parents know, but at the time it didn't seem like it merited a strong disciplinary action."

"Can you help us identify the other student?" Lisbon asked. "We'd like to talk to him."

"Sure." Mr. Ackerman typed something into his computer, then turned his screen to face them. "This is him."

Jane and Lisbon exchanged glances. The screen displayed a school photograph of the boy they'd seen at the crime scene, the one who had looked on with such fascination at the techs cleaning up the grotesque remains of Blake Hoffman's body.

"What is his name?" Lisbon asked.

"Justin Halprin," Mr. Ackerman informed him. "He's a sophomore. A year younger than Blake."

"What do you know about him?" Jane asked, his eyes fixed on the photograph.

"Not much," Mr. Ackerman admitted. "He keeps a low profile. Incredibly bright, from what his teachers have told me, but won't lift a finger on subjects that don't interest him, so his performance never rises above average. Bit of a loner. Doesn't have a lot of friends."

Jane looked meaningfully at Lisbon, but she shook her head slightly. They couldn't afford to get ahead of themselves on this.

Mr. Ackerman looked back and forth between them. "Do you want me to call him into my office so you can talk to him?"

"Yes," Jane said.

"No," Lisbon said at the same time. She ignored Jane's incredulous look and addressed Mr. Ackerman. "We'll speak to him after class is over. Can you tell us where we would be most likely to find him?"

Mr. Ackerman gave them the relevant details. Lisbon thanked him for his time and she and Jane took their leave.

Jane paced impatiently outside Ackerman's office. "We need to talk to that kid, Lisbon."

"I agree," she said. "But we don't know anything right now beyond the fact that he and the victim both acted like a couple of teenage hotheads over a girl. I don't want to haul him into the principal's office for questioning in the middle of class on the basis of a single argument that happened almost three weeks ago. If he isn't involved, there's no need to cast that kind of attention on him."

"Why the hell not?" Jane asked.

She shook her head. "I know you didn't go to high school, Jane, but you have to know what kids are like. If the police snatch him out of class and start interrogating him, gossip will spread like wildfire. I don't want to be responsible for turning him into a social pariah if he's innocent."

"And if he's guilty?" Jane challenged her.

"If he's guilty, we'll find out and he'll have bigger things to worry about," she said calmly. "Come on. Class will be out in a few minutes. We can catch him on his way home."

Jane grumbled a bit, but acquiesced. They went outside to wait for Halprin to leave.

When the bell rang, they saw Amy, Blake's girlfriend, leave the building first. She saw them standing under a tree near the parking lot and walked up to them. "Have you found anything?" she asked anxiously, her face pale and her eyes rimmed with red.

"We're still looking into everything," Lisbon told her. Jane ignored them, his eyes scanning the students pouring out of the building for Justin Halprin. "I'm glad you stopped by. I have a couple more questions I want to ask you."

"Okay," the girl said, looking nervous. "Anything I can do to help."

"Do you know a boy named Justin Halprin?" Lisbon asked.

Amy made a face. "Yeah. He's super creepy."

"How do you know him?"

"We're in biology together."

"Mr. Ackerman told us he and Blake had an argument a few weeks ago. Were you there when it happened?"

"Oh, that," Amy said, flushing. "Yeah. I was there."

"Can you tell me how the argument started?"

"Well," Amy said, looking embarrassed. "It was kind of about me."

"Go on."

Amy cleared her throat. "It was after biology. There's a fifteen minute break after second period. Justin had been staring at me all through class and I was glad to get out of there. But he followed me to my locker." She shifted on her feet. "He had this weird smile on his face, you know? And he kind of came up behind me and started whispering in my ear."

"Whispering what?" Lisbon asked.

Amy looked down. "He said he wanted to do things to me."

"What kind of things?" Lisbon asked patiently. She had an idea, but she needed confirmation.

Amy turned brick red. "I'd—I'd really rather not repeat it, if you don't mind."

"Please," Lisbon said. "It could be important."

"It was all sex stuff." Amy shuddered. "Really gross sex stuff."

"How did Blake come into it?"

"His locker's next to mine. He didn't hear what Justin said, but he saw my face and he saw I was upset. He got really mad. He knows what happened with Quentin—that's my ex-boyfriend—so he's kind of overprotective of me." She swallowed. "Was, I mean. Anyway, he put his arm around me and snapped at Justin, 'Get the hell away from her, you fucking freak.'" She looked off into the distance. "It was weird, you know? I've never heard him call anyone a name like that before. He's always, like, super polite. It's one of the things I liked about him. I asked him about it later and he said Justin's always given him the creeps."

She had Jane's attention now. "What did Justin do when Blake said that?" he asked.

"He got really angry," Amy said. "Like—scary angry. He started yelling at Blake, right in the middle of the hallway, but he was so worked up nobody could even understand what he was saying. I thought he was going to hit Blake for sure, but one of the teachers overheard and came to bust up the crowd that had gathered around by that point."

"What happened after that?"

Amy blinked. "Nothing. It all blew over. They both had to go to the principal's office, get a talking to for making a big scene in the middle of the school like that, but that was pretty much it."

"Did you tell any of the teachers what Justin said to you that day?"

Amy looked down. "No. I asked Blake not to mention it. I mean, I didn't exactly want to repeat that stuff to Mr. Ackerman, you know? Blake said he'd take care of it." Her face crumpled. "He always took really good care of me."

Lisbon made soothing noises, trying to comfort the girl as she struggled to regain her composure.

Next to her, Jane straightened. "Lisbon," he said in a low voice. "There he is."

Amy turned her head and saw Halprin sauntering down the front steps. He must have sensed her eyes on him, because he turned his head in their direction. Seeing Amy, he gave her an ironic smile and waggled his fingers in a suggestive wave.

Amy gasped softly and jerked her head around, determinedly not looking at him.

"Go," Lisbon advised. "Don't worry. We'll talk to him."

Amy nodded and fled.

Jane and Lisbon approached the boy warily. Seeing them coming, he stopped and waited, that same odd half-smile on his face.

"Justin Halprin?" Lisbon said.

He smirked. His gray eyes were alight with intelligence, but there was a coldness in them Lisbon found unnerving. "Who wants to know?"

Lisbon felt a chill run down her spine at the sight of those cold eyes. She remembered having the same reaction when she'd seen him at the crime scene. She shook off the feeling and flashed her badge. "Agent Lisbon, CBI. This is Patrick Jane, my consultant. We have a few questions for you."

He appeared more amused than nervous. "Fire away."

Lisbon put her badge away. "I understand you had an argument with Blake Hoffman a few weeks before he died."

He raised his eyebrows. "I didn't hear a question in there."

"Did you kill him?" Jane asked, his eyes fixed on him.

Halprin turned to Jane, slowly sizing him up. He seemed unfazed by Jane's less than friendly stare. "If I did," he said, that half-smile still in place. "It wouldn't be very smart to admit it to you, would it?"

"No," Jane acknowledged, still looking at him intently. "It wouldn't be very smart."

"How well did you know Blake?" Lisbon asked.

Halprin shrugged. "Not well. I'd seen him around school, but we didn't have any classes together or anything." His lip curled. "For the life of me, I'll never understand how a douchebag like that ended up with such a hot girlfriend."

"Sounds like he didn't think much of you, either," Jane remarked. "What was it that he called you again? A 'fucking freak,' wasn't it?"

Halprin's eyes flashed. "That little cocksucker didn't know what he was talking about," he spat. "He thought he was so damn smart."

"You think you're smarter than him, do you?" Jane asked, purposefully injecting his tone with a healthy amount of skepticism.

"I'm ten times smarter than he was," Halprin snapped.

"You don't seem too upset that he was murdered," Lisbon observed.

"He deserved what he got," Halprin said venomously. He inhaled through his nose. "Doesn't mean I killed him."

"No, it doesn't," Jane said. "Not necessarily. Still, you're the only person we've spoken too with so little regard for human life you don't seem remotely bothered that one of your fellow students had his intestines torn out only a few short days ago. That pretty much puts you at the top of the suspect list as far as I'm concerned."

"Jane," Lisbon said reprovingly. Jane ignored her, still intent on Halprin.

Halprin made a visible effort to calm himself. "I didn't like him," he said, slowly and carefully. "That isn't a crime."

"True," Lisbon said. "But if you know something about what happened and don't tell us, that could be considered obstruction of justice, which is a crime."

"Or if you murdered him yourself," Jane interjected. "That's definitely a crime. Tell me, where were you three nights ago?"

This question seemed to steady Halprin. "I was at home watching my sister," he said, a faint note of triumph in his voice. "She's twelve."

"Your parents weren't home?" Lisbon asked.

"My dad is out of town," Halprin answered.

"What about your mom?" Jane asked.

"She was out," he said curtly.

"Out where?" Jane prodded.

"Probably out fucking our neighbor," Halprin sneered. "Why don't you ask her?"

"That bothers you, doesn't it?" Jane said. "The idea that your mother might be unfaithful to your father."

"Might be?" Halprin snorted. "She's not exactly a genius about hiding it. It wasn't hard to figure out."

"Can you think of anything else that might help us find out who killed Blake Hoffman?" Lisbon asked, trying to steer the conversation back on course.

"What would I know about it?" Halprin said contemptuously. "Like I said, I barely knew him."

"Right. By your own admission, your sole interaction with him was a heated verbal exchange," Jane said.

"What's your point?" Halprin said impatiently.

Jane shrugged. "Nothing. Just that he pissed you off, and then three weeks later he ends up dead. Interesting coincidence, wouldn't you say?"

Halprin smiled coolly. "Do you have any proof that I've done something wrong?"

"Not yet," Jane said. "But I'm sure something will turn up sooner or later."

Halprin ignored him. "Am I under arrest?"

"No," Lisbon said, watching him warily.

He gave them that odd half-smile again. "Then this conversation's over."

With that, he walked away without so much as a backwards glance.

Lisbon watched him disappear down the street, troubled.

Jane, tense beside her, exhaled only when Halprin turned the corner and moved beyond their line of sight. "He did it, Lisbon," he said, pacing on the small square of grass they were standing on. "I'm sure of it."

"We have no proof of that," Lisbon reminded him.

Jane stopped pacing and looked her in the eye. "I don't care what the evidence says. That kid is evil, Lisbon."

"He's just a kid, Jane," Lisbon said softly. "He's only fifteen years old."

Jane shook his head. "I don't care. He killed that boy. Ripped out his insides because he humiliated him in front of a group of their classmates."

Lisbon sighed. "Jane, the only piece of evidence we've found so far is that knife. If it turns out to be the murder weapon, it points directly to the father being the murderer."

"He framed the father," Jane said stubbornly. "He tried to pin it on the girl by sending that text, but she messed up his plan by deciding to go that party at the last minute. Once she was eliminated, he had to find someone else to cast the blame on, so he hid that knife in the shed to implicate Blake's father."

"All supposition," Lisbon said. "We have no way to prove it. Besides, he just gave us an alibi. Based on his attitude, he seemed pretty confident it will check out when we go to verify it."

Jane resumed his pacing. "It's a lie. He's guilty, Lisbon. I can feel it."

"The evidence—"

"Forget the evidence," he interrupted, stopping again in front of her. He searched her eyes. "What do your instincts tell you?"

Lisbon hesitated. "That he murdered Blake Hoffman," she admitted.

"Exactly," Jane said, satisfied. "You can feel it, too.

"My instincts have been wrong before," Lisbon pointed out. "And so have yours."

Jane shook his head. "We're not wrong about this, Lisbon. He's the one."

"Our collective instincts are worth exactly nothing when it comes to due process," Lisbon said firmly. "We have to find proof."

"All right then," Jane said. "Let's get to it."