The other woman looked at Maggie for a long time. She seemed to be appraising her, but not unkindly. “You must hate Ryan.”
“Why do you say that? Because he shot a fellow officer?”
“Well, that, yes. But I meant because he took a gun to your daughter’s school.”
Maggie took a moment to answer. There was some truth to what Ginny Warner was saying, but Maggie was asking for her help to locate her son, and that help wouldn’t be forthcoming if the boy’s mother was afraid of her.
“Ginny, obviously I don’t condone what Ryan did, taking the gun to school,” she said carefully. “I don’t know what his intentions were, but he didn’t use it on school property. Maybe he meant to—”
“He wouldn’t have!”
“Maybe not. We don’t know. But he didn’t.” Maggie chose her words with care. “My job is to protect the people who live in this county. Your son is one of those people, even though Dwight Shultz is my friend. The most important thing, at this point, is to find your son safe, bring him in safely, and hear his side of this story.”
Maggie wasn’t sure how accurate it was, but she hoped it sounded sincere.
Ginny Warner thought for a moment, then nodded.
Maggie tapped her pen against her open notepad. “Okay, what about what’s been going on with Ryan at school? Can you tell me about that?”
“Ryan’s been having problems with those other boys almost since school started,” Ginny answered after a moment. “I don’t know all of the kids’ names, just Adrian Nichols and Stuart Newman.”
“What kinds of problems?”
“At first, they just teased him, picked on him the way smaller boys or new kids get picked on, until the other kid gets bored. But then it got worse.”
She stared down at one of her son’s notebooks. Maggie followed her gaze. There was a small sketch of a dolphin on the cover, like he’d been doodling. It was good.
“They started bumping against him in the hallway,” Ginny continued. “Slamming his locker shut when he was trying to get something out, things like that.”
“Is that when you went to the principal’s office?”
“No. Ryan asked me not to. He was embarrassed. I didn’t ask for a conference until Adrian Nichols shoved Ryan when he was walking home from the bus stop. Ryan fell and scraped the side of his face on the sidewalk.”
“What did the principal say?”
“That she couldn’t do anything.”
“But Ryan had a physical injury.”
“It wasn’t school property.” She sighed. “Ms. Freeman was sympathetic, but she couldn’t take any kind of disciplinary action.”
“But you went in to speak to her again?” Maggie asked.
“Yes. In November, right before the Thanksgiving holiday.”
“What for?”
“Stuart Newman tripped Ryan in the shower after gym,” Ginny answered. “Adrian Nichols was there, too.”
“Was Ryan hurt?”
“He was a little bruised. On his knee.”
“What did Ms. Freeman do about that incident?”
Ginny sighed. “She seemed like she wanted to do something, but she couldn’t. “
“But this was on school property,” Maggie said.
“No witnesses. She did call them into her office, but it was Ryan’s word against two other boys.”
Maggie chewed at the corner of her lip. “There are cameras in the locker room, aren’t there? Not in the shower, but somewhere. You’d be able to see that all three boys were in the shower room.”
Ginny shook her head. “There’s a camera over the coach’s office and one over the door to the locker room, on the outside. The other two boys said Ryan slipped and fell on his way out of the shower.”
Maggie sighed. “Okay, what about the third time you went in to the school?”
“There wasn’t really another incident,” Ginny answered. “At least, not where Ryan got hurt. I just—they were just relentless. Teasing, threatening, crowding him. He hated going to school.”
She suddenly put her face in her hands and took a deep breath that Maggie could almost feel. After a moment, she put her hands down and straightened her shoulders. “I hated to send him. If I didn’t work two jobs, and if he didn’t have so much riding on his grades, I would have pulled him out and tried to homeschool him the rest of the year. You don’t understand what it was like to make him go to school, knowing how scared he was sometimes, and how much he dreaded it. It’s my job to protect him.” She leaned forward, her eyes widening. “It’s our job to protect our kids!”
Maggie nodded. “Yes.”
Ryan’s mother sat back against her chair and put her fingers up to her mouth, as though to silence herself. Maggie changed tacks.
“Tell me about how your son handled your husband’s death. Was he angry? Did he act out?”
“Of course he was angry,” Ginny answered calmly. “He didn’t understand. We were hit by a drunk driver who’d had two DUIs and didn’t have any insurance. We lost Paul, and then we lost everything else. We didn’t have any life insurance. We’d been meaning to get some, but it just felt like we had so many other things to budget for, and we were young, you know?”
She took a sip of coffee that had to be ice cold.
“But no, he didn’t act out,” she said. “He was mostly just sad. Paul wasn’t a buddy, or very affectionate. He was the son of an Army colonel, so he was kind of reserved, but he was a good man, and he was solid. He went to the graduations and the awards and the field days. He was there if Ryan needed advice.”
Maggie asked a few more questions about Ryan’s background, his relationships with other kids at Franklin, and his temperament. Then she changed topics. “Ginny, do you have any idea where Ryan could be right now?”
The woman shook her head slowly. “I don’t. I drove around for hours yesterday, last night. Looking. I just didn’t know where to go.”
“Where did you look?”
“I went over to the island, because he likes it over there. Mostly the state park. I drove all around over there.” She thought for a moment. “I went all around the neighborhood here, of course. To the school. I even went over to Apalach, because he likes the downtown. He spends a lot of time at the library, and at the bookstore, the one on Commerce Street.”
“Downtown Books & Purl.”
“Right, yes. I drove everywhere I could think of over there, but he just wasn’t there.”
Maggie wrapped things up a few minutes later, gave Ryan’s mother her card with her cell phone number, and urged her to call if she heard from Ryan or if the boy came home. She tried to make her understand that the safest thing for her son was to be in custody.
She didn’t mention that the safest thing for her son was to be without a gun. Not only because of his probable state of mind, but because every law enforcement officer in the county knew he was armed. None of the people she worked with wanted to harm a kid, not even a kid who had shot one of their own, but if Ryan Warner even looked like he was pulling out a gun, he was probably going to get hurt.
Ginny Warner led Maggie to the front door and opened it for her, but she reached out and put a hand on Maggie’s arm as she passed. Maggie stopped and looked at her.
“I know you’re a police officer, but you’re also a mom,” Ginny said. “Please. Please don’t let Ryan get hurt. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I know you can’t know that, but I do. Believe another mother’s heart. Please.”
Maggie nodded, agreeing to nothing she couldn’t guarantee, and eager to get away from Ginny Warner before she could see the odds reflected in Maggie’s eyes.
The two women who opened the door to Wyatt were clearly sisters. They were both very pretty, and they had the same dark brown hair. One was quite a bit taller than the other, and her hair was caught up in a long ponytail
. The other had hers cut at an angle around her chin. He guessed them both to be in their mid-forties, but he had no idea which was the elder.
They both smiled widely at him as they stepped back to let him in.
“It’s so nice to meet you in person, Sheriff,” the taller one said as she closed the door.
“Ah. Well, thank you, but I’m not the sheriff anymore,” he replied. “You can just call me Wyatt.”
“We signed the petition about that,” said the shorter sister.
“Which petition is that?”
“To get you back into office,” the taller sister answered. “That just wasn’t right.”
“Well, I did resign of my own accord.”
“Let’s go out on the screened porch,” the shorter one suggested. She led the way, with Wyatt in the rear. “We think that’s a stupid policy. You two worked together for years without any problems. What if your son wants to be a deputy? He can’t?”
They stepped down into a screened porch that was added onto the back of the house. There were plants everywhere, along with several mismatched chairs. An old pine table at one end sat six. There was a green plastic pitcher of tea on the table and three glasses, two of them half-full.
Wyatt waited until the ladies had sat down, one on either end, then he took a seat between them. The taller sister poured him a glass of sweet tea that he didn’t like and wouldn’t drink. It was a bone of contention between him and Maggie, who thought that any self-respecting person from Virginia ought to be on a steady diet of sweet tea.
Wyatt smiled his thanks for the tea and pulled out a small notebook and pen. “Okay, which one of you is Desiree and which is Dawn?”
“I’m Desiree, she’s Dawn,” said the taller one.
“DeMott,” Wyatt said.
“DeMott deMott,” she answered.
“What?”
“I married a deMott,” she said simply. “But I’m a big ‘D,’ big ‘M.’ He was a big ‘M’ but a little ‘D.’”
“He was,” the shorter sister added. Dawn.
Wyatt looked at her and then back at Desiree. “So, DeMott-deMott.”
“Yes,” she said, with an approving smile.
He jotted that down, then looked back at Dawn. “And you’re just regular DeMott.”
“DeWitt. I married a DeWitt.” She smiled politely. “DeMott-DeWitt.”
If the circumstances had been different, Wyatt would have known instantly that Maggie and probably a host of other cops had set him up. But circumstances weren’t different.
“Okay,” he said, jotting that down. “And you were both here at home yesterday when the shooting occurred.”
“Oh, we don’t live here,” Dawn said. “We live in Sopchoppy. We’re just house-sitting for our Aunt Louise.”
“She’s getting a boob job,” Desiree explained.
Wyatt nodded. “Can I get your correct addresses, then? In case we need you in court?”
Desiree gave them the address. Apparently, they’d lived together in the house they’d grown up in since their husbands’ almost simultaneous deaths. Wyatt was pretty keen to look those up.
“And you were both here when the shooting happened?”
“Yes, but Dawn didn’t see it,” Desiree said.
“I was back here, working on our scrapbook,” Dawn explained. “I didn’t go out there until I heard the shot.”
“I saw it,” Desiree said. “I was getting the mail.”
The house was two doors up from the bus stop and across the street. She would have had a good view from the mailbox.
“Can you tell me what you saw?”
“Well, the bus came, and the older kids got off,” she answered. “Those boys that started all the crap got off first. Then some other kids. The other boy, he got off last.”
Wyatt made notes as she spoke. “What was the dark-haired boy wearing? The one that shot the deputy?”
“He was wearing khaki pants. But they don’t call them khakis anymore.”
“Cargo pants?” Wyatt asked.
“Yes! Those. They were tan. Tannish. And a red hoodie. I remember thinking it was odd, because it’s so hot this week, but it seems like they all wear them, no matter what the weather is.”
“He didn’t look like a bangclanger, though,” Dawn said.
“A what?”
“Gangbanger, Dawn. Geez.”
“Give me a break. There’s this whole new vocabulary you have to keep straight now,” Dawn said. She looked at Wyatt. “What I mean is, not like those kids that wear the hoodies with their pants all falling down. He just looked sporty.”
Wyatt nodded. “Okay, so then what happened?”
Desiree sat up straight. “So, I was watching them because the boys all started raising their voices, and then the blond boy shoved the dark-haired kid. Then the deputy, he came around the corner, and he was walking up to them. I thought he was going to bust it up, and he was talking to the dark-haired boy, but then the kid pulled a gun out from under his jacket. His hoodie.”
“Did he point it at the deputy?”
“No. No, he was pointing it at the boys. Mainly the blond boy. To be honest, I never saw him point it at the officer. So, I was really surprised he was the one that got shot.”
“And the chunky one, you said,” Dawn added.
“Yes, the one with the really red hair,” Desiree said. “They were standing pretty close together, him and the blond kid, but he was pointing the gun at both of them, kind of.”
Wyatt nodded, and Desiree took a sip of her tea. The ice was half-melted and rattled against the glass.
“Anyway, the deputy, he put his hands up; not like ‘stick ‘em up’ but like he was trying to get everybody to calm down. You know?”
Wyatt nodded. “Yeah.”
“It scared the crap out of me. But it started looking like the kid was going to put the gun down, and all of a sudden the blond kid throws a backpack at him and the gun went off.” She brushed a bit of hair back from her face and Wyatt saw that her hand was trembling just a bit. “I didn’t think anybody got shot at first, but then I saw.”
“What did you see?” Wyatt asked quietly.
“The deputy, he grabbed his stomach, and then at one point, after the other boys had run away, he was turned so I could see him. He was yelling at the bus driver. I could see blood all over the front of him. It was bad.”
Wyatt had seen it, too. She was right. He looked at Dawn. “Were you outside by then?”
“I ran out front after the shot, yes,” she said. “Right before the boys ran away. And do you know, it looked to me like the heavy boy was filming it on his phone. I kid you not.”
Wyatt felt a powerful heat swirl upward from his stomach to his chest; a current of rage that he had no time to indulge.
“What happened then?”
“Well, I told Dawn to go back into the house because she has such a gentle disposition, and I took out my phone and called 911.”
Wyatt waited for her to go on. She put a couple of shaky fingers to her lower lip.
“Then the bus pulled away, and he was…he was running after it, I think. I guess he had a child on the bus because he was calling—” She stopped speaking for a moment, her throat contracting.
“Calling? Calling the bus back?’ Wyatt asked.
She shook her head quickly. “No. No, he was yelling ‘Daddy’s okay’. Over and over.”
Her face crumpled, and tears ran down her face. The one with the gentle disposition looked on sympathetically.
“I went back out then,” Dawn said. “I was scared for Desi. I saw the deputy on the ground, and people were running out from their houses. I waited with Desi while she talked to 911, and then we ran across the street. We wanted to try to help some way, but we didn’t know what to do.”
“Everyb
ody was scared,” Desiree added, pulling herself up straight. “We didn’t know whether to turn him over or bring him inside somewhere. We felt helpless.”
“Then the lady officer came running around the corner,” Dawn said.
“Yes,” her sister said. “She turned him onto his back, and there was so much blood.”
“So much.”
“And she just whipped off her shirt and tried to stop the bleeding,” Desiree said.
“Desi had a shirt on over her tank top, so she took it off and gave it to her.”
Wyatt looked from Dawn to Desiree. “You’re the one that gave her the shirt.”
“Yes?”
Wyatt nodded. “Thank you. She’s sorry, but she doesn’t know what happened to it.”
Desiree waved him away. “Poor thing, I wanted her to put it on, but she misunderstood.”
“Wait,” Dawn said. “Was that your wife?”
“Yes, ma’am. She appreciated the kindness.”
Desiree nodded, and they were quiet for a moment.
“He just kept telling her Daddy was okay,” Desiree said after a moment, staring out at the yard. “I’ll never get done hearing him say that.”
Maggie and Wyatt met at the Petro gas station on 98, just a couple of blocks from Ryan’s neighborhood. The station was in a V made by Hwy 98 splitting at Patton Drive. Patton wasn’t much of anything except a parallel road right on the bay, allowing access to a couple of boat launches and some rarely-used docks.
Maggie was at the gas pump and she leaned against the side of the Jeep as she filled up and waited for Wyatt to come out with their cold drinks. It was ruthlessly humid, and the very slight breeze off the bay provided her a modicum of relief as she lifted up her ponytail to air the back of her neck. A high, dark gray cloud shaped like an anvil hung in the sky out beyond St. George Island. The tip of the anvil pointed roughly west-northwest, promising a pretty good rain across the bridge in Apalach. Maggie wanted to stand out in it.
Wyatt came out of the gas station and headed for the pumps, his remarkably long legs crossing the small parking area in just a few strides. He handed her a giant cup of sweet tea, extra ice. He held a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand, and a Snickers bar in the other. He’d already taken a bite.
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