“Works in the gardening center.” He gave her a look that said she should know this meant something important.
“Sorry,” she had to admit. “I’m not following.”
“Lot of chemicals in places like that,” Eran told her. “Fertilizer. Interesting things that can be mixed to cause undesirable results.”
“Like what?”
“Like bombs.”
“Really.” Brynna frowned. “You think this guy would do something like that?”
Eran shrugged. “There’s no telling. As much effort as has been put into it, no one really knows what goes on in the human mind. You understand that as well as I do. Even serial killers—throughout recorded history, people have talked about how they were such nice young men, always quiet and polite and they were always handsome and clean, too.” He made a face. “These are the sickos who are cutting up body parts in their kitchens and cooking them.”
Brynna made a face. “Yuck.”
“Look at Georgina Whitfield,” Eran reminded her. “Who knew she could see the things she can, identify people who are slated to die and would have done terrible things had they lived. Or maybe identify the ones who are going to die because they’re going to do these things. That’s a real pay-it-forward situation.”
“Pay it forward?” Brynna looked at him quizzically. “What does that mean?”
“It means . . . I’m not sure how to explain it. Kind of that you do something good in the hopes that either someone else does the same, or something good is done for you at a later date. What I meant was that these people Gina Whitfield sees—it’s a pay-it-forward situation, but not in a good way.”
“I get it,” Brynna said. “Comeuppance, but beforehand.”
“Right.” He was silent for a moment. “Why can’t we just get the information from Gina Whitfield?” he finally asked. “What he’s going to do, and why?”
“I’m not sure she knows that,” Brynna answered. “It might be that the only thing she can pinpoint is the death.”
“Lovely.”
“Yeah, not exactly the kind of thing I’d want to be picking up on a regular basis.”
“So I guess the best we can do is keep tabs on him. I hope to hell if he’s planning on doing something crazy, we catch him in time to stop whatever it is.”
“I hope so, too,” Brynna said. “Speaking of . . .”
“Yeah.” Eran checked his watch. “Traffic’s a bitch, but we should still get to Lesperniza pretty close to the start of the school day. It’s first thing in the morning. I think we’ll be okay.”
Brynna nodded, but she sure didn’t like the way her nerves were jumping for no discernible reason.
IN THE CAR DANIELLE kept quiet while her mother settled her on the seat, then fastened the seat belt across her shoulder. She gave Danielle a small smile before she closed the door and that warmed Danielle’s disposition a little because it was such a rare thing. She wished her mom would do it more often. Maybe inside Mom was just as mad at everything as Danielle always seemed to be.
The ride to the school was silent, like it almost always was, and it felt like it took forever. They let her off at the front walk and waited while she went inside the schoolyard and closed the gate behind her. She knew better than to do anything else because she’d gotten in some big trouble about that a couple of times before and she just didn’t feel like going through all that right now.
Miss Anthony met Danielle at the door, already gesturing for her to hurry inside. “You’re late, Danielle—you’re late every day. You really need to learn to get here on time. It’s not right to make everybody else wait for you.” Miss Anthony looked at her expectantly but Danielle said nothing. She didn’t want to be here at all, so if there was anything she was sorry about, it was that. She had a feeling Miss Anthony wouldn’t appreciate her saying so.
In the classroom, the desks were arranged in a half circle in front of Miss Anthony’s spot at the front of the room. The kids were already seated and they were restless. One little boy was banging his foot against his chair leg, another girl was playing patty-cake really hard on her desktop. A couple of the others just stared into space like they always did.
“Okay, everybody,” Miss Anthony said in her fake cheerful voice. “Now that Danielle is here, we’re going to start off the day by drawing a picture.” She had a stack of colored construction paper in her hand and she started passing pieces out, giving a couple to each of Danielle’s classmates. Danielle decided to stand next to her desk and wait; maybe Miss Anthony would see her, finally understand that she didn’t want to be here today, and just let her go home.
“Danielle, you need to sit down,” Miss Anthony said. She stepped around her, and put two pieces of paper on Danielle’s desk, then moved on to the next one.
“I want to go home,” Danielle said. “So I can watch cartoons.”
“That’s nice,” Miss Anthony said. “Sometimes I want to ome, too. But we all have to stay here until this afternoon, just like we do every day. You can go home then.”
“But I want to go now.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen. Now sit down and stop acting like a baby. We’ve talked before about how you’re almost a grown-up now.”
Suddenly she was angry, very angry, at Miss Anthony and everyone else in the classroom. She didn’t want to go sit down and be quiet. She didn’t want to draw some dumb picture, even if the paper Miss Anthony gave her was red and yellow, her favorite colors. She wanted to go home. She was tired of being told to act like a grown-up—she could look at her mom and dad and know that grown-ups never had any fun, and she sure didn’t want to be like them.
Danielle was so frustrated that she stomped her foot and screamed as loud as she could right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the other kids—they were so stupid—were surprised and scared, so they started crying. Then the rest started shrieking with her just for the fun of it, their voices getting louder and louder as each one tried to do better than the one next to him, and her, too. It made her even madder that they were doing this because they were taking all the attention away from her. They were always trying to do that, but right now it was her time to get Miss Anthony’s attention so the teacher finally listened to her.
No one ever listened to her, and now Danielle was so mad that she snatched at the thing closest to her on her desk. It was a pencil cup, and when it tipped over she scooped up the pencils and, still hollering as loudly as she could, headed down the circle of noisy, bratty kids. Miss Anthony was working her way toward Danielle as she tried to soothe the ones who were shrieking the loudest. She looked at Danielle funny and then started hurrying even more, but she wasn’t moving fast enough to stop Danielle from grabbing one of the smaller boys and ramming the pencil into his eye.
“Shut up!” Danielle screamed. “My turn, not yours! Mine mine mine!”
But the others were making even more noise, and Miss Anthony was screaming, too, and she grabbed Danielle by one arm and tried to turn her. But like Miss Anthony has been saying, Danielle was as big as a grown-up now, so when she did turn, she poked Miss Anthony in the side of the head as hard as she could with a different pencil, and it went in and in and in. Miss Anthony let her go and Danielle pushed her away. Miss Anthony fell down, and when the nearest little giointed at Miss Anthony and started screaming all over again at a headache-inducing volume, Danielle took a bigger pencil, one of the jumbo-sized things made for the babies to play with, and jammed it as far as she could into the brat’s wide open mouth.
The noise level was climbing instead of getting quieter, but before Danielle could do anything about the other kids, someone—a man—seized her from behind by wrapping both his arms around her back and lifting her off her feet. She kicked and screamed, then smashed her head backward; she connected with something and the man yelled in her ear, then he threw her to the floor and jumped on top of her back, pinning her in place so she couldn’t move while he held her there. Through all the yelling, Daniell
e heard a vaguely metallic voice over a walkie-talkie and realized the person who’d knocked her over was the school’s security guard.
He kept her down there for a long time while he talked into his radio, until there were sirens outside and a lot of other people in the room. By then Danielle felt a lot calmer and she wasn’t mad anymore. Miss Anthony was lying on the floor, too, looking at her the whole time and never blinking her eyes, not even once. It was hard with her face pressed against the chilly tiled floor, but Danielle tried anyway to tell Miss Anthony she was sorry about the pencil that was stuck all the way in the side of the teacher’s head.
But Miss Anthony never answered her, and never said it would all be okay.
Twenty-one
The school where Danielle Myers spent her days was a one-story building with an outdated triangular overhang above an entrance set about fifty feet back from the sidewalk. A black six-foot fence surrounded the schoolyard and would have looked disturbingly like prison bars had the top of it not curved outward. Fence or not, the building’s worn pink paint was splotched with slightly mismatched squares of paint added at later times to hide graffiti. In the best of times, it would not have been a particularly cheerful or welcoming building. Right now, going in looked like trying to get into the center of chaos. There were at least six squad cars and several ambulances, and a Chicago Fire Department truck blocked one end of the street. Eran’s heart sank as he turned onto Grant Avenue and saw all the emergency vehicles.
“What’s all that?” Brynna asked.
“I think it’s an indication that we’re too late,” he answered. He found a spot to squeeze the Crown Victoria into and they climbed out. The double-wide gate to the outer yard was standing open and uniformed cops and EMTs were running back and forth like crazeants. Civilians were huddled in groups around the front entrance, talking in hushed voices, some comforting, some being comforted. A frazzled balding man in an outdated suit hurried past Eran, heading toward another man Eran recognized as one of the district captains.
“All the parents have been notified to come and pick up their children,” the older man told the captain. “We use an auto-messaging system that goes to the phone numbers on file. Hopefully we can get the building cleared within an hour.”
“You need to get these people out of here, Principal Skylar,” the captain snapped. “We have to secure the crime scene, and until I say otherwise, that’s the whole damned building.” He looked up and caught Eran’s gaze. “Detective Redmond?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was just passing through the neighborhood and saw all the emergency vehicles,” Eran replied smoothly. “Thought I’d stop and see if I could lend a hand.”
“Who’s she?”
“My girlfriend. I was driving her to work.”
The captain’s face darkened for a moment, then something else caught his attention and he forgot about Brynna and Eran. “Carry on, then. We’ve got this covered.” He hurried away.
Before the guy in the suit could take off in the other direction, Eran snagged him by the elbow. “What happened here?” he demanded.
The man blinked at him, shock etched across his features. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but from what I got from the security guard, he was making his usual morning post-class check when he heard the kids screaming in Marge Anthony’s room. He looked through the window and saw one of the older students just as she—” His voice choked up and coughed, then he continued without going into the messy details. “He ran in and grabbed her but it was too late. The teacher’s d-dead and two of the kids are dead, and this is just a nightmare.”
Eran’s mouth turned down and he shot a look at Brynna. “What was the student’s name?”
“Uh . . . Danielle, I think. Yeah, that’s it—Danielle Myers.” Principal Skylar shook his head. “Can you believe it? She falls off a bridge downtown on a field trip just a couple of days ago and a man saves her life. Then she turns around and does this. I mean, what kind of karma is that?”
Eran released Principal Skylar’s elbow and watched him leave. He turned to Brynna with a look of defeat on his face. “Well, this certainly isn’t a case of better late than never.”
Brynna nodded. “I’m sorry. Two kids, huh? That’s awful.”
“Yeah,” Eran agreed. They both turned to look as the coroner’s wagon pulled up and a gray-haired man with a rigid face got out and hurried into the building. After a moment, Eran decided to go inside. Brynna followed him without asking.
The hallway was even more crowded than the entry area, and yellow crime scene tape covered an open doorway about a third of the way down on the left side. “Wait here,” he told Brynna. “I don’t have any good reason for bringing you right up to the scene.” She nodded and stayed behind without comment.
He didn’t go inside the classroom itself because everything he needed to know he could see from the doorway. The rest of the children had been cleared out but the three bodies were still there. The teacher, an attractive middle-aged woman with shoulder-length brown hair, was lying on her side with a puddle of blood encircling her head like a scarlet halo. One child, a boy, lay on his back off to one side. A pencil protruded from one eye while the other was open and stared at the ceiling. He was only about eight years old and he wore blue denim overalls with a plaid shirt underneath. The outfit was oddly endearing, like something a grandfather might pick out for his grandson. His carefully chosen outfit was streaked with blood that had leaked from his eye.
The third and final victim was a girl of about twelve and she was also sprawled on her back, mouth held open by a jumbo-sized child’s pencil jammed between her teeth and deep into her throat. Her eyes gazed at something that Brynna might have glimpsed in her existence but which Eran had yet to see. Like the boy, her pink flowered T-shirt and blue jeans were splattered with red. Even her yellow tennis shoes were dotted with splotches of blood. The coroner moved from body to body, his face betraying nothing. Eran had seen a lot of corpses in his time on the police force, but he knew it wasn’t nearly as many as this man and he felt a jab of sympathy for him. These were children, for God’s sake. The folks who worked with bodies every day might say they could cut it and leave the images at work with the job, but Eran knew it wasn’t true. For the first few nights after something like this, sometimes even weeks, the pictures in your brain came back to haunt you. Some people could never get rid of them and had to move on to different careers. And even if you could block them, it didn’t mean you were cold. They came back to you at odd times. In your dreams, years later, out of the blue because someone you saw on the street reminded you of a dead face.
Danielle Myers was still there, sitting at one of the desks off to the side with her hands cuffed behind her back and three officers monitoring her closely. Her hair, which had been in a ponytail, was half undone, and her hands had their own streaks of drying blood, as did the plain blue T-shirt and worn jeans she was wearing. She looked dazed and vaguely crabby, as if she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about or exactly what had happened and she just wanted it to all be over. It didn’t look like her parents were anywhere to be found, although they had to have been called nearly three-quarters of an hour ago.
Eran backed away from the door and looked over at Brynna. “Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Any reason why this happened?” Brynna asked.
He gave a little tilt of his head. “I don’t know. If I ask it’s going to seem like I’m gawking because I have no reason to be here.” Eran gazed at the knots of people without really seeing anyone in particular. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. It happened, the damage is done. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing on anything else in the future—it’s just a single, tragic incident.” He looked at Brynna. “I wish we could change it but we can’t. The one chance to stop it would have been to let things go as they normally would have, but Casey Anlon made the decision not to do that.”
&nbs
p; “It’s not his fault,” Brynna reminded him. “He thought he was doing a good thing—he would have never wished for something like this to happen.” She was silent for a moment, then she said, “I have to put a stop to this, Eran. I have to find Jashire and make sure this ends for good.”
BRENDA HOGUE PUT THE telephone gently back in its cradle and sat there for a while, staring at it. She was sitting in Charlie’s home office, a comfortable room with a big wooden desk that they’d found at a garage sale a couple of years ago. He had the room decorated in standard football. He was a staunch Cleveland Browns man, and that was shown in everything hanging on the walls. They paid extra before the start of each season so he could get all the games on cable, and that was how they spent their winter Sunday and Monday nights. All this football memorabilia—this was the husband she knew. The one who wouldn’t take her calls or call her back was a stranger.
Something was really, really wrong. She’d gone through all his desk drawers, but there was nothing to indicate he was having an affair or that there was another woman overriding all the things their marriage stood for: the joy of their children, the love of family, the stability of their home life. Even so, Brenda’s sixth sense was screaming. She’d always been able to feel things that were wrong, like when Aunt Mae had died, Brenda had smelled funeral flowers for half a day before she’d finally gotten the news. Another time was when Bryan had broken his arm during gym class and she’d been out shopping with a dead cell phone battery. Something had told her she needed to get home, and when she had, there had been a message waiting on the answering machine telling her to get down to Van Wert Community Hospital.
Concrete Savior Page 24