“But the idea of whipping up that poisoned acid and just putting it out there to get taken by any poor bastard that comes along… that’s pretty evil, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” I took a hefty slug of my drink.
“But what if it wasn’t random?” he said. “That’s pretty evil too.”
“Sure, but, come on… that’s nuts.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Gordon, I met them. They were three perfectly harmless, slightly idiotic teenage boys. Who’d want to kill them? And, more to the point, who could possibly want to go to such crazy lengths to do it?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
I swallowed some more of my drink, which was damn tasty. “Oh, hell,” I said, “why does anybody kill anybody? Money, jealousy, revenge, lust—”
“Because they got shafted with being somebody’s goddamn upstate correspondent…”
“I’m not sure that last one’s in the Bible.”
“Okay, seriously,” he said. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that somebody did kill those three guys on purpose. Why do you think they’d do it?”
“How would I know?”
“You spent a hell of a lot more time with them than I did, which is none.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Hey, come on, where’s that girl I know? The one who just lives for wild speculation?”
His tone was smarmy but effective. “Oh, hell, all right. Let’s think about it from the beginning. So…you’ve got these three guys. They’re all friends. They hang out at school and they go to Melting Rock together every year. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe somebody just hates their guts or something.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s pretty damn convincing. How about we start over?”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “Okay, fine. So there’s these three… No, there’s four—” I cut myself off, then spent some quality time staring into space.
“What?”
“I…Nothing.”
“You just thought of something.”
I drained my glass and stood up. “I gotta go.”
“Hey, come on, sit down. Let me buy you a drink.”
“I’m a moron.”
“What are you—”
“God, I don’t know why I’ve been so obtuse lately. I guess all this stuff has been kind of dribbling in and I’ve been covering it in bits and pieces. I haven’t really had a chance to think about the big picture.”
“Which is?”
I finished putting on my sweater and shrugged into my backpack. “Never you mind.”
“Hey, come on….”
“Look, I may have been an idiot for the past couple of weeks, but I’m not so dense I can’t see my damn nose in front of my face.”
“Huh?”
“Give it up, Gordon. I know you too well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I leaned down to peck him on the cheek. “What that’s supposed to mean,” I said, “is that as far as I’m concerned, there’s no way you dropped in here by accident.”
I WENT STRAIGHT from the Citizen to Mad’s apartment and found the occupant recently emerged from his postgym shower.
“Yo, Bernier. What’s up?”
“I was just over at the …What’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
I sniffed the air. “It’s like… flowers or something. Lavender.” I took a step closer. “It’s you.”
He tightened the towel around his waist. “It is not.”
I leaned in and sniffed him. “It is so. Lavender and…rosemary.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Have you been shopping at Centered Scents or something?”
“What?”
“The aromatherapy store on the Green.”
“No. Hell no. I…It was a gift, okay?” He went into the bathroom and emerged with a tin whose hand-lettered label said RELAX-METALC. “It makes my skin feel good, all right?”
“Jeepers, Mad, who gave you that crap?”
“Nobody.”
“Come on, who?”
“A chick.”
“What chick?”
“Just a chick, okay?”
“You are such a—Oh, my God. Tell me you didn’t get that from Lauren Potter.” He didn’t answer, which was proof enough for me. “Christ, I should’ve known. That hippie junk is right up her alley.”
“You wanna tell me what you came over here for?”
“Jesus, Mad, do I have to remind you that the girl is only seventeen? You’re practically old enough to be her—”
“She’s eighteen. Just turned.”
“Please tell me you weren’t her birthday present.”
“Are you gonna say what you came over here for or aren’t you?”
I sighed and flopped down on the lumpy couch. “You got any snacks? I’m starving.”
“Fat-free chips and salsa.”
“The yucky hot kind that burns my tongue?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
He went into the bedroom to put on some shorts and a T-shirt while I sussed out the food—not hard because Mad’s kitchen contains fewer provisions than a U.N. relief kit. We rendezvoused back on the couch, where he drank red wine out of an old jar and I sipped one of his diet Sprites—Mad being the only guy I know who’s secure enough in his masculinity to admit to drinking diet soda.
“So,” he said, “you ever gonna tell me why you came over here?”
“I was thinking.”
“Dangerous habit. About what?”
“Okay…I went over to the Citizen to, you know, wet the old whistle after work, and there was Gordon—”
“Band? What the hell was he doing there?”
“My question exactly. And I’m pretty sure the answer is that he was hoping I’d show up so he could pump me for information about the Melting Rock story.”
“What information?”
“Damned if I know. But Gordon obviously figured that since I was stuck in that hellhole for three days and I’ve been covering the thing so much ever since, I must know something.”
“Weaselly little bastard.”
“Yeah, but at least he’s consistent. Anyway, it kind of hit me that, well, maybe he’s right. Maybe I do know something—or maybe I should know it, anyway….”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not quite sure. But while I was sitting there talking to Gordon, one thing did hit me over the head.”
“Which is?”
“Four.” I held up the appropriate number of fingers.
“Four what?”
“Okay, listen.… This whole time, everybody’s been marveling at the fact that besides the three kids who died, only one other person has gotten sick from that stuff—the girl from Baltimore. Everybody’s been wondering where the rest of the drugs are, when the other shoe’s going to drop. Right?”
“Right. So?”
“So maybe there is no more. Maybe all there ever was was those four doses. Four doses, four guys.”
“Four? But only—”
“First Tom Giamotti dies. Then Shaun Kirtz, then Billy Halpern. Maybe it’s because they’re buddies and so they just happened to share the same batch of bad drugs. Or maybe it’s because they were targeted in the first place.”
“Are you serious?”
“Now, as far as we know, four tabs of the killer acid were sold at Melting Rock. The fourth one went to Norma Jean Kramer. But what if it was supposed to go to somebody else?”
“And who would that be?”
“I was thinking about that when I was walking over here. And my first thought was, who’s the most obvious person? I mean, there were four guys in that little Jaspersburg High enclave, and only one of them is still breathing.”
“The jock, right? What’s his name …?”
“Alan Bauer. And if I’m right, we’ve got to warn him. I mean, if somebody tried to kill him once, who’s to sa
y they aren’t going to do it again?”
“Wait a minute. Why do you think he didn’t take the acid along with the others?”
“I’m not sure. I know he was indulging in various, you know, substances, but he was also counting on getting a soccer scholarship. Maybe he didn’t want to take the chance.”
“Or maybe he knew.”
“What?”
“It’s just a thought. Maybe he didn’t take it because he didn’t want to get dead.”
“So you mean maybe he was in on it? Jesus, I guess it’s possible, but…I really doubt it. As far as I knew, they were all friends.”
“You got any other ideas?”
“Yeah, maybe this is totally out of left field, but… what if that fourth tab really wasn’t meant for Bauer, after all?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Think about it,” I said. “Bauer’s alive and well right now, but somebody else isn’t.”
“And who would that be?”
“Whoever I found in the goddamn Deep Lake Cooling pool.”
“Couldn’t that be Alan Bauer?”
“What? God, that never even occurred to me, either. But, come on…I saw that hideous thing four days ago. If Bauer’s been missing since then, don’t you think somebody would’ve said something?”
“Yeah, I guess. So, if it’s not him, who do you think was supposed to get tab number four?”
“Well, who do we know is missing right now?”
“The bail jumper with the earring fetish.”
“Robert Sturdivant. You got it. Not to mention his buddy Axel Robinette.”
“But wait a second,” Mad said. “Sturdivant is the guy who sold the drugs to those kids in the first place. How could he be a target?”
“I was thinking about that on the walk over here too, and—”
“It’s only a block and a half, you know.”
“Yeah, well, I think fast. So, like I was saying, I was thinking… what if he wasn’t just supposed to sell the drugs, he was supposed to take them too? What if whoever set this whole thing up gave him four tabs and said, ‘I want you to sell three of them to Tom and Shaun and Billy, and, by the way, here’s a freebie for your trouble’?”
“So the killer, whoever he is, gets rid of those three guys and the delivery boy all in one fell swoop. Convenient.”
“Yeah, but maybe Sturdivant gets greedy. Maybe he’d rather have the money than the high, so he sells it to that girl from Baltimore. He obviously hasn’t been told that the acid is bad, or he’d never take it himself, right? Which means that Sturdivant is just a patsy.”
“Like Lee Harvey Oswald.”
I stared at him over my Sprite can. “Where did that come from?”
“Hey, the government knows what really went down. It’s all in files in the basement of the Pentagon, believe me.”
“Whatever. So the question is, how does Axel Robinette figure into all of this? Was he really supposed to get the fourth tab? I mean, the guy was definitely jittery when I talked to him the day before he disappeared. He clearly needed money so he could blow town. Maybe he knew he was in danger or something. What do you think?”
“I think,” he said, “that in all this cogitation you’re skipping over the most important part.”
“Which is?”
“Jesus, Bernier, how many times have you had to talk to the journalism club at Benson High?”
“Too damn many. What’s your point?”
“What do you always tell them about the five W’s?”
“I’m not following you.”
“You’ve got your who, your what, your where, and your when,” he said. “But nine times out of ten, the most interesting part of the story is the why.”
CHAPTER21
You’re wondering about the motive,” I said.
“Damn right I am,” Mad shot back. “Aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I just… God, I just don’t know. I mean, let’s set aside the possibility that maybe these three guys weren’t the intended victims—that the whole thing was random or the acid was meant for somebody else. If we assume for the moment that those four tabs were meant for Tom, Shaun, Billy, and whoever else, then …why?”
“I think I just asked you that a second ago.”
“Why would somebody want to kill them? How could somebody hate three clueless teenage boys enough to want to pull this off?”
“Maybe somebody just wanted to shut down Melting Rock.”
“What?”
“I mean, that’s what happened, right? Maybe that was the point all along.”
“Why would someone want to do that?”
“Because the place is a goddamn smelly mess.”
“Come on, be serious.”
Mad shrugged, then coated a tortilla chip with an obscene amount of salsa. “Who knows why? Maybe it’s a political thing. I mean, if there’s no Melting Rock, the village of J-burg is pretty much in the crapper, financially speaking.”
“You’ve got a point there.”
“And, hey, think about it. What did those three kids have in common?”
“They were all male; they all went to the same school.…”
“… and they were all hometown boys.”
“So you’re saying… what? That the killer was hoping that if a bunch of local kids died of bad drugs, people’d want to shut down the festival for good? Do you really think that makes any sense?”
“Hey, you wanted me to play ball with you, I’m playing ball. That’s all I’ve got.”
“So shutting down the festival—maybe just for a day, maybe for good—either it was the whole point of the killings, or it was just a fringe benefit.”
“I guess.”
“And if it wasn’t the point—if killing them was an end in itself, then …why?”
“Here we go again.”
“I mean, come on,” I said. “How does a bunch of high-school kids piss somebody off enough to want them dead? Is it just… jealousy? Some nerd deciding to get one over on the cool kids?”
“Nah. I think they usually just cut to the chase and shoot up the lunchroom.”
“Okay, so what else could it be? I mean, most murders are about money, aren’t—holy shit.”
“What?”
“There’s, um, this story I’ve been working on….”
I filled him in about the Melting Rock budget snafu and Mrs. Hamill’s pricey Victorian hellhole.
“And you think… what? That the boys were killed because they knew about it?”
“I don’t know. I was just saying how most murders are about money, and it occurred to me that there’s actually a lot of money at stake.”
“But how could they know about it? They were just a bunch of teenage kids.”
“Right, but they were a bunch of kids who went to Melting Rock their whole lives. And, in fact, when I first met them, Lauren said they were involved in organizing it too. She said”—I hunted for the details—“that Shaun Kirtz had worked on the festival’s Web site and Tom Giamotti had volunteered in the office. Plus, she and Billy had manned some promo table on the Green. Maybe one of the guys stumbled onto the financial racket, and either they threatened to go to the cops or they—”
“Wanted a piece of the action?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s definitely worth looking into.”
“You know, Cody said the embezzlement could potentially be connected to the murders. I just don’t think he meant this directly.”
“You told Cody?”
“Pillow talk.”
“So what’s he gonna do about it?”
“Look into it. Subtly.”
“And goddamn Band’s gonna—”
“Cody promised we’d get to break the story one way or the other.”
“Jesus,” he said, “you really think the money’s the motive?”
“It’s the best one I’ve heard so far.”
“Yeah, but if you ask me, somehow it just doesn’t jibe.”
“I guess…I don’t know, it’s just the way they were killed. The whole thing seems so…”
“Sneaky and psychotic?”
“Not the words I was looking for,” he said, “but I guess they’ll do.”
“And you’re thinking that if somebody was really doing this over money, they would’ve done something more…straightforward?”
“More or less.”
“It could be they wanted it to look like an accident all along. Maybe they thought nobody would figure out it wasn’t just an OD.”
“Yeah, but…I don’t know, maybe it was really just your regular, old-fashioned crime of passion. Teenagers definitely have plenty of that.”
I thought about the tin of Relax-Me-Talc, and decided not to go there.
“Fine,” I said. “So if that’s really the story here, then what prompted it? What kind of, you know, passions did these kids stir up that made somebody want to kill them?”
He repeated his shrug-and-dip-the-chip maneuver. “Maybe somebody got sick of looking at a bunch of scruffy little creeps.”
“Would you be serious?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “So what are you asking exactly?”
“What I’m wondering,” I said, “is just what the hell these guys did. And more to the point, who did they do it to?”
THEY WERE LOVELY QUESTIONS; unfortunately, it didn’t look like I was going to find answers anytime soon—if indeed there were answers to be had.
With Labor Day weekend just days away, much of the population of Walden County appeared to have blown town in search of a few final days of summer vacation. My attempts to talk to Alan Bauer, therefore, were foiled by the fact that his entire family had decamped to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for some sort of amusement-park-related healing. I tried to picture purple-haired Cindy riding a Ferris wheel shaped like a chocolate kiss, and couldn’t.
Although I would’ve been more than happy to flee the 607 area code myself—particularly if it involved a homicide detective and a hot tub—it was sadly not an option. At the beginning of the year, we reporters divide up the holidays, and to make sure I’d get to go home for Christmas, I’d volunteered to work on New Year’s, Thanksgiving—and Labor Day weekend.
So there I was, covering the cops beat for three days straight and writing the usual fluff about back-to-school plans and the Gabriel Workers’ Alliance Solidarity Barbecue. I was also feeling fairly sorry for myself, though I was somewhat mollified by the fact that I’d at least get to make an appearance at the newsroom picnic—which, by the way, was happening in my own backyard.
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