by Lisa Gardner
And her credibility would come into question. People still whispered. Of course, it was a small town. If people didn’t whisper through the long, rainy winters, everyone would lose their minds.
Rainie Conner’s tough. Gotta watch out for her. Killed her own mother.
Rainie sighed, then became aware that the man in the navy blue suit was still standing there, watching.
“Can I help you?” she asked sharply.
“Officer Lorraine Conner?”
“I don’t know. Who’s asking?”
The man smiled, a wry tilt of one corner of his mouth. The gesture crinkled the corners of his eyes and momentarily startled Rainie. Lean hunter’s face. Penetrating blue eyes. She did a quick double take before she caught herself. Then she was embarrassed. Whoever the man was, she already wished he’d turn and walk away.
He said, “I’m Supervisory Special Agent Pierce Quincy of the FBI.”
“Ah shit.”
He smiled dryly again. And it got to her again, even now, when she definitely knew better. She wished for a bottle of beer.
The agent moved into the room and, without waiting for an invitation, took a seat. “I take it that gentleman is with the state?”
“Mr. Perfect is a state homicide detective. God help us all.”
“A ninety percent conviction rate is impressive.”
“So is his spelling ability. You still want to deck him after a five-minute chat.”
“Problems with the case?”
“I screwed it up royally,” she assured him.
“And now you’re resting on your laurels?”
“Hardly. I’m planning my next line of attack.”
The corner of the man’s lip twitched. Rainie was happy to see that she had amused him, but she still wasn’t in the mood for a chat. She sat forward and cut to the chase. “What do you want, G-man? I’m tired, I have a triple homicide to investigate, and I’m not giving up jurisdiction of my case. Just so you know.”
“I’m here to help—”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, I’m one more bureaucrat placed on this earth to mess with your mind and question your abilities.”
“Finally, some honesty in law enforcement.”
“I also want to talk to Daniel O’Grady.”
Rainie leaned back. That answer she believed. She just wasn’t sure what it meant.
She tilted her chair onto its back legs, absently placing one foot on top of her desk, then crossing her other foot over it. Her legs still ached from running this morning. She stretched out her calves while she gave Supervisory Special Agent Pierce Quincy another appraising stare.
Experienced, she thought, well established in his career. Probably in his forties, graying slightly at the temples. Worked well with his short-cropped hair and distinguished suit. Added to his power. She was willing to bet money Supervisory Special Agent Pierce Quincy consciously did a lot of things to add to his image of power. He didn’t need much help, though. It was all in his eyes—that piercing, steady stare. This man had seen some things on the job. He’d taken on a few things more. Nothing overwhelmed him anymore, and for a moment Rainie was envious.
“You a profiler?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
“I do some profiling. I also teach classes and research various subjects for the Behavioral Science Unit.”
“You study serial killers.”
“Serial killers, rapists, and child molesters,” he said with a straight face, then added, “It makes for very pleasant dreams.”
“What do you want with Danny? He’s a suspected mass murderer. That’s different from a serial killer.”
“Very good, Officer. Plus, he’s a juvenile mass murderer, which is distinctly different as well. Unfortunately, we don’t understand these distinctions, hence my new research assignment.”
Rainie’s brows shot up. “You’re researching school shootings?”
“Correct.”
“You’re going from town to town, investigating kids murdering other kids?”
“Yes.”
Rainie shook her head; she didn’t know whether to be amazed or appalled. “Traffic accidents I can handle,” she told him. “Drunken brawls, stabbings, even the occasional domestic incidents. But what went down in that school yesterday … How can you focus on something like that full-time? How can you keep from waking up screaming every night?”
“With all due respect, Officer, I have a bit more experience with violent crime than you.”
Rainie grimaced. “Thank you. Words I haven’t already heard twelve times this morning.” She straightened up in the chair and let her feet hit the floor. “Well, sorry to break it to you, Agent, but I doubt you’ll get to speak with Danny. His parents got him a crack defense attorney who’s placed him off-limits to all interviews. Despite the fact that Danny has confessed twice and was found holding the murder weapons, he’s pleading innocent.”
“Do you think he’s guilty?”
“I think I have a case to put together.”
“That’s a careful answer.”
She smiled at him wolfishly. “I may be inexperienced, SupSpAg, but I learn quick.”
“Soup Spag?”
“Supervisory Special Agent, in local law-enforcement terms. We’re not big on titles, you know.”
“I see.” Quincy appeared a little dazed. Rainie had a feeling he wasn’t sure what to make of her yet, or how to handle her. The thought pleased her. She liked keeping the feds guessing. In the end, it might be the only thing she had to show for her day.
So she supposed she should’ve known. She’d no sooner started feeling smug than the FBI hunter went on the attack.
He said calmly, “I don’t think Daniel O’Grady shot up his school. And I don’t think you’re certain of it either, Officer Conner. I think we’re both still wondering what really happened yesterday afternoon. And better yet, how we can prove it.”
NINE
Wednesday, May 16, 11:43 A.M.
Rainie drove Quincy to the school.
Quincy sat in the passenger’s seat, gazing out the window with what he was afraid must be an incredulous stare. He had not been to Oregon in many years and had forgotten its stunning beauty. They drove through rolling verdant pastures liberally sprinkled with black and white Holsteins and topped by red farmhouses with bunches of yellow pansies. He could smell freshly mown grass and the salty tang of ocean air. He could see towering mountains ringing the valley, their summits carpeted in dense Douglas fir.
King-size cab trucks whizzed by, their powerful V-8 engines gunning. People waved to Rainie as they passed, and about half a dozen black Labs lolled their tongues as they panted merrily out the window. Up ahead, everyone slowed for a John Deere tractor that was laboring down the road. No one honked at the aging farmer or yelled at him to pull over. They simply waited and waved politely when they finally had room to pass. In answer, the farmer touched the brim of his faded red baseball hat.
“That’s Mike Berry,” Rainie said, as they swung wide around the green tractor, breaking her silence for the first time since they’d gotten into the patrol car. “He and his brother own the two biggest dairy farms around here. Last year they bought out three family farms that were destroyed by the floods. One belonged to Carl Simmons, who’s sixty years old and has no family left. Mike arranged for a living trust, so Carl can stay in his home until the day he dies and never worry about a thing. The Berry brothers are good people.”
“I didn’t think there were many places like this left,” Quincy said honestly.
Rainie turned to look at him. “There aren’t.”
She went back to driving. Quincy didn’t bother her again. He could tell that her mood had turned pensive, and in truth he was growing troubled himself. For all his talk of objectivity and professionalism, it was difficult to look at such beautiful countryside and contemplate the savagery that had gone on in the grade school. So far, few things in Bakersville were as he’d anticipated.
That included Officer Conner. All PC platitudes aside, most female cops he’d known were broad-shouldered, thick-waisted, and, frankly, butch. He would not use those terms to describe Officer Conner. Her five-foot-six figure appeared fit and pleasantly curved. Her long chestnut hair, worn unapologetically loose, framed a startling, attractive face with wide cheekbones, firm jaw, and full lips.
Then there were her eyes. Not blue, not gray, but somewhere in between. Quincy imagined that the color shifted with her mood, becoming soft flannel when she was contemplative, icy blue when enraged. And when she was intrigued? Her head tilted slightly, her lips parting in anticipation of a kiss?
Quincy skittered away from his thoughts and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. It wasn’t like him to think of a police officer that way. Business was business. Especially these days.
He moved his analysis to her qualities as a cop. She was inexperienced. Her handling of the crime scene and the suspect proved as much. But he didn’t think she was dumb. In his thirty-second appraisal, she had struck him as stubborn, smart, and naturally analytic. He already understood she was fiercely loyal to her community and, at times, proud to a fault. He suspected she lived for her job, had few close friends and few outside interests. This, however, was cheating. He was drawing heavily on the profile of the surviving child of an alcoholic, which could go one of two ways—an underachieving drunk or an overachieving workaholic. Since Rainie obviously wasn’t the former, he imagined she was the latter. She had yet to prove him wrong.
All in all, she was a different sort of police officer from what he’d expected. Probably different from what Detective Abe Sanders had been expecting as well, and thus they were butting heads. With all due respect to Bakersville’s sheriff’s department, most small-town police officers had good people skills but weren’t the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. They made roughly twenty thousand a year. Their cases were routine. They had a tendency to settle into ruts as masters of their tiny domains, and what analytic abilities they did have atrophied as they patrolled Friday night football games.
Of course, Quincy was an arrogant federal agent, paid extra to look down at all other forms of law enforcement—especially those mental midgets in ATF.
Rainie turned off the rural route, and farmland gave way to a neighborhood. Minutes later a sprawling white school building came into view. Yellow crime-scene tape roped off the parking lot, and mounds and mounds of wrapped flowers threatened to bury the chain-link fence.
Rainie pulled the patrol car over.
“You haven’t been here yet today, have you?” Quincy asked quietly.
She shook her head, still looking at piles of flowers, balloons, and teddy bears. Two feet deep, stretching along a good ten feet of fence. Loose roses and pink ribbons and tiny, tiny crosses. Handmade signs saying We love you, Miss Avalon, and a large red carnation heart reading, For my daughter.
Rainie’s eyes had grown overbright. She sniffled roughly, and Quincy knew she was fighting hard not to cry. He turned to the makeshift memorial.
“It’s one of the amazing things,” he said after a moment. “On the one hand, these incidents are so tragic, they make us fear the worst about humanity. What kind of society produces children who attack other children with assault rifles? On the other hand, these incidents are so tragic, they bring out our humanity. The small acts of courage that get the kids through the day, from the EMTs entering a war zone to the teachers risking their lives to tackle a shooter. From the brother who protects his sister with his own body, to the mother who administers first aid, setting aside her fear for her own child to help someone else’s. And all around the globe it strikes a nerve—people feel a need to send flowers, poems, candles, anything to let your town know it’s not alone. Bakersville is in their thoughts and their prayers.”
Rainie wiped the corner of her eye, then blinked a few times. “Yesterday,” she said thickly, “the call went out that the hospital needed more blood to handle the casualties. The Elks immediately opened up their lodge to the Red Cross. Next thing you know, there was a line of people extending four city blocks waiting to give. The grocery store sent out their bag boys with free lemonade for everyone. A couple of older ladies set up play stations for the kids. There were people in that line for two or three hours and they never complained. Everyone just said it was the least they could do. That was the story the Bakersville Herald carried today on the front page. The news of the shooting was in a smaller box in the lower right-hand corner. Not everyone agreed with that prioritization, but I thought they might have a point.”
“The shooting is about an individual. The aftermath is about a town.”
“Something like that.” Rainie unfastened her seat belt. “If you don’t mind, Agent, I spent most of yesterday in that building, and now I’d just like to get this over with. Not being an experienced profiler type, there are many things in that school it hurts me to see.”
Quincy followed her into the school. He already had his notepad out and his mind working overtime.
Earlier, in her office, Officer Conner had agreed to walk Quincy through the crime scene for his notes, as well as to refresh her own. He would not say that they were working together, more that Rainie shared his concerns about Danny’s innocence. Thus, she was allowing him to tag along as a quasi-observer, quasi-expert. Of course, she’d told him frankly, the minute he tried to claim the case as his own, she reserved the right to cut him off at the knees. At the time, she’d looked at his kneecaps quite seriously.
Quincy had the feeling that Officer Conner was not known for playing nice with others. Perversely enough, he liked that about her.
Now they walked down the yawning hallway toward the back of the school. Quincy noted the floors dusted with printing powder, the small sections of cutout tiles that must have been spotted with blood and been carted away to the lab.
According to Rainie, the CSU had finished up round one of processing the scene this morning. There would be future visits as the task force sought to finalize a thorough “walk-through” of the events on that day. Then there were the mounds of evidence it would take months to sort through. Quincy estimated that a school of this size would yield hundreds of footprints to sort and thousands of fingerprints to match. The crime-scene log would probably grow to six or seven volumes.
“This is where I found Walt and Emery assisting Bradley Brown,” Rainie said, pointing to a bloody area at the intersection of two main hallways. She looked at him expectantly.
“Was Brown conscious?”
“Yes. I asked him if he’d seen anything, and he said no. He heard the shots, came running up this hall, turned right, and boom.”
Quincy turned right, where the level of violence was clearly depicted by the outline of three bodies on the floor. “Everything happened down there?”
“That’s what we think.”
“In the hallway, not a classroom.”
“That’s correct.”
“How did Danny end up in the hallway?”
“According to his teacher, he never returned to class after lunch. Mr. Watson said he’d wondered what was going on, but Danny was hardly ever late, so he figured there must be a good reason he hadn’t returned yet.”
“What time was that?”
“The school runs three lunch periods. Danny’s is the last, ending at one-twenty. Students have five minutes to get to class, signaled by a bell at one-twenty-five. Danny wasn’t in his classroom at one-twenty-five. At one-thirty-five, dispatch received a call about shots fired.”
“So Danny skips his class. And the girls are in the hallway because?”
“Alice needed to use the rest room. Sally was her buddy—in the third grade, you travel in pairs. Their teacher gave them a hall pass.”
“What about the other fatality, Melissa Avalon. She’s alone in the computer lab?”
“Yes, it’s her lunch break. She keeps the lab open for students to use during cafeteria hours, then closes up shop at the one
-twenty bell.”
“And that’s scheduled, correct? At one-twenty, she’s always alone in the lab?”
Rainie nodded, easily following his train of thought. “It’s looking more and more like she was the target, isn’t it? Sally and Alice just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That’s my assumption at the moment, but let’s not jump ahead.” Quincy moved to the janitor’s closet, arching one brow at the mess. “I take it Officer Cunningham is one big boy,” he murmured.
Rainie grimaced. “He was doing his best at the time. Things were intense.”
“Becky O’Grady was hiding in the back of the closet?”
“Yes, all the way in the back. Curled up in a ball. She appeared to be suffering from shock, and I couldn’t get her to answer many questions. I understand that Sandy took her to the emergency room, but the doctor said she just needed time.”
“Do you think she saw what happened?”
“I don’t know. Luke talked to her teacher this morning. She claimed Becky was in the classroom right up to the time of the shooting. Mrs. Lund thinks she got separated from her class during the mad dash to exit the building. It was a good thirty or forty minutes before Mrs. Lund even realized Becky was gone.”
“So now we have two questions.” Quincy ticked them off on his fingers. “First, what happened to Danny O’Grady between the end of lunch—one-twenty P.M.—and when you finally confronted him at …”
“Two-forty-five-ish.”
“Over an hour unaccounted for.” Quincy frowned.
Rainie smiled thinly. “Not completely unaccounted for. Shep was with him. He claims he arrived at the school a little after one-forty-five. Students had already fled the premises. He went inside to offer help and encountered Danny, dazed and confused and picking up the guns.”
“Picking up the guns? Oh, I like that. As if the boy simply stumbled upon them.”
“You don’t believe Shep either, do you?”