Time Bomb

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Lieutenant, was she gunning for the children, or was this an assassination attempt?”

  “We’re still collecting data on that as well. That’s all, at this time, folks. Get back to you soon as we have more.”

  Segue back to the soap: a cocktail party full of beautiful people, haute-coiffured and haute-cuisined, but riddled with angst.

  I knotted my tie and put on my jacket. Time for school.

  I arrived at Hale at 12:45—lunch hour but the yard was empty. A grizzled man in shabby clothes was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the school. He carried a ten-foot cross and wore a sandwich sign proclaiming JESUS IS LORD on the front, NO HEAVEN WITHOUT REDEMPTION on the back. A middle-aged cop stood at the entrance to the gate, watching him. Blue uniform, but not LAPD. I got close enough to read the insignia on his sleeve. School police. I gave him my name, he checked it against a list on a clipboard, asked for ID verification, and unlocked the gate.

  The man with the cross had shuffled halfway down the block. Now he turned and shouted, “Suffer the children!” in a hoarse voice. The school cop looked at him as if at a puddle of vomit, but made no move. The cross-man resumed his march.

  I entered the yard. The storage shed was still wrapped with crime-scene tape. Despite the fine weather, a sense of desolation hung over the grounds—gloom coupled with tension, like the pause between thunderclaps. Maybe it was the emptiness, the lack of childish laughter. Or maybe just my imagination. I’d had the same feeling before... at deathbeds.

  I pushed that aside and checked in with Linda Over-street’s secretary. Carla was young, tiny, and efficient. She had a punk hairdo and a smile that said life was a big joke.

  I went to the first classroom. Yesterday there’d been two dozen students; today I counted nine. The teacher, a pale young woman just out of training, looked defeated. I gave her an encouraging smile, regretted not having the time to do more. As I took her place at the front of the classroom, she excused herself, sat in the back, and read a book.

  The pattern of absenteeism repeated itself in every other class—at least half of the children had stayed home. Many of the ones I’d tagged as high-risk were among the missing. Therapist’s dilemma: those who need help the most, run the farthest from it.

  I concentrated on the help I could offer, went to work reestablishing rapport, giving the children time to ventilate, then introducing them to their bogeywoman: telling them Holly Burden’s name, the few facts I knew about her. They were skeptical about the notion of a female sniper. Many of the youngest kids kept calling her “him.”

  I had them draw her, mold her out of clay, build her out of blocks. Rip her up, smash her, bludgeon her, erase her. Kill her, again and again.

  Blood and glass...

  Through it all, I kept talking, kept reassuring.

  It went on that way until, in one of the fourth grade classes, the mention of Holly Burden’s name made the teacher go pale. A woman in her fifties named Esme Ferguson, she was a tall, square-faced bleached blonde, heavily made-up, conservatively tailored. She left the room and didn’t return. Sometime later I spotted her in the hall, caught up with her, and asked if she’d known Holly Burden.

  She took a deep breath and said, “Yes, Doctor. She was from here.”

  “From Ocean Heights?”

  “From Hale. She was a student here. I taught her. I used to teach sixth grade. She was in my sixth grade class. Years ago.”

  “What do you remember about her?”

  Penciled eyebrows rose. “Nothing, really.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  She bit her lip. “She was... odd. The entire family’s odd.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “I really can’t... This is too hard to talk about, Doctor. Too much happening all at once. Please excuse me. I have to get back to class.”

  She turned her back on me. I let her go, returned to my work. To talk of the odd girl. Try to explain madness to children.

  Madness, as it turned out, was something these children grasped easily. They loved the word crazy, seemed to revel in it, in graphic discussions of deranged people they’d known. Their view of mental illness was skewed toward blood and guts: wet-brained vagrants carving each other up in alleyways over a bottle of redeye; hebephrenic bag ladies walking in front of buses; drooling molesters; shrieking youths run amok on PCP and crack cocaine. Random bursts of psychotic poetry at the corner mini-market.

  I sat back, listened to all of it, tried to cloak myself in the therapist’s objectivity. After a couple of hours, the world they lived in began to overwhelm me.

  In the past, when working with children who’d been traumatized, I’d always taken pains to put the traumatic event in context. Isolating disaster as a freak bit of cruelty. But looking into the knowing eyes of these kids, listening to their experiences, I heard myself faltering, had to force a note of confidence into my voice.

  My last class of the day was a rowdy bunch of sixth graders whose teacher hadn’t shown up. I let the frazzled substitute out on parole, and was about to begin when the door opened and a young Latina walked in. She had teased, frosted hair, wore a tight, knit scarlet dress, and had matching inch-long nails. Her smile was glossy and happy-face wide. In one hand she carried a huge briefcase; in the other, a red purse.

  “Hi, kids,” she announced. “I’m Dr. Mendez! How are you all doing today?”

  The children looked at her, then at me. Her gaze followed theirs.

  “Hi,” she said to me. “I’m Dr. Mendez. I’m a clinical psychologist. And you must be Mr....?”

  I held out my hand. “Dr. Delaware. I’m a clinical psychologist too.”

  Her smile went stale.

  “Um...” she said, still staring at my hand. The purse dropped from her hand.

  The kids started laughing. She bent—awkwardly be-cause of the tight dress—and retrieved it. They laughed harder.

  I said, “Hold on a minute, guys,” and asked her to come out into the hall. I closed the door. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “Good question, Dr. Mendez.”

  “I’m here to do therapy with them—for the sniping.”

  “So am I. I’ve been doing it since yesterday.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, flustered.

  “The police called me in.”

  “To investigate?”

  “To help.”

  “This makes no sense at all,” she said.

  I said, “Do you work with Dr. Dobbs?”

  She pulled out an engraved business card and handed

  it to me. PATRICIAMENDEZ, M.A. COGNITIVE-SPIRITUALASSOCIATES, INC. Two addresses: on Olympic Boulevard in West L.A., and in Whittier. Four phone numbers. Tiny print at the bottom identified her as a Psychological Assistant to Lance L. Dobbs, Ph.D., and gave his license number.

  I handed it back to her and said, “Have you checked with the principal? She should be able to clear things up.”

  “She wasn’t in. But I’m here on authority of the School Board—they’re really in charge, you know, not the police.”

  I said nothing.

  Her briefcase was making her shoulder sag. She lowered it to the floor.

  I said, “I think you should check in with the principal, anyway.”

  “Well”—“She folded her arms across her breast—“I only know what I was told.”

  “Sorry you wasted time coming down here.”

  She frowned, thought. “Look, I’m just here to do my job. Couldn’t you go to another class?”

  “These kids have been through plenty. They need the comfort of routine. Predictability.”

  “I can provide that,” she said.

  “By walking in right in the middle of my session? Fitting them to your agenda?”

  She tensed but smiled. “You seem to be coming from a hostile place. Possessiveness.”

  “And you seem to be coming from a deceptive place, Ms. Mendez. Billing yourself as a
doctor with just a master’s degree. Pretending to be a psychologist when you’re an assistant.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Tha... that’s just a technicality. Next year I’ll be a Ph.D.”

  “Then next year you’ll be telling the truth.”

  “If you’re implying there’s something—”

  “How many classrooms have you been to, so far?”

  “Seven.”

  “Didn’t anyone mention I’d been there?”

  “They didn’t... I—”

  “You didn’t really take the time to talk to them, did you? Just blew in, did your canned bit, and blew out.” I looked down at the briefcase. “What’s in there? Bro-chures?”

  “You’re a very hostile man,” she said.

  A wave of laughter rose from inside the classroom. Then a thump—overturned furniture.

  I said, “Look, it’s been fun but I have to go. Until you check in with the principal and clear this up, please stay away from the kids. For their sake.”

  “You can’t order me—”

  “And please think twice about misrepresenting yourself. The Board of Medical Examiners wouldn’t be pleased.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Just sound advice.”

  She tried to look tough and failed miserably. “It’s my job,” she said, almost pleading. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Check in with the principal.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said.

  “It keeps being a good idea,” I said, turning the doorknob. The sound on the other side grew louder.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “Are you bilingual?”

  “No.”

  “Then how in the world are you going to help them?”

  “Their English is fine.”

  “That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  “Then you’ve been misled. In more ways than one.”

  The sky was dimming as I left the yard. I saw Linda Overstreet just outside the gate, talking to the man with the cross. Trying to explain something to him. He stared at the sidewalk, then raised his head abruptly and seemed to swoon.

  She backed away. He moved toward her, went nose to nose with her, wagging his finger. She attempted to talk back; he talked over her, gestured more wildly. She finally gave up, turned her back on him and walked away. He opened a toothless black hole of a mouth and began shouting—something raw and incoherent.

  She made it to the gate before noticing me, gave a what-can-I-do shrug, stopped and waited until I caught up with her. She was wearing a black linen dress, simply cut, suitable for mourning. But the contrast with her blond hair and fair skin lent a touch of unintended glamour.

  “Getting religion?” I said.

  She grimaced. “Crazy old jerk. He showed up early this morning, screaming about the whore of Babylon, suffer the children, all this other garbage. I tried to explain to him that the kids didn’t need any more disruption, but it’s like talking to cement—he has this tape in his head, keeps on playing it.”

  “What about the school cop?”

  “See him anywhere?” she said, pointing to the un-guarded gate. “Gone at three, won’t stay a minute later. And not much good when he is here, standing around with his clipboard. Claiming he’s not authorized to deal with Old Screamo as long as all he does is mouth off—right to free speech and all that. He’s giving me a civics lesson.”

  The cross-bearer howled louder.

  “What is it, the phase of the moon?” she said. “Brings them crawling out of the woodwork? Speaking of crawlies, you’ve already made an enemy.”

  “Ms. Red Dress?”

  She nodded. “She came bursting into my office on the verge of tears, claiming you’d humiliated her.” She gave her arm a dramatic wave. “What really happened?”

  I told her.

  She said, “You really need this, don’t you? Try to help us out and get embroiled in all this political garbage.”

  “I can take it in small doses,” I said. “The question is, how do you stand it?”

  She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder. Anyway, don’t worry about her. I told her not to come back until I see the proper forms—gave her a stack to fill out. If there’s a call from the Board, I’ll deal with it the way they deal with nuisances—ignoring them, putting them on hold, memo blizzard. By the time they take a meeting and decide what to do, you’ll probably be finished and out of here and the kids will be all right. How’re they doing?”

  “The ones that showed up are doing fine,” I said.

  Her face fell. “Yes, fifty-eight percent absent and my ears are still burning. I’d like to think I was persuasive, but let’s face it, how can I in good conscience tell them everything will be okay?” She shook her head. I thought I saw her lip tremble but she covered it with a grimace.

  “Wouldn’t it be something if they finally won because of something like this?” she said. “Some stupid crazy? Anyway, don’t let me keep you.”

  “On your way out or in?”

  “Out. I’m right over there.” She pointed across the street to a white Ford Escort.

  I walked her to it. She unlocked the car and put her briefcase inside.

  I said, “I’d think the principal would get a private parking slot.”

  “The principal usually does. But the entire grounds are still closed off, orders of the police. No parking, no foot traffic. We’ve had to keep the kids inside for lunch and recess—not that they’re exactly begging to go back out.”

  “It’s important they do go back out,” I said, “to desensitize their fears of the yard. How long did the police say they needed it closed?”

  “They didn’t. No one’s been here at all today, collecting evidence or anything, so I can’t see the point— I mean, what could there be left to find out? Guess I’d better check it out. Meanwhile, you have a nice evening.”

  I opened the car door.

  “A gentleman,” she said, getting in. “How nice.”

  I searched her face for sarcasm, saw only weariness. The black dress had ridden up. Very long, white legs...

  “Take care,” I said, closing the door. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m heading out for some dinner—nothing fancy, but I wouldn’t mind some company.”

  She blushed, looked away, jammed the key into the ignition and turned it. The Escort’s engine came to life with a poorly tuned sputter, belched, and finally caught. When it had settled to an idle, I said, “I wouldn’t mind some company either.”

  She blushed deeper. “Uh, just one thing—you’re not married or anything, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Neither married nor anything.”

  “That probably sounds weird to you, my asking.”

  Before I could answer, she said, “It’s just that I like to keep things straight, give a wide berth to trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Her laugh was brittle. “Not that it’s worked too well so far.”

  6

  I followed her to a place of her choosing, on Broadway in Santa Monica. All-you-can-eat salad bar with enough produce to stock a county fair exhibit, seafood on a grill, lots of woodsmoke, lazy fly fans, Alphonse Mucha reproductions on paneled walls, sawdust on the floor. Nothing really good or really bad, budget prices.

  We constructed our salads and took them to a back booth. Linda ate with enthusiasm, went back for a refill. When she finished the second bowl, she sat back, wiped her mouth, and looked sheepish.

  “Good metabolism,” she said.

  “Do you exercise a lot?”

  “Not a fig—Lord knows my hips could use it.”

  I thought her hips looked fine, but kept it to myself. “Count your blessings.”

  The entrees came and we ate without talking, comfortable with the silence, as if we were old friends, using the silence to decompress. After a few minutes she said, “What do you think of the sniper—being a girl and all.”

&
nbsp; “It took me by surprise. By the way, one of your teachers—Mrs. Ferguson—told me she knew her. Had taught her in sixth grade.”

  “Taught her at Hale?”

  I nodded.

  “Good old Esme. She didn’t say a thing to me—par for the course. But if anyone would remember, it would be her. She’s been around for years and she’s a local. All the rest of us are recent transfers. Or carpetbaggers, as we’ve been called. What else did she have to say about her?”