Kate had retrieved everything except the sheets that had fallen off the table when she heard something between the bongs of the alarm.
A click.
It was accompanied by a firm pressure against the back of her head, and a man’s voice saying, “Don’t move, or I’ll blow your brains out right now.”
A couple of Fenton teachers gave Derek a side-eye when he walked past them with Eli Winston. A dark stare back ensured none of them opened their mouths.
Derek was in no mood for their bullshit. They were acting as though everything was the same; as if they could still treat these kids like dirt without repercussions. “What, do they think this will all go away over the summer and they can come back in the fall and pretend no brutal, bloody crimes were committed here?”
“They don’t believe there were multiple crimes,” Eli said as they walked toward the main staircase. “They know about Andrews. They still think the boys were all runaways.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Nope. Bad boys, skulking off in the night. Look what they’ve caused now, all this scandal for nothing except one dead teacher who didn’t even have tenure.”
Derek stopped mid-step, his mouth open in shock. “They seriously said that?”
“The Devil…I mean, Mr. Angel did.”
“Devil is right.” Derek’s shoulders bunched and his hands fisted. He had a sudden urge to beat the shit out of that bastard. He’d spoken to Andrews exactly once and still considered him worth more than all the rest of the teachers here combined. But he had to focus on the case.
They reached floor three and looked down both sides of the corridor, seeing no one. Eli picked up his pace, doing a speed-walk, and Derek kept up with long, even strides.
When they got to the shower room, Derek said, “Let me look first. If anybody’s in there, I don’t think it’s a good idea for an adult man to be skulking in with a kid.”
Eli grimaced. “Good point.”
Going inside, Derek looked in the community shower, and in each individual stall. The only noise was the slow plip-plop of water oozing one drop at a time from a leaky showerhead. The coast was clear. “Come on in,” he called.
Eli went straight for one of the stalls. Dropping to his knees, he worked his fingers into the crumbling grout surrounding a wall tile. Within a few seconds, the tile fell out into his hand, revealing a dark open space.
Eli reached in and his eyes lit up with excitement. “There’s something here. It’s paper.”
“Try to touch it only on the corners.”
“Fingerprints, right!”
With great caution, Eli pulled out a white, letter-sized envelope. It was dusty, and the writing on the outside was slightly smeared, probably because of the room’s dampness. Derek took it from him, holding the envelope by the top and bottom edges.
The teen looked confused. “At first I thought it was the note from under the door, but there wasn’t all that writing on the back.”
Leaving the stall, Derek stepped under a fluorescent light and held the envelope up to study it. Although the ink had smudged, and the writing was sloppy—as if it had been written in a hurry—he was able to make out the text. It was addressed to the boy who’d come to stand beside him.
He glanced over. Eli had apparently spotted his name, too, and waited anxiously.
Derek read aloud.
“Hey Eli. Nothing from Charlie—sorry. Suddenly having a bad feeling about tonight, so I’m leaving this note for you. If something happens to me, give it to your new friend, okay? Nobody else! Sorry it took me a while to come around. Thanks for being a great student, and a great person. Charlie was lucky to have you as a friend.” – Mr. A.
He didn’t even have to look over to know how the words had to be affecting the fifteen year old at his side. Saying nothing, Derek dropped an arm across Eli’s shoulders, offering steadiness and reminding him he was not alone.
“If I’d checked in there last night…”
“We talked about this, Eli. There’s nothing you could have done. Mr. Andrews came across a person who was not only insane, but evil.”
Derek didn’t add that there might have been something he could have done if he’d arrived perhaps as little as ten minutes sooner. That was a possibility he would never forget, just as he knew Eli would never completely get over his own regrets.
“I guess he meant you when he said my new friend. So, are you gonna open it?”
“Can you help?”
Understanding they were still trying to avoid fingerprints, Eli carefully lifted the flap by its tiniest tip, using just his fingernail.
“You’re pretty good at this.”
“Maybe I’ll be a cop someday like you.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Really? What are you then?”
“Private investigator.”
“Cool!”
“Cop’s better—so stay in school. Just not this school.”
Derek cautiously pulled the tri-folded sheet of paper out of the envelope. Gripping a small bit of the corner, he shook it open and held it up so both of them could read it.
Change of plans. Can’t come there, you have to come to me. Urgent. Building 13, ASAP. Tell no one—our little secret!
“I’m guessing you didn’t write that.”
“No, I definitely didn’t.”
“Can I take a closer look at it?”
Derek held it up to the boy. He read it a couple of times, but still looked confused.
“What time did this show up?” Derek asked.
“A few minutes before six.”
“Urgent and ASAP. Whoever wrote this somehow knew I was meeting Mr. Andrews at 6:30 and wanted to get him out of the classroom before I got there.”
“Sounds that way.”
Derek thought back to the brief discussion he’d had with Andrews in the teacher’s lounge yesterday. They had kept their voices down, but had Slate heard them anyway? The custodian had been the last one to leave. It was possible he had stood outside listening.
“I should get this to the detective in…” A bell started to clang. “Well, that’s annoying.”
“Fire alarm,” Eli said. “They test it once a month. We better fall out.”
They went downstairs, along with a stream of boys and faculty members moving in long, quiet lines. Even the day after a murder the boys—who should be excited—were quiet and obedient.
“We have to wait on the lawn until they give the all clear,” Eli said. “I should go join up with my dorm mates.”
“Okay. Thanks for your help.”
Eli dropped his head and turned to go, muttering, “It was the least I could do.”
He watched as Eli joined his friends, wondering what the future looked like for him. For all the students, really. This place had changed their lives. Whether they overcame and moved forward, or fell back into anger and resentment was up to them.
He suspected he knew which way Eli would go.
Seeing Gabe Cooper, Derek hailed him. “I have something for you. It’s evidence.”
Cooper glowered. “Then I sure’s hell hope it’s not what you’re holding in your bare hand.”
“Drastic times. I handled it by the edges. The boy touched the tab and maybe a corner.”
“What is it?”
“A note asking Mr. Andrews to come to the shack where he was murdered. There’s also a handwritten message on the outside from Andrews. You need to look at it.”
Drawing on a pair of gloves, Gabe took the envelope, read Andrews’ message, and then removed the page inside. Derek explained the circumstances under which Andrews had written it, and how he had found it.
“I’ll need to talk to Eli.”
“He’s feeling a lot of guilt.”
“He shouldn’t. That boy would be another vic if he’d gone to that place last night.”
“He knows. I think he’s just glad he was able to do something to help.”
“You tell
Kate about this?”
Derek shook his head. Realizing it had been at least an hour since he’d seen her, he looked around the crowded lawn. In a sea of boys and men, there were only a couple of women milling around. He spotted the wicked witch of the nurse’s room, a couple of secretaries, and a few cops. No Kate. “She’s not here.”
“Huh, strange. I don’t imagine anybody coulda missed that alarm.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Not since noon.” Gabe called to one of his detectives. “Is Dr. Lincoln with you?”
“Huh-uh. We finished up with her almost an hour ago.”
Great. Right around the time he’d stopped waiting for her and gone upstairs.
“Well, where is she now?”
“She said she was going to wait for him.” The guy jerked a thumb toward Derek. “We were done with the room for a while, so she stayed there, in the lounge on the first floor.”
Close to the entrance. Which meant she should have been one of the first ones out here when the alarm bell rang.
Derek’s heart started thudding and he moved in a slow circle, looking at every face, and every head of hair. There wasn’t a brilliant flash of red hair anywhere. “She’s not here.”
Gabe and the detective exchanged a look. “Maybe she’s around the side…”
“Eli said they have strict rules to come and line up out front for a head count. She would have followed everyone else.”
“Maybe she left, then,” the other cop said.
She’d certainly had reason to, given what a shit he’d been this morning. There was only one problem with that theory. “I still have her car keys.”
Now Gabe looked worried. “Maybe we should…”
“Derek!”
Hearing Eli’s excited voice, Derek watched as the kid ran toward him. A furious looking teacher called after him to come back. Eli ignored him, skidding up to Derek and the detectives.
“I need to see the letter again!”
Gabe raised a brow.
“Let him see it,” Derek urged. “If not for him, it would never have been found.”
Conceding that, Gabe pulled the paper out of the evidence baggie and unfolded it. The boy stared hard, and then his eyes flared in triumph. “I knew it!”
“Knew what?”
“That’s not Slate’s handwriting.”
Derek froze. Beside him, Gabe did the same thing.
“Whenever he caught me being loud in the halls, he wrote me up. He has this scratchy, old-man’s handwriting that’s almost impossible to read. I swear, there’s no way he wrote that.”
“If Slate, the perpetrator, didn’t write it….” Gabe said.
Derek finished the thought. “Then who did?”
“Fuck,” the cop said. “He had help.”
Derek barely reacted. He was too busy worrying about Kate. It was bad enough when he thought she might be inside during a possible fire. Now, if what Eli said was true, she could actually be inside with someone who’d aided and abetted in several murders.
“Get a search party, Gabe!” he snapped. Not waiting for a response, he ran toward the school.
Mr. Angel stepped in his way. “Hold on there, buddy, you can’t go inside until the fire department gives the all clear!”
Derek shoved the teacher out of his way, sending him flying onto the ground. Hearing the shocked laughter of some of the boys, he didn’t even pause.
Once inside the empty school, he headed straight toward the lounge. He burst through the door, hoping Kate would be there, asleep on the couch, deafened to the alarm by sheer exhaustion.
The room was empty.
“Damn it, where are you?” he whispered, looking around for any clue to where she’d gone. “Oh, Jesus,” he said when he spotted her purse. There was no way she’d have left here without it unless somebody had forced her to.
He was about to run back out to begin tearing the school apart when he glimpsed something white under the couch. He scooped it up, seeing a bunch of printed pictures, and realized it was one of the research documents Julia had promised him.
An image near the bottom of the page caught his attention. It was of two boys. One, a teenage Richard Fenton. The other…he knew him. He knew that face.
The memory struck.
“Oh, Christ, it’s you.” He thought of that first day, when Emerson was showing him around. He’d had to try to remain impassive while he’d watched a kid being murdered in the gym. “They kicked you to death, didn’t they?”
He was looking at the boy who had flown through the air and landed in front of him. The first death-imprint victim he’d seen inside the school. His murder had been violent. Judging by the serious look on his pale face, and the bleakness in his eyes, his life hadn’t been so great either.
Although he suspected he already knew his identity, Derek glanced down to confirm it.
“William Fenton. The brother who died young.”
He remembered seeing the family picture in Richard Fenton’s office on his first day here, the one that was also printed on this page. And suddenly, from out of some far corner of his brain that held onto memories and didn’t want to release them, he got a gift.
Our little secret.
Fenton had said that to him that day in his office.
The person who lured Andrews to his death with that note had said it too.
It was too odd a thing for an adult man to say. Unless that adult man was a fucking pompous asshole.
The pieces began to put themselves together. Everything coalesced into a story that started with a teenager being beaten to death within these walls sixty years ago, and ended with the headmaster taking Kate because she’d figured it out. Fenton had helped Slate with his killings. Or Slate had helped Fenton. Either way, Kate was in serious danger.
Bellowing her name, he dropped the pages and ran out, pivoting toward the headmaster’s office. The yellow police tape was still there, but he tore it away and kicked the door in.
One look told him no one was inside the room where Slate had killed himself. One thing was easy to see, though. His death had been ugly. Congealed blood remained on the floor by the chair where Slate had been secured. Red dollops dripped down the radiator. Evidence markers noted spots on the furniture.
One of the floor markers had been knocked over into the blood. It drew his attention because that particular puddle looked strange. Not just a round smear, it had spread, but only in one direction. Streaks of it flowed from the center in thin fingers toward the area behind the desk. They almost went as far as a throw rug that sat there.
It was as if the bloody spot had been lifted at an angle, gravity pulling rivulets down. But that couldn’t have happened on a flat floor.
Derek moved closer, all his instincts telling him he was on to something. His senses were heightened, his whole body sparking with energy.
He suddenly realized why.
He could smell her. Kate. It was just a whiff, the slightest hint of cinnamon, but he knew he’d smelled that same warm, spicy scent in her shower as he washed her hair last night.
She had been here recently.
Kneeling down to examine the odd streaks, he felt the floor wobble the slightest bit under his knees, and had a suspicion. Grabbing the edge of the throw rug, he yanked it up, revealing a hinged trapdoor underneath.
“You sly bastard,” Derek snapped as he pulled at the rusty ring in the center, lifting the door. Below it was an old, warped set of stairs. “You have your own escape hatch.”
He wondered if Fenton had used it to sneak into his office last night and take care of his insane partner in crime. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn he had.
Reaching into his pocket and finding it empty, he muttered, “Damn it.”
He didn’t have his weapon. He had left it locked in Kate’s car.
Derek had been breaking the law every time he carried the gun onto school grounds, but had considered it worth the risk. Today, though, with cops crawling ev
erywhere and the killer apparently stopped, he’d hadn’t done it. He deeply regretted that now, but wasn’t going to waste time going after it, not when Kate’s life was on the line.
Derek began to descend into the darkness below Fenton’s office. The stairs, more like a ladder, weren’t long, ending on a dirt floor in what looked and smelled like a root cellar. He didn’t remember seeing this on the renovation drawings. Given its rough condition, he had to wonder when it had been built, and who had even known it was here.
At the bottom of the ladder, he flicked on his small flashlight to study his surroundings. The cellar was round, the ceiling low. He had to duck as he walked deeper into it. Although he saw footprints, there was no way anyone else could have been here without him seeing them. It was just too small.
“Damn it!” he snarled, realizing he’d hit another dead end. She wasn’t here. Neither was Fenton. He needed to go back up and think of somewhere else the bastard could have taken her without drawing attention to himself.
“Derek!”
Hearing Kate’s scream, Derek spun toward the sound. It had seemed to come from far away, but not above.
This cellar wasn’t the only underground room beneath the academy.
Derek flashed the beam over every surface, finally spotting a small, low door beside a pile of dirt and roots. Dropping down, he stuck the flashlight between his teeth and yanked the door open to crawl through.
He emerged into a tunnel. It wasn’t as low as the door had been, but it was only about half the height of the root cellar. It was crude, with no clear design or foundation, just a hole scratched into the earth. The very wet earth. Whoever had dug this had been determined. They’d had to be, considering it led right toward a swamp.
“No!”
“Kate,” he whispered, the fear in her voice making him frantic to get to her. He rose to his feet, bent in half, and tried to run. He slammed into old roots, and kicked past dead mice, and stomped through reeking water.
By the time she screamed again, she sounded closer.
“Hold on, Katie. I’m coming for you,” he mumbled.
He’d promised her that once. No, he hadn’t envisioned it happening like this, but he would keep that promise if it killed him.
The tunnel turned, went down until the water rose to his shins. It narrowed in spots to barely the width of a man, and the walls scraped his sides. At one point, he had to drop back onto his knees and crawl for a few yards.
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