by Lisa Gardner
“Luke Hayes is in charge of the victimology reports,” Rainie said. “I can ask him to focus on Melissa Avalon for now and try to have something for us tomorrow.”
Quincy nodded. “Second area of focus: the school computers. We know Danny spent a great deal of time on-line, possibly talking to someone called No Lava. Who is this person? And what was his agenda when he contacted a thirteen-year-old boy? Learning what’s on the computers should help us with a second possible theory of this case, that the man in black is a stranger who Danny met on-line.”
“Speaking of which,” Sanders interjected gloomily. Both Rainie and Quincy turned to stare at him. He focused on Rainie, saying defensively, “I was going to tell you. There just hasn’t been time.”
“Spit it out, Sanders.”
“I got a call from our technicians this morning. They’re having problems recovering data from the school computers.”
“What kind of problems?”
Sanders smiled tightly. “You’ll like this. As I mentioned before, there were some signs that Danny—”
“That someone,” Rainie corrected.
“Fine, that someone made an attempt to clean the machines. The history file for the Web browser had been deleted and the cache file had been purged. But that’s pretty obvious stuff that most computer-literate people know how to do, so the techies weren’t that worried.”
“I gather it gets worse.”
“In a nutshell. I guess anytime you visit a Web site, the site puts a small piece of information in the computer’s ‘cookie’ file so that the next time the user visits the site, the site can ‘remember’ information about the user. A good technician can bring up the cookie file from the hard drive and get fairly complete records of every place the user has been. Nope. On all four computers, the cookie files had been deleted as of six P.M. Monday, May fourteenth. The only cookies present are new ones from Tuesday morning, and they’re a hodgepodge collection of eToys.com and various Pokémon sites, probably from the kids that morning.”
“What about e-mails?” Quincy pressed. “I know I can go on-line and retrieve old e-mails, even ones I’ve read and deleted.”
“Generally yes. Someone, however, cleaned out the old and the saved e-mails, then compacted the files so they’re unrecoverable. Finally, the person accessed the firewall server and deleted all the data logs. In short, the four computers are wiped clean.”
“I want them,” Quincy said simply.
“You can have them,” Rainie agreed.
“Wait a minute,” Sanders protested. “We have good people—”
“The FBI has better.”
“Dammit, our technicians have already started work—”
“Then the FBI’s data-recovery agents will be all that much faster at finishing.”
“It’s true,” Quincy told Sanders, who looked ready for a full-blown snit. “Even after everything you’ve described, the information is somewhere on the computers. When a file is deleted, the computer generally only deletes the directory reference to the file, not the actual data. So unless our infamous someone thought to use a Department of Defense–approved deletion program that overwrites the data with zeros, the information is on the machine. We need this information. Whatever Danny was doing on-line with No Lava is highly relevant to what went down Tuesday afternoon. So let our data-recovery agents handle it. We’ll get answers sooner versus later.”
“We can get the information too,” Sanders insisted curtly. “I can put a rush order on it. There’s no reason for the FBI to get involved.”
“Too late,” Rainie said.
“Dammit, it’s just an excuse to steal jurisdiction—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass!” Rainie yelled back. She slapped her hand against the top of her desk. “Someone else was in the school. Someone else shot Melissa Avalon. I want to know who, goddammit, and for the last time, Sanders, it’s not your call.”
Sanders fell back into steely silence. He crossed his arms over his chest. He muttered, “Man, what I’d give for a hot fudge sundae right now.”
Rainie glared at him harder. They all fell silent. The seconds ticked off. After a moment Quincy said, “Third action step.”
He looked at them both. Rainie nodded to show she was paying attention. Sanders returned to the conversation more grudgingly.
“We go back to what you were doing this morning, Rainie—a complete list of other possible suspects. VanderZanden, Charlie Kenyon, Richard Mann, Me-lissa Avalon’s father, this computer person, No Lava.”
“I’m working on that. I just don’t have a lot of manpower.”
“Fine,” Sanders interjected crossly. “Let’s divvy it up between us. What the hell, we can pretend cross-jurisdictional investigations really work. I’ll take VanderZanden. The fed can have No Lava, since he’s stolen my computers. Luke Hayes has Melissa Avalon’s father—”
“I’ll take Charlie Kenyon and Richard Mann,” Rainie volunteered.
“Perfect,” Sanders said flatly. His eyes met Rainie’s with open challenge. “That just leaves us with one last suspect: Shep.”
“No way! He’s the sheriff—”
“Whose time at the school is completely unaccounted for! We know he’s got problems at home. We know he’s an older man, which makes him exactly Melissa Avalon’s type. And we know he goes way back with you, Conner, which makes this whole damn case even more interesting.”
Rainie decided to ignore that last comment. She said tightly, “Shep called me from his radio after the shots were fired, meaning he was in his patrol car, not at the school.”
“Or he did the deed, returned to his car in the parking lot, and made the call.”
“Shep would not frame his own fucking son!”
“We don’t know that he did! Come on, the evidence is all over the place. Danny did it. Wait, no, a second person’s present, maybe he did it. You said it yourself, Conner, Danny’s got the perfect defense right now—the man on the grassy knoll. Looks to me like he’s about to walk. Meaning Shep’s either really clever or really lucky.”
“You,” Rainie said hotly, “have been watching too many Oliver Stone movies.”
“I’ll do it,” Quincy said calmly. They both looked at him belatedly, as if just now remembering he was there. “I’ll look into Shep,” he repeated, then quickly cut off Rainie’s objection. “It’s due discipline, Rainie. There are too many things about this shooting that don’t make sense. Until they do, everyone must be a suspect—mysterious men in black and, yes, the town sheriff.”
Rainie sat back. She wasn’t happy, but there was no more point in arguing. Quincy returned to the general conversation.
“One last thing,” he said. “If the UNSUB is a stranger, we need to cast a wider net because chances are that he’s still in the area.”
“You mean in Bakersville?” Rainie asked incredulously.
“No, this town is too small to hide in. He’d look for a neighboring town, maybe a larger tourist resort. Someplace where he could go to bars and local establishments and watch all the news coverage. He’s probably following the investigation very closely and asking others about it. It’s his way of reliving the moment, of still having fun. We should make contact with neighboring police departments. Have their officers ask hotel workers and bartenders. Any new faces showing a lot of interest in Bakersville’s tragedy? Any mid-twenties to mid-forties white males who’ve been mouthing off on the subject or asking a lot of questions? That sort of thing.”
Sanders nodded. “I can make a few calls,” he said, then shrugged dubiously. “I don’t want to lose my own men to a wild-goose chase, though. You guys may like the notion of some mystery man, but I keep coming back to the victim’s injury. I’ve seen a lot of homicides, and a single gunshot wound to the forehead—that’s a targeted victim any way you look at it. Maybe it wasn’t Danny, but somebody specifically wanted Melissa Avalon dead.”
Quincy didn’t argue. Neither did Rainie. It did seem to come back to Meliss
a Avalon, and the fact that they still couldn’t understand why made them all very uncomfortable.
“Well, at least we have one lucky break on our side,” Quincy said finally.
Sanders and Rainie exchanged startled glances. Sanders did the honors. “We have a break?”
“The recovery of the .22-caliber slug. You said it yourself, Detective. Most .22s become too deformed for a ballistics test. My guess is our shooter knew that too. So he tells Danny to bring a .22. Chances are, his slug will ricochet inside the skull, obliterating trajectory and rifling marks. Given all other circumstantial evidence, Danny will be blamed for Melissa Avalon’s death as well. Except the bullet doesn’t ricochet. It holds a trajectory that immediately lets us know the shooter must have been another adult. And it keeps enough of the base intact to reveal its little secret—it’s perfectly smooth, indicating a unique weapon. One 40-grain slug later, we know something else happened at that school.”
Rainie slowly nodded. Without the slug and its trajectory, there would never have been any reason to look beyond Danny O’Grady. Especially with the boy confessing each and every chance he got.
Sanders, however, was frowning. “I don’t get it. You’re saying someone asked Danny to bring a .22 to cover for his own .22. But why the hell would he do that? Why wouldn’t he simply use Danny’s gun?”
Rainie stopped. Stared. She looked at Quincy, who for once appeared completely flummoxed.
“The .22 slug is smooth,” she murmured. “It definitely didn’t come from Danny’s gun. And that poses another question: If the shooter brought his own weapon to kill Melissa Avalon, why a .22? It’s not that powerful, particularly for a head shot. Frankly, many people survive that wound. And yet he fired only one shot to her forehead with his own gun. Risking her living to tell the tale. Risking someone seeing him armed. I don’t understand. . . . Something here doesn’t make sense.”
They all looked at one another. No one had an answer. A preselected victim. A mystery slug. An unidentified man who had cajoled a thirteen-year-old boy into taking part in murder.
They had come a long way from a mindless act of rage, and now, suddenly, Rainie didn’t know where they were going anymore. She thought about her small, peaceful town. She thought about the towering trees and the gentle rolling hills. She thought about Danny, so scared and frightened and determined to take credit for murder. She thought of the school halls, still streaked in blood.
And for the first time in fourteen years, Rainie was frightened.
NINETEEN
Thursday, May 17, 4:21 P.M.
DANNY SAT ALONE in his eight-by-eight room, staring at a spider that was slowly working its way across the thin-carpeted floor.
The door was open. Every morning at 6 A.M., the doors were flung wide by burly staff members who yelled, “It’s that time, boys and girls.” The doors stayed open all day, joining a series of look-alike rooms to a main hallway until nine o’clock at night, when everyone prepared for bed. More staff people—not guards, Danny was told, but guides—came by and locked everyone in from the outside. At ten o’clock came lights-out. Danny would find a face peering in through the Plexiglas window, making sure he followed the rules.
Danny followed the rules. He didn’t make any trouble. He got up when he was supposed to. He let the guide escort him to the cafeteria. He stared at his tray. He let another guide lead him to a classroom, where twenty boys, ages ranging from twelve to seventeen, pretended to be studying under the eyes of some chipper lady who insisted that they could be whatever they wanted to be. Later they were allowed to socialize.
Danny always came back to his room, where he sat alone. No one cared. Cabot County’s Juvenile Center was a newer facility. It operated as a giant, beige-colored dorm, unlike the other places kids whispered about. Old prisons converted into youth facilities where the walls and floors were slabs of concrete and everybody got to watch everybody pee. Cabot County wasn’t anything like that. Some of the kids got to wear their own clothes as long as they didn’t sport gang colors or offensive T-shirts. The social room had lots of Plexiglas windows and real live plants. If kids earned enough merit points, they could watch TV or even rent movies for the VCR.
For the most part, the guides led them through their days, a careful schedule of meals, classes, and rec time. As long as you did what you were told and went where you were told, no one made a fuss. You could even be alone during the social time. Sit in your room. Stare at your blue hospital scrubs. Watch spiders. Didn’t matter.
The whole point was that you were never going to make it any farther. The nice rooms had Plexiglas windows for a reason. And all the outside doors were inch-thick steel. Then there was the ten-foot-high fence ringing the yard and topped with coils of barbed wire. The searchlights. The guides who had keys to rifles loaded with rubber bullets.
When Danny first got there, the older kids had been fascinated by him, and they told him stories of juvies who’d run for it. Kids who had been flattened by mattresses, gassed with pepper spray, or, rarely, if they made it beyond the fence, hunted down by growling Dobermans. If the dogs catch you, they’re each allowed one bite as a reward, kids said. The guides pick the place.
Danny thought the kids were full of shit, but he didn’t say anything. Since the day he’d come in, that had been his motto. Don’t give up a word.
I’m smart, I’m smart, I’m smart.
I’m scared.
Now he watched the spider laboriously climb toward the barred window, thirsty for sunlight or maybe the wind in its hairy little face.
Danny fingered his scrubs—no laces, no buttons, no belts for a kid under “SWatch”—and tried to get his mind to shut up.
The lawyer came to talk to him yesterday. Danny hadn’t wanted to see the man. He had a fancy gray suit and an expensive watch and Danny knew he must cost a lot of money, which made him feel worse. His mom would be stressed about that, trying to figure out how to pay. His father would yell at her that it didn’t matter, because good old Shep didn’t get how the world worked. He was still lost in his football fantasies where he and/or his son were scoring the winning touchdown during the big homecoming game.
Danny hated worrying his mom. He knew she had cried. He’d heard her himself. Late at night he tried to cover his ears with his hands to block out the sound, but then he’d have to move his hand and stuff it in his mouth to keep from whimpering.
The lawyer made small talk. He told Danny what a lawyer did and what a trial was about. What his role would be and what Danny’s role would be. He spoke as if Danny was four years old, and Danny let him. He stared at a point just beyond the lawyer’s ear while the man babbled for an hour.
Danny wasn’t supposed to talk to the counselors, he was told. They technically worked for the detention center, so it could be argued that they were law enforcement and anything he told them might be used against him at trial. To be on the safe side, Danny should ask for a chaplain or a pastor or a rabbi if he felt like spilling his guts. Priest-penitent privilege was absolute.
Danny didn’t talk. He knew absolutely he could not talk, could not trust anyone, even during the quiet hours of the night when the words bobbed up inside him and lodged as a fierce, hard knot in the center of his chest. That’s when he saw what had happened again, clearly but somehow distanced, as if it had all been a dream and had nothing to do with him. Then he’d raise his hand, see that he wasn’t even trembling, and want to scream and scream and scream.
The lawyer told him two experts would be visiting him as well. There were more rules about talking. One of them couldn’t be trusted. Danny was to be careful. The other—Schaffer, maybe?—worked for his parents. He could tell him everything. Maybe he should think about telling him everything. Maybe he would feel better about getting it off his chest.
The lawyer looked at him kindly.
Danny thought about Miss Avalon. The expression that had washed over her face. The way she had turned toward him. Her last words, not understanding.
“Danny, run! Run, run, run!”
The spider reached the window. Danny watched it race happily over the warm, unbreakable glass.
So many things in his mind. All these images, but so far away. Blood. Noise. Smells he’d never imagined. Hot guns in his hands. But so far away. Maybe just a dream. Snap, open your eyes and it’s gone. Maybe a bad TV show. Click, turn it off, go to bed.
Sally and Alice and Miss Avalon. Sally and Alice and pretty Miss Avalon.
“Run, Danny, run!”
Danny got up. He raised his hand and slammed it down on the spider. Smash. He had happy spider guts all over his hand. He studied his fingers. They still wouldn’t tremble. He stared at his hand and he willed it to shake. Nothing.
Danny, the stone-cold killer.
He went back to his bed.
RAINIE SWOOPED DOWN on Charlie Kenyon like a bat out of hell. She’d had four run-ins with the nineteen-year-old, and this time around she didn’t have the patience. She spotted him riding a small Huffy dirt bike down a bumpy logging road on his father’s wooded estate, she flipped on her lights, and she went after him.
Quincy was riding shotgun. He didn’t blink an eye at the display of sirens, lights, and billowing dust as Rainie pulled Charlie over to the side of the road and fishtailed to a stop. She got out of the car with her hand resting on the top of the baton in her heavy utility belt.
“Off the bike, Charlie.”
“Holy shit, Officer, was I speeding?” Looking cool in a black leather jacket and too-tight jeans, Charlie remained standing over the dirt bike. He gave her a mocking grin. Rainie worked on not smashing in his face. She needed to get more sleep. Even for herself, she was short-tempered these days.
Charlie’s gaze flickered behind her, to where Quincy was climbing out of the car.
“Who’s the suit?” Charlie asked.
“None of your business.”
“Breaking in a new partner? Shouldn’t you have told him about the dress code? Man, I’ve seen guys killed for wearing silk ties in these parts.”