by Gayle Wilson
Which was probably the smart thing to do, but something—maybe nothing more than his personal involvement with her—made Jace unable to disregard Lindsey’s opinion. If she was right, he’d spent the last two days going down an alley that wasn’t going to lead him where he needed to go.
“Talk to Walt and Ms. Moore,” Carlisle suggested again. “We just might get lucky.”
There was no way he was going to let this shit destroy everything he’d worked for. It wasn’t his fault that whore had been sleeping around. Her car hadn’t been at the house. He’d checked. So how was he supposed to know they were going to walk in on Campbell?
Once they had, there was nothing else to do but go through with what he’d planned. As emotional as the Anderson bitch had been lately, people would have bought into the idea that
she’d felt responsible for the other suicides. So despondent over them that she’d reached the point of taking her own life. The principal, however…
He shook his head, knowing, as he had then, that scenrio was far less likely to fly. Not with that fucking detective who was determined to blame one of them for any and everything that happened around here.
There had to be a way out of this. All he had to do was think it through. Take control. Figure out which buttons to push—something he was very good at. If that didn’t work…
If that didn’t work, there were other ways to end this. And as far as he was concerned, right now none of them were off the table.
“I want to bury my son. He deserves that. I deserve it. And this community knows that.”
Jace hadn’t had time to explain why he was here before Harrison had begun again on the bitter, on-going battle about the autopsy.
“I respect that, Mr. Harrison, but it’s the law. And as long as there is some question—”
“I don’t have questions. I want to lay my son to rest beside his mother. The sheriff tells me you’re the holdup. Maybe, since you aren’t from around here, you don’t understand what something like that means to us.”
“I understand—”
“Then let me bury my son,” Harrison demanded.
“Even if there are still doubts—?”
“You think that matters to me? My son’s dead. Nothing you can do is ever going to bring him back.”
“And if someone had a hand in his death? You don’t want to know that?”
“Are you saying somebody put that rope around Tim’s neck and then pushed the desk out from under him? I saw my son, Lieutenant. I looked at his body laid out on that morgue table. There were no marks except—” Harrison faltered, his anger no match for the power of that memory. “If what you’re saying were true, Tim would have put up a fight. He would have defended himself. There would have been some indication he’d fought for his life.”
“I’m not sure it happened that way.”
“Meaning what?”
“That maybe somebody drove him to do what he did.”
For three or four heartbeats, Harrison was perfectly still, his eyes locked on Jace’s face. The anger faded from them as he seemed to consider what Jace had said.
Jace hurried to press his advantage. “We know there was an orchestrated cyber campaign against Andrea Moore that may have played a role in her suicide.”
“What kind of campaign?”
“An attempt to smear her reputation with her classmates by suggesting she was promiscuous. That she was pregnant, which was a lie. And that it wasn’t the first time she had been.”
He knew from Lindsey that Harrison had been aware of those rumors. And while Walt’s interest gave him the opportunity to explain the theory he’d been working under, Jace was well aware that he couldn’t prove any of that had led to Andrea’s death. Not the kind of proof that would be required by a court of law.
“Somebody created a fake online profile for her,” he went on, bolstering his case with things he could prove. “It detailed her supposed sexual exploits, although according to her autopsy, Andrea was still a virgin. As a result of that profile, she was openly derided in the chat rooms the Randolph-Lowen students frequent. And maybe at school. We know that in the last few days of her life, she received thousands of e-mails from classmates and others who’d read about her on what was supposedly her site. If something like that happened to Tim—”
Before Jace finished the sentence, Harrison turned and walked out of the room. Acting on instinct, Jace followed him.
He was aware that the “My Place” profile for Tim was genuine. If, in an attempt to prove him wrong, that’s what Harrison was going to pull up, then he needed to acknowledge that. But it didn’t disprove the rest of what he’d said.
Jace entered the hall as the history teacher disappeared into one of the bedrooms. Feeling that at this point he had no choice, Jace walked into the room in time to see Harrison jiggle the mouse of the computer sitting on the desk in the corner.
As soon as the screen came up, Harrison clicked on an icon on the desktop. Then he sat down in the chair in front of the monitor, waiting for the site to come up.
When it did, it appeared perfectly innocuous, just as it had the last time Jace had looked at it. Harrison scrolled through the pages, seeming familiar with the navigation.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said, continuing to review his son’s profile and the messages there. “I watched Tim build this. That was the condition before I’d let him have a page here. Until he died—” Harrison’s voice broke, but he strengthened it to go on, “I checked what was posted every night. It was a routine. Clockwork. And with the exception of a couple of things I thought might be questionable, there was never a problem. Tim’s friends are good kids. All of them.”
“Have you read his e-mail?”
Without turning, Harrison minimized the profile and brought up the mail screen. Jace watched as he clicked on the inbox. Only when the dozens and dozen of e-mails began to download did Jace know that something of what he’d suggested to Tim’s father must have been going on.
“Oh, my God,” Walt said softly. “Dear sweet Jesus.”
Feeling as if he was intruding on what was a private grief, Jace forced himself to move closer to the desk so that he could read the headings as the e-mails continued to flood the screen. The gist of all of them was the same, the phrases in which it had been couched differing only in their degrees of cruelty and vulgarity.
“Mr. Harrison?”
“You want to know if this is true,” Walt said. “You want to know if Tim was all these things they’re saying about him.”
“No, sir. What I want to know is, if Tim saw those, would it have been enough to make him do what he did?”
“He was so worried about me. Because I teach. Because I’m a deacon at our church. Because of what everyone in town would think. Not about him, but about his mother and me. Worried they’d think we’d done something wrong. That we hadn’t raised him right. Especially his mom.”
“Tim was gay,” Jace said flatly, knowing from what Harrison said that the basis of those hate-filled e-mails had been a secret long kept. And long feared.
“He told me last year,” Harrison said, swiveling his son’s chair to face Jace. His eyes, red-rimmed with grief, were more bleak now than when he’d opened the front door. “He said that however I took it, telling me would be a relief. But I think somewhere inside I’d known for a long time. Maybe always. At least…” Walt shook his head. “Having it in the open between us was a relief for me, too. And it made us closer. Like when his mom died. Just the two of us holding strong for one another.”
“Tim never told anyone else?”
“Here? Where they preach from the pulpits every Sunday that homosexuality is a sin and those who practice it will burn in hell? Who could he tell? Who could he trust that much? Nobody. And believe me, Tim was smart enough to know that.”
“Then…” Jace lifted his chin toward the e-mails that were still downloading on the screen.
“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know. Mayb
e it was like what you said with Andrea. Tim was kind. And sensitive, especially about the feelings of others. Everyone who knew him knew that. Maybe whoever did this just made something up they thought would hurt him, like with Andrea. And they got lucky.”
“Do you know anyone who would want to hurt your son? Anyone who had a grudge against him? Anyone at school he’d had trouble with?”
Harrison laughed, the sound devoid of amusement. “You didn’t know him. Everybody loved Tim. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body. That kid didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
Maybe it was a comfort for Harrison to believe that. Maybe it was even true. If so, it made what had been done to him even more evil. More diabolical.
Andrea Moore had been chosen because she was vulnerable. Believing in her own self-worth had been a struggle she’d fought for years. Despite the progress her mother and her therapist thought she’d made, the ridicule and cruelty she’d been subjected to by her peers had destroyed whatever fragile foothold she’d managed to attain in that battle. After days of unrelenting pressure from the things that were being said about her, she’d gone home and cut again. And then, despairing, she’d cut a little deeper, severing the veins in her wrists.
And Tim Harrison? Had the cruel insults he’d just watched flash across the boy’s monitor been enough to make him react by hanging himself?
“Maybe he didn’t have enemies,” Jace said aloud, “but somebody at Randolph-Lowen is behind this. Somebody is pulling the strings to make these things happen.”
And Jace believed he knew why. Just as he had told Lindsey at the beginning. He had stopped the church fires, but they’d found another way to get the rush they’d once gotten from watching the flames they had set consume their targets.
Now they were targeting their classmates. With a few carefully placed sparks, they had managed to set off a firestorm of rumor and gossip. Then they had stood in the background and watched as those flames, too, had consumed their victims.
Twenty-Seven
“Somebody to see you,” Lindsey’s father announced as he walked back into the kitchen. He had answered the doorbell that had interrupted their dinner, assuming it would be for him.
“Did you tell them we’re eatin’ supper?”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Lindsey put her napkin beside her plate and pushed her chair back from the table.
She hadn’t talked to either Jace or Shannon since their contentious discussion at Rick’s. If either of them had come to see her, she was more than ready to heal the strains that day had created in their relationships.
“I showed him to the living room.” Her father picked up his napkin, waiting for her to leave before he resumed his seat.
“Don’t you be long,” her mother cautioned. “Your supper won’t be fit to eat if it gets cold.”
Without responding, Lindsey left the kitchen and made her way toward the front of the house. Her dad had said “he,” which meant Jace and not Shannon. That realization created a stir of anticipation, along with a nervousness over the way she’d acted the last time they’d been together.
It wasn’t that she regretted defending Justin. She couldn’t help thinking, though, that she could have made her case in a way that wouldn’t have alienated the two people, other than her family, she cared about more than anyone in the world.
She rounded the corner the hall made with the arched entry to the living room. The expectancy she’d felt dissipated in an instant, to be replaced by an even stronger sense of anxiety.
Justin Carr stood in front of the fireplace, his torso bent so that his head rested against the forearm he’d placed along the top of the mantel. The pose emphasized his thinness, making her more aware than ever that, no matter his IQ, he was still a child.
“Justin?”
He turned and straightened in one motion, a rush of blood suffusing his cheeks. Lindsey wasn’t sure if that was because she’d caught him in such a vulnerable pose or because of whatever emotion had sent him to see her.
“Your dad said you were eating. I can wait.”
“It’s okay. Is something wrong?” As she asked the question, Lindsey advanced into the room, resisting the urge to offer him some physical form of comfort, as inappropriate as that might be between a teacher and her male student.
“You have to talk to that detective, Ms. Sloan. My dad’s going to kill me. If the Point hears about this, they won’t touch me. Everything I’ve worked for will go down the drain.”
“Justin—”
“If this is about what I said in your room that day, you have to tell them I apologized. I barely knew Andrea Moore. What I said was just something stupid my dad says. I didn’t mean anything by it. Not about her. Even if it made Ms. Anderson mad, it’s not worth ruining my life over.”
“Nobody’s trying to ruin your life.” Lindsey couldn’t think of anything that might sooth his angst. Everything he said echoed her own fears. “If you weren’t involved in any of this, it will come out. Your name will be cleared, and things will—”
“Who’s going to clear my name? You know how that works. Once people think you’re involved in something criminal, it doesn’t matter what kind of proof you offer of your innocence. Not around here. They’re never going to forget that you were accused. If you’re accused, then it stands to reason, you must have done something. They’re ready to believe the worst about any of us. Especially about someone like me.”
The bitterness of being an outsider—a bitterness Lindsey would wager had been created long before Justin Carr arrived at Randolph-Lowen—marked his words, but she couldn’t deny them. The idea that someone who hadn’t come from this small, close-knit community might have set those fires would be welcomed.
Justin wasn’t even from Alabama. He’d grown up in locations all over the world, most of them far removed from the South. All those accusations of Southern-bred racism, which had swirled through the media during the last two months, would be more difficult to espouse if this boy could be proven guilty.
“And you have to know I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to you,” Justin went on, his voice more impassioned. “I’d never do anything to hurt you, Ms. Sloan. You have to believe me.”
…with what happened to you…
Despite the efficiency of the local gossips, there had been little talk about either incident. Apparently her neighbor’s version of how the snake had gotten into her house had been accepted. And although the fire at the ticket booth had been very public, it had been blamed on overloaded wiring. When she’d been asked about it, she herself had downplayed its seriousness, primarily to keep her mother from freaking.
“What do you mean, what happened to me?”
“The snake. The fire at the game.”
She shook her head, trying to think if this were as significant as she feared. If Justin was clever enough to have gotten away with the arson, as well as those two attacks, surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to make this kind of mistake.
“How did you learn about those, Justin?”
The boy looked confused by the question. “The detective asked my dad where I was those nights.”
“And did your dad know?”
“My dad always knows where I am.”
“So…where were you?”
“God, not you, too.”
“I’m just wondering how you knew about the snake.”
For a fraction of a second, the boy seemed at a loss, but his recovery was quick. And plausible. “I heard somebody talking about it at school.”
“Who?”
“I don’t remember. They weren’t talking to me. I just…heard it. In the lunchroom I think.”
“What did they say? Exactly.”
Justin took a breath, as if gathering his thoughts, before he answered. “That you’d called the cops because you found a rattlesnake in your house. That was it.” His face suddenly relaxed. “They had a police scanner. They heard the dispatcher send the cops to your house.”
“But…you don’t remember who had the scanner or who you overheard talking about it.”
“It was just…” He made a quick, negative motion with his head. “I don’t know. The only reason I listened was because they were talking about you.”
She wasn’t sure how to take that, but it didn’t mitigate her uneasiness. She was accustomed to adolescent crushes and accustomed to dealing with them. For any young, single, remotely attractive teacher they were an occupational hazard. After ten years in the classroom her radar was fairly well attuned to the signs. She had never gotten that feeling from Justin, and despite what he’d just said, she didn’t have it now.
“So you listened because it was about me? Should I be flattered?”
“I think it was Steven. Yeah, I know it was. I listened because it was one of the guys in the program and because he was talking about you.”
“Steven Byrd?”
“He’s got a scanner. He’s into that kind of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Justin shrugged. “All of it. Geek Squad. Cops and robbers. Technology. CSI crap.”
She knew Jace had questioned Steven about the Web site profile that had been created for Andrea. He’d come away from that meeting feeling the kid had told the truth when he said he hadn’t had anything to do with putting up that page.
Still, Justin was right about Steven’s interests. And in spite having been born here, Steven was almost as much of an outsider as Justin.
“Do you remember who he was telling?”
Again the boy looked as if he were struggling to retrieve the memory, but once more he shook his head. “I wouldn’t have remembered it was Steven if he hadn’t been…You know.”
“I don’t know. If he hadn’t been what?”
“So into you.”
Lindsey was aware of what the phrase meant, of course, but it wasn’t one she would have ever associated with Steven Byrd. Like Justin, by neither word nor deed or attitude had he indicated his feelings about her were anything other than those appropriate for their relationship.