by Diane Kelly
I stopped just inside the doorway. “Hey, there.”
Trey looked up from his tools and smiled. “Hey, Marnie. Ready for lunch?”
The teacher slid me an irritated look. Couldn’t really blame her. I’d hit on Trey, too, if I wasn’t already nailing him.
Leaning back against the door jamb, I told Trey about the epiphany I’d experienced in the parking lot. “All of the victims are in the same kindergarten class here. That fact could be significant.”
“Want me to run a computer search on the school’s system?” Trey asked. “See who’s accessed the kids’ personal records?”
“A search warrant would be required for that,” I thought aloud. “Unless we had permission from school administration.”
I glanced over at Gwennie, who’d wandered in to make copies. I stepped over to the machine. “Gwennie, got a favor to ask you.”
She laid a notice of a head lice infestation on the glass, punched keys to order up four hundred copies, and closed the copier’s lid, turning to me. “Anything for you, Miss Muckleroy. What is it?”
Once I’d explained the situation, she frowned. “If someone’s taking advantage of these kids on my watch, I want to know about it.” She gestured around the room. “You got my permission to look at anything you want to, Marnie.”
“Thanks, Gwennie.”
We returned to the front office, where Trey sat down at Gwennie’s computer. He spent a few seconds navigating through the system to the children’s personal files. “How far back should I go?”
“Start with the week before school started,” I suggested. “Since all of the victims are in kindergarten, they would have registered for school in August.” I remember Savannah blubbering about her youngest baby starting school, how quickly he’d grown up.
Trey ran a report and I grabbed it as it came off the printer. Eight people had accessed all three of the kids’ files. The principal, the vice principal, the school nurse, Gwennie, Mrs. Nelson, Trey, the attendance clerk, and Tiffany Tindall.
The first five people on the list were unlikely suspects, having been employed by the school for years with no problems. Next on the list was Trey. Technically, he could be a suspect. The problems had cropped up about the same time he’d begun working on the school’s computer system. But Trey was, well, Trey. He made a butt-load of money working for that software company back in Silicon Valley. What incentive would he have to steal kids’ identities? Besides, he’d made extensive updates to the school’s network and had probably accessed every file on the system.
The tiny office of Arthur Silsby, the attendance clerk, sat to the side of the reception area. Arthur sat at a beige metal desk on one of those oversized rubber balls. He stared at his computer screen, typing information into the system. Suddenly, he erupted in a sputtering cough, pulled an inhaler from his breast pocket, and took a quick puff. Kshhh.
Arthur wasn’t getting rich keeping track of the students’ tardies and absences, but I couldn’t imagine a guy like him stealing the kids’ identities, much less having a girlfriend to order all that frou-frou stuff for. Then again, he was short and small-boned for a guy and could easily fit into those silk panties and bra. Still, I wasn’t about to perform a strip search on him to find out if he was a secret cross-dresser.
With the other potential perpetrators eliminated, that left only Tiffany. It was likely she’d accessed the files as part of her duties assisting Mrs. Nelson. The rich bitch wouldn’t have any reason to steal kids’ identities when she had a dozen credit cards of her own. Heck, she’d had so many, they’d fallen out of her wallet when I’d pulled her over and asked to see her driver’s license. She’d had to scramble to gather them all up.
Wait a minute . . .
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MADAME BEULAH WAS RIGHT
My eyes snapped wide open. “Gah!”
What an idiot I was. The clues had been right in front of me all the time. All those credit cards. Tiffany driving by the Parker House when she had no business on Renfro Road. The handwriting, too. Now I remembered where I’d seen it—on Tiffany’s speeding citation. The I’s in Tiffany’s signature had been topped with the same fierce slashes that appeared on the credit card applications. With her daddy gone bust, Tiffany had to finance her lifestyle somehow. She’d likely known his financial and legal woes were coming long before her father had been arrested.
Busted.
I sat the report on the desk next to Trey and pointed to Tiffany’s name. “It’s her.”
“The college girl who acts like she owns the place?”
“You know Tiffany?”
Trey snorted. “She tore me a new one last week because the system crashed and she couldn’t get online to check her emails. She’s a royal bi—.”
“A-hem.” Gwennie gestured with her head toward a young Latino boy standing at the front counter, only his eyes and the top of his head visible over the countertop. Gwennie pulled a ruler out of a pencil cup on the counter and brandished it at me and Trey. “Y’all ain’t too old to get your hands slapped, you know.” Having properly chastised us, she turned to help the boy.
I pulled a rolling chair up next to Trey and sat. “So Tiffy got in a snit when she couldn’t check her e-mails? Maybe there’s some incriminating evidence in them. I’d probably need a warrant to look at them, though.”
Having finished with the boy, Gwennie turned to us. “All the employees are warned not to use the school computers for personal purposes. They sign a form agreeing that the administration can access anything they do online. Would that be good enough?”
“Sure would,” I said. After all, if someone was wrongfully stealing the students’ private information, this was not only a police matter, but a school matter, too.
Gwennie gave us a nod. “Have at it, then.”
Trey worked the keyboard and mouse, performing his magic, and the next thing I knew we were into Tiffany’s e-mail account. We scrolled through the messages and learned she was at risk for failing Children’s Literature 101 and had a sorority mixer with the boys of Beta Theta Pi Friday night, the theme being Bahama Beach Bash. Unfortunately, we found no smoking gun, though she’d mentioned in an e-mail to one of her sorority sisters that she’d scored the perfect outfit for the mixer. Maybe the outfit was one she’d ordered with a fraudulent credit card.
The communication was the closest thing we had to evidence. I printed out the e-mail, though any halfway competent defense attorney could poke all kinds of holes in it.
I stepped up next to Gwennie. “I’d like to speak to Tiffany Tindall. Could you page her to the office?”
Before Gwennie could answer, Arthur’s high-pitched voice squeaked from his office. “Tiffany isn’t here today. She called in sick.” He took another puff from his inhaler. Kshhh.
Looked like I’d have to wait until tomorrow to approach Tiffany. At least the pending bust would give me something to think about other than Trey leaving, though I wasn’t sure anything short of a nuclear bomb or the second coming of Christ could take my mind off that. It felt as if my heart were in a chokehold from which it would never break free. I looked at Trey and bit my lip to keep from crying.
“Lorene’s?” Trey asked.
“It’s sloppy Joe day in the cafeteria.”
Trey made a disgusted face. “Remember the chocolate pudding? The hair net?”
“That was twenty years ago. Get over it.”
He cocked his head. “They serve ‘em with tater tots here like they do in Hockerville?”
“Tots and baked beans.”
“The Jacksburg lunch ladies treat you right. Let’s do it.”
We made our way into the cafeteria and took places in line behind a fourth-grade class. When we reached the serving area, I took an orange plastic tray for myself, handing another to Trey. We slid our trays along the metal rails. One of the lunch ladies slopped a heaping pile of ground meat and sauce onto a bun, another added the tots, and a third spooned up beans. She handed the
divided plates to us over the top of the sneeze guard.
Trey rubbed his belly. “This looks delicious. Thanks.”
The woman shot Trey a skeptical look. Maybe she knew something about the food we didn’t.
We continued down to the end of the line, grabbed a couple of pints of chocolate milk, and paid for our meal. We settled across from each other at the end of one of the long cafeteria tables, both of us digging in the instant our butts hit the seats.
“How was your morning?” Trey asked between huge, gooey bites of sloppy Joe. “See anyone interesting out on the highway?”
A hot blush rushed up my neck to my face. I’m not sure why. It’s not like he could read my mind and know I’d seen the Ninja. Besides, I had no real interest in the Ninja rider anymore. He couldn’t possibly be as funny, smart, and fun-to-be-with as Trey. Trey had ruined me for other men, damn him.
I shook my head and looked down at my plate, poking at the pile of tater tots with my fork. I could feel Trey’s gaze lock on the top of my head like the point of a laser beam. I jabbed my fork into the tater tots and dipped them in ketchup.
“No one at all?” he asked. “No murderers? No octogenarians with big ol’ boners? No marijuana farmers?” He paused a moment. “No Ninja?”
I looked up, a bit surprised he’d mention the Ninja after he’d been so angry Sunday when he’d discovered the computer searches I’d run. My eyes locked on Trey’s. “I saw no one of any significance to me.”
We sat for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes, an invisible connection between us. Trey and I were meant for each other, right for each other. Why did fate—that sick, twisted bitch—keep toying with me like this? Why did she make it impossible for me to be with the man I loved?
My appetite gone, I set my fork down on my plate.
Trey put down his half-eaten sandwich and looked down, too. When he looked up again, his face was dead serious. “Marnie,” he said softly, “I’ve got to come clean with you.”
“Come clean? What do you mean?” The tense, guilty look on his face caused nausea to form in my stomach.
He hesitated a moment, looking away before looking back at me again. His shoulders slumped. “God, I don’t want to tell you this.”
My skin felt prickly and raw, as if I’d shaved over goose bumps. His anguished expression told me that whatever he had to come clean about wouldn’t be good, and it wouldn’t be insignificant, either. I took a deep breath. “Shoot.”
Trey reached across the table for my hand, but instinctively I pulled it back. Hurt flashed across his face, and he pulled his hand back, too. He leaned toward me, his voice low. “My boss called this morning. The company’s planning a sequel to Felony Frenzy. They want me to head the project.”
My entire body went numb, as if Novocain had flooded in my bloodstream. I stared at Trey. My voice cracked as I forced it out through a throat constricted in fear and rage. “You told him no, right?”
Trey paused a moment, then slowly shook his head. “Marnie, I was one of the programmers for the original Felony Frenzy. It wasn’t my concept, but I’m the fastest programmer they’ve got so I was asked to work on it. This time, they’d want me to lead the team. It would mean a big raise and—”
“But you’re already making good money, more than you could possibly need. You told me so yourself.” My voice sounded pleading, desperate. But I was desperate. Desperate to believe this was not happening, desperate to believe the man I’d fallen for was not a greedy, lying bastard in disguise.
“It’s not really about the money.” Trey’s tone turned defensive. “This is a huge, cutting-edge project, Marnie. A career maker. The kind any computer geek would give his left nut to work on.”
I stared across the table. “Keep your nuts. Work on another project. Maybe another educational game. Or even one of those war games. But not Felony Frenzy, Trey. Anything but that.” My entire body felt tight, brittle, every muscle tensed, waiting for his response.
“No other project has the level of funding the company’s putting into Felony Frenzy 2. This is the company’s primary focus. My chance to lead something huge.”
I could only stare at him, wondering how the man sitting across from me could be the same man who had held me in his arms and comforted me while I bawled like a baby, the same man I’d confided in about the shooting that had sent me into a downward spiral. The same man whom I’d opened myself up to completely, emotionally and physically, believing he’d done the same. I could forgive him for working on the first game, but if he could work on the sequel now, after getting to know and purportedly love me, what did that say about him? About us?
Trey clenched his jaw, a vein in his neck standing out as he looked at me. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, Marnie. It was awful. But that was real. This isn’t. Felony Frenzy is just a game. It’s mindless entertainment.”
Torturing innocent people and killing cops was just a game? Mindless entertainment? It was so much more to me. And he, of all people, should know that.
I wouldn’t—couldn’t—allow myself to love a man who would be involved in such a disgusting, worthless endeavor, who promoted senseless brutality and violent crime as trivial amusements. Everything Trey had meant to me, everything we’d shared the past two months, suddenly felt cheap, meaningless, and fake. Simulated, like a video game in which you can role-play for a while then walk away from with no real consequences.
I was working so hard to fight back the onslaught of emotion in me that I couldn’t speak. I’d loved the man I thought Trey was. And now I found out he wasn’t that man at all. I felt so betrayed, so cheated.
Trey’s hands clenched into fists atop the table. “The company’s giving the project a huge budget. We’ll be able to develop graphics like the video game world has never seen before. Very realistic, lifelike stuff.”
Finally, I found my voice again. “Realistic, lifelike stuff, huh?”
He nodded.
I put my hands, palms-down on the table and stood, leaning toward him, my face only inches from his. “Be sure that when you show a cop getting his head blown open to use lots of maroon. When that much blood is in one place at one time, it isn’t red. And they may call the brain ‘gray matter,’ but it’s really more of a putty color, so get that right when you program someone’s head exploding.”
My voice had grown loud and risen an octave, causing a hush in the room as all of the tiny heads turned to watch us. “And if you want it to be realistic, make sure you include a funeral scene with devastated children who will never see their father or mother again, kids who run out of tears before they’re done crying, grief-stricken spouses left with bills they can’t pay because the police department couldn’t afford to provide good life insurance. And make sure you include a cop who has nightmares for years after being forced to shoot a homeless man!”
I felt an ironic urge to slap Trey across the face and, though the bastard deserved it, I wasn’t about to do it in front of a roomful of school children. I grabbed my plastic tray off the table, dumped the remains of my lunch in a garbage can, and slid the tray onto the counter for the dishwasher.
I stormed out of the cafeteria, past the gaping students, down the hall, and out the front door, hot, salty tears burning my eyes, blurring my vision. The last two months had been a joke. A twisted joke. To Trey, crime and violence were just a game. To me they were anything but. With such polar opposite views, we’d never make it as a couple, even if we could somehow overcome our other problems.
Trey was on my heels, calling my name, grabbing at my arm, but I shrugged him off and didn’t turn around. There was nothing left to say. If he could do this, work on Felony Frenzy 2, what we had was over. Case closed.