The two officers looked down, averting eye contact.
They missed it.
“If what you say is true, can you give us the license plate of this vehicle you supposedly saw crash into the Prius?”
“We didn’t catch the plate number,” said Katy. “It was about five hundred yards ahead of us. It took off before we could get close.”
“You didn’t video it? You had your phones on you, didn’t you?”
“For goodness’ sake,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth. “Our priority was to get to Jayden. We’re not rubberneckers. We wanted to stop what was going on.”
The chief smirked.
He puffed his chest, then put his hands on his belt, and turned to his junior colleague.
“Private detectives from New York,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Ambulance chasers. Looking to rustle up business. That’s what they’re all like.”
I glared at him, my hands curling into fists. This corrupt cop who gave a bad name to all the good officers out there trying to do a difficult job.
“We’re trying to rustle up the truth,” I said, through gritted teeth.
He turned to me, his pale blue eyes icy cold now. He leaned in, his garlic-laden breath making me reel back.
“Do you know what I think really happened?” he growled.
“Tell me,” I said, summoning all my willpower not to growl right back.
“Mr. Brown was going to kill himself on that quiet stretch of the road. He drove into that ditch deliberately, but he didn’t plan on you two coming along, playing superwomen.”
“Are you saying we should have left him to die?” said Katy.
“I’m saying there’s no need for a cock and bull story about a phantom truck.”
A flash of anger shot through me.
“If you look closely, you’ll find the evidence. Truck tire marks on the asphalt, black paint marks on the side of the Prius. Go take a look yourself!”
He puffed his cheeks and leaned in, his thick finger two inches from my nose. “You gals can stop sticking your noses into what doesn’t concern you.”
“When someone gets rammed on the road or dies by gunshot, it concerns me,” I said, barely realizing I had raised my voice. “It should concern all of us!”
The chief stood up and shouted, this time so the entire kitchen would hear.
“Stop interfering with police business or you two can pack your bags and go back to wherever you came from!”
Katy and I sat stunned, while he pocketed his notepad and marched out of the kitchen, the junior cop in tow.
“Hey, y’all.”
We turned to see Sally Robertson standing by the door.
She waved, unsmilingly.
“Ms. May asked everyone to come to the dining hall,” she said. “She wants to talk—”
The disembodied voice of the school’s public announcement system came to life, interrupting her in mid-sentence.
“All staff, students, and members of the faculty are expected in the dining hall immediately.”
Loud groans came from the back of the kitchen.
“Another town hall?” said Cathy, walking toward us. “What about lunch? Does she expect that to be on time today too?”
Sally gave an unhappy shrug.
Harry turned to Cathy. “Tell them to order pizza. And I ain’t going to any town frigging hall meeting.”
“It’s mandatory,” said Sally, her voice rising in pitch. I wondered if she’d get into trouble if the kitchen staff didn’t show up. “She wants to talk to everyone about what happened this morning.”
“What if we don’t want to?” said Lou-Anne.
“Come on, folks,” Sally was saying, her voice strained. “Don’t make this any harder on me.”
Grumbling loudly, Cathy and her staff followed Sally out of the kitchen.
Katy took a step forward, but I pulled her back and pushed her into the pantry.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Shh,” I said, putting a finger on my lips.
Chapter Thirty-three
The kitchen was empty now.
“Won’t Martha May wonder where we are?” asked Katy.
“We’re not her staff. Besides, this is probably a public relations talk to keep everyone calm and quiet,” I whispered, gesturing for her to come with me.
“Do you really think she bribed that cop?” asked Katy, as she followed me toward the back of the kitchen.
“It’s hearsay. From a dead man, on top of it. But it would be just like Martha to bribe him to keep things quiet. It would be disgusting if he took it.”
“I don’t trust that man one bit.”
“I don’t trust anyone here, anymore.”
“Are we going to check Jayden’s room?” asked Katy.
“I’d like that, but we’d have to come up with a good excuse, now the cops have told us to stay away from their investigation,” I replied. “Let’s check Sam’s room before anyone objects.”
“They’ll throw a fit if they find out.”
“Let them. I’m not going to be bullied by an incompetent and corrupt local chief who may or may not be on Martha’s payroll.”
After accidentally walking into the janitor’s room, then a large storage room, we finally found the entrance to the basement.
It was an old door with rusty hinges that looked more like an entry to a storage closet.
Katy and I slipped through it and tiptoed down the narrow wooden stairwell.
A low corridor made of cold stone slabs greeted us as we opened the even smaller door at the bottom. There were rooms on both sides of the corridor, but their doors were closed.
The ancient curved ceiling was lined with modern fluorescent light bulbs. They flickered erratically and emanated a static hum that would drive anyone crazy after a while. I felt bad for Cathy and her team.
How could they stand living here?
The ceiling was so low, Katy hunched slightly to avoid hitting her head on the light fixtures. A musty smell hung in the air, like this corridor hadn’t been aired for a hundred years.
The low ceiling, the bleak stone walls, and the bright artificial light made me feel slightly nauseous.
“When you said this building was like something out of a horror flick, you weren’t that far out,” Katy whispered.
“It’s like a torture dungeon,” I whispered back.
I didn’t know if anyone was inside these rooms, even though the entire school was expected to be in the dining hall upstairs.
I tiptoed toward the closest door and gently turned the knob. It opened easily.
Katy and I peeked in.
It was a bedroom and there was no one inside.
We stepped in and closed the door behind us.
“It’s Cathy’s,” said Katy, pointing at the row of framed pictures on the cabinet, next to the bed.
She was right.
The head cook was in every one of them, surrounded by smiling people. Cathy looked much happier in the pictures than in real life, an easy grin on her face and those rosy cheeks making her appear more lively than I’d seen her at school.
I walked over to the windows and got on my toes to look out. A long glass pane lined the top half of the wall, but all I could see were the grass stalks that grew next to the building.
“We’re in a sunken basement,” said Katy, peeking over my shoulder.
“A cellar more like it,” I said. “This wasn’t built for people. This was where they probably stored grains and bulbs in the winter, a long time ago.”
“I’d get mad too, if my rent kept increasing every year in this place,” said Katy with a shudder.
What a sad place to call home, I thought. But despite the small size and the dreary atmosphere, Cathy’s room was spotless.
“They must share a common bathroom somewhere outside,” said Katy, opening the door to the tiny closet.
After a quick look, making sure not to disturb anything, we left Cathy’s
room, closing the door quietly behind us.
The other rooms were built similarly with the same tiny closet, motel bed, and a thin desk set against a wall, on which sat a small television.
“Martha won’t win any employer-of-the-year award, that’s for sure,” said Katy.
“I hope she hasn’t cleaned out Sam’s room yet,” I said, trying the next door.
It had been easy to identify each room as everyone had their name-tagged uniforms hung in their closets. We had to walk all the way to the end before we came to Sam’s room.
We knew instantly when we walked in it was his personal space.
Instead of a television set on his desk, there were piles of old books that rose all the way to the ceiling.
We scanned the titles. Most were science fiction classics from a long time ago, from Isaac Asimov to Jules Verne. Tucked in between them were vegan and healthy eating books and tomes on organic gardening.
“He needed a good bookshelf,” said Katy. “Poor man.”
On the bedside table was a desktop. It was a big, bulky computer that looked like it had been built in the early nineties.
Taking a frayed towel from Sam’s closet, I stepped up to the computer. Using it to mask my fingertips, I pushed the power button on and waited.
Behind me, Katy was examining his closet, using a T-shirt as a substitute for a glove.
“He didn’t have much,” said Katy, “but I can’t help feeling he was happy.”
“Except for the way he got treated by the principal,” I said.
“One thing I’ll say for Sam is he was even neater than Cathy,” said Katy, walking over to the bedside table and opening a drawer.
I turned to her.
“You haven’t seen any drug paraphernalia in here, have you?”
“The room smells lemon-fresh clean. I can’t imagine Sam taking drugs,” she said.
I had to agree.
A drug addict’s room would look vastly different. Anyone who came in here would know Sam was a bookish nerd and a clean freak.
I was about to pull my phone out to call Win, when the ancient desktop came to life on the small screen.
“Doesn’t anyone use passwords anymore?” I said, as I clicked on an archaic email app and got into Sam’s inbox.
Most of his emails were to a local planetarium and the library. He didn’t seem like someone who communicated through email very often. I was about to give up scrolling, when one message from only two days ago caught my eye.
I clicked on it.
Nick Davies?
What did he have to say to Sam?
Chapter Thirty-four
“Hey, Katy,” I called out softly. “Come, see this.”
She stepped up to me and crouched next to the table.
“Seems like Sam was in bad pain,” I said, scrolling to the top of the email thread.
“He told us he had arthritis,” she said, as she read the note.
It was a conversation between Nick Davies and Sam, cordial and to the point.
Nick had been trying to convince the gardener he could get painkillers strong enough to help him, while Sam seemed reluctant. He’d been asking for more details, even wondering if the medication would be vegan.
“Strange,” I said. “I have a hard time imagining anyone opening up to Nick about something so personal.”
Katy nodded.
“Especially men from Sam’s generation. They’d die before admitting to any pain.”
“Maybe he was desperate?” I said, leaning back in the chair, wondering if his death hadn’t been cold-blooded murder after all.
I clicked on a few more emails. There were friendly notes exchanged between Sam and Jayden, mostly about football and books. Other than the one email thread with Nick, nothing else jumped out.
“What if it was Nick who did it?” I said.
Katy’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, Nick got the opioid and injected Sam with an overdose?”
“Was Nick in the dining hall all evening?” I asked, trying to recall where everyone sat that night.
“He was behind us, at the corner teacher’s table with Sally, so we didn’t see him the whole time.”
“That means he could have left the table any time, and we’d never have known.”
“Why would Nick do that?” asked Katy. “Was he trying to help Sam, or did he really kill him for some reason?”
“That’s what we need to find out.”
Katy shook her head. “It can’t be Nick. He’s the biggest scaredy cat here. Maybe it’s Martha May.”
“The boss everyone loves to hate?” I said. “Why would she kidnap her own student, kill her gardener, and go after the Phys Ed teacher she just fired?”
I paused to think this through.
“She couldn’t have been driving that black truck because she was at the school the whole time, and we were with her when Jayden got shot. She’s nasty but maybe not a killer on the rampage.” I turned to my friend. “Unless, she has someone working for her.”
Katy arched a brow. “Nick Davies?”
I sighed and closed the email app.
“And does any of this have anything to do with the mayor and his shenanigans?” I said, as I switched off the computer. “So many questions and not one answer that makes sense.”
I looked at the clock on my phone. The town hall meeting would be over soon, if not already. We couldn’t stay down here for much longer.
“At this rate,” I said, as we closed up and stepped back into the damp and dingy corridor, “I’m beginning to feel like we’ll find Brianna in a shallow grave in the woods.”
“Bad news,” said Win.
Katy and I were in our room on the third floor, perched on the edge of my bed, my phone on my lap.
On the other end of the line were Win, David, Tetyana, and Luc, all huddled around David’s desk in his office at the martial arts school next to my bakery back in New York.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“The school’s in the red,” Win replied. “It has a two and a half million-dollar credit line from the bank. Martha May has used it all and hasn’t paid a penny back. Interest is accruing, and the bank is calling, which means she’s in major arrears. There’s very little money in the school’s checking account either.”
“If you think you’re going to get paid for your work,” came Tetyana’s voice crisp and clear. “You might as well forget about it.”
“That bad, huh?” I said.
“That’s just one account,” said Win. “There could be others. I haven’t had time to look elsewhere yet.”
“She’s been up for two nights now,” came Luc’s tired voice. “I hardly get to see her these days. Stop giving her more work, guys.”
When Win sunk her teeth into something, it was hard for her to let go.
“How did you find all this?” I asked her.
“Well…” She hesitated.
My stomach sank. I hope this wouldn’t be another problem for Peace, my resident lawyer, to tackle in the future.
“You hacked into the school’s accounts, didn’t you?” said Katy, sitting up. “Didn’t we tell you—”
“Of course, I didn’t,” came Win’s indignant voice through the speakerphone.
“Win?” said David. “You’ve been avoiding us for the past two days. What are you hiding?”
We heard a sigh from Win.
I braced myself.
“I hacked into the bank.”
“What?” said Katy.
“Unbelievable,” said David.
“She is,” grumbled Luc on the other end.
I closed my eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t just say that.”
“I told you I’d get more information on the school for you, didn’t I?” said Win, her voice rising defensively. “Besides, Martha May won’t be able to hide this for long. If anyone does a credit check, say before making a large donation, they’ll find out everything. These aren’t national secrets, people.”
&nb
sp; “Normal people use Google to find stuff,” said Luc in a weary voice.
“I was careful,” said Win. “I went in quickly, got the info, and got out.”
“But what does this mean for the school?” I said, trying to get our discussion back on track. “It explains why the staff isn’t being paid well. It explains why she let go of the security company, and why she scaled down operations. But doesn’t she make a few million in revenue every year from tuition fees? Where does that money go?”
“That was what I was going to find out next,” said Win. “If you guys don’t freak out every time like this, I could have nosed around a bit more.” She paused. “Do you want me to check her accounts again?”
“No!” A chorus of voices came from both ends of the phone.
“I have no desire to spend my weekends visiting you in prison,” came Luc’s voice. “Besides, you don’t look great in orange.”
“I won’t get caught.”
“Famous last words.”
“Asha, are you guys doing okay?” said David, his voice laced with concern. “Do you need backup?”
“No, we’re fine,” I said quickly, giving a side glance at Katy. She nodded knowingly.
We’d left out the bit about the local chief receiving a bribe from Martha May for keeping quiet. We didn’t have any proof, and the last thing I wanted was to alarm everyone, or for Tetyana to blast up here on her motorcycle with an assault rifle strapped to her back.
It was just the thing David and she would plan if they suspected a potential threat to our safety.
Right now, all Katy and I wanted to do was stay at the school until we found the missing girl. Though we’d never met her, we felt like we owed it to her. This was a personal obligation now.
But with every passing hour, my gut said Brianna was in great danger.
“You have your Glocks on you?” said David.
“Yes,” said Katy and I at the same time.
“Tanto knives?” asked Tetyana.
“Don’t worry about us,” I said. “We’re prepared.”
“Always wear your Kevlar vests, girls,” said Tetyana in her training voice, the one she used on new students who didn’t listen to her.
Merciless Crimes: A Thrilling Closed Circle Mystery Series (Merciless Murder Mystery Thriller) Page 14