Catch Your Death

by Kierney Scott

  “No.” She wiped her eye with the back of her hand. “I mean, he was stressed but that is only because he was so conscientious. He put a lot of pressure on himself to do his best. Is that why this happened? Was it the pressure?”

  Jess didn’t say anything because she didn’t have an answer. Suicide was complicated. There was rarely one cause. Sometimes it was an impulsive act, spurred on by a single event, but more often than not it was brought on by a lingering insidious depression where the magnitude of the despair was so great that death offered the only hope for escape. “Did you notice a change in his behavior recently?”

  “He’s been agitated. Worried. I should have asked more questions.” She gulped.

  “It’s okay. What was he agitated about?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head.

  “Was it his grades? How was he doing in school?”

  “He has straight As. He has unconditional admission to Harvard, Yale, and MIT.”

  Jess looked up when she saw the pulsating light of a police car. The flashing lights weren’t necessary but at least they hadn’t turned on the sirens. The last thing they needed was to wake up every student on campus. That would be mayhem.

  Jess and Yvonne walked to the entrance of the building, Yvonne still pressed to her side.

  Five patrol cars and an ambulance had responded to the call. Admittedly Jess had never worked a suicide, but this was clearly overkill. They only really needed to send the one police officer to accompany the coroner.

  “Hi, I’m Special Agent Bishop. This is the house mother, Yvonne Crawford. We found the body of the deceased, Levi Smith. He’s in the shower area. We need to get that cordoned off before any of the other students wake up.” Jess spoke to who she assumed was the most senior officer. He was wearing plain clothes so was most likely a detective. His silver hair was combed back, slick to his head, the severe ridges of gelled hair leaving grooves of exposed scalp.

  “I’m Captain O’Rourke. Chief Hagan called me and asked me to come on down. These are my officers. They will handle it from here. Thank you for your help.”

  Jess’s eyes widened. The chief of the Washington DC police department had sent someone to personally respond to a suicide?

  Captain O’Rourke must have seen the surprise on her face because he added, “Hagan went to school here. So when he heard there had been an incident here, he called me and asked me to check it out. Again, thank you for your help.”

  Jess forced herself to smile. Thanking her was the polite way to say she was no longer welcome at the scene and they would not be requesting her help with any resulting investigation. “You’re welcome. Neither of us have touched the body but you’ll find my prints on the walls and light switch.” Jess spotted Jamison walking up the snow-covered path. She held up her hand to him in a stagnant wave.

  “Hey,” he said when he reached the threshold. Jamison towered over everyone. At six foot four and two hundred and thirty pounds, he had the ability to make everyone feel small. His size was intimidating but not half as much as his sheer presence. Everything about Jamison demanded respect. He didn’t even have to raise his voice to make grown men cower.

  “Hey,” Jess said. “This is my partner, Special Agent Briggs.” He hadn’t been her partner for a while but it was easier to introduce him like that than get started on their complicated history. “Yvonne, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to leave you for a second with Agent Briggs. I think I dropped my wallet upstairs. I need to grab that and then we’ll be on our way.” She turned to address Captain O’Rourke again. “Before we go, I’ll give you my direct line so you can call me with any follow-up questions.”

  Before he could respond, Jess was already making her way to the stairs. She stuck her hand in her pocket and absently stroked her wallet. She hadn’t dropped it. That was an excuse to search Levi’s room for a suicide note. Captain O’Rourke had shown his hand by telling her that the police chief was a Gracemount alumnus. O’Rourke was here for clean-up. This was all about disaster recovery. The school didn’t want it to get out there had been another suicide here. Reputation was everything in these places.

  Jess took the stairs two at a time. When she got to Levi’s room, she glanced behind her to make sure no one was watching before she opened the door. She didn’t bother knocking because she could hear Levi’s roommate snoring. Jess turned on the flashlight on her phone. She was confident the roommate would sleep through the apocalypse, but just in case she didn’t turn on the lights because she didn’t need a witness to what she was about to do.

  Jess did a cursory inspection of the room. Everything on Levi’s side of the room was neat and orderly. His maroon blazer hung over the back of the chair. Under the school insignia were several badges: a winged foot that represented he was on the track team, a lacrosse stick that said captain, a treble clef, presumably because he was in a band. Another pin said honor society, another had weighted scales. If she remembered correctly, that represented the debate team. The final pin was a chalice with the Eye of Providence etched above lips with a finger pressed against them. Below were two arching wings that looked like they were cradling the goblet. Jess narrowed her eyes as she studied the pin. She had no idea what club it represented but it looked Masonic. She couldn’t remember seeing anything like it when she was in high school, though to be fair she didn’t remember most of high school. Her dad was arrested when she was eight and most of her childhood from that point on was a blur, punctuated by lengthy interviews with psychologists and law enforcement as they studied her to see how she was coping, and hoping to get some insight into her father’s crimes through her. But Jess never told them anything of value. In the beginning, she was protecting her dad, but then she was protecting herself because no one could ever know that she had discovered her dad’s macabre secret years before the FBI had, and that she had said nothing.

  She scanned the small area, searching for anything that looked like a note or a journal. She picked up each of the binders she found and thumbed through them, studying each for anything that looked out of place before she sat her phone down on the desk that separated the two twin beds, but all she found were fastidious notes written in a small, neat script. The dark pencil strokes told her he pressed down forcefully as he wrote. There were comments in the margins from his teachers, all positive. So far, he looked conscientious, not suicidal.

  She pulled the mattress away from the box springs. The faint light reflected off a laptop, which was wedged between the headboard and the wooden slats. Jess let the weight of the mattress rest on her back so she could use both hands to pull it out. But it was stuck. She tugged again, this time putting her foot on the bed for leverage. The sharp trill of metal scraping against metal sliced the silence of the room. When she pulled the laptop free, a fresh gouge marked the front. Jess reached in to find what the computer had been stuck under. She lifted a thick, leather-bound book and examined the tarnished metal clasp that the computer had caught on. Her heart picked up speed when she realized it could be a journal but her excitement was soon dashed when she saw the small typeset of scriptures. She thumbed through the pages. At the top were neon Post-it notes with comments related to the text. Levi had been hiding a bible under his bed. Jess shook her head. With most boys she would expect porn or stolen exams, not highlighted passages from Isaiah.

  She unzipped her coat enough to hide the computer against her chest. If the chief of police had personally sent officers to respond, they were here to clean up and circle the wagons. They were here to cover this up. Five suicides in less than a year had the potential to destroy a school. She needed to find out exactly what had happened here that led to five boys taking their own lives.

  Jess zipped up her coat and then put the bible back on the bed. She hesitated for a few seconds before she picked it up again and placed it under her coat with the laptop. The bible would probably be locked up in evidence if she left it, and the family might want it. If they did, they deserved to have it. Jess
wasn’t a believer but she respected other people’s right to do whatever it took to get them through the day. She would make sure his family got it.

  “Jeanie,” Jess whispered into the silence. She shuddered as a chill ran the length of her spine. Jeanie was his family. She was who Jess would be giving Levi’s bible to. Icy tendrils wound their way over her body. This wasn’t a routine investigation, this was Jeanie’s family. The realization hit her like a lead ball bearing fired directly at her chest, robbing her of breath. She had known all night this investigation was different, personal, but she had compartmentalized by letting herself observe and process at a cognitive level without letting the reality penetrate any deeper.

  She closed her eyes for a second to give herself the distance she needed as the enormity of the situation hit her. All victims had families that loved and mourned them but Jess intentionally kept an emotional distance from victims’ families because the pain was too much for her. But there was no getting away from it here. “Oh shit.”

  Four

  Jess kept one hand pressed against her chest to keep the bible and laptop in place, and the other she wrapped around the banister as she ran down the stairs. She found Jamison and Yvonne at the entrance of the school. Yvonne was smiling and nodding. Her eyes were still red from crying but the color had returned to her cheeks. Jamison’s hands reached wide as he told a story. He had managed to make Yvonne stop crying and smile, to temporarily forget herself. Jess was right to have called him. He could handle any person, any situation. Whatever life threw at him, whoever he came across, he adapted, taking everything in his stride. That was Jamison’s gift.

  His other gift was his ability to scare the living shit out of every person he met with a single glance. People feared and respected him in equal measure. There was a duality in him: terrifying and calming.

  “We need to go,” Jess said before she had reached them. Jess would have liked to stay to make sure Yvonne was okay but she had just interfered with an active investigation by stealing a deceased boy’s laptop. It was not in her best interest to stay here and wait for the police to discover it was missing.

  Jamison turned to look at her, his dark eyes narrowed in question, but then he clocked how she was awkwardly holding her arms against her chest and he nodded without commentary. Jamison was the best partner Jess had ever had. They just got each other. And she had ruined it all by believing a serial killer over him. Their relationship would never recover from that because neither of them could ever forget the betrayal, but Jamison was professional enough to pretend that everything was okay. He was the one person better than her at compartmentalizing. “Okay. I’ll walk you back to your car. Where are you parked?”

  Jess kept walking until they were past the line of police cars. The snow crunched underfoot. It was hard now, packed down and frozen like sheets of ice. “Can you take me home please?” She didn’t have the right to ask him for anything, but here he was standing in the snow in the middle of the night.

  “Where’s your car?”

  Jess looked down at the white ground and then past him to the school. She wasn’t ashamed of how she coped and she would never apologize for it. “I got a taxi. I was out when I got the call.”

  The muscles along Jamison’s jaw tightened under his dark skin but he didn’t say anything; he just kept walking. They both knew what she meant when she said she was out. He knew the darkness that lived inside her and how she chose to quiet it. Once upon a time Jamison had been the one she trusted with all her secrets. Their past was long and complicated. They had gone from partners to friends to lovers and now here they were. There was not a word for the emotional stalemate they were locked in.

  Jess had to increase her pace to keep up with Jamison. “Are you going to ask me why I called you?”

  He didn’t turn to look at her. “I don’t think I want to know.”

  His words cut her. He still thought she was at the school to have sex. Bile rose in the back of her throat. “I came here tonight for Jeanie. She asked me to check on her nephew, Levi. When I got here, I found him dead. He’s the kid who committed suicide.”

  Jamison’s pace slowed. He turned back to face her. Fresh snow had begun to fall and two large flakes rested in his dark lashes. “What?”

  “That’s Jeanie’s nephew they’re carrying out right now in a body bag. She has no idea. I told her I would call her as soon as I found him. But how do I call her and tell her he is dead?” Her voice cracked under the strain of emotion she was trying not to let filter into her subconscious. Jess didn’t do feelings, good or bad. Her preferred state could best be described as numb. Not for the first time, she wished she could call Lindsay and ask her what to do. She always knew how to respond.

  “Shit.” When Jamison exhaled, a long billowy puff of air trailed out.

  “Yeah. Shit. And it gets worse. Levi is the fifth kid to commit suicide in that school in a year. And to make it even more complicated, Chief Hagan went to school at Gracemount Academy and he sent a captain to investigate. I need to find out why these kids did it. I need to find out for Jeanie.” Jess wasn’t like Lindsay: she didn’t have the words to comfort people when they cried. She wasn’t like Jamison: she couldn’t make people feel better, but she could give people answers. That was her skill, the one thing she had to offer. She could investigate and give people truth. She would find out why Levi died because it was the only thing she could do for Jeanie. “I’m going to call Director Taylor. There is a reason the Metropolitan Police want jurisdiction here and we both know it will be so they can cover up anything that shows the school in a bad light.” Jess glanced down at the time on her phone. It was just after two. She was not going to earn any points for waking up the FBI director in the middle of the night but she had to act fast. She didn’t want to give the school time to concoct a cover story. She had to interview people now when they were raw. That was when she was going to get honest answers.

  Jamison nodded. “You don’t want to call her.” It wasn’t a question. They both knew Jess would rather do anything other than tell Jeanie someone she loved was now dead. She didn’t want to hear Jeanie cry or feel the desperation in her voice, the unspoken pleas for answers. Dealing with the living was what haunted Jess, the people left behind to hurt. She could confidently walk into any prison in America and interview the most sadistic of killers but speaking to their victims destroyed her.

  “I’ll call her after I speak to Director Taylor. I need to get the go ahead to open an investigation.”

  “I’ll call her.” Jamison pulled out his phone. He sucked in an unsteady breath. The deep furrow that formed between his eyes told her that he did not relish the task either.

  Relief washed over her. With three words, the knot between her shoulders loosened. “Thank you.” She couldn’t ask him to do it but she was grateful he offered, not for her but for Jeanie. She deserved someone better than Jess delivering the horrible news; he would be compassionate and empathic and strong—everything Jess could only pretend to be.

  Jamison had been with her when she’d found Lindsay murdered. If he hadn’t been, she would be in jail now awaiting trial for murder because he was the only person who could have stopped her from shooting the person who had killed her best friend.

  Five

  Jess took two ibuprofen before she knocked on the door and waited to be invited into the director’s office. Not for the first time, she had already exceeded the daily recommended dose before lunch, but still the pain wouldn’t shift. She had read the warnings, she was aware that it was bad for her liver and her heart, but the only other choice was to switch to a prescription painkiller and she wasn’t prepared to do that. She wouldn’t risk addiction. She needed to stay alert for her job. It was all she had.

  She shifted from one foot to the other to control her nervous energy.

  “Come in.” His deep voice was muffled slightly by the door.

  Jess went in and closed the door behind her. She glanced around the room. She h
ad been in meetings with the director before but never in his office. It was larger than she expected but it was inviting despite its size. Solid wood panels gave the space warmth. Half of the room was the director’s personal office space and the other was a conference table which comfortably seated sixteen. “I’m sorry for calling you so late last night.”

  “Under the circumstances, it was warranted, I would say.” Director Taylor wrung his hands together. Dark spots covered his wrinkled skin, signaling his advanced years. He was nearing the end of his tenure as director, and once he had finished his decade in the position, he would most likely retire. “How is Jeanie holding up?” he asked.

  Jess blinked. It was a simple question, one that she would know the answer to if she had had the courage and decency to call Jeanie herself, but she didn’t. She couldn’t bear to hear the inevitable distress in her voice and know there was nothing she could do to mitigate it, so she had left it to Jamison. “She’s coming home tonight,” was all she could say.

  Director Taylor nodded, accepting her answer. “I can’t even imagine.” He pointed to the chair across from him, inviting her to sit. “And suicide no less. That is rough, always so many unanswered questions.”

  “Yes, sir.” Leather squeaked as it stretched under her weight as she sat. “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about. “Levi Smith wasn’t the first suicide at Gracemount Academy this year. He wasn’t even the second. His death was the fifth since August.”