“Here we go,” Charlie said, pulling up a chat room. Faith leaned in for a closer look, but the site was one intended for teachers who were looking to retire. Another chat room was for West Highland terrier lovers.
Will asked, “What about the first site?”
Charlie went back to Barely Legal. “It’s got a disclaimer on the front that says all the girls are of age. As far as the Internet is concerned, as long as they’re not obviously underage, like, children, then that’s all you need.”
Faith looked around the room, feeling a slight sense of disgust as she thought about Evan Bernard sleeping here. She went to the bedside table and opened the drawer from the bottom with her foot. “More porn,” she said, not touching the magazines. There was a girl on the front cover who looked about twelve, but the masthead insisted otherwise, proclaiming, Legal Horny Honeys.
Will had slipped on a pair of gloves. He pulled out the magazines. All of them had teenage-looking cover girls. All of them implied that the girls were of legal age. “Perfectly legal.”
“Detective?” Ivan Sambor’s large frame filled the doorway. He held a couple of plastic evidence bags in his meaty hands. Faith saw a large pink vibrator and a set of fur-lined handcuffs, also pink. “Found these in the other room.”
Will said, “Tell the lab those have priority.”
Ivan nodded, leaving the room.
Faith told Will, “Bernard doesn’t have any other properties in his name either in the state of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee or Alabama.”
“Let’s broaden the search,” Will said, though Faith thought that was a shot in the dark. Bernard would not use his real name if he had a silent partner to act as a front.
She said, “I’ve got a team calling all the storage rental places within a thirty-mile area.”
“Check under the names of any family members,” Will told her. “We need to know who his friends are. Maybe there’s an address book.” He glanced around the room, scanning every piece of furniture, every painting on the wall. “The judge limited the scope of our search warrant to evidence tying Kayla Alexander to Bernard. We could argue that we’re looking for names of other victims. Even if he’s convicted for Kayla, Bernard could be out in two to three with good behavior.”
“He’ll be a registered sex offender. He’ll never teach again.”
“That’s a small price to pay for kidnapping and murder.”
“You’re sure he’s involved in the other crimes, that it’s not just what he said: he had sex with her, she went her way, he went back to school?”
“You saw that bedroom, Faith. He’s into young girls.”
“All that means is that he is into raping them, not murdering them.”
“He learned in Savannah that it’s dangerous to leave witnesses.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Charlie said, “but maybe you should consider the fact that he was also looking into retiring.”
Will seemed puzzled. “How do you know that?”
“The Web site?” Faith asked, wondering how he had forgotten about it so quickly. “Charlie, pull it up again.”
Charlie did as she asked, finding the correct Web page. He scrolled through the list of questions and responses. “I’m not sure what screen name he went by. They’re all pretty innocuous.” He clicked to the next page. “Basically, they’re talking about what benefits they retain after retirement, consultancy jobs to help pay the bills—that sort of thing.” The screen changed as he selected a new link. “Georgia’s teacher retirement program.” He leaned closer to the screen to read the details. “All right, this deals with private versus public school teaching. With the state retirement program, you have to have a certain number of years vested to qualify for a pension. Private, you’re on your own.” He scrolled down, skimming the text. “It says here that they have to go thirty years to get full retirement.”
“Maybe he decided he couldn’t wait it out,” Faith said. “A million dollars would certainly help pave the way toward a comfortable early retirement.”
Will told her, “Bernard’s only been at Westfield for twelve years. He told us he was teaching in the public school system at one point. Let’s find out where he taught before that.”
“He would’ve left in the mid-nineties,” Faith said, doing the math in her head. “Maybe there was some impropriety they swept under the rug.”
“I know teachers don’t make a lot of money, but don’t you think it’s odd that he’s living in this crappy apartment at his age?”
Charlie suggested, “Maybe he’s been spending all his spare cash on flights to Thailand to pick up underage girls.”
Faith asked, “Do you think we have enough cause to look at his financial records?”
Will shook his head. “We didn’t list financial documents in the search warrant.”
Charlie cleared his throat. Faith looked at the computer screen. He had pulled up Evan Bernard’s accounts at the local credit union. “Let this be a lesson not to store your passwords in your key-chains.”
Will said, “Check to see if he made any payments to storage facilities.”
Charlie moved the mouse around, highlighting each account as he read through the details. “Nothing’s popping up. He pays twelve hundred a month for this place. His utilities are about what you’d expect. Groceries, dry cleaners, car payments, a couple of PayPal payments.” He read through the rest. “It looks like most of his money goes into his 401-K. The guy’s socking it away for retirement.”
Faith asked, “What does he bring home every month?”
“Around twenty-three hundred.”
Faith stared at the computer screen. She could hear policemen outside the window, laughing about something. Traffic noise from the street filled the air with a low hum. This was the sort of place you rented when you were fresh out of college, not heading toward your fifties and looking to retire. She said, “Evan Bernard’s been teaching for how many years and he doesn’t own his own house?”
“Could be divorced,” Charlie suggested. “An ex-wife could have bled him dry.”
“We’ll check court records,” Will said. “If he’s got an ex, maybe she found out what he was doing and left him. If we can corroborate that Kayla was a pattern, we might be able to get a judge to deny bail.”
“We already tried the neighbors. Most of them were gone—probably at work. There’s a stay-at-home mom in the unit across the garden. She says she’s never met Bernard, never seen anything suspicious going on.”
“Send a couple of units back around seven tonight. More people should be home by then.” Will went to the closet and checked the top shelves. “Maybe he’s got a photo album or something.”
“We won’t find anything he doesn’t want us to.”
Will kept searching the closet, taking down boxes, checking their contents. “We know he was gone from the school for two hours.” He pulled out a stack of yearbooks and dropped them on the bed. There were almost twenty in all, their cheerful covers screaming school spirit. He picked up the top one, which was emblazoned with the Westfield Academy crest, and started thumbing through the pages. “That’s not enough time to do the murders, hide Emma and get back to school. The accomplice must have done the heavy lifting. Bernard would have known Emma came from a wealthy family.”
“Kayla’s parents were well-off. Why not take her, too? Why kill her if she represents money?”
Will closed the yearbook and held it in his hand. “Are we sure Kayla wasn’t involved?”
Faith glanced at Charlie, who was still checking out the computer files.
Will didn’t seem to mind talking in front of the man. “Kayla Alexander was a nasty piece of work.” He dropped the yearbook and picked up the next one. “We haven’t found one person who’s said otherwise.”
“She’d have to be pretty sick to be screwing Bernard in her car while she knew that her best friend was about to be kidnapped.” Faith considered something. “Maybe Kayla felt threatened by Emma’s affair with
Adam.”
Will picked up on her train of thought. “Kayla might know that Adam and Emma were parking in the garage. The nosey neighbor told on the girls last year. They had to find somewhere else to park.”
“I’ve been wondering why Kayla parked her white Prius in the driveway of the Campano house when she knew that the last time they were caught skipping, it was because the neighbor saw a car in the driveway.”
He stopped searching the pages. “Something’s bothered me since I saw the Prius in the parking lot. Everything the killer touched had blood smeared on it: the trunk, the door handles, the steering wheel. Everything except for the duct tape and the rope in the trunk.”
“Do you think Kayla brought them for the killer to use?”
“Maybe.”
“Hold on,” Faith said, trying to process all of this. “If Kayla was involved, why did she get killed?”
“She had a reputation for being nasty.”
“You’ve said all along that the killer must have known her.”
His phone started ringing, and he slid it out of his pocket. The thing was pathetic, the pieces held together with Scotch tape. “Hello?”
Faith picked up one of the yearbooks and thumbed through it so she wasn’t standing there doing nothing. She glanced up once at Will, trying to read his expression as he listened to the call. Impassive as usual.
“Thank you,” he said, then ended the call. “Bernard’s fingerprints don’t match the thumbprint on the letter.”
Faith held the yearbook to her chest. It felt heavy in her hands. “So his accomplice handled the threatening notes.”
“Why send the notes? Why show their hand?”
Faith shrugged. “Could be they were trying to scare away Adam so Emma would be alone in the house.” She contradicted herself. “In that case, why didn’t Kayla just drive Emma to the house? It had to be that they weren’t getting along.”
Will opened the Westfield yearbook from last year and flipped through the pages. “We need to go back to the beginning. There’s a second man out there.” He traced his finger across the rows of student photographs. “Bernard’s not the kind of guy who gets his hands dirty.”
“My friend at Tech said he would probably have news today,” Faith told him, hoping she wouldn’t have to be more specific about the vial of gray powder she had asked Victor to have tested. Will might have been okay speaking freely around Charlie Reed, but Faith didn’t know the man well enough to trust him with her career.
Will said, “Go to Tech. See if there are any results.” He found Kayla Alexander’s class picture and tore out the page from the yearbook. He handed it to Faith. “While you’re there, ask Tommy Albertson if he’s ever seen this girl hanging around either Adam or Gabe Cohen. Ask everybody in the dorm if you have to.” He flipped to another page and found Bernard’s faculty photograph. He tore it out, saying, “Show this one, too.”
Faith took the photographs.
Will opened another yearbook, searching for his own copies of the photos. “I’m going to go to the Copy Right and do the same.”
Faith looked at the bedside clock. “You said the next ransom call is supposed to come at four?”
Carefully, he tore out the right pages. “The killer is probably with Emma right now, getting the second proof of life.”
Faith put the yearbook on the bed. She started to walk away, but stopped, knowing something was different. She fanned out the yearbooks, finding the three that did not belong. They were thicker, their colors not as vibrant. “Why does Bernard have yearbooks from Crim?” Faith asked. The Alonzo A. Crim High School was located in Reynoldstown, a transitional area in east Atlanta. It was probably one of the seedier schools in the system.
Will told her, “At least we know where Bernard taught before he moved to Westfield.”
Faith was silent as she thumbed through the pages. She had never been one to believe in fate or spirits or angels sitting on your shoulder, but she had long trusted what she thought of as her cop’s instinct. Carefully, she skimmed the index in the back for Evan Bernard’s name. She found his photo in the faculty section, but he also sponsored the newspaper staff.
Faith found the appropriate page for the staff photo. The kids were in the usual silly poses. Some of them wearing fedoras that had “press” tags sticking out of them. Some had pencils to their mouths or were eyeballing the camera over folded newspapers. A pretty young blonde stood out, not because she wasn’t hamming for the camera, but because she stood very close to a much younger-looking Evan Bernard. The photo was black-and-white, but Faith could imagine the color of her strawberry blond hair, the freckles scattered across her nose.
She told Will, “That’s Mary Clark.”
According to a very angry Olivia McFaden, within half an hour of Evan Bernard’s arrest, Mary Clark had abandoned her classroom. The teacher had simply taken her purse out of the desk, told her students to read the next section in their textbooks, then left the building.
Faith found the woman easily enough. Mary’s beat-up Honda Civic was parked outside her family’s home on Waddell Street in Grant Park. People took good care of their homes here, but it was nothing like the richer climes of Ansley Park, where professionally manicured lawns and expensive gray-water reclamation tanks made sure the lawns stayed green, flowers kept blooming, all through the summer. Trashcans lined the road, and Faith had to idle the Mini while the garbage truck slowly made its way up the hill, emptying the cans and crawling along to the next house.
Grant Park was a family-friendly neighborhood that managed to be barely affordable while still being in the city limits of Atlanta. Trees arched overhead and fresh paint gleamed in the afternoon sun. The houses were a mixed variety, some shotgun style, some Victorian. All of them had seen a whirlwind of remodeling and renovation during the housing boom, only to find all their paper equity gone when the boom went to a bust.
Still, a handful of houses had been passed by in the race for bigger and better—single-story cottages popped up here and there, neighboring homes looming two and three stories above them. Mary Clark’s house was one of these poor cousins. From the outside, Faith guessed the house probably had two bedrooms and one bathroom. Nothing about the house overtly pointed to disrepair, but there was a certain air of neglect to the place.
Faith walked up the stone steps. A large two-toddler stroller of the type used for runners seemed to be taking up permanent space on the front porch. Toys were scattered about. The porch swing looked weathered from its place on the ground. The hardware and chains rusted in a pile beside it. Faith gathered someone had started the weekend project with great intentions but never followed through. The front door was painted a high gloss black, the window curtained on the other side. There was no doorbell. She raised her hand to knock just as the door opened.
A short, bearded man stood in the doorway. He had a small child on either hip, each in various states of oblivious happiness at the prospect of a stranger at the door. “Yes?”
“I’m Detective Faith Mitchell with the—”
“It’s okay, Tim,” a distant voice called. “Let her in.”
Tim didn’t seem to want to comply, but he stepped back, letting Faith come into the house. “She’s in the kitchen.”
“Thank you.”
Tim seemed to want to say something more to her—a warning, perhaps?—but he kept his mouth closed as he left the house with the twins. The door clicked shut behind him.
Faith glanced around the room, not knowing whether she was expected to stay here or to find the kitchen. The Clarks had chosen a post-college eclectic style for the living room, mixing brand-new pieces with old. A ratty couch sat in front of an ancient-looking television set. The leather recliner was modern and fashionable, but for faint scratches on the legs that showed signs of a recent visit from a cat. Toys were scattered all over the place; it was as if FAO Schwarz had fired off a bunker-buster from their New York headquarters.
A quick glance into the open doo
rway of what must have been the master bedroom showed even more toys. Even at fifteen, Faith had known not to let Jeremy have every room of the house. It was no wonder parents looked exhausted all of the time. There was no space in their homes that belonged completely to them.
“Hello?” Mary called.
Faith followed the voice, walking down a long hallway that led to the back of the house. Mary Clark was standing at the sink, her back to the window. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. Her strawberry blond hair was down around her shoulders. She was wearing jeans and a large, ill-fitting T-shirt that must have belonged to her husband. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed.
Faith said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Faith sat down at the table, a 1950s metal and laminate set with matching chairs. The kitchen was cozy, far from modern. The sink was mounted onto a one-piece unit that had been painted a pastel green. All of the cabinets were the original metal. There was no dishwasher, and the stove tilted to the side. Matching pencil marks on either side of the doorway celebrated each growth spurt Mary’s twins had experienced.
Mary tossed her coffee into the sink, put the cup on the counter. “Tim said that I should stay out of this.”
Faith gave her back her earlier comment. “Do you have a choice?”
They both stared at each other for a moment. Faith knew the way people acted when they had something to hide, just as she knew how to spot the cues that they wanted to talk. Mary Clark showed none of the familiar traits. If Faith had to guess, she would say the woman was ashamed.
Faith clasped her hands in front of her, waiting for the woman to speak.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 70
