“I guess I’m fired?”
“You’ll have to talk to McFaden about that.”
“They don’t really fire teachers anymore. They just give them the shittiest classes until they quit or kill themselves.”
Faith did not respond.
“I saw them take Evan out of the school in handcuffs.”
“He admitted to having sex with Kayla Alexander.”
“Did he take Emma?”
“We’re building a case against him,” Faith told her. “I can’t tell you details.”
“He was my teacher at Crim thirteen years ago.”
“That’s a pretty bad neighborhood.”
“I was a pretty bad girl.” Her sarcasm was loud and clear, but there was pain underneath the boast, and Faith waited her out, figuring the best way to find the truth was to have Mary lead her there.
The woman slowly walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. She sat down with a heavy sigh, and Faith caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath. “Evan was the only bright spot,” Mary told her. “He’s the reason I wanted to be a teacher.”
Faith was not surprised. Mary Clark, with her pretty blond hair, her piercing blue eyes, was exactly Evan Bernard’s type. “He molested you?”
“I was sixteen. I knew what I was doing.”
Faith wouldn’t let her get away with that. “Did you really?”
Tears came into the woman’s eyes. She looked around for a tissue, and Faith got up to get her a paper towel off the roll.
“Thank you,” she said, blowing her nose.
Faith gave her a few seconds before asking, “What happened?”
“He seduced me,” she said. “Or maybe I seduced him. I don’t know how it happened.”
“Did you have a crush on him?”
“Oh, yeah.” She laughed. “Home wasn’t exactly nice for me. My father left when I was little. My mother worked two jobs.” She tried to smile. “I’m just another one of those stupid women with a father fixation, right?”
“You were sixteen,” Faith reminded her. “You weren’t a woman.”
She wiped her nose. “I was a handful. Smoking, drinking. Skipping school.”
Just like Kayla, Faith thought. “Where did he take you?”
“His house. We hung out there all the time. He was cool, you know? The cool teacher who let us drink at his place.” She shook her head. “All we had to do was worship him.”
“Did you?”
“I did everything he wanted me to do.” Mary shot her a searing look. “Everything.”
Faith could see how easily Mary had probably played into Bernard’s hands. He had given her safe harbor, but he was also the person who could bring it all to an end with one phone call to her parents.
“How long did it last?”
“Too long. Not long enough.” She said, “He had this special room. He kept the door locked. No one was allowed in there.”
“No one?” Faith asked, because obviously, Mary Clark had seen it.
“It was all done up like a little girl’s room. I thought it was so pretty. White furniture, pink walls. It was the kind of room I thought all the rich girls had.”
The man certainly was a creature of habit.
“He was sweet at first. We talked about my dad leaving us, how I felt abandoned. He was nice about it. He just listened. But then he wanted to do other things.”
Faith thought of the handcuffs, the vibrator they had found in Bernard’s special room. “Did he force you?”
“I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “He’s very good at making you think that you want to do something.”
“What kinds of things?”
“He hurt me. He …” She went very quiet. Faith gave her space, not pressing the woman, knowing that she was fragile. Slowly, Mary pulled down the collar of the baggy T-shirt. Faith saw the raised crescent of a scar just above her left breast. She had been bitten hard enough to draw blood. Evan Bernard had left his mark.
Faith let out a long breath of air. How close had she come as a kid to being just like Mary Clark? It was the luck of the draw that the older man in her life had been a teenage boy instead of a sadistic pedarest. “Did he handcuff you?”
Mary put her hand over her mouth, only trusting herself to nod.
“Were you ever afraid for your life?”
Mary did not answer, but Faith could see it in the woman’s eyes. She had been terrified, trapped. “It was all a game for him,” she said. “We would be together one day, and then the next, he would break it off with me. I lived in constant fear that he would finally leave me, and I would be all alone.”
“What happened?”
“He quit in the middle of the year,” Mary told her. “I didn’t see him again until my first day at Westfield. I just stood there like a gawking teenager, like it was thirteen years ago and he was my teacher. I felt all these things for him, things that I shouldn’t feel. I know it’s sick, but he was the first man I loved.” She looked up at Faith, almost begging her to understand. “All the things he did to me, all the humiliation and the pain and the grief … I don’t know why I can’t break this connection I have with him.” She was crying again. “How sick is that, that I still have feelings for the man who raped me?”
Faith looked at her hands, not trusting herself to answer. “Why did Evan leave your school?”
“There was another girl. I don’t remember her name. She was hurt really badly—raped, beaten. She said that Evan did it to her.”
“He wasn’t arrested?”
“She was a troublemaker. Like me. Another kid stood up for him, gave him an alibi. Bernard could always get kids to lie for him, but he still quit anyway. I think he knew they were onto him.”
“Did you ever see him again? I mean, after he left school, did he try to get in touch with you?”
“Of course not.”
Something in her tone made Faith ask, “Did you try to get in touch with him?”
The tears came back, humiliation marring her pretty features. “Of course I did.”
“What happened?”
“He had another girl there,” she said. “In our room. My room.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I screamed at them, threatened to call the police, said whatever stupid thing I could think of to get him back.” She stared at the markings on the doorjamb, the milestones of her children’s lives. “I remember it was pouring down raining, and cold—cold like it never gets here. I think it actually snowed that year.”
“What did you do?”
“I offered myself to him, whatever he wanted, however he wanted.” She nodded her head, as if agreeing with the memory that she had been willing to debase herself in any way for this man. “I told him I would do anything.”
“What did he say?”
She looked back at Faith. “He beat me like a dog with his hands and fists. I lay there in the street until the morning.”
“Did you go to the hospital?”
“No. I went home.”
“Did you ever go back?”
“Once, maybe three or four months later. I was with my new boyfriend. I wanted to park in front of Evan’s house. I wanted someone else to fuck me there, like I could pay him back.” She chuckled at her naiveté. “Knowing Evan, he would’ve stood at the window, watching us, jerking himself off.”
“He wasn’t there?”
“He had moved. I guess he was on to greener pastures, on to our illustrious Westfield Academy.”
“And you never spoke to him again—not until you saw him your first day at school?”
“No. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Before, he never left bruises where people could see them. That’s how I knew it was over. He kicked my face so hard that my cheekbone fractured.” She put her hand to her cheek. “You can’t tell, can you?”
Faith looked at the woman’s pretty face, her perfect skin. “No.”
“It’s on the inside,�
�� she said, stroking her cheek the way she probably soothed her children. “Everything Evan did to me is still on the inside.”
Will walked through the parking lot behind the Copy Right, feeling time start to crush in on him. Evan Bernard would be out of jail this time tomorrow. His accomplice was no closer to being identified. There were no clues to follow up on, no breaks on the horizon. The forensic evidence was a wash. The DNA would take days to process. Amanda was ruthless in her focus. She worked cases to win them, cutting her losses when she felt the odds stacking against her. Unless the four o’clock ransom call revealed something earth-shattering, she would soon start pulling resources, assigning priorities to other cases.
They thought Emma was dead. Will could feel it in the way Faith looked at him, the careful words Amanda chose when she talked about the teenage girl. They had all given up on her—everyone but Will. He could not accept that the girl was gone. He would not accept anything less than bringing a living, breathing child back to Abigail Campano.
He pressed the button beside the door and was buzzed in immediately. As Will walked down the hallway to the Copy Right, he could hear the high-pitched whir of the machines working at full speed. The construction crew on the street added to the cacophony, hammer drills and concrete mixers providing a steady beat. Inside the store, the plate-glass windows facing Peachtree Street were vibrating from the activity.
“Hey, man!” Lionel Petty called. He was sitting behind the front counter, his head bent over a paper plate that contained a very large steak and French fries. Will recognized the logo on the paper sack beside him as that of the Steakery, a fast-food place specializing in large portions of dubiously inexpensive meat.
“You got my phone call!” Petty said, obviously excited. “The construction crew came back this morning. I was shocked, man. Somebody must’ve screwed up their orders.” He looked closely at Will. “Damn, man, you got creamed.”
“Yeah,” Will said, stupidly touching his bruised nose.
The noise level died down a bit and Petty stood up to check the machines.
Will asked, “The contractors—is it the same crew?”
He stopped at one of the copiers and began loading in reams of paper. “Some of them look familiar. The foreman’s been coming in and out of the garage with his big-ass truck. Warren’s pissed about it, but there’s nothing we can do because we don’t technically own the lot.”
Will thought about what the manager had told him, how most of their customers never came to the building. “Why does he care?”
“The trash, man—all that litter. It’s a matter of respect.” He closed the machine and pressed a button. The copier whirred back to life, adding a deep hum to the chorus of spinning wheels and shuffling paper. Loud beeping came from outside as a Bobcat front loader backed into position to move the steel plates off the road.
Petty sat down in front of his meal. “The dust gets dragged all over the carpet. It’s so fine that we can’t vacuum it up.”
“What dust?”
Petty cut into the meat, grease and blood squirting onto the paper plate. “The concrete they use underground.”
Will thought of the gray powder. He glanced back at the construction workers. The Bobcat rammed its front shovel into the edge of one of the steel plates, revealing a gaping hole in the road. “What does it look like?”
Petty cupped his hand to his ear. “What?”
Will didn’t answer. The hand at Petty’s ear held a cheap-looking knife. The handle was wood, the grommets holding it together a faded gold. The blade was jagged but sharp.
Will tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly going dry. The last time he had seen a knife like that, it was lying inches from Adam Humphrey’s lifeless hand.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Faith stood outside the conference room door in Victor’s building. Behind the glass, she could hear the low murmur of male voices. Her mind was elsewhere—back in Evan Bernard’s apartment where he kept his pink vibrator and handcuffs in his little-girl bedroom. Were these the same devices he had used on a teenage Mary Clark? What were some of the sadistic things he’d gotten up to with the girl? Mary wasn’t telling, but the truth was written all over her face. He had damaged her deeply in ways the other woman could not articulate—would probably never be able to articulate. It made Faith sick just thinking about it, especially when she was certain that Mary was just one of many, many victims the schoolteacher had targeted over the years.
Faith had called the resource officer at Alonzo Crim High School as soon as she’d made her way out of Grant Park. There was no record of the alleged rape that had forced Evan Bernard to leave his position. Mary Clark could not remember the girl’s name—or at least she claimed not to. No charges had been filed against Evan Bernard, so the local precinct had no records of an investigation. Of the hundred or so current faculty members, none had been around during the time Mary Clark was being sadistically abused. There were no witnesses, no evidence and no accomplices in sight.
Still, somewhere out there was another person who knew exactly where Emma Campano was. Will seemed to think there was a chance that the girl was still alive, but Faith held no such illusion. If the killer had a living victim, he would have recorded another proof of life for the second call. This was all well planned out. Bernard was the calm one, the one who remained in control. The Campano house told them that the killer, Emma’s abductor, was not similarly gifted. Something must have gone horribly wrong.
Faith had ripped open the envelope her gas bill was supposed to be mailed in and used it to store the yearbook photos of Kayla Alexander and Evan Bernard. She opened it now and looked at Evan Bernard’s school photo. He was a good-looking man. He could have easily dated women his own age. Without prior knowledge, Faith would have dated him in a heartbeat. A well-educated, articulate teacher who tutored kids with learning disabilities? There had probably been women lined up at his front door. And yet, he had chosen the young girls who didn’t know any better.
Just being in the teacher’s house this morning had made Faith feel filthy. His barely legal porn and the painting of the young woman on his bedroom wall all pointed to his sick obsession. She was just as furious as Will that he would easily make bail tomorrow. They needed more time to build a case against him, but right now, the only thing they had to go on was a missing hard drive and a fingerprint that did not belong to their only suspect. And still, there was a nagging question in the back of Faith’s mind: was Bernard the key to all this, or was he just a disgusting distraction from the real murderer?
Faith could well understand what a forty-five-year-old man wanted with a seventeen-year-old girl, but could not fathom what had attracted Kayla Alexander to Evan Bernard. His hair was going gray. He had deep wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He wore suit jackets with corduroy patches at the elbows and brown shoes with black pants. Worse, he had all the power in the relationship, and not just because of his job.
By virtue of the fact that Bernard had simply lived longer than Kayla, he was smarter than her. In the twenty-eight years that separated their ages, he’d garnered more life experiences, gotten more relationships under his belt. It must have been so easy for him to seduce the willful child. Bernard was probably the only adult in her life who encouraged Kayla’s bad behavior. He would have made her feel special, as if he was the one person who understood her. All he would have wanted in return was her life.
At the age of fourteen, Faith had been similarly tricked by a boy who was only three years her senior. He had compromised her in so many ways by holding the threat over her head that if she stopped seeing him, he would tell her parents all the things she had done with him. Faith had just dug herself deeper and deeper, skipping school, breaking curfew, being at his beck and call. And then she had gotten pregnant and he had tossed her aside like a piece of garbage.
The conference room door opened as the meeting adjourned. Men in suits poured out, blinking in the sunlight coming through the windows. Victor seeme
d surprised to find Faith waiting for him. There was an awkward moment where she reached out to shake his hand just as he went in to kiss her cheek. She laughed nervously, thinking she couldn’t adjust to who she was supposed to be right now.
“I’m here for my job,” she told him by way of an explanation.
He held out his hand, motioning for her to walk with him. “I got a message that you called earlier. I was hoping it was for a date, but I reached out to Chuck Wilson anyway.”
Wilson was the scientist who was analyzing the gray powder Charlie Reed had found. “Does he have anything?”
“I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. I made him promise he’d get to it today.” He smiled. “We could go to lunch and check with him afterward.”
“Sooner would be better. Is there a way to call him?”
“Of course.”
They went down a small stairway. She told him, “I need to talk to one of your students, too.”
“Which one?”
Faith played with the envelope in her hand, the pictures of Kayla and Bernard. “Tommy Albertson.”
“You’re in luck,” Victor said, glancing at his watch. “He’s been waiting for me in my office for the last hour.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“That’s what the meeting was about.” Victor took her arm and led her down the hallway. He lowered his voice. “We’ve just gotten approval to begin the process of expelling him.”
The parent side of Faith experienced a mild form of panic at the thought. “What did he do?”
“A series of extremely stupid pranks,” Victor told her. “One of which resulted in destruction of school property.”
“What property?”
“He backed up the toilets on his hall last night. We think he used socks.”
“Socks?” Faith asked. “Why would he do that?”
“I’ve given up asking myself why young boys do anything,” Victor commented. “My only regret is that I won’t be the one who gets to tell him he’s out of here.”
“Why not?”
“He gets an opportunity to face the expulsion committee and explain his case. I’m a tad concerned because there are some kindred spirits on the panel. It’s made up of Tech graduates, most of whom participated in their fair share of idiocy while they were on campus, and most of whom went on to excel in their chosen careers.”
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 71
