Pushed

by Franklin W. Dixon

  Sounds, I told myself. Focus on the sounds. But there weren’t any. I listened harder. I didn’t hear any voices or movement out there.

  I braced my hands on the metal walls and slid the drawer open. I was right. The room was empty. I scrambled down to the floor and pulled open Frank’s drawer. Seeing him lying there was almost as freaky as being stretched out in one of the drawers myself.

  “So are we done here?” I asked Frank as he climbed free.

  “I just want to take another fast look at the coroner’s notes. I want to make sure we haven’t missed anything,” Frank told me. He crossed the room and grabbed the clipboard. “The report’s gone.”

  “Just his?” I asked.

  “I think so. The stack of forms doesn’t seem much thinner.”

  “Whoever just came in must have taken it,” I said.

  “I don’t like this,” Frank told me.

  “Me either. Let’s try to catch up with them. That paper is important evidence. We don’t want it going anywhere it shouldn’t,” I said.

  “They can’t have gotten too far,” Frank reasoned. We hurried to the door. Took a quick look out to make sure the hallway was empty and that no one would see us coming out of the morgue. The coast was clear. We stepped out of the room.

  “Hold up,” I said quietly. “I think I hear metal wheels. Hear that squeaking?”

  “Yeah. It’s coming from down there,” Frank answered. We raced after the sound. When we rounded the corner at the end of the hall, we saw two men wheeling a gurney. A sheet-covered body lay on top.

  I looked at Frank. “You think?” I asked softly.

  “One way to find out,” he whispered.

  We hung back and watched as the men rolled the gurney out a door leading to a parking lot. Then we followed. Through a small, square window crisscrossed with wires, we saw the men load the gurney into a truck.

  “Do they usually move bodies around in trucks?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much that’s usual in this situation,” Frank replied. “That body should be part of a police investigation. There hasn’t been enough time for that.”

  “Could they be moving him to another morgue, you think?” I asked as the men got into the cab of the truck.

  “It’s not like this one is overcrowded or anything,” Frank said. “There were empty drawers—as we both know. Feel like taking a little ride?”

  “You got it,” I answered. We left the building and ran over to the truck, keeping low to the ground. I tried to open the back door of the truck—locked, of course.

  But locked doors aren’t really a problem if you’ve been trained by ATAC. Frank pulled a lock pick out of his jacket pocket. The truck’s engine rolled over as he started working the lock.

  Frank got the door open just in time for us to jump on board as the truck began to move out of the parking lot. He clicked the door shut behind us.

  I pulled out my key chain. It had a tiny but super powerful flashlight on the end. I clicked it on, and the back of the truck was flooded with light.

  “This truck definitely isn’t meant to transport bodies,” Frank commented. It was true. Most of the space was jammed with furniture and boxes. The gurney looked bizarre among what looked like the contents of a regular moving van.

  “We might as well make sure this is who we think it is,” I said. I pulled back the sheet. It was Mark. I quickly covered his face again.

  “Here are the coroner’s notes,” Frank said, touching a sheet of paper that was stuck halfway under the body. He shook his head. “Why do I feel like we’re missing something?”

  I lifted the part of the sheet that was over Mark’s feet. “It’s not that we’re missing something,” I pointed out. “It’s that something’s missing. There’s no ID.”

  “That’s it!” Frank exclaimed. “That’s what was bugging me. No toe tag.”

  The truck started moving faster. We were clearly out of the stop-and-go traffic of Manhattan and on a freeway.

  “Where do you think they’re taking the body? And us?” I asked.

  Frank shook his head. “I don’t know. But I have a feeing it’s no place we want to be.”

  13.

  POTTER’S FIELD

  The truck pulled to a stop. The rumble of the engine died. “Help me move that couch out a little,” I said to Joe. “I think we can both squeeze behind it. Who knows what the goons driving the truck would do if they found us back here.”

  “I definitely don’t want to end up back in a morgue drawer today—or pretty much ever,” Joe stated.

  We shoved the couch out and scrambled behind it about two seconds before the back doors of the truck swung open. I tried not to even breathe as I heard the gurney being unloaded.

  As soon as the doors slammed closed, I sucked in a lungful of air. “Let’s see where we ended up,” I told Joe. We waited five minutes—five minutes that felt like twenty—so we wouldn’t run into the guys from the front of the truck. Then Joe and I climbed out.

  “Stay back,” Joe whispered. “The guys are still in sight.”

  I spotted them about a hundred feet away, standing on a small wooden pier that jutted out into what I assumed was the Long Island Sound. We definitely weren’t in Manhattan anymore.

  As we watched, using the truck as cover, the men loaded Mark’s body into an oyster boat. Within minutes, the boat was heading across the water, the motor the only sound along the deserted stretch of beach.

  “Let’s check the front of the truck,” suggested Joe. “See if we can find out who we’re dealing with.”

  “Good idea.” We trotted around to the front of the truck and got in. Joe started going through the glove compartment. I spotted a clipboard on the floor and picked it up.

  “Tess,” Joe burst out.

  “What?” I exclaimed.

  He waved a check in my face. “Made out to the Move It Moving Company, and signed by Tess.”

  I checked out the papers on the clipboard. “I’ve got a Tess signature too. This is paperwork from the morgue. It’s instructions to have Mark’s body transported to his family in D.C. Tess signed it,” I explained.

  “They definitely aren’t heading toward D.C.,” Joe commented.

  I looked out the window. The boat was heading toward a small island. “Hart Island,” I burst out.

  “What?”

  “Hart Island. I think that’s where they’re headed.” I pointed out another island in the Sound. “That’s the Stepping Stone Lighthouse over there. Hart Island is close to that. And the island the boat is heading to is small. It has to be Hart. They’re going to bury the body in potter’s field.”

  “Catch me up. I’ve never even heard of Hart Island,” said Joe.

  “Chet did a report about Rikers Island for history. He said one of the things the inmates had to do was bury bodies in the potter’s field on Hart Island. It’s where the city buries bodies no one claims.

  “Tess paid them to dispose of the body and the coroner’s notes. No body. No notes. No evidence,” I said.

  “And Tess wanted no evidence, because she killed Mark,” Joe added. “I think Mark found out whatever Evan discovered about the Haven. That’s what he was fighting with Tess about. She killed him so he couldn’t tell—just like she killed Evan!”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “But we need proof.”

  I opened my eyes at exactly three a.m. It’s a thing I can do. When I’m falling asleep, I repeat the time I want to wake up over and over in my head. And it always works, even when I’m really tired. And I was. That pier on the Long Island Sound was in the middle of nowhere. Joe and I’d had to walk more than five miles before we found a town with a bus that would take us back to the city.

  I got out of bed and shook Joe by the shoulder. “Wake up,” I whispered. He didn’t even roll over. At home, Aunt Trudy sometimes has to pour cold water over his head to get him up in the morning.

  “Joe, wake up,” I whispered again. I shook him harder.

  �
��It’s Frank’s turn to take out the garbage,” he muttered, eyes still closed. I think ATAC should train us how to wake up quickly. If they had a program like that I’d sign Joe up yesterday.

  “I’m going down to the kitchen. I’m not even going to bother with water. I’m getting ice cubes,” I threatened, speaking directly into Joe’s ear. I didn’t want to wake any of the other guys up.

  Joe sat up fast. “I’m awake. What time is it?”

  “It’s time,” I told him.

  He got out of bed and we crept downstairs to Tess’s office. It was locked. But, like I said, that’s never a problem. I pulled out the lock pick. A couple of flicks of the wrist, and we were in.

  Joe and I started searching the office. I took the desk, feeling like I was back at Mr. Davis’s campaign headquarters. You do a lot of grunt work as a detective—a lot of watching, a lot of searching through papers.

  The contents of Tess’s desk were pretty ordinary: business cards; paper clips—colored ones, not regular metal; rubber bands—also colored; and a stack of the Haven letterhead. I spun the desk chair around and pulled open the top drawer of her filing cabinet. It was filled with tax records.

  I started flipping through. “Wow, Tess makes, like, no money,” I told Joe. I did a fast calculation. “She pays herself just about minimum wage.”

  “Well, we already knew she doesn’t spend money on clothes, at least according to Karen,” Joe commented as he checked behind the books on Tess’s shelves.

  I kept flipping through the tax forms. No major changes in the amount of money Tess brought in from year to year. But I did notice something strange.

  “Tess didn’t claim any dependents,” I said. “Which makes sense from the time her son ran away. But even before that, she didn’t put him down on her tax forms.” I checked a few more years. “She’s never claimed him.”

  “That’s weird. Mom always says one of the reasons she’s glad she had children is because of the tax break,” Joe said.

  I frowned. “It’s really weird. But it doesn’t seem like it connects to Evan or Mark getting killed.”

  “Oh, score!” Joe said. “Tess has a floor safe. If there’s anything she doesn’t want anybody to see, it’s going to be in there.”

  I knelt down by the safe next to Joe. “Do you remember the tryout combination for this puppy?” he asked.

  “Three-seven-three. But I bet Tess is too smart not to have changed it,” I answered. All safes arrive from the manufacturer with a temporary combination in place. It’s amazing how many people who shell out big bucks for the security of a safe don’t bother to ever reset the combination. All safecrackers know the tryout codes for all the major safe companies.

  Joe entered the combination. “You’re right. She’s a smartie. I guess we’ll have to do it the hard way.”

  “The hard, long way,” I said. Cracking a safe isn’t like in the movies. You don’t just stick your ear to the door and twiddle the knob a little to open the door. Well, actually you mostly do. But it takes a lot longer than the thirty seconds it does on screen.

  “I’ll start us out.” Joe started slowly turning the knob of the dial lock, listening intently. He was trying to figure out the contact points.

  You have to be able to picture the inside of a lock to get what that means. There’s a spindle that runs from the knob through several wheels, one wheel for each number of the combination. Each of these wheels has a small metal tab sticking out of it. Each wheel also has a notch cut into it. The spindle ends in a drive cam. The drive cam has a drive pin attached to it.

  Joe here. You don’t really have to know all this stuff. You just have to know I’m picking the lock of the safe.

  Frank here. This is my section. And I’m describing the inside of a lock because you can’t understand how a safe is cracked if you can’t picture the inner workings.

  So anyway, when you turn the knob of the safe, the spindle turns the drive cam. As the drive cam turns, the drive pin moves along the closest wheel until it hits the metal tab on the wheel. The tabs are called wheel flies, if you want to get technical about it. When the pin hits the wheel fly, the wheel starts to turn too.

  Then the wheel fly on that wheel—the one closest to the drive cam—hits the wheel fly on next wheel. That wheel starts to turn too. This keeps happening until all the wheels in the lock are turning.

  When you dial in the right combination the notches on all the wheels end up on top. This row of lined-up notches makes a long, straight gap. The metal bar that has been keeping the safe door from opening falls into the gap. And there you go. Open safe.

  Basically, you use the sound the pin makes on the wheels to figure out the combination. First you have to figure out what the lock’s contact area is. I need to tell you a little more about the drive cam so you can understand this part. The drive cam also has a notch in it. The notch—

  Joe here. Really, Frank. I’m begging you. It took us two days to learn how to crack a safe. You can’t explain it all. Just say I got the safe open. Which, by the way, I did.

  Frank here. Okay, okay. So Joe got the safe open. It took a couple of hours, because the process is complicated and it requires a lot of explanation to really understand it.

  “It’s all files,” Joe said, reaching inside the safe.

  He handed half of the files to me. I flipped through, looking for Evan’s or Mark’s name.

  “I got Evan’s,” Joe told me.

  I leaned in to look as he opened it. The file held copies of all the photos that were in Evan’s box, each carefully preserved in a plastic sleeve. “Nothing else in there?” I asked.

  “Just one sheet of paper with Evan’s contact info on it. Really detailed. Address. Phone. Parents’ work numbers. Parents’ e-mail addresses,” Joe said.

  “Why would she have that info?” I asked. “Sandy didn’t make us give him any of that stuff when we came in. He knew we might not stay if he did.”

  “She had Mark’s home address, too, remember? It was on that paperwork we found in the truck—the forms Tess signed,” Joe pointed out.

  I opened the top file on my stack. It had photos and contact information too. Photos of a teenage girl I’d never seen before. The pictures were a lot like Evan’s. They showed the girl begging, picking pockets, shoplifting. “This isn’t what I was expecting,” I admitted. “This is what I’d expect to see in Olivia’s safe—if Olivia had a room to put a safe in.”

  “There’s definitely an Olivia connection going on,” Joe said. “I just found Sean’s file. Same kind of pics as the others, except Shay and Eli are in one of them.”

  “Mark has a file too. I wonder if Tess showed it to him when she pulled him into her office the other day,” I added.

  “She might have used the photos to threaten him to keep quiet about what he found out. He was screaming at her, she brought him into the office, and something shut him up,” said Joe.

  “This is head-exploding. All these pictures,” I said. I glanced at the clock over Tess’s desk. It was almost five. “We need to clear out of here.”

  “Yeah, Tess pretty much lives here,” Joe said. “She’s working all the time. She seems so great, running this place, getting the scholarships. I just don’t get what Evan and Mark could have found out that Tess would be willing to kill to keep secret.”

  “Sandy is usually here early too. Who knows when he’ll come down here and head to his office? And the breakfast-making crew is going to be up soon,” I reminded Joe. “We need to get this stuff back in the safe. But I want to write down the names of everyone who has a file.”

  Joe grabbed a blank sheet of paper off Tess’s desk. “You write, I’ll read.” He started listing off the names. I wrote them down as quickly as possible.

  “Is that it?” I asked when Joe hesitated.

  “No,” he told me.

  “Who’s next?” I asked.

  “Me.” He held out a picture. Looking at it was like a punch to the gut. It showed Joe picking the pock
et of the man with the hat in Washington Square Park.

  We both stared at the photo for a long moment. “Let’s keep going,” Joe finally said. He read off the names from the last three files. Then he returned them to the safe, shut the door, and twirled the knob of the lock.

  “Whatever Olivia has going with Tess, they work fast,” I commented as we headed back upstairs to the boys’ dorm.

  “I don’t get what Tess would want with those pictures,” Joe said. “They’re perfect to use for blackmail. But why would she be thinking she’d need to blackmail anybody here? Not for money, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe it was just kind of an insurance policy. Maybe she thought someday one of the kids here would find out what she was doing, and she’d want the pictures to use to keep them quiet. That’s what we’re thinking she did with Mark. Maybe she tried it with Evan, too. But he didn’t back down. And I guess Mark didn’t either. She might have shut him up for a little while after she had her ‘talk’ with him in her office. But he clearly wasn’t willing to let her get away with whatever’s going on.” I opened the door. “Let’s try to get a little sleep before breakfast. It’ll help us think better.”

  Joe nodded as we quietly walked over to our beds. As I stretched out on mine, I felt something lumpy. I reached under my back and pulled out a doll—a dark-haired boy doll.

  Its eyes were white Xs. Blood dripped from its mouth.

  14.

  THREATS

  I held my own doll up so Frank could see it. It was the same as his—except it was a little cuter and had blond hair, which makes sense, because clearly it was supposed to be me. I ran my finger over the blood spilling from the doll’s mouth.

  Frank’s gaze moved to the wall behind our beds. Even in the darkness I could read the dripping red words of the new message: “This is you—unless you leave.”

  “Somebody really wants us gone,” Frank whispered. “That’s gotta mean we’re getting close to the truth.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “We’re—”