by Lisa Gardner
“What?”
“You seem nervous.”
“A family I know was murdered. One of my students is missing. This entire neighborhood suddenly seems to have turned into the Wild West. Of course I’m rattled.”
“You’re not rattled. You’re nervous.”
A flicker of movement to my right. A bird swooping by the window.
I placed both my hands on the wooden back of the closest kitchen chair. A chair can be a marvelous tool for offense and defense. Like a lion trainer facing down a roaring charge, or a brawler taking out an opponent in a bar.
“He threatened me,” she said suddenly.
I stilled, gaze ping-ponging between both entrances, exits. “Who?”
“Roberto. The day the principal called him into his office regarding the inappropriate photo. As guidance counselor, I talked to Roberto first. He was all attitude, nothing to say. In the end, we were both just sitting there, waiting for the principal, when I got a call on my personal cell. I opened up my lower desk drawer to fetch it from my purse. I happened to look up just in time to see Roberto fiddling with his cell phone. He slid something into his palm. I couldn’t see what.
“I demanded for him to show me his phone. He smiled. Snapped the back on, held it out. The phone fired up, but I knew he’d done something to it. Why else had he removed the back? I told him that was it. Fess up now, show me what he’d pocketed, or I’d call the school security officer to pat him down.”
I nodded. Movement out the rear door again. A tree branch moving in the wind? Except what wind? It had been calm just moments ago. I tightened my grip on the chair.
“Roberto got up. He placed both hands on my desk and, staring down at me, he stated, very calmly, my address. What time I got home from work. The color of my bedroom walls.”
This news caught my attention. I momentarily stopped peering out the back door, glancing at the counselor instead. No doubt about it. She was pale and shaky, with a sheen of tears in her eyes.
“He said maybe he was an even better photographer than I realized. And a pretty young counselor like me . . . He insinuated—” She took a deep breath, soldiered on. “He insinuated the demand for such a photo around the high school would be very high. And he hated to disappoint his audience.”
“He intimidated you. Bullied you into submission.” Just like he had everyone at Mother Del’s.
Tricia nodded once, wiped at her eyes. Took another settling breath.
“I’m twenty-seven,” she whispered. “This is my first job as a guidance counselor. I was warned in training to expect some harassment from male students. Comes with the territory. You have to stay in control. Remember you are an authority figure. But the way Roberto spoke . . .
“He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t acting out. He was serious. And so confident as he rattled off my personal information. I couldn’t act. I couldn’t move. Then there was a knock on my door. The principal was ready to see him.
“Roberto walked out. I just sat there. I never moved. I never called for the security guard. Later, when the principal said he’d found nothing on Roberto’s phone, I didn’t know what to say. Not without confessing that I’d let a student get the best of me.”
“You covered for him,” I said coldly.
“Kind of.”
“There’s no ‘kind of.’ He probably replaced the SIM card on his phone. Meaning the principal basically saw a brand-new cell, devoid of all content. Roberto had publicly shamed one of your students. He’d posted child porn on a student-frequented social media site. And you helped him get away with it.”
“But I wasn’t done yet!”
I arched a brow.
“Seriously! I knew I screwed up. But I was working on it. Roberto was definitely a threat and he needed to be stopped. We can seize cell phones in the classroom. Anyone caught actively texting during class violates school rules and automatically loses their phone for the rest of the day. I put out an alert to Roberto’s teachers. If we could surprise him, snatch the phone without him having time to prepare . . .”
“What happened?”
“He died.” She said it so flatly it took me a moment to process. “This was late May. We had only a few more weeks to grab the phone before the school year ended. I didn’t think it would take that long, except clearly the visit with the principal had made Roberto more careful. I still figured he’d forget sooner or later. Teens are such phone addicts. But then . . . Roberto committed suicide. It was over, just like that.”
“What about his phone?”
“I never heard what happened to it. But no more photos ever appeared. The matter seemed resolved. Maybe not how I’d been expecting, but resolved.”
“Except Anya started publicly blaming Lola and Las Niñas.”
“She confronted Roxanna the last day of school. Screamed, called her a murderer, as well as some other less-than-complimentary names. But then Anya always had a dramatic streak, and Roberto’s death had devastated her. She told anyone and everyone he was the great love of her life.”
“You think she went after the Baez family to avenge Roberto’s death? You think, if you had only spoken up that day, gotten Roberto caught by the principal and Lola and Roxy real justice—”
“Lola and her gang wouldn’t have gone after him.”
“According to Las Niñas, they didn’t kill Roberto. It really was a suicide.”
Tricia frowned at me, appearing genuinely perplexed. “I never heard of Roberto being depressed or suicidal. And as guidance counselor, it’s my job to be familiar with those members of our student population. Frankly, Roberto was a classic bully. Cruel, clever, controlling. But self-destructive? I can’t picture it. Plus . . .”
The hesitation was back, her left hand pressed against her stomach.
“What?” I demanded. More movement beyond the rear door. An entire bush shaking. No way that was the wind.
“The note,” she said.
“The note?” I didn’t know where to look, where to focus. Her. The door. Her. Backing up another step. Feeling the press of the countertop behind me. Reducing the field of possible attack to the tiny kitchen in front of me. But also boxing myself into a corner.
“I found it in my office, the day after we heard of Roberto’s death. It said, You’re safe now. The note was typed. Unsigned. But I understood the message. Someone knew about Roberto’s threat. And was taking credit for resolving the matter.”
“Did you tell anyone about what Roberto said?”
“No. But . . .”
Her. The door. Her. “For the love of God, spit it out!”
“Roxanna was sitting outside my office that day. The principal wanted to see her, as well. So she and her friend Mike Davis were waiting out in the hall. The school isn’t exactly soundproof. It’s possible they heard something.”
“So Roxy might have gone after Roberto?”
“I don’t know! Roxy was always protective of her family and Lola in particular—”
“Get down!”
I saw it coming out of the corner of my eye. A projectile flying at the rear door. I was already dropping to the floor, while Tricia, who’d not been shot at that morning, threw up her arms to cover her face.
Clunk.
Then, in quick succession, thump, thump.
Not bullets. Nothing with enough velocity to shatter glass. Which meant . . .
Gingerly I made my way to the door. The dogs were up. What they couldn’t see, they could still hear, and both whined low in their throats. I peered out the bottom edge of the door’s windowed top.
Rocks. Three of them, now resting on the back step. They’d been thrown to get my attention. By a kid who was trying to hide behind an overgrown lilac, but kept giving away his location because he couldn’t stop bouncing.
“Excuse me,” I said to Tricia. “But I believe this is
for me.”
Chapter 35
D.D. SAT IN THE PARKING lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the chain’s dozens of locations in Boston. Like most locals, she came for the coffee, not the donuts. This morning, she’d ordered it regular, which meant heavy on the cream and sugar. Normally, she took her coffee black, but having gotten up at the crack of dawn to play ball with a hyperactive canine, she needed all the help she could get.
She had Roxanna Baez’s blue folder open, and had already skimmed through the entire essay series. Now, she started back at the beginning, reading more carefully. According to Roxy, she’d only submitted the first two essays, describing the removal of her and her siblings from her mother’s custody, followed by their arrival at Mother Del’s.
Roxanna had used real names, including those of Roberto, Anya, and her soon-to-be ally, Mike Davis. The second essay ended on a cliff-hanger: Roxy squaring off against Roberto and Anya at Mother Del’s. Nothing explicitly criminal and evil. And yet . . .
D.D. understood why Roxanna’s writing teacher had grown concerned after reading the essays. She wondered if Juanita Baez had seen either piece. If she knew the toll her drinking had really taken on her children . . .
No such thing as a perfect family, as Roxy had written. They all had to be made.
Did Roxy view her family as a success? Even after reading the entire series, D.D. remained uncertain. Clearly, Juanita had fought for her sobriety. She’d worked hard to get her children back. Which for Roxanna and Lola had meant finally leaving Mother Del’s and being reunited with their mother and younger brother. One step closer to perfection, all things considered.
Except then Juanita had gone and fallen in love with a contractor who lived in Brighton, putting her children back within reach of their former tormentors.
D.D. found the community theater piece interesting. So it had all started as Roxy’s idea—good thinking, too, to keep her, Lola, and then Mike out of Mother Del’s house for as long as possible. Except Roberto and Anya had hijacked that and, apparently, had never given it up. Anya was now the community theater’s star performer, while Roberto had died there—maybe after a drunken bender brought on by his distress over how close his girlfriend had grown to the director, Doug de Vries?
So many players five years ago. All brought back together by Juanita’s move into Charlie the contractor’s house. D.D. sipped more coffee, perused the essays a third time. The pieces were there. She could feel it. Five years ago, these past few months. Everything full circle. A family ripped apart. A family put back together. A family destroyed once and for all.
By one of the people in these pages. She was sure of it.
Her cell rang. Her other reporting detective Neil.
“How’s the dog?” he asked.
“Spotted.”
“Jack in orbit?”
“Jack’s happiness is beyond the moon and the stars.”
“Worth how many pairs of shoes?”
“More than I’ll ever admit.”
“Phil asked me to follow up with latent prints and Ben Whitely. Guess you’ve been keeping him and them hopping?”
“Jumping is good for the soul.”
“So,” Neil continued, “what do you want first, the confusing news or the more confusing news?”
“Hmm, I’ll go with confusing.”
“Latent prints, who were a little cranky about being dragged in on a sunny Sunday afternoon, had no problem processing the digital photos sent over by the Brighton field office. Unfortunately, no match.”
“Did they have enough points to work with? The whiskey bottle looked like it had a clear print, but I was less certain about the shell casing.”
“I’m told that by combining two different camera angles, they were able to ‘unroll’ a fairly complete image of a right index finger from the brass. Which matched the print recovered from the fifth of whiskey. So quality isn’t the issue. Most likely, the person isn’t in the system. Meaning the print on both the shell casing and the whiskey bottle belongs to someone who’s never been arrested, applied for a security clearance, or been in the military.”
“Wait—I thought Roberto had a whole criminal file. Hooligan in the making. Surely his prints are in the system.”
“His prints are,” Neil assured her.
D.D. got it. “It’s not his print on the whiskey bottle or the brass. Meaning, even if his prints were on the gun, he wasn’t the one who loaded the weapon. Now, you could argue Roberto bought the gun already loaded, or it was set up a while ago. But what are the odds that the person who fed the bullets into the suicide weapon was also the same person who supplied the fifth of whiskey? That sounds less and less like a suicide to me, and more like a staged event.”
“I would agree. Who loaded the gun, brought the booze, however, we don’t know.”
“What about Lola and Roxy Baez?”
“No fingerprints on file. I checked.”
D.D. thought about it. Meaning Roxy or Lola could’ve done it. Or . . . Her gaze returned to the pile of essays on her lap. “What about Juanita Baez?” she asked slowly. Could it be that simple? Upon learning what had happened to her two daughters, Juanita had decided to take matters into her own hands?
“Juanita is in the system. Print isn’t hers.”
“So maybe the girls, but not the mom,” D.D. murmured. She scowled, took another sip of heavily sweetened coffee. Pieces, so many pieces of the puzzle. She tried to re-sort the cast of characters in her mind, but still came up empty.
Someone else had been behind Roberto’s suicide; ironically enough, Anya had been right about that. The questions remained: who, and how did that person—event?—fit into the string of carnage that had followed? Had one person done it all? Or had one person killed Roberto, setting off the shooting of the Boyd-Baez family, Hector, etc., as acts of retaliation by a second perpetrator? Which brought her to:
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go with the more confusing news.”
“Ben said he’d let you know there was evidence that Lola had had sex before her death.”
“Yes.”
“He got a DNA match from the recovered hair: Doug de Vries.”
“The community theater director?” D.D. asked in genuine shock. “Anya’s new sugar daddy and ticket to Broadway success?”
“If you say so. De Vries does have a record, hence his DNA is in the system. Turns out, Anya isn’t his first starlet.”
“Creep! Wait a minute: According to the detective who worked Roberto’s shooting, Roberto had been fighting with Anya over her relationship with Doug de Vries. Which would give the theater director motive to eliminate his younger rival, Roberto. But you’re saying Doug’s vitals are in the system. Meaning if it had been his fingerprint on the shell casing . . .”
“Doug was not the one who handled the gun.”
“But he did have sex with Lola?”
“Exactly. Probably within twenty-four hours of her death.”
D.D. sighed, rubbed her forehead. “Roxy said Lola was trying to get back into the theater program. She’d set her sights on taking down Anya. Meaning what? The thirteen-year-old got Roberto drunk, then staged his suicide? Then destroyed Anya’s new partnership with Doug de Vries by seducing the director herself?”
“Who probably didn’t put up much resistance,” Neil quipped.
“Double creep.” She took a long pull of her coffee. How much caffeine did it take to be recognized as an addict? Most likely, she was already there. “Let’s take this from the top. Roberto’s suicide probably wasn’t a suicide. Our mystery fingerprint person supplied a fifth of whiskey to an already angry and volatile young man. Then—when Roberto was nearly passed out?—he or she wrapped Roberto’s hand around the gun, positioned it at his temple, and pulled the trigger.”
“Motive?” Neil asked.
“Plenty to go arou
nd. Doug de Vries would qualify under jealousy—”
“Except it wasn’t him.”
“Bringing us to Lola, Roxy, and any kid who’s ever been at Mother Del’s. All of whom were victims of Roberto at one time.”
“Vengeance. I like it.”
“Or self-defense. There’s also Roberto’s missing cell phone, which has been linked to at least one inappropriate photo. According to the Brighton detective, they never found the phone at the scene. Their best guess: Anya took it and hid it somewhere in the theater.”
“Guy who likes those kinds of photos could have shot some of his girlfriend, which she probably wouldn’t want the police to see.”
D.D. nodded. “Or,” she continued thoughtfully, “a theater director with a reputation for seducing teenage starlets might also be into such photos. I bet Doug de Vries has a personal computer. Maybe that’s our missing link. Roberto snapped the photos, but Doug distributed them. Meaning the community theater isn’t just the launching pad for Anya’s Broadway ambitions, but a business partnership. Hence Roberto’s own involvement for the past five years.”
“Younger creep and older creep working together,” Neil said. “Yuck.”
“Send an entire team to Doug de Vries’s house. Given the evidence that he had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, we have probable cause to tear his place apart. Computer, bedroom, car, I want it all. Which, if we’re really lucky, might yield us a murder weapon, as well.”
“You think he could’ve gunned down the Boyd-Baez family? But why?”
D.D. hesitated. She stared at the essay series on her lap. For a current shooting linked to five-year-old events, it amazed her that they still had so many suspects in play. Including Doug de Vries, who might or might not be distributing child porn, but who was definitely involved with Anya Seton now and yet had sex with Lola Baez within the twenty-four hours before her death. If Lola had been looking for revenge against Anya, what had the community director gotten out of it? A quick fix?
“Doug, Anya. Anya, Doug,” she murmured now. “We eliminated Anya as a suspect in the Boyd-Baez shootings as she claimed to have been with Doug at the time, and Doug corroborated it. Here’s a question: Does Anya have her prints in the system?”
