Brisbane and Trenton. Gage knew them well. Brisbane was short and rumpled, his pale scalp clinging to the last few threads of gray hair like the last leaves on an oak heading into winter. Trenton's stylized swirl of hair appeared blood red under the harsh fluorescent light. Even crouching, Trenton towered over his partner, his knobby knees sticking out at odd angles. Zoe was nodding through her hands while the detectives murmured to her. Seeing this, Gage felt the back of his neck burn.
"You're questioning her without me present?" Gage snapped.
"Gage," Quinn warned.
"It ends now."
Zoe, hearing them, sprang out of her chair and threw herself into Gage's arms. Pink cotton pajama bottoms, cut off at the knees, jutted out of the bottom of her black T-shirt. She was barefoot, her toenails painted black. They weren't the hugging type, either of them, but this one felt good. She pressed the side of her face against his leather jacket.
"It's—it's awful—" she stuttered.
"It's okay," he said.
"Walked—walked in—"
"We don't have to talk about it now."
She started crying. That, for Zoe, was even more shocking than the hug. He patted her back and waited for the storm to pass. Quinn joined Brisbane and Trenton outside the open door, conferring momentarily before all three stepped into the room.
Zoe, sniffling, wiped at her eyes. Her black mascara—something he thought she'd given up months ago—smeared at the corners, leaking down the sides of her face. Standing behind him, Karen produced a tissue from her pocket and handed it to Zoe, who accepted it gratefully.
"Thanks," Zoe said.
"No worries," Karen said.
"You look kinda familiar," Zoe said.
"This is Karen Pantelli," Gage said. "You may remember her from when she was here a year ago. She works for the FBI, though she's on vacation. Now, tell me exactly what happened."
"I just walked in and there he was," Zoe said. "All that blood."
"This morning?"
"About—about an hour ago."
"Easy."
She took a deep, shuddering breath. "Once in while the three of us go to breakfast at the cafeteria. I knocked—knocked on his door, and that's when I saw it was just slightly open. I said his name and he didn't answer. I opened—opened it—and—and—"
"All right," Gage said, patting her shoulder, "let's hold off on the rest. Will you be okay for a few minutes?"
There was a bit of reluctance to her nod, but it would have to do. Leaving her leaning against the wall, he and Karen stepped into the open dorm room. He saw the kid, Connor, right away, seated in a beige office chair at the little built-in desk by the window—or a chair that might have once been beige, because there was so much blood trailing down the backside that it was hard to tell.
Naked from the waist up, Connor's bony back was streaked with blood. He still sat upright, though his chin rested on his chest. The bullet hole was a messy smear in the middle of all that black hair. The blood was contained to the one little corner of the room, but there was a lot of it—and other bits, too, orange and white stuff that could have been flesh or bone. Red splatters coated the huge computer monitor, the black drapes decorated with stars, and the yellow-pine desk. Judging by the putrid stink, his bowels had let go of their contents into his Star Wars pajama bottoms.
With Quinn, Trenton, and Brisbane, plus two uniformed cops already in the room, the addition of Gage and Karen made for a tight fit. Gathered as they were near the door, elbow to elbow, it was as if they'd paid twenty-five cents for a peep show at a carnival.
"Nobody touch anything," Quinn said. "We're waiting for the forensic team out of Newport."
"Joys of a small town," Gage said.
"Save the jokes, pal."
"He didn't die right away," Gage said, and he felt a twist in his gut at the thought of Connor's final moments of agony. "His heart went on pumping. Otherwise there wouldn't have been so much blood."
Trenton, his red hair nearly scraping the low ceiling, snorted. "What are you, CSI Barnacle Bluffs?"
"He's right," Karen said. "And judging by the way some of the blood has already dried, this happened fairly early last night."
"You his partner now?" Trenton snapped. "The FBI doing cutbacks?"
"Just traveling through," Karen said.
Gage surveyed the room. He figured he had only a few seconds before Quinn realized there was no reason Gage and Karen should be there. Posters from various science-fiction shows—Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and the like—decorated the walls. Red Dwarf? He'd never heard of that one. Models of Star Trek and Star Wars ships hung from the ceiling on white thread. Except for a single-person bed, which was a twisted mess of white sheets with a plain brown bedspread bunched at the bottom, the room was neat and tidy. It was impressively neat and tidy, considering how packed it was with books—both textbooks and paperbacks, all of them shelved neatly on the homemade bookshelves that had been constructed out of cinder blocks and unfinished pine. A small entertainment center—old boxy TV on top, stacks of DVDs beneath—along with the white mini fridge somehow also fit into the room.
"Kid never saw it coming," Gage said.
"Brilliant observation," Trenton said. "Unless he had eyes in the back of his head, that would have been tough."
"Don't you have some traffic tickets to give out?" Gage said.
Quinn sighed and leveled a finger at Gage and Karen. "All right, you two need to get the hell out of here. You can stay with Zoe until we're finished talking to her."
"Not without a lawyer present, you won't," Gage said.
"What the hell, Gage, she's not even a suspect."
"Yeah, that's what you say now. But if she was the first to find Connor, then I know what that means."
"Fine," Quinn said. "Take her home. If I need her, I'll call her down to the station and you can bring your damn law—"
He was interrupted by a burst of static on his radio, followed by a breathless, high-pitched squawk: "Chief! We have him—in the cafeteria! Come quick! He's … he's got a gun!"
Quinn, eyes flaring wide, brought the radio to his mouth, but Gage was already on the move. There was only one him it could be. Jeremiah Cooper. It wasn't until he heard the radio that Gage realized that this was the one person they all should have been asking about and yet nobody had. Brisbane shouted after Gage, but Gage knew how all this would play out unless someone intervened.
On his way past, he told Zoe to wait right there. By the time she asked where he was going, Gage was skidding down the stairwell, gritting his teeth at the needlepoint pain shooting through his knee. Karen followed close behind, then Brisbane and Trenton, then Quinn, all of them bursting through the door and onto the grass.
Gage, not knowing the campus at all, was at a loss at which way to go, and before he could decide, Quinn grabbed his arm.
"No way," he said.
"But I know Jeremiah," Gage said.
"Stay out of this!"
Quinn and his two detectives sprinted toward an equally ugly tan slab of a building on the other side of the lawn, shadowed by two giant oaks whose leaves were in the crimson throes of fall. Four uniformed cops, weapons drawn, gathered outside the double-glass doors. People clad in Birkenstocks and blue jeans, students and faculty alike, rubbernecked from the sidewalk, another two uniformed cops keeping them at bay.
"Probably not a good idea," Karen said.
"It's never stopped me before."
"Gage—"
Without a backward glance, he hustled for the cafeteria, holding his cane like a relay baton. His creaky knee would hold. It always did. The sun, breaking through the oaks and the firs, streaked the still-damp grass like the bars of a xylophone. Pressing through the crowd of onlookers, a female cop shouted at him to get back, but he waved her off and joined Quinn and the detectives outside the front door. They all had their guns drawn. Gage didn't even have a gun. He'd left his Beretta at home.
"Gage," Quinn said, "I though
t I told you—"
Before anyone could stop him, he yanked open the door and slipped into the building.
He took in the hall at a glance: a checkered black-and-white tile floor, flyers tacked to bulletin boards, an old-fashioned reader board with stick-on letters spelling out the meals for the day. Two doughy-faced male cops, both young enough that they could still have been in high school, flanked a set of swinging doors just to the left. Backs leaning against the wall, Glocks raised, they looked wide-eyed and far too trigger-happy. They turned and gaped at him with the panic of small-town cops whose training hadn't prepared them for this.
"He's inside," one of them said. "There's—there's kids in there."
Gage heard wet soles squeaking on the tiles behind him and the rustle of clothes. Before the two cops could truly realize that Gage didn't belong, he grabbed the door handles and swung them open far enough that he flitted through the crack like a snake.
No thinking. No debate. If he stopped to consider what he was doing, he knew he wouldn't do it.
It was a cavernous room with a dozen circular tables, about a third filled with students with their faces on the table and their hands cupped behind their heads. He caught a whiff of bacon and maple syrup. A girl in the corner was crying, but otherwise nobody made a sound. Jeremiah sat cross-legged on an empty table in the middle of the room, the revolver pointed directly under his own chin. The .38 Smith & Wesson. Hair messy, chin bearing a patch of beard, he looked straight at Gage without acknowledging him. A blank stare. A dead stare.
Hands raised, Gage approached. Jeremiah's Superman pajama bottoms were frayed at the knees, and his white sleeveless undershirt was so tight, Gage could see his rib cage. His shoulder blades stuck out like butter knives pressing through white sheets. At a nearby table, a big guy in a Broncos jersey whimpered. A second girl joined the girl in the corner who was crying. Ten paces away, Jeremiah finally spoke in a thick quaver.
"D-d-don't," he said.
"Jeremiah," Gage said.
"I'm going—I'm going to do it."
"Jeremiah Cooper, I just want to talk to you."
In response, Jeremiah gritted his teeth and jabbed the Smith & Wesson harder against his chin. He closed his eyes. The revolver looked enormous in his little hand, comically large, like something out of a cartoon. Up close, Gage saw the rawness of his cheeks, the pink around the eyes, the tracks on the skin where the tears had dried.
"Killing yourself won't bring him back," Gage said. "And it will make a lot of people very sad, including me. Zoe. Your parents."
"I want to die."
"Put the gun down."
"Good-bye."
"Stop!"
Gage's shout had the intended effect: it shocked Jeremiah out of whatever detonation sequence was programmed into his brain, prompting him to open his eyes and look at Gage. The gun was still pointed at his chin, his finger was still on the trigger, but he was present. He was looking at Gage, and he was actually fully in the room. It was the window Gage was waiting for.
"I didn't think you were so selfish," Gage said.
Jeremiah blinked a few times. "What?"
"You really want to do this to all these people?"
"I don't—I don't understand—"
Gage motioned to the kids cowering at the tables, and as his hand swept across them, many hunkered even lower in their seats. "Look at them, Jeremiah! You really want them to watch you blow your brains out? You want that image in their minds for the rest of their lives? Do you know how that's going to affect them?"
"This isn't … about them. I'm not—not going to hurt them."
"But you are! You're going to scar these people for the rest of their lives. Is that what you want?"
Jeremiah relaxed his grip on the revolver a tiny bit. "They don't care. They don't care about me."
"You want to kill yourself? Fine. But not here. Not like this, in front of all these innocent kids. People deserve to know the truth, Jeremiah. And you can tell us what happened. You can explain. Doesn't Connor deserve that, at least? His mother?"
Something in what he said opened the floodgates, and the tears started to roll. "I don't know if I can do it," Jeremiah said.
"You can do it."
"I didn't—didn't want this."
"I know," Gage said. "Jeremiah, just put down the gun. Put down the gun and let's talk about it."
Jeremiah blinked through his tears. They stood like that, the two of them, suspended in place and time, an unnatural stillness pervading the room until somewhere off in the kitchen, behind the stainless-steel buffet table and around a brick divider, a dish clinked. An Asian girl three tables away moaned.
Something had to give. Hands still held aloft, Gage took a step forward, a small step but big enough that Jeremiah noticed. Gage wanted him to notice. He wanted him to see.
"I—I don't know if—" Jeremiah said.
"There's a better way out of this," Gage said. He took another step.
"I need—need some time."
"You'll have all the time you need." Another step.
"Please. Please, don't."
"Jeremiah, give me the gun."
"Please."
"It's all right," Gage said, hand reaching.
"I—I—don't—"
Then Gage was there, his hand on the boy's gun hand. The skin was cool and clammy and, at Gage's touch, trembled violently. Without even touching the revolver itself, Gage eased Jeremiah's gun hand away from his chin and to the side, down, so it pointed at the center of the table.
It was as if a plug had been pulled. All that coiled-up rage and grief inside Jeremiah drained in a second. He bowed his head and sobbed, releasing the revolver into Gage's grasp.
There was a commotion behind them, the doors swinging open, the scuff and squeak of boots on the tiles, the rush of many footsteps. This triggered a second wave of pandemonium as the quivering students suddenly let loose with all their pent-up fear—shouting, screaming, crying, laughing, even some applause, people rising from their seats, chairs knocking over, the rush of many bodies.
When Jeremiah mumbled something, it would have been lost in the cacophony of noise if Gage hadn't been standing so close.
"I—I didn't shoot him," Jeremiah said.
Then the police descended, a swarm of bulletproof vests and handguns.
Chapter 7
The first decision out of the president's office was to cancel classes for Friday. Emails and calls went out. Flyers were placed around the BBCC campus. "This was a time to seek solace and comfort from those we loved and who loved us." That was an actual line from President Higham's letter. It was only a few hours after that email that a second went out declaring that classes would be canceled the following week as well. Not only was an investigation being conducted by the police, but the school would be doing its own internal review to make certain it was doing all it could to prevent these kinds of tragedies.
Not being equipped with phone or email, Gage heard none of this. The first he heard about it was from Zoe. Later that night, the clock on the wall edging close to midnight, the two of them hunkered down in the living room in their usual places: Gage in his leather recliner, eyelids growing heavy, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in his lap; Zoe stretched out on the couch, earbuds in, eyes closed and hands folded on her stomach.
They hadn't spoken in hours, not after he'd asked, for perhaps the twentieth time, if she was okay. She'd finally snapped that if he would just stop asking, she would be okay. The garlic-chicken pizza and Diet Pepsi were devoured with only the conversation of the wind. He was working up to a way to ask her a twenty-first time when she lifted her phone, did a little of that magic finger swiping, and announced in a deadpan voice what the various communications from President Higham had said.
"Probably for the best," Gage said.
"Yeah, whatever," Zoe said. "Wasn't like I was going back anyway."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Still wearing the
earbuds, she closed her eyes and tapped her fingers in time to the beat of music he couldn't hear.
"Zoe," he said.
Her only response was to deepen her frown.
"Zoe," he said, "come on, let's have a conversation about this."
The frown deepened, but after a few stilted seconds, she finally removed her earbuds and raised her eyebrows at him. They were eyebrows, he noticed, that had recently been plucked to a thin line, something she had repeatedly said she would never do. She was still dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, but the more natural hair color, the trimmed eyebrows, and the lack of facial adornment were all subtle changes that had the overall effect of producing a Zoe who wasn't standing out from the crowd in such a bold way.
He motioned for her to sit up. With an exasperated sigh, she did, though her frown was now approaching world-record territory.
"What?" she said.
"I'd just like to have your full attention for a minute."
"Fine, you got it. What? And don't ask me if I'm all right again or I'm going to break a window."
Gage folded the newspapers and dropped them on the floor next to the recliner. "I just want to know what you meant when you said you weren't going back."
"What, was I speaking Spanish or something?" Zoe said. "Means just want I said. I'm not going back to school. Finito."
"You mean, you're not going back to that school."
"No, I mean I'm not going back to school at all. I don't see the point."
"Zoe—"
"I'll get a job in a coffee shop or something. Or maybe I'll learn how to blow glass. That seems to really be the thing on the Oregon coast."
"I see."
"Or maybe I'll work at the movie theater."
"Okay."
"Or maybe I'll see if Alex needs some help again in his bookshop. He seemed to like having me around in the summer."
"It's possible," Gage said. "But let me ask you one thing. Do you really have to make this decision now?"
"It's made," Zoe said. "School's not for me."
"You got nearly straight A's and perfect scores on your SAT, and school's not for you?"
"That crap doesn't mean anything."
"I'm just saying, maybe you should just see how you feel in a week. You have some time to think about this. To deal with what happened."
The Lovely Wicked Rain: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series) Page 5
