by Blake Pierce
Pelelo shook his head and clicked his tongue.
“Oh, yes—Holly Struthers,” he said. “Very worrisome. I do hope she turns up soon, safe and sound. But why is this a matter for the FBI?”
Jenn said, “I’m sure you’re also aware of the rape and murder of Katy Philbin.”
Pelelo’s eyes widened a little.
“The girl whose body was found yesterday, you mean—the girl who went to Wilson High? But I’d heard that there was a suspect in custody. Good Lord. Surely you don’t think that Holly … well, I don’t even know how to say it.”
Riley said, “At this point, we really don’t know if there’s any connection. That’s why we wanted to talk to you. How well did you know Holly?”
Pelelo swiveled in his chair a bit and steepled his fingers. He struck Riley as practically an encyclopedia of body language—although she didn’t yet know how to read his apparently practiced gestures.
Pelelo said, “Well, I’m afraid I’m just now in the process of getting to know all my students. I just became principal here this year.” With a grin he added, “You might call me the new kid here at Lincoln. I’m new to Angier, for that matter.”
He thought for a moment, then added, “But Holly has made an impression on me, I must say.”
Riley felt suddenly queasy. Did she detect a touch of a leer in his voice?
She had a sinking feeling that this wasn’t the kind of man who ought to be working around hundreds of teenaged girls.
She also recognized that he was like a lot of administrative-type men she’d known over the years. He was a big-city guy who had managed to dazzle his way into this job in a well-to-do community with charm and good looks and little else.
He’d never be much good at his job, but few parents would notice—and fewer still would care.
Appearances are everything in this town, Riley reminded herself.
And Nigel Pelelo looked picture perfect behind that desk. Parents might even disregard the unsavory way he glanced at female students.
But if his behavior amounted to more than just looking, might they disregard that too?
She was sure that there was a lot of denial in this community.
Pelelo continued, “Holly gets called into my office quite often. For small things mostly—disrupting class, talking back to teachers, rudeness to other students. And she has this little habit of running away from time to time. Never so long before, but she does run away.”
Pelelo looked up at the ceiling rather dreamily.
“We’ve talked and talked and talked,” he said.
“About what?” Jenn asked.
Pelelo sounded just a bit defensive now.
“I’m not sure it would be right for me to tell you,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I honestly don’t know whether there’s any kind of confidentiality issue concerning what gets said between a principal and a student.”
Riley didn’t know either, but she doubted it. Pelelo hadn’t been meeting with Holly in the capacity of a professional counselor, after all.
Pelelo leaned forward in his chair.
“But I will tell you that I think she’ll be fine when she pulls out of this phase she’s going through. And I’m sure she’ll come back from wherever she is. She’s a good girl, with lots of potential and a great future ahead of her. She’s a bright and lovely girl.”
Riley’s skin was crawling now. She already knew that Holly had been rebelling against her parents. Like so many teenagers, Holly had been convinced that they didn’t understand her at all. In fact, Holly may have felt misunderstood, neglected, even mistreated by just about everybody.
Holly was surely vulnerable to the charms of a handsome, charming father figure in a position of authority.
Had Pelelo taken physical advantage of her vulnerability?
Riley hoped not.
But even though she suspected that nothing but talking had occurred in this office, Riley thought that even talking had hardly been appropriate or proper.
This town, she thought yet again. Innocence in Angier seemed to be a hard thing to come by—and an easy thing to lose.
She weighed whether to press Pelelo specifically about his relationship with Holly.
She quickly decided that an indirect approach would be better.
If Pelelo were guilty of anything, maybe he’d give himself away in unintended and even nonverbal ways.
Riley looked at Jenn and gave her a nod, prompting her to ask her own questions.
Jenn took the hint and asked, “Mr. Pelelo, do you know anybody—students or adults—who might have meant any harm to Holly?”
Pelelo chuckled a little.
“In this school, you mean? The kids here at Lincoln are good kids, and their parents are good parents. As for what happened to Katy Philbin—well, maybe you should be talking to the principal at Wilson High instead of me. Although I doubt that you’ll find him at work on a weekend.”
Riley caught a hint of school rivalry—and maybe some professional rivalry as well.
But in itself, that seemed hardly surprising or sinister.
Jenn kept asking routine questions, and Riley eyed Pelelo closely. But she reminded herself not to let her suspicions run away with her.
At this point, she had no tangible reason to suspect Pelelo of rape and murder. If she allowed herself to obsess about his creepy relationship with Holly Struthers, she might fail to catch the real killer.
Soon Riley’s phone buzzed.
She considered ignoring it. But under the circumstances, it might be something urgent, even life-threatening.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” Riley said.
She stepped outside the office and took the call.
“Am I speaking with Special Agent Riley Paige?” the caller asked.
“You are.”
“This is Austin Daggett. I’m the mayor of Angier. Chief Sinard gave me your number.”
Riley didn’t know what to say. What could the mayor want with her?
“Where are you right now?” Mayor Daggett asked.
His voice had a distinctive rasp to it that reminded her of her father.
From years of whiskey and tobacco, Riley guessed.
Riley said, “My partner and I are at Lincoln High. We’re talking with Principal Pelelo.”
“Well, drop what you’re doing and meet me in my office.”
Riley was startled. Should she explain that she didn’t take orders from him? Right now she was accountable only to Chief Sinard himself, and she actually outranked him on most issues.
“What’s this about?” Riley asked.
“I’ll tell you when you get here,” Mayor Daggett said.
Without waiting for Riley to reply, Daggett gave Riley directions on how to get to Angier’s town hall. Then he abruptly ended the call.
Riley stood for a few seconds staring at the phone. She thought the mayor had some nerve giving her orders out of nowhere. She had half a mind to ignore his summons.
But she didn’t dare—not if he had some new information pertinent to the case.
She stepped back inside the office and caught a snippet of the exchange between Jenn and Principal Pelelo. The man’s smile was looking a little frozen, but it seemed obvious to Riley that all this questioning was getting them nowhere.
She said, “Agent Roston, we’ve got to go now.”
Jenn looked surprised but got out of her chair. Riley managed to force out a polite thank-you to Pelelo for his time and cooperation. Then Jenn and Riley headed back to their car. Riley quickly explained that they were on their way to talk to the mayor.
Jenn shook her head as she got behind the wheel.
“That Pelelo guy gives me the creeps,” she said as she started the ignition.
“You and me both,” Riley said.
She didn’t say so, but she suspected that things were about to get creepier.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
During the drive to City Hall, Riley kept flas
hing back to the image of poor Katy Philbin’s body in that cornfield—battered, her mouth full of dirt, with bruises on her thighs …
The girl reminded her of April, of course. That was why Riley kept seeing this awful picture in her mind’s eye. Her own daughter had been endangered more than once because of Riley’s investigations. She couldn’t dismiss the memory of a murdered teenager because it stirred her personal terrors.
Riley tried again to drive the image from her mind, but she couldn’t make it go away.
She knew that wasn’t good.
She usually managed to keep her personal fears separated from her work. In fact, this one might not even be related to her job. It seemed quite possible that she and Jenn might go back to Quantico without solving Katy’s murder. If Holly’s disappearance turned out to be truly unconnected to what had happened to Katy, there was no further reason for two FBI agents to stay here.
Riley wondered—would that image keep haunting her even after she got back home?
The thought made her shudder.
She wasn’t sure she could make herself leave Angier without catching Katy’s killer. She also felt driven to find out what had happened to Holly.
But what if she had no choice?
If there was no sign of a serial killer, how could she stay on this case?
Maybe we’ll know more when we talk to the mayor, Riley thought.
But she had a gut feeling that the meeting wasn’t going to go well. His phone call hadn’t given her any sign that the man might be helpful.
Jenn pulled up in front of Angier’s City Hall—a compact but venerable granite-and-brick building that Riley guessed to be about a hundred years old.
The two agents walked inside and made their way through a marble-floored hallway to the mayor’s office. Their footsteps echoed through a space that seemed to be largely uninhabited today. But there was a receptionist at a desk inside the doorway labeled “Mayor Austin Daggett.” After greeting them with a frown, the receptionist rose from her chair and ushered them directly inside.
Mayor Daggett looked up from his desk with an unfriendly glare, as if Riley and Jenn were unexpected and unwelcome.
He conspicuously did not ask them to sit down, as if he didn’t expect them to stay for more than a few minutes.
The man struck Riley as a living relic, a small-town mayor from bygone years. He was a tall man with steel-gray hair who wore a bow tie and suspenders and pants that hitched up above his waist.
There was also a distinct and familiar odor in the office.
Whiskey and cigars, Riley thought.
Her impression of his voice on the phone had been correct. Sure enough, on his desk was a half-full bottle of expensive, eight-year-old bourbon, along with an empty shot glass. There was also an ashtray filled with cigar butts.
The mayor apparently ignored no smoking rules in his personal domain.
She was just as happy that he wasn’t smoking right now.
Mayor Daggett said in that raspy voice of his, “There’s a guy in the jailhouse who says you two violated his Fourth Amendment rights and beat him up in the process.”
Riley suppressed a smirk.
So much for idle chitchat, she thought.
He didn’t sound drunk, anyway. Riley remembered how her father had been able to drink almost constantly all day long without showing its effects. Mayor Daggett seemed to have that same capacity.
And now she knew that Trip Crozier had a lawyer, probably a public defender who was hard at work earning as much as he could of taxpayers’ money.
Riley said, “The suspect won’t be able to make those charges stick.”
Mayor Daggett started shuffling papers in his desk, as if to indicate that this conversation was worthy of only part of his concentration.
“I’ve gotten other complaints about you,” he said.
He glanced up from his papers. He seemed to expect Riley and Jenn to explain themselves. Of course, Riley had no idea what he was talking about.
He said, “Barry Teague tells me you made a nuisance of yourselves at the crime scene.”
For a moment Riley couldn’t place the name.
But then she remembered.
Barry Teague had been the disagreeable medical examiner they had encountered at George Tully’s cornfield.
She recalled his palpable resentment that she and Jenn were even there.
“Maybe if you federal folks let me haul the body out of here and do my job …”
Riley felt herself bristle all over.
She and Jenn seemed to have stepped into a local nest of good old boys who didn’t like outsiders.
She said, “My partner and I conducted ourselves in a perfectly professional manner at the crime scene.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Mayor Daggett growled.
Riley took a long, deep breath to keep her temper under control.
“Mayor Daggett, you called Agent Roston and me away from an interview. Perhaps you can tell us why.”
Daggett kept idly poking among his papers.
He said, “It’s time for you two gals to fly on back to Quantico.”
Riley felt her face flush. She could hardly believe her ears.
“How do you figure that?” she asked.
Daggett shrugged without bothering to look at them.
“We’ve got Katy’s killer in custody. And if you haven’t made too much of a legal mess out of things, we’ll get a conviction. Meanwhile, I don’t want you underfoot while my local boys are doing their job.”
Jenn spoke up now.
“What about Holly Struthers?”
“The missing girl?” Daggett said. “She’ll turn up. She’s from a good family.”
Riley almost scoffed aloud.
A non sequitur if ever I heard one, she thought.
Jenn said, “Mayor Daggett, there’s every possibility that there’s a serial killer at large in this town.”
“There’s not,” Daggett said.
“How do you know?” Jenn asked.
“Things like that don’t happen in Angier. I’ve been the mayor here for more than half of my life. I keep a clean town.”
Riley didn’t know which annoyed her more—the man’s arrogance or his naïveté. For the moment, she didn’t know what to say.
Daggett added, “I keep a peaceable town, too, with happy people. But yesterday I got lots of calls from folks who are worried and scared. You’re the cause of it, as far as I’m concerned. Well, I’m not putting up with it. I want you away from here yesterday, if not sooner.”
Riley had had more than enough of him by now.
She said, “Mayor Daggett, we’re not here at your request. Which means we’re not answerable to your authority. Now if Chief Sinard—”
Daggett interrupted, “Sinard’s on board about this.”
“What do you mean?”
“He agrees with me. Your presence is no longer needed here. Not that it ever was.”
Riley’s mouth fell open.
Could Daggett be telling the truth? It was Sinard who had been so anxious that he got a DC relative to call in the FBI in the first place.
Riley had felt sure that Chief Sinard was the only ally in Angier she and Jenn could fully count on.
But then she quickly realized—Daggett truly pulled all the strings in this town.
If Sinard wanted to keep his job, he had to do as Daggett liked. And right now, that meant getting Riley and Jenn out of Angier.
She said, “I’d like to talk this over with Chief Sinard himself.”
Daggett shrugged again.
“Be my guest. It’s a waste of the government’s time, as far as I’m concerned. But then, I guess wasting is all that fed time is really good for.”
Riley glanced at Jenn, who looked just as exasperated as she was—and just as ready to get out of this office.
But before they could turn to go, the mayor’s desk phone rang.
Daggett picked it up. His face blanched at wha
tever he heard.
“What?” he said. “Good Lord!”
Riley could tell right away that something awful had happened.
Then her phone rang too.
Before answering her ringing phone, Riley watched the mayor as he listened to whoever had called him. What could the man be hearing that caused him so much alarm? But he wasn’t saying anything. He was simply listening with a dumbstruck, horrified expression.
Then Riley answered her own phone. She heard Chief Sinard’s voice.
“Agent Paige, where are you right now?”
Riley wondered if maybe Sinard was calling to relay the mayor’s message—that she and Jenn were no longer needed or wanted in Angier.
Riley said, “Agent Roston and I are at Mayor Daggett’s office.”
Sinard groaned aloud. His voice sounded agitated.
“Well, whatever the mayor told you about going back to Quantico, you can ignore it. Another body has been found.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Riley’s heart sank. She asked, “Is it Holly Struthers?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to check on it myself. You’d better come along but it’s out in the country. I’ll drive by City Hall and pick you up in just a few minutes.”
The call ended and Riley looked at Jenn.
Riley said, “It looks like we’re still on the case after all.”
Meanwhile, the mayor had just hung up his phone. He looked back and forth between Riley and Jenn.
He stammered, “That—that was Marcus Dunning. He runs the landfill outside of town. He says that one of his employees found …”
Daggett’s voice faded away. He couldn’t seem to finish his thought. But Riley understood what he was leaving unsaid. The body had been found in that landfill.
The mayor seemed at a loss for words. His mouth moved soundlessly.
Riley looked him in the eye and asked, “Do you have a request to make?”
The mayor’s head bobbed up and down, nodding yes.
Riley said nothing.
Finally he blurted, “Uh, I’m hereby making an official request for the help of the FBI on this matter.”
When Riley still made no answer, the mayor added, “Please.”
Riley turned to Jenn and said, “Come on.”
