The Murder House

by James Patterson

  “We’ve been lucky,” the principal says, knocking on her wooden desk. “We haven’t had a school shooting for sixteen—well, now I guess it’s seventeen years.”

  Right. That’s right. “The BB gun shooting in 1995,” I say. I point out the window. “Out there on the south grounds.”

  She nods, looks through the window. “That was Halloween. We banned costumes at the school for over a decade after that.”

  “It was Noah Walker,” I say. “Noah shot those kids with the BB gun.”

  She looks at me, unsure of how to answer. Because Noah was a juvenile at the time, the criminal proceedings against him would have been sealed. The school would have been prohibited from publicly announcing his name.

  “Well,” she says, “I guess it’s not much of a secret, after it came out last year during his trial.”

  Not a secret at all. But she’s getting a little squirmy, so I don’t push the point.

  “Well, let me introduce you to our security personnel,” she says, getting out of her chair. “Is there anything else you’ll need from me?”

  “Maybe just one thing,” I say. “Could I take a look at the school yearbook from 1995?”

  Once I have some time alone, after meeting with the school security personnel, and once I’m shown to a small office, cramped and windowless, that probably was once a janitor’s closet, I crack open the yearbook, heading to the index in the back and finding the name Walker, Noah.

  I flip to the page and run along the names on the right column until I come to his. Noah would have been, what, twelve or thirteen back then. I admit to a curiosity—and maybe more than curiosity—about how a guy with a ripped physique and rugged good looks would have appeared as an adolescent.

  I find his name, but when I look across to the corresponding picture, there is no face staring back, just a NOT PICTURED graphic. Okay, that probably makes sense; he was suspended from school after the Halloween shooting that year, so he probably was gone by the time they were taking yearbook photos. I let out a sigh, disappointed, but then catch myself—why am I disappointed? And why am I thinking about Noah Walker’s muscles?

  Next to the graphic for Noah: a weaselly-looking kid with straw hair parted down the middle, a skinny face, and eyes too close together. He isn’t smiling or frowning; he looks confused, actually, like the invention of the camera was a revelation at that moment.

  But I know this guy. I look at the name on the side and square it up. This is Aiden Willis. Right. Aiden Willis, the raccoon eyes, the squirrelly guy who works at the cemetery—I saw him at Melanie’s funeral, then again at the Dive Bar, when I bought him a beer and he disappeared.

  Small town. You forget that. The locals all grew up together, know one another.

  I flip to the index, then find the page for Isaac Marks. Isaac, my former partner and new boss, asswipe that he may be, was the same age as Noah and Aiden. In his photo, he is wearing a stern expression, like he’s trying to look tough. That feels about right. Isaac, back then, probably dreamed of being important, of having the respect he probably didn’t receive in school. All speculation, of course, but it fits with the kind of guy he is now—and we don’t really change that much, do we?

  I look up. Noah, Aiden Willis, and Isaac Marks. Isaac and Noah, the same age, the same class; Aiden, one year older. They all would have known one another back then. A tiny school. Everyone knew everyone.

  I pick up my phone and dial the extension for the school principal. After a moment, they put me through.

  “Ms. Jacoby?”

  “Please, it’s Paulina,” she says.

  “Paulina,” I say. “Do you have anyone on staff who was here during that school shooting in 1995?”

  47

  THE SOUTH side of Bridgehampton School is over an acre of open grass, with a baseball diamond closer to the school and a playground next to it for the younger kids. To my right, but a healthy distance away, are the woods, a thick layer of trees providing the eastern border of the school grounds. As I move closer to the school, to my left—northwest—I see the parking lot that bends around from Main Street.

  “Here,” says Darryl Friese, walking with me. “I was right here. I didn’t even know what happened at first. I mean, my first thought? I thought, like, an insect had flown into my eye or something. Dumb, right?”

  I shake my head. “There’s no such thing as dumb in a situation like that.”

  Darryl turns to me. He was nine in 1995, which makes him twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven now, but these seventeen years have not been kind to him, his hair receding badly, an unhealthy gut hanging over his slacks. His left eye looks odd because of the color, grayer than his other eye, which is solid blue, but otherwise there’s no lingering trace of the BB injury.

  “Okay, so let’s get this exactly right,” I say. “Stand at exactly the same angle, the same position.”

  He adjusts himself. “It was just like this. I remember because this girl, Angela Krannert—God, haven’t thought about her for a long time—anyway, Angie was standing by the back entrance of the school, and I was walking toward her. I remember—the last thing I was thinking, before the BB hit me—I was trying to think of something that would make Angie laugh.”

  He is facing directly north. If he walked straight forward from this angle, he’d eventually walk right into the school’s back door.

  He points over by the woods. “You see that little alcove there?” he says. “Kids used to go there to make out or smoke cigarettes. Because you were technically still on school property, but you were hidden.”

  I nod. I see it. A tree stump, a small clearing. “That’s where Noah was set up?”

  “Yeah.”

  I line it up. Noah, from his position, would have been almost directly to Darryl’s right.

  “So how did he shoot me in the left eye?” Darryl laughs. “Believe me, I’ve always asked that. They just chalked it up to the pandemonium. I mean, it was chaos. I was out of commission, basically. I was on the ground screaming. But nobody could hear me because they were all screaming, too. Nobody knew it was a BB gun, not at first.”

  “They said you must have spun around, giving him a clear shot at you.”

  He laughs. “That’s exactly what they said. And I get it, I was just a punk kid, nobody believed me. I have a seven-year-old now, and the things that come out of his mouth?” He shakes his head with conviction. “But I’m telling you, I got hit with the BB before anybody knew what was going on. There was no screaming, no chaos, nobody scattering in different directions. I was probably the first one shot. No,” he says, “I was walking straight for Angie at the back door.”

  I survey the place again. The woods, Noah’s perch, directly east, to my right.

  And to the northwest, the school parking lot.

  With a healthy row of shrubbery separating the parking lot from the south grounds. A perfect place to hide.

  “Is this part of some investigation?” Darryl asks me. “Are you investigating the Halloween shooting again?”

  “No,” I tell him. “Nothing like that.”

  Which is technically true. I’m not investigating the 1995 Halloween shooting per se. I’m just trying to learn more about Noah Walker, and by extension the people with whom he associated. I don’t know, yet, who ran with Noah back then, back when they were preteen punks.

  But I do know this much: One of them was the second shooter that day.

  48

  “YOU JUST try to find something that interests them,” says the phys ed teacher, a man named Arnie Cooper, an aging African American man. He’s tall and well-built, age adding a few inches to his midsection, but you can still see the remnants of an athlete—the high hurdles, from what I’ve heard, and what I’ve seen in glass cases near the gym, in framed photos on the walls. Born and raised in Bridgehampton—“south of Main Street,” he is quick to say—state champion in the high hurdles in 1978, a member of the US Olympic team that didn’t compete in the 1980 games in Moscow because o
f the US boycott.

  Behind us, the south grounds of the school are littered with multicolored foam archery targets, the bull’s-eye yellow, the next ring orange, then powder blue and black. Half of the fourth graders are missing the target altogether, the rubber-suction-cupped arrows sailing in the air and falling harmlessly to the grass.

  “Hard to get kids to run around and play anymore,” the teacher says. “They got their faces buried in those phones and contraptions. That’s all I did when I was a kid. I always remember running.” He gestures to an older student out on the yard, some kind of teacher’s assistant. “Brendan, I’m gonna be a few minutes, okay?”

  Coop, as he demands everyone call him, walks with a limp these days, the years of clearing hurdles and pounding his feet having taken a toll. “I was running okay in my thirties, though,” he tells me as we walk along the yard. “And I was definitely running okay the day of the shooting.”

  He stops and gestures toward the back door of the school. “I was in the gym shooting hoops when I heard the screaming,” he says. “At first, it didn’t mean anything to me. Just kids shouting, y’know? But then it did. I think it was…hearing an adult voice. Some of the parents walk the little kids up to the school. When I heard a parent yelling, I knew something was wrong. So I came out that door.”

  “And what did you do?” I ask.

  “Well, soon as I came out—I mean, it was all wrong. There were kids lying on the ground, there were parents covering up their kids, people were scattering like cockroaches, y’know what I mean? I’m thinking, These kids have been shot. I mean, really shot. With bullets. But there wasn’t really any blood I could see, so it was confusing.” He stops, puts his hands on his hips, shakes his head. “Man, it had been a long time since I was that scared.”

  “So you—”

  “So someone was pointing over by the east side of the school, and someone was saying, ‘He went that way, he went that way,’ and someone else was saying, ‘He’s dressed as Spider-Man, he’s Spider-Man,’ so I started running around the side of the school toward the front, toward Main Street, looking for Spider-Man.”

  We start following that same route, walking east and then turning north, moving along the immaculately landscaped grass and trees, toward the paved drive off Main Street.

  “I practically ran right into the street,” he says. “I didn’t know where he was.” I follow him until we’re standing just along the curb on Main Street.

  He gestures to his right, down the street to the east. “That’s where I found him,” he says. “Right next to Small Potato.”

  A little shack of a nursery stand, painted red with white supports, covered in chicken wire, empty this time of year, its quaint green sign proclaiming it the OLDEST FARM STAND IN THE HAMPTONS. I bought my Christmas tree here after Thanksgiving.

  “Back then, they were selling pumpkins,” he says. “But they’d pretty much packed up by then. There wasn’t anyone there. But Noah, he was sitting on a bench just past the nursery, in a Spider-Man costume with the head part removed. He wasn’t moving. He was wearing headphones. He looked—I mean, I know how this sounds—but he looked like he was waiting for a bus.”

  “Well—was the rifle nearby?”

  He raises his shoulders. “I didn’t see it. They found it later. He tossed it in the bushes behind him. I just told him he had to come with me, and I gripped him pretty tight and hauled him back toward the school, but he didn’t resist me. He didn’t fight. All he said was ‘What did I do?’”

  What did I do? “So,” I say, “this kid shoots a couple dozen people with a BB air rifle, runs around to the front of the school, and sits down on a bench like he’s…like he’s waiting for a bus. Like nothing’s wrong.”

  Coop shakes his head, laughs in agreement. “I know. I hear what you’re saying. I figure it’s one of two things.”

  I turn and face him.

  “Either he didn’t do anything wrong,” he says, “or he’s one cold-blooded son of a bitch. The kind who doesn’t feel anything. Who could slice someone open while he’s smiling at them, and then look you in the eye and deny it. You know what I mean?”

  “I think maybe I do,” I say. I drop my eyes and nod slowly. “I think maybe I do.”

  49

  I TURN off Sag Harbor Turnpike onto the gravel drive, my car crunching over the rocks. I pull up to a small shingled shack with a tent over the entrance and an old, beat-up wooden sign with a single word—TASTY’S—carved into it.

  The parking lot is full, and so is the restaurant, when I walk in to the scent of delicious seafood. I love places like this, no-frills dives, simple tables with paper tablecloths, random photos and signs hanging on the walls, food served in paper trays. The menu is on a chalkboard on the wall—both kinds of clam chowder, steamers, shrimp two ways, scallops two ways, oysters on the half shell, mussels, fried clam strips, about four versions of lobster, and hand-cut French fries.

  Ricketts, the rookie cop who’s off duty today, has a table for us. She’s already nursing a bottle of Miller High Life. There’s a second bottle on the table, either for her or for me. Either way, I decide I like this kid.

  “Hey, rookie.”

  “I love this place,” she says. “Best seafood on the South Fork, and the cheapest. They haven’t raised prices in a decade.” She’s a little looser than the first time I met her, when she was in uniform at the station. She’s wearing a sweater and jeans and her short blond hair is tousled.

  A man appears with a Mets cap on backward and a gray shirt. Ricketts orders the scallops, so I do the same, along with a couple of waters, and we’ll split a cone of fries.

  Ricketts reaches down to her purse and removes a file folder. “Your list of unsolved murders over the last decade on the South Shore,” she says. “Anything involving a knife or cutting.”

  I nod. “How many?”

  “Eight,” she says.

  “Eight?” I reach out my hand for it. “Gimme.”

  She pauses. “You, uh…might want to eat first. You might not have an appetite afterward.”

  “That bad, huh?” Okay, fair enough. “But eight?”

  “Well, I counted Melanie and Zach as unsolved.”

  “As you should.”

  “The prostitute found impaled on the tree trunk last summer, too.”

  “Definitely.” Bonnie Stamos. Some images will never leave your mind, and one of them is that poor girl, her body split in half over that tree stump.

  “And I’m including…you know—”

  “Chief James.” I nod. “As you should.”

  She finishes a swig of beer. “Then that’s eight.” She gestures around the place. “You know, this is where Melanie Phillips worked.”

  I partake of the alcoholic beverage she’s offered me, because I don’t want to seem rude, or make her feel lonely.

  “Oh, you knew that. Of course you did. Sorry. I’m—maybe I’m—”

  “Relax, Ricketts. I’m hard to offend.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I was kind of nervous to meet you, actually. I saw you one other time in the station, but I was intimidated, actually.”

  “By me?” The beer is tasting good. “You shouldn’t be. We girls have to stick together.”

  “I know, but you’re like, this—pretty much everyone’s intimidated by you. Y’know, coming from Manhattan, and you’re smart and tough and…well, beautiful. Most of the men don’t know how to handle you. Most of them want to sleep with you, from listening to them. But they also want to see you fall on your face.”

  That sounds about right, that last part. “Keep your head down and do a good job,” I say. “The acclaim will come, if it’s deserved. You have to prove yourself to these cavemen by your actions. Let the rest of that stuff slide—the sexist comments, all that crap. It will all fall away if you do a good job as a cop.”

  “Okay,” she says, nodding compliantly like a student.

  “Don’t sleep with other cops,” I say. “Because then it w
on’t matter how good you are. You’ll just be the girl that fucks.”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “I didn’t say it was fair, rookie. I’m just trying to help you avoid headaches. You’ll be subjected to double standards all over the place. You’ll have to be better than the men to be considered equal to them.”

  “Okay.” She nods. “Okay.”

  “There’s a lot of good men on the force. I’m only talking about a few bad apples here. Unfortunately, some of those bad apples are the ones calling the shots. So keep your head down and work your ass off. Always have your partner’s back. And call me, anytime, day or night, if you need anything.”

  Her face lights up. “Yeah?”

  “Of course.”

  “Here you go, guys. Scallops and a cone of fries.” A different man, wearing a button-down shirt and blue jeans. Tall and trim, bronzed skin, a nice smile, thick brown hair swept to one side. The kind of guy your parents would want you to bring home. And I thought the scallops looked yummy.

  “Hey, Justin, this is Jenna Murphy. Jenna, this is Justin Rivers. This is his place,” Ricketts says.

  “Here every day,” he says. “Great to meet you.” He wipes his hand on his jeans and offers it to me, a strong grip when I shake it.

  “Likewise,” I say. “So you’re the guy who hasn’t raised prices in a decade.”

  “Yep, yeah, that’s right.” He makes eye contact with me, holds it for maybe one meaningful beat longer than normal, but then breaks it off. A shy one. Not a slickster. I like the shy, awkward ones. Why do I always pick the jerks to date instead?

  No ring on his finger, either. A girl always looks.

  “Well,” he says, clapping his hands, “nice meeting you, and enjoy your food.”

  “I will,” I say as he walks away. “I will.”

  “I know, right?” Ricketts laughs. “Now you know why it’s my favorite place.”

  The scallops are the best I’ve ever had, cooked just perfectly, a touch of butter and lemon but not overplaying it, letting the seafood speak for itself. The fries are nicely seasoned and the creamy garlic sauce accompanying them is enough to make me change religions. We top it all off with a second round of beer, but I’ll stop there.