“What are you trying to do?” she growled. “Ruin my school’s reputation? Spread rumors that my head gardener was high? A week before the most important meeting of this year?”
“Your gardener just died,” I said.
With an angry hiss, Martha May spun around and marched back through the cedar hedge.
Chapter Fifteen
“You think he didn’t die of a heart attack?” asked Jayden, his voice cracking.
That was a tough question to answer, and I didn’t know him well. Jayden could be playing a role, and those could be crocodile tears for all I knew.
“Why don’t we leave that for the authorities to confirm?” I said and paused. “I promise you, we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Jayden leaned against the door, wiped his tears, and nodded.
“Asha,” said Katy, a note of warning in her voice. “Did you see this?”
She’d been examining Sam’s body more thoroughly for open wounds. Using the tips of her fingers, Katy gingerly pulled up his right sleeve and pushed it higher.
I stared.
“What is it?” asked Jayden.
“A rubber band,” I said, leaning in to examine it. “To tighten the arm and find a vein.”
“You can see the red spot,” said Katy, pointing at the crook of Sam’s elbow. “He injected himself here.”
“Sam would never do that,” said Jayden, shaking his head.
“Unless,” I said, “someone injected him. Whoever did it had been in a hurry and left the rubber band by mistake, or ran off before they got caught.”
Jayden shook his head again. “Why would anyone do that to Sam? He was a good man.”
I turned to Katy. “He walked toward the kitchen door, but we never saw him go in, did we?”
“Last I saw,” said Katy, “he stopped to clean his trowel using the garden hose.”
“That means either someone lured him back here just after we left, or he finished supper early and came out,” I said.
I looked at the rubber band on Sam’s arm.
“Something’s wrong with this picture.”
I didn’t care how the headmistress felt about her school’s reputation. I had a duty here.
I pulled out my phone and dialed nine-one-one.
The call center didn’t believe me at first, thinking it was a joke by one of the schoolgirls, but they finally promised to dispatch an emergency crew. I hung up, knowing it would take them at least an hour to get to the school from town.
As Katy, Jayden, and I waited by Sam’s body till the authorities arrived, a handful of kitchen staff drifted over to join us.
They huddled by the cedar hedge entrance in various degrees of shock.
Some couldn’t bear to look and hid their faces behind their hands. Lou-Anne, the young server girl, sobbed while others stood still, staring silently at Sam.
“He didn’t come in for supper today,” said Cathy, shaking her head.
So, he never went inside after we left.
“Did he usually miss meals?” I asked.
“Never. He was serious about his food. Always going on about fiber and nutrients and all that. I made special vegan options for him every day.”
“Did he take supplements?”
“You mean vitamins? No, he lived clean. No alcohol. No soda. No sugar. No pills or anything fancy. Just fruits, veggies, tofu, and water.”
I glanced around the greenhouse.
“What about security cameras? Where are they installed?”
“The cameras are only in the front,” replied one of Cathy’s staff members.
“I’d expect this school to have cameras everywhere,” I said, frowning.
“Cost savings,” said Cathy, as her staff nodded somberly behind her. “That’s what we’ve all been asked to do. Tighten our belts. Turn off the lights. Keep the heat down. If she could squeeze our blood and make money, she—”
A loud siren stopped her.
We all turned.
Without a word, Cathy and her team scampered back to the kitchen, like they didn’t want to be found with us. Or next to a dead body. Jayden stayed on the ground next to Sam, his face still a mix of shock and grief.
Leaving Katy with him, I stepped out of the cedar enclosure and ran to the front to flag the emergency crew over.
I had expected a bunch of squad cars, followed by a medical and forensics team. Instead, it was two local police officers who turned up with a couple of paramedics.
The white mustachioed officer, with Chief written on his lapel badge, took over as soon as he got out of his car.
After snapping photos and once Sam’s body was on the stretcher, the cops taped off the greenhouse and shooed us inside the main building to take our statements.
The junior officer took the syringe from me, a wary look on his face, like he didn’t know what to do with it. I noticed he didn’t use gloves or a plastic bag.
His superior had the harder job—containing Martha May’s wrath. After yelling at him to get rid of that damn tape before Friday’s board meeting, she stormed off to her office.
The officers, who’d been cowering near the main entrance as she shouted at them for disrupting her school, looked relieved when she marched off.
“Will Sam get an autopsy?” I asked the chief, who was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Given the circumstances, it might be a good idea.”
He stared at me for a second. Then, he turned to Katy, his mouth turned down in disapproval.
“Never seen you two here before,” he said, pushing his hanky into his pants’ pocket. “You from out of town?”
“New York,” said Katy.
“From what I hear, you were the last to be seen talking to the deceased,” he said with a stern look. “Is that right?”
“Yes, we were,” I said, feeling my shoulders tense. “We were following up on some questions—”
The chief wagged a finger near my nose. “We’ll be back to talk to you two. Don’t be in such a hurry to leave town, you hear me?”
With that, he snapped around on his heels and walked back to his squad car, followed by his junior officer, still carrying the syringe in his bare hand.
“What a bunch of doofuses!” spluttered Katy. “Are they seriously going to try to pin this on us?”
“They won’t,” I said, trying to suppress the anger spinning inside of me. “Not if we have anything to do with it.”
A noise from behind us made me turn. It was a harried Cathy scurrying up the corridor, a tray in her hands.
“She wants to finish her meal in her office,” she stopped and whispered as she saw us. “Can you believe it?”
Though we’d just met, our brief conversation in the greenhouse over Sam’s body seemed to have created a bond.
“She wants to eat now?” said Katy, making a face. “I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Me too,” she replied. “Poor Sam. Whatever did he do to go like that?”
Neither Katy nor I had an answer. Not yet.
With a sigh, Cathy shuffled toward the principal’s office.
Sam’s last words swirled in my mind.
All I want is to continue living my story. However long I got of it, anyway.
Did someone threaten him if he talked? Did this have anything to do with the runaway girl?
Katy and I walked over to the dining hall to find the students who’d discovered the body, when Nick came rushing out, bowling Katy and me over.
We jumped back.
“Oh!” he cried.
His eyes were red with stress and he had a strange twitch to his neck.
“You okay?” I asked.
“She thinks I let this happen,” he blurted.
“She?” said Katy. “You mean Martha May?”
He nodded, his eyes darting back and forth as if he expected her to jump on him at any second.
“Does she think you killed Sam?” I asked.
The twitch became more prominent.
“
She’s mad at me for not stopping whoever called the cops. Like I have power over the girls. They all have phones and they do whatever they want.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to do, Nick,” I said, wondering if I should confess to the deed. “Call nine-one-one when someone’s found dead unexpectedly.”
“She said I should have contacted our doctor instead.”
“Wouldn’t the doctor call the police, anyway?” I asked.
“No way,” replied Nick. “Dr. Williams does anything she asks.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “Hide a dead body, even?”
Nick gulped.
“If you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” I said.
Katy put a hand on his shoulder.
“She can’t kill you.”
“You’d better believe she can.”
He wrenched himself from Katy, turned around and trudged toward the main office, like his shoes were made of lead.
Chapter Sixteen
“That wasn’t a natural death,” I said.
“Crack or cocaine?” asked Katy.
“Fentanyl, most probably,” I said. “Tetyana said it’s easier to get it on the streets and it’s easier for a non-drug user to die from an overdose.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“Someone who wanted Sam out of the way.”
Katy let out a sigh. “If he was killed for talking to us, I’d feel horrible.”
“We don’t know that for sure. He could have been a target even before we met him.”
“The syringe could have had a real poison like cyanide,” said Katy. “Something that kills fast.”
“That would clearly signal murder, but I think the killer was smarter than that. It could also have been filled with something with no effect, like water, to distract us, while Sam was killed in some other way.”
“That would be some psycho move.” Katy shook her head. “I guess we’ll have to wait for the test results before coming to conclusions.”
“Did you see how those local cops handled the evidence?” I said. “They seemed more interested in showing who was in control, than following proper procedure.”
“I hope those idiots don’t have a lab here,” said Katy. “Then, they’ll have to send the syringe to a bigger county with more experienced staff and better protocols. We can hope, right?”
I shrugged. I no longer had any idea what to expect.
“One thing is for sure, we ain’t in New York anymore,” I said with a sigh, wondering what we’d got ourselves entangled in.
It was late to be out for a walk, but after giving Tetyana and Win an update that evening, I had tossed and turned in bed, trying to ignore the migraine that was threatening to break out any moment.
Though David and everyone in my family frowned at my habit, I took sleeping pills every night. It was the only way to keep the nightmares from my childhood at bay.
But now, knowing a young girl had gone missing and the school gardener had died, even my sleeping tablets couldn't put my troubled mind to rest.
I’d heard Katy rustle uncomfortably in the bed next to mine. I threw my coverlet off, got up, and told her I was going for a walk.
I needed fresh air.
Badly.
Katy hadn’t wanted to be left behind, so we’d both geared up, and come out to explore the school.
Unlike us, the students and staff had run off to their rooms the minute the curfew gong had rung at seven. We watched them dash off like Pavlov’s dogs upon hearing the bell.
They had been so conditioned to follow the ritual, that within minutes, the students, teachers, and staff, had disappeared into their quarters, leaving Katy and me alone in the dining hall.
We treaded silently now, side by side, along the trail behind the school.
It was chilly outside. I was glad we’d come prepared.
Katy and I had exchanged our red heels for our hiking boots. We’d ditched our business pantsuits for warm jogging tights and our fall jackets.
When Tetyana had made a fuss about packing our tailor-made thin Kevlar vests for this trip, I’d thought it was overkill, but wearing them underneath our shirts made me feel much safer now.
We also had flashlights in hand, Tanto knives in concealed pockets in our boots, and our Glocks tucked in the built-in-holsters in our vests.
It felt silly to be packing like we were out to catch a terrorist, when we were patrolling an isolated all-girl’s boarding school. But after what had happened that day, something told me a killer was on the loose, and they wouldn’t hesitate to strike again if they felt threatened.
We had to be prepared for anything.
For a school that catered to the children of wealthy families, Martha May had a lousy security system.
Installing electric wire on top of the gates and cameras only in the front of the grounds was like shutting the front door while leaving all other entrances wide open.
The old guard who’d been sitting near the main entrance of the building was a mere token.
According to Cathy, he had worked for the school since he was a teen and had never left. In return for room and board in the basement with the other staff, his job was to station himself in front and keep his ears and eyes open during the day. But every time I’d looked, he was nodding in his chair.
Though the principal locked the gates at night, I couldn’t help but feel the danger lay within the school grounds. Not on the outside.
I was beginning to see the school’s dirty underbelly, and it wasn’t pretty.
Martha May talked a big talk about her academy and her influential clients, but the school was seriously underfunded and understaffed.
A mechanical-like thud near the main gates made Katy and me spin around.
We’d done a full circle in the back and had just walked toward the front of the school building. It was past ten o’clock. The third-floor dorm rooms, the teacher’s quarters and the principal’s home were in total darkness. Everyone had gone to sleep.
At least, that’s what it looked like.
“Did you hear that?” whispered Katy, as we immediately turned off our flashlights.
“A car door?” I said, frowning.
We stood still, hidden in the shadows of the building, our eyes on the parking lot. But we saw no movement, no lights, no vehicle pulling out of the lot.
“Wait,” I said, “someone’s outside on the road.”
Sticking to the shadows, we crept along the driveway, toward the main gates. We could hear a car idling outside. Whoever it was had turned their headlights off to not attract attention.
I pulled my Glock out. Katy followed suit.
When we got closer to the fence, we slipped behind a tree trunk and crouched low. Through the thicket of birch trees, I could make the silhouette of a sedan parked just outside the main gates.
There was a shadow inside the car.
Maybe two.
We watched in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the surroundings.
There were no lampposts outside the fence, but the security lights on the grounds were enough for me to make out what was going on.
“It’s a Cadillac,” I said, peering through the darkness. “This is not just any riffraff.”
Katy let out a giggle.
“Shh,” I said, putting a finger to my lips.
“Whoever they are, they’re having a good time tonight,” she whispered.
She was right.
The Cadillac was moving up and down.
Who would that be? Why would anyone drive all the way to this remote location and park their car outside the gates of a locked private school to have a shack fest?
I pulled out my phone, turned on the photo app, and zoomed it on the vehicle’s license plate. I didn’t know how well I could capture it, but it was worth a try. After snapping a half a dozen pictures, I slipped my phone back in my vest, before anyone caught sight of the bright screen.
Katy and I staye
d behind the trees, waiting for the tryst to end, trying to guess who it would be.
After twenty excruciating minutes, just as I felt cramps shooting up my leg, we heard the car door open. I froze as a girl’s giggling voice came over to us.
What’s going on?
Katy pointed at something that was moving toward the fence.
My eyes locked on the silhouette. It was a schoolgirl, still in her short uniform skirt and shirt. She was standing next to the fence.
The vehicle turned on its lights, giving a spotlight on the girl. She was staring at her wrist, as someone would look at their wristwatch.
We leaned through the tree trunks to get a better look, but it was hard to make her face out. Then again, she’d be one out of two hundred students here, and I’d hardly memorized all their faces.
Suddenly, as if on some mysterious cue, the girl waved at the car, then turned around and did the most unexpected thing.
She started climbing the fence as swiftly as a monkey would climb a coconut tree. We watched in surprise as she worked her way up, like she’d done this many times before.
My heart went into my mouth as she approached the top. Katy reached over and dug her fingers into my arm as she also realized the problem.
Get down now! You’ll be electrocuted.
My mind raged as I debated whether to jump out and warn her, when the girl skillfully stepped over the top bar and scrambled down in seconds.
Katy and I hunkered back down, our hearts hammering wildly.
I prayed she hadn’t noticed us, but her attention was elsewhere. She twirled around to face the car and gave a mock bow, as if to get the driver to acknowledge her performance.
In response, the car rolled closer and stopped next to her on the other side of the fence. The driver’s window rolled down and a man’s gray-haired head popped out.
My stomach turned.
He looked old enough to be her father.
The girl blew a kiss at the man.
The man grinned.
“See you next week,” whispered the girl loudly, though I was sure anyone who’d hear her talk would easily hear the car.
I glanced around, but the school grounds were as quiet as before. Everyone was still asleep. Except for this girl.
I turned back around just as the car moved on to the main road and rolled away. The girl stepped on to the driveway and headed toward the school building.
Merciless Crimes: A Thrilling Closed Circle Mystery Series (Merciless Murder Mystery Thriller) Page 7
