Change of Heart (13 page)

“I believe you, Billy.”

“That cop was here yesterday. He wanted to ask me more questions about what happened that night. He said it would go a lot easier on me if I cooperated. How can I cooperate when I didn't do it?”

“Billy, did you trash Sean's locker?”

His face hardened.

“Come on, Billy, I know you didn't kill Sean.”

“Then why are you asking me about his locker?”

“Because someone killed him. People don't go around killing people for no reason. Someone must have had it in for him. If you didn't trash his locker, then someone else did—someone who had a grudge against him. Maybe a big enough grudge to want him dead.” I hated to have to ask again, but I needed to know for sure. “So, did you do it, Billy? Did you trash Sean's locker?”

“No.” His voice was defiant. He seemed to be waiting for me to challenge him.

“Okay,” I said. “What about all the phone calls Sean was getting? Was that you?”

That earned me another indignant look.

“No.”

“Morgan says you called her night and day.”

“I wanted to talk to her.”

“But you didn't call Sean?”

“I called him once—the night I went to the arena.”

“Morgan said he was getting threatening phone calls.”

“Not from me,” Billy said. “I only called Morgan.”

“What about the day before Sean was killed? Did you go to the arena on Wednesday, Billy? Maybe after I saw you outside school, after Sean threatened you?”

“The police asked me the same question. And the answer is no. I was nowhere near the arena that day.”

“Did they believe you?”

“They had to. I have an alibi for the whole day.”

I waited, but he didn't tell me.

“Where were you, Billy?” I said finally.

His eyes slipped away from mine.

“What's the matter, Billy?”

He looked doggedly down at the tabletop.

“Billy?”

“I was with Ben.”

“Ben? I didn't know you and Ben hung out together.”

Billy knew Ben, of course. So did Morgan. And I knew they both liked him. But it had never occurred to me that either of them would spend time with him now that Ben and I had broken up.

“We don't exactly hang out together,” Billy said. “But I wanted to talk to him, you know, because he—well, just because.”

“Because why?”

Billy shifted his gaze back to the tabletop.

“Billy?”

“Because I thought he would understand how I felt.”

He meant because I had broken up with Ben like Morgan had broken up with him. And for more or less the same reason—because of another guy.

“I'm sorry, Robyn. I wasn't going to say anything, but ...”

“It's okay. You can spend time with anyone you want. You don't need my permission.”

“I called him, and he said he had Wednesday off school to volunteer.” Ben goes to a private school that is very big on community service. “He invited me to go with him. I met up with him after I saw you at school ...”

“After you tried to see Morgan again,” I said gently.

He nodded. “He picked me up just up the street, like we arranged. We spent the day at an animal shelter in the west end. They just finished adding a new wing, and they had a whole bunch of volunteers there painting, getting the place ready for the animals. There were lots of people who saw me there all day, Robyn. Afterwards I went over to Ben's house. I was there until eleven at night. I told the police that. They took his name and everything. They must have checked with him. I had nothing to do with what happened to Sean at the hockey game.”

Well, that was something.

“Maybe whoever sabotaged Sean's helmet decided to go even further,” I said. I wondered if Charlie Hart had thought about that. But why would he? He had an eyewitness who placed Billy at the scene of the crime just before Sean's body was found. He had found the murder weapon on Billy's property, with Billy's fingerprints on it. What difference would it make who had tampered with Sean's helmet when all the evidence pointed to Billy? Billy even had a history of attacking Sean. I looked across the table at Billy and realized that he'd never told me the whole story about that.

“What happened the day you got into that fight with Sean? Why did you go after him like that?”

Billy hung his head again. “He said something. He said something and I ... I just lost it.” He looked up at me. “I know how that sounds. If I could lose it like that and attack him, I could also kill him, right?”

“I didn't say that, Billy.”

“But I didn't kill him.”

“What did Sean say that made you so mad?”

Billy let out a long shuddery sigh before leaning across the table. In a soft voice, he repeated what Sean had said. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the floor.

“You know what, Billy?” I said. “If he had said that to me, I think I would have jumped him, too.”

Billy's head bobbed up. He almost smiled.

The guard who had been standing at the door came over to where we were sitting.

“I have to go,” Billy said. “Thanks for coming, Robyn. And thanks for the picture.”

“No problem,” I said.

Billy had stood up, preparing to leave, when I called to him.

“Hey, Billy? How is Ben, anyway?”

“He misses you,” Billy said. “He asked me if you were seeing Nick, but then he said never mind—he didn't want to know. Other than that, he's okay, I guess.” He turned, walked to the door, and waited for the guard to open it for him. Only after he was gone did I realize that I hadn't asked him how he was doing in there. Or whether he was still scared.

B

illy had said that he hadn't made threatening calls to Sean. He'd said he hadn't trashed Sean's locker. He had an ironclad alibi for the day of Sean's accident—there was no way he could have tampered with Sean's hockey helmet. So who had done all those things? And how big a grudge did that person have against Sean? Big enough to want him dead?

Try sleeping when you have questions like that scurrying around in your head like squirrels in an attic.

I reached for my phone and made a call.

“Sure,” my dad said after he listened to my question. “I've been stumped plenty of times before.”

“What do you do when that happens, Dad?”

“What's this about, Robbie?”

“You have to ask?”

There was silence on the end of the line.

“Dad?”

I thought maybe he'd lecture me about letting the police do their job. But he didn't.

“So the question is, what do you do if you have a gut feeling that something is true, but no hard evidence to back you up? Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“You chip away at it. You work with what you've got, even if it's not much. And you have faith that it will lead you somewhere else. It's the only thing you can do.”

“That's it?”

“Pretty much. Detective work isn't linear, Robbie. No straight line guaranteed to get you from point A to point B. There could be a million possible ways, and you have to figure out for yourself which one makes the most sense.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

I was about to hang up when he said, “Ask me what I was doing on Thursday night.”

“What you and Nick were doing?”

“Yeah. Go ahead. Ask me.”

“I thought it was top secret.”

“It was. It isn't anymore. Come on. Ask me.”

I knew he was trying to make up for not telling me earlier, but now that I knew that Nick was working for him, I didn't really care what they had been doing. The less I knew, the better. But a peace offering is a peace offering.

“Okay, what were you doing on Thursday night, Dad?”

“Hal was in town.”

Hal is an old friend of my father's. They went to high school together. Hal manages an old rock band.

“To do a music video,” my father added.

“With the dinosaur band?”

“Hey, those guys aren't much older than me,” my father protested.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Hal is also managing a new group,” my father said. When he told me which one it was, I couldn't help being impressed.

“They were here?”

“One night only, to shoot their new video. Took them all night to shoot it. They'd work for three hours on something that will take up maybe fifteen seconds in the final video.”

“I can't believe they were here and you didn't tell me.”

“I wanted to, but work is work, Robbie, and this really was top secret. Even the press didn't get wind of it.”

“It couldn't have been all that top secret. You told Nick.”

“Nick was working with me.”

“On security? Isn't he a little young for that?”

“Not for that part of the job. All he had to do was help make sure no one got near the site who didn't belong there. Hal gave me an autographed poster for you. I'll give it to you the next time you're over.”

“Thanks, Dad. And thank Hal for me the next time you're talking to him.”

By the time I got out of bed the next morning I had a plan. Okay, it wasn't much of a plan, but as my father had said, you have to start somewhere.

I had two places to start: Tamara Sanders and Jon Czerny. Sean had promised to cooperate on a documentary that could have boosted Tamara's budding TV career. Then he had dumped both her and his promise. As for Jon Czerny—not only was he jealous of Sean, Sean had stolen the team captainship from him. Now that Sean was gone, Jon was back on top. Had he killed Sean to get what he wanted?

All I had were questions and suspicions. But that was better than nothing. I figured Tamara's alibi would be easy to check. She had said that she was in the editing room at the TV station the night Sean was killed. So that's where I decided to start.

As soon as I got to school, I went looking for Dennis Hanson. I finally spotted him in a crowded hall at lunchtime. I elbowed my way toward him and grabbed his arm to get his attention. He let out a shout, as if I had bitten him, and frantically jerked free of me. Every head in the hall turned to see what had happened.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you,” I said. I wished people would stop staring at us—at him. “I need your help. I'm trying to help Billy, but to do that I need to go back to the TV station. I have to find out who was in the editing room the night Sean was killed.”

“Painters,” Dennis said.

“What?”

“Painters were in Editing.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw the schedule when we were at the station. Painters were in Editing on Thursday, 8
P.M.
to 2
A.M.
”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded but didn't look directly at me.

“Dennis,” I said, “is there any way you could find out if there was anyone in the room while the painters were there?”

“I could ask my dad.”

“Would you? It's for Billy.”

“Okay,” he said. “We can go now.”