Underdead (26 page)

“I can imagine,” I said. “How long has he been practicing with the team?”

“He started the beginning of last week.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “He didn’t say anything about it when I tutored him after school last week.”
The same night someone shot at me.

Kendra shrugged again and speared a lettuce leaf with her fork. “Maxine probably advised him not to mention it. You know how some of the teachers are about after school sports—they think kids shouldn’t be on the teams if they can’t keep their grades up.”

“They shouldn’t,” Alan said.

Kendra responded immediately with some heat. “You’re being shortsighted, Alan. Sports are an important outlet for a stressed-out kid, and sometimes it’s the only thing they feel they’re good at. Taking it away often makes things worse.”

“Uh oh, here it comes,” Becky said.

“Oh God, not the self-esteem argument again,” Alan said, rolling his eyes.

“Gosh, would you look at the time. I have to go prep for my next class.” I piled my dishes back on my tray and got up. Becky caught my eye and grinned knowingly, but didn’t follow suit. Unlike me, she liked to watch people argue. She followed several of the reality TV shows, espousing them as fascinating sociological experiments.

“We’re still on for our Olympiad meeting today, aren’t we?” Kendra asked me.

I nodded unenthusiastically and she and Alan went back to arguing. Becky watched avidly, occasionally putting her oar in, probably when it got too close to resolution.

I walked away lost in thought. If Chucky was practicing late with the team, his mother would have had to pick him up and drive him home. That would’ve put her on campus the night someone shot at me and yet I didn’t recall seeing either of them in the crowd that had gathered in the parking lot. Surely that was a conspicuous absence. Almost as conspicuous as the fact that Rachel had taken the coaching job after all.

*

Kendra entered my classroom soon after the last bell. She slung a thick folder on one of the lab benches and sat down. “I’ve got Bob’s old Olympiad files. We’ll need to sort through it sometime, might as well get it over with.”

“Right.” I sat across from her and she handed me a pile of mismatched papers stacked every which way.

We worked in silence for a while. Kendra was sorting as efficiently as a computer and I tried my best to fight back the boredom and keep up.

“Man, you’re fast,” I said.

“I’ve done this a few times. I use to co-chair with Roger back when he did it.”

“Really? I saw pictures of him on the website. Barely recognized him with all the hair.” I giggled.

Kendra grinned. “I know.”

“I’m surprised he stopped doing it. I mean he won a bunch of teaching awards for it.”

“Yeah, he was amazing.”

I held up a yellowing sheet of paper. “Talk about carryover crap,” I said. “I think this is an entry form from 1992.”

Kendra stopped me from tossing it into the trash. “Hold on. Let me see that. Nope, we keep it. It lists the events from that year, with good descriptions. We can use them for our practice rounds. Throw it in this end pile here where I’ve put all the administrative stuff.”

“If you say so.” I tossed it into the pile and went back to my sorting. In the middle of a brochure on metric estimation, I discovered a nice thank you note to Bob from a parent whose child had placed fifth in the Egg Drop.

I got a little choked up. “Aw, that’s so sweet,” I said, refolding the note.

“What’s sweet?” asked Kendra.

I handed her the note. “Just a thank-you note to Bob.”

She read it and got a little teary too. I went back to my pile and unfolded another small note card, this one, with “Blondes have more fun!” printed on the front. It too, was addressed to Bob. But it wasn’t from a parent, unless one of them referred to herself as “Pookie,” loved him “always and forever,” and was “counting the minutes until their next night together.”

I must have made a sound, for Kendra looked up and said, “Is that another one? Let me see,” she took it out of my hand. Her grin faded as she read it. “Geez.”

“Yeah.” It was one thing to read a nice little thank-you note about a deceased friend, and quite another to read a rather personal love letter.

“Okay, not a keeper.” She ripped it in half and threw it away. “There aren’t any more in there, are there?” she asked, hesitating by the trash can.

“God, I hope not. But if I see anything that looks remotely like a letter, I’m checking first to see if it’s from
Pookie
before I read any further.”

“People do choose silly pet names for themselves when they’re in love,” Kendra said, returning to her pile.

“It’s hard to imagine Bob in love with anyone who would refer to themselves as
Pookie.”
I returned reluctantly to my own pile of papers.

In another half hour, we had finished. Kendra rushed off to soccer practice while I stayed behind to pack up my things.

As I reached to turn off the lights, my eyes dropped down to the love letter Kendra had thrown away. I stooped down, pulled it out of the trash, and tucked it into my back pocket.

I wasn’t sure why. It had probably been written by an old girlfriend. There hadn’t been a date on it, and since the papers had been arranged so haphazardly, the fact that I had found it next to a letter written last spring was an unreliable guide, at best.

My mind went back to that e-mail Becky had written to Bob.

No, I told myself. No way did Becky write this trite, gushing love letter. I wasn’t all that familiar with her handwriting, but I was pretty sure I could rule her out on the basis of the cheesy pet name alone.

And yet…I
had
heard Becky use the phrase, “Blondes have more fun,” on more than one occasion when asked why she bleached her hair.

No. I couldn’t believe it.

As I left campus, I found myself heading for the divey coffee shop across from the police station. There was nothing I had to say that couldn’t have been handled in a phone call, but Gavin was annoyingly difficult to get a hold of. The man turned up like a bad penny every time he wanted something from me, but had been noticeably reticent in returning the favor. Frankly, I didn’t understand why—in TV shows, the detectives always give the victims a number where they can be reached, day or night, and urge them to use it at the slightest provocation. Not Gavin. No, my detective pulled a full Garbo—he wanted to be left alone.

About the time I had finally settled into my grading, Gavin came out. I shoved the papers back in my bag with silent apologies to the students whose quizzes I’d mangled and ran across the street to the police station parking lot. I intercepted Gavin just as he got to his car.

“I could give you a ticket for jaywalking, you know.”

“I thought detectives were above writing tickets,” I wheezed, trying to catch my breath.

“Not when you do it in front of the police station.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I just want to talk to you.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back against his car. “All right.”

“Can’t we go somewhere more private?” It had gotten dark and I was starting to get nervous.

A couple of officers passed by and snickered.

Gavin greeted them with a pained looking smile that faded into a grimace as they passed.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing,” Gavin said. “Where’s your car?”

“Around the corner, why?”

“Geez, Jo,” he said tiredly. “Can’t you at least try to practice some basic safety precautions?”

“I do try! It was the only space I could find. What’s wrong with you? Did you have a bad day or something?”

He just let out a sigh. “Get in. I’ll drive you to your car. We can talk at your place.” As he got in the driver’s side, he mumbled something under his breath. I directed him to my car. He double parked behind it until I’d pulled away from the curb and followed me home.

When we reached my apartment, Gavin headed straight for the kitchen and sat down in his usual seat at the table. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well?”

He really was acting oddly, even for him. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “I can make you a hamburger, or I may have some cookies left if you’d rather.”

“I’m fine. What did you want to tell me?”

Gavin had never been particularly warm and fuzzy, but I’d never seen him like this. I sat across from him. “Is something wrong? Did I do something to piss you off?”

He just sat there, as responsive as a block of wood. Talk about passive aggressive! He was worse than my mother on of her Martyr-Mom days!

As the moments ticked by in silence, I began to worry. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe it wasn’t me he was mad at. It wasn’t as if he was shy about yelling at me. Maybe something bad had happened at work? I remembered that odd treatment he’d received from those other officers in the parking lot tonight and then it hit me.

“You’re getting shit back at the station about me, aren’t you? Is that why you wouldn’t give me your cell phone number? Because the guys might talk?”

His head snapped up and he glared at me. “Of course not.”

I didn’t believe him. “That’s it, isn’t it? You said before that pretty much only your captain knows what it is you really do. The other officers have no idea what you’re trying to protect people from—they must think you’re hanging around me for no reason other than because you want to. And I thought I was working with a bunch of eighth-graders!”

“Shit,” Gavin said, rolling his eyes. “If you’re going to go on like this, maybe you
should
give me something to eat. These absurd mental leaps of yours are a lot to take on an empty stomach.”

I stayed planted in my seat. “Are you sure you want to have dinner with me? I mean, the guys at the station might talk.”

He put his head down on his hands. “Oh God.”

By the time we had finished eating, Gavin was back to his usual self. He crossed his arms over his broad chest, focused his light gray eyes on me, and asked what it was I had wanted to tell him. Unexpectedly, I found myself clamming up. My suspicions seemed too silly to voice aloud when he put me on the spot like that.

“Do you have any leads on who shot me?” I parried.

“No.”

“What you mean, ‘No’? It’s been four days.”

He sighed. “We’re trying to trace the bullet, but so far we’ve come up empty. Forensics thinks it was homemade. If they’re right, which it’s looking like they are, we won’t get very far with that piece of evidence.”

“What about the other evidence?”

“What other evidence?”

“I don’t know, didn’t you guys find something?” I threw up my hands.

He shrugged. “What was there to find? Someone took a shot at you in an otherwise deserted parking lot and took off.”

I stared unblinkingly at him until he continued, rather irritably. “We’re working on witness testimony, but that isn’t much to go on. You’re the only one who could have seen who shot you, and you’ve told us nothing. The rest of the statements are just a bunch of conflicting, vague after-the-fact reports.”

“That’s it? That’s the best America’s Finest can do?”

His calm demeanor was starting to fray at the edges. “I didn’t say that. I’m merely trying to explain why we can’t provide a quick turnaround for you. We have to do it the long, hard way—alibi, motive, opportunity. The one thing we have going in our favor is that silver bullet. Not everyone could’ve made it.”

“How hard is it?” I scoffed. “All the ingredients for it are in the chemical room off the chem lab. You just mix up the stuff and brush it on. Becky has her basic chemistry students silver-plate stuff in one of her labs right before Christmas vacation.” I stared open-mouthed at Gavin as I realized what I had said. “Oh, no.”

“Jo, relax. If that’s how it was done, and it’s as easy as you say, any number of people could have done it. The master keys let you in any room in the school, and there are enough of them scattered around that I would seriously recommend changing the locks at some point.”

“You don’t understand,” I said miserably, forcing out the words I wanted so desperately not to say. “Becky was—I think—involved with Bob. Romantically I mean.”

“Is that why you came to the station tonight?”

I nodded and produced both the e-mail and the letter I’d found, explaining hesitantly how I’d come across them.

“You should have told me about these earlier.” It wasn’t an accusation, but I felt guilty just the same. I wasn’t helping anyone by withholding information only to blurt it out later.

“I know,” I said wretchedly. “I guess I didn’t want to accuse her—even tacitly—if I wasn’t sure, and it’s hard to imagine Becky and Bob as a couple—I wouldn’t have thought him her type. Her story about the Grateful Dead concert seemed the more believable explanation.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. We’ve already been through Bob’s e-mail—your headmaster gave us access the night he died—and Becky’s Grateful Dead concert story does check out. I could’ve saved you some unnecessary hand wringing had you bothered to confide in me.”

My cheeks turned pink. “Oh. What about the second letter?”

He picked it up and idly pushed the two halves back together. “It’s not exactly the smoking gun we’re looking for. From what you’ve told me, it’s at least a year old, possibly as much as four—that’s how long Bob had been running the Olympiad, right?—and frankly, unless you’re sure the handwriting’s Becky’s,” he looked to me for confirmation, but I just shrugged, “it could be from any number of old girlfriends. From what I understand, Bob was no slouch in the dating department. Chances are it’s from someone with no ties to the school.”

I sagged back against the chair as a wave of relief flooded through me.
Thank God it wasn’t Becky.

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

“Bob’s assistant coach has accepted his coaching job, after all. And Chucky Farryll’s been practicing with the varsity soccer team. He and his mother would have been on campus last Thursday night—when someone shot at me.”

“I see.”

“I don’t get it. Why would anyone try to shoot me so long after Bob’s death? If they hate me that much, why did they bother killing Bob in the first place? The whole thing doesn’t make sense! Someone’s trying to tie me in to all this, which means it’s someone I know, and yet no one I know could possibly have done it.”