The Third Victim (Quincy / Rainie) Read online

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly trying to pull himself together and not having much luck. His gaze returned to the picture of Melissa Avalon. He pinched his nose harder.

  “I’m sorry. It’s been a long twenty-four hours.”

  “It’s okay,” Rainie said. “Take your time.”

  “I needed time last night. Now I need a vacation. Well, that’s neither here nor there. I’m sure you have more questions, though I already told Detective Sanders the little I know about things.”

  “Detective Sanders?” Rainie inquired sharply. Warn-ing lights went off in her head. She didn’t ignore them. “What did you tell Detective Sanders?”

  “Not much.” VanderZanden shrugged, obviously caught off guard by her tone. “I was in my office when I heard the shots. I came out to the main entranceway to see what was going on and heard someone scream. The next thing I knew, the fire alarms went off and everyone began running for the door. At the time I figured it was something minor. A student had fired a cap gun in the halls and the smoke had triggered the alarms. Or someone had lit a few firecrackers as a prank. These things happen.

  “The first time I realized it was serious was when I saw the face of Mrs. McLain, the sixth-grade teacher. She was white as a sheet; her hands were shaking. I told her to calm down, it was just a drill, and then she looked at me. She looked at me and she said, ‘I think some students have been shot. I think someone just shot at us. I think he’s still there.’ Even then it wasn’t until I saw Will’s bloody leg in the parking lot that I realized she’d been right—someone had opened fire in our school.”

  “Did you hear anyone say Danny’s name?” Quincy asked.

  VanderZanden shook his head. “I heard Dorie screaming about a man in black coming to get her. Of course, Dorie is only seven years old, and we’ve had problems with her imagination before. Once she had the entire second-grade class convinced they couldn’t go to the bathroom because little trolls hid inside the toilets to snatch children for lunch. You have no idea how messy it can be when twenty-one seven-year-olds won’t use the rest rooms. I had parents calling me for weeks.”

  “Were a lot of children around when she was going on about the ‘man in black’?” Rainie asked.

  “Everyone was around. We’d evacuated the whole school into the front parking lot, as specified in our fire-drill manual.”

  Rainie blew out an exasperated breath. “Well, that explains that batch of interview answers,” she muttered to Quincy. “One hysterical girl, two hundred and fifty impressionable minds.” She returned to Principal VanderZanden. “Are you sure none of the teachers saw anything? What about Mrs. McLain? I can’t believe someone was shooting a gun in the hallway and no one noticed.”

  “I don’t think the shooter was standing in the hallway. One of the teachers said that it sounded like the shots were coming from a room at the end of the west wing. Maybe the computer lab. I know that from where I was standing in the main entranceway, I couldn’t see a thing.”

  Rainie glanced at Quincy. He nodded faintly, sharing her thought. The killer started with Miss Avalon, then turned to see Sally and Alice. Shot them as well, then ducked into the now-empty computer room as all hell broke loose. It would explain the lack of witnesses as well as the random firing pattern.

  “What can you tell us about Danny O’Grady?” Quincy asked VanderZanden. “Was he a good student? Did he get along well with others?”

  “Danny’s a fine student. He’s made the honor roll several times. He was hardly ever sent to my office with discipline issues. Melissa—Miss Avalon was just telling me the other day that she’d never seen anyone so good with computers. He has a natural talent for it.”

  “What about enemies?” Quincy pressed gently. “Was Danny picked on by other students? Was he considered popular by his classmates—or was he often a target of their unwanted attention?”

  Rainie nodded her head at this question. She should’ve thought to ask it herself last night. Rightly or wrongly, most school shooters felt painfully persecuted by their peers. Rainie had even read somewhere that these homicides weren’t that different from teen suicide—the less popular kid felt an unbearable amount of pain and decided to do something about it. In the case of a school shooting, however, the kid didn’t just plan to end his own life but to take some of the offending parties’ lives with him. That’s the thing with teenagers—they came up with sentences that didn’t always fit the crime.

  VanderZanden seemed to be struggling with Quincy’s question. He finally shook his head. “I wasn’t aware of anything,” he said, then added more reluctantly, “I’m an adult, however, and an authority figure. In other words, while I try to be in touch with my students, I’m still probably not the best judge of what really goes on among twenty adolescents during a thirty-minute recess.”

  “What about close friends of Danny’s who might be able to tell us more?”

  “I don’t think Danny has close friends. He’s quiet, keeps to himself.” A thought seemed to strike Vander-Zanden all at once. “You know, there was this incident, not too long ago . . .”

  Quincy and Rainie perked up.

  “There’s this older boy, Charlie Kenyon. Do you know him?”

  “Oh, sure.” Rainie supplied for Quincy: “Charlie’s the son of our former mayor. Nineteen now, a bit too much money, way too much free time. He was sent off to military school back east four years ago, but he returned last spring no worse for the wear. Now he fancies himself some kind of minor hood. Hangs out where he’s not wanted, drives under the influence every other weekend. We’ve brought him in half a dozen times, but it’s always misdemeanor stuff and his father’s quick with bail money and high-priced lawyers. I don’t get the impression Charlie’s feeling a need to reform anytime soon.”

  VanderZanden nodded his head with real emotion. “That’s Charlie. About two months ago he started hanging around our school after hours. Teachers would see him lounging outside the fence, talking to kids on the playground. As long as he was on the street side of the fence, however, there was nothing we could do. Then one day Mrs. Lund saw Charlie hand Danny a cigarette through the fence. She immediately took the cigarette away from Danny and wrote him up, but there was nothing she could do about Charlie. He told the boy not to sweat it. ‘Detention is when all the fun stuff happens,’ or something like that. We sent a note home to Danny’s parents, and we never caught him smoking again, but we’d still see Charlie around. I don’t know why he insisted on bothering us at the K-through-eight. You’d think he’d be more interested in the high school.”

  “Did Charlie know Miss Avalon?” Quincy asked.

  “I don’t think so. She moved to town just last year, when we got the federal grant. Then again . . .” Principal VanderZanden flushed. He looked at Rainie with something akin to embarrassment.

  “She was very pretty,” Rainie filled in for the tongue-tied principal. “Very, very pretty.”

  “She’s a very good teacher,” VanderZanden added immediately, but his dark eyes appeared wistful. Melissa Avalon had been beautiful.

  “How old was she?” Rainie inquired.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Young enough and pretty enough to attract a nineteen-year-old,” Rainie concluded, and looked at Quincy. He appeared deep in thought.

  “Miss Avalon moved to Bakersville recently?”

  “Last summer. We hired her in August. Frankly, we’d given up on getting the grant, and then boom. You know the feds. Obviously.”

  “Where did Miss Avalon come from?”

  “She’d just gotten her master’s from Portland State University.”

  “Was this her first job?”

  “Her first full-time teaching position. She subbed in Beaverton’s school district before that. That’s one of the reasons we hired her.” VanderZanden gave them the apologetic look of a veteran civil servant. “We have a very tight budget here, and new teachers are cheaper than experienced ones.”

  “Do you know
anything about her private life?” Rainie asked. “Where her family lives, anything?”

  VanderZanden hesitated. He looked self-conscious again and wouldn’t meet Rainie’s gaze. “I believe she has parents in the Portland area.”

  “What about past relationships? Maybe an old boyfriend she left behind? A current beau who wanted more of her time?”

  “I think . . . I think you should ask her parents about that sort of thing. It’s not appropriate for me to be commenting on the private lives of my staff.”

  “Principal VanderZanden, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Phone calls are fast, Officer,” he said firmly. “It’s the advantage of modern life.”

  Rainie frowned, not liking the principal’s sudden lack of cooperation, but before she could push harder, Quincy pissed her off by taking over the interview.

  “What about Danny’s relationship with Miss Avalon? Did they get along well? Did he have any problems in her class?”

  “Oh no,” VanderZanden said emphatically. “That’s the crazy thing about yesterday. I would’ve sworn Miss Avalon was Danny’s favorite teacher. Certainly he loved being in the computer lab and was one of our most adept students on the Internet. Before school, during lunch, after school. It seemed he was always in the lab. Sometimes Miss Avalon even stayed late just for him.”

  “On the Internet?” Rainie jumped in. “Do you know what he’d do on the Web, where he’d go?”

  “I’m not sure. Visit Web sites, look things up.”

  “Did he go into chat rooms?”

  “Probably. Miss Avalon had it set up so students couldn’t access X-rated sites—she had one of those filters installed. Otherwise, students were free to roam. The whole point was to encourage them to be more computer savvy.”

  “Did he play computer games?” Quincy asked. “Any specific ones?”

  “I don’t know. In all honesty, the only person who would is Miss Avalon.”

  Rainie nodded, chewing on her bottom lip. Danny loved the Internet. That put a new spin on things. An adept user could go just about anyplace, learn just about anything. The Springfield shooter, Kip Kinkel, had used the Internet to learn how to build bombs and rig booby traps. Right before they were murdered, his parents had even commented to friends that they were happy to see their troubled son take an interest in computers. Finally, something nonviolent . . .

  It also meant Danny could’ve been exposed to any number of crackpots and loose cannons. Forget just Charlie Kenyon. Danny was a young, troubled boy whose family was going through a hard time. His vulnerability would’ve been boundless.

  “We need to search those computers,” Rainie muttered.

  “Detective Sanders already has them. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Oh, you know Detective Sanders. He’s such an efficient little— It must have slipped his mind.” Rainie smiled sweetly for VanderZanden, though her sarcasm was not lost on Quincy.

  “Did Danny often stay late after school?” Quincy returned to the original line of questioning.

  VanderZanden glanced at Rainie. She shrugged. “It’s a murder investigation. Everything is going to come out sooner or later.”

  VanderZanden sighed. He appeared tired and worn again. A man due to have many more sleepless nights and ethical struggles over how to best serve his students. He said quietly, “Danny’s parents have been having marital difficulties.”

  “Sandy got a new job,” Rainie told Quincy bluntly. “She likes it, but it’s a lot of hours. Shep didn’t want her to work in the first place, let alone if it came in the way of getting dinner ready.”

  “Are they separated?”

  “Nah. They’re Catholic.”

  “Oh, got it.”

  “Sandy came in one day to meet with Danny and Becky’s teachers,” VanderZanden explained. “She expressed that there was a great deal of tension at home and she knew it was hard on the children. She wanted their teachers to understand what was going on and keep an eye out for the kids. Becky has certainly been more withdrawn this year. And Danny has had a few . . . issues.”

  “The smoking,” Rainie prompted. “And . . .”

  “Three weeks ago Danny came to school agitated. He couldn’t remember his locker combination, and something in him just went. He started pounding on the door with his fists and yelling how much he hated the locker and the school and how was he supposed to remember anything when everyone knew he was stupid—”

  “Stupid?” Quincy interjected. “You heard him say he was stupid?”

  “Oh yes, I was there, Agent. It took both myself and Richard Mann to subdue him. Danny was yelling ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid’ over and over again. I was very worried about him.”

  Quincy looked at Rainie. She shrugged. She didn’t know where this was coming from either, but Danny seemed to have an issue with his intelligence.

  “He was on the honor roll?” Quincy asked the principal again.

  “Yes.”

  “You considered him a good student? His teachers were pleased with his performance?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t the best in some subjects, but, then, when something interested him . . . I don’t think there was anything he couldn’t do on a computer.”

  “Principal VanderZanden, did you ever hear his parents call him stupid?”

  “Sandy? Never. She loves those kids. As for Shep?” VanderZanden arched a brow. “Let’s just say he was more concerned about the size of his son’s muscles than the power of his brain.”

  “Did Danny do many after-school sports?”

  “Shep made him try out for football. He got on the team, but sports aren’t Danny’s forte. He’s small for his age, a bit awkward. Unfortunately, his father can be rather . . . forceful. He wanted his son to play football, so Danny played football. In all honesty, however, Danny mostly warmed the bench. He just wasn’t any good. You know, you really should talk to the school counselor, Richard Mann, about these things. He met with Danny a few times after the locker incident and would know a lot more about his state of mind.”

  “We’ll be sure to do that,” Rainie told the principal. She remembered Richard Mann from yesterday. He’d been very efficient in setting up the first-aid station and clearing the parking lot. She also remembered him as being on the young side, and that made her immediately wonder about him and pretty Miss Avalon. More food for thought.

  “We’re going to need a copy of Danny’s school records from you,” Rainie told the principal. “His report cards, incident slips, everything.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “We can get a subpoena if we have to. I’m just asking you to save us all some time.”

  “All right, all right. There’s just so much to do. . . .” VanderZanden looked at his school building. The front doors were closed, the interior seeming shadowed and foreboding from this distance. Yellow crime-scene tape still roped off the parking lot and wove through the chain-link fence, while dark red stains spotted the school sidewalk—blood from the wounded students who had clutched neighbors’ hands while waiting for the medevac choppers to arrive. It was impossible now to look at the building and not think of death.

  “I understand that Columbine had to completely refurbish the inside of the high school,” the principal murmured. “After the shooting they ripped out the carpet, repainted the walls, redid the lockers. They even changed the tone of their fire alarm, which had sounded for hours that day. And their library—that poor, tragic library—simply doesn’t exist anymore. They covered up the entrance with a new bank of lockers and brought in a trailer to house the books.”

  He looked at Rainie and Quincy. There were no twinkling lights in his eyes. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here,” he said honestly. “The damage isn’t that extensive, and yet it is. I want the children to feel safe again, but in this day and age, schools can be scary places. I want the building to be welcoming, but I don’t want to pretend nothing happened. I want us to move on, but I don’t want us to forget.

/>   “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do all that. When I was training to be a principal, the biggest threat we could imagine was an earthquake. They certainly hadn’t started the duck-and-run drills in the L.A. schools for drive-by shootings. Nor had they ever envisioned that schools would become war zones for rival gangs and street disputes. Now we have teachers and students dying in the halls. Small towns, big towns, black, white, upper class, lower class—it doesn’t seem to matter. And the human in me wants to rail against that, wants to live in denial, while the principal in me knows I can’t do that. I have an obligation to my students. If this is the world we live in, then this is the world I must prepare them for. But how do I do that? I’m not sure I’m prepared for this world. I know Miss Avalon wasn’t.”

  “Have you arranged for grief counseling?” Quincy asked gently.

  “Of course. Several child psychologists are coming into town.”

  “I didn’t mean just for the students. I meant also for you and your staff.”

  “Of course, of course.” Principal VanderZanden’s attention drifted back to the memorial. It rested on the poster that said, We love you, Miss Avalon.

  His figure swayed. He suddenly looked small to Rainie. A slight, vulnerable man growing old in front of her eyes.

  “She really was trying to help him,” VanderZanden said to no one in particular. “She really cared for her students, especially Danny. If you could’ve seen the time she spent with him, all those hours after school because she knew he didn’t want to go home. She helped him learn basic programming, she laughed with him over Internet jokes. She was so patient, so car-ing. . . . Sometimes I hate Danny O’Grady. And that makes me feel worse. What kind of principal hates a student? What kind of man fears a child?”

  Principal VanderZanden obviously didn’t expect any answers. He squared his shoulders. He walked back to his car while clouds finally moved over the sun and the first drops of spring rain began to fall.

  After a moment Rainie said, “I think he needs some help.”

  “You would, too, if you’d just lost the woman you loved.”

  “Principal VanderZanden is a happily married man!”