All for One (16 page)

Like it was for Jimmy Vincent’s tiny victims. Like it was for Guy Edmond.

The dead were lucky in some respects, but Dooley suspected that they were a fairly angry bunch, especially those cheated out of life by another. And he wondered if the ones who’d cheated themselves were as angry, and if they were, at who.

A hellish eternity, he imagined it would be.

He lifted his gaze toward the sky. Stars winked at him through breaks in the clouds.

*  *  *

The slumbering tabby lifted its head and stared at the front window. A shadow floated across the sheer curtains.

Chester rose to his feet and strutted into the bedroom of his master, leaping onto her bed and eyeing the door through which he’d come. Mary stirred, a hand reaching automatically to the ball of fur purring by her leg.

“Hey, Chester,” she said sleepily. “What’s up?”

The creaking board on her front porch answered the question in a way Chester could not.

Mary’s eyes waked and rolled slowly toward her bedroom door. Through it she could see through the hallway at an angle, and past it the living room, and at the far side of that the outlines of the window mullions silhouetted on the curtains. She sat up easily, slid her legs over the side of the bed, and gathered Chester onto her lap. Her hand stroked his side again and again as she forced the sleep from her mind and listened.

She heard the distant, metallic timpani of a train chugging over Cougar Pass. And the hoot of a barn owl high in a pine behind her house. And a hint of the wind scouring the driveway with autumn’s harvest, the verdant foliage dried and pulverized, swept in piece and part into mounds that would disappear with a shift of the fickle breeze.

She heard all these things, and mingled with them the squeak of weathered planks beyond the front door. Tuning to that and filtering the rest, she noted a cadence to the sound, a step. Feet testing the wood. Someone walking. Pacing.

Right outside her front door.

Mary moved her hand from Chester’s prickly coat and to her nightstand drawer, pulling it quietly open. A shiny, hammerless revolver lay on top of the bible her parents had given her as a young girl. She took the gun in hand and stood, keeping Chester close against her chest.

Three steps took her almost into the hall, but she paused just short of the doorway as a grainy shadow crossed outside the front window. She pointed the revolver at the window and stepped into the hall. The weapon trembled slightly with her hand. She entered the living room, eyes as wide as the barn owl restless in the pine, heart racing like the locomotive cresting Cougar Pass.

Another few steps toward the window. Silence and solitude beyond it now. Not a creak, not a shadow. She stopped before the bolt of glowing linen, wanting to see through it, wanting to confirm the suspicion that had already given feature and name to the maker of the shadow.

She wanted to see. She was afraid to look.

One of her feet began to move, and Chester’s ears went rigid and swiveled toward the window. A deep, resonant mewing churned in his body. Mary felt the rumble and looked at him.

The feline’s eyes bugged, and the window shattered inward a split second later. Mary turned away, covering Chester and huddling low against the wall as shards of the window shredded the curtain and rained upon the furniture and floor. Something thudded hard against the coffee table and skidded into the kitchen.

Footsteps scampered across the rain-soaked lawn, a car door slammed, an engine roared to life. Tires spun on the wet road, then made traction and screamed as the unseen car raced away.

Mary swung quickly around and pointed the gun at the broken window. Air came and went through her lungs in great, rapid gasps, and the tattered curtain billowed inward over the littered sofa, flapping in the stiff breeze.

A loud, annoyed
Meow
escaped Chester, and he jumped from his master’s arm and ran into the kitchen.

“Ches-ter,” Mary called to him, her voice quivering at its source, deep inside where staccato breaths bisected what she had said.

“Meow.”

She kept the gun toward the window (it could not be called pointing anymore, the weapon swaying and bucking in her hand as it was) and crawled three-pointed around the half-wall that separated the living room from the kitchen.

“Meow.”

The revolver jumped, its stubby barrel now sweeping the entire living room, and Mary looked back over her shoulder toward the sound of her cat. “Ches.. Chester?”

“
Meow
,” the tabby replied obligingly, his small face angled at something on the floor, his predator’s eyes calculating its worthiness as prey.

Mary looked back and forth between Chester and the front of her home smashed open to the night. The light from the streetlamp washed into her house only half filtered now, sharp, angular beams pulsing whole into the living room and the kitchen beyond with each flap of the mangled curtains. She caught glimpses of her cat and his attention fixed at the floor, at something round and red as best she could tell in the flat light, round and red with a crisp bolt of silver glinting out either side. She slid a bit closer and made her eyes focus on the object. Closer still, close enough to touch it if she wanted, but she didn’t. Her hand only hovered close to it.

Chester pawed at the object. It rolled toward Mary, round, red, and pierced.

An apple with a switchblade through its center.

Fourteen

The desk was neat, too neat almost for Dooley to believe it belonged to a cop. But there Joel Bauer sat, unlidding two cups of convenience store coffee.

“Just black?” Joel asked, holding the cup halfway across his desk.

Dooley nodded and took the offering, his third of the young morning. He stared vacantly into the black liquid and whiffed the aroma. “Thanks.”

“Jack Prentiss is a hothead,” Joel said. “Ignore him.”

“He’s a father,” Dooley countered. “Doing what fathers do.”

Joel wrapped both hands around his cup and tapped his fingers together. “What’s your sense so far?”

“I don’t have a sense yet. I don’t know enough about the kids.” He held one hand over the cup and let the moist steam warm it. “I was trying to get to know them. Little by little. Planting a few seeds for thought.” Dooley shook his head. “What I do know is that they don’t want to talk about something.”

“Something?” Joel sipped in slow spurts lest his lips be scalded. “What something are you referring to? Other than the obvious?”

“Guy Edmond.”

“One of them killed him. Get them to talk about that.”

“I’d like to know why they’d do it.”

“Doesn’t that come after?” Joel asked and suggested concurrently. “Especially with this victim. If you look for people who didn’t like him you’ll have half a town of suspects. Maybe the whole town.”

“Fine. Let these six tell me why
they
hated him.”

Joel dumped a packet of sugar in his coffee. The phone rang as he stirred with a plastic stick. “Bauer.”

Dooley let the detective have his conversation and spun a picture on the desk so he could see it. A happy Joel Bauer, and a woman, a young boy, and a baby dressed in a red and green crushed velvet dress beamed at a spot just away from the camera, a mottled grayish background draped behind. The moment oozed joy. True joy.

Did every family with children seize these instants to soothe themselves at a later date when life up and happened in some painful way? Dooley wondered if Jimmy’s parents had, and if they’d burned those as reminders of a past wished never to have been.

He and Karen had only a few wedding pictures, snapshots of giddy kids taken at a Vegas chapel by a witness he’d slipped a couple bucks to. He hadn’t looked at them in ten years.

He turned the picture back toward Joel as the call ended.

“That was the office at Windhaven.”

“And?”

“You didn’t talk to Jeff Bernstein yet?”

“If someone’s complaining, I never got near him.”

Joel shook his head. “No one’s complaining. Jeff Bernstein’s volunteering.”

“Come again?”

“He says he wants to talk to you.”

Dooley needed no more coaxing than that. He hurried out of the Bartlett Police Department building into a light flurry of snow, his coffee cooling untouched on Joel’s tidy desk.

*  *  *

Jeff Bernstein waited alone in the library, his lunch sack open on the table before him. An apple sat gouged to its core, and his sandwich, PB&J, moved in and out of his mouth, disappearing in fast bites. He didn’t want to be eating when the detective arrived.

That he did ten minutes into lunch, finding Jeff where the office had told him to look, sitting in almost the same seat that Bryce had occupied the day before at this time. Alone and small behind the table.

Alone and...smiling.

“Good afternoon, Detective,” Jeff said. With his good hand he motioned Dooley over and gave his mouth a last wipe with the napkin his mother always put at the bottom of the sack. “Have a seat.”

Dooley surveyed Jeff and the room almost skeptically, giving his jaw a good rub before accepting the invitation. He turned one of the little chairs across from Jeff backward and sat.

“I have some chips left,” Jeff said cheerily, offering them.

“No, thanks.” Dooley’s head cocked quizzically at the sixth grader. “Mrs. Gray said you wanted to talk to me.”

Jeff nodded, a chipper grin carved across his face. “I heard what happened with Mike’s dad last night.”

“You did.”

The happy nod again. “I guess Joey’s mom wasn’t too freaked, but Bryce’s and PJ’s folks were as mad as Mike’s dad.”

“Oh. You know this?”

Jeff smiled fully now. “Of course. We’re friends. We don’t keep secrets.”

“I see.” Dooley folded his hands on the table, and to match him Jeff lifted his casted arm up from his lap and laid it almost touching the detective. The lump of plaster
thunked
on the hard wood. Running from beneath the blue sling Dooley could read some of the partial best wishes of Jeff’s friends and classmates. “And your parents?”

“They say if you’ve done nothing wrong you shouldn’t be afraid of anything or anyone.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

Jeff chuckled. “Of you? No. I’m not afraid of you.”

Dooley pressed close to the table, closer to Jeff. “So talk to me. You wanted to talk, right?”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what happened to Guy,” Dooley said.

“He died,” Jeff replied, cocky, even pleased.

“You don’t feel bad about that, do you?”

“No I don’t. Guy deserved whatever he got.”

There was something old in this one, Dooley sensed. A calculating pragmatism that was barely tickled by moral considerations. Barely, but maybe enough.

“He deserved to die?” Dooley probed.

“Whatever he got,” Jeff repeated.

“He never killed anybody,” Dooley pointed out. “It doesn’t seem like fair punishment.”

“He would have,” Jeff responded confidently. “Someday he would have killed someone. I’m sure of that.”

“Who would he have killed?”

Jeff shrugged, grinning obviously. “Maybe me.”

“You? Did he ever threaten you?”

Jeff lifted his cast. “He did more than threaten.”

“Did you get in a fight?”

“No, I could outrun him. I’m fast. That’s why he did this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guy didn’t like people getting away from him. So one day he caught me coming into the bathroom and slammed my arm down on the sink. He said I wouldn’t be able to run with a whole bunch of plaster on my arm, and to consider myself lucky because the next time I ran from him he was going to break my leg. And after that he’d kill me.” Jeff scratched at his arm above the cast. “He’s not going to do that now. Is he?”

“Did you tell?”

“Sure. He denied doing anything. He said he saw me come into the bathroom and slip by the sink. It was my word against his.”

“So nothing happened?”

“Something happened,” Jeff contradicted. “I couldn’t run away anymore. He got what he wanted. Another person to pick on.” He pulled the sling’s sturdy blue material back and pointed at one message written among the many.
‘Tough break, JB. Catch you soon.’
“Guy wrote that. He was the first person to sign my cast. He grabbed me when I got back to school two days after he broke my arm, pulled me into the same bathroom and wrote that. Funny, huh?”

Dooley eyed the slanted scrawl contemptuously.

“Oh, and JB; Guy wasn’t using my initials.” Jeff smiled artificially. “He liked to call me Jew Boy. That’s funny too, huh?”

Dooley forced his face to stone, burying any reaction as he wondered how much of this was true, concurrently believing that all of it was. “Who else did he pick on?”

“Everybody. Mike stood up for Bryce once. He got a black eye and Guy got a busted lip. They both got in trouble, but Mike was just defending himself.”

“Did he pick on Joey?”

“Sure.”

“Bryce?”

“He called him a four-eyed fag and stole his juice money at least twice a week.”

“PJ?”

“He made fun of her. Of where she lives.”

“Elena?”

Jeff hesitated, then shrugged. “Probably. He picked on most people.”

“Did you ever see him pick on Elena?”

Jeff quieted through a thought. “She was afraid of him, so he must have.”

“Why was she afraid?” Dooley pressed, digging at the reluctance.

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you guys didn’t keep secrets,” Dooley offered. “I thought you were all friends.”

“We are.”

“So?”

“So, some people have their own secrets.” The oldness in Jeff’s face inflected every muscle now, steeling the fake smile, making his eyes narrow ever so slightly.

“Right,” Dooley said, leaning even closer now. “And what’s the
big
secret, Jeff?”

“I don’t know what that would be,” the answer came, calm and evasive.

“You play much baseball with one busted wing? You swing much?”

Jeff smiled. “Sometimes I hand the bat to whoever’s up.”

“Do you?”

“Yep.”

“What happened back there, Jeff?”