4 The Killing Bee (23 page)

Andrea interrupted him. "You especially like the number four."

He stared at her. She had a pretty good sneer, too. "What?"

"You like the number four a lot more than the number three," I said.

"If you're still hassling me about that extra computer Ms. Helquist ordered—"

"Don't play dumb," I said.

"We're hassling you about your son's grade," Andrea said.

"You felt life wouldn't be complete unless
little Mikey got straight fours," I said.

"So you told Meckel he better make damn sure that happened," Andrea said.

Lawrence just stood there, in shock. I said, "What was the deal, you wanted straight fours so you could get him into some private school in Albany?"

"Or was it just an ego thing?" Andrea said.

"You people are so out of line," Lawrence sputtered.

"Are we really?" Andrea said. "We
have a tape recording of Meckel ordering your son's teacher to raise his grade."

"I don't believe you," Lawrence said, but then he looked us both over and realized we were telling the truth.

"Look," he said, "I don't know anything about this. I never once talked to Meckel about Mike's grades."

"Nonsense. Mec
kel was pretty clear on the subject," I said.

"Then all I can say is, maybe Sam had some kind of twisted idea I'd be more laid back about financial irregularities if my son was doing well."

"Your story doesn't hold up," Andrea said. "We know you had a meeting scheduled with Meckel for Tuesday."

"The Tuesday he was killed," I elaborated.

Lawrence's eyes darted around the room, like he was looking for a way to escape.

Or maybe he was looking for a spelling bee trophy or some other weapon to attack us with. Hopefully he wouldn't find one.

"We also know," Andrea said deliberately, sounding very much like the English teacher she was, "that Meckel had just learned your child would be receiving threes, after all. That’s what he told you on Tuesday morning. Just before you began yelling at him."

"And just before you killed him," I said, beating Andrea to the punchline.

The room was silent for a moment. Then Lawrence said, "You've got it all wrong."

"Enlighten us," Andrea said.

"You're not gonna believe this," said Lawrence, "because you're both dyed-in-the-wool bleeding-heart liberals. You think people like me who believe in conservative values are just idiots."

Lawrence got up from his seat and began pacing. I watched him warily, hoping he wasn't working himself up into a homicidal rage. "But I don't care, I happen to think fiscal responsibility is important.
Honesty
is important. It bothers me that my taxpayer money is being used to buy somebody a personal computer. Doesn't it bother you?"

Before Andrea or I could reply, Lawrence said, "And I believe firmly
in holding our schools accountable. The best way to do that, objectively, is with standardized tests. So we have to keep those tests fair and accurate."

Andrea and I gazed at each other, raising our inner eyebrows. Where w
as Lawrence going with this? Then we got our answer. "On Monday, everybody on the school board got an e-mail from the superintendent. The BOCES office in Albany had finished scoring the Terra Novas from Saratoga County, and the superintendent was forwarding us the results. He asked us not to tell anybody until the big school board meeting—you know, the meeting we had this morning—because that way we'd get maximum publicity. And he definitely wanted the maximum. Because as you know, the results were really good.

"And like you heard this morning, the results from High Rock were better than just good. Seventy
-second percentile. Highest in the district. Which is a little weird, don't you think? The poorest kids in Saratoga go to our school. We've never been first before, we've always been last or next to last. So what the heck is going on here?"

Lawrence answered his own question. "I'll tell you what I
think
is going on. Hanky-panky. Meckel knew his reputation would go up if the tests did, and maybe he'd get a merit pay increase, so he rigged the results. I'm betting he changed a lot of the students' answers before he sent the tests off to BOCES to be scored. And that's what I was going to confront him about—Tuesday afternoon, not Tuesday morning. Our meeting was scheduled for two o'clock."

"Why haven't you brought this up before?"

"The man's dead. I'm not sure I'm right. I don't want to besmirch his reputation without proof."

I turned to Andrea.
"Just for argument's sake, let’s say this guy"—I pointed my thumb at Lawrence—"is telling us the truth. How could Meckel's cheating on the tests lead to his murder?"

Andrea asked
Lawrence, "When you made the appointment with Meckel, did you mention your suspicions?"

"Yes, it came up."

"And what did he say?"

"He flatly denied it."

Andrea frowned thoughtfully. "Okay, suppose you're right, and somebody
futzed
with the tests. But what if Meckel himself didn't do it? What if somebody else did the
futzing,
and after you made the appointment with Meckel, he investigated and found out?"

"So Meckel confr
onted this other person on Tuesday morning—and got bonked on the
conkus
for his troubles," I said. "I like it."

Lawrence was watching me and Andrea, his head bouncing back and forth between us like he was at a Ping-Pong match. "But who else might have done the cheating?" he asked. "Helquist?"

My prime suspects were Elena and Melanie, but I didn't mention that. "Look, I've already seen the general results for the Terra Novas. But do you have a more specific breakdown?"

Lawrence blinked at us, no doubt taken aback at this new turn of ev
ents that had us all working together like colleagues. I was pretty taken aback myself. Then he shrugged. "Sure, I got a breakdown in my desk here."

He went over and pulled out a sheaf of papers
stapled together. "The High Rock results are on pages two and three," he said, handing them to me.

I turned to the fou
rth-grade results and found Elena's class. In math, they were in the seventy-eighth percentile. In English, they were in the eightieth.

Then I found Melanie's class. Their high scores were even more pronounced
—eighty-first in math, eighty-second in English.

There were only twelve classes in the whole school. So Elena and Melanie's classes accounted for a lot of the dramatic High Rock increase. Had Elena and Melanie both cheated? Of course, maybe they just had smart kids in their classes, or maybe they did an especially thorough job of test preparation and drilling because they were concerned about tenure. But it seemed questionable.

Andrea was reading the scores over my shoulder. She asked Lawrence, "If one or more of the teachers was cheating, is there any way we could prove it?"

"I don't know," Lawrence said. "Maybe if you looked at the actual tests themselves, you might find something. Like, if the teacher erased wrong answers and put in correct answers, you might find some kind of pattern. Or in the math section where if s not just multiple choice, you might find some answers in the teacher's handwriting instead of the kids'."

"So where are these tests?" I asked.

"After they're scored by BOCES, they get returned to the schools."

"Which means they're probably at High Rock somewhere," said Andrea. "Sitting in the principal's office, maybe."

Suddenly my mental neurons began firing on all cylinders. For the first time in five days, I got that high you get when a puzzle finally starts to come
together. "Andrea," I said, "do you remember when we went to see Ms. Helquist in her office? And she was in the middle of opening that big brown package?"

Andrea's face lit up. "You think the tests were in there?"

"The return address was from Albany. I didn't see anything else—but I'm betting it was from BOCES."

Andrea frowned in thought. "So she opens the package, finds the Terra Novas . . . And then later that day she calls you up, says she's gotta tell you something."

"Something she found in those tests. Something that would help solve the murder. That’s what she was gonna tell me—except she got killed."

"We have to get ahold of those tests," Andrea said. "Maybe we can figure out whatever it was that Ms. Helquist figured out."

"Any way I can help you get the tests?" Lawrence asked.

I thought about that for a second
—but only a second. My adrenalized mind had already come up with a plan. I was going to get those tests by methods that weren't really legal, strictly speaking. Or even loosely speaking. Lawrence had turned out to be a big help, and perhaps a better guy than I had given him credit for . . . but I didn't think he'd be the best guy to accompany me on my upcoming mission.

"No thanks, we'll take care of it ourselves," I said. "We ap
preciate your help. Andrea, let’s roll."

And with that, we headed out into the Saratoga sunset.

Walking back to our car, we debated my grand plan, which was this: I wanted to go back to the school
tonight and break into Helquist’s and Meckel's offices. I figured there was a good chance the package with the Terra Nova results was in one of those two places. Either Helquist stuck it in her own desk, or else she put it on Meckel's desk so the new principal would be able to deal with it.

Andrea wasn't all that interested in my reasoning. "Are you
nuts?"
she said. "Look what happened the last time you tried to play cat burglar."

"How else do we get hold of that package?"

"We don't even know the package is still there."

"We have to at least try."

"Why don't we go to Chief Walsh?"

We went back and forth on that for a while. We could tell the chief all about our suspicions of Elena and Melanie, and ask him to go into the school and search for the Terra Novas.

But then word would leak out that Elena and Melanie were suspected of cheating. We weren't eager to spread those kinds of rumors even if they were true—and they might not be.

The other problem was, Chief Walsh was ornery enough that he might refuse to act on our suggestion. Or if he did, he might not act on it right away. And in the meantime, with all the dirt we'd kicked up lately, the killer mig
ht decide to sneak into Helquist’s or Meckel's office and grab those tests before we got a chance.

"Maybe that
’s what Melanie was really doing that night when she broke in," I suggested. "Maybe she thought the tests were already there, and she was searching for them."

"But fortunately the tests didn't get delivered till the next day." Andrea bit her lip. "I hope the killer hasn't snuck off with them already. If it was Elena or Melanie, they could've just gone in and gotten them during the middle of the school day."

"It’s possible. But security's been pretty tight in there this week." The cops had somebody hanging out at school all week long, to reassure the kids. And I was pretty sure they'd kept Meckel's office locked.

By this point in the discussion we were back in the minivan again, pulling onto our street. "So you're really hungry for another B and E, huh?" Andrea asked. "Not scared of getting another concussion?"

"Hey, I'm a hardheaded guy."

"What if this time you get attacked with something more lethal than a
flashlight? And another thing—the tests could be at Ms. Helquist’s house. Maybe she took them home with her."

"That
’s a good point. Guess I'll have to break into both places."

"Oh, God."

"Look, Andrea, you're not going to talk me out of it."

"I'm painfully aware of that. So you know what?"

"What?"

"I'm going with you."

"There's no need for that."

"You're afraid I'll get hurt, aren't you?"

"Well . . ."

"So now you know how I feel."

Andrea parked in front of our house and got out of the car. "Look, Andrea, you can't do this."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one thing, who would take care of the kids? We can't very well ask Dave to babysit again while we go out and commit a burglary. He's a cop."

"Then we'll ask one of our other friends."

I would have argued further, but just then the kids came racing out the front door of the house, with Dave behind them. "Mommy! Daddy!" they yelled.

"The Knicks won!" Latree shouted as he put his arms around me.

"Dave bought me a new Pokémon deck!" Charizard yelled joyfully.

"They're winning the series two games to one!" said Latree.

"I got a Japanese Raichu with ninety HP!" said Charizard.