The Suicide Club (26 page)

“If you suspected he’d been abused, you should have reported it,” Lindsey said. “That’s your job, remember.”

“His father keeps a tight rein?” Jace asked, attempting to defuse the atmosphere.

“He’s ex-military. Very strict. Very old school. Justin has siblings, but he’s the only one at home. His parents are considerably older than the norm for our seniors. At least his father is. I got the impression Justin was an unexpected addition. Maybe an unwanted one. I can’t remember the mother ever even coming to the school. Justin’s dad handles everything, including making a lot of demands on the guidance office to procure his son a scholarship or an appointment.”

“Justin will probably get an appointment to West Point,”

Lindsey added. “I know he applied. Both his grades and test scores put him in the top few percentiles.”

“He won’t if
I
have anything to say about it,” Shannon said. “And I do. I wouldn’t recommend that punk for anything.”

“He’s bright. He’s polite. And he’s not from around here.” Lindsey no longer bothered to speak to her friend. Instead, she seemed to be lobbying Jace on the kid’s behalf. “That’s the biggest strike Justin Carr has against him.”

Maybe she thought that as an outsider, Jace could identify with the boy’s difficulties. The trouble with her supposition was that at this moment, he cared nothing about some kid’s bruised ego, unless it gave him a motive for what had been going on.

“We have lots of military brats,” Shannon said. “And most of them aren’t.
This
one…I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“You think his dad would be the kind to set a curfew? Check the mileage on the car?” Jace asked.

“That sounds just like him.”

“Any run-ins with the department?” Jace asked the deputy.

Carlisle shook his head. “Not that I remember. Most of the kids around here are relatively well behaved. Especially when you hear about the stuff they do other places. If he’d been into anything serious, I’d remember the name.”

“The snake even sounds like something he’d dream up,” Shannon added. “He
is
a snake.”

“Not the symbolism they were going for,” Lindsey said. “And not an interpretation I can agree with.”

She’d told Jace the snake was a warning. And a message that
she
was a snake in the grass because she’d associated with him, something her students, if they were involved, would view as a betrayal.

“And the fire at the stadium?” he asked.

Shannon shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine he’d take a chance like that. Not in that setting. As Lindsey pointed out, he’s got a lot to lose.”

“Can we find out if he was at the game that night?” Although Jace had couched that as a request, Carlisle nodded, recognizing it for what it was. “Like you, I can’t remember anything in our files about Carr, but information about something that would put him under the control of the juvenile authorities in another location wouldn’t necessarily be available. It would be sealed. How long’s he been here?”

“He enrolled at the first of last year,” Lindsey said.

“As a junior?”

She nodded, her face strained.

Regret that she was being forced to face these unpalatable truths stirred in Jace’s chest. But Shannon was right. The time for protecting any of these kids was long past.

“I want to see the records from his previous schools, not that they’re likely to tell us much.”

“You got it,” Shannon said.

“I don’t think you can do that,” Lindsey objected.

“You hide and watch me,” Shannon said. “I don’t know about Andrea Moore. Maybe she was just a time bomb waiting to explode. Tim Harrison? Hard to believe, but kids do crap all the time that nobody can believe. But
Dave?
Think, Lindsey.
Think.
Dave was one of the most stable people I know. He isn’t going to copycat some sixteen-year-old’s stupidity.”

“He was unstable enough to jeopardize his marriage and the boys you say he loved by having an affair with you.” Lindsey’s voice was cold.

“That wasn’t an affair, Linds. It was stress relief. Sex. Like minds. However you want to describe it, I don’t give a damn. All I’m telling you is that Dave didn’t kill himself by downing too many pills. Or any other way. That dog won’t hunt. And it’s past time somebody put an end to whatever the hell is going on around here. If you don’t want to help him do that,” Shannon said, nodding toward Jace, “then get the fuck out of the way and let me.”

“
T
he kid’s clean,” Carlisle announced, dropping a folder onto Jace’s desk. “At least according to the locals where the family’s lived before. We haven’t gotten anything back from the Army. I don’t know whether they’re protecting their own or whether their bureaucracy is just slower than everyone else’s. You talk to the dad?”

Jace had intended to wait for that interview until they’d gotten all the background information on Justin, but Shannon’s surety, combined with his sense that things were escalating, had forced his hand. “This morning. I didn’t get very far.”

The description of Justin’s father as “old school” had been on the mark. Judging by the colonel’s weather-beaten features, Jace would have estimated his age in the late fifties, but the ramrod posture and snow-white buzz cut made it possible he could be off by as much as a decade.

Justin’s mother, who had appeared to be younger than her husband, hadn’t opened her mouth during the half hour he’d spent in their immaculate living room. Her eyes had been merely guarded where the colonel’s had been openly hostile.

“I figured as much. He called the sheriff to complain that we were harassing his son. How about the kid?”

“The father refused to let me talk to him.”

“Sounds like he knows something’s up with the boy.”

“Maybe, but he’s also a guy who’s used to calling the shots. I think he was making that point.”

“You could bring Justin in.”

“Not on what I’ve got. There’s nothing to tie him to the fires or the attacks on Lindsey. I’m betting that if I try to lean on him, his parents will provide him with an alibi for each and every one of those occasions. I know they’d have a lawyer here before the boy opens his mouth. And, according to both Shannon and Lindsey, he’s exceptionally bright, which means he’d be smart enough to know he doesn’t have to talk to us. You find out who he runs with?”

Carlisle shook his head. “Seems to be pretty much of a loner. Most of the local kids don’t like him, but he doesn’t give a shit. He isn’t breaking down any doors to get accepted. The consensus is he’s smart, but weird.”

“Weird how?”

“They didn’t go into details, and I hated to try and pin anyone down. Just weird. Different,” Carlisle said with a shrug. “Around here that could mean somebody who doesn’t like football or NASCAR. It don’t take much.”

Over the course of the last forty-eight hours, Jace’s opinion of the man he’d once characterized as “Deputy Dawg” had undergone a revision. Carlisle fit in well with the good old boys he’d grown up with, but underneath those folksy Southernisms was a native intelligence and the dogged determination of a better-than-average investigator.

“Can you think of anything we haven’t covered?”

Jace’s question seemed to surprise Carlisle, but he took it in the spirit of cooperation in which it had been rendered. Or maybe he recognized the request for what it was—a peace offering of sorts.

“You’ve talked to his parents and to the assistant principals. I’ve touched base with the guys I trust to give me the straight shit. Shannon. Lindsey. Not much left.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Jace had tried every one of those avenues, and other than Shannon’s strong instincts about Justin’s culpability, none of them had provided evidence the boy was anything other than a brilliant loner. It was frustrating because the longer he worked on this, the more convinced Jace had become that there was something to Shannon’s assessment of the kid.

For one thing, she’d been in this business a long time. He trusted that, because of her experience in dealing with them, she would have a feel for the ones who spelled trouble.

And Lindsey wouldn’t?
After all, brilliant loners were her specialty. Carlisle’s question interrupted that nagging caveat.

“You’re planning to talk to Harrison again, right? Try asking
him
about Carr. About the relationship between him and his son. If there was one. And while you’re at it, talk to Andrea’s mother about Justin. If you really think the suicides are connected to one another and to the fires, that seems to be something to look at. Carr’s association with the victims.”

Justin’s school records didn’t indicate he’d had any personal dealing with Campbell, nor had the assistant principals Jace talked to. Still, everything from the two attacks on Lindsey, which had immediately followed Jace’s first contacts with her, to the relentless and slanderous online assault on Andrea indicated there was a thread that tied these events together. And a controlling evil behind all of them.

“Hard to believe he could fool this many people,” Jace said, touching the file Carlisle had pitched on his desk. “And Lindsey, who’s known Justin as long and as closely as anybody in this town, remains convinced he isn’t involved.”

“You met her folks yet?”

“Lindsey’s?” Jace shook his head.

“If you had, you might understand her. Lindsey was brought up to believe the best of people. And she isn’t cynical enough to have figured out that some criminals start young and fast. Sometimes it don’t matter what type of home you come from or what kind of upbringing you had. Some people come into this world looking to hurt and destroy.”

“The bad seed.”

Carlisle shrugged. “You could put it that way. Lindsey wouldn’t. She’d find some evidence that they’d been abused or neglected or something. You’d think with her training that would be Shannon, but she wasn’t protected like Lindsey growing up. She’s harder. If I had to bet on which of them was right, I’d be backing her gut about Carr.”

Which was probably the smart thing to do, but something—maybe nothing more than his personal involvement with her—made Jace unable to disregard Lindsey’s opinion. If she was right, he’d spent the last two days going down an alley that wasn’t going to lead him where he needed to go.

“Talk to Walt and Ms. Moore,” Carlisle suggested again. “We just might get lucky.”

There was no way he was going to let this shit destroy everything he’d worked for. It wasn’t his fault that whore had been sleeping around. Her car hadn’t been at the house. He’d checked. So how was he supposed to know they were going to walk in on Campbell?

Once they had, there was nothing else to do but go through with what he’d planned. As emotional as the Anderson bitch had been lately, people would have bought into the idea that

she’d felt responsible for the other suicides. So despondent over them that she’d reached the point of taking her own life. The principal, however…

He shook his head, knowing, as he had then, that scenrio was far less likely to fly. Not with that fucking detective who was determined to blame one of them for any and everything that happened around here.

There had to be a way out of this. All he had to do was think it through. Take control. Figure out which buttons to push—something he was very good at. If that didn’t work…

If that didn’t work, there were other ways to end this. And as far as he was concerned, right now none of them were off the table.

“I want to bury my son. He deserves that.
I
deserve it. And this community knows that.”

Jace hadn’t had time to explain why he was here before Harrison had begun again on the bitter, on-going battle about the autopsy.

“I respect that, Mr. Harrison, but it’s the law. And as long as there is some question—”

“I don’t have questions. I want to lay my son to rest beside his mother. The sheriff tells me you’re the holdup. Maybe, since you aren’t from around here, you don’t understand what something like that means to us.”

“I understand—”

“Then let me bury my son,” Harrison demanded.

“Even if there are still doubts—?”

“You think that matters to me? My son’s
dead.
Nothing you can do is ever going to bring him back.”

“And if someone had a hand in his death? You don’t want to know that?”

“Are you saying somebody put that rope around Tim’s neck and then pushed the desk out from under him? I saw my son, Lieutenant. I looked at his body laid out on that morgue table. There were no marks except—” Harrison faltered, his anger no match for the power of that memory. “If what you’re saying were true, Tim would have put up a fight. He would have defended himself. There would have been some indication he’d fought for his life.”

“I’m not sure it happened that way.”

“Meaning what?”

“That maybe somebody
drove
him to do what he did.”

For three or four heartbeats, Harrison was perfectly still, his eyes locked on Jace’s face. The anger faded from them as he seemed to consider what Jace had said.

Jace hurried to press his advantage. “We know there was an orchestrated cyber campaign against Andrea Moore that may have played a role in her suicide.”

“What kind of campaign?”

“An attempt to smear her reputation with her classmates by suggesting she was promiscuous. That she was pregnant, which was a lie. And that it wasn’t the first time she had been.”

He knew from Lindsey that Harrison had been aware of those rumors. And while Walt’s interest gave him the opportunity to explain the theory he’d been working under, Jace was well aware that he couldn’t prove any of that had led to Andrea’s death. Not the kind of proof that would be required by a court of law.

“Somebody created a fake online profile for her,” he went on, bolstering his case with things he could prove. “It detailed her supposed sexual exploits, although according to her autopsy, Andrea was still a virgin. As a result of that profile, she was openly derided in the chat rooms the Randolph-Lowen students frequent. And maybe at school. We know that in the last few days of her life, she received thousands of e-mails from classmates and others who’d read about her on what was supposedly her site. If something like that happened to Tim—”

Before Jace finished the sentence, Harrison turned and walked out of the room. Acting on instinct, Jace followed him.

He was aware that the “My Place” profile for Tim was genuine. If, in an attempt to prove him wrong, that’s what Harrison was going to pull up, then he needed to acknowledge that. But it didn’t disprove the rest of what he’d said.

Jace entered the hall as the history teacher disappeared into one of the bedrooms. Feeling that at this point he had no choice, Jace walked into the room in time to see Harrison jiggle the mouse of the computer sitting on the desk in the corner.

As soon as the screen came up, Harrison clicked on an icon on the desktop. Then he sat down in the chair in front of the monitor, waiting for the site to come up.

When it did, it appeared perfectly innocuous, just as it had the last time Jace had looked at it. Harrison scrolled through the pages, seeming familiar with the navigation.

“Nothing’s changed,” he said, continuing to review his son’s profile and the messages there. “I watched Tim build this. That was the condition before I’d let him have a page here. Until he died—” Harrison’s voice broke, but he strengthened it to go on, “I checked what was posted every night. It was a routine. Clockwork. And with the exception of a couple of things I thought might be questionable, there was never a problem. Tim’s friends are good kids. All of them.”

“Have you read his e-mail?”

Without turning, Harrison minimized the profile and brought up the mail screen. Jace watched as he clicked on the inbox. Only when the dozens and dozen of e-mails began to download did Jace know that something of what he’d suggested to Tim’s father must have been going on.

“Oh, my God,” Walt said softly. “Dear sweet Jesus.”

Feeling as if he was intruding on what was a private grief, Jace forced himself to move closer to the desk so that he could read the headings as the e-mails continued to flood the screen. The gist of all of them was the same, the phrases in which it had been couched differing only in their degrees of cruelty and vulgarity.

“Mr. Harrison?”

“You want to know if this is true,” Walt said. “You want to know if Tim
was
all these things they’re saying about him.”

“No, sir. What I want to know is, if Tim saw those, would it have been enough to make him do what he did?”

“He was so worried about me. Because I teach. Because I’m a deacon at our church. Because of what everyone in town would think. Not about him, but about his mother and me. Worried they’d think
we’d
done something wrong. That we hadn’t raised him right. Especially his mom.”

“Tim was gay,” Jace said flatly, knowing from what Harrison said that the basis of those hate-filled e-mails had been a secret long kept. And long feared.

“He told me last year,” Harrison said, swiveling his son’s chair to face Jace. His eyes, red-rimmed with grief, were more bleak now than when he’d opened the front door. “He said that however I took it, telling me would be a relief. But I think somewhere inside I’d known for a long time. Maybe always. At least…” Walt shook his head. “Having it in the open between us was a relief for me, too. And it made us closer. Like when his mom died. Just the two of us holding strong for one another.”

“Tim never told anyone else?”

“Here? Where they preach from the pulpits every Sunday that homosexuality is a sin and those who practice it will burn in hell? Who
could
he tell? Who could he trust that much? Nobody. And believe me, Tim was smart enough to know that.”

“Then…” Jace lifted his chin toward the e-mails that were still downloading on the screen.

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it was like what you said with Andrea. Tim was kind. And sensitive, especially about the feelings of others. Everyone who knew him knew that. Maybe whoever did this just made something up they thought would hurt him, like with Andrea. And they got lucky.”

“Do you know
anyone
who would want to hurt your son? Anyone who had a grudge against him? Anyone at school he’d had trouble with?”

Harrison laughed, the sound devoid of amusement. “You didn’t know him.
Everybody
loved Tim. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body. That kid didn’t have an enemy in the world.”