Waking Hours (23 page)

“Excuse me? No, you didn’t tell me.”

He explained his findings of the previous night, the blood and the nail in the tree, drawing an imaginary map on the dashboard to show her approximately where each event took place.

“I called my cop friend Frank and told him what I’d found out,” Tommy said. “He said he’d make sure Detective Casey got it. Frank thought the blood was probably from some animal, which made me think. Where I parked the car, there was a sign for a lost dog. I heard George Gardener once shot a dog that wandered onto his property, but maybe that was just one of those local legends kids make up. I asked my Aunt Ruth to look through the archives of the East Salem
Courier
. No luck. I thought of George because of the double G.”

“What double G?”

“The symbol,” Tommy said. “The one they found on Julie’s stomach.”

“This?” Dani said, reaching into the backseat as she drove and fishing in the side pouch of her briefcase to show Tommy the drawing of the
she’d shown the girls the day before.

Tommy took it and stared at it. He turned it upside down once, then right side up again.

“Never mind,” he said, putting it back in her briefcase. “I thought maybe if George was a suspect, he was signing his name. That’s all.”

“You thought it was a double G?”

“Never mind,” Tommy repeated.

Suddenly she had a reasonable diagnosis. “Tommy,” she said. “Are you dyslexic?”

He didn’t answer at first. “Maybe a little,” he said. “I spent a year at a special needs school relearning how to learn. That’s why fourth grade took me two years. Not three. As per your earlier comment.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, remembering the joke she’d made. She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Tommy, I had no idea . . .”

That explained why he was so observant. People with dyslexia had to look harder at the details surrounding them and overcome a dysfunction of the visual pathways, decoding what information was meaningful and what wasn’t. It was like trying to hear what someone was saying at a really loud party. For dyslexics, the world was full of visual noise.

“It’s all right,” Tommy said. “I’m not ashamed of it. I just don’t talk about it much because people look at you funny. Or they feel sorry for you.”

“I admire anybody who overcomes it,” Dani said. “For the record.” She changed the subject. “Do you remember Jill Ji-Sung?”

“Of course,” he said. “Who wouldn’t remember her?”

Dani couldn’t deny that Jill had been cute as a button, but Tommy’s words stung slightly. “What do you mean by that?”

“We only had one Korean cheerleader,” Tommy said. “Right? Did I miss one?”

Dani had to laugh. “Well, she’s now the guidance counselor at East Salem.”

She related what Jill had told her about Logan Gansevoort. He was finishing his education at a public high school because he’d been thrown out of two private schools. He had a variety of problems, most of them involving substance abuse. He’d been arrested once for getting into a fight in a bar during a winter vacation his family had sent him on to Nevis/St. Kitts.

“Sent him?” Tommy said. “They didn’t go with him?”

“They figured he was old enough,” Dani said.

“How old was he?”

“Fifteen.”

“Sheesh,” Tommy said. “Seems a little young to be getting into bar fights. Can you put people in jail for bad parenting?”

“Not until somebody actually gets hurt.”

She wondered what kind of parenting she’d find as she drove to the Kasden home. The neighborhood was one of the newer developments, if you could call it a neighborhood when no house was visible from any of the other houses. The Kasden home was a large colonial, set back from the road behind a wall of shrubs and a gated driveway.

Dani used her cell phone to call the house, and the gate opened. She usually assumed gates at the ends of driveways were there to keep people out. When she saw a yard filled with skateboards and bicycles, pitch-backs and soccer balls, discarded sweatshirts and stray footballs and baseballs and basketballs, she decided that the Kasdens’ gate was probably there to keep the wildness in.

Jane Kasden apologized for the mess before letting them in. Dani estimated, by the quantity of detritus strewn about, that the Kasdens had either twenty girls or four boys. The latter turned out to be correct. In addition to Amos, they had sons twelve, eight, and four. The oldest child was African-American, the middle child was Asian, and the youngest had Down syndrome.

The mother escorted Dani and Tommy into the study, which was as orderly as the rest of the house was messy. Mitchell Kasden was at his desk, paying bills. He rose from his chair and invited Dani and Tommy to sit on a large leather couch.

“I like your man-cave,” Tommy said.

“The boys aren’t allowed in,” the father said, “and yet I regularly find Lego blocks and Pokemon cards in my files. How could that be?”

When Dani asked them to give her a little background on their unusual family, they explained how they’d learned, after losing their first child to Tay-Sachs disease, that they were both carriers of the recessive gene that caused it. The chance of losing a second child to Tay-Sachs was too high. They decided they could afford to adopt a family.

Amos was the first child they’d taken in, adopted at age six through an accredited agency in the former Soviet Union. He’d attended East Salem Elementary despite not speaking a word of English on his first day, did well academically but began developing behavioral problems. Mitchell Kasden thought it started the day he taught Amos to play chess.

“We knew he was extremely bright,” he said. “Within a few months he was beating me regularly, and I’m pretty good. But then he couldn’t stop thinking about chess. We had to take the board away from him, but he kept playing games in his head. We wondered if it had something to do with his coming from Russia. Chess is almost the national game there.”

“And then he started speaking Russian again,” Jane said. “It was the strangest thing. You’re not supposed to be able to retain your native tongue if you don’t have anybody to speak it with.” She looked nervously at her husband.

“Sometimes we’d find him in his room, speaking Russian,” Mitchell said. “Frankly, it frightened Jane. And me. As if he were having conversations with someone who wasn’t there.”

“Did you ever get a Russian-speaking person to tell you what he was saying?” Dani asked.

“Once,” the father said. “But Amos refused to talk.”

“He knew someone was listening?” Tommy asked.

“We don’t see how he could have,” the father said. “We didn’t tell him the man we brought in was fluent in Russian. Anyway, we did some research and learned that St. Adrian’s is one of the most highly regarded schools in the world for boys with emotional or developmental impairments. And here it was, right in our own hometown.”

“They’ve done wonderful things for him, I have to say,” Jane said. “He has tutors for every class. He has friends. He was home for two weeks last summer and he played so nicely with his brothers. We really couldn’t be happier.”

“It’s not cheap,” Mitchell said. “But it doesn’t matter if it helps him.”

When Dani asked about the night that Amos had gone to the party, they said they didn’t know much. The Kasdens had talked to the dean of students and the assistant headmaster. The school had a policy of strictly controlling contact between students and family, “since so often it’s the family relationships that are causing the behavioral problems,” Jane explained.

“Amos had off-campus privileges that night,” she continued. “He’d gone into town. He told us he’d known a few of the kids at the party from elementary school but he’d lost touch with them.”

“He found them again on Facebook,” Mitchell said. “He ran into Logan and Terence downtown the night of the party. That Gansevoort boy is just a bad kid—” He stopped himself and apologized, then added, “Rayne Kepplinger is a piece of work too. I did her retainers. I’ve never had a patient complain as much as she did.”

“The point is,” Jane said, “yes, Amos went with them to Logan’s house, but when he realized there was going to be drinking, he left. He walked back to campus. The surveillance video shows him brushing his teeth in the bathroom in his dorm. We saw it.”

“What time was that?” Dani asked. “I haven’t heard of any surveillance video.”

“The school told us they just sent it over to the police this morning,” Jane said. “It was taken a little after one in the morning. The police said it would have taken Amos at least half an hour to walk from Logan’s house.”

Meaning, Dani realized, that Amos would have been in his room at the time of the murder. The look Tommy gave her told her he’d done the same math.

“We heard they were drinking,” Mitchell said. “Amos knows he can’t combine alcohol with his medications.”

“What are his medications?” Dani asked.

“His doctor could tell you exactly,” Jane said. “It’s a combination, but it’s strictly monitored.”

“The school won’t release his medical records without your permission,” Dani said. “In writing.”

“You’ve got it,” Mitchell said. “I’ll send it today. You understand why they’re so concerned with security, don’t you? There are children of nine world leaders enrolled there. And six from royal families. They have to be careful.”

Dani thanked them and said they’d been very helpful. On their way out, she and Tommy were stopped by the three other Kasden boys, all carrying magazine covers and footballs they wanted Tommy to autograph with a black marker. One had a poster for the New York Giants. Tommy explained that he’d never played for the Giants, but the boys wanted him to sign it anyway.

“What’d you think?” Dani asked once they were in the car again.

“I think they’re good people,” Tommy said. “I’m liking Logan Gansevoort less and less.”

“I’m liking him more and more,” Dani said. “As a suspect.”