The Competition - [40]

I suggested the road could wait until tomorrow.

He thought I might be right.

24

Wednesday morning, October 9

Morning, as usual, came too early for me. I had to fly through my shower and jump into the first thing I saw in my closet. Not Graden. Graden woke up at the crack of dawn as a matter of habit as well as choice. Probably his only obnoxious trait. When I went out to the living room, I found him reading the paper and drinking coffee.

He looked up and smiled. “Morning, sunshine. I don’t think you have time to order breakfast.”

“No.” I sighed, poured myself a large mug of coffee, and tried to slug down as much of it as possible.

He looked me over, noticing my outfit. “I take it you won’t need to be in court today.”

I was wearing black jeans and an ivory turtleneck sweater. “Nope. We’ll be out doing interviews, and I don’t want to freeze.”

Graden smirked. “Yeah, it could get down to sixty degrees. Better wear your snow boots.”

I threw my napkin at him, then walked over to the hall closet and pulled out my down puffer coat. Graden walked over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen, I need you to be very careful. Those kids are crazy-”

“No, not crazy. Personality disordered-”

“Whatever. Which makes them unpredictable. No one knows where or when they’ll surface. And remember, they still have guns.”

I opened my purse and pulled out my.38 Smith and Wesson. “But I’m a better shot, and I’m a little crazy myself.”

“A little.” Graden smiled and kissed me.

When I got downstairs, Bailey was parked at the front entrance and chatting with Angel. “Mind if we stop and get some coffee?” I said. I hadn’t had my two-cup daily dose.

Bailey pointed to a bag in the front passenger seat. “Got ya covered. Even brought bagels.”

I grabbed my coffee from the cup holder and took a sip, then rummaged through the bag. Coffee, bagels…even cream cheese? This kind of service I never got. Not from Bailey. “Okay, where’s the catch? What do you want?”

“Nothing. Friends buy friends breakfast, don’t they?”

“No.”

“But now that you mention it, we really should check in with Dorian. Let her know we didn’t preserve Otis’s laptop for her.”

See? “So let me get this straight. I’m supposed to incur the wrath of Dorian for a measly coffee and bagel?”

“And cream cheese. And there’s some jam in there too.”

I put in the call and got lucky: Dorian’s voice mail. I pumped a fist and gave Bailey a triumphant smile. Then I checked my own voice mail. There were fifty-seven messages. I listened to the first one. The producer of channel nine news was asking for comment on the search at the Jarvis residence. The next four were the same. I didn’t bother to listen to the rest, or wonder how the press got my cell phone number. They’d gotten it during the Antonovich case too. I made a mental note to change my number. Again. Northbound traffic wasn’t bad. By ten to eight, Bailey was pulling into the faculty parking lot at Robert S. Taft High School. Located on Ventura Boulevard-the busiest thoroughfare in the Valley-Taft wasn’t as big or as fancy as Fairmont High. It had that ’60s square-box, plain-wrap look. Also unlike Fairmont, it wasn’t an enclosed building. It was your typical Southern California school, with classrooms accessible from outdoor hallways.

A secretary directed us to the classroom that had been set aside for our interviews. The door had been propped open, and the room was downright frosty. Even Bailey rubbed her hands together and zipped up her jacket. The other problem was that the only furniture in the room was a few desks. The kind that are attached to chairs. If we sat at those desks, it would put a physical barrier between us and the students. We needed the kids to relax and open up.

“I guess we could sit on the floor, hippie-style,” I said.

Bailey shook her head. “A little too casual. We need to maintain some authority.” She pulled a couple of desk-chairs to the front of the room and sat on the desk. I followed suit.

Seconds later, a teenage boy with shoulder-length blonde hair poked his head in through the open doorway. “Are you the cop-I mean, officers we’re supposed to talk to?”

Bailey put on her warm interview smile and gestured for him to come in. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

He slid into the chair facing us and stretched out his legs. They stuck out past the edge of the desk by about a foot. His name was Kenny Epstein, and he’d known Logan since junior high. I asked if they were good friends.

Kenny shrugged. “We weren’t super close or anything, but we were friendly. We’d shoot the shit-uh, sorry.”

I waved him off. Yo, me and Bailey, we were the cool cops.

Kenny gave a nervous smile and continued. “Logan was always the smartest guy in the room. A real brainiac. But not a nerd or anything. Pretty much everyone liked him-”

“Would you say he was popular?” I asked.

Kenny tossed his head, flicked back his overgrown bangs. “He didn’t party a lot or anything. He wasn’t Joe Social. He was kind of the quiet type, you know? But he was a good guy.”

“Did you ever hear of him getting bullied or pushed around by the jocks?” Bailey asked.