PJ SAT NERVOUSLY IN the waiting room belonging to the principal of Jamison Academy. There was something about waiting to see the principal that brought back her own childish indiscretions. She found herself watching the clock, waiting for the bell to ring in the hopes that Kevin Archibald, the principal, would be tied up until school was over.
She’d gotten the summons while waiting to interview Fredericka Chase. Mr. Archibald would like to see you immediately concerning your son. Not words that a mother wanted to hear, least of all when the mother had several homicides hanging over her head. She’d dropped what she was doing and taken a cab, wondering why the principal wouldn’t give her an explanation on the phone.
His office door opened. “Come in, Dr. Gray,” he said.
Trying to remember that she was the parent and not the student being summoned into the inner sanctum, she followed the voice and was ushered into an office designed to impress. Wood paneling, a desk that went on forever, tasteful groupings of chairs, the deep tones of the Oriental rug, heavy brass lamps with green glass shades, the only touch of modernity a twenty-one-inch flat panel monitor so thin it looked like it could be rolled up as a window shade.
Mr. Archibald, whom she had only spoken to on the phone up until now, took a seat in a massive leather chair behind the desk, and waved her into a smaller version that faced him.
If I’d sassed the teacher, I’d be quaking right about now.
That is, until she got a look at the principal. He was much younger than she anticipated, maybe thirty-six. He was classically handsome, with a strong jaw, abundant, dark, curly hair that tumbled down over his forehead, brown eyes, and the build of an athlete. PJ pictured him in a muscle shirt and cute little shorts, and the mystique of the principal’s office evaporated. While she could easily imagine calling him Kevin in a throaty whisper, addressing him as Mr. Archibald seemed ludicrous.
The girls must be falling all over themselves trying to get sent to the office.
“Dr. Gray, are you aware of our zero tolerance policy?”
“Certainly. Zero tolerance for drugs, smoking, bullying, sexual harassment, and weapons. It’s a very attractive feature of the academy, and I fully support it.”
She didn’t want to think that Thomas had been involved in any of those things.
He nodded and opened a desk drawer. Drawing out a flat box about six inches wide and ten inches long, he placed it in front of him. “Then perhaps you can explain this package, which came in the mail addressed to Thomas, in care of the academy.”
He opened the top of the box. Inside was a dagger with a jewel-encrusted hilt, nestled in a velvet liner.
PJ was speechless.
“It looks like gold and real jewels, but it’s all imitation. However, the blade is functional.”
“Thomas wouldn’t bring anything like this to school. We don’t own any daggers,” she said. She felt as though someone were squeezing her heart. The moment she saw the dagger, she knew what was going on. “We have to find out who sent it and why.”
“Exactly. That’s why I’m turning this over to the police.”
“I need to fill you in on what’s happened with Thomas. The police are already involved. Seeing this,” she tapped the box, “confirms my suspicion. Thomas is being stalked.”
The dagger’s box was a forensic dead end. There was a tantalizing partial fingerprint on the guard of the dagger, but it didn’t turn up any matches in IAFIS, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Which made sense, if it belonged to some teenaged gamer.
There had been no progress in determining who had set up the meeting and terrorized PJ’s son. Two court orders resulted in a phony ID for gronz_eye and the unhelpful information that a library computer had been used. No sign-in record existed at the library for the times the chat took place. Simple but effective. In a similar but trickier way, the gamer had erased his footprints from The Gem Sword of Seryth sites, where thousands of gamers interacted. PJ had visited the chat room several times from her office computer, but hadn’t run across gronz_eye. Thomas, under her watchful eye, hadn’t been able to locate him playing the game, either. The gamer had switched names, chat channels, game sites, and computers, and vanished into the cyberworld. He hadn’t given up on Thomas, though.