John F. Kennedy High School consisted of three large buildings—a field house gymnasium, a science center, and an imposing three-story main building constructed in 1972. Natalie parked her car in the school lot and retrieved her notebook and pen from the glove compartment. Today they were tasked with gathering as much information as they could, while people’s memories were still fresh.
She got out and crossed the courtyard, where discarded wads of chewing gum filled the cracks between the stones. The flag was at half-mast. She entered the 300,000-square-foot main building and found herself gazing into a hundred pairs of distracted eyes as she walked through those all-too-familiar doors. She’d arrived between classes, and the corridors were clogged with kids. Roughly 1,500 students went to school here, and nothing had changed since Natalie was a freshman.
Today, the entire student body appeared to be in shock. The atmosphere was subdued. The PA system issued a bunch of fuzzy announcements—grief counselors were available, a school assembly was planned for later that afternoon, memoriam speeches for Ms. Buckner were being prepared, and volunteers were welcome.
Natalie’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Ellie, texting her.
Mom stayed home sick today. Where are you?
At JFK. Interviewing witnesses, Natalie texted back. Can I give you a lift after school?
Okay. We’ll talk then. Sad emoticon.
Natalie put away her phone and found Luke waiting for her in front of the bulletin board, and when he turned to look at her, she felt that zing again. In unguarded moments, Luke’s eyes cupped her like a fresh peach.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked.
“Not great. But I’m upright, aren’t I?”
“Hmm. Hard to tell. I’m still half asleep myself. Coffee?”
“Miracle worker.”
He handed her one. “It ain’t my first rodeo.”
She took a sip. “Any news about Riley?”
“No change in status.”
“Shit.”
“Word of the day. Shit,” Luke said. “Let’s go.”
They walked past rows of banged-up metal lockers that seemed so small to her now. Natalie used to grapple every day with her unyielding, clanking locker with its finicky combination lock. She listened to the familiar slap of feet against the linoleum floor. Every turn down another hallway brought back more memories—art class, chorus, gym, lunch, study hall. Her high school self dogged her like a shy shadow.
On the first floor were the administrative offices, the cafeteria, and the auditorium. On the upper two levels were the classrooms. Natalie could feel the old humiliations throbbing from the cement-block walls. She never used to care what she looked like until she’d entered high school, when the popular girls started snickering about her hand-me-downs. Back then, Natalie radiated a kind of self-possession that garnered instant suspicion. She bought a pair of cheap sunglasses and grew her hair so long, it fell like a plank down her back. She hid behind her shades and long dark hair and ill-fitting clothes until eventually she found her own tribe—a small group of “gifted” misfits who excelled academically and rebelled against their parents’ hopes and dreams by listening to Nine Inch Nails and dying their hair funny colors. She became so enmeshed in this tight-knit clan that it felt like an explosion when Bella ran away, and nothing was ever the same for them again.
Some of the students were watching the two detectives with guarded eyes, their youthful faces registering adult skepticism. “God, it’s like a John Hughes movie in here,” Natalie said in a subdued voice. “You’ve got your jocks, your class clowns, your druggies, your Goths…”
Luke glanced at the impressionable faces swimming all around them and said, “High school felt like it would last forever. Thank God it didn’t.” It was funny, he pretty much had the world by the balls. He was handsome, charming, successful, a decorated detective, and yet he constantly saw himself as the ninth-grade loner he used to be, a moody fatherless boy who seemed destined to crash and burn in the real world. Well, news flash, Natalie thought—just the opposite.
They walked past a mural of the Founding Fathers and stopped in front of the principal’s office. Luke knocked on the etched-glass door and Gilda, the administrative secretary, waved them inside, waddles of fat jiggling under her arms.
“Go right in, he’s expecting you,” she said as she beamed at them.
Principal Seth Truitt had deep-set eyes, manicured gray hair, and the sour disposition of a man who’d spent too much time hunched over his keyboard, dealing with the banality of bureaucracy. “Good morning, Lieutenant. Good morning, Detective.” He stood up and shook their hands.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” Luke said.
“Of course. Whatever you folks need. Please. Have a seat.”
They sat in a pair of matching vinyl chairs angled in front of Seth’s broad, mahogany desk. The office was drafty and sunny, full of period trim and knotty pine built-ins, decorated with somber portraits of past administrators.
“We’re in shock, the whole school,” the fiftysomething principal said. “Daisy was extremely popular with the students. It’s such a tragedy.” He shook his head. “So. How can I help? What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
“Whatever you can tell us about Riley Skinner would be great,” Luke said.
“Of course.” He opened a dog-eared file on his desk. “Troubled kid, into drugs, on the fast track to nowhere.” He sighed. “Riley was brought up in a dangerous household, where the potential for violence is always a risk. Ms. Buckner … Daisy was trying to help him overcome these obstacles. I’m not sure if you know this, but she’d helped other troubled students before, and this time was no different.”
“Did he ever threaten her physically?” Luke asked.
Seth shook his head. “No. But he became verbally abusive about a month ago, and I take any threats to my teachers very seriously. She was upset by the incident, but Riley apologized, and she figured it was just teenage bravado. Daisy was determined to help him pass her class. The boy’s no dummy. He just has issues, that’s all.” Seth leaned forward. “Confidentially, a lot of my teachers are good at crowd control. They’re good at lecturing and hectoring … what I call lifers. They’re in it for the pensions and the summer vacations. But Daisy actually enjoyed teaching, which is why she got some of the highest scores on our student review site at the end of the year.”
Natalie nodded. “Why was Riley flunking out of her class?”
“He was failing several classes, actually. Let’s see.” Seth thumbed through the file. “Misbehavior, lack of impulse control, absenteeism, failing grades. He was a dropout waiting to happen. His grades were terrible this year. But the deciding factor was Daisy’s class. He was about to flunk out of her humanities course, which is a relatively gut-level course, and if that happened, then we were under tremendous pressure to hold him back a grade. It would’ve been humiliating for Riley, though.”
“Humiliating enough to push him over the edge?” Natalie asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Seth acknowledged. “All of his friends were moving on. When a student gets stigmatized like that, it’s easier to drop out of school. That was Riley’s future.”
“He couldn’t recoup?” she asked. “It’s only April. Wasn’t there enough time to turn things around?”
Seth folded his hands on the desk. “We typically respond to an academic crisis with increased parent-teacher communication. Daisy reached out to Riley’s father, and we were hoping Dominic would get more involved, but he never responded to our phone calls or emails. So I offered her my recommendation.”
“Which was?”
“You don’t pass an underachiever and hope for the best. It’s not good for the school, and it certainly isn’t good for the student.”
“So you recommended he repeat a grade,” Natalie said. “How did Daisy respond?”
“Some of these teachers don’t care enough to think it through. They’d rather take the easy way out. But Daisy wanted to do what was best for Riley. So she offered him several solutions. She handed the boy a lifeline, but he didn’t take it.”
“What sort of lifeline?”
“Oh my gosh, she went above and beyond the call of duty. She asked him to write a paper that could’ve pushed his grade up to a C, if he’d bothered to hand it in. She gave him every opportunity to redeem himself, but he was full of excuses. She was more than fair.”
“In your opinion,” Luke said, “was Riley a danger to himself and others?”
“Oh, he was trouble,” Seth admitted. “There were fistfights.”
“Is he capable of murder, in your opinion?”
Seth closed the manila folder. “Honestly? I can’t imagine it. But if you think about it—raging hormones, academic pressures, neglect at home. It’s all there.”
Natalie nodded. “We’ll need the names of the kids he hangs out with.”
“Sure,” Seth told them. “It’s not a very long list.”