Beans of Steel, the coffee shop down the hill and around the corner from Greg’s apartment, had three things Greg valued: a warm, roaring fireplace mocked up to look like a smelter; comfortable seating; and a Wi-Fi system powerful enough to cope with the couple of dozen students and young techies sucking up bandwidth. The coffee was very much secondary, although Greg, who knew nothing about coffee, had read somewhere that it was pretty good. He sipped at it in absent-minded ignorance, staring at the startup screen on his laptop and feeling vaguely disappointed. He’d hoped to feel at least a little guilty for logging on as Emily Pasquarelli.
Emily had nice hands. Manicured but not garish. He could remember every curve of every finger as she’d typed in her password.
Ba$ra01.
Finding the video footage on Emily’s hard drive took only a couple of minutes. Jerky, monochrome images began to flit across his laptop. Every now and then he would freeze the picture, make a quick note on his cell, and move on.
The parade of images from the school’s three entrances depicted a typical day in the life of Calderhill Academy. There was no hint of the horror to come.
Greg had watched various people arrive first thing Monday morning, including the Delcades. Lindsay, determined to pursue her various grievances at the earliest possible moment, had arrived at seven ten, far too soon for the scowling teenagers she had dragged in her wake. She had parked her silver minivan – in full view of the camera and quite illegally – right outside the main entrance and marched up the steps with Vicki and Chandler trailing behind. He himself, of course, had arrived at seven thirty, and Lindsay had stormed out of the building a little after seven thirty-five. She had jumped back in the minivan and driven out of frame.
Never to be spotted again. Which was a problem. How did a woman, indisputably found dead in the basement, get back into Calderhill without being seen?
Andrea’s movements, on the other hand, were easy enough to trace. She, like Vernon Szymanski, didn’t bother with the main entrance. The cameras picked up her ghostly image in the loading bay at six forty-three a.m., dressed as he’d seen her slightly later in the day, in a woolen Steelers cap, heavy coat, and Doc Martens. She’d entered the bay as a truck would, walking in off Dean Close, then turned to her left and climbed a set of steps to the wide, four-foot-high concrete ledge that bounded the bay on three sides. She’d then disappeared off camera and had no doubt let herself in through the metal door that led directly to the custodian’s room.
She’d left the same way at eight nineteen p.m., appearing suddenly at the right of the frame and descending the steps to the bottom of the bay. She’d then headed off in the direction of Dean Close before vanishing from sight. So far as Greg could tell, there was nothing unusual about either her appearance or behavior. She wasn’t obviously disheveled, and she wasn’t running or doing anything else to indicate she was fleeing the scene of a murder.
But then again, outward appearance didn’t always provide a window to inner turmoil. Even if it did, the camera image wasn’t good enough to pick out the nuances of Andrea’s expression. And besides, she would have had plenty of time to compose herself before opening that big metal door and letting herself out.
He consulted the notes on his phone. He had painstakingly tracked every member of staff into the building that morning and crossed them off his list when they departed at the end of the day. By seven p.m., the earliest Lindsay Delcade could have been murdered, there were, by Greg’s reckoning, only three people left in the building: Andrea; Frank, the second-shift security man at the front desk; and one member of the faculty. Unless, of course, he’d missed that person in the general scramble at the end of the school day. Greg frowned, pushing the timeframe forward minute by minute.
Turned out he hadn’t missed them at all.
At eight fifty-four, shortly before security would have shut up the school for the night, a tall, thin figure trotted down the front steps, shoulders hunched against the cold.
Demetrius Freedman, the chemistry teacher.