Greg was still pretending that he was ready to fall asleep. He lay in bed, hands tucked behind his head, reciting the psalms his mother had pounded into him to settle an unquiet mind. Somewhere above him was the slanted wall/ceiling, invisible in the thick darkness, except for an errant streak of light that had somehow made its way through the thick drapes covering the window. A freight train’s plaintive whistle keened distantly into the night.
‘Gospod – pastyr moi,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Ya ni …’
Psalm Twenty-Three vanished in an image of pooled blood, followed by that of a tall, hunched man moving quickly past a camera lens. He gave up. A sigh of defeat exploded into the darkness.
Was Demetrius Freedman really nursing a strong enough grudge to plunge a screwdriver into Lindsay Delcade not once, but at least a dozen times? And if he was, why hadn’t the police dragged him in for questioning? Why were they so fixated on Andrea Velasquez?
Greg scratched at the invisible ruin of his left eye.
The crime scene mattered, obviously. Andrea had been in the custodian’s room. Her prints were on the murder weapon. She’d lied to the police. But Demetrius was at least in the building, so he had the opportunity. Not only that, he disliked Delcade intensely, which, people being people, was motive enough for murder.
There were a couple of reasons Greg could think of that would spare Demetrius the jaundiced eye of law enforcement. One: the police were simply unaware that Demetrius was in the building. If a person didn’t know him well, they might not recognize his blurry image on the video. And besides, if they stopped watching the moment Andrea Velasquez stepped out of the custodian’s room, they might not have watched for long enough to see him in the first place. Second: perhaps he’d been up front with the police from the get-go and the detectives were inclined to believe him. Still, if he’d been Cassidy, he’d have given Demetrius a hard time anyway, just to see if something broke loose.
Which is probably why he wasn’t a police officer. They had procedures and experience. He, on the other hand, was little more than a bumbling amateur. He was already in way over his head.
Another sigh heaved itself into the night air.
And regardless of who’d actually killed Lindsay Delcade, there remained the most exasperating question of all: how, in God’s name, had the bloody woman sneaked into school? And why? What the hell was she doing there?
In a nutshell, what was going on in Lindsay Delcade’s life that made wandering around Calderhill Academy between seven p.m. and midnight a rational thing to do?
The question rattled about his skull like a pinball, striking alarm bells wherever it went, refusing to go away.
And then it occurred to him: there might be a way to find out.
He sat up in bed, weighing the pros and cons.
There were a lot of cons.
A lot.
But the pro was overwhelming. He needed to know what Lindsay Delcade was thinking in the last hours of her life. And this – for him, at least – was the only way. He padded into the living room and retrieved his laptop. He didn’t bother with the lights. Face illuminated by the soft glowing of the screen, he dropped into the dark web, tapped a few keys, and entered a chatroom.
Dialogos: I’d like an appointment. Hours not days.