12:02 a.m. EST
“Looks like they hit a deer,” Frank DeGidio said. “Ray hooked the car up and hauled it to the yard so you can tell your insurance guy he can take a look at it, but trust me, it’s totaled.”
Tommy had known Frank and Ray DeGidio since middle school. Frank was a local cop and Ray owned a towing service. Tommy glanced out the window at the flashing lights of the police car.
“Are you okay?” he asked Reese.
“I’m a little shaken up, but yeah, I’m okay.”
“The EMTs looked him over and said he was good,” the cop said. “I thought he should go to the hospital and get himself checked out, just to be sure, but he wanted me to bring him here.”
“I’m a doctor,” Quinn volunteered. “I’d be happy to have a look at him.”
“Okay then,” Frank said.
Tommy donned his coat. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
They stood next to the squad car for a moment, DeGidio looking up at the snow, which had just started to fall.
“Snow’s going to make it hard to write up the accident,” he said. “Once the skid marks get covered over, you have to wait until a thaw, and if you wait too long, a good lawyer can claim the evidence has been compromised ’cause you didn’t get to it in time.”
“Do you have any sense of what happened?”
“Looked to me like they hit something first, and whatever it was busted the windshield, ’cause there was glass inside the car. Then they slammed into a tree, bounced off and crossed the road, and T-boned into a cliff on the other side.” DeGidio used his hands to illustrate what he was saying. “The kid got thrown clear, but the other two went through the windshield. That’s just a guess. I’m really sorry about your friends. If it helps, the EMT said it looked like they went fairly instantaneous. They didn’t suffer.”
“I appreciate that, Frank,” Tommy said.
“Can I ask you what George Gardener was doing driving your car?” the policeman said. “I never seen him driving anything but that beat-up old pickup.”
“They were heading for JFK,” Tommy said. “To catch a flight to England. That’s where the boy is from. I told George to take my car because I was worried his truck wouldn’t make it to Kennedy and back.”
The cop nodded. Tommy knew he hadn’t really answered the question, but Frank let it go.
“You have contact information for the old guy? The Englishman?”
“I can get it for you,” Tommy said. “If you need to, you can bill me for whatever it costs to send his body home.”
“I’ll pass that along. George have any heirs?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Man. It’s gonna be crazy if he doesn’t. All the people who’ll be going after the Gardener Farm. I’ve heard it’s the most valuable piece of land in Westchester.”
“You think it was a deer?”
“Don’t know. The car was burned pretty bad. Whatever it hit got wedged in the grill and burned up with it. I told Ray if he found any filet mignon to save it for me.”
In the kitchen, Quinn was shining a small flashlight in Reese’s eyes and asking him simple questions to make sure he was fully oriented. He turned to give Tommy a thumbs-up.
“He’s good,” Quinn said. “Banged up his knee a little, but nothing serious. It sounds slightly miraculous.”
“Do you remember any of what happened?” Tommy asked the boy.
“It happened pretty fast,” Reese said. “One minute everything was fine, and the next everything was upside down and flying.”
“Did you see anything afterward? Or hear anything?”
“No,” Reese said. “Once I figured out what was happening, I found Dr. Villanegre’s phone—mine burned up in the car—and dialed 911. Then I just waited.”
“Just wondering. We got some odd signatures on the security cameras,” Tommy said. “We’re still trying to figure out what they mean. You didn’t see anything?”
Reese shook his head.
“Should we wake the others?” Quinn asked.
“Let them be,” Tommy said. “It’ll keep. We’re going to need all the sleep we can get.”
There was a spare guestroom for Reese across the hall from Quinn’s room. Tommy showed him where the towels were and where the bathroom was and then left him to his own devices, adding that he’d be up in the kitchen keeping watch if anybody needed a glass of warm milk to help them nod off.
At the monitor in the kitchen, Tommy scanned the surrounding woods again, but he couldn’t see more than thirty or forty yards beyond his property, even when he zoomed. A quick Google search led him to a website and a gadget he believed could solve the problem. He found his credit card and ordered one.
His other problem was less easily solved. He couldn’t believe the accident was, well . . . an accident. It was true, deer on the roads were a problem in East Salem, but he’d driven here all his life and never hit one. It was too much of a coincidence. George and Julian were dead, but the more he thought about it, the less sense it made that they’d been targeted and more likely that they were collateral damage. He’d believed Reese when the boy had said the people who ran St. Adrian’s Academy were trying to kill him. Dani believed him too. If that was true, then it was more likely that Reese was the target—but they’d failed to take him out.
Why?
Reese had survived the crash. Between the time of the crash and the time Frank DeGidio or the EMTs showed up, Reese had been alone. Vulnerable. What happened during that time? If someone or something had tried to kill him, why didn’t it try again when it had the chance? He wanted to believe the kid, but his story didn’t make sense. Maybe he simply hadn’t finished telling it yet, though Tommy had given him ample opportunity.
He decided he’d see what Dani had to say about it in the morning.
In his room, Reese read from his Bible, reviewing the part in 2 Corinthians that talked about false apostles and deceitful workers and how Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, and how his agents often masquerade as “servants of righteousness.” He’d learned that he couldn’t trust anybody. The people he was most suspicious of were the ones who wanted him to trust them the most, the ones who said they were his friends, or who claimed to be on the same side he was—the ones who claimed to be servants of righteousness.
He hadn’t decided yet about Tommy Gunderson or the others. He’d learned of them when they came to campus to investigate the murder of the girl on Bull’s Rock Hill, and they’d figured out that his classmate, Amos Kasden, had done the killing. Then Amos tried to kill Dani, but Tommy killed Amos before he could hurt her. A simple syllogism—the enemy of evil must be good—suggested that he could let down his guard and take the things Tommy and Dani and the others were saying at face value, except . . . that could be a trick too. Reese reminded himself that he had to be careful. They called Satan the great deceiver, not the so-so deceiver.
It was safer to keep his intentions to himself and assume everyone was in league with the devil. He would tell them whatever they wanted to hear, play the part of a shy English schoolboy, and when he got the information he was after—he was gone.