The Third Victim Part 18

Rainie turned to look at him.

"There aren't." She went back to driving. Quincy didn't bother her again. He could tell that her mood had turned pensive, and in truth he was growing troubled himself. For all his talk of objectivity and professionalism, it was difficult to look at such beautiful countryside and contemplate the savagery that had gone on in the grade school. So far, few things in Bakersville were as he'd antic.i.p.ated.

That included Officer Conner. All PC plat.i.tudes aside, most female cops he'd known were broad-shouldered, thick-wasted, and, frankly, butch. He would not use those terms to describe Officer Conner. Her five-foot-six figure appeared fit and pleasantly curved. Her long chestnut hair, worn unapologetically loose, framed a startling, attractive face with wide cheekbones, firm jaw, and full lips.

Then there were her eyes. Not blue, not gray, but somewhere in between. Quincy imagined that the color shifted with her mood, becoming soft flannel when she was contemplative, icy blue when enraged. And when she was intrigued? Her head tilted slightly, her lips parting in antic.i.p.ation of a kiss?

Quincy skittered away from his thoughts and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. It wasn't like him to think of a police officer that way.

Business was business. Especially these days.

He moved his a.n.a.lysis to her qualities as a cop. She was inexperienced. Her handling of the crime scene and the suspect proved as much. But he didn't think she was dumb. In his thirty-second appraisal, she had struck him as stubborn, smart, and naturally a.n.a.lytic. He already understood she was fiercely loyal to her community and, at times, proud to a fault. He suspected she lived for her job, had few close friends and few outside interests. This, however, was cheating. He was drawing heavily on the profile of the surviving child of an alcoholic, which could go one of two ways an underachieving drunk or an over achieving workaholic. Since Rainie obviously wasn't the former, he imagined she was the latter. She had yet to prove him wrong.

All in all, she was a different sort of police officer from what he'd expected. Probably different from what Detective Abe Sanders had been expecting as well, and thus they were b.u.t.ting heads. With all due respect to Bakersville's sheriff's department, most small-town police officers had good people skills but weren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. They made roughly twenty thousand a year. Their cases were routine. They had a tendency to settle into ruts as masters of their tiny domains, and what a.n.a.lytic abilities they did have atrophied as they patrolled Friday night football games.

Of course, Quincy was an arrogant federal agent, paid extra to look down at all other forms of law enforcement -especially those mental midgets in a.T.F..

Rainie turned off the rural route, and farmland gave way to a neighborhood. Minutes later a sprawling white school building came into view. Yellow crime-scene tape roped off the parking lot, and mounds and mounds of wrapped flowers threatened to bury the chain-link fence.

Rainie pulled the patrol car over.

"You haven't been here yet today, have you?" Quincy asked quietly.

She shook her head, still looking at piles of flowers, balloons, and teddy bears. Two feet deep, stretching along a good ten feet of fence.

Loose roses and pink ribbons and tiny, tiny crosses. Handmade signs saying We love you, Miss Avalon, and a large red carnation heart reading, For my daughter.

Rainie's eyes had grown overbright. She sniffled roughly, and Quincy knew she was fighting hard not to cry. He turned to the makeshift memorial.

"It's one of the amazing things," he said after a moment.

"On the one hand, these incidents are so tragic, they make us fear the worst about humanity. What kind of society produces children who

attack other children with a.s.sault rifles? On the other hand, these incidents are so tragic, they bring out our humanity. The small acts of courage that get the kids through the day, from the EMTs entering a war zone to the teachers risking their lives to tackle a shooter. From the brother who protects his sister with his own body, to the mother who administers first aid, setting aside her fear for her own child to help someone else's. And all around the globe it strikes a nerve people feel a need to send flowers, poems, candles, anything to let your town know it's not alone. Bakersville is in their thoughts and their prayers."

Rainie wiped the corner of her eye, then blinked a few times.

"Yesterday," she said thickly, 'the call went out that the hospital needed more blood to handle the casualties.

The Elks immediately opened up their lodge to the Red Cross. Next thing you know, there was a line of people extending four city blocks waiting to give. The grocery store sent out their bag boys with free lemonade for everyone. A couple of older ladies set up play stations for the kids. There were people in that line for two or three hours and they never complained. Everyone just said it was the least they could do. That was the story the Bakersville Herald carried today on the front page. The news of the shooting was in a smaller box in the lower right-hand corner. Not everyone agreed with that prioritization, but I thought they might have a point."

"The shooting is about an individual. The aftermath is about a town."

"Something like that." Rainie unfastened her seat belt.

"If you don't mind, Agent, I spent most of yesterday in that building, and now I'd just like to get this over with. Not being an experienced profiler type, there are many things in that school it hurts me to see."

Quincy followed her into the school. He already had his notepad out and his mind working overtime.

Earlier, in her office, Officer Conner had agreed to walk Quincy through the crime scene for his notes, as well as to refresh her own.

He would not say that they were working together, more that Rainie shared his concerns about Danny's innocence. Thus, she was allowing him to tag along as a quasi-observer, quasi-expert. Of course, she'd told him frankly, the minute he tried to claim the case as his own, she reserved the right to cut him off at the knees. At the time, she'd looked at his kneecaps quite seriously.

Quincy had the feeling that Officer Conner was not known for playing nice with others. Perversely enough, he liked that about her.

Now they walked down the yawning hallway toward the back of the school.

Quincy noted the floors dusted with printing powder, the small sections of cutout tiles that must have been spotted with blood and been carted away to the lab.

According to Rainie, the CSU had finished up round one of processing the scene this morning. There would be future visits as the task force sought to finalize a thorough 'walk-through' of the events on that day.

Then there were the mounds of evidence it would take months to sort through. Quincy estimated that a school of this size would yield hundreds of footprints to sort and thousands of fingerprints to match.

The crime-scene log would probably grow to six or seven volumes.

"This is where I found Walt and Emery a.s.sisting Bradley Brown," Rainie said, pointing to a b.l.o.o.d.y area at the intersection of two main hallways. She looked at him expectantly.

"Was Brown conscious?"

"Yes. I asked him if he'd seen anything, and he said no. He heard the shots, came running up this hall, turned right, and boom."

Quincy turned right, where the level of violence was clearly depicted by the outline of three bodies on the floor.

"Everything happened down there?"

That's what we think."

"In the hallway, not a cla.s.sroom."

That's correct."

"How did Danny end up in the hallway?"

"According to his teacher, he never returned to cla.s.s after lunch. Mr.

Watson said he'd wondered what was going on, but Danny was hardly ever late, so he figured there must be a good reason he hadn't returned yet."

"What time was that?"

"The school runs three lunch periods. Danny's is the last, ending at one-twenty. Students have five minutes to get to cla.s.s, signaled by a bell at one-twenty-five. Danny wasn't in his cla.s.sroom at one-twenty-five. At one-thirty-five, dispatch received a call about shots fired."

"So Danny skips his cla.s.s. And the girls are in the hallway because?"

"Alice needed to use the rest room. Sally was her buddy -in the third grade, you travel in pairs. Their teacher gave them a hall pa.s.s."

"What about the other fatality, Melissa Avalon. She's alone in the computer lab?"

"Yes, it's her lunch break. She keeps the lab open for students to use during cafeteria hours, then closes up shop at the one-twenty bell."

"And that's scheduled, correct? At one-twenty, she's always alone in the lab?"

Rainie nodded, easily following his train of thought.

"It's looking more and more like she was the target, isn't it? Sally and Alice just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."