“What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. But his mother was afraid you’d think Jay killed him. She didn’t want me to say anything about it.”
Darrell frowned. “You said Jay’s things are in boxes upstairs?”
“That’s right.”
“We’d like to search them.”
Erica waved us toward the stairs. “Be my guest.”
Jay didn’t have much in the way of personal possessions to bring to Norm’s house. His music, posters, books, and clothes had been squeezed into two moving boxes. Darrell took the first box and dumped the contents onto the boy’s bed.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Rebecca.” He was acting distant and professional with me, and I didn’t blame him after what I’d said. “A diary, maybe? Jay seems like the kind of kid who might keep one.”
“Is that really going to help us? I can’t see him confessing to his diary. ‘Tonight I had pizza for dinner. Also killed Dad.’ ”
Darrell shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
“I don’t think Jay killed him,” I said. “And neither do you.”
“That may be true, but the sheriff’s right. Jay is our only credible suspect right now, and the more we find out about his relationship with his father, the more everything points to him. Fingerprints where they shouldn’t be? Arguments and threats only a few days before Gordon was killed? No alibi? I may not be certain he’s guilty, but I’m no longer convinced he’s innocent.”
Darrell poked through the record albums and rolled-up posters, but there was nothing like a diary to be found. He dumped the next box, which was filled with books.
“Norm said Gordon thought Jay was spying on him,” I pointed out. “Maybe he was. If he was digging up dirt about Gordon or the litigation, that would explain why his fingerprints were in the office.”
“Yes, I thought about that.”
“Spying on his dad may be unethical, but it doesn’t make him a killer.”
“No,” he agreed. “No, it doesn’t. But this might.”
“What?”
Darrell pointed at a book on Jay’s bed, lying among the classics and the poetry collections that had been stacked in the boxes. I knew what the book was, because I had it on my own bookshelf. Everyone in Black Wolf County had read it.
The Ursulina Murders by Ben Malloy.
It was a blow-by-blow account of the deaths of Kip and Racer and what the beast had done to their bodies.
“For a copycat killer,” Darrell said, “this is a road map.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jay sat behind one of the desks in an empty classroom at the high school. Norm Foltz sat next to him. I told you that gossip spreads faster than a telegram in Black Wolf County, so everyone already knew by the time we got to the school that Jay had become a suspect in his father’s murder. Norm had arrived to act as the boy’s lawyer while we talked to him.
I tried to figure out what Jay was hiding from us. Because he was definitely hiding something. He didn’t even look up at me or Darrell as we asked our questions. He sat behind the school desk and pushed around a paperback copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray with his fingers. That book was an interesting choice, the story of someone presenting an innocent face to the world while a secret portrait grows more and more horrific.
Jay was neatly put together, his red hair clean and combed. His long, lanky legs jutted out under the desk. He wore an argyle winter sweater that looked expensive; it might have been cashmere. For a teenager trying to fit in with the other kids in Black Wolf County, that was the wrong way to do it. Most of us found our clothes in a Main Street thrift shop, and advertising your money was a great way to be hated. But I got the impression that Jay didn’t really care what anyone thought of him, and that included his father.
Darrell led the interview. He wore his marine face, which was no less intimidating in his sixties than it would have been when he was a sergeant in Korea thirty years earlier.
“Jay, when we first talked to you, you said you weren’t allowed in your father’s office,” he began.
“Yeah. So?”
“So why did we find your fingerprints there?”
Jay hesitated before answering, which told me he was making up a story. He was smart, but he had the cocky arrogance of a kid who thought he was smarter than everybody else. “I was just playing games with him.”
“What kind of games?”
“Sometimes I’d swipe Gordon’s key and go down and mess around in his office.”
“Mess around?”
“Move stuff. Just enough that he wouldn’t be sure if he’d left if that way himself. Gordon was paranoid, so I liked to mess with his head.”
“How often did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Three or four times. I hadn’t done it in a while.”
“Did you look at any of your father’s private papers when you were in the office?” Darrell asked, with a glance at Norm.
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“About the lawsuit?”
“Sure.”
“Did you tell anyone what you saw?”
“No.”
Norm put a hand on the boy’s arm. “Just to reiterate what I told Rebecca and Ajax, I never asked Jay to spy for me, and I never got any privileged information from him or Will.”
“But I would have done it,” Jay added, drawing a frown from Norm.
“Did Gordon find out you’d been in his office?” Darrell asked.
“No.”
“He never confronted you about it?”
“No.”
“Did he know you’d read materials about the litigation?”
“No.”
“Then why was Gordon convinced you were spying on him?”
“I told you, he was paranoid. He was looking over his shoulder the whole time he was here, like he expected something to happen.” An inappropriate smirk crossed the teenager’s face. “It’s almost like he knew the Ursulina would come after him.”
Darrell stared across the desk with a stony expression. “Your stepmother says you’re planning to stay in Black Wolf County to finish out the semester.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you didn’t like it here.”
“I don’t. I mean, I’m sorry if I’m offending your little slice of paradise, but this whole county is a backwater piece of shit. The weather sucks. The food sucks. The people suck.”
“Then why stay?”
“Because I’ve already switched schools once this year, and I don’t need to have my grades messed up by switching again. I’m applying to colleges in the fall.”
“We heard your father planned to send you back to Milwaukee after Christmas,” Darrell said. “The two of you argued about it.”
“What else is new? We argued about everything.”
“Why did your father want to send you back? He’s the one who took you out of the Milwaukee schools to start with. You said he thought the schools there were putting ideas in your head.”
“That’s right.”
“So what changed?”
“Who knows? Maybe he got tired of having me around.”
“We heard you threatened him,” Darrell went on. “You said if he tried to send you back to Milwaukee, he’d be sorry. What did you mean by that?”
“I didn’t mean anything. I just said it. I was spouting off.”
“Did you threaten to reveal what you’d seen in his files?”
“No. I told you, he didn’t even know I’d been in his office.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Nothing. It was a stupid thing to say.”
Darrell reached into his coat and removed a paper bag, and he dropped the contents in front of Jay. It was Ben Malloy’s book.