Kill Alex Cross

orderly, surprisingly clean.
    O’Shea did most of the talking as we walked. He’d been with the school “since Clinton,” he told me, and had seen a lot of “big” families come through, although none bigger and more important than the Coyles.
    “What’s your impression of Ethan and Zoe?” I asked. “What kind of kids are they?”
    “Ethan’s a good enough egg,” he said. “Scary-smart, too. A lot of the other kids think he’s kind of weird. He got picked on some. Make that a lot .”
    “What about Zoe?”
    At first, he didn’t answer. He raked his fingers through his hair and seemed a little nervous about the question. “I suppose you want the truth, huh?”
    “Don’t worry, Mr. O’Shea. I’m not writing any of this down,” I told him.
    “All right, well … truthfully? Zoe Coyle’s a little troublemaker. Anyone who tells you she didn’t try to take advantage twenty-four/seven is either lying or kissing up. And believe me, this school is full of kiss-ups.”
    “I can believe that,” I said honestly.
    “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’ve been praying for those kids every night. But that girl’s all about seeing what she can get away with. I chased her and her little smoking friends out of here more than once. And she would give me lip.” He stopped as we came to the end of the passage. “Anyway, here we are.”
    In front of us, there was a half flight of concrete steps up to another door. This was where the locators had been found, although the crime scene had been cleared days ago. There wasn’t much to see now, but I needed to walk through here at least once.
    We kept going and emerged through the groundskeeping “shed,” which was about the size of my house. That put us on the school lawn next to a couple of practice fields and the south gate.
    Up the hill, past a line of old bur oaks, I could see the main building we’d just left behind. Very pretty landscaping. Not the kind of scenery you associated with tragedies.
    “That’s where the kids came out, supposedly,” O’Shea said, pointing up at the lecture hall windows. “I suppose that they did come out there.”
    I turned in a full circle, taking it all in. Did they come this way? Were they conscious? Drugged?
    “Kind of a straight line from up there, isn’t it?” the custodian said. “Right through this spot and out that gate. You suppose that’s where they took them?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. People don’t always travel in straight lines. In fact, the ones who have something to hide usually don’t.”
    He nodded, a little like he was playing cop with me.
    “Well,” he said, “you ought to know.”

I SPENT THE rest of the day talking to as many people at the Branaff School as I could. The students were strictly off-limits until I could get parental consent, so I focused on the faculty and staff for the time being.
    Dale Skillings was the headmaster. He seemed pretty tightly wound to begin with, but he’d also been through the wringer in the press, and no doubt with the parents as well. Everyone wanted to know how this could possibly happen at Branaff. Inevitably, some of the blame had already landed on the headmaster’s desk. If he was terse, or defensive with me, I could understand why.
    “Enemies?” he said when I asked. “They’re two of the most famous children in the world. It’s not possible to avoid some amount of animosity. But if what you’re really asking about is Zoe’s fight with Ryan Townsend, I can’t discuss that with you. You’ll have to take it up with Congressman and Mrs. Townsend.”
    In fact, I already had a few calls in on that one. Skillings wasn’t going to budge on the rules where the kids were concerned, but he did make his staff fully available to me, which I appreciated.
    One of the sixth-grade math teachers, Eleanor Ruff, told me about how Zoe had barely scraped by in her class and about how Ethan was testing off the charts, no surprise. She was a twenty-year veteran at the school, but her feelings were as close to the surface as anyone’s I interviewed.
    “You don’t even like to imagine something like this happening,” she said. She fluttered around her classroom, watering the plants while we talked. Meanwhile, I sat uncomfortably in a student chair that was much too small for me, or even half of me. “Then one day, everything changes. I’m just glad they were taken together. At least they have each other —”
    The second she said it, her