Very Bad Things (15 page)

Katie had tried Googling Steve’s name and had only found interviews with his ambassador dad or hockey stats. Nothing about why he couldn’t seem to stay put. If Katie was going to learn anything more, she had to look at Steve’s academic records. Or at least get someone to look at them for her.

Bea Lively volunteered in the Student Affairs Office, mostly working with leaders of various groups on campus. She’d helped set up the poetry slam in January, which was when they’d gotten to be friends. If anyone could take a peek at a student’s records without hacking, it would be Bea. Katie figured it was worth a shot.

So she headed straight for the administration building and Student Affairs. When she walked through the door, the phones were trilling, and a pair of gray-haired women behind the counter seemed to be scrambling to keep up. They didn’t even glance at Katie when she approached. But Katie didn’t need them.

“Bea?”

A tall girl with bright orange braids hanging down the back of her burgundy blazer was putting up event notices on the bulletin board. Bea turned her freckled face toward Katie. “Hey,” she said, giving a little wave. She had a wrist full of handmade bracelets, yellow tights under her burgundy-and-black plaid skirt, and brown clogs. Bea was not a slave to fashion.

“Have you got a sec?” Katie asked.

“Hang on, okay?” Bea finished pressing pushpins into a flyer, then walked over to Katie. “How’re you doing? I heard
they found that missing girl. The phones are going bonkers. I had to take a break.”

“That’s kind of why I’m here.” Katie looked over at the women behind the counter. They were busy answering calls and didn’t seem to be listening, but Katie didn’t want to take any chances. She drew Bea toward a pair of chairs against the far wall.

Above them, a framed poster of a broadly smiling girl and boy hovered. Bold black letters screamed
WHITNEY ACADEMY IS THE PLACE TO BE!

Yeah, Katie thought, it was the place to be if you liked sharing the campus with a psycho killer.

“What’s up?” Bea asked. “You’re not here to get your transcript forwarded, are you? I know your mom wants you to leave, but they’ll catch the guy soon, I’m sure they will, and graduation’s coming up so fast.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Phew.”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“You look so serious.” Bea wrinkled her forehead. “So is the favor illegal or immoral?”

“A little of both,” Katie said, and wet her lips. “Can you look at someone’s records for me?”

“Like, their grades?”

Katie shook her head. “Like why they left their other schools.”

“Who are we talking about?” Bea pulled a braid forward and twisted it.

Katie kept her voice low. “Steve Getty.”

Bea dropped the braid. “The ambassador’s son?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he do? Besides thinking he’s God’s gift to women, I mean.”

Katie didn’t know a way to put it nicely. “I think he might have date-raped someone.”

“For real?” Bea looked horrified. “Why would Whitney let him in if they knew? Screw that”—she waved a hand in the air—“why isn’t he in jail?”

“Maybe the school didn’t know. Maybe Steve’s dad kept everyone quiet,” Katie replied, thinking of something Tessa had said.

People get away with stuff all the time around here. And if their parents can’t buy them out of it, they just yank them from school and they start all over again somewhere else
.

Steve Getty’s dad was high-profile enough to pull plenty of strings and quietly pass out hush money.

“I’m toast if I get caught, but I’ll do my best,” Bea said, and her gaze shifted toward the women behind the counter. “Student volunteers aren’t supposed to handle transcripts. But if the phones keep ringing nonstop, I can probably get to the computer in back for a few minutes alone.”

“Please try,” Katie begged. Her phone buzzed, but she ignored it. “I think Steve might have had something to do with Rose Tatum.”

“The dead girl?” Bea said, and got quiet for a moment. “But everyone’s saying Mark was the last one—”

“I know what they’re saying,” Katie cut her off. She’d begun having doubts of her own, and it sickened her. “What if everyone’s wrong?”

Bea’s eyes filled with pity. “But, Katie, what if they’re right?”

“Call me if you find out anything,” she said, and grabbed her book bag.

As Katie walked out the door, her phone buzzed again. She left it in her pocket till she was outside. She took a deep breath of spring air and glanced around from the top of the building steps. A police cruiser rolled slowly past and then another. Her pulse picked up. She couldn’t help wondering if they were going to arrest Mark.

A couple of students walked by, staring at her, and Katie scooted over to a pillar, tucking her shoulder against the column to check her messages. The most recent two were from Tessa, and the words nearly made Katie’s heart stop:

You’re right. I have a secret,
the first text said. And the second,
Come to dr c’s now & I will tell you all I know.

I
t didn’t take long for the police to come calling after Rose was found.

They caught Mark at home between classes. No more playing nice and asking for cooperation. They had a warrant this time, signed by a county judge. They wanted to search several rooms at the headmaster’s house and Mark’s locker at the ice rink.

While the housekeeper kept them in the foyer, Mark called his dad, who arrived minutes after with the school’s general counsel. The lawyer looked over the paperwork and gave a grim nod. Mark’s father frowned.

“If you just tell us what you want, we’ll get it for you,” he told the police captain, but the officer asked him to stay back and let them do their job.

“You should get to class,” his dad suggested, but Mark couldn’t go.

His stomach was doing flip-flops. How could he leave when they were digging through his stuff? What were they looking for exactly? If they wanted to find strands of Rose’s hair or her fingerprints, they probably would. She was here at the party—no one was denying that fact.

Charlie had helped Mark clean up afterward, tossing sticky cups and mopping up puddles of beer. Mark hadn’t seen blood anywhere. Not a drop.

He stood aside, watching as they worked their way through the house. First, they focused on the basement rec room, then Mark’s bedroom and the maid’s room, where Mark had told them he’d passed out.

They rifled through drawers, tossed sofa cushions, and even asked his dad for the key to the liquor cabinet. A uniform wearing latex gloves and booties vacuumed lint from the rugs. They dusted doorknobs for prints and took the linens from the beds along with a pair of Mark’s shoes and his hairbrush. Everything got packed into big brown bags that were tagged and taken out to a waiting police car.

Annalisa moaned at the mess they left behind, and Mark’s dad didn’t seem any too happy about it, either.

“For God’s sake, this is my home, not a crime scene,” his father muttered to the lawyer, and then Mark overheard them talking about the cops issuing a warrant for the greenhouse, too. They wanted to confiscate pruning saws and shovels.

Did they think Mark had killed Rose, then used a saw from the greenhouse to cut off her hand and a shovel to bury her? They’d already fingerprinted him and taken a sample of
his DNA. Was it just a matter of time before they cuffed him and hauled him off?

I’m sorry
, he wanted to tell his dad again. Because all of this was his fault. He’d brought this on, even if he hadn’t meant to. And it wasn’t going away.

Before the cops had finished, when no one was paying him any attention, Mark skipped out. He took off on his bike, heading to the rink as fast as he could pedal. If they were going to paw through his locker next, he wanted to get there first.

He tried to remember what was in there. Dirty socks. Jockstraps. Helmet. Skates. Extra blades. Nothing that his teammates wouldn’t have. Nothing worth shit to anyone but him. Definitely nothing to do with that girl.

But when he got to the rink, there was a black and white Barnard police car sitting out front. Another one? Were they executing the search warrants all at once?

Breathing hard, Mark pedaled around back, dropping his bike to the grass and rushing in through the rear door.

He saw Steve and Charlie and a few other guys hanging around the coach’s office. “Dude,” he heard Steve mutter, “you’re in big trouble.”

Mark silently walked past. He wasn’t going to be baited into a fight this time.

“Hey, Summers, they said to keep back,” Charlie told him, but Mark didn’t listen.

He went around the rows of lockers, turning into the aisle where his locker was. “Um, excuse me,” he said to the two cops picking through his stuff, “but that’s my locker.”

“You’re Mark Summers?”

“Yeah.”

A uniform stopped him before he got too close, but he could see that the locker door was wide open. They hadn’t needed to crowbar it. His lock had been broken for ages. Mark hadn’t cared. He’d never kept anything valuable in there. He couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to lift a bunch of sweaty nut cups.

“Just give us some room,” the officer said. “It won’t be long.”

Mark nodded, moving toward the end of the aisle.

They’d tossed aside most of his stuff except for a towel brown with dried blood
—his
blood, he was sure—which was quickly stuffed into an evidence bag.

Then one of the cops held something in his latex-gloved hand. “Looks like a burner,” he said, his gaze shifting toward Mark.

The other nodded. “Bag it.”

“That’s not mine,” Mark told them, because it wasn’t. He had his phone in his back pocket, and the one they removed from his locker looked like a crappy flip phone.
A burner
, the cop had said. The prepaid kind you used when you couldn’t afford a contract, Mark thought. The kind that kept your calls anonymous. Only he’d never seen this one before. “I don’t know how it got there,” he told them.

But he had a horrible feeling he knew whose it was.

T
essa’s eyes watched the clock. Was Katie coming or not?

“I can stay about another twenty minutes, but that’s all,” Dr. Capello said from behind her desk. “Then I’ve got to head to my office in town. Do you want to talk about whatever it is now? Is it so important that Katie be here, too?”

“Yeah,” Tessa told her, staring at the door, “it is.”

She’ll show
, Tessa thought.
She has to
.

Another five minutes ticked past and then the door flew open.

Katie poked her head in, and Tessa jumped up from her chair, walking toward her. “You came,” she said. “I knew you would.”

“What’s up with you?” Katie whispered, looking past Tessa’s shoulder at the school shrink. “Why’d you want to meet me here? Why not back at the dorm?”

“Dr. C should hear this, too,” Tessa told her. She needed someone else in the room, someone who might actually believe her.

“Have a seat, Katie.” Dr. Capello gestured to the chairs near her desk. “Let’s hear what Tessa has to say.”

Despite her skeptical expression, Katie sat and placed her book bag on the floor by her feet. She pushed her long hair behind her ears, then settled back. “Okay,” she said, “I’m listening.”

Tessa’s armpits felt damp. She was nervous, even though she’d been gearing up for this for days. “I haven’t been straight with you,” she said, and forced herself to meet Katie’s eyes. “I didn’t mean to keep secrets, but I was scared. I wasn’t sure what to do, but then they found the girl, and I knew I couldn’t stay quiet—”

“Tessa, just
spill
,” Katie said, sounding tired. She looked tired, too. There were gray shadows beneath her eyes.

Tessa wet her lips. “I know something about the night Rose Tatum disappeared, more than I’ve told you. Something Mark can’t seem to remember.”

“Oh, my God.” Katie threw up her hands. “This is about bashing Mark? Been there, done that. Sorry, Dr. Capello, but I’m out of here.” She grabbed her bag and headed toward the door.

“I promised him I wouldn’t tell,” Tessa blurted out. She couldn’t let Katie leave. She had to listen! “He was totally trashed when he called me that night.”