Nashville
10:00 a.m.

Hillsboro High School had none of the charm of the many private schools in town. It looked like an industrial plant from the sixties, all cramped windows and metal rebar. The gymnasium was close to the road, dirty white brick with green accents; the school itself set farther back, crouching on the surrounding land.

Sadness permeated the air, everything felt empty. Even for a Saturday, things were simply vacant.

They entered the building and Taylor was immediately struck by how small everything seemed. Granted, it had been a while since she’d last been here, during an escapade with a decidedly nonprivate-school boy who attended Hillsboro. She’d attended some dance with him—a requisite papier-mâché, roses and hand-lettered banners in the gym affair—and found herself so incredibly bored by the whole evening that she stopped returning his calls. Hell, all she could remember of him was his first name, Edward, and that he drove a motorcycle, which was the reason she’d agreed to a date with him in the first place.

Nothing of the school looked the same to her. She shrugged; it had been nearly twenty years since she’d last been inside.

A small bundle of gray-haired energy appeared before them, stuck out her wizened hand to shake.

“Lieutenant Jackson? I’m Cornelia Landsberg. Thank you for coming.”

“Ah, you’re the principal. Excellent. It’s nice to meet you, ma’am. This is Detective Renn McKenzie. He’s going to join me in our interviews today.”

Landsberg was already ushering them toward the office. Taylor couldn’t help but feel like she’d done something wrong, saw McKenzie shoot her a glance, reading her body language—when were you last in the principal’s office? She coughed, hiding her smile behind her palm.

Landsberg led them into the quiet of the main office, which looked like a thousand other school front offices she’d been in. It didn’t smell right, though. Taylor still associated the school’s main office with the inky perfume of mimeograph machines, even though by the time she was an upperclassman at Father Ryan it had all gone to computers.

Posters of mascots hung on the walls, cheering on the student council and basketball team. A young brunette, most likely a teacher’s aide, puttered behind the desk. Landsberg ignored her, led them back through a swinging solid-wood gate into the bowels of teenage authority.

“Gwen Woodall and Ralph Poston are meeting us—they’re our guidance counselors. They’ve pulled all the files for our problem students.” She stopped and turned, looked up at Taylor with beady, black-bird’s eyes rimmed in red. Taylor was struck by the woman’s resemblance to a small pigeon.

“We keep a close eye on our kids, Lieutenant. After Columbine, all the schools are more in tune with the troubled children. I’m sad to say we have a grief plan in place to handle just such a situation. We’ve had students come in today for comforting. They’re in the gym now, talking to grief counselors brought in specially to help. It’s good for them to be together, to share their emotions. It doesn’t lessen it, of course, but it’s helpful to know others are suffering from the same sensations. Do you think a student might be responsible for this?”

“I wish we could say definitely, ma’am. We’re just trying to get some information right now. We do have one student in particular that we need to talk about—a boy in the underclass called Thor.”

“Thor? I can’t say that I’ve heard that name. Do you have a surname?”

“No, just the fact that he’s dealing drugs to the students.”

“Drugs?” She shook her head. “They always find a way in, don’t they? In my day it was grass, and the teachers smoked it with the students. Now we have a zero-tolerance policy toward anything of the sort, but one hears rumors. It seems we can’t keep them safe anymore, can’t keep them insulated. They all have their MySpace pages and Facebook, Twitter and text messages—goodness, they have their own language. Our English department had a meeting just last week to discuss whether to accept some of the linguistic vernacular shortcuts into the curriculum, since they can’t seem to get them to stop using it. We voted against that, of course, but we’re willing to do what it takes to reach the students. I have a Twitter account myself, and all the students have my phone number. They’re encouraged to text me anytime they need. But drugs…I don’t hold with that behavior. It’s instant expulsion if we catch them at it. Oh, here we go.”

She opened the door to the teacher’s lounge. There was the faintest scent of cigarettes—Landsberg being the tiniest bit of a hippy, Taylor imagined she wouldn’t be too fussed if one of her teachers used this room for a smoke break. Better to hide it than send the offending teacher outside, where they might be seen by the students. She was sure there was some sort of regulation prohibiting tobacco on school grounds, but so long as the state representatives could sneak a smoke in the state house, she was pretty sure the odd teacher here or there could get away with it.

Do as I say, not as I do. The lesson she’d received from every adult in her life, her father most of all. She choked back the anger that rose at the thought of Win Jackson, in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, and the current, marked absence of her mother, Kitty, still in Europe nearly a year later with some man Taylor had never met. They’d only spoken once in that time, when Taylor called to tell her that she’d arrested Win. Her mother had been in turn livid, then resigned.

It’s just so embarrassing, Taylor. What will my friends think about your behavior?

Taylor had responded hotly, What will they think about yours, Mother, gallivanting with some moneyed playboy you have no real ties to? Kitty had hung up on her, and that was that.

Landsberg was making the introductions. Taylor dragged her attention back to the room.

“Gwen Woodall, Ralph Poston, this is Lieutenant Taylor Jackson and Detective Renn McKenzie. I’m going to leave you for a bit—I want to check on the students in the gym. Call if you need anything.” She tapped her cell phone, in a plastic holder attached to her belt, then slipped out, shutting the door behind her.

“Please, have a seat,” Poston said, gesturing to the chairs opposite them. “We’ve spent the morning looking through the files and talking. This is just…it’s just…” He choked up, and his compatriot came to his rescue, laying a hand on his arm.

“It’s okay, Ralph. Let your feelings out.”

He began to sob and Woodall gave Taylor an apologetic smile. “It’s taken all of us hard, as you can imagine. Sit. Sit. We’ve got a list of names of some of the boys we’ve had trouble with recently.”

Taylor and McKenzie settled themselves at the table, and Taylor opened her notebook.

“Please, fill us in.”

“Okay.” Woodall handed Poston a tissue. “There, there, Ralph. It’s going to be okay.”

He took it and blew his nose, a great honking sound, like a strangled goose. Taylor bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.

Woodall looked like she was having trouble not giggling, too. Taylor liked her. She had a wide brow and ready smile, blunt brown hair cut just below her chin, and freckles scattered across her nose. She looked more like a student than a psychologist. She passed a sheaf of papers over the table to them.

“We’ve been looking through the files, pulling all our students who’ve been identified with narcissistic and psychopathic personality traits. Unfortunately, as these are teenagers we’re talking about, that pile is quite large. I did some cross-referencing to see which of the students were in trouble for drugs and came up with about fifteen names. They’re on the second page.”

Taylor glanced through the files. Wide, furious eyes crowded her mind, faces cast in belligerence, fear or disdain. Many were black; only a few were white, and there was one Asian boy, possibly Vietnamese. They all looked lost. She handed the pages to McKenzie.

“What about threats to the school, or to other students? We’ve heard that a threat may have been made in recent weeks against the students who were killed.”

Woodall glanced down at her hands. “You know how it is, Lieutenant. We have metal detectors at the doors, a safety officer on patrol in the halls. There’s a constant flow of bullying and intimidation among the students, almost too much to keep up with. Our student population is diverse, all races, ranging from wealthy to poor, from happy homes to foster children. Rivalries flare up, create animosity, schisms in the cliques. We’ve been having some gang-related issues lately, and I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that the recent home invasions were by a gang from Hillsboro. But we’re doing our best.”

Taylor had heard about the ruffians—within the past month, three different families had been held hostage by a group of young black men, robbed and then forced to drive to area ATMs, withdrawing money at each stop. So far it hadn’t dropped into her purview—no assaults, and, thank goodness, no murders. Robbery was having a field day trying to track down the suspects in those cases.

Poston removed himself from his tissue. “We don’t think that it’s any of our students, but of course we always like to think the best of them.”

“Of course,” McKenzie said. “I think the person we’re looking for would be extremely shy, wouldn’t be getting into open tiffs with other students. He would be quiet, silently angry. He’d get good grades, but wouldn’t speak up a lot in class. He wouldn’t have a lot of friends, maybe one or two people that he would spend time with, girls and boys like him. He may be religious, or actively keep himself isolated from the rest of the students. Watchers. We’re looking for the watchers.”

Taylor raised an eyebrow at him. That made sense.

Poston shook his head. Taylor was reminded of one of Christopher Robin’s friends, Eeyore. “You’ve just described half the student body. The other half are the jocks, into sports and girls,” he said.

“What about the Goths?” Woodall asked. “I heard that there was a pentagram at each crime scene. That might fit.”

“A pentacle,” McKenzie corrected. “Pentagrams are a geometrical symbol, just a simple star. Pentacles are stars within a circle. Do you have any students who seem to be into the occult?”

“Well, sure. The Goths celebrate their differences, cover their notebooks in strange drawings, write bleak poetry. They’re hassled from time to time, but they manage to keep to themselves. We’ve got a strict policy against the makeup—we don’t want to encourage them to be that different from their peers. But they do congregate together, take some of the same classes.”

“Who’s in the Goth clique?” Taylor asked. “And do any of them show up in these files you pulled for us today?”

Woodall flipped through the pages, as if refreshing her memory, though Taylor got the sense she knew them backward and forward. “Strangely enough, none of them. They’re all so sad, but not what we deem threatening. We try to get them to open up, but they hang back, don’t want to be a part of things.”

“What about a boy who may be dealing drugs to the upperclassmen, specifically to the popular crowd. He’s been described as short with blond hair, possibly named after a comic book character, like Thor.”

“Thor?” Woodall looked puzzled for a minute. “Could you mean Thorn? I’ve heard that name. But I can’t remember from where. Ralph, do you know?”

“I thought it was a code word for getting out of class. Like a thorn in my side.”

Woodall openly rolled her eyes this time. “No, I distinctly remember a conversation I heard last week about a boy named Thorn. It was two of the seniors…well, my goodness, it was Jerrold King and Brandon Scott. They were having a fight, actually. I stepped in before the fists began to fly. But for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what they were so upset about.”

“Any idea who might know?”

Woodall bit her lip. “You can ask their friends, see if they know. But after I broke it up, they scattered, and I didn’t give it another thought. Boys will be boys.”

Taylor made a note to ask around about the fight. Too much of a coincidence for her taste.

“We’d like to get a list of the kids you’d term Goth,” McKenzie said.

“Certainly. I’ll pull it together for you.”

“Thank you. Did any of the students who were killed have any problems with their classmates? More fights between them, things like that? And are you aware of drugs on campus?”

“We’re allowed to do random locker searches, and we find all kinds of things. There’s always some drugs—marijuana, Ecstasy and the like.”

Taylor leaned forward in her chair. “Can you remember whose locker had Ecstasy in it most recently?”

Woodall went to the filing cabinet and pulled out a manila folder. She flipped it open and perused, taking her time about it. Taylor was getting fidgety, felt like they weren’t getting anywhere, until Woodall turned with a smile.

“We expelled a boy just last week. He had pills. I was surprised—he’s a lovely young man. Claimed they were his mother’s and had gotten into his backpack by accident. Thinking about it, he’s one of the quiet ones, like you said.”

“What’s his name?” Taylor asked.

Woodall closed the file. “Juri Edvin.”