Page 41 of Unnatural
He opened his mouth and then closed it. He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Trust was an odd thing to ask about. There were a dozen reasons he could have saidno. But…this wasAutumnasking him. “Not to hurt you?” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“Yes, you can trust me not to hurt you.”
“Good.” She stepped all the way to his bedside. “I’m going to take your temperature and look at your wounds, okay?”
He nodded, and she pulled a chair up, sitting down and gently peeling the bandages away. He had so many questions, but he hardly knew where to start. “Why were you there?” he asked after a moment. “At that school.”
She paused, her hands stilling. “I followed you.”
She’dfollowedhim?
“I was in New York City trying to find more information about my past.” Something almost dreamy moved across her pretty features. “I saw you on the street,” she murmured. “And I followed you.” She met his eyes. “We have a lot to talk about, Sam.”
Chapter Nineteen
The man who’d entered Deercroft Academy with a firearm, ultimately killing four teachers, wounding two children anda custodian, and finally shooting himself, was named Jason Leads, and he’d lived alone in a studio apartment in Queens. He was a loner, apparently, and his neighbors reported that they’d only seen him on occasion, either coming or going. He’d barely responded to attempts at conversation, only giving terse, one-word replies to neighborly greetings.
Mark used his gloved hand to pick up a photo on the desk in the small main room. It was the suspect, along with an old woman with a head of tight gray curls. The woman had an oxygen tube in her nose but was offering a weak smile. Leads’s grandmother, Shirlene, who had died ten years before. Other than her, the suspect had no family and no friends who’d come forward. Acompleteloner.
Just like the others.
The suspect worked as a website designer from home. The computer was gone now, being looked over by techs, but Mark didn’t expect that anything of any consequence would come from it. The police had ID’d the suspect aftera wallet and a Deercroft Academy brochure were randomly found wrapped in a jacket and stuffed behind some shrubbery near the front of the school the day after the tragedy occurred and hours after Mark had surveilled the schoolyard.Convenient.It looked as though the gunman had intended on returning for the personal items he’d brought. The authorities had gone to the man’s apartment and found ample evidence that he was in fact the shooter, and techs had finished up that morning.
“Do you see anything unusual, Agent?” the cop who’d accompanied him here asked.
“No,” Mark answered. The bed was unmade, covers thrown back. He expected the DNA found on the sheets and elsewhere would be a match to the body in the morgue. He’d also bet that the body had been left unattended long enough that he couldn’t be sure it was even the same man who’d been transported from Deercroft Academy.
But of course, he had no way to prove that, and he’d sound like a lunatic if he voiced such a thought.
“The diagram was found over there?” he asked the man who had been one of the first responders to arrive at the apartment and seal it off after Jason Leads had been identified.
“Yeah,” the officer said. “On the bedside table, along with another brochure from the school. The shooting was definitely not random or spontaneous. How long he was planning it though is hard to say. Any clue to motive?”
“That aspect’s out of my purview,” Mark said. But he anticipated that a motive would not be found.Crazywas the conclusion they’d have to come to.Just plain crazy.
Which was very legitimate in plenty of crimes, even ifcrazycould be defined in more technical terms. But not this one. At least he didn’t think so.
“Oh right, you’re working on a separate case.” The officer opened his mouth as though to ask about that, then realized Mark wouldn’t be able to answer and sighed. “At least he made it easy for us to identify him. And then he left all his plans behind.”
Mark made a sound of agreement.Yes, too easy.
Then again, he didn’t want to jump to conclusions based on what was in large part a gut instinct. He had to consider the possibility that Jason Leads was not connected to the lost, even if the man with the white hair was. Perhaps it was easy to identify Jason Leads because he hadn’t planned on getting caught, hadn’t planned on someone stepping in, and had adjusted plans at the last minute with a bullet to the head.
Why had he considered that drastic option necessary though? Why hadn’t he tried to get away? The white-haired man was down, and the police were still blocks away.
There was time. After all, the white-haired man and the unknown woman had managed to evade police. Then again, they’d had some time. When the police had arrived, the gunman was dead, and they hadn’t immediately known about the other man and woman.
Some interesting things had come out from forensics the day before though regarding the white-haired man, things they were having a hard time explaining. Notably, several of the bullets they’d found had appeared tohithim but then been stopped and ended up on the schoolyard, the heads blunted. Almost as if he wore armor.
The forensics team had appeared stumped. Mark had only become more certain the white-haired man was someone it was imperative he find, and quickly.
Mark looked around for a few more minutes and then left with the officer, parting ways in the downstairs lobby.Mark walked to his rental car parked just down the block and sat in it, tapping the wheel for a moment as he considered what he knew and what Jason Leads’s apartment had confirmed for him.
He took his phone from his pocket and pulled up several different news pages and scrolled back a few days on each.
A married senator from the East Coast had been caught soliciting sex from a sex-trafficking victim in DC. The lawmaker had run his campaign on a platform of old-fashioned family values, so the scandal was particularly damaging. He claimed a sex addiction. Mark sighed. When caught with your pants down—literally—claim an addiction. Become the victim. Cast those accusing you of indecency as the indecent ones for their lack of compassion and understanding. The senator had done exactly that, and then he’d gotten his wife to make a teary statement about how she was sticking by her husband and attempting to understand his addiction. Even so, there were calls for him to resign, and the calls were getting louder. His party leaders were sure to step in any moment and press him on stepping down.
