The fire truck stops inches from where I stand, the grandstand of sirens silenced and replaced with my shout of, “Stop! Stay back!” I race toward the EMS team now coming up on the side of the fire truck. “Detective Samantha Jazz,” I announce, turning my hands into a stop sign. “Stay back and call in CSI.” It takes me about three minutes too long to rein them all in and save the evidence they might destroy. By the time they finally get a grip on what is happening, the hollow echoes of approaching sirens transform into screeching howls a moment before a good half dozen patrol cars explode past the entrance into the faculty parking lot.
That’s my sign to get lost before I end up shut out of the scene. I need to examine the body and the vehicle, to read the story to be read there, but that’s a good way to get noticed and shorten what little time I have left free to explore. I need to see that camera footage, and with that goal in mind, I head away from the approaching patrol cars and double step a fast walk toward the faculty entrance into the campus building. Lang is nowhere in sight, and I like it that way. Well, as long as he’s not dead or injured, but that’s highly unlikely. Whoever did this isn’t looking to shoot up the school or the police force.
I approach the door with a clear path, the absence of students or faculty anywhere in view, telling me that campus police, for all their early pushback, are now doing their jobs. Pushing past double steel doors, I end up in a hallway just inside the building, and Officer Jackson is standing in front of me.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Securing the building.”
“You have a way of being everywhere I am.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? I’m on your team.”
He’s right. The Poet is dead. I don’t know why I’m pushing back with him. “Yes. You are. Are we clear?”
“We are.”
“There’s plenty more space to cover.”
“Right. Going now.” He exits the building and I shake off the encounter, focused on finding the security booth. My destination doesn’t require a hunt. It’s just off the entrance to my right. Entering the small office lined with cameras, I find no one here. Jesus. Someone should be here, watching the feed, looking for a shooter.
I sit down at the desk, a row of screens line the wall now directly in front of me, a setup that I’ve seen before. With nothing even locked down, I quickly and too easily key in camera views. What I find is not good. The camera feed for the parking lot where Newman was shot is nothing but fuzz. I try to bring it back up, but the camera’s offline. Whoever killed him either killed the camera from the outside first or had access to the security booth I’m sitting in right now and knows technology better than me, which isn’t saying much. Aside from that, there’s little to see besides law enforcement scurrying about like rats on the campus, looking for blood, finding none. I tab through screens, looking for clues, one after another, and I find nothing.
The door jerks open. I launch to my feet and turn toward the door. Lang blasts into the small room, his big body awkwardly, well, big. He’s big. It’s not. He scans his surroundings and slams the door behind him. “What the hell are you doing, Jazz?” he demands. “I told you to stay where you were.”
I wave that comment off and focus on what matters. “Whoever killed Newman probably killed the parking lot camera first, which, considering I can’t get the camera back up, is likely. Which is weird considering Summer’s security feed was offline and The Poet always knows how to maneuver around cameras.”
“The Poet is dead,” he snaps. “I don’t know where you’re going with this and I don’t think I want to know.”
I wave that off and focus on the here and now. “We need to know if that camera’s knocked out, because if it’s not, then the killer could have been here in this security booth where we stand right now.”
“You have access to the security booth and you alone, which means that you could have cleared the footage. In other words, everyone whispers about me being the brawn and you being the brains. I’m officially the brawn and brains. The man had a restraining order against you, and you were here when he died.”
“I’m more than aware of that fact,” I snap.
“Alone, Jazz,” he snaps right back.
My brows dip. “Alone?”
“You were here when you shouldn’t have been here, gone rogue, and gone rogue alone. Only you’re not alone this time, are you? I’m here.”
I scowl. “I didn’t call you.”
“You should have and before you came. What happened to ‘live together, die together,’ remember?”
“That’s what you say every time you drag me into a hellish situation I shouldn’t be in, which is often. I don’t do that to you.”
“Right,” he says, his tone taking on a mocking quality. “Ms. Morals. Better than me. We’ve never gone down for one of my hellish situations.” He motions to the cameras. “What’s on there that I need to know about?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing worth seeing on that feed. What about when you were skulking around the building?”
“No one to shoot. Nothing to see. Because he killed himself. That’s the whole point here. How about we make sure you don’t go down for his choice to take his life?”
“The passenger door was open and the gun is in his hand in the passenger seat. He didn’t make that choice.”
“The door’s shut, Jazz.”
I blanch but recover quickly. “It was open.”
“Read my lips,” he says. “The door is shut. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Chapter 85
Newman’s door was shut when Lang got to him.
Those words replay in my mind and I flash back to me finding that very same door open.
My mind processes this information in a rapid formation of facts that all amount to validation.
“Did you hear me?” Lang presses. “The door was shut.”
I snap back to the present and to Lang with a quick reply. “Further proof that he was murdered. I must have surprised the killer. He or she shut the door after I turned my back on the minivan to talk to you. Then that person escaped while the camera was off.”
“Or Newman realized we were onto him and killed himself. That’s the right answer, Jazz. He killed himself.”
“The Poet wouldn’t kill himself. That’s not how he’s made. That’s not how he thinks. He believed the world was a better place because he was here. Someone killed him.”