Deviant (25 page)

Her nose was doing that wrinkling thing again, but he didn't have to bear it for too long because almost immediately she turned on her heel, walked over to Hector and Charlie, and began heading back downhill toward Manitou.

Danny watched her for a while before finally unstrapping Sunflower and kicking in the other direction.

After five minutes of cold wind and rough gradient he was actually relieved to encounter his father's work gang laying blacktop on the new casino road.

“Hello, Danny,” Walt said.

The half dozen men and Vern, the guard with the shotgun, all said hi.

“Cold today, huh?” Bob said, coming over.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

“So how's your case coming along? I asked your dad and he didn't seem to know.”

Danny looked Bob square in the face. “Why do you think it's a kid doing it? Why not an adult who used to torture animals as a kid and he's just returned to his old ways?” he said bitterly.

Bob stroked his goatee and looked at his fellow convicts. He took off his hat. “So, somebody's been talking, then, have they?” he said.

“I've seen the holes in the fence,” Danny said.

Bob nodded. “Elks did that three months ago. Hasn't been repaired. No one's seen the need. We're all short-timers. No one would risk their parole for a quick excursion around the countryside.”

“Unless you were crazy, right?” Danny said.

“Yeah, unless you were crazy,” Bob replied.

“Do you have access to a computer?” Danny asked.

Bob nodded. “Why?”

“Well, the cat killer's hacked the Cobalt Sheriff's Department's pet registry system to figure out who owns a cat; that's how he knows what houses to break into. He's crazy, but he's not stupid.”

Bob nodded at Danny. “You figured that out by yourself?”

“Pretty much.”

They stood and looked at each other for a moment before Bob said, “It's not me. I was a mixed-up kid. I don't even know that boy anymore.”

Danny nodded. There was a fundamental difference between someone like Principal Lebkuchen and someone
like Bob or Walt. Mr. Lebkuchen conveyed vulnerability and trust; Bob projected a tough, bristling, defensive posture that no doubt had been exacerbated by his years in federal prison.

Danny swallowed and decided to go on the offensive. “I think I know how I'm going to catch the killer. I'm working on a plan,” he said.

“Oh, really?” Bob replied, looking surprised.

“Yeah. It's still coming together, but I think it'll work. This guy's gotta be stopped. It may only be cats, but he's really hurting people.”

Bob nodded. “I suppose you've found a pattern in what he's doing and you're going to leap one step ahead?”

“Something like that.”

“Just watch out he doesn't leap two places,” Bob said.

Danny felt a chill go down his spine. “I'll be careful,” he said.

“Be better than careful,” Bob said. “Be smart.”

Bob blinked slowly at Danny and then walked back to Walt.

Danny threw his board on the ground and skated home.

Danny'd had his dinner, finished his geography homework, and was thinking about turning in early when he got the text:

dnny, cm schl nw. emrgncy.

The text wasn't signed so he couldn't tell if it was from Tom or Tony or Olivia or Cooper. But it didn't matter. “I gotta go out,” he said.

“It's almost nine o'clock,” Juanita replied from the living room.

“Just for a bit. It's supposed to snow tomorrow and I want to get some skateboarding in,” Danny replied.

“Wrap up well,” Juanita said. “And don't be too long.”

The streets were icy and for a second Danny thought about walking, but he reckoned that he and Sunflower
could handle it. He grabbed a black ski mask, his beanie, ski gloves, and his thick black North Face jacket.

He kicked hard, and on Alameda he was soon hitting twenty-five miles per hour easily.

He was doing close to thirty when he jump-braked and almost spilled outside the school.

The sheriff's car was parked outside—a big black Escalade with
COBALT COMMUNITY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT
written on the side.

The cops had set up spotlights and there was a crowd.

Everyone was there.

Tom, Olivia, Cooper, Tony, Hector, Todd, Charlie, Susie, April. A dozen other kids from various grades. Quite a few adults, too: the sheriff, his deputy, parents, teachers, and a distraught-looking Mr. Lebkuchen.

Everyone was gathered near the school entrance in a semicircle around
something
.

Danny flipped his board, caught it, and walked across the playground.

He pushed to the front.

A competent police official would have moved the crowd back farther or gotten them off the school playground completely, because this was definitely a crime scene.

A cat was hanging from the school flagpole. A silvery gray cat, which had been strangled on the pull rope.

It had been disemboweled and its internal organs laid out beneath it. Tiny kidneys, lungs … something that might have been a liver. The person who had killed it had drawn
a pentangle in chalk on the playground surface, using the organs as cardinal points of the star.

There was a curious hush, punctuated by people whispering into cell phones.

“Danny, is that you?” Tony said, coming up beside him.

He took off his ski mask.

“The cat's named Whiskers. It belongs to Jessie Walker,” Tony said.

“Don't know her.”

“Year below us—that big tall redheaded girl.”

“She live in Cobalt?”

“Yeah, Point Avenue.”

“When did the cat go missing?” he asked. It was a crucial question. If it had been the day before, Bob could have stored it somewhere and somehow got to CJHCS from the prison, put it on “display,” and then raced back. But if it had gone missing that day, Bob's opportunity window would have been very tight.

“I don't know,” Tony said.

Tom pushed in beside Danny. He seemed excited. “Last time they saw him was this morning. He's moving faster now, isn't he?”

Danny nodded. “He is.”

“Two days between kills,” Tom whispered.

“No one's going to say that this is a freak accident, that's for sure,” Tony muttered.

They lingered for a while but it was cold.

And they had seen enough.

“Let's get out of here,” Danny said to Tony.

They walked home together up the hill.

They didn't talk.

Water vapor from their breaths condensed and froze on their ski masks in the subzero cold.

At the cul-de-sac he turned to look at her. “I'm sorry I hurt your feelings,” he muttered.

“It's OK,” she said. She looked at him. “This is scary, isn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“At church they're always telling us to be on the lookout for the devil and stuff, but you think it's just, uh, you know …”

“Theoretical?”

“Yeah.”

They walked across Johnson Close to her front door.

“You know, I kind of miss it when you would come into our house in the mornings,” Danny said.

Tony nodded. “Me too,” she said.

She stepped onto her porch, grabbed the handle of her front door, turned, and looked at him.

Danny held her gaze.

She smiled, leaned forward, kissed him on the lips, and then went inside.

Danny stood there for a while, dazed.

Finally he walked across the street to his own house.

He felt confused, elated, exhausted.

He said good night to his mother and went to bed.

It was snowing, and high up on the mountain he could see a 4x4 or a rescue vehicle on the Pikes Peak road, its lights making a descending arc through the blue dark. The car descended and then all was black on the mountain. No moon, no stars, and the silence like a frozen fermata between violent acts.

 

The mood was somber the next morning on the playground at the front of the school. All traces of the incident had been eradicated, but even though the physical evidence had gone, everyone knew that this was still the actual space where an animal had been killed, in—at the very least—some twisted act of cruelty and probably in some kind of evil satanic ritual.

The
Cobalt Daily News
that had thumped against everyone's front door had carried the headline
SATAN COMES TO COBALT
, and on the first page Pastor Younger of the Metropolitan Faith Cathedral had called for an immediate return to Christian values and a suspension of the practice
of letting soldiers from Fort Carson be buried under the Wiccan Pentagram alongside those buried under the Star of David, Christian Cross, and Muslim Crescent.

Mr. Lebkuchen, however, did not look panicked.

He was standing silently, calmly, on an upturned plastic box, wearing a blue suit but no coat, hat, or scarf. The pupils and staff were arrayed before him in their respective classes. Since Danny's homeroom teacher was Mr. Lebkuchen himself, his joint class was at the very front of the assembly. It gave him a great perspective on Mr. Lebkuchen's pale skin, which was starting to turn red in the biting wind coming down from the Arctic.

Uncomfortable seconds passed while Mr. Lebkuchen sought the right thing to say.

Danny shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket.

He was standing between Tom and Tony. Tony was placid and stoic; Tom was fidgeting like crazy and swaying slightly from having to stand so long.

The only sound was the wind and a murmuring from the school gates, where a reporter from the
Colorado Springs Gazette
was testing his tape recorder mike so he could catch Mr. Lebkuchen's response to the previous night's grizzly events.

Tony's teeth started chattering.

Tom was stamping his feet.

“‘It is not right that in the house of the muses there be
lament,'” Lebkuchen began suddenly in a commanding voice. And then, weirdly, he smiled. A big, genuine grin that Danny didn't understand at all.

“What did he say?” Tom whispered, but before Danny could tell him that he didn't have a clue, Mr. Lebkuchen continued: “Someone was clearly targeting our school. No doubt they were looking for headlines. But they will not get the kind of publicity they are seeking. The instruments of darkness will not destroy what we have so painstakingly constructed here. They will not sabotage what we have built in this community. For this was not just an attack on a defenseless member of God's creation. This was an attack on Cobalt itself, on you and me, and of course on our precious school.”

Mr. Lebkuchen's face had an ecstatic quality to it, a wildness that Danny did not like. It made him nervous, and he hoped Lebkuchen wasn't going to make them sing or anything.

“When this school opened originally some thirty years ago, it had the name of a man who mocked God. Naturally, a school built on such a rocky foundation faltered and the Cobalt Tesla Elementary dwindled year after year and finally failed. But our school was built up from the community. Our charter school belongs to the community, and those outsiders will not destroy it. They will not sabotage our school; they will not destroy it, because they have already been beaten. They have already lost and we have already won,” Lebkuchen said, his voice rising in a note of triumph.