“Don’t say anything to Alger yet.”
“Too late.” Nina stood aside and motioned Matthew Alger into the office. She pinned him with a fiery glare. “So Rourke tells me I shouldn’t have said anything to you,” she snapped. “I’m sure he’s right, but I have to confess, I don’t have any experience dealing with city officials who steal. You’re the first.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Classic, thought Rourke. This was something he heard every day on the job and most of the time it was bullshit. Alger was lying. It was there in the flick and shift of his eyes, in the posture of one hand covering the other.
“So are you going to arrest him?” Nina demanded.
God save him from people who tried to “help” him with his job. “We’ll call the state auditor,” Rourke said, scribbling a note. “Right away.”
Nina grabbed the spreadsheet. “But what about—”
His buzzer sounded. He craned his neck to see the front desk. “Yeah?”
“Three kids to see you, Chief,” said his assistant.
Rourke looked at Alger. “We’re done here for the moment.” He shifted his attention to the intercom. “Send them in.” A visit from three kids was not unusual. Thanks to his youth group, a lot of local kids considered him approachable, a problem solver.
He got up and opened the door. To his surprise, in walked Zach Alger, Sonnet Romano and Daisy Bellamy. They were dressed for outdoors, backpacks clanking with snowshoes, their cheeks stained red from the cold. Alger was clearly taken by surprise, too. He glared at Zach. “You in some kind of trouble?” he asked.
Rourke could see Nina biting her tongue. He knew she wouldn’t accuse Alger in front of his kid—for the kid’s sake.
“No, sir,” Zach said, managing to make the “sir” sound like an insult. An uncomfortable silence stretched the moment out. Finally, Matthew Alger stepped toward the door. “I’ll be in my office.”
“Bye, Mr. Alger,” Sonnet said, all politeness.
She nudged Zach, and he said, “See you, Dad.”
The three of them watched him go. Rourke checked out his visitors, a habit with him. One quick perusal could tell him if a kid had been fighting, or was the victim of an assault, if he was on something or in shock. Rourke even knew, without any high-tech device, when a kid was lying. At the moment, the only message he was getting from these three involved disquiet and…fear, probably. Daisy Bellamy, whom he barely knew, looked particularly pale and troubled. She wore a camera on a strap around her neck, and seemed to be cradling it unconsciously with her hand.
“Been out hiking, I see,” he said, hoping to prod them into talking to him.
“We have,” Sonnet said, stepping forward.
“You don’t look too happy about that. I thought you guys loved snow days.”
“We went snowshoeing today,” Daisy said.
“On the trail above Meerskill Falls,” Zach added.
“We had permission,” Sonnet said. “It’s on Camp Kioga property and Daisy’s dad said it would be okay.”
The hike up to Meerskill Falls and beyond was not exactly well marked, but by traveling in a group of three, they had probably been safe enough. Around here, kids got in trouble the same as they did anywhere. There were just more scenic places to do it.
“We wanted to check out the ice caves,” Daisy said. There was an odd tremor in her voice as she turned on her digital camera and angled the preview screen toward him. “We found one, too. Actually, Sonnet found it. I took a bunch of shots.”
Strange that these kids weren’t all talking at once. Kids usually couldn’t wait to blurt things out. Rourke studied the thumbnail photo, his skepticism firmly in place. People brought a lot of things to police stations, items they mistook—in all innocence or ignorance—for other things. A bit of antler shed in the woods was mistaken for human bone. A tuft of animal fur stuck in the bark of a tree was deemed the hair of a missing child. Buried treasure turned out to be fool’s gold. In ninety-nine percent of cases, the discovery had a perfectly logical—and non-criminal—explanation.
Not this time, though. This time, there could be no mistaking what he was looking at.
“You took these today?” he said.
The kids nodded in unison.
“Did you touch anything?”
Sonnet shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m going to need the memory card out of this camera,” he said. “Is that all right, Daisy?”
“Sure.” She slipped it out of the camera, her eyes large and frightened.
“You did the right thing, you guys,” he said, and reached for the intercom to buzz his assistant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jenny was trying to re-create a scene she barely remembered. Like she’d told Rourke on the phone, it was a perfect day for working on her project. She’d awakened to a light-drenched world of new-fallen snow and had duly called everyone she promised to call each day—Nina, Laura, Olivia and Rourke. She called them because she knew that if she didn’t they would call her.
She set the scene perfectly for a day of work. She made a fire in the potbellied wood-burning stove and set the iron teakettle on top to boil. She parted the curtains to view the lake out the window, a vast unbroken expanse of white, with the tiny snow-clad island in the middle. She fixed a pot of white snowbud tea and dressed in jeans and a cloud-soft cashmere sweater. She settled on the overstuffed sofa in front of the fire, booted up her laptop computer and…
Nothing.
It was awful. Here she was in the ideal situation, alone with her thoughts and memories, and she couldn’t seem to write. The words
