School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,86

He looked over his shoulder where Henry and a short, round, middle-aged woman with a bad dye job were talking to another pair of officers. “So’s Henry, and so’s Mrs. Eccleston.” Jackson grimaced. “But I think maybe you and me should spend part of tomorrow helping that poor woman move to another room. She’s got kids coming in on Thursday, and a lot of her posters got shot to shit.” He paused and then looked at the cops. “That’s another thing. It was a handgun—Berretta, Walther PK—something small. Not an AK or anything meant to spray bullets. This was a one-shot-at-a-time gun, which means it takes some skill, and this shooter didn’t have any.”

“Lucky for you,” Fetzer said. “I take it this is the lawyer you work for?”

“Ellery Cramer.” Ellery held out cards to both officers, who each took one. “And I take it you’ve spoken with Jackson about this matter before?”

“We actually looked up the beat of the two people you asked about,” Fetzer said softly, giving Ellery a sideways look. “There weren’t any obvious calls that night, but….” She gave a gentle snort. “There’s a couple of empty buildings—a big-bulk hardware store and a grocery store—on a big lot. It’s on the same patrol area as your party. It hit me kind of funny. When that was our beat, we checked that place six times a night because there was almost always something hinky going on there. But going back over the logs, with the party bust and the paperwork, there was almost a two-hour gap patrolling that area—and Lindstrom and Craft only hit the place every other shift. I think maybe we should check that out.”

Ellery nodded. “We think that besides being a distraction, there might have been something about Ty specifically that made our scumbags want to get him out of the way.”

“Gambling,” Jackson said, surprising him. Jackson nodded to Henry. “Henry was interviewing a coach—”

“Baldwin Schroeder,” Fetzer said. “You gave us that name when we got here. He was out on the practice field when the shots were fired. We have him on film.” She sniffed. “The person we have on film firing badly into that portable building was wearing baggy sweats and a hoodie over the face. And cleats, like you said. We followed the dirt off the cleats into the quad, but—”

“It had all been stomped off by then,” Jackson said glumly. “Yeah. I saw.”

“We know you saw,” Fetzer said. She gave Jackson a pointed look. “That’s when your damned blood trail stopped.”

“Well, did you see where hoodie guy went?” Jackson asked, clearly uncomfortable with the mention.

She shook her head. “You saw that overhang over the lunch area? The cameras don’t get the wall back there. It’s a blind spot. The shooter ran in that direction and disappeared. We’ve got people looking at camera footage, but they’ve got two or three student functions going on there—swim team, cheerleading, student government. Kids were running around all over the back of that building. All the shooter had to do was ditch the hoodie. Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

Jackson closed his eyes and thought carefully. “They’ll ditch the cleats too,” he said. “I don’t think they fit.”

Fetzer and Hardison were both standing, heads tilted.

“What makes you say that?” Hardison asked.

“They were too loud, like they were clopping because they were too big,” he answered. “I had to hop out the window and run down the length of the portable. Someone younger, and not injured, would have been long gone. I shouldn’t have even spotted a cleat going around that corner. But I did, and mud usually takes a lot of working to get knocked off like that. I really think he was wearing someone else’s cleats. Maybe ask the football players if their shoes disappeared during break or something.”

“Were they even football cleats?” Fetzer asked. “There was a rec-league soccer team using the upper field for practice too.”

Jackson grimaced. “Well,” he said, “you guys have more suspects to interview!” He swallowed then, rapidly, and Ellery noticed that he was awfully pale and had grown paler as they stood. “I’d show them pictures of Ziggy Ivanov if I were you, but it probably wasn’t him.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Fetzer asked.

“We should get you home,” Ellery said, and Jackson shook his head.

“No, we need to talk to Ty Townsend about a few things. Like I said, I think we know why he was targeted for that drug bust. We also need to