Chapter 23
As it turned out, the mayor wasn’t home after all. Todd Farraday himself-a bespectacled, pimply-faced, sallow-skinned, long-legged kid-answered the door. He opened it only a cautious crack and peered outside.
“Who are you?” he asked.
One look at this nerdy wimp, standing there in his ratty T-shirt and jeans and his equally ratty and untied high-tops, told me that he wasn’t exactly what his mother had in mind when she brought her supposed bundle of joy home from the hospital fifteen years earlier.
“We’re police officers. Are you Todd Farraday?” I asked, holding out my card.
“Yeah. Whaddya want?”
“I’m with Homicide, Todd. I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Homicide. What do you want to talk to me about?”
“A case I’m working on.”
He backed away from the door, and a breeze pushed it open in front of us. “Wait a minute, I don’t know anything at all about that.”
My statement had been innocuously general, but his immediate denial was damagingly specific. I was instantly on the alert. “You don’t know anything about what?” I demanded.
Realizing too late that he had inadvertently let something slip and trying to hedge his bets, Todd Farraday shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said miserably in an unconvincing whimper. “I mean, I wasn’t even there.”
“You weren’t where?”
“At the school district; that’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? You think I’m connected to those school district murders because of what happened last fall, but I’m not. I swear to God. My mother doesn’t let me out of the house at night now, and I don’t sneak out anymore, either.”
“Is your mother home?” I asked.
Todd Farraday shook his head. “No. She’s at a meeting down in Olympia. She won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon. But don’t talk to her about this, please. She’ll kill me. She really will. She said that if I got into any more trouble of any kind, she’d send me to a military school in New Mexico. In Roswell. I was in New Mexico once,” he added mournfully. “I hated it.”
We were still standing on the porch. Todd had backed away from us across the polished hard-wood floor of the vestibule.
“I think we need to talk about this,” Ron Peters asserted quietly. “Can we come in?”
Todd looked at Ron Peters, and his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, haven’t I seen you on TV?”
Peters nodded. “Probably. I work in Media Relations.”
“You’re not going to put this in the paper or on the news or something, are you? My mom would die, she’d just die, and so would I!”
“Todd, we just want to get to the bottom of this,” Peters said reassuringly. “Could we come in please? It’s cold out here, and we’re letting all the warm air outside.”
“I guess,” Todd answered warily. “Come on in.”
He stood there watching as we made our way inside and closed the door behind us. I looked at him hard. “I didn’t tell you what case we were working on, Todd, but you guessed which one right away without having to be told. How come?”
He shrugged his shoulders again and turned sullen. “I dunno.”
“You do know,” I insisted, “and you’re going to tell us.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t make me tell you anything. I know my rights.”
I turned to Peters. “I guess we could just as well go then. We’ll come back later on after his mother has time to make arrangements for an attorney to be present.”
Todd Farraday’s stricken face paled visibly. “Aw shit! Don’t do that, please. I already told you. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even out of the house that night, and the guy who was…”
“What guy?”
“Just a guy, that’s all. A friend of mine. He’s the one who told me about it, after it came out in the papers. He wanted to know what he should do. I mean, like he thought I had some kind of experience, you know?”
“What did he tell you, Todd?”
“He was skiing, late at night, and he wasn’t supposed to. Jason got these new skis for Christmas, see, and he wanted to try them out. But his mother said later. They’re going up to Whistler sometime this month, but the snow was here that night, and Jason didn’t think it would hurt anything.”
I remembered then, the ski trails imprinted in the snow in front of the school district’s office the morning after the murders. Criminals working under the cover of night sometimes make the mistake of assuming it’s still the old days, when kids used to go to bed and stay there once their parents turned out the lights and locked the doors. Nowadays, the lights go out-and so do the kids, without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
More often than not, the kids themselves are up to no good, but having extra eyes on the nightime streets when they aren’t expected has worked in my favor on more than one occasion. A surge of excitement went through my body when I realized this was going to be another.
“Your friend Jason saw something?” Peters prodded gently.
Todd Farraday nodded. “And he asked me what to do about it, but he got in trouble the same time I did for sneaking out, and I told him to forget it.”
“Did he tell you what he saw?”
Todd shook his head. “I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want to know.”
“What’s Jason’s last name?” I asked.
“Don’t you understand? If I tell you, he’s going to get in trouble again too. His mother probably won’t even take him to Whistler. She’ll end up telling mine, and I’ll be in trouble anyway.”
“Where does he live?” Ron Peters asked. “Around here someplace?”
Todd nodded. “A few blocks away. It’s not far.”
“Supposing you call him and tell him we’re here. Tell him we want to talk to him. We need his help, but we don’t want to get him in any more hot water. Tell him we’ll do our best to keep it a secret from his mother. You two can make up a story that you need to get an assignment from him or something, can’t you?”
Todd looked back and forth between us indecisively. “Prob’ly,” he said. “At least I could try. Wanna come on into the living room and sit down?”
Obligingly, Ron Peters wheeled himself toward the arched entrance to the living room. The unthinking words were barely out of Todd’s mouth when he realized what he’d said. Todd Farraday may have been a spoiled young punk, but he still had some vestiges of good manners left. His face flushed beet red.
“Sorry,” he said, hurrying out of the room. “I’ll go call Jason.”
A full-length oil portrait of Natalie Farraday hung over the marble-manteled fireplace. She was a handsome woman, rather than a beautiful one, posing against a tree trunk. I was standing there admiring the painting when Todd came into the room and stopped beside me.
“Jason’ll be here in a few minutes. He told his mom he has to return my Axis and Allies game.”
“This is your mother?” I asked, knowing the answer but asking anyway.
Todd Farraday nodded.
“Did you want to hurt her? Is that why you did it?”
“I already told you, I had nothing to do with…”
“I’m not talking about the murders, Todd, I’m asking about the bomb threats. Why’d you make those calls? Why’d you throw those rocks through the windows?”
“But aren’t I supposed to have my attorney…”
I turned on him savagely. “Don’t give me that shit. You already know you’ve beaten the system. You know good and well I won’t be able to touch you for that, but I deserve an answer, and, by God, I’m going to get it.”
Suddenly Todd Farraday’s eyes filled with tears. He sidled away from me and sank down sobbing on a nearby ottoman. “You don’t know what it’s like having a mother like my mom, a mother who always wants you to be perfect, who always says you have to set an example. The other kids, except for Jason, were all the time making fun of me. I just wanted to be one of the guys, you know what I mean? I just wanted to be treated like everybody else.”
“But you weren’t treated like everybody else,” I countered roughly, wanting to rub his nose in it. “Your mother got you off!”
“I know,” Todd Farraday responded bleakly, staring down at his empty hands. “And that wasn’t fair, either. I wanted to be treated like any other kid, but she said I’d better keep my mouth shut because having that on my record would wreck my life.”