Murder of an Open Book Page 19

  “And you were Skyping with this Bryce Monday night?” Skye asked.

  “Yeah.” Keely fingered the trio of skulls adorning her left ear.

  “We’ll need his phone number.” Wally’s pen was poised over his notepad.

  Keely recited the digits from memory, then demanded, “Can I go now?”

  “You can leave when I say you can leave,” Wally said, continuing his bad-cop routine.

  “If Bryce confirms what you’ve told us, I’m sure the chief will let you leave,” Skye said to comfort the girl. “But I do have a couple of questions before we check with your friend. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.” Keely tore off small pieces of tissue, constructing a snow fort in front of her. “I mean, I guess so. What do you want to know?”

  “We need to get a better idea of Ms. Hucksford’s coaching style.” Skye snuck a peek at Wally, who dipped his head in agreement at her line of questioning. “For instance, we’ve been hearing a lot about her bonding activities. Specifically, that you quit over them. What exercise made you decide to leave the team?”

  “You won’t believe me.” Keely’s lips trembled. “When I told Dad and he talked to Ms. H, she convinced him that I was exaggerating.”

  “That was before someone killed her.” Skye’s expression was grave.

  “Fine.” Keely flipped her ponytail, the red-dipped end disappearing over her shoulder like a foxtail. “But you won’t like it.”

  “Whether we like it or not”—Skye scooted closer to the girl—“we need to know what was going on.”

  “At first, Ms. H just had us do some stupid feel-good stuff like sit in a circle and write our name at the top of a piece of paper. Then we passed it to the left and each player wrote something positive on top of the paper.”

  “That sounds pretty harmless.” Skye had used that type of exercise in some of her own group counseling sessions with kids who lacked self-confidence.

  “Yeah, but then things got weirder.” Keely toyed with the stack of multicolor bangles on her wrist. “Coach turned off the lights and told us that she had taken apart a flashlight and hidden the pieces around the gym. Then she picked someone to be the monster and told her to go hide.

  “The monster was supposed to tag everyone else, and once you were tagged you had to freeze. We had to find the flashlight and put it back together, then shine it at the monster, which would kill it. So if the monster froze everyone, she won, but if we got the flashlight together first, then the team won.”

  “I can see how that might help with building trust,” Skye said.

  “For little kids, but it was just a bizarre game for teenage girls.”

  “Maybe,” Skye conceded. “Is that what made you quit the team?”

  “No. That was bizarre but not creepy.” Keely hugged herself, shivering as if she were cold. “Once we got the championship trophy, Ms. H got even more OCD about winning. If we had a less-than-perfect practice, she’d have a total meltdown. And when some of the girls wanted to get involved in other extracurricular activities, she blew her stack. She went on and on about how we were her girls and she had all the power over us.”

  “That does sound over-the-top,” Skye said, a bead of sweat trickling down her temple. Whatever was coming was going to be bad.

  “After a couple of the girls chose cheerleading over playing volleyball, Coach made us attend another bonding experience,” Keely continued. “But this time, when we got to the gym, the guys from the varsity football team were in the girls’ locker room.”

  “Was Mr. Goodson present, too?” Wally asked, leaning forward.

  “Yes.” Keely poked at a tiny hole at the neckline of her T-shirt. “He was there. He didn’t seem too happy about it. But he was there.”

  “What happened?” Skye’s imagination was running wild, and she hoped it wasn’t what she thought it might be. She’d just read an article on hazing and bullying in a school psych journal, and this sounded as if it was headed into a very dark area.

  “All the girls had to pick slips of paper from a bowl.” Keely’s voice cracked, and she cleared her throat. “Whatever number you pulled, you had to find the boy whose jersey number matched your paper.”

  Skye let out a soft gasp. This was going to be bad.

  “The boys had five index cards, and you had to draw one and then do what was written on it.” Keely closed her eyes and blew out a long breath. “Like the good little robot she is, Roxy went first.”

  “And?” Skye asked, hoping against hope the tasks were something silly like hop on one foot or paint your face red and black.

  “She had to kiss whichever girl the football player pointed to.”

  “And she did it?” Skye asked, now praying that all the girls walked out.

  “Yes.” Keely nodded. “The guy chose Juliette, and Roxy and she kissed.”

  “Who was next?” Skye asked, wondering just how much therapy these girls were going to need, knowing she wasn’t equipped to provide it.

  “Me.” Keely rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. “My card was for . . . ah . . .” Her voice dropped and she whispered, “To have oral sex with the football player.”

  “Son of a b—” Wally exploded.

  Skye cut him off. “Which is when you resigned from the team.”

  “Yes.” Keely nodded vigorously. “I told the coach that I quit the squad, left the locker room, and went home and told my dad. But by the time he got to the school, the boys were gone and the girls were doing another stupid but harmless bonding exercise. Ms. H told him she and I’d had a fight and I was trying to get her into trouble.” Keely’s cheeks turned pink. “She reminded him that I’d been caught lying before when I didn’t want to do something. He bought her story hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Because as a father, he’d rather think you were fibbing than think an adult he trusted would do what you described,” Skye explained.

  “Maybe.” Keely slumped in her chair. “But Dad wasn’t thrilled when I agreed to play on the team again, so I think, deep in his heart, that he believed me. He just didn’t want to admit it or deal with the problem. Since Mom left, he’s been pretty depressed and barely functions most days.”

  “Why did you go back?” Wally asked. “Weren’t you afraid of the coach?”

  “Ms. H promised never, ever to do anything like that hazing with the boys again and said that I was exempt from all future team-building activities.” Keely bit her lip, then twitched her shoulders. “And everyone begged me to play this upcoming season. Especially Roxy. She thinks she needs the team to win to get her scholarship.”

  “Did the other girls go through with what was written on those cards?” Skye asked, dreading the answer but needing to know.

  “I doubt it. Coach Goodson freaked out after I read my card, and he stopped the game.”

  Skye turned to Wally and said, “What they did is illegal, right?”

  “Hazing for sure. We’ll have to see if anything else happened after Keely left that night before adding other charges like child abuse.”

  Skye nodded to herself. Sadly, a lot would depend on the other players telling the truth, and that was highly unlikely. In instances like this, everyone wanted to ignore the problem. And with Blair dead, it would be even more difficult to substantiate anything. Even if they couldn’t get proof, she had to convince Homer he needed to fire Thor Goodson.

  Wally asked, “Are you friendly with any of the guys on the football team?”

  “I tutor a couple of them in math and science,” Keely said. “Why?”

  “Just wondering if Mr. Goodson ever had any inappropriate team-building activities with them before Ms. Hucksford’s little party,” Wally explained.

  “I don’t think so.” Keely shook her head. “He and the guys seemed pretty shocked when Roxy and I read from our cards. I don’t think he had any idea what wa
s written on those index cards. Or what Ms. H had planned for that night. He was already ordering the guys to grab their stuff and get out of there before I even left the room.”

  After a few more questions, Wally asked Skye to step into the hallway. They asked Keely if she was all right, and when she assured them that she was fine, they told her they’d be right back.

  Once they were in the hallway, Wally said, “We need to keep Keely here until we talk to Goodson.”

  “Want me to sit with her in your office?”

  “No. Martinez can watch her. I want you with me when we interview the coach.” Wally’s expression was grim. “I was happy when Peterson didn’t want to come in with his daughter because I figured she’d talk more freely if her father wasn’t present, but now I wish we had a relative with her. Too bad her mother’s out of state. We’ll need to call Peterson to come get her. I’m not having her go home alone.”

  “I agree. Although Keely seems fine, she needs her father.” Skye frowned. “But right now I’m more worried about the other girls.”

  “Especially since one of them might have killed the vic.” Wally crossed his arms. “They all have a lot more motive than we thought.”

  CHAPTER 21

  RDV—Rendezvous

  While Wally went to get Thor, Skye escorted Keely to his office. Before taking the girl upstairs, Skye snagged a couple of brownies from the treat platter near the coffee urn, wrapped them in a napkin, and handed them to the teenager. After buying her a soda from the machine, Skye accompanied her to the second floor.

  Once Keely was settled in Wally’s visitor chair with her snack, Skye said, “I’m really sorry Ms. Hucksford put you in such an appalling situation, and I’m even sorrier that your father wasn’t there for you.” Skye waited until Keely looked at her. “I also want you to know that the chief and I are going to make sure the school is aware of the incident and of Mr. Goodson’s part in the hazing.”

  “I feel sorry for him, but he should have stepped up to the plate and stopped Ms. H sooner.” Keely popped the soda can’s top. “I was really worried about the younger girls.” She broke off a corner of the brownie. “With Coach losing it like she was, I wasn’t sure what she’d do next.”

  “And that’s the real reason you rejoined the team,” Skye said slowly. She’d known that there was more to it than helping Roxy with her scholarship. “You wanted to be there to protect the others if Ms. Hucksford tried anything like that sex game again.”

  “Maybe,” Keely mumbled around a mouthful of brownie. “But don’t tell anyone.” She winked. “You’ll ruin my tough-chick rep.”

  “It’ll be our little secret.” Skye crossed her heart. “But you need to promise to come to me if anything like that ever happens again, and please encourage the other girls to do the same.”

  “Sure.” Keely didn’t meet Skye’s gaze. Instead, she used her finger to get every crumb of the brownie from the napkin and then she changed the subject. “This is really good. Do you know where they bought these?”

  “Bite your tongue,” Skye teased. “My mom’s the dispatcher here, and she baked them. She’d have a fit if anyone even implied they were anything less than homemade. She brings food every shift and never anything from a store or even a packaged mix. You should taste the awesome chocolate chip cookies she brought the other day.”

  “All of her snacks are amazing,” Zelda Martinez said as she entered the office. “I just wish Miss May would add a little Mexican cooking to her menu, but she says she doesn’t do hot and spicy.”

  “Except her personality,” Skye joked.

  “There is that,” Zelda agreed. Her long dark brown hair was drawn tightly back and fastened in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her face was bare of makeup, and the only jewelry she wore were tiny crosses dangling from her earlobes.

  When Skye had first met her, she’d wondered if Zelda was trying to be one of the guys. But as they’d gotten to know each other, Skye had noticed that the young officer’s short fingernails were always professionally manicured and painted with a bright red polish. Skye had realized that the woman was holding on to her feminine side while attempting to maintain a professional demeanor.

  Leaving Zelda to keep Keely company, Skye hurried back to the interrogation room. While she was almost certain that Keely would come out of this situation without too much emotional trauma, she just hoped the other girls had also escaped Blair’s horrendous hazing experiment without permanent psychological damage. What had the volleyball coach been thinking to do something so disgusting?

  As soon as Skye came into view, Wally stopped his pacing outside the coffee room’s closed door and said, “Keely’s alibi checks out. I just got off the phone with her friend Bryce and his mother. Both of them corroborate that he and Keely Skyped Monday night from about quarter to ten until a little past midnight our time.”

  “Good.” Skye felt the tightness in her chest ease, glad the girl was off the hook. “How do you want to handle the interview with Thor?”

  “Since you two are colleagues, you take the lead and I’ll jump in.”

  “Okay.” Skye put her hand on the doorknob. “But from what Keely said about Thor and Blair’s relationship, I think he may respond more to a dominant woman, so I get to be bad cop this time.”

  “Not that I doubt you, darlin’”—Wally tenderly tucked a curl behind Skye’s ear—“but I’ve never seen you be unkind to anyone.”

  “After what he and his girlfriend attempted to do to those children,” Skye said, her lip curling, “I won’t have any problem whatsoever being mean to him.”

  “Go get ’em, tiger!” Wally chuckled softly, following Skye into the interrogation room.

  Skye studied Thor. He sat slumped in a chair with his right hand cuffed to the leg of the bolted-down table. Wearing dirty canvas cargo pants, a ragged long-sleeved Henley waffle-knit shirt, and scuffed boots, his usual All-American blond good looks were hidden beneath a layer of grime and several days’ worth of facial stubble.

  Thor glanced up as Skye took a seat opposite him. Evidently frightened by her ominous expression, he whined, “I didn’t want to do it.”

  “Hard to Taser someone by accident,” Skye snapped. “Or unintentionally hold their head under the water until they drown.”

  “What? No!” Thor yelped. “I’d never kill Blair. I meant the hazing, not the murder. I saw Keely Peterson was here, and I figured she told you about that little incident in the locker room.”

  “Little incident!” Skye barely stopped herself from lunging across the table. “Sexual abuse is not a little incident, ever. You had no—”

  “Keely told us that you were a less-than-enthusiastic participant,” Wally interrupted.

  He took the seat next to Skye, turned on the tape recorder, announced the date and time, and told Thor he was being recorded, then asked Thor to state his name and address.

  After the preliminaries were complete, clearly trying on his good-cop role for size, Wally said, “So why don’t you give us your side of what happened that night?”

  “There was no sexual abuse.” Thor gazed at Wally as if the chief were the last Band-Aid in the box and Thor was bleeding to death. “All that happened was two girls kissed each other—just lips, no tongue,” he assured them earnestly. “Then I put a stop to it. I was totally shocked. I had no idea what Blair had written on those cards.”

  “Keely’s departure and the possibility that she was about to expose your sick little games weren’t the reason you broke up the party?” Skye demanded.

  “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I was mixed up.” Thor shook his head. “I sort of thought that first kissing card was a joke. Then, when Keely read her card, I was so dumbfounded, it took me a minute to act, but I was never letting that go on.” A tear slipped down his chiseled cheek. “I have sisters those girls’ ages, and I’d kill anyone who forced them into a sexual situ
ation.”

  “Which is why you murdered Blair,” Skye pounced. “Because that’s exactly what your wonderful girlfriend tried to do to her players.”

  “No. I loved Blair. I would never hurt her.” Thor looked confused. “Besides, she promised never to do anything like that again, and she deleted all the photos. I watched her erase them to make sure.”

  “What in the world made Blair attempt that kind of vile hazing in the first place?” Skye demanded, unable to grasp why someone would do something so heinous to a child. Intellectually, she knew it happened all the time, but she had never been able to wrap her mind around the motivation behind the exploitation. And maybe she was sexist, but it was especially hard to understand why a woman would abuse and humiliate her own gender.

  “Blair said that the girls needed to be toughened up. Needed to remember who was boss and who had the power in the relationship. She told me that when she was growing up, her father had been hard on her, and that’s why she was a winner, because she never threw in the towel,” Thor explained. “Apparently Mr. Hucksford was a lot easier on his older daughter, and Blair considered her sister a failure.”

  “Hmm.” Skye wondered what exactly Blair’s dad did to her. Abuse often begat abuse. Or to paraphrase the Bible, the sins of the father frequently influenced how their children behaved as adults.

  “Blair said she needed my boys to scare the girls a little. You know, act all mean and dominant. She said that even though her players ended up taking the championship at the tournament, they had lost too many matches during the season.” Thor shoved a lock of hair off his forehead. “When I told her that it was only a game, she smacked me and said that no one says it’s only a game when their team is winning.”

  “So . . .” Wally encouraged.

  “So I went along with her and brought my boys to the gym that night, but I never dreamed that she planned to have them involved in any of that sex stuff.” Thor looked back and forth between Skye and Wally, then asked, “You believe me, right?”

  Skye was unwilling to nod to indicate that she trusted him because she didn’t, so instead she waved her hand for him to continue. Thor was on a roll, and she didn’t want to interrupt him by speaking. If he had time to consider what he was saying, he might clam up and demand an attorney. So far, although he’d been read his rights, he hadn’t asked for a lawyer. But he could always change his mind and stop talking.