Without Mercy (Mercy 1)

“Hello? … What?”

His cell phone. Of course.

“I’m sorry, Cora Sue. I can’t hear you. I’m in the office. It’s the connection … What? … Are you there?” A long pause as the smell of smoke slipped under the door. “I don’t know what you expect me to do! Just turn the water off under the sink … Oh, for the love of Mike. Fine, fine! I’m on my way. I don’t know! A mop? Towels? Hold on. I’ll be home in two minutes!”

A few seconds later, she heard him stride out of the room, slamming the door to the office so hard the building shuddered.

Now was her chance!

She started counting to ten to make sure he wasn’t returning but stopped at five and unlocked the bathroom door.

The room was awash in shifting golden light. Deep in the fireplace, flames consumed the sheaves of paper tucked into manila files. Black smoke rolled up the chimney as the pages curled and burned.

Jules threw open the screen of the fireplace and grabbed a poker from the hearth. Leaning close to the fire, feeling its heat, she used the tool to push the pages apart, separating the stack of files, easing each manila folder away from the center of the blaze, trying to save as many of the documents as she could.

“You bastard, what were you up to?” she said under her breath, and wondered what information the files had contained. A clue to the killer’s identity?

Unlikely.

But surely proof of the school’s complicity in something that wouldn’t bear scrutiny in the light of day.

She managed to drag the papers onto the stonework, then used the small shovel to stamp out the flames curling over the corner.

“Come on, come on,” she urged, leaning over the smoldering, smoking papers. Some of the pages were untouched, others completely consumed.

All were files on the staff and students at the academy; there were no accounting ledgers, no proof of a second set of books.

So what did it all mean? she wondered, soot on her gloves and jacket. Somehow she had to find out, and the only way was to haul these files, half burned as they were, out of here.

A brass wood carrier sat empty on the hearth. It might just do the trick. Using the thick leather gloves left near the utensils on the hearth, Jules carefully pulled out the papers she could salvage from the firebox. The edges of the pages were blackened, some still glowing red, but she kept at it, blackening the fingers of the gloves, carefully laying the pages and files, some still with clasps, into the carrier.

She had started adjusting the screen when she heard a noise in the hallway.

She froze. Oh, God, no. Not when she was so close. Sure enough, voices carried through the door.

“She could still be in here?”

Wade Taggert!

Damn!

She straightened, left the gloves on the hearth, and slid silently toward the bathroom.

The doorknob rattled.

Her heart nearly stopped.

Lynch hadn’t locked the door when he’d flown out in a rage.

Not the dead bolt, but the lock in the knob might always be turned to the locked position.

The door didn’t open immediately, but she didn’t dare draw a breath. What if they had a key? How would she explain herself? The carrier of burned pages?

Heart in her throat, she backed up, caught the corner of Lynch’s desk with her thigh, and bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

“You smell smoke?” Takasumi asked.

“Always. Lynch burns a fire every day, rain or shine. Kinda like Nixon.” Taggert laughed. “I heard he built a fire and ran the AC.”