Without Mercy (Mercy 1)

Finally, she reached Omen’s stall.

The big black horse was inside, standing toward the back, the muscles of his sleek coat seeming to quiver.

“It’s okay, boy,” she said, but was unable to convince herself as the hymn replayed in her mind. The body they may kill, God’s love abideth still …

This was the place Ethan meant; she was sure of it.

The note she’d received, tucked in her math book during the class where Ethan was a TA, had been only one word: OMEN.

She turned to Omen, who snorted suspiciously. “He’ll be here,” she whispered to the pitch-black gelding. “I know it.”

In the past, they’d met here when Ethan got off duty, around eleven. This had to be right.

She reached for the latch of the stall and opened the gate.

She’d hide inside with the big black horse standing guard.

Ethan would find her.

He would.

CHAPTER 36

A cult?

Jules was trying to sell him on some secret society led by one of the teachers or even Reverend Lynch himself, but Trent was still a little skeptical. Her reasoning was sound, to a point. Why, he wondered, would Lynch need a cult when he already ruled this tiny little enclave?

Trent thought of the grisly scene he’d witnessed in the stable. Could it be part of some kind of initiation? A macabre sacrificial rite?

If so, the sheriff’s department would be stunned. They were working on the premise of a lone killer, someone psychotic enough within the school to pull off the double homicide, someone with a history of violence. Detectives Baines and Jalinsky were doing background checks on the students and faculty; however, considering the type of student Blue Rock attracted, the investigations had hit on dozens of juvenile arrest records. The suspect list in the sheriff’s investigation was not narrowing yet.

And he knew that Jules wouldn’t want to hear who was at the top of that list.

Guilt gnawed at him as he watched her go through the motions of trying to prove her theory—and Shaylee Stillman’s—that the murders of Drew Prescott and Nona Vickers were part of some elaborate plot devised by a fanatical cult. That the murders and the cult were somehow linked to Lauren Conway’s disappearance.

But Trent listened to Jules’s theory. To her credit, she was putting together a pretty good case as they sat at the old oak table in his quarters. As much as he had doubted her, Trent saw where Jules was going with her theory of what was happening at the academy.

He’d pushed his chair next to hers to read over her shoulder, glad for an excuse to be close. As the fire burned in the grate, they went over the information together.

Jules had sorted the faculty records into stacks on the table. Most of the information was standard: résumés and references, awards and degrees. But the handwritten notes in the red-taped files, they were disturbing. As with the student files, it was the personal notes in files marked with red tape that gnawed at him, pricking that instinct that something wasn’t right.

From a partly singed paper, he learned that Salvatore DeMarco, while an accomplished math teacher, was also an ex-Marine who had been thrown out of the corps for fights that sent him to the brig and his combatants to the hospital with knife wounds. After the Marines, he’d served six months in jail for beating a woman who’d cut him off in traffic.

“Lynch notes that DeMarco has anger-management issues,” he said. “That’s putting it lightly.”

“Scary stuff, huh?” Jules said, biting her lower lip in that manner he found so distracting. It made him think of nuzzling her lips with his teeth….

He placed a hand at the back of her neck and felt her tense until he rubbed the exposed skin gently. “Yeah, it’s real scary.” He turned back to the files, trying to understand where all of this was going. Why would Lynch hire anyone he considered remotely unstable or volatile to deal with at-risk kids? What was his purpose?

Kirk Spurrier’s folder had been destroyed, except for the bottom notes on a couple of pages. Trent was able to make out part of his résumé, where he’d listed that he’d been a pilot in the Air Force and was adept with weaponry. On the other partially legible page, Lynch had noted that Spurrier was sometimes passive-aggressive.

“Passive-aggressive. Isn’t that what we do to keep from lashing out at people the way DeMarco does?” he said as Jules pushed her chair back and walked to the kitchen.

“Sometimes,” she agreed. “But there are extremes.”

Jordan Ayres’s file was intact, and the only comment by Lynch was that he considered her extremely capable but felt she was someone who had authority issues. Trent read “bossy” between the lines.

Jules returned with what was left of the coffee. She refilled each of their cups from the glass pot, then carried it back to the kitchen.