Essential listening: Palaces of Gold, Lady Maisery
0o0
Odette Moss turned out to be a strange mix of a slight girl in a stocky frame.
It was as if her bones were too big for the rest of her body – not that she was undernourished, or even unattractive. It was more that her body appeared to have hurtled through puberty and out the other side early, and was now waiting for the rest of her to catch up. In a couple of years she would be a strong, handsome, broad-shouldered woman, ready to take on the world, but for now she was sixteen, awkward and very, very wary.
Unusually so.
She hadn't said a word since Ms Blake had ushered her into the makeshift interview room; instead, she shot dark, weary glances at them from behind her long, chestnut hair. Her uniform wasn't particularly tidy, and Grace got the impression that she'd been made to change just for this interview.
A smudge of ink or paint adorned the cuff of her shirt, just past the end of her blazer. Her tie wasn't straight. Her hair fell in waves around her. There was just something haphazardly defiant about the whole picture.
Grace glanced at Morgan. They were trying to make this as informal as possible, while Hotch and Rossi lurked outside in the hall, listening in. The principal, on the other hand, didn't seem so concerned about not scaring her. In lieu of a parent or guardian, Ms Blake was sitting beside Odette, the very image of disapproval: her lips pressed into a thin white line, her arms folded in ill-concealed unfriendliness.
They were in the teachers' lounge, which was private and comfortable. Grace studied them both thoughtfully, as Morgan introduced them. There was something unusual about Odette, but she was willing to reserve judgment before proclaiming the girl a flamboyant and cold-hearted killer.
"You're to answer anything these agents ask you Miss Moss," Ms Blake instructed her coldly.
The look of venom that Odette Moss sent her principal spoke volumes. Her posture altered subtly; she slumped a little more. Not because she was cowed, as Ms Blake (who looked a little satisfied at this) seemed to imagine – this was an act of defiance. Grace narrowed her eyes slightly, and watched as the slightest of frowns danced fleetingly across Morgan's brow.
The principal resumed her tight-lipped silence.
"Miss Moss –" Morgan began, but to his and Grace's surprise, he was interrupted.
"My name is Odette."
Her voice was quiet; tense. She didn't look up – in fact, she barely moved. Morgan smiled very slightly.
"Odette," he amended. "You'll have heard the sad news by now." He paused and allowed her time to respond, but she didn't. "Do you have much contact with Chris Carpenter?"
"I met with him three times a week," said Odette softly. "Sometimes more."
There was a grudging note to her voice and Ms Blake hastened to explain.
"Miss Moss is one of our more troubled students," she said sniffily, ignoring the looks of warning both Morgan and Grace were shooting her. "Chris was instructed to…" she paused. "Work with our more difficult students."
Well, there goes any chance of getting any useful information out of Odette, Grace thought bitterly, only just managing to keep her face impassive.
"Did you get on?" she asked.
"He's okay," said Odette, guardedly. "He was kind."
The implication that others were not was not lost on the agents.
"You've never had any problems with him?"
"No."
Ms Blake made a noise of blatant disbelief. Grace glared at her, but Morgan didn't take his gaze off the girl, and after a moment a pair of pale green eyes flicked up at him before vanishing behind the curtain of hair.
"No," she said firmly. "I told you. Mr Carpenter's okay."
Grace glanced at Morgan. They needed to push her, but they also needed her to trust them. She would have to risk alienating Ms Blake.
"And other members of staff aren't?" she asked.
She received another flash of green for her trouble, and a derisive scoff from Ms Blake. Although Odette remained silent, the flash of green had been enough to confirm Grace's suspicions – she was hardly likely to open up in front of Ms Blake, then.
"When was the last time you spoke to Mr Carpenter?" Morgan asked.
"Thursday afternoon, after class," said Odette.
That matched the statements of the other girls, at least. So far, so good.
"That isn't one of your prescribed times," Ms Blake interrupted, sharply.
"He asked to see me."
"Why?" the principal demanded.
"He said he couldn't make it on Friday," said Odette, resentfully. "He – uh – he had a meeting he thought would overrun," she added, stumbling a little over the words.
"What did you talk about?" Morgan asked, subtly changing direction.
He hadn't missed the lie any more than Grace had.
"On Thursday?"
"Yeah."
"My parents, school stuff," she said, with a shrug. "The usual."
"Miss Moss's parents are zoologists," said Ms Blake, with something sour in her voice. She had clearly anticipated a certain amount of eminence from admitting the child of two distinguished professors to the school, and had been – in her eyes – badly disappointed by their daughter. "They spend much of the year in Africa, studying elephants."
"Forest elephants," Odette corrected her, with quiet annoyance.
"They're pretty badly endangered, aren't they?" Grace asked, searching the back pockets of her mind for the scant information she could remember from National Geographic.
Odette peeked out at her, nodding slightly.
"They're been driven off the planet," she said, and suddenly her voice was possessed of a passion that would not have been out of place at a rally. For a moment her eyes were alive, sparkling with animation. "Between poaching and deforestation, they're right on the edge!"
"I hardly think these agents are interested, thank you," Ms Blake interrupted.
Odette's lips clamped shut and all traces of liveliness were immediately extinguished.
Grace frowned, thinking that the elephants weren't the only ones being driven to the edge here.
"Your parents are away a lot, huh?" Morgan asked.
Odette nodded, fiddling with the ends of her sleeves, reluctant to speak again.
"You must miss them," he prompted her.
Another nod.
"Where do you stay in the holidays?" Grace asked, trying to find another avenue in.
"With my aunt Paula. She's got a ranch on the other side of Cooksville in Maryland – keeps horses."
"You don't get to see your parents too much?" Morgan asked again.
"No."
"That's rough."
Odette shrugged.
"I guess. They're where they need to be."
Grace watched her carefully. Those weren't the words of a bitter person.
"And you don't mind?" she suggested. "I know if I was left out here…"
"Sent out here," Odette corrected her, almost sharply. "I was sent here. I grew up in the reserves with Mom and Dad."
"If I was sent out here, away from my family, I'd feel a little – I don't know – abandoned."
"Well I don't!" Odette told her, fiercely.
For the first time, Grace could see the whole of her face. Her skin had been tanned a warm olive colour in the sunshine of her youth, but it looked paler somehow, as if the sunlight was leaching out of her. There was a slight flush to her cheeks, as though speaking out of turn was unusual behaviour. Whether the flush was annoyance or embarrassment, Grace wasn't sure. He chin was up; defiant. The passion in her voice lent her countenance a fierce beauty that Grace suspected the residents of Fairview House seldom encountered.
"My parents care about me, yes – and I miss them like crazy, but you can't study forest elephants remotely. They're like phantoms," Odette told them. "You have to be there all day and all night – and if Mom and Dad leave the compound, the poachers move right back in. It doesn't matter how hard the rest of the team work to keep them out, they just do. They can't leave and they wanted me to have an education."
The last part was said with a great deal of bitterness.
"And Aunt Paula's okay," she added, looking a little embarrassed now. "She's better with horses than people, but she tries hard."
And others don't. Message received.
"That is enough from you, young lady!" Ms Blake snapped.
Odette went a slightly darker shade of tan – pure anger now.
"I think we can take a break," said Derek, hurriedly. "Just for a little while – and then, Odette, it would help us if you could tell us if you noticed anything unusual when you spoke to Mr Carpenter on Thursday."
She gave Morgan a long look before nodding.
"Twenty minutes?" said Grace.
Ms Blake was up and out of the door in moments, leaving Odette behind.
"You can stretch your legs if you like," said Grace. "Or stay here?"
"I'll stay," said Odette, and pulled a sketch book out of her bag.
"Okay…"
She followed Morgan out into the corridor and over to where Hotch and Rossi were waiting – at a discrete distance.
"Anything?"
"She's angry," said Morgan, "but very quiet."
"The kind of kid that boils over?" Rossi asked.
"I don't know."
"I don't think so," said Grace, glancing back at the door. "I don't know. I think maybe she's the kind of kid that knuckles down until she can leave and then never looks back."
"Speaking from experience, Pearce?" Rossi twinkled at her. She smiled.
"She's definitely holding back. We need more time with her, man," Morgan said, slowly. "And alone."
"I don't think we're going to shake her chaperone," said Hotch. "There's too much at stake for the school."
Morgan shook his head.
"Man, if she is the UnSub I'm surprised she didn't go for Ms Blake, first."
"You are not wrong," Grace agreed, and then turned at the sound of hurried footsteps.
"JJ?" Hotch asked.
She was walking quickly and purposefully, and they all know what her expression meant.
"There's been another murder."
0o0o0o0
The scene awaiting them in the art teacher's rooms was like something out of a horror film – not gory as such, simply disturbing on a deep human level.
Piper Bonnell, a woman who had been vital and hearty the day before (if distressed at losing a friend) had been shot like Chris Carpenter and then – also like Carpenter – her corpse had been arranged. The UnSub had wrapped her in a fine, scarlet fabric, stained crimson in places from her blood. Her body had been tied to a chair – her chair, it seemed, rolled out from behind her desk to the centre of the classroom – in an apathetic sort of sitting position, her long dreadlocks flowing down her back. She looked almost elegant, except for the blood and the gaping hole in the side of her head.
On her lap, its maw gaping and half-filled with her blood, was a life-size, childlike doll, swaddled in a dirty blanket that looked like it might have come out of a skip. The doll's sightless eyes seemed to stare out at them all, accusing: why didn't you stop this?
As before, all the blinds had been drawn in the classroom, giving the UnSub privacy, but also lowering the light levels, which was probably the intention. Someone had turned off all lights except for the strip directly above the tableau.
They stood for a moment on the threshold, transfixed by the grotesque arrangement.
The sounds of mild hysteria filtered through from further along the corridor.
"Ms Blake found her," JJ explained, tersely. "The coroner's on his way."
She slipped out to deal with the forensic units and – likely enough with all the police activity on campus – the press. Jacob Whiteley, who had spent all morning fielding phone calls from worried parents, stuck his head round the door, froze for a moment and then recoiled.
"Oh man, really?" he exclaimed. "Come on, one's enough, surely?"
Rossi grimaced.
"There are always more," he said. "You want to come talk to Ms Blake?"
"No," said Whiteley, glancing in the direction of the sobbing. "But we don't always get what we want."
Rossi nodded and the two men excused themselves.
"Someone's really going out of their way to make a point here," Grace remarked, eyeing the scene.
"Yeah," said Hotch. "And I think I know what they're trying to say."
He walked to the back of the classroom and pulled the sheet off Odette Moss's triptych. The assembled agents stared at it glumly. One by one, everyone's gaze slid back to the art teacher's corpse and her companion.
"Man that's creepy," Morgan shuddered.
"I'm never going to look at a Resusci Annie the same way again," Prentiss remarked.
Grace nodded. A part of her mind that she wasn't fond of wondered whether, if you compressed its chest, Bonnell's blood would bubble out of the doll's mouth. She grimaced.
"That's an unusual angle," Grace remarked, looking at the mess someone had made of the side of the art teacher's head.
"It woulda taken time," Morgan observed. "And no one heard the shots."
"We were all on campus last night," said Hotch, glancing up at the team. "Did anyone hear anything?"
Everyone looked around and shook their heads.
"The guest accommodation is pretty far away from here," said Grace. "If it's a small calibre like last time we might not have heard anything."
"Several shots, like last time," said Prentiss. "We'll have to wait for the coroner to confirm it, but…"
Hotch nodded.
"There's not enough blood here," said Reid, suddenly. He had been looking carefully at Bonnell's corpse; now his eyes flicked over the rest of the classroom. "This has to be a secondary scene."
"She bled out," Morgan observed. "Musta left some kinda trail."
"We would have seen it if it was out in the hall," said Prentiss, frowning.
The agents fanned out, looking for any kind of disturbance. The art classroom was going to be a forensic nightmare – often technicians could spot things like spots of blood fairly easily, but in here the tiny splashes of paint on almost every surface masked them, with the exception of the pool around the murdered woman's feet.
It was Prentiss who found the first splash – she called the others over to the connecting door to the next classroom, leading through a sort of technician's cubby.
"The door's locked," she said, "but look."
They followed her pointing finger to the flash of crimson, partially obscured by the wood of the door.
All five agents crammed together and peered through the window, past the darker cubby and into the classroom beyond.
"Is that…?" Prentiss began.
Grace's heart sank.
"Looks like the multiple shot theory was right," she said, grimly. "And it explains the weird angle on the head shot."
"She was trying to get away," said Reid, in a small voice.
"The UnSub must have chased her down," Morgan observed, sadly.
They surveyed the mess of bloody foot, knee and handprints on the floor of the adjoining classroom.
"We need to get forensics in there," said Hotch, and stalked off.
0o0o0o0
Rossi watched as Detective Whiteley did a spirited job of comforting a woman he detested, and respected him for it. Whatever else Ms Blake was, right now, she was a mess. She'd lost two colleagues in two days, and this one she'd found herself. She was pale, shaking and tearful – a breakdown in composure that she was already working to get under control.
He glanced up as Agent Pearce slipped through the door; briefly meeting his eyes, she presented the Principal with a large cup of hot, sweet tea, which the woman accepted gratefully. She had found and prepared it with unusual speed and Dave had a distinct suspicion that Grace had nipped back to the guest accommodation to make sure the tea was of sufficient quality and strength for the situation. She had a funny way of viewing tea as medicinal, and he'd seen her turn her nose up at the teas on offer at several stations, Sheriff's Offices and Police Departments across the States.
He smiled slightly as she joined him, very much in the background.
"What?"
"You are so British."
With a movement so carefully concealed that he wouldn't have spotted it if he hadn't been on the receiving end, she gently elbowed him in the ribs. Both of them turned away, hiding their smiles. It wouldn't do to laugh at a time like this.
All mirth vanished when she told him, in an undertone, that they'd found the secondary scene.
"It was a bit of a horror show," she intimated, quietly. "Someone in this school has lost their minds."
"I think they're beginning to enjoy it," Dave said.
"Yes," said Pearce. "That's what worries me. It's almost as if the UnSub thinks it's funny."
"Pointing to a younger, less well-adjusted UnSub, who won't be able to stop," Rossi agreed. "Are you going to re-interview Moss?"
Grace nodded, eyeing Ms Blake.
"I'm going to ask Nancy Cartwright to sit in," she said, softly. "Ms Blake's in no state to do anything and I think she would trust her administrator to protect the school's interests."
There was something in her voice that made Dave watch her expression closely for a few seconds.
"You want to talk to Moss without her interfering?" he guessed.
Pearce nodded.
"We won't get anything out of her otherwise." She grimaced. "By the way, Hotch wants you to break it to Blake that we're going to need to search the students' rooms."
Rossi made a disgruntled sound.
Well, he thought, I can see that going down well.
"Someone in this school got drenched in Piper Bonnell's blood last night, and that kind of evidence is tricky to dispose of," she remarked. "Morgan volunteered to have a poke around in the incinerator room, but…"
"I'll see what I can do," he said, and Pearce made a dignified and almost unnoticeable exit. Whiteley made the barest motion to show that he'd seen her go.
Well, no time like the present…
"Ms Blake, are you up to answering a couple of questions?" Dave began, sitting down across from her.