Virgil explained how he’d huddled down at the far end of the room, stretched on the floor with the book boxes on the other side. “He couldn’t get the angle on me,” Virgil said. “I got lucky.”
—
THEY LEFT ALEWORT to do his work and went back to the auditorium, where Virgil climbed the ladder to make sure the camera was really gone, although he was sure that it was. When he got to the top, he saw that it was, indeed, gone; and then turned and looked down at the stage, where he saw five bumps arrayed across it, four small and one a bit taller and longer.
A phrase popped into his head: prompter box.
And he thought something he should have thought of sooner: in the small space of ten minutes, Kerns wouldn’t have had time to kill Bacon and carry him all over the school. He would have hidden him quickly, if, in fact, he’d killed him.
And if he knew every nook and cranny . . .
With a growing dread, he backed down the ladder in a hurry, and then hustled over to the stage, hopped up on it, walked over to the prompter box, and looked down into it. The opening in the box was only a foot high and three feet wide, big enough for perhaps two people. He looked down into it, but couldn’t see anything.
Shrake: “What you got?”
“How do you get down into this?”
Jenkins looked at the outside of the box, down below the stage level, facing the audience, and said, “Nothing on this side. Must go under the stage.”
They found a trapdoor on the left side of the stage, half-covered with a pile of ropes and canvas. “It’s been moved,” Virgil said. “Let’s pull it off.”
“Could be prints and DNA,” Shrake said.
“So don’t touch the pile, push it off with your shoes.”
They did that, and Shrake pulled up the handle set into the trapdoor, and then lifted the trapdoor on its hinges. A set of narrow stairs went to the area under the stage, a space perhaps five feet deep.
Will Bacon’s body was crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ah, shit!” Virgil went down the stairs, clumsily stepping over the body. “We need a light, get a light.”
Jenkins shouted at a deputy, and a minute later Jenkins dropped down the stairs with a Maglite.
Bacon was dead. His head looked like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat, or a fat pipe of some kind, his shiny broken teeth grinning up at them through a mass of pulped flesh, bone, and blood.
Virgil looked down at him, locked his hands on top of his head, and started rocking back and forth, unbelieving, and Jenkins was saying, Virgil-Virgil-Virgil, and then Jenkins said, “Shrake, get him out of here, he’s fucked up.”
—
VIRGIL WAS LOCKED UP for a while, sitting in a chair in the auditorium, remembering and replaying his meeting with Bacon, thinking that Bacon was a good guy making a tough way in the world, and that he’d been killed because Virgil hadn’t taken enough care. Because Virgil worked alone, he tended sometimes to lean on civilians; other cops had thought that was weird, but that was because they fundamentally didn’t trust civilians, it wasn’t because they’d get the civilians killed.
Virgil was somewhat aware of the arrival of a doctor, who went down the stairs and said what everybody already knew, that Bacon was dead. Alewort then kicked everybody out of the space around the trapdoor.
But Virgil didn’t pay much attention for a while, just sat and rocked back and forth, and then Jenkins came over and slapped him on the back and asked, “How you doin’, buddy?”