“Did it occur to you that somebody else might have? Somebody might have seen whatever it was and picked it up before whoever it was got here.”
“I don’t think so. I think if that had happened, it would have been turned in to lost and found or turned over to the administration.”
“So you do know what we’re looking for,” Brian said.
“No,” Gregor said, “I know the kind of thing we’re looking for. If this was real life, instead of a school, I’d know a lot better because then I’d have a limited number of options. I’m still flailing around where the school is concerned though. I’m never sure how they do what they do. Maybe I should have brought Mark with me.”
“His mother would have killed you,” Brian said. “But let’s go over this one more time. Michael Feyre was blackmailing a faculty member—”
“Several, from what I can figure out,” Gregor said. “James Hallwood, definitely, no matter what he says. Philip Candor, not certain but possible. Marta Coelho. I don’t know about what, probably buying some pot, but there’s something. Nothing else explains how incredibly jumpy she is about this whole thing. If we combed the campus and really insisted on getting information, we’d find half a dozen more.”
“Right,” Brian said. “We should comb the campus. That would be interesting. So one of these people—”
Out near the pond, the last of the yellow tape had gone up and the uniformed patrolmen were backing off, trying to do as little damage as possible. Gregor thought it was a bit late to be worrying about that. They’d been tramping all over everything all afternoon.
“Look,” he said, “it’s perfectly simple. The blackmail required evidence of some kind. I’m not sure what, but it required some form of physical evidence. Michael Feyre, in all likelihood, promised to give it back if the faculty member in question served as safety and gave him a blow job as part of an autoasphyxiation session.”
“Wasn’t that risky?” Brian asked. “He was blackmailingpeople. He must have known some of them would want to kill him.”
“He was sixteen years old” Gregor said, “and sixteen year olds think they’re immortal at the best of times. He was also, if the descriptions of him are accurate, and I think they are since one of them came from his own mother, a raving psychopath. Psychopaths think they’re immortal, too. They think they’re smarter than everybody else. They think they’re braver. They think they’re stronger. And most of all, they have supreme contempt for all other human beings. He may have suspected that some of his victims wanted to kill him, but I’ll bet anything he didn’t believe any of them would ever have the guts to actually do it.”
“And you think this one did,” Brian said.
“It’s really very simple, if you look at it sanely,” Gregor said. “Michael Feyre was a sadist. We know that, too. We know it from everything everybody has said about him, again including his mother. He had whatever it was he had, something absolutely damaging to his victim, something his victim wanted back. He put it somewhere he or she couldn’t get it.”
“He threw it under this stand of evergreens,” Brian said.
“Apparently, yes,” Gregor said, “and he told his victim that he or she could come here and get it or service him sexually so that he wouldn’t talk. Or he’d come back and get it himself and turn it in. He made it damned near impossible to find, and he put a time limit on the whole enterprise. He had to have it by X hour or he’d do something about it. You’ve got to remember that the whole administration of this school, and a good half of the faculty, live on campus. He wouldn’t have had to wait for the morning or the end of the weekend.”
“All right. Then what? Our murderer comes out here and tries to find whatever it is, and Mark is up on the catwalk and sees the operation, right?” Brian said. “But Mark didn’t recognize the person.”
“No, he didn’t,” Gregor said, “but the person didn’t even know he or she was being watched. The murderer tried to getunder the trees and couldn’t. The murderer tried for some time, which was why Mark could see the ’body,’ as he puts it, lying on the ground for long.”
“Motionless, he said,” Brian pointed out.
“Stretching, I think,” Gregor said. “And he’d moved away when the murderer got up and left. The murderer then went to Hayes House and did what Michael required to keep his mouth shut. Michael got up on that chair. The ropes were put in place on his arms, on his legs, on his neck. The murderer unzipped Michael’s fly and took out his penis—and then, instead of doing the expected, the murderer kicked the chair out from under Michael’s feet and let him hang. All that was needed after that was to put the penis back in the pants and zip up. Then leave.”