Secrets and Motives

I was at Riverside high school the day they led the three girls out. Courtney Richards, Evelyn Kimball , and Allison Laurence were taken out of the principal’s office, down the halls where they had made friends, taken classes, and learned for the past three years, and out the front doors to the waiting police cars. Courtney and Evelyn held their heads high, faint smiles barely visible. Only Allison seemed to show a sign of guilt for what the girls had been accused of, keeping her head low and eyes downcast. Though she appeared sad, she didn’t cry.
As the girls were put in, I heard Evelyn yell something to the reporters gathered outside before the door was shut: “What we did was right. If we hadn’t done it, everyone at this school would still be in danger.”
Shaking my head, I walked back up the stairs and entered the school again, treading lightly down the hallway back towards the office. Although the students had been told to stay in the classrooms, quite a number of them had spilled out anyway, whispering amongst themselves. I shivered.
I closed the door to Principal Van Patten’s office behind me and sat down opposite of him. The bloodstain in the center of the table still remained.
Van Patten rubbed his face in his hands. “I don’t understand it. Not at all. Miss Richards and Miss Kimball  were star students. Top 10% in the school. Both cheerleaders. Courtney in debate, Evelyn in FBLA. Both had full ride scholarships. I can’t imagine why they would even dream of doing something like this. Even Miss Laurence certainly isn’t one of the worst students in this school.”
I took out my notebook and pen. “Mr. Van Patten, I know this must be tough for you, but I need to know exactly what happened.” My cell phone buzzed, but I ignored it. He answered in a shaky, nervous tone.
“It was just after first bell had rung. I was in here, doing work on my computer, when I heard the door open behind me. Turning, I saw Miss Richards, Miss Kimball , and Miss Laurence enter. Courtney had her bag with her, the other two didn’t. They were quiet. I asked them what they wanted, and Courtney reached into her bag and…pulled out the knife. There was dried blood all over the blade. Some of it had soaked into the handle. I froze, of course, but she just placed it right there…” he indicated the red stain on the table, “...and then, in a quiet voice, she said, ‘We killed Mr. Price.’”
 “And what did you do then?”
“Well, obviously, I tried talking to them calmly. But Evelyn said they weren’t going to hurt me or anyone else in the school. They…said they had stopped the person who had been.”
“Do you know what they meant by that?”
“I can only assume they were referring to Mr. Price. Then they just sat down in the chairs over there and waited while I called the police.”
I knew the story after that point. The girls had their fingerprints and DNA samples taken. The bloody knife was put in an evidence bag and sent off to the lab. The girls were then escorted out of the school, calmly, with no disruption whatsoever.
I closed my notebook. “Thank you for your time. I’ll make sure justice is served.” Van Patten nodded.
I was scheduled to interview the girls the next day, so I took the night to go over the facts in the case.
Craig Price had been the Human Anatomy teacher at Riverside High. Three days previously to the arrest of the three girls, he had been found dead in the backyard of his house. He had suffered over fifteen stab wounds, mostly to the neck, face, and chest. The coroner had placed the time of death sometime between 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM. Surprisingly, only one of them was fatal: a puncture to his neck that had severed his jugular vein.
Evidence of a break-in had been found. A window had been wrenched open on the first floor, probably with a crowbar. Cabinets, drawers, and closets had been opened and searched through. The basement had seen the most damage.
Price had been an avid hunter, taking a week off every autumn to go into the mountains to track deer and elk.. Down in the basement was where he had set up his, well, for lack of a better word, slaughterhouse. Ever year, after returning from his hunt, he took his tags down there. He cut the skin off, carved the meat off the bones, and sent it to a smoker to be made into pepperoni, sausages, steaks, and other meat products. He kept it all in a walk-in freezer in the basement. The hides he sold to a local factory that made clothing.
The metal table had been overturned. The floor, tools, and aforementioned table had been caked with dried deer and elk blood. Apparently, Price hadn’t been a very neat guy. The boning knives and carving saw were all torn from their racks and covered the floor. One knife was missing, which I could only assume had been taken by one of the three girls to kill Price with. The freezer had been ransacked as well, although no meat appeared to be missing.
Judging from the amount of human blood at the base of the stairs, the attack had started there. Had he heard them and gone down to investigate? The blood trail led up and out the patio door to the backyard, where the fatal blow had been delivered.
I got a call late that night from the lab confirming the girl’s DNA and fingerprints were all over the crime scene. They had been the perpetrators after all.
But what had they been looking for?
The next day, I arrived at work bright and early. I had a long day ahead of me. Two interviews, back to back, was going to be difficult, especially with the crime the girls had been charged with. But, then again, they seemed to cooperate with us up to this point. I didn’t see why now would be any different.
As I walked back to the interview rooms, I stopped by the deputy standing guard at the door. “Who do I have the pleasure to talk to first?” I asked, taking my coat off and hanging it on the peg near the door. “Evelyn Kimball . She’s waiting, detective.” I thanked him and walked inside, shutting the door quietly behind me.
Evelyn sat sullenly at the table, hands crossed over her chest. She wore the orange jumpsuit that had been given to her the day previously.
“Hello, Miss Kimball . My name is Detective Bateman and I’m here to ask you some questions.” I sat down at the chair opposite. It squeaked loudly against the floor.
I opened my notebook and got out my pen. Before I could say a word, she interrupted me.
“Did you know I had an older sister, detective?”
Caught off guard, I paused for a moment before deciding to answer. “No, I didn’t.” I flipped through the profile I had been given, turning to the family section. Mom, Dad, younger brother. Older sister…deceased.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Kimball . But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to find out why you and your two friends killed Mr. Price.” I had hoped to get that point across and move on, but she stopped me.
“It’s important you know about my older sister, detective. She’s one of the reasons why we did it.”
Now this I needed to hear. “Please, say what’s on your mind.”
She began. “Last year, my older sister, Elizabeth, was found dead in a ditch outside of town. Someone had strangled her and thrown her from the car like she was a piece of litter. She had DNA; skin samples under her fingernails. Your department ran it through the system, no matches. You tried looking at her schedule. No one could place where she had been the afternoon she was killed. Mom and Dad didn’t remember where she was going and I didn’t either. In the end, the only clue they had was a piece of a bumper and black paint flecks. They never caught the guy who did it. Can you believe that? All that evidence and they didn’t get an arrest.”
“Evelyn, if you please…”
“Let me finish. Lizzie’s death left a pit in my life. Every morning I woke up and thought she would be there, but she wasn’t. Have you ever lost anyone close to you detective? It’s terrible.”
I didn’t reply.
“This year I got Mr. Price for Human Anatomy. Everyday, after school, I would see him walking out to his car. I noticed it was black. I know, I know, just because Mr. Price had a black car doesn’t mean he was the one who killed Lizzie. But I snuck out to his car one day and looked. The rest of the car had to be twenty, twenty-five years old. But the bumper? It looked new. Like it had only been put in a short time ago.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “Evelyn, are you telling me that you and your friends killed Mr. Price because his car was the same color as the one that was maybe driven by the man that killed your sister?”
Evelyn nodded, thought a moment, then shook her head. “No, not just for that reason. There’s more to the story. But I can’t be the one to tell you that. You’ll have to talk to Courtney.”
After that, she refused to say anything more. No matter what questions I asked, threats I made, or ways I tried to bargain, she didn’t utter another word. After five unsuccessful minutes of this, I called the deputy inside to take her away. As she was being escorted out, she looked at me and smiled.
“Once you know the full story, you’ll thank us. Trust me.”
I took a break to get some coffee and clear my head. I didn’t understand why the girls were spacing their stories out. Was it for dramatic effect? If so, I really wasn’t interested in waiting for the sequel.
Fifteen minutes later, I stepped into Courtney’s room. Like Evelyn, she was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Unlike Evelyn, she leaned forward in her chair, eyes cast down at the table. The light overhead shone down like a spotlight. The back of her chair was hidden in the shadows.
“Miss Richards? I’m Detective Bateman. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
Courtney lifted her head and smiled faintly at me. Her eyes were bloodshot from what I could only assume was lack of sleep. “I know what you want. You want to ask me why we killed Mr. Price. You want to know the answer.”
I sat down opposite, careful not to appear too authoritative. “Of course I do. It’s my job to figure out why people do things.”
She shook her head. “No. That’s a psychologist’s job. You’re just a detective.”
I ignored her comment and moved on. “Evelyn told me she took part in the plan because she was sure he killed her sister. So why did you get in on it, Courtney?”
She laughed softly. It sounded hollow and quiet as it faded. “Evelyn’s my best friend, you know. I would die for her. And, obviously, I would kill.”
“So that’s why you did it? Because Evelyn told you to?”
She shook her head again. “No, I had my suspicious about Mr. Price long before she came to me. You should have seen the way he looked at girls in his classes. Always giving them sideways glances and smiling. I can’t believe I’m the only one that noticed it. It seemed so obvious. There were rumors floating around, you know. He was supposedly having trysts with students during lunch and after school. Nothing was ever confirmed, but I knew something was off about him the moment I met him. He was just…a really slimy kind of guy. I didn’t like him at all.”
“Courtney, Evelyn told me that I’d have to talk to you if I wanted to hear the rest of the story. Do you plan to do that?”
She smiled. “I’ll tell you the middle part, detective. It’s up to Alison to tell you the rest.”
I sighed. Why span this out? “Alright, go ahead.”
She leaned back this time, crossing her arms. “I’m sure you’ve heard about Bethany Poole.”
I flipped through my notes. “Yes, that case was all over the news a few weeks ago, wasn’t it. She disappeared while walking home from school. No witnesses. She still hasn’t been found.” Even though the apparent futility of solving that case disquieted me, I tried not to show it. “And how exactly does Miss Poole’s disappearance relate to this case?”
“She was Alison’s best friend. They went everywhere and did everything together. Alison had a dentist appointment after school the day she went missing. That’s why they weren’t walking home at the same time.”
“And you think Alison blames herself for Bethany’s disappearance?”
Courtney stared quietly at the table. “Of course she does.”
I scribbled a few things down in my notebook.
“There’s one thing she didn’t know, though. Evelyn and I were walking home from school at the same time as Bethany. We saw her on the sidewalk ahead of us. We said hi as we passed. She mumbled something about waiting for someone before we got too far away to hear. A few minutes later, Mr. Price drove by in his black car. He was coming slowly, like he was watching for something. He passed us and went around the bend, right towards where Bethany was. Next thing we here, she’s gone missing. That’s really suspicious, don’t you think?”
I leaned back in my chair. “According to that story, you two were the last to see Bethany alive, not counting Mr. Price. If you knew he was in the vicinity, why didn’t you tell the police? We could have done something. Interviewed him or searched his house.”
She nodded. “Uh huh. You guys’d do such a good job, like the time you let Elizabeth’s killer go free. Give me a break.”
I gave her a stern look. “Courtney, we do everything we can to solve our cases. Life doesn’t always fit together perfectly. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, even if we don’t want them to.”
She continued talking like she hadn’t heard my statement. “We already had something planned for him by then. Bethany’s disappearance was just icing on the cake. If we went to the police, he’d get arrested and spend the rest of his life in a jail cell while the two families would grieve. Does that sound fair to you, detective?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Just because Craig Price had been in the vicinity didn’t mean he was responsible for Bethany’s kidnapping, or any of the other girls’ for that matter. “Courtney, whose idea was it to break into Mr. Price’s house?”
She answered without skipping a beat. “Alison’s. After we told her what we knew we all decided we needed to something before he hurt anyone else. She suggested we search his place for evidence, then call the police if we found anything. We all know Mr. Price’s hunting schedule. He takes the same week off every October to go into the mountains. We didn’t go there with the intention of killing him. But after what we found…”
“And what, exactly, did you find?”
She smiled. “You’ll have to talk to Alison for that information, detective. I’m done.”
Unlike her friend before her, she said nothing as she was being taken away.
The day had grown late. The evening sun lit everything orange and yellow on my way home. Alison’s interview was first thing the following morning. I really should have spent the night sleeping or at least resting, but I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that something was wrong with the girls’ judgment.
Back at home, I took out all the info I could gather on Craig Price. Laying it out on the table, I constructed a visual biography of his academic and professional life since had had graduated from college.
After a year at his first job, he had met a woman named Brittany Paulson. Their relationship had lasted two years until she was killed in a car accident. Depression must have sunk in then, because he took two years off working at a local grocery store. He seemed to get better after that and head back into the teaching profession; only working at two other schools before coming to Riverside. The first as an assistant upstate, the second as the Human Anatomy teacher at Riverside’s rival, Black Hills. The former he had held for two years; the latter for four. On both he had left to transfer to the next school by his own decision; not being fired or kicked out. His record at both schools at been spotless as well, no complaints from students, parents, or coworkers.
However, at Black Hills, there had been a disappearance a year into Price’s stay there. It fit the MO of the ones that had happened at Riverside: female student goes missing, turns up dead a short time afterwards. This time she had been named Vanden Armstrong.
I hung my head in my hands. Was this just a series of coincidences, or was Price somehow involved in all of them? The former seemed more likely. All of the evidence the girls had come up with against him was flimsy at best. He drove a black car and had a new bumper. So what? Car parts were replaced all the time. He gave the students strange looks, according to Courtney. Some students generally hate most of their teachers, and considering what she thought of him, her perceptions might have been clouded.  It was most likely a misread situation. Driving in the vicinity of Bethany on the day she disappeared? It was entirely possible he had just been passing by.
The death of his girlfriend had probably been very hard on him as well. Maybe some of his more suspicious behavior could be blamed on his despondency.
It would take the final interview to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. Later that night, I got a call from the lab confirming that Price had been at the store, buying soap when the girls had broken in.
As I went to bed, I couldn’t help but think of Evelyn and Courtney’s tones. They had seemed so confident in the fact that what they had done was right. But they had to be wrong...right?
The next morning, when I stepped into the interrogation room, I wasn’t prepared for the sight I beheld. Unlike her two accomplices, Alison slumped at the table, head buried in her arms. She appeared to be sleeping. As I sat down I rapped my hand on the metal loudly. Raising her head up, she gave me a bleak look. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yes, Alison. You and your two friends have made my job a lot harder than it needs to be.” I leaned forward. “Whose idea was it to space the story out?”
She stared at me glumly. “Evelyn’s. She’s always been a dramatic person. I guess she wanted to build up Mr. Price’s reputation before tearing him down.” She sat quietly for a moment. “Bethany was my best friend. Everyone used made fun of her, you know. She was missing two fingers from an accident with her dad’s buzzsaw when she was little. All through elementary, everyone made of fun of her. But I didn’t. I was made fun of for my glasses. That’s how we got close. We were both outcasts and we only had each other. It was my fault she was kidnapped. If I wouldn’t have gone to that stupid dentist appointment I would have been with her and it wouldn’t have happened. When I heard their suspicions, I knew. I knew that if I couldn’t help her when she was alive, I had to help her after she died.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. The room seemed cold, oppressive, even to me. I had to change the subject before I ran out of things to say. “Courtney told me yesterday that you’d tell the rest of the story. Right now, I have why you did it and how you planned it. But I don’t know how it was carried out.”
She repeated Courtney’s sentiments from the previous day in a bored, uninterested tone. Everyone knew Mr. Price’s hunting schedule, they planned to search his house on a night he was supposed to be gone to look for evidence.
“We got to his house around 9:00 PM. All the lights were off and the doors and windows were locked. Just to be on the safe side we waited another hour or two until the street was dark and there weren’t any people out anymore. Evelyn had taken a crowbar from her dad’s tool shed. We snuck around the back and found a window we could all fit through. It took all three of us pushing down to get it open.
“I guess we didn’t really know exactly what we were looking for. Just some kind of sign of what we suspected him of. Once we were all inside, we started going around the house. We didn’t turn on any lights just to be safe. If I remember correctly, I got the kitchen, Courtney got the living room, and Evelyn went to the garage.
“Who am I kidding? You saw the scene, obviously. You know we didn’t find anything.” That was true, at least. An inventory taken didn’t note anything missing from the ground floor. “The funny thing was, we saw pictures of this woman all around the house. As far as any of us knew, he wasn’t married or had a girlfriend or anything. I didn’t know who she was.
“I think we were about to leave. Evelyn and Courtney looked pretty pissed that we hadn’t found any evidence. That’s when we saw the basement door. It was ajar and there was this cold air coming through it.
“Well, you know we had to check it out. It smelled awful. I knew we had him the moment we started down the stairs. What we saw made us stop in our tracks. There was blood everywhere. It was all over the table and the floor around it. We couldn’t see a body anywhere, but we could tell he had been down here recently. Some of the knives were off the hooks on the walls.
“Don’t jump to conclusions. All three of us knew that Mr. Price went hunting and gutted the deer in his basement. But something just seemed wrong. There was a lot of blood, sure, but there wasn’t enough for a full sized deer. Like…Bethany had been on that table. He had carved her up. We knew it.”
I shook my head sadly.
“And do you know what the worst part was? We found a locket of hers n a table near the stairs. The bastard had kept it. Like some kind of trophy.”
That I hadn’t heard about. I opened my notes and looked at the inventory from the basement. Sure enough, listed about three-quarters down the list was a locket. With the initials B.P engraved on the heart.
I felt my stomach drop. But she kept talking.
“By that point we had everything we needed. We got our phones out and started taking pictures. That’s all we came there to do. But then we heard the basement door open. Where had he been the whole time? At the store? Upstairs, asleep? I guess it didn’t matter in the end. He came down and saw us. We just kinda froze. I dropped my phone. Isn’t that funny? I dropped it and the case cracked but I didn’t do anything. He started yelling then. He asked us what we were doing in his house.
“I think that’s what made Evelyn snap. We knew what he had done to her sister and Bethany, but he had the audacity to ask us what we were doing. Like it was unfair for us to expose him. Before Courtney or I could do anything, she snatched one of the knives from the board and just ran towards him. I think her speed caught him by surprise because all he had time to do was cry out. She stabbed him in the chest. He tried to throw her off but she stabbed him again. After that she turned towards us, like she was asking for help.
“Courtney and I snapped then, too. All three of us grabbed him and dragged him out into the backyard. He kept asking us what we were doing and why we were there. He knew. I think he was mocking us. It didn’t matter, in the end. Courtney and Evelyn took turns stabbing him out there until he stopped moving. I don’t know who it was that delivered the killing blow. I kinda spaced out after the third or fourth one.
“I don’t really remember the next part. I just zoned out. I vaguely remember them taking me back towards the car. The next thing I knew, we were back at Evelyn’s house, planning all this out.”
She sat quietly for a moment or two.
“Maybe it was wrong, what we did. We should have called the police. We should have left after we didn’t find anything upstairs. It’s too late now. What’s done is done. And now he can’t hurt anyone else.”
As she was led out of the room, I turned towards her. “Allison…” I started to say, thinking about how wrong they were, how a series of very unfortunate circumstances made them think what they did. She turned towards me and I saw a look of deep sadness in her eyes. But it wasn’t regret. It was mourning. Mourning for the friend she had lost. I knew she thought she had done the right thing.
I couldn’t take that away from her. I couldn’t tell her the necklace had in all likelihood belonged to his dead girlfriend, Brittany Paulson. I couldn’t tell her there was less blood because he had already packed the deer away in the freezer. I couldn’t tell her he wasn’t there because he had gone to the store to get soap to clean up the blood from the carving.
“Never mind.”  I said. She gave me a sad smile. “Goodbye, detective.” She said one last time. The door shut behind her, leaving me in the empty room.
I took a few days off of work after that. I stayed up late and slept in as long as I could. Nothing worked. Coffee, pills, late-night TV, nothing could get me to stop thinking about the case, about the three girls that had destroyed the rest of their lives based on a well-crafted delusion.
I found myself walking down the hall of Riverside a week or so later, heading towards Craig Price’s classroom. It had been closed until they could find a replacement. At the end of the day, there were no students around. My footsteps echoed gloomily around the hall.
Opening the door, I stepped inside. It was dark, the desks empty and silent. No classes would be taught in there for a long time.
I thought about the three girls and what they had done. Unexpectedly, I found myself questioning Craig Price’s motives. Surely not everything could be blamed on misconceptions by the girls. Had the locket really belonged to Brittany Paulson? Had he gone hunting and carved up a deer to hide evidence of what he did to Bethany Poole?
I shook my head. Of course not. I was letting myself get carried away. The case was over and done. The three girls had committed the crime based on a series of drastic, unfortunate misunderstandings.
As I turned to leave, I found myself bumping into something near the door. A low, dull sound filled the room, like old boards clattering together. Looking up, I saw that it was the model skeleton, used to teach students about the different bones in the body.
It was missing two fingers.