The wheels were already turning by Monday.
Somebody had gone to the party and never left. Nobody remembered seeing him last. The people that had gone with him hadn’t seen where he could have gone off to, and the people that hadn’t gone ended up not having any luck. No phone calls were answered, no checks to home revealed anything, and a sweep of the site of the party came up empty. He had just vanished off the face of the earth.
With a day to stew on it, the moment school opened, the rumor mill began flying.
The first rumors were, obviously, that he was dead. A natural death was unlikely, due to the lack of body near the party or reported car crash. So the implication that he was dead necessitated the conclusion that he had been murdered. Anywhere else, such a thing would have been absurd. But in Ravenville, in a way, it was the only option.
With the rumors of his murder proliferating rapidly, the next set were hushed, hurried questions about who was responsible. Nobody had come forward to claim the credit by monday morning, for if he had been murdered, it would have been too soon to incriminate oneself. No evidence had been found, either, so all that anybody had for the identity of the culprit was the circumstances of the party. Whispered accusations of the party’s host luring them there only to kill him were contested with the alibi of him being in the basement with friends the entire time, an alibi that itself was called into question as the mere possibility that it was a group kill began to take root. But some of those at the party claimed that it hadn’t been any of them, that everybody had been accounted for, so the dead boy must have been lured away by somebody else.
Michael knew that all of these were wrong. But he wasn’t the one being asked.
Anybody that had seen him at the party had not asked him any questions over the weekend, nor was anybody waiting for him with questions when school began on Monday. He certainly heard all kinds of suggestions, with half a dozen different people suspected of being responsible for the deed, and even more associated with the victim within the last hour of his life. They were universally wrong, but without any credit or evidence to make anything lean one specific way, nobody would ever get anywhere.
By the time second period began, the suspect pool seemed to have narrowed, if only by a small margin. Everybody at the party had snitched on who else was there, but most people had validated their own alibis in the act of incrimination. The ones that had passed out drunk in the back porch were the easiest to catch, and the roster had been slowly whittled down over the hour until the only unknowns were the ones that had not been seen at the party. Those being the ones in the basement, Larry, Ken, and his friends.
That had, unfortunately, also revealed that Michael had been at the party.
By third period, the entire class was sneaking glances at him when they thought he was too busy taking notes to notice. Nobody had explicitly asked him, and looking back over the chain of events, he didn’t consider it likely that people would begin accusing him. The timing of when he left didn’t add up, nobody had known when he would leave, and he hadn’t even seen the man before moving his body into Sarah’s car. That was an alibi that was self-evident.
Ken wasn’t foolish enough to try and blame him, especially when he didn’t know who had killed the man either. The first rule of doing a frame job was to actually know who the involved parties were. It was an unreliable trick to pull, and nailing down every single certainty in the process was the only way to do it right.
The rest of the grade, though, didn’t know that. All they knew was that he had been at the party, that he hadn’t been seen much, and that there was a whole lot more up in the air. Nobody had accused him on the way to lunch, so he assumed that Sarah hadn’t cracked under any sort of panic and tried to blame him. Good. This would blow over soon, then.
He was a few bites into his sandwich when a hand grabbed him on the shoulder.
“Mikey, what did you do?”
He slapped the hand away and gripped the wrist, twisting the arm towards him and away from the other person before releasing it and sending them staggering. “Don’t grab me like that, James.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, sure.” James caught his balance and straightened back up behind Michael. “But, dude, what did you do?”
“Are you asking if I killed somebody at the party?” “What else would I be asking that about?”
“No, Michael, of course I didn’t.” There wasn’t much to be said beyond a flat denial.
“Are you sure? Because somebody died last night, and you’re one of, like, five people without an alibi.”
“My alibi is that I don’t even know who’s dead. I didn’t know who would be at the party. You invited me, I had no plans on being there, and primarily, I am not the kind of person that would kill unprovoked. I think that is a sufficient alibi for the situation.”
“Yeah, but…ugh, fine.” The stress seemed to seep out of James in a sigh, as he brought both hands up to his face. “Look dude, I’m just worried, because if I bring somebody along to a party and then somebody else dies there right afterwards, it looks bad for everybody, and I’m seriously worried about this.”
“You don’t think anybody would suspect you?”
James pressed his face further into his hands, muffling his next words. “Everybody knows that I would have taken credit for that by now.”
Michael couldn’t disagree with that. He just tilted his head in acknowledgement and took a bite out of his sandwich. Even if it hadn’t been a declaration to the entire school, James would have told somebody about a first kill and then there would have at least been knowledge that it was somebody, instead of being total conjecture.
Evidently still unsatisfied, James sat in the silence for a moment longer before pulling his hands away. “Michael, be honest with me,” he asked. “Do you know who killed Matthew?”
Michael paused, weighing his options. Exposing Sarah would reduce how many people suspected his involvement, but it would obviously expose her, prevent him from teaching her anything, and thus make things more boring. There was potential in entertainment watching her try to survive the focus that being exposed would bring, but past that, he knew there was something odd going on.
Also, he had helped her bury the body. He was way too involved in this to get away cleanly.
“Yes,” he replied after a moment, “I think I do. But I’m not entirely sure, and I certainly did not actually do it myself.”
James looked at him for a moment longer, like he was trying to draw something out of his expression, before sighing. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to.
Michael nodded as James stood up and left, finishing his lunch in silence while waiting for the bell to ring. He felt a little bad about somewhat lying to James, but there was a chance he would have just immediately told people in an attempt to spin the story in his favor, and Michael didn’t want that.
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Something that had been nagging him ever so slightly, but been lost in the bustling work of not being caught for killing somebody, had been the nature of the instigation. Sarah had not started the fight. Matthew, who he was beginning to maybe remember the name of, had left the party, deliberately moving to the spot where Sarah had been told to go to, and assaulted her before she even knew he was there. He had moved, not impulsively, but like he had known she was coming. Movement with a plan was always something to be wary of.
There was a vast gulf between a plan formed in ten seconds and a plan formed even a day before. And Matthew had moved like the latter.
The bell rang to mark the end of lunch, and Michael had balled up his trash and thrown it away before the noise had even ceased. There was a poster up on the wall across from the cafeteria doors, the lettering official and the paper crisp white. It had to have been new, posted earlier that day, and Michael stopped to take a look at it.
A police poster, requesting information. A picture of the dead boy’s face stood in the center, surrounded by small text about when he was last seen at the party and asking for information. His phone number, known haunts, the location where he could have otherwise been. And the location of his car.
Michael wondered.
And had an idea.
Four hours later, Michael was walking through the outer edges of the woods, and he could tell Sarah was barely holding back a complaint behind him.
He didn’t blame her. Her eyes were still red, surrounded by purple bruises, and her hair was visibly oily. But she trudged along behind him, waiting for him to explain why they were there. He appreciated that.
“Lesson two,” he began. “Information is key. If you want to go after somebody you need to know their schedules, their room, and above all, what they can do. But before you can use that information, you need to find it. So the most crucial information to withhold is often not the details of one’s schedule, but how to find their schedule. Not where they are, but what their car looks like.”
“Hiding the stuff that you can’t find out for yourself.” Sarah hmmed in acknowledgement. “I get it. But why are we walking down some backroad?”
“Because this lesson is about how to find that information.” Michael didn’t break his stride as he turned and went down a path that was barely visible through the trees, denoted only by the twin wheel marks crushing the leaves to the ground beneath his feet. “Asking others is simple. It is easy, if you have friends that know your victim’s details. But it is obvious. I have, before, been presented with payback cases where people have shown records of the culprit asking around about the victim as evidence, and it has been convincing. If you ask around, and fail, then you expose yourself.”
“But even if you fail, wouldn’t the victim be afraid to speak up?”
Michael stopped and half-turned to Sarah, looking over his shoulder at her tired form.
“If you failed at murder, then your target is still alive. They have seen you, your weapon, and your attempted manner of execution. They are still capable of communication. And they will communicate that desire for payback.”
He resumed his walk. “Asking out is a poor method of gathering information if you wish to remain subtle. This leaves observation, but as mentioned, observation is easily foiled by not knowing what you are looking for. So you need to find out what you are looking for.”
Sarah almost tripped on something behind him, and he stopped, the near-unseen path opening up to a small clearing in the trees. The ground was covered in grass trailing the end of summer, the green only brighter because the yellow was beginning to show through, the lush tufts beginning to crack as the air got dryer and colder, and the shadows of falling leaves stole the sun. The wheel-marks from earlier continued, a flattened path in the grass that hadn’t quite resolved itself in a few days, leading around a small tree and towards a new-looking hatchback, a few dead leaves sitting on the roof.
“Wait, we…doesn’t that path lead to Larry’s?”
Michael nodded. “There’s so many paths in these woods that you could get lost in here without much effort. This was the closest lot for somebody that might want to park out of the way for Larry’s house.”
“So…” She walked up besides him, pointing at the car. “That’s his car?”
“The boy who tried to kill you, yes.” A moment of silence, and he strode off towards it. “His name was Matthew Straw, and though I do not recognize his car or know who his friends were, this is the third method of gathering information.”
His hands dug around in one of the pockets on his cargo pants, emerging with a thin strip of metal with a hook on the end and some small and delicate tools.
“Searching,” he said as he inserted the metal strip between the door and the window. “You simply break in to somewhere and find the information. You could look through call logs on a phone, dig through backpacks for information on extracurriculars, attempt to find work schedules, or any number of things. That is what most people will do. Ascertaining the intent of a break-in is difficult, even when–”
He pulled on it, and with a jerk, the car door opened to him.
“Even when nothing seems to have been taken. So this lesson is twofold,” Michael finished. “Illustrating a method of information gathering, and showing how to tell when somebody has tried to search something or somewhere.”
“Okay.” Sarah rubbed her hands together and leaned in to look at the inside of the car. “So what are we looking for?”
“I would like to see what you can tell first.”
She blinked and surprised, but immediately started looking around. “Oh, um…the sun visors are down, which is weird, because he came here at night. The seat looks a little weird, but I don’t remember what he looked like, which…”
A pause, before Sarah looked up at him. “Should I remember what he looked like?”
Michael shrugged. “It was dark, and you were stressed. You did what you had to do. He didn’t want to remember you, and if you do remember him, think of it as a lesson, that his friends would likely do the same to you.”
She nodded, blinking, gaze turned through the car for a few moments before she returned to the present. “Okay. Okay. The little lid beneath the center console is open, but there’s nothing in the cigarette lighter, so that’s odd. Especially because there’s nothing in there. And, um…I don’t see anything in the carpeting? Maybe there’s some hidden compartment in the door?”
“There’s not.” Michael shook his head, moving to sit down in the driver’s seat. “But you have the right idea. If something has been searched, people will leave it open. So you watch for adjustments you didn’t make, drawers and bags open that it doesn’t make sense to leave open. If there’s nothing left inside something that was left open, you can assume it was searched and emptied. And most importantly, you look for things that were put back, but wrong. A zipper on the wrong side, a drawer hanging just far enough out.”
He reached out and tugged at the glove box, and the entire lid came out in his hand with a clank, metal pieces falling to the floor. Sarah yelped and started pawing at herself, trying to remember what pocket she had left her dagger in, and he reached out with his other hand to calm her. She was going to need a few days of quiet before she was back in fighting shape, he knew, but sometimes he forgot how badly people could react when they were new at this. Mostly because he never saw people be new at this.
“Or, as a final example, something being unlocked that you know had been left behind.” Michael dropped the lid on the floor, looking around at the wreckage. “Notice anything odd?”
Sarah leaned in again, stretching over and in front of him with panting breaths. “No, nope. Nothing here at all.”
“Exactly. There’s nothing in the glove box. The only thing on the floor is the parts of it.”
She furrowed her brow. “Maybe he just didn’t keep much in here.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged.
“Or maybe somebody else was looking for something here first.”