“Where are you going, Lucas?” she whispered to herself.
She exited the feed, then went to the next camera he would have passed based on the direction he was heading. He passed it, looking exactly the same as he did when leaving the main entrance. The next camera he would be caught on was at the administration building across the road. She hopped to its view and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
He never passed the camera’s eye.
“What the fuck?”
She checked the time stamps on the feed. It should have taken him less than a minute to reach the doorway where the camera was positioned. The space he had to cross contained the bus lane, one of the entrances to the student parking lot, and the access road to the custodial loading dock, the auto shop, and the greenhouse. He would have been out in the wide open where anyone could see him.
Quickly, she sped through the feeds of all the cameras on the back side of the building. Nothing. Where the hell did he go? Even if he went to the tennis courts, he would have shown up on a parking lot feed. How did he just disappear?
Making a split-second decision, she switched screens on her computer and looked up Ezra’s schedule. The clock on the wall showed that it was two minutes until passing time. Quickly, she rang the classroom of his current teacher. “Sorry to bother you. Could you please, quietly, ask Ezra Vaughn to come see me in my office immediately when the bell rings? Thank you.”
Impatiently, she waited for Ezra to arrive. When he did, he looked nervous. “Close the door, Ezra, and have a seat.”
He shut the door, let his backpack fall off his shoulder, set it on the floor, and sat down in one of the chairs opposite her desk. “What’s going on?”
“Ezra, did your dad mention having an appointment today? Anything that would take him off school grounds?”
He frowned. “No. There’s no way he would have left today with Kennedy missing.”
“Did he mention meeting anyone today on school grounds?”
“No. He doesn’t usually share that stuff with me. I figured he’d be in meetings all day today. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want you to panic, but… we can’t find him. He left the building at just before ten, supposedly to go see Superintendent Sealy, but he never made it there. On top of that, it turns out that the meeting wasn’t actually until one, so we have video of him leaving the building, but then he never shows up once he hits the corner of the building.”
The frown left his face, and in its place, she saw indecision.
“Ezra, do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Do you know something about what’s going on?”
“Of course not.” He chewed on his bottom lip.
“You know something though.”
“I don’t know anything. It’s just… Dad was asking me a lot of questions about Ryker this morning. It got me thinking. He’s in my AP Computer Science class, and he challenged me this summer to hack the school website. Said he didn’t think we could do it, but… I’m pretty sure he and a couple of kids at least tried. I blew him off. No way was I going to mess around with that with early acceptance to MIT on the line, plus my dad’s the principal.
“He’s been off lately. Ever since Dad caught him cheating last year, to be honest. Angry all the time. Blames everybody for everything that goes wrong when it’s really his fault. He won’t tell anyone, but he lost his full ride to school next year because of it, and several other schools retracted their invites. No one on a college campus is going to touch a cheater. They’ve got enough problems on campuses without letting someone in who’s just going to create more issues.
“On top of that, Judah told me he’s been trying to steal Kennedy from him. Says he’s been obsessed with her for a long time, but she won’t have anything to do with him because something about him reminds her too much of her dad. Supposedly, when she kept turning him down, he got totallypissed off. Rumor is he was trying to stack the votes so that they would be homecoming king and queen.
“After the punishments came down for the homecoming raid, he totally flipped out. Told people you’d be sorry, was telling everybody he was going to get you and Dad fired. All kinds of bullshit. I blew it off because Ryker’s a blowhard, and nobody takes him seriously, but now…”
She leaned forward on the desk. “This is very important. Was he at the study zoo all night on Saturday?”
“That’s just it. He was. He got there before me, and he left after I did.”
Kennedy’s call came in around eleven thirty. The students went straight from the dance, which ended at eleven forty-five, to the Lewis household. If he arrived at the study zoo thirty minutes after that, was it enough time to snatch Kennedy, stash her somewhere, then get to the group to avert suspicion?
“What about today? Was he missing at all today from somewhere he should have been?”
