The classroom was empty.
The children who normally occupied it had temporarily been moved to the school library until the smell of smoke could be eradicated from the room.
As if of like mind, Dax and Nathan went straight to the wastepaper basket beside the desk.
Knowing they probably preferred to have her hang back, Brenda still joined them. Even looking at the basket, burnt and misshapen, the fact that the fire had started here still amazed her. She was so careful. How could this have happened? The metal container was completely blackened, as was the side of the desk closest to the basket.
“Looks like this is the only place the fire damaged,” Harwood noted.
Nathan looked around and nodded. “Lucky.”
“Controlled,” Dax countered. He raised his eyes to Brenda. “Whoever set this did it after the alarm went off.”
Why was he looking at her like that? Did he expect her to suddenly fall to her knees and confess? “How can you tell?” Brenda asked.
He’d already made the calculations. “Because it took the firefighters less than ten minutes to get here. Ten minutes would have been enough time for the fire to have spread throughout the whole room if it had started first. The alarm was tripped and the firefighters were already on their way when the fire was set. Someone wanted to be sure that no one was hurt during all this.” Dax paused as he looked at her. “Do you have any matches in the classroom?”
So much for thinking she was being paranoid. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
There was no smoking allowed on the premises. Besides, he doubted if she was a smoker. There were no nicotine stains between her middle and index fingers and her teeth were blazing white. Which begged the question, “Why?”
“We have a science project going.” She gestured toward the cone-shaped papier mâché structure sitting in the middle of a table in the far corner. It looked like a child’s version of a tropical island. “The children and I are making a volcano.”
Plausible, he thought, nodding. “Can I see the matches?”
Nerves were skittering through her as she opened the top drawer to her desk. She didn’t know whether to be furious or to search for the name of a good lawyer. Reaching for the box where she kept her matches, she stopped.
“They’re not here.” There wasn’t much to move around in the drawer, but she went through the motions with no success. “I keep them in a metal box, but it’s not in here.”
The taller of the two detectives said nothing, only nodded, but by now she was convinced that he thought she was involved in this more than just peripherally. Closer scrutiny into her life might only convince him of the fact. Recently widowed, her finances were not in the best of shape. Maybe he’d think that she decided to supplement it by ransoming Annie.
The very thought moved a cold shiver up and down her spine. The nausea that she had been struggling to keep at bay threatened to overpower her.
She blew out an annoyed breath as she slammed the drawer shut harder than she’d intended. “Look, I can take a lie-detector test.”
Guilty people didn’t usually volunteer to do that—unless they were very, very good, Dax thought. Lie detectors were not infallible and had been known to be fooled. Still, he decided to pass—for now. “That won’t be necessary.”
She surprised him by not grasping at the truce he offered her. “I think it is just to get that look out of your eyes. I want you to understand that I love Annie Tyler, maybe because no one else seems to, but I think that she is a wonderful little girl who has been given a raw deal from the day she was born.”
He decided to play devil’s advocate just to see her reaction. “Having parents who can buy you anything you want doesn’t seem like such a raw deal to me.”
“Anything but their time,” she pointed out evenly.
He looked at her with renewed interest. Not all kidnappings were about ransoms. Sometimes children were taken because the kidnapper thought they were rescuing the child from an unhappy life. “Maybe you could give her a better life.”
“I know I could—” Brenda stopped abruptly. “I didn’t take Annie. I wouldn’t traumatize her like that. Besides, I was right out there in plain sight all the time,” she pointed out.
That didn’t constitute an ironclad alibi. “Accomplices aren’t unheard of.”
She’d had just about enough of this. “Detective Cavanaugh, I want a lie-detector test,” she repeated. “I insist.”
“We’ll see what we can do to accommodate you later,” Dax told her before turning toward Harwood. “Right now, I’d like to talk to some of the other teachers, see if they saw anything. And while you’re at it, I’d like the address and phone number of those prospective parents Mrs. York was showing around.”
“Of course,” Harwood agreed quickly. “It’s in my office. I’ll go back and get it. Mrs. York can help you with the other teachers.”
Right now, Dax thought, Mrs. York looked as if she’d rather hand his head to him on a platter.
Chapter 3
“You really suspect her?”
Nathan was leaning back against the desk at the front of the room, his attention diverted toward Brenda York. He glanced at his partner. To his left a stocky, pleasant-faced teacher was leading a gaggle of second-graders out of the art room, which had been set aside to conduct questioning.
Dax was looking at Annie Tyler’s teacher from across the room. She was saying something to one of the kids who looked concerned. The boy smiled at her and nodded. She had a way about her, he thought. Made people trust her. Put them at their ease.
And at her mercy?
He glanced at his partner. “We’re supposed to suspect everyone, Nathan, you know that.”
Nathan gave a little shrug. His small pad inside his jacket pocket rustled against his shirt. The pages, thick with notes, were no longer smooth. “Yeah, but she seems so upset about it.”
Dax smiled. “You always did have a weakness for blondes.” He turned toward his partner. “The woman had access. By her own admission, she knows the little girl inside and out, that means she’d know exactly how to handle her.”
Shaking his head, Nathan frowned. “What’s her motive?”
She moved like poetry, Dax thought. Flowing into every step. Confident, yet incredibly feminine.
Abruptly, he wiped the thought from his mind, telling himself he had to get out more. Dax shoved his hands into his pockets. “Money’s always a good motive. Most people can’t have enough of it.”
“So you do suspect her.”
Dax shrugged. He was thinking out loud, but he and Nathan had that kind of relationship. Half-formed thoughts could be voiced in safety.
“My gut tells me no, my training tells me to hold off any final judgments.”
As he watched the woman stop to comfort one of the last children in the line, Nathan sighed. “If I were single, my gut would be telling me a whole lot of other things besides hold off.”
Dax laughed but made no comment. Precisely because his gut, or whatever part of him that was instrumental in allowing attraction to set in, was telling him a great deal, none of which included the phrase “hold off.” If being a cop, a good cop, wasn’t so ingrained in him, he might have followed through on one of any number of instincts.
As it was, he felt something stirring within him,