Blood Line by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online

Julio was his cousin didn’t mean the boy’s death would be any different from Hocks’s. But a good cop wouldn’t be content to sit and wait, not if he had ways of shaking things loose. “I’ll do a little asking around. See if I can turn up anything.”
    “Hey, be my guest! I’ll use any help I can get.”
    Wager figured that.
    His first stop the next morning was at the yellow brick building whose chillingly familiar concrete decorations were from another era and whose very walls seemed worn by the shoulders of generations of kids. It was the high school Wager had dropped out of so long ago that he was surprised at how easily he remembered the way to the secretary’s office. Maybe it was because he had been sent there so many times or because so little had changed, including the green-brown paint of the corridor. Chickenshit green they had called it then, and it looked as if the same chicken was still busy. It even took an effort not to shuffle his feet in the glare of the icy spectacles that the thin, gray-haired woman aimed at him as he stood in front of the scarred counter to be noticed.
    “May I help you?”
    The official politeness turned to official concern when he showed his badge and told her what he wanted.
    “Yes, certainly, I’ll see if he’s available.” She said a few words into a telephone and replaced it. “Room one-twelve, down the hall to your right.”
    The door said MR. KINNEY. PLEASE KNOCK. Wager did and a voice answered “Come in!” Wager did that, too. Mr. Kinney, in his thirties and prematurely bald, stood to shake hands across his desk. It was something that had never happened when, as a kid, Wager had been forced to poke his head through this same door. “I read about Julio Lucero. It’s a very sad thing.”
    Wager agreed. “Can you tell me who he hung around with? Any names he might have mentioned?”
    The lean man ran his fingertips along the fringe of dark hair above his ear and across the line of mustache above his lip. Wager wondered why men with that pattern of baldness often grew a mustache. “We haven’t really seen much of him in the last three or four months—he was apparently transferring to a vocational program.”
    “Any names at all would be a help.”
    “Yes, of course.” Kinney flipped open a manila folder. “There’s really not much here,” he said in apology. “I didn’t have much contact with him—a couple of mandatory referral visits for excessive absences.” He explained, “The school population’s grown so much, but the staffing hasn’t kept up. Anymore, the cases I know most about are crisis cases. That’s all I have time for now.”
    “Julio wasn’t a crisis case?”
    “No.” The man looked embarrassed. “In the past, maybe—a few years ago—excessive absence would have called for intervention. But now with addiction, pregnancy, attempted suicide, physical violence, abandonment … It seems cold to admit it, but we don’t have much time to spend on dropouts. One of my co-counselors calls our work ‘social triage.’”
    Wager didn’t know what “triage” meant but he heard the note of bitter surrender in Kinney’s voice. “Can you tell me if Julio was tied in with a gang?” The brief newspaper story of his nephew’s death had been headlined POLICE SUSPECT GANG SLAYING, and Wager figured the reporter had interviewed Golding.
    “I don’t have any indication of that, but it’s certainly possible. No gang clothing or signs are allowed on campus, of course, but it would be naive to think that none of our students are gang members or at least affiliates.” He shook his head. “But I never heard that about Julio.”
    “Did he have trouble with anyone? Fighting, maybe?”
    Another shake of the head. “I don’t have much on him at all. I’m sorry.”
    The counselor, by telephoning a couple of Julio’s teachers who were on break, finally managed to get three names for Wager. He arranged for an interview room while he called