Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

cars, abandoned by their young owners, lay scattered about, and here and there small paw prints marched across the sand’s surface.
    She noticed that the chains holding the seats to the crossbar of the swing set were missing, along with the seats themselves—taken, no doubt, by the crime scene techs the night of the shootings. Both Adam and James had been seated on the swings when they were shot in the back of the head.
    Who shoots a kid in the back of the head, then walks away? Surely not a best friend.
    Mallory walked around the swing set and stood where the shooter—or shooters—had stood. Had the boys seen them coming? Did they know they were about to die? Or had they been laughing and talking and unaware of the danger that was coming at them through the dark? She stared until she could almost see the two boys, first on the swings, then crumpled on the ground where they lay after falling. The vision sent a shudder through her, then disappeared.
    She tried to picture Ryan pulling a gun—where would he have gotten a gun?—and approaching his friends from behind the swings. Pressing it to the back of Adam’s head—Adam, with whom he’d been best friends since kindergarten!—and pulling the trigger. How had Ryan been able to get James to remain seated on his swing after he’d shot Adam? Surely Courtney’s presence alone wouldn’t have been enough of a threat to keep James still.
    Bang! Bang!
Mallory tried to imagine the scenario, tried to hear the gunshots, tried to see Courtney standing by while Ryan killed the two others, but she just didn’t see it happening that way. She couldn’t accept either Courtney or Ryan as the shooter. It just didn’t fit. There had to have been someone else there that night.
    So if neither Courtney nor Ryan was the shooter, where were they when Adam and James were murdered?
    According to the police report, the shooting had occurred sometime after ten PM , so it would have been dark. Assuming that on the night of the shooting there had been a bulb in the lamppost at the end of the walk, just as there was now, what, Mallory wondered, could be seen from where the shooter stood?
    She did a 360-degree scan, and when she came back to where she’d started she had a pretty good idea of where the missing teenagers might have been when the shooting began.
    Straight ahead—in direct line with the swings—stood the slide. In her mind’s eye, Mallory could almost see how it could have happened. She walked toward the slide, playing out the possibilities in her head. Supposing one of them—Courtney, more likely—had been at the top of the slide, just sitting there, maybe, or maybe about to go down, when the shots that killed the boys on the swings rang out. Might she have screamed, drawing attention to herself? Might she have frozen there, at the top of the steps, where she easily could have been seen by the shooter?
    She saw the shooter, the shooter saw her.
    Where would Ryan have been? At the foot of the slide or behind her on the ladder—either could work.
    What would Courtney or Ryan—or both—have done?
    They’d have run like hell, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they have looked for a way out of the park, or at the very least a place to hide?
    Sure they would. They wouldn’t have stood there, waiting to be shot like Adam and James had been. They’d have looked for a way out. And since their bodies hadn’t been found, perhaps they’d found one.
    Or maybe the shooter forced Courtney and Ryan to leave the park at gunpoint, killed them somewhere else. They’d already fired twice, enough to attract attention. Maybe the shooter feared the police had already been summoned by someone who’d heard those first two shots.
    Possible, Mallory acknowledged. But why hadn’t their bodies turned up by now?
    The first scenario sounded more likely to her than the second; it felt right. And if she was right, the missing kids were most likely still alive.
    Mallory walked back to the slide and stood