a doctor’s appointment or slip out that back door by the gym?”
“How’d you know about the back door?”
“I went to Bentonsville High,” she said. “If you go out that door and cross a road, the woods are right there. Then you’re home free.”
“You used that escape route?” Molly injected heavy skepticism into her voice.
“All the time.” Diana’s words carried a ring of truth, although she seemed ashamed of the admission.
Well, Molly didn’t feel guilty. “I went out the back door. It was easy because I have PE last period. The teacher loses track of who’s there and who’s not.”
Molly had forged her mom’s signature before, too. She’d never leave school without covering her tracks. A terrible thought occurred to her, and her heart raced. “You’re not going to tell my mom, are you?”
“Why would I do that?”
Molly’s heart rate returned to normal. “Because I shouldn’t be skipping school.”
“Then why are you?”
“Why did you?” Molly shot back.
Diana didn’t answer for a moment. “I guess because I didn’t want to be there.”
“That’s my reason, too.”
“Okay,” Diana said, as though she actually accepted that. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
She’d almost reached the door when she turned around. “If you ever want to talk about anything—Terry Pratchett books, school, anything—just come find me. I’ll be around.”
Then she left.
Molly frowned, wondering what had possessed her to admit she’d skated out of her last class. How could she be sure Diana wouldn’t rat her out?
Diana had seemed okay. She wasn’t too old and she hadn’t lectured Molly about doing the right thing. But Diana was one of them. An adult.
Molly snorted, disgusted with herself for revealing anything at all to Diana. She put her headphones back on and opened her book, wondering how long it would be until she caught hell for skipping school.
THE APPLE-CHEEKED KID on the stand looked about fifteen years old, although Tyler’s court documents stated his age as nineteen.
Unlucky for the kid.
The juries in adult cases usually came down harder on offenders than juvenile court judges, a bad thing for Grant Livingstone. Because Tyler was about to prove without a reasonable doubt that the teenager had committed arson.
Nobody had died, but the owner of the single-family home that had burned to the ground suffered second-degree burns trying to contain the flames before the fire department arrived.
“I’d like to make sure I have some of the facts straight,” Tyler said, sidling up to the young man. Up close, dressed in a too-big navy blue suit, Grant looked like a boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes. “Is that okay, Mr. Livingstone?”
“Uh, sure.” The kid clearly wasn’t used to being addressed formally.
“You say the empty gas can police found in your parents’ garage is one you used to fill up the tank of the lawn mower. Is that correct?”
“Yeah,” Grant said, then seemed to remember where he was. “I mean, yes, sir.”
“You also maintain that you were seen in the vicinity of the fire shortly before it started because the house that burned down was along your running route. True?”
“Yes, sir.” The teen straightened and spoke louder, more confidently. “I pass right by that house, I mean where that house used to be, when I go out for a run.”
“How long have you been running that route?”
“Not long. I change my route all the time.”
“I see,” Tyler said.
And he did. Circumstantial evidence had been enough to bring Grant to trial, but not enough to convict him. Without a motive, the odds of the teenager walking free were sky high.
Grant knew that. That’s why he’d refused to plea bargain and why his wealthy father had shelled out big bucks to hire a defense attorney. However, they were unaware of what Tyler knew.
“Mr. Livingstone, do you know a Dr. Millicent Osgood?”
Shock flashed across the kid’s face, which he quickly masked. But Tyler had seen it and knew the case was as good as won.
“Objection,” Grant’s defense attorney called, clearly not recognizing the name. “Irrelevant.”
Tyler glanced back at the young lawyer, a junior associate at a legal firm that counted one of Tyler’s neighbors as a partner.
The attorney had mounted a fairly impressive defense but erred when he let Livingstone take the stand. The law didn’t require defendants to testify, a marked advantage if your client was guilty. A prosecutor who’d done his homework could almost always get a guilty man to incriminate himself. The younger the defendant, Tyler found, the more likely he was to slip up.
All of which meant that the very young lawyer from Ernst, Cooper and Pettinger must actually believe his even younger client wasn’t guilty.
“If the court will bear with me,” Tyler told the judge, a statuesque woman in her sixties. “I’ll show how Dr. Osgood relates to this case.”
“Overruled,” the judge said. “The defendant will answer the question.”
“Dr. Osgood was my twelfth-grade biology teacher at Bentonsville High.”
Tyler waited a moment for that fact to sink in with the jury. “Mr. Livingstone, do you have a high school diploma?”
Grant squirmed in his seat. “No.”
“Why not? You were supposed to graduate with your high school class last year, weren’t you?”
“I, uh, didn’t pass all my subjects.”
“Isn’t it true that the subject you flunked was biology and Dr. Osgood was the teacher who flunked you?”
The pause before Grant answered stretched longer than before. “Yeah.”
“Where do you go to school now, Mr. Livingstone?”
“Rockville Prep.”
“If not for that grade in biology, you’d be in college, correct?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” the defense attorney interrupted, not without a touch of panic. “I fail to see how any of this is relevant.”
Before the judge could rule, Tyler said, “I’d like to submit
