But they never did ask. No one ever even questioned me.
I was tempted to tell them that I knew Jim was going to Vulcan Quarry. But what if they didn’t believe I’d stayed in my dorm all night?
I’d be damned to the Neverworld forever. I’d have no chance—none—of ever making it out of here alive.
“What if we went to the police now?” whispered Cannon.
“What?” asked Whitley.
“What if we went to speak to the Warwick police about Jim? We could get our hands on his case file. They have to have pulled his cell phone records. We get our hands on those reports. We’ll know a lot about his final days—where he went and who he was with.”
“The police never came up with anything substantial to make them think Jim’s death was anything but suicide,” said Martha.
“Unless the school forced them to cover up what they found,” said Whitley.
“Or his family,” added Kipling. “If Edgar Mason thought somethin’ damnin’ was about to come out about his beloved dead son? The apple of his eye? He’d do anythin’ to stop it from gettin’ out. Remember the safe house?”
We said nothing, all of us thinking back.
Christmas break, senior year, Jim invited us to his family home in Water Mill, and we were shocked by the extreme security measures his family had adopted as totally routine.
Edgar Mason had always been paranoid. Hoover, Jim called his dad, a not-exactly-joking reference to J. Edgar Hoover, the fanatical wiretapping founder of the FBI. For years, Edgar Mason had employed a private security firm called Torchlight to safeguard his family, which meant for the entirely of Jim’s life, two armed ex–Navy SEALs silently tailed him and every other member of his family when they left the house.
The Christmas visit revealed a new level of Edgar’s obsession. Every inch of the Masons’ many houses around the world was being recorded in HD, the feeds playing in a basement control room called the Eye. There was a cybersecurity team on staff in Washington, D.C., who monitored the family’s servers twenty-four hours a day.
Then there was the safe house.
“For home invasions, terrorist attacks, and Zero Days,” Jim said, pointing out the black bunker peering out, crocodile-like, over the hill on the edge of the property. “It has power generators, independent water supplies, a secure phone line that can call the director of Homeland Security in three seconds. When the end of the world happens, let’s meet here.”
The smile fell from his face, the lonely implications of such a structure hardly lost on him. He seemed reluctant to say more. After all, his dad’s obsession with safety had everything to do with him. Edgar Mason had always been careful, but it was apparently Jim’s boating accident the summer before senior year that had triggered this new level of mania.
“I say we go over there,” said Cannon. “Ask around. See what the police know.”
“Or are trying to forget,” said Whitley.
“Bee?” prompted Martha.
Everyone turned, waiting for me to weigh in.
I stared back.
Taking a look inside Jim’s police file could mean his final texts to me would come to light. I’d have a lot to explain. But what else was in that file?
The decision was really no decision at all.
“Can I help you?” asked the police officer. POLK read his name tag.
“We’d like to speak to Detective Calhoun,” Whitley said sweetly.
Calhoun had been the lead investigator on Jim’s case. He’d given the few public statements and briefings. We had decided it was easy enough to start with him, with his thick gray beard and rodent eyes, his wan blinks at the news cameras as a gaudy rash of embarrassment seeped across his neck. One sensed he wanted nothing more than to get away from the glare of such a high-profile case and go back to working petty crimes like public bench vandalism.
“What do you want with Calhoun?” demanded another officer, now approaching. His name tag read MCANDRESS.
“We wanted to ask him about a case he worked on,” said Martha.
“Which one?”
“The death of Jim Mason,” I said.
“That case is closed,” said a third officer.
After ten more minutes of hostile questioning—they seemed wary of outsiders—we made it to Calhoun’s office, finding the man in question marooned behind a desk piled high with papers, like a giant bullfrog hiding in a bog.
I wasn’t sure what I expected—maybe that movie scene where the grizzled old detective, asked about the cold case still haunting him after All These Years, begins to talk and talk.
Instead, Detective Calhoun was a concrete wall.
“Mason case was solved. Suicide,” he belched.
“What made you rule suicide?” Martha asked, frowning. “Usually with suicides there’s a ritual or preparation before the act. A note left behind. Glasses removed, as well as shoes and socks. Was there any sign of that with Jim?”
Calhoun flashed a grin that was really more of a sneer.
“That case is closed.”
That case is closed.
The Warwick police station, located just off the highway, was a quaint banana-yellow bungalow with white shutters and a sign on the bulletin board that read LIFE IS BETTER WITH COFFEE. The place seemed ill-suited for solving crimes, better for selling homemade muffins.
Little did we know how terrifying it would be—that our time with the Warwick police would be pandemonium.
There was no other way to put it.
We tried different tactics: warm, curt, nervous, sexy (Wit, wearing a low-cut red dress, perched on a desk). We tried surprising them. We tried a brazen arrival at Calhoun’s private residence after his wife went to bed and Calhoun stayed up late drinking Harpoon IPA, eating gummy worms, and watching Better Call Saul. No matter what we said, and where, how, or what time we said it, Calhoun refused to tell us anything about Jim’s case.
“Can’t help you.”
“You Nancy Drews get out of here.”
“How dare you accost me at my home!”
“You kids get out of here, or I’ll make sure every one of you spends the rest of your life flipping byproduct burgers at the local Mickey D’s, because a fryolator and an automatic mixer to make a few watery milk shakes are all you’ll be fit for after I get through with you. UNDERSTAND ME?”
We decided to give up on Calhoun and bribe the office manager, Frederica.
We waited for her to leave the station in workout clothes, watched her getting drenched in the downpour as her umbrella went inside out. As she fumbled for the keys to her Kia, Cannon ran to her, armed with a golf umbrella and a grin.
We watched from the Mercedes as he made his pitch: ten thousand dollars cash to go back inside and steal the Jim Mason file. Frederica blushed, nodded, and power-walked back inside.
Cannon turned, grinning, giving us the thumbs-up. Then Frederica emerged with the entire Warwick police force in tow, eight officers hightailing it for Cannon.
“Get on your knees! Police!”
With a yelp, Whitley backed the car out, tearing through the lot to pick up Cannon, who, sprinting for his life, hurled himself into the backseat. We barreled through the grass, over a curb, and through a red light into a twelve-lane intersection, tires squealing, and nearly collided with a cement truck.
“Move!” Cannon screamed. “Move!”
We spent the next few wakes at Roscoe gun range learning how to shoot as we formulated our new plan. We would raid the Warwick police. We paid the owner of Last Resort Twenty-Four-Hour Pawn Shop fifty dollars for the name of a guy who sold guns without a license out of the back of his RV, called Big Bobby. Out of Big Bobby, we bought three guns: two Ruger LC9 strikers, and a Heckler & Koch HK45.