Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Eighteen

When we got back outside, we found a crowd thickening around the memorial wall, most of them early twenties or younger. They were curious and bored in equal measure, their thumbs busy texting even as they carried on sideways conversations with each other.

I checked the crowd, face by face. Still no Rico. I got out my phone, and when he answered, I got straight to the point.

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“The memorial’s about to start.”

“It can start without me.”

Up front, Padre spoke in a huddle with Frankie. Behind him I saw Cricket and Jackson join the group, hand in hand. They both looked tired and ordinary and grumpy, but they were showing up.

“You’re being a diva.”

“Frankie’s turned a murder into a photo op. I’m not the one playing diva.”

At the edge of the parking lot, I saw the first news crew gather around the crowd of attendees. It reminded me of a Nature Channel documentary, sharks herding bait fish into a neat ball.

“This isn’t about you, or the cameras, or even Lex. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I need your help.”

“I’ll be there afterward.”

“I need you now.”

Silence at his end. A girl barely in her teens came up to the poster and put a flower in front of it. She already had the edgy glamour of the Goth baby—heavy mascara, thick eyeliner, red lips—but her cheeks were soft and plump.

“Rico?”

“Fine. I’ll be there. But there’s something I have to take care of first.”

***

Trey and I stood beside the wall of mementos. There was a poster for the upcoming competition, with images of the team members featured prominently. Cricket with a silver trophy, grinning under a beret, Jackson’s muscular arms wrapped around her from behind. Rico onstage, the spotlight pouring down on him like sunlit honey. Frankie behind a mike stand, regal and backlit, the stage lights a hazy corona.

And Lex. In his photo—his dark hair running with red, the black leather and black nails—he wore celebrity easily. In two dimensions, he fit together seamless and whole. In real life, however, the cracks had become chasms. Unfixable fault lines.

Something pulled at me, but I couldn’t identify what it was. I wished I had a way to diagram the whole wall, to draw the same links that Trey did on a yellow pad and see everything come together in a clean coherent fashion.

“Lex’s killer is probably here,” I said, “in this crowd somewhere. Maybe even up on this wall.”

“Possibly.”

“Are there undercover cops around?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“If I tell you, you can’t look.”

“I won’t.”

He hesitated. “I see two of them at the…you’re looking.”

“No, I’m not. Keep talking.”

He took my chin firmly in hand, eyes on mine. “Two undercover officers at the edge of the stage and one behind us, next to the streetlight.”

I tried to spot them without moving my head, but couldn’t. I did spot Rico, however, headed toward the stage, hands shoved in his pockets.

I pulled Trey’s hand down. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Rico saw me coming. He was dressed even darker and baggier than usual, slouched and sullen.

He shook his head. “Cops to the left of me, reporters to the right. This is a sad state of affairs.”

Most of the reporters were TV news—I saw the battalion of vans lining the streets, all of them plastered with logos. Cameramen stood with their equipment hoisted on their shoulders, while others in neat suits held only microphones. I could pick out the newspaper reporters; they were the ones with paper and pens and minute recording devices.

“So what kept you?”

“I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

I sighed. “Fine. Where’s Adam?”

“I don’t feel like talking about that either.”

“Y’all didn’t come to Lupa last night for the clean-up. Something going on between you two?”

“Not talking, I said.”

Before I could ask further questions, Frankie moved to the microphone, her expression solemn. “Thank you all for coming. We’re ready to begin.”

The crowd grew silent and pushed in tighter around her. At the edges of the action, video operators shouldered their cameras, and the pretty people with perfect hair moved into place. Rico took his spot beside Cricket, who leaned over and whispered something in his ear. He smiled at her and shook his head. Jackson stood behind her, not one of the team, but always in the background, like her very own bodyguard.

As flashbulbs illuminated the podium with sporadic flares, Frankie spoke louder, her voice rising. “We are here to honor one of our own, poet Lex Anderson, taken before his time on this very ground. We are each diminished when one light goes out. Therefore, it is our responsibility to make up for that darkness by shining a little brighter ourselves.”

She indicated the box of tealight candles and a white pillar candle the size of a salt box. “As you come forward to pay your respects, please take a candle. Light it here, or from your neighbor. Pass along the light.”

A few “amens” rose, and someone started humming some unnamable hymn, the sound mingling with the hot thick air rising up from the pavement, rising like prayer itself. And in fifteen minutes everyone had a candle, the dozens of separate lights fracturing and cracking in each tiny glass cup, but melting back whole, yellow and liquid.

Someone handed me one, and I accepted it. Trey declined. He was keeping his hands empty.

The crowd was larger now, thicker with the tattooed and the pierced, but also older men in ponytails and blazers, women my age in jeans and fitted tees. I recognized one of the men standing by the streetlight as the undercover cop Trey had indicated. Of course the killer would be here, drawn to these lights as irresistibly as Lex had been. Different moths to different flames, but all pulled by a similar desire.

I got a shiver, despite the hot night, despite Trey standing barely six inches from me. He cased the crowd, noting and cataloguing, unmoved by the spectacle. I almost took his hand before I remembered why he was keeping it free.

A man in a black hooded sweatshirt moved abruptly to the edge of the stage. He was dark-skinned, so dark it was hard to tell where his clothes ended and his skin began, but his eyes flashed maniacally bright, slanted and predatory, like a coyote. His attire was all wrong for the heat, heavyweight cotton knit, with a cowl-like hood obscuring his face.

I grabbed Trey’s arm. “Uh oh, menacing figure at two o’clock.”

“I see him.”

To my right, one of the pony-tailed men moved forward too, talking into a walkie-talkie. Onstage, Jackson squinted into the crowd as the hooded man reached under his sweatshirt.

Jackson pointed. “Watch out! He’s got a gun!”

The first screams reverberated as Jackson jumped off the stage and made straight for the hooded figure. The guy whipped around, saw Jackson barreling for him, and then pulled back for a roundhouse punch…

But Trey reached him first.

Hoodie launched the fist at Trey instead, and Trey blocked it with a single forearm sweep, neatly side-stepping the force of the blow. In a blur of motion, he grabbed Hoodie’s arm and yanked. Hoodie somersaulted forward, landing with an audible fleshy thud on his back. Trey flipped him on his stomach, knelt beside him, and pulled his arm back into a half-nelson. The guy spewed curses into the asphalt, but he didn’t move a muscle.

“Stay down,” Trey said calmly.

“Goddammit, get off me!”

Trey pulled the guy’s arm back another half inch. “And stop talking.”

The guy did not argue. Jackson did not argue. Even the cop did not argue. He did step forward, however, badge out.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said.

Trey nodded, letting the police officer drag the guy to his feet. The guy immediately started protesting, but the cop propelled him toward a waiting cruiser without pausing to listen. I heard Frankie’s name in the jumbled conversation, but the police officer’s voice rode roughshod over whatever the guy was trying to say.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the officer said, and he shoved the guy into the backseat of a patrol car.

Frankie froze behind the mike. Cricket too. Even Padre was a statue, his mouth agape, eyes wide.

Jackson squinted. “Vigil?”

It was too late for the guy to answer. The door to the patrol car slammed shut, and the light bar flared to blue life. Suddenly, the whole scene was a roiling stew of relentless cameras and spasmodic flashbulbs. I pushed forward until I was right beside Trey.

“What the hell was that?”

“That was Maurice Cunningham. Also known as Vigil.”

“I got that, but what was he doing with a gun?”

“It wasn’t a gun.”

Trey pointed. A can of spray paint lay at the end of the massed candles, a uniformed cop already stooping to pick it up.

I turned back to Trey. “He was going to vandalize the memorial.”

Trey frowned. “That makes no sense. There are over a hundred people here, including news crews. And most have cameras.”

He was right. We were surrounded by cameras—news cameras, regular cameras, cell phone cameras. Soon there would be hundreds of photos, maybe thousands, headed for the TV news, for the Internet, to be texted and e-mailed and tweeted.

“I think the cameras were the point,” I said.