Four

"I appreciate this is a difficult time for you, but I do have a few more things I need to go over," Detective Marta Harper said, standing at the front door of the LeDrew residence, a modest bungalow in the northeast part of Milford on a tree-lined street.

She had been met at the door by Angus LeDrew, a skinny, pale man in his fifties with thin wisps of hair over a liver-spotted head, and shoulders weighed down by invisible cinder blocks.

"We've told you people everything," he said wearily.

"Is it them?" said a woman's voice from inside the house. "The TV people?"

Over his shoulder, he said, "No, the police."

His wife, Fiona, was as thin as he was, but with features as brittle and delicate as faded, dried flowers. She viewed Marta through dead eyes.

"Oh," she said.

"It's just..." Angus said. "We have... an appointment shortly." He opened the door wider and allowed the detective to enter the living room.

Everyone took a seat. Marta noticed both of them were unexpectedly dressed up, for how early it was. Angus was in a white shirt and tie, minus a jacket, and Fiona was in a black knee-length dress with a small gold necklace draped around her neck. The detective wondered whether the funeral for their son was this morning.

As if reading her mind, Fiona said, "We buried our boy yesterday."

Angus, grim-faced, added, "What was left of him."

Fiona visibly winced. Marta was well aware that their son's remains had been scattered far and wide by the blast. She didn't have to ask whether they'd opted for a closed casket.

Fiona said, "No one came to the funeral. Not his friends, not his cousins, not one person came."

"My brother," Angus said. "You forgot he was there." He looked at the detective. "He drove all the way down from Syracuse. But his wife, she stayed home." He mouthed the word Bitch.

"But no one else," his wife said. "Mark was a good boy. People should have come and paid their respects. My son didn't hurt a soul. He was never really going to hurt anybody. Did anyone at that school die other than my son? Did they?"

Marta sat there, solemnly, and let them talk.

"He just wanted to talk to people," Angus said. "That's what that teacher said. He told you people Mark wanted to set a few things straight, that's all."

"We've had to take the phone off the hook," his wife said. "Hateful calls. Awful people. Saying terrible things about us."

Marta thought it was time for a question. "Did your son discuss problems he had with anyone at Lodge? Students or staff?"

Angus shook his head. "He didn't say anything to me. And it's been a long time since he was there. Don't see what the point was in going back after all this time. You have to move on. If you have a problem, you deal with it. You don't let it fester over time."

Marta looked to Fiona. "He had a hard time there," she said. "He was a very gifted boy, just not in an academic way. The school should have tried harder to understand him. You know? Tried to figure out his needs?"

"Needs," Angus said, coming close to rolling his eyes.

"So he didn't discuss any grievances with specific teachers? Mr. Boyle said he made mention of a couple during their conversation."

Angus shook his head. "That man. I won't say his name."

"Why's that, Mr. LeDrew?"

"He should have done something. All he was worried about was saving his own skin. Making my son walk away first before getting him to blow himself up."

Marta didn't feel disclosing that Richard Boyle was her brother-in-law was the right move at this time, but she couldn't stop herself from saying, "Mr. Boyle worked very hard to deescalate the situation. It's tragic what happened to your son, but it would have been worse had more people been involved."

She decided to move on to something else.

"What do either of you know about how Mark came into possession of dynamite?"

"I had no idea," Angus said.

"He worked for a few months for Jasonland Quarries," Fiona said. "They sometimes used dynamite. I can't think of any other place he got it."

"When did he leave that job?"

Fiona looked to her husband for an answer. "About eight months ago," he said.

"So it's possible he was hiding explosives here, all that time?"

Fiona paled. "I don't know. Out in the garage, maybe."

"You're just assuming he stole that stuff from the quarry," Angus said. "Like he was a thief or something. He might have bought it legit somewhere. You don't know."

"Would that make it better?" Marta couldn't help but ask. "Because the real issue would seem to be what he intended to do with it. We looked at his computer history. He watched a lot of videos on how to build a bomb."

"What do you want from us?" Fiona asked, her voice breaking. "Tell me. What do you want us to do? Admit we're terrible parents? Is that what you'd like? Well, I won't do that. I loved Mark and I did my best by him."

Marta noted that she hadn't said "we."

"It's not all on us. You need to go back to that school. You need to talk to those teachers. Like that Mr. Willow. He was hard on Mark, I know that much."

"He was probably trying to toughen him up," Angus said. "God knows the boy could have benefited from it, needed some direction. That Mr. Wakely, the principal, he was decent enough, trying to steer Mark toward more mechanical things he'd be good at. But you know what it's like these days. The school system's only worried about pushing kids through. Make it the next person's problem."

Trent Wakely had been ready to take their son down if he'd had a clean shot, Marta thought.

Angus's face flushed. "But it's the one who watched him die. He's the one you gotta talk to."

Back to Richard Boyle.

"He was right there. He could have done something. Nobody heard the whole conversation. There's only his word about what was said between them. He talked my boy into walking away and blowing himself up to save his own ass."

Detective Marta Harper got to her feet. "Thank you for your time. Again, I'm very sorry for your loss."

On her way back to her car, she saw what the LeDrews' next appointment was. A deep blue Jaguar sedan pulled into the driveway, a silver-haired man behind the wheel. Marta was pretty sure she recognized him. A hotshot lawyer from New York. She'd seen him on the news, usually defending the indefensible.

As he got out of the car, he walked to the end of the driveway, shot one quick look at Marta, then looked down the street, as though waiting for someone else to arrive.

Seconds later, a TV news van turned the corner, drove slowly up the street, and parked across the end of the driveway.

"Oh great," the detective said under her breath.