Change of Heart by Norah McClintock

Author:Norah McClintock [McClintock, Norah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

B

illy had said that he hadn’t made threatening calls to Sean. He’d said he hadn’t trashed Sean’s locker. He had an ironclad alibi for the day of Sean’s accident—there was no way he could have tampered with Sean’s hockey helmet. So who had done all those things? And how big a grudge did that person have against Sean? Big enough to want him dead?

Try sleeping when you have questions like that scurrying around in your head like squirrels in an attic.

I reached for my phone and made a call.

“Sure,” my dad said after he listened to my question. “I’ve been stumped plenty of times before.”

“What do you do when that happens, Dad?”

“What’s this about, Robbie?”

“You have to ask?”

There was silence on the end of the line.

“Dad?”

I thought maybe he’d lecture me about letting the police do their job. But he didn’t.

“So the question is, what do you do if you have a gut feeling that something is true, but no hard evidence to back you up? Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“You chip away at it. You work with what you’ve got, even if it’s not much. And you have faith that it will lead you somewhere else. It’s the only thing you can do.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Detective work isn’t linear, Robbie. No straight line guaranteed to get you from point A to point B. There could be a million possible ways, and you have to figure out for yourself which one makes the most sense.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

I was about to hang up when he said, “Ask me what I was doing on Thursday night.”

“What you and Nick were doing?”

“Yeah. Go ahead. Ask me.”

“I thought it was top secret.”

“It was. It isn’t anymore. Come on. Ask me.”

I knew he was trying to make up for not telling me earlier, but now that I knew that Nick was working for him, I didn’t really care what they had been doing. The less I knew, the better. But a peace offering is a peace offering.

“Okay, what were you doing on Thursday night, Dad?”

“Hal was in town.”

Hal is an old friend of my father’s. They went to high school together. Hal manages an old rock band.

“To do a music video,” my father added.

“With the dinosaur band?”

“Hey, those guys aren’t much older than me,” my father protested.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Hal is also managing a new group,” my father said. When he told me which one it was, I couldn’t help being impressed.

“They were here?”

“One night only, to shoot their new video. Took them all night to shoot it. They’d work for three hours on something that will take up maybe fifteen seconds in the final video.”

“I can’t believe they were here and you didn’t tell me.”

“I wanted to, but work is work, Robbie, and this really was top secret. Even the press didn’t get wind of it.”

“It couldn’t have been all that top secret. You told Nick.”

“Nick was working with me.”

“On security? Isn’t he a little young for that?”

“Not for that part of the job. All he had to do was help make sure no one got near the site who didn’t belong there.

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