Darkfall

could only have my mother back? You creepy, snot-eating nerds! Do you think I’m glad my mother’s dead, for God’s sake? You stupid creeps! What’s wrong with you?
    But she didn’t scream at them.
    She didn’t cry, either.
    She swallowed the lump in her throat. She bit her lip. She kept control of herself, for she was determined not to act like a child.
    After a few seconds, she was relieved she hadn’t snapped at them, for she began to realize that even Sissy and Cara, snotty as they could be sometimes, were not capable of anything as bold and as vicious as the trashing of her locker and the destruction of her clarinet. No. It hadn’t been Sissy or Cara or any of the other snobs.
    But if not them… who?
    Chris Howe had remained crouched in front of Penny’s locker, pawing through the debris. Now he stood up, holding a fistful of mangled pages from her textbooks. He said, “Hey, look at this. This stuff hasn’t just been torn up. A lot of it looks like it’s been chewed .”
    “Chewed?” Sally Wrather said.
    “See the little teeth marks?” Chris asked.
    Penny saw them.
    “Who would chew up a bunch of books?” Sally asked.
    Teeth marks , Penny thought.
    “Rats,” Chris said.
    Like the punctures in Davey’s plastic baseball bat.
    “Rats?” Sally said, grimacing. “Oh, yuck.”
    Last night. The thing under the bed.
    “Rats…”
    “… rats…”
    “… rats.”
    The word swept around the room.
    A couple of girls squealed.
    Several kids slipped out of the cloakroom to tell the teachers what had happened.
    Rats.
    But Penny knew it hadn’t been a rat that had torn the baseball bat out of her hand. It had been… something else.
    Likewise, it hadn’t been a rat that had broken her clarinet. Something else.
    Something else.
    But what?
    V
    Jack and Rebecca found Nevetski and Blaine downstairs, in Vincent Vastagliano’s study. They were going through the drawers and compartments of a Sheraton desk and a wall of beautifully crafted oak cabinets.
    Roy Nevetski looked like a high school English teacher, circa 1955. White shirt. Clip-on bow tie. Gray vee-neck sweater.
    By contrast, Nevetski’s partner, Carl Blaine, looked like a thug. Nevetski was on the slender side, but Blaine was stocky, barrel- cheated, slab-shouldered, bull-necked. Intelligence and sensitivity seemed to glow in Roy Nevetski’s face, but Blaine appeared to be about as sensitive as a gorilla.
    Judging from Nevetski’s appearance, Jack expected him to conduct a neat search, leaving no marks of his passage; likewise, he figured Blaine to be a slob, scattering debris behind, leaving dirty pawprints in his wake. In reality, it was the other way around. When Roy Nevetski finished poring over the contents of a drawer, the floor at his feet was littered with discarded papers, while Carl Blaine inspected every item with care and then returned it to its original resting place, exactly as he had found it.
    “Just stay the hell out of our way,” Nevetski said irritably. “We’re going to pry into every crack and crevice in this fuckin‘ joint. We aren’t leaving until we find what we’re after.” He had a surprisingly hard voice, all low notes and rough edges and jarring metallic tones, like a piece of broken machinery. “So just step back.”
    “Actually,” Rebecca said, “now that Vastagliano’s dead, this is pretty much out of your hands.”
    Jack winced at her directness and all-too-familiar coolness.
    “It’s a case for Homicide now,” Rebecca said. “It’s not so much a matter for Narcotics any more.”
    “Haven’t you ever heard of inter-departmental cooperation, for Christ’s sake?” Nevetski demanded.
    “Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy?” Rebecca asked.
    “Wait, wait, wait,” Jack said quickly, placatingly. “There’s room for all of us. Of course there is.”
    Rebecca shot a malevolent look at him.
    He pretended not to see it. He was very good at pretending not to see the looks she gave him. He’d had a lot of practice at it.
    To Nevetski, Rebecca said, “There’s no reason to leave the place like a pig sty.”
    “Vastagliano’s too dead to care,” Nevetski said.
    “You’re just making it harder for Jack and me when we have to go through all this stuff ourselves.”
    “Listen,” Nevetski said, “I’m in a hurry. Besides, when I run a search like this, there’s no fuckin‘ reason for anyone else to double-check me. I never miss anything.”
    “You’ll have to excuse Roy,” Carl