Page 44 of Lessons in Power

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll answer. John Thomas liked to hurt people.” I stuck to simple, declarative sentences. “He picked on younger kids, anyone he saw as weak. He especially liked playing games with girls.”

“What kind of games?” the detective on the right asked.

I measured my reply. “He liked pictures. Taking them. Sharing them. He made a lot of innuendos. He’d get in your personal space, touch you when you didn’t want to be touched.”

“Did he ever lay hands on you?” the officer on the left asked. “Did heplay gameswith you?”

Maybe they were just trying to establish the facts—or maybe they were trying to establish motive. Either way, I stayed calm as I replied. “He grabbed my arm a few times when I wasn’t appropriately cowed by who he was and what his father did. But that was it.”

The detective laid a picture on the table.Emilia, slumped against the bathroom wall. “We were able to trace this picture to a disposable cell phone in John Thomas Wilcox’s possession.”

That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t reply.

“Would you consider this girl to be one of John Thomas’s targets?”

This girl.Emilia didn’t even get a name.

“I understand that this picture was distributed to the whole school,” the detective continued. “Was that why Asher Rhodes attacked John Thomas?”

For the first time, I had to work to stay calm. “You’d have to ask Asher,” I said.

The detective who’d asked the question leaned forward. “I understand that you witnessed the attack.”

The attack.The way he referred to it set my teeth on edge.

“John Thomas incited that fight on purpose,” I said. “He baited Asher.”

“And why would John Thomas Wilcox do that?” the detective pressed.

“To prove that he could.”

There was a beat of silence. “If that’s all you have to ask my client,” Tyson put in, “let’s wrap this up.”

The last thing the detectives wanted was to “wrap this up” so soon.

“Would you say that Asher Rhodes has a temper?” the one who’d asked me about the fight said. “Is he easy to provoke into violence?”

“No.” The response came out sharper than I’d meant it to, so I forced myself to tone it back a notch before continuing. “Asher is very easygoing. A little goofy.” I searched for a better way to describe Asher. “Kind.”

“Then why rise to the bait?” the officer asked. “What could our victim have possibly said that could justify—”

I snapped. “John Thomas told Asher that he’d slept with his sister. He said that if Emilia claimed she didn’t want it, that was a lie.” Those words hung in the air. My tone was low and deadly. “Like I said, John Thomas liked to hurt people.” I paused. “I despised him. He was a bully and a coward and I didn’t think he was worth the breath it took to say his name. But—” I held fast against the memories that wanted to come. “I tried to save him. I tried to stop the bleeding. I yelled for help. I called 911.” I never broke eye contact, never slowed or sped up my speech. “I didn’t have anything to do with John Thomas’s murder. And neither didAsher. He was suspended yesterday. He wasn’t even on campus when John Thomas was shot.”

There was a beat of silence.

“We’re done here,” the lawyer said, gathering his things. I glanced at Ivy. She gave a slight nod. I stood.

“To be clear,” one of the detectives said, standing as he spoke, “Ms. Kendrick Keyes is not a suspect in John Thomas Wilcox’s murder. Surveillance footage taken just outside the Hardwicke library confirms her statement about how and when she discovered the body.”

It was not lost on me that they had waited to point out that I wasn’t a suspect until now. They’d probably hoped that I would point the finger at someone else if I thought that they suspected me.

They’d probably hoped that I would jump at the opportunity to tell them Asher was a violent, violent boy.

“What about security footage from inside the library?” I asked. If security had caught the shooter on camera, the police wouldn’t have been sitting here cross-examining me. And that meant either that John Thomas’s killer hadn’t been caught on camera, or the footage had been erased.

“I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to discuss the details of this case.”

I hadn’t been holding my breath that they would.