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smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn’t wanted here.
    At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Having absorbed certain snobbish attitudes from their parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop’s kids didn’t really belong at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren’t many of that kind. Most of the kids didn’t care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop’s kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father.
    By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had happened, and everyone had fallen silent.
    Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.
    Had one of the snobs trashed her locker?
    She spotted two of the worst offenders-a pair of sixth-grade girls, Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallace-and suddenly she wanted to grab hold of them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her, make them understand.
    I didn’t ask to come to your damned school. The only reason my dad can afford it is because there was my mother’s insurance money and the out-of-court settlement with the hospital that killed her. You think I wanted my mother dead just so I could come to Wellton? Cripes. Holy cripes! You think I wouldn’t give up Wellton in a snap if I 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