The Cereal Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

carpeted front stairs when we pushed through to the house's elegant entryway. The upturned collar of Alfred Perkins' black trench coat framed his horrified eyes behind round hornrimmed glasses. Above his high forehead, the cottony mass of white hair was wildly askew. His boot buckles clickety-clacked as he marched across the foyer toward us. When Schulz identified himself, the headmaster demanded: "Is there any way we can keep this out of the papers?"
     
     
Schulz raised both eyebrows and ignored the question. Instead, he said, "I need some information about next of kin so we can get back to the coroner. Can you help me out?" The headmaster gave the names of Keith's parents, who were apparently in Europe. The deputy wrote the names on a pad, then disappeared. Schulz started his characteristic swagger down the hallway, poking his head through each doorway. When he found a room he liked, he beckoned with a thumb to Perkins.
     
     
"Headmaster, sir," he said with a deference that fooled nobody, "would you wait in here; until I have a chance to talk to you?" When the headmaster nodded numbly, Schulz added, "And don't talk to anyone, please, sir. Press or otherwise."
     
     
The headmaster clomped to his assigned spot. Schulz closed the heavy door behind him, then turned and asked who else was around. Julian called to Macguire, who trundled in and was assigned to another room. Perkins' son looked deeply stunned. In a kinder tone Schulz asked Julian to sit in the living room until he'd finished talking to me. "And try not to disturb anything," he added. "But get yourself a blanket to warm up."
     
     
Julian's face had a lost look that tugged at my heart. He obeyed Schulz in silence. But as we headed down to the kitchen, I heard him choke on exhaled breath.
     
     
I said, "Let me - "
     
     
"No, not yet. I'll take you back in just a couple of minutes. We need to talk before the investigative team is all over this place." Schulz paused, then gestured for me to sit on one of the old-fashioned wooden stools. I obeyed. After looking around the kitchen, he sat on another stool and pulled out a notebook. He tapped his mouth with a mechanical pencil. "Start with when you had me paged and work backward."
     
     
I did. Keith's body. Before that, the cleanup, the after-dinner talks, the dinner itself. The blackout.
     
     
Schulz raised one thick eyebrow. "You're sure it was a fuse?" I said I'd just assumed so. "Who fixed it, do you know?"
     
     
I shook my head. "Oh, and one of my coffeepots was in the front hall closet. I didn't put it there."
     
     
Schulz made a note. "You have a guest list?"
     
     
"The headmaster would. Thirty seniors, plus most of the parents. About eighty people altogether.
     
     
"You see anybody you know wasn't invited, seemed out of place, whatever?" I didn't know who had been invited and who hadn't. No one seemed out of place, I told him, but the senior-year anxiety had been palpable. "Anything else palpable?" he wanted to know.
     
     
I stared at him. He was all business. Anything else you could touch? He gave me just the slightest flicker of a smile. John Richard Korman always said I expected him to read my mind; Tom Schulz actually could. I wished for the two of us to be somewhere else, doing anything but this.
     
     
Reading my thoughts again, Schulz said, "We're almost done." Then he tilted his head back and drummed the fingers of one hand on his chin. "Okay," he went on, "anybody who was not here who should have been?"
     
     
I didn't know that either, and said so.
     
     
He looked me straight in the eye. "Tell me why somebody would kill this boy."
     
     
Blood jack-hammered in my ears. "I don't know. He seemed innocuous enough,.really more like a nerd...."
     
     
Silence fell around us In the old kItchen.
     
     
Schulz said, "Julian fit into this scenario at all? Or the headmaster's son? Or the headmaster?"
     
     
Miserably, I looked at the big old aluminum canisters in the kitchen, the