Free Nobody's Angel by Stacy Gail Page A

Carmichael went psycho. The main thing I wanted you to know was that he was a good guy. We all trusted him, Denise most of all.”
    “I see. What sort of relationship did they have?”
    “Not that kind,” Krista said with an eye roll only those fresh out of high school can execute with any real clout. “He was cool, you know? Very easy to talk to, to the point where Denise trusted him enough to tell him about a problem she was having with another student in our art class.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “The creepy stalker kind.” Again Krista looked around, this time with a sharp eye cutting across the faces of every student who happened to be passing through the quad. “I tried telling Pringle about this after the carnage, but he didn’t want to hear it. Something about not wanting to put the school in a position of getting into another possible lawsuit by besmirching an innocent student’s name. I don’t know what besmirching is, but this dude is no innocent. I think he’s the real reason Denise is dead.”
    Kendall frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. There were a dozen witnesses who said they saw Professor Carmichael choke her to death before planting a palette knife into his own neck.”
    “It does make sense if you know the whole story,” Krista insisted. “Somewhere along the way, Denise picked up this weird guy—he was like her second shadow. No matter where she went, he was always there, just watching her. She tried to ignore it, but he worked it so that he got to sit next to her in class, and before she knew it some of her things began to disappear. We suspected it was him, so we laid a trap by leaving one of her scarves behind, then took video of him sniffing it like a perv before he stuffed it into the front of his pants. Classy, right?”
    Kendall kept her expression neutral while her skin crawled. “Did you go to the police?”
    “I wanted to, but Denise didn’t want the guy to get in trouble. She just wanted to be left alone. So we went to Professor Carmichael instead, and told him the whole story. The next day the professor told us he’d kicked the creeper out of class so Denise wouldn’t have to deal with him there. What’s more, he’d alerted campus security that they had a thief and potential stalker on their hands. Then the bell rang, and Professor Carmichael sort of cricked his neck around, like, scary-hard.”
    That telltale gesture made her pulse skip a beat. “Go on.”
    “Then he looked at Denise and said, ‘You think you’re the one who’s got the power? You don’t even know what power is, bitch.’ Then...” Krista lifted a shoulder. “All hell broke loose.”
    Kendall worked at stifling a shudder as the words echoed her earlier conversation with Zeke. “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying Denise’s stalker wasn’t in the room at the time of the attack?”
    “I’m saying I know he’s involved somehow. He had an axe to grind with Professor Carmichael, didn’t he? I mean, when the professor kicked him out and put campus security on his case, he was cut off from his obsession, Denise. That must have made him crazy enough to...I don’t know, drug Professor Carmichael or something, so that the professor could do both Denise and himself in as some kind of twisted stalker’s revenge.”
    “But if this person did somehow manage to drug Professor Carmichael, how would he have controlled the professor to behave in such a violent manner?”
    “I just know what my instincts tell me.” Apparently fed up with the weighty burden of logic, Krista surged to her feet. “I don’t know how he did it, but I swear that creeper had something to do with Professor Carmichael going from happy and normal, to psycho and deadly in less than a second. You don’t know what it was like. It’s like he was possessed or something. And the only person I can think of who would want both of these people dead is that creepy stalker, James Denton.”
    Kendall froze as Krista