Free The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) by Mike Markel

started to cry. She shook her head,
then covered her face and lost control. The student sitting next to her put her
hand on the girl’s shoulder.
    “Thank you for sharing that …” I turned to Ryan,
who whispered “Donna” to me. “Thank you, Donna. I know that wasn’t easy.” I
swept my eyes around the room.   “Is that
what the rest of you saw? That Krista had a kind of blank look?”
      Most of
them nodded.
    “You don’t have a name for Krista? I mean, a last
name.” Nothing.
    Ryan said, “Do any of you have a photo of Krista?
From that class or last night?”
    A guy said, “The professor was strict about that.
All devices were turned off all the time.”
    I said, “You didn’t see Krista come into the house
last night, right? She was already there when you arrived for the class at
six?”
    Nods of agreement.
    “Do any of you know what Krista was doing upstairs
last night?”
    A good-looking guy with a couple days’ stubble was
slouched in his chair. “Upstairs is where they keep the bedrooms, right?” He
put on a leer and looked around the horseshoe for approval. When he saw the
dirty looks coming in from both sides, the leer slid off his face. He shrank
into his chair. I glanced over at Ryan, who was writing something on his
seating chart.
    I said, “So Professor Rinaldi never mentioned the
fight with Krista during the rest of the class?”
    Half the kids nodded their heads.
    “Didn’t that seem a little odd?”
    A girl with dyed red hair said, “That was
Professor Rinaldi. I remember once she told us that she wasn’t our friend. She
was our professor. She wasn’t into talking about herself—and she didn’t ask us
about ourselves. She said she was there to help us understand how to ‘do
sociology.’ I remember that phrase because it sounded … so odd.”
    “What do you think she meant by that?”
    “What I got out of it is that she didn’t want us
to think of ourselves as students who learned about sociology—that would be,
like, she knew all about the subject, and she’d pour that information into us
and then we’d know about it, too. That would be a waste of everyone’s time, she
said, because all we’d accomplish is that we’dduplicate
her own biases and gaps. But if we learned how to ‘do sociology,’ we’d be
researchers. We’d be right there, creating new information.”
    “What did you think about that?”
    The girl with the red hair laughed. “Nobody’d ever
said anything like that … I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, her
eyes sweeping the room, “but no one had ever said anything like that to me.
That was the thing about her.” Here she started to lose control. “She treated
us like adults who could do things on her own.”
    I scanned the room and waited for anyone else to
add a comment, but they were silent.
    “One last question: did Professor Rinaldi ever
mention her son, Robert? Did she talk about him much?”
    I got the same vacant looks. One boy said, “Who?”
    A girl said, “He the one in the pictures above the
fireplace?”
    I nodded.
    “He’s kinda cute,” the
girl said.
    “Okay,” I said, “let’s stop there. Like I said,
thanks for helping us out here. My name is Seagate. If you think of anything
else that could help us, please get in touch with the Rawlings Police
Department, ask for me.”
    Daryl Sorenson stood and walked over to the door.
He spoke a few words to some of the students as they filed out. Then he looked
over at me and Ryan, nodded, and left the room.
    I noticed Donna had stayed in her chair. She had
stopped crying but hadn’t quite pulled herself together. She looked like she
wanted to speak to me. Ryan stayed back behind the table at the front as I
drifted over to her.
    “Donna, I want to thank you for speaking up.”
    She nodded. “Sorry I broke down like that.” She
tried to force a smile. “I haven’t said anything out loud about my brother to
anyone on campus.”
    “He getting any help? You