Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella by Linwood Barclay Page B

fingerprints on it.’
    Malcolm feigned puzzlement. ‘I’m not following.’
    ‘Did you come home the morning I met you because you’d just bought a new baseball bat and wanted to tuck it into the garage? So if and when someone asked for it, you’d be able to produce it?’
    ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Patently ridiculous.’
    ‘I’ll bet you were smart enough to pay for it in cash. But how many places in Promise Falls sell baseball bats? Maybe half a dozen? You think if someone were to go to all those places with your picture, and ask if anyone remembered you buying a baseball bat in the last week, they’d get lucky?’
    Malcolm hesitated.
    ‘Buying a bat is not a crime,’ he said.
    ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But it raises an interesting question. You’d have had to buy that bat before news got out that Mike Vaughn had been killed. You bought it to help Chandler before you could have reasonably known he needed the help.’
    ‘You’ve totally lost me,’ he said, holding the bat with one hand, tapping it in the palm of his other.
    ‘That’s probably why you wiped his real bat down too. To help him. To make sure none of his fingerprints were on it. And you accomplished that. None of Chandler’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. But what’s funny is, that’s the thing that incriminates you.’
    ‘You should leave,’ he said.
    ‘Franny wanted his fingerprints on that bat. So after she struck Mike, she would have just left the bat there. That’s where I have a hard time figuring out the rest of it. Let’s say it was you who wiped the bat clean. That means you were at the scene. But if you were at the scene, you’d have witnessed Franny hitting Mike. So why wipe down the bat?’
    ‘I did no such thing,’ he said.
    I took a close look at some of the books, the ones related to teaching. ‘Before you got into offering financial advice, you taught, didn’t you?’
    ‘What? In a community college, yes. Why the hell are you asking that?’
    ‘A lot of educational institutions in this state, as part of the background checks on their instructors, insist on having them fingerprinted. Have you ever been fingerprinted, Malcolm?’
    His eyes were wide. He muttered something.
    ‘What was that?’
    Quietly he said, ‘Possibly.’
    ‘Because while they didn’t find Chandler’s prints on the bat, and none for Franny, since she was at least smart enough to wear gloves, they did find one partial print that got missed when it was wiped down. They’re searching databases now to see if it shows up anywhere. What do you think the odds are that it’s yours?’
    Malcolm was starting to breathe heavily. There were droplets of sweat forming on his brow.
    Greta appeared in the doorway. ‘Did you want a coffee, Mal—’
    ‘Get out!’ he shouted.
    Stunned, she backed away. He strode over to the door and slammed it shut.
    I said calmly, ‘The only way I can figure it is you came onto the scene after Franny left. But how? How did you find Mike? How did you find him, and the bat? You want to tell me that?’
    ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I just leave things as they were?’
    ‘What happened, Malcolm?’
    ‘I just wanted to protect my son. I just wanted to save him. I did what any father would have done.’
    He’d walked over behind his desk. The bat in his hands was shaking. He gripped it more tightly to try to make it stop.
    ‘How did you know he was there?’ I asked again. ‘How did you find Mike after Franny killed him?’
    Malcolm turned and looked out the window. ‘I heard him.’
    It took a second for that to sink in. ‘Franny didn’t kill him,’ I said.
    Malcolm shook his head slowly.
    ‘She thought she had, and then she ran,’ I said.
    ‘When Chandler slipped out of the house, I heard him go. Greta was asleep. I thought, what the hell is he up to now? He and Mike humiliated that boy, then he writes that damn story, and now he was sneaking out. I wanted to stop him from