“OK,” Tom said, and walked off.

  Students Danny had never heard talking before were saying hi and chatting and laughing. Everyone’s mood was relaxed, relieved, festive, like they’d just been released from ninety days in solitary.

  Hector walked over to them. “Hey, Danny. Look, I’m sorry, Tony, I don’t think I can come. My mom’s been feeling sick this morning and with Dad in Portland, I’m kind of the man of the house,” he said.

  “You can’t come?” Tony said, disappointed.

  “No, I don’t think I can,” Hector said.

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry about that,” Tony replied.

  “I’ll still pay for my ticket. The church won’t lose any money,” Hector said.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, I’m just sorry you’re going to miss out.”

  Hector offered Danny his hand. “Hey, man, no hard feelings, OK?”

  Hard feelings about what? Danny wondered, shaking his hand.

  “Yeah, that’s the spirit,” Hector replied cheerfully. “Well, I gotta go, guys. See you Monday.”

  “I better get my board,” Danny said, and began making his way through the throng of kids heading for the school buses.

  He went to his locker, got his skateboard and, as a gesture of defiance, laid it on the floor and skated the corridor.

  “Danny Lopez?” a voice said.

  “Dammit!” he muttered, turned, and of course it was Mr. Lebkuchen.

  “And where do you think you’re going, young man?” Mr. Lebkuchen asked.

  “Home,” Danny said.

  Mr. Lebkuchen shook his head. “You still have detention, young man. Did you forget about that?”

  “Detention?” Danny said, but something was happening to Mr. Lebkuchen’s face.

  It was turning red.

  He was suppressing a laugh.

  “Ha-ha, don’t look so worried. I’m joking! I’m joking. Of course you can go home with everyone else. Have a great weekend. You’ll have to make up the detention on Monday morning, though. And no skateboarding on school grounds!”

  “Yes sir,” Danny said, not at all amused by Mr. Lebkuchen’s attempt at humor but relieved to have gotten off so lightly.

  “What did you think of Basho?” Mr. Lebkuchen asked.

  “Oh, I’ve been saving it,” Danny said.

  “Excellent. Got me through some hard times when I was younger—not just the poems, but nature itself. Our Americans aren’t bad either; you should try Thoreau. In fact, I might put him on the curriculum. Have you read Thoreau?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Well, OK, we’ll see. All right, off you go, have a good weekend.”

  “I will, sir.”

  When Danny got outside, Tony was chatting with a girl he didn’t know.

  “Excuse me,” Danny said to the girls and then, turning to Tony, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure,” Tony said happily.

  He led her to the overhang at the bike sheds.

  “What is it?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know about all this. It doesn’t feel right. This guy they caught, the whole thing … it’s too easy,” Danny said.

  “He was a druggie. Druggies do stupid things.”

  Danny shook his head. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like … I don’t know. Lebkuchen told me he was dying, for one thing. Does that seem weird to you?” Danny asked, immediately feeling bad about betraying the poor man’s trust.

  “He said that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lebkuchen’s dying?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tony looked very dubious. “Of what?”

  “Cancer, it sounds like.”

  “Why did he tell you?”

  “Because he likes me. You know what? I shouldn’t have said anything. What a jerk I am.”

  “We go to the same dentist. I’ve seen him close-up in the waiting room. He seems fine,” Tony protested.

  “Yeah, well, that’s what he said.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t kidding?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “I hope it’s nothing contagious. Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?”

  Danny shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Tony! Tony!” someone called from across the playground.

  “I have to go,” Tony said. “You’ll think about the show?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Tony walked off and Danny carried Sunflower across the yard. As he reached the school gates Charlie intercepted him. He also was grinning and happy. Clearly the cat thing had been hanging over everyone like a bad spell. “Dan the man,” Charlie said.

  “Hey,” Danny said suspiciously.

  “You want to come to The Lion King? We’ve got three extra concessions. Todd can’t go now; obviously Jessie’s not going; and last night Hector tells me he can’t come, so we’ve got the tickets,” Charlie said. “Whaddya say?”

  “I don’t have a suit … and really, I just don’t want to go.”

  “Bygones be bygones. Come on, dude. You want laughs? It’s got laughs. You want excitement? It’s got excitement. You want aloof, interplanetary robot sex? Well, it doesn’t have that, actually, but it’s pretty good. I saw it on Broadway.”

  Danny smiled in a way that he hoped was friendly. “Thanks for the offer, Charlie. Can I get a rain check? Another time, maybe the movies or something, I really would like to.”

  “OK, man, I guess I’ll see you Monday, OK?”

  “OK,” Danny said, and kicked his board hard to get away from all the good-natured people being nice to him.

  He was a good ten meters away before he stopped and skated back to Charlie.

  “What did you say about Hector?” Danny asked.

  “Hector says he can’t come,” Charlie said.

  “No. You said he told you last night he couldn’t come,” Danny said.

  Charlie shrugged. “Yeah, he did. Why?”

  “He told Tony his mom got sick this morning.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, she’s eight months pregnant. Maybe she got sick last night and this morning. I don’t know. Look, you wanna come? We’ve got the whole theater. Have you been to Denver yet?”

  “No. And thanks, but no.”

  “OK. Give me a call if you change your mind. Have you got a pen? Wait, you’re just opposite Tony’s house? If you change your mind, tell her dad; he’s in charge.”

  “I will, thanks,” Danny said.

  Charlie went over to some of the other kids to try to sell them tickets, and Danny really could have escaped this time but by then Tom was done with the reporter at the gate. He grabbed Danny’s arm in that annoying, pawing way of his. “I think I’m going to be in the paper—probably guaranteed it when I told him I was Tom Sloane, the Tom Sloane, the governor’s son. Gives them an angle. Didn’t mention you or Olivia, though. Forgot, sorry,” he said.

  You’re not the governor’s son, you’re the lieutenant governor’s son—the ex–lieutenant governor’s son, Danny thought, but kept these reflections to himself.

  “So what are you going to do for the rest of the day?” Tom said, grinning.

  “I don’t know, go home, skateboard, I don’t know.”

  “You skateboard? Really? Oh yeah, ’course you do. Hey, you should take up snowboarding,” Tom said.

  “Everybody says that.”

  “You should.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Look, I better go. See ya Monday.”

  But both boys just stood there. Both knew there was something more to say. Finally Danny shook his head slowly and muttered, “I don’t know.”

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “I just don’t know,” Danny said. “Does this make any sense to you?”

  “What? The cat killer?”

  “Yeah. The cat killer. A crack addict? Are you kidding me?”

  Tom shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “How did he hack the database? How did he know who had a cat? A crack addict’s not hacking a database.”

  “He got help on the Internet. Lebkuchen said that.”

  “No, no, that doesn’t work for me. And anyway, it’s more than that. You’re bound to have played Dungeons and Dragons, right?” Danny said.

  Tom’s cheeks colored. “Uh, not really, just a little bit, I guess. Just a little. I had this twelfth-level Cleric once, could raise the dead, that was pretty cool … and of course in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks—”

  “OK,” Danny interrupted. “So you remember the alignments? Good/Evil, Lawful/Chaotic?”

  “Yes,” Tom admitted.

  “A crack addict is someone who’s Chaotic Evil, crazy, off the wall, totally out for themselves. This was not the crime of a crack addict. The person who did all these killings was smart—very smart—cool under pressure … in other words, Lawful Evil.”

  “What are you saying? You think they got the wrong guy? He just confessed for no reason?” Tom asked, squinting into the sun and doing his little fidgety dance.

  “People confess to things they didn’t do all the time,” Danny said.

  “Do they?”

  “Sure.”

  Tom nodded, unconvinced.

  “Maybe I’m crazy,” Danny said.

  “No ‘maybe’ about it.” Tom laughed.

  “OK, bro, I guess I should go,” Danny said, and offered Tom his hand. Tom shook it.

  “See you Monday?” Tom said.

  Danny nodded. “Sure,” he replied.

  Danny gave him a wave, bomb-dropped onto his board, waved to Tony, and skated home.

  He found the key under the mat and opened the front door.

  “Hello? Hello?” he called out, but of course no one was there.

  Even Jeffrey didn’t come to say hi.

  He made himself a PB&J, got some Coke from the fridge, and sat in front of the blank TV for a while. The sandwich was bad. The jelly was plum and the peanut butter was some kind of crazy organic kind that wasn’t terrific-tasting.

  He tried to get a picture on the TV by sticking a metal coat hanger in the back of it to use as an aerial, but the only channel that would come in featured a blurry woman selling a kitchen whisk with a demented level of enthusiasm.

  He turned off the TV, went upstairs, and found Jeffrey.

  “Well, you’re safe. You don’t know what’s been going on, do you? We might even unlock the cat flap now. Would you like that?” Danny asked.

  Jeffrey purred, closed his eyes and, after ten minutes of Danny’s petting, fell asleep.

  “I remember when you used to be a bad-ass cat,” Danny said, and went back downstairs. He was bored. No TV. No radio. He was sick of everything on his iPod. And they didn’t even have books except for that book Mr. Lebkuchen had loaned him. He rummaged in his backpack and pulled it out. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it was called. He read a poem.

  Cold night: the wild duck

  sick, falls from the sky

  and sleeps awhile.

  The poems weren’t really his thing, but they were kind of cool. He flipped over the book and read the author information on the back.

  Danny closed the book and stared at the cover, which looked remarkably like the view of Pikes Peak out the living room window. A snowy mountain, a forest, an empty road. Basho was a guy who lived in ancient Japan, traveling around and seeing things. He sounded a bit like a wandering samurai in a manga, which was made of awesome if you thought about it.

  Danny put the book on the coffee table.

  “That’s what I need. A quest. A mission,” he said aloud.

  An idea was brewing in his mind.

  He went back upstairs and got changed into his jeans, fleece sweater, and Converse sneakers. He pulled on his North Face jacket, grabbed Sunflower, and went outside. He skated in the cul-de-sac for a minute or two, hoping that Tony would appear. Not so much as a curtain twitch, so he skated down Alameda and found himself kicking in the direction of the new casino road to Walt’s road crew.

  The road was very nearly finished.

  Only a couple of hundred yards to go. What would happen to Walt then? Would they have other jobs for the prisoners to do around town, or would Walt become a bum again, hanging around the house all the time? That prospect was grim; the dude would only get himself into mischief.

  “Hey, son,” Walt said.

  “Hey, boy,” some of the other prisoners called out.

  “Is it OK if I talk to Bob for a minute?” Danny asked Vern.

  Vern shrugged. “You have to ask Walt,” he said.

  Danny was a little taken aback by this casting of his lame-ass stepdad as some kind of authority figure.

  “Can I talk to Bob?” Danny asked.

  “’Course you can,” Walt said.

  Danny flipped Sunflower, caught it in his fingertips, put it under his arm, and walked over to Bob, who was supervising a machine that was pulverizing gravel. Bob turned off the earth flattener and offered Danny his hand. Danny looked at it for a second and then shook it.

  “They caught the cat killer,” Danny said.

  “Oh yeah?” Bob replied in his Alaskan drawl.

  “Yeah, last night he killed another cat at our school and then supposedly they caught him speeding on I-70. It was a crack addict.”

  “That’s good news. Good news about catching this guy, not about the cat,” Bob said.

  Danny shook his head. “I guess, but …” His voice trailed off.

  “But what?”

  “These killings were so well planned, it just doesn’t seem like the actions of someone on crack or meth.”

  Bob shrugged. “Well, it’s true that most criminals are pretty stupid, but sometimes you’d be surprised.”

  “To find out who owns cats in Cobalt, you’d have to hack into the town database. And then you’d have to stalk the houses and make sure no one’s home. You gotta have patience for that kind of thing.”

  Bob grew thoughtful. “Maybe you don’t need patience. Maybe you make sure they’re not at home, somehow.”

  “Jessie and her family were at the movies. How could he make her go to the movies?”

  “What if he sent them free tickets to the movies that can only be used at a certain time? That would be the smart thing to do. He pays cash, then he fakes up some letter saying they’ve been given the tickets through a special offer, a free gift, a competition, something like that?”

  “Yes!” Danny said excitedly.

  “It would be an easy thing to check. Though it probably won’t come to anything; they’ve probably got the right guy. Ninety percent of criminal cases end in a confession or a guilty plea,” Bob said, but Danny was already on Sunflower, skating back toward Cobalt.

  In the back pocket of his jeans he found the list of addresses of everyone whose cat had been abducted.

  There was no one home at Mrs. Pigeon’s house, but on Beechfield Road, he found Mrs. Craven, who had lost her Persian cat Tigerfeet supposedly to the coyote.

  He rang her doorbell and when she answered it he recognized her as one of the lunch ladies at CJHCS.

  She recognized him too, but of course they had never spoken.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Danny Lopez, grade nine.”

  “Hello, Danny, I know you,” she said.

  Danny had thought about beating around the bush or inventing some lie, but instead he decided to come right out with it: “Mrs. Craven, the night your cat went missing, when they thought it was the coyote, were you at home?”

  “Why do you want to know?” she asked suspiciously.

  “We’re doing a project on it at school, sort of a special homework.”

  Mrs. Craven shook her head. “That’s an odd subject for homework, but then …” Her voice trailed off a moment, but then she concluded the thought: “It’s an odd school.”

  “Were you at home?” Danny persisted.

  “No. I wasn’t. I got a voucher for a free meal at that new restaurant. A brasserie, they call it. Les Deux Magots on Center Street in the Springs. Well, it’s not that new anymore, but it’s new to me. I’m so sorry that I went now. If I’d been home …”

  Danny had heard all he needed to. He said good-bye to Mrs. Craven and rushed away.

  Danny’s cell phone had died days earlier, so five minutes later he found himself at a pay phone outside the Cobalt 7-Eleven.

  He put in fifty cents and Information gave him the number of Les Deux Magots. After a couple of flunkies he got the manager.

  “If I wanted to get a voucher for a meal as a present for someone, would I need a credit card or could I pay cash?” he asked.

  “You could pay cash if you come in,” the restaurant manager replied.

  The cat killer wasn’t stupid enough to have used a credit card, so he must have gone there in person and paid cash, Danny thought.

  His next question was obvious. “Do you sell a lot of gift vouchers?”

  “Yes, it’s a popular gift,” the manager said.

  “About how many a month?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t know, twenty or thirty. Why do you want to know?”

  “Thank you,” Danny said, and hung up.

  Twenty or thirty a month. That was too many for him to work with. If it had been half a dozen he could maybe have gotten a description of who’d bought one, but twenty or thirty? Unlikely. Still, it was excellent data.

  “OK, work to do,” he said, and jumped on Sunflower again. He kicked hard to Douglas Street, walked past that awful chestnut tree, and knocked on the door of number 9.

  A girl with brown hair and green eyes in a CJHCS uniform answered the door. Sarah Kolpek.

  “Hi, I’m Danny Lopez. I’m in grade nine. I was talking to your sister about Coco,” he said.

  “I know you. I’ve seen you around. You’re Tom Sloane’s friend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, I wanted to talk to you. I don’t know if they caught the right guy who’s been going around killing cats.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sarah said. “Nobody killed Coco. Coco’s death was just an accident. A freak accident was what the sheriff said.”

  Danny nodded.

  Sarah’s sister, Claire, knew, but Sarah did not.

  There was absolutely no point trying to convince her otherwise. “Yeah, I forgot. But listen, I just wanted to know how come you guys were out that night? Where were you?”