Seven Deadly Pleasures Read Free Page B

Johnson is connected. She has her own radio show and she talks to Oprah on a regular basis, I'm not kidding. She knows the mayor and the chief of police. The news only reports on people that don't have the money or the muscle to put a stop to the tattle, you see what I'm saying?"
    "That's right," someone offered softly.
    "And I'm telling you, when a powerful person like Ms. Johnson doesn't want any bad publicity, the news does not make it to the boob tube. Bank on it, folks. Ms. Johnson used her relationship with the police to cover this up. They investigated it in secret and when they came up with no new leads, Bria's mom went crazy. She moved down South and no one heard from her again."
    He went back across to the entrance door, opened it a crack, and looked out into the empty hall. He could see the students leaning toward him out of the corner of his eye. He turned and spoke in a low whisper.
    "Right out here, by this door, is where the horror most likely started." A boy near the back of the room buried his head under crossed arms and a couple of girls had their hands drifting up toward their ears. Ben walked slowly back to the center of the room.
    "You know the alcove at the top of the stairs out here, right? That's where the juniors have those four little rooms all to themselves that everybody is so jealous of. What you might not know is that this place used to be an old factory, and that space wasn't fixed up in the first year the school opened. Back in 1999 the alcove wasn't four neat little rooms, but one big, dark room. It was filled with busted pieces of drywall and boxes of old, moldy shipping papers. There were stacks of splintery wood and piles of twisted sheet metal all over the floor. The ceiling was a maze of decayed pipes and dangling wires. There was a padlock on the big black doors out front, and everyone knew it was against the rules to go near the alcove, let alone in it."
    A few sets of eyes drifted upward. This was perfect. The alcove was right above them.
    "Don't look, for God's sake!" Ben hissed.
    A couple of girls made the high-pitched "eek" sound. A boy was biting his fingernails, and a girl who had been sneaking corn chips out of her book bag had all four fingers in her mouth up to the middle knuckles. Ben sauntered back to the teacher's desk and moved aside a plastic tray bin filled with lab reports about the Ecosystem. He leaned his butt against the edge and folded his arms.
    "Oh, they questioned everybody," he said. "Just because the news didn't get a hold of it doesn't mean they didn't try to discover the truth of what happened to Bria Patterson. You know the security guards here have sections they're responsible for, right? You know that Mr. Rollins has the second-floor high school rooms. Nowadays, old Mr. Harvey has the landing, the stairway, and this bottom area all the way to the lunchroom, but back then, it was under the watch of a guy named Mr. Washington. He only had two suits and both were this neon lime green color. Everyone called him 'Frankenstein,' because he was so tall and goofy, and he walked kind of pigeon-toed like a zombie."
    Ben stepped away from the desk and imitated the walk for a minute. A couple of kids broke wide smiles, but most were smart enough not to trust Ben 's short moment of humor. He stopped.
    "Mr. Washington was the last to see Bria Patterson. He thought he saw her standing up by those black doors, on the landing in front of the alcove. When the police went up there, they saw that the lock on the black doors had been stolen."
    Ben supported his elbow on his forearm and pointed his index finger straight up.
    "They took in their flashlights and floodlights and chemistry cases, their ballistics materials, DNA sample packs, and high-powered magnifiers. They dusted the place stem to stern for fingerprints, and do you know what they found?" He stopped. He put his hands in his pockets and shoved them down so his shoulders hunched up a bit. "The most frightening thing