“I’m sorry.” He seemed to be wincing slightly. “There was also the fact that I’ve gotten at least a hundred calls over the last day and a half, all from people who were sure they knew who had committed the pranks.”

“Now I feel guilty, adding to the avalanche,” I said. “I probably should have just relayed the information I had to Debbie Anne. Or one of your deputies.”

“Actually,” the chief said. “I suspected, with all the time you’d been spending around the New Life choir, that your suspicions might be a lot more accurate than most, but I wanted to see if I could induce the boys to come clean first.”

“Before I gave you concrete information that forced you to take more drastic action.”

“I was … well, yes. Precisely. I wanted to handle it privately, with apologies to Reverend Wilson and Father Donnelly, complete financial restitution, and a stiff unofficial course of community service to the two churches.”

I nodded. I hoped Josh and Jamie never did anything as stupid as the pranks, but if they did, I hoped the chief was still around to help us deal with it.

“I was wrong,” the chief went on. “I let myself be swayed by my good opinion of the young men. My desire to avoid ruining their futures. If I’d only brought them in after the duck prank, perhaps they’d have stopped, and whatever tragic sequence of events happened here last night would never have taken place.”

“But they didn’t do the duck prank,” I said. “And I doubt if they did this. They did the skunks and the snakes—I overheard them talking about it on Saturday. But they had nothing to do with the ducks. That’s what I was calling last night to tell you.”

Chapter 24

“Didn’t do the duck prank?” The chief looked surprised, and a little skeptical. “Are you sure? And how do you know?”

I relayed what I’d heard in the hallway at Trinity on Saturday, what I’d seen on Riddick’s computer, and then what I’d overheard Sunday afternoon.

“So you see why I don’t think Caleb and Ronnie did anything after the snake incident.” I didn’t realize until I was finishing up my account how much the information had been weighing on me.

“You believed them, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “They had no idea anyone was listening, and they sounded utterly truthful. They were both reproaching the other for committing the duck prank—doing something so stupid, something that was likely to get them caught, after they’d agreed to lie low.”

He pondered for a few moments. I glanced down the hallway and saw that a couple of the deputies were looking at us, obviously impatient, but not about to interrupt the chief when he was so intent on a conversation.

“Anything else?” he asked.