Chapter 32 Buck
BUCK
The fire didn’t take the whole building. The suppression system kicked in early enough to keep it contained to one room, and the wall between this room and the next did what it was supposed to do. But contained doesn’t mean minor.
Not when it’s T.J.’s classroom.
Small desks sit at odd angles in a shallow pool of gray water and ash.
Melted plastic has hardened into warped shapes along the far side of the room.
Bright paper borders near the ceiling are curled and blackened against the cinderblock.
The remains of third-grade science fair projects have collapsed into soggy, blackened heaps.
At first glance, the fire looks like it originated from one desk. Elena was here earlier, and I was sickened but not surprised to learn it’s T.J.’s desk. It’s where the most obvious damage is.
Further inspection leads me to a supply cabinet at the back of the room, closest to his desk, where the fire climbed from low and back, then rolled forward. Not accidental, not electrical.
Whoever set this knew where T.J. sat and made sure the worst of the visible destruction landed there.
This fucker doesn’t come after me, Weston, or Calder, the men responsible for Arseny Kozlov’s death. Instead of settling it straight, the spineless bastard burns up a kid’s desk and weeks of children’s work.
Fury rages through me, but I clamp down on it and keep working.
The cabinet door is open, swollen from water and heat, but Elena told me it contained chemicals and was always kept locked. Fresh scrape marks score the screws on the hinges, and bright metal shows where a tool bit in and slipped. Someone forced it open before the fire.
Inside, a shelf has shifted away from the wall. Behind it, half-hidden in soot and damp debris, there’s a single crumpled disposable glove and a folded sheet of paper.
I bag the glove first, then carefully unfold the paper, which is only singed. It’s a printed duty schedule showing teacher drop-off assignments, late pick-up coverage, and hall supervision.
He’s been studying the building and its routines long enough to find the soft spots. He learned where the adults were looking and where they weren’t.
When I step back from the cabinet, I catch sight of Elena in the hall with the superintendent and a sheriff’s deputy. She’s standing straight, arms crossed, her face pale but controlled. Principal first, mother second. I hate that she has to do both at a time like this.
I make myself keep looking at the room, even though every instinct in me wants to drop everything and get her and T.J. as far from this place as possible.
After the earlier incidents, we focused on adding camera angles at the school, installing more lights, and running patrols.
The camera that monitors the front entrance is old and was mounted wide for general exterior coverage, rather than detail, but I spend hours in my office, combing through its grainy images, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
Schools are hard to lock down without turning them into something they shouldn’t be.
During the day, people are always on the move.
Teachers, parents, custodians and other support staff, late drop-offs, early pick-ups, and deliveries.
The doors open for legitimate reasons all day long.
A man who knows how to use normal movement as cover can still get through if he times it right and nobody has a reason to stop him—and that’s exactly what happened.
Yesterday afternoon, after janitorial staff had arrived and while late pick-up was still underway, a man in a dark jacket and cap moved along the side of the building. Confident and unhurried, he walked inside like he belonged there.
I freeze the frame and zoom. The image tears apart, but it doesn’t matter.
Weston and Calder walk in then and stop.
“That him?” Weston asks.
“Looks like it,” Calder says.
We already did the work on Kozlov. Old photos. Intel. Military background. Every scrap we could get our hands on.
Even though the entry footage is poor, the height and build are a fit, and so is the way the man carries himself.
Once I spot him, I find him in older clips, too.
In the past couple of weeks, he was inside the school at least three times, using the same entrance with similar timing, always during transitional windows, when there’s enough normal movement to cover one more man slipping through without drawing attention.
He got close enough to learn where T.J. sat.
Tyler died in a war between grown men, and this bastard tries to get revenge by stalking an eight-year-old through an elementary school.
There’s no honor in that. No soldier’s code. Only a coward with training.
I pass along the new information to the sheriff, whose department has been unsuccessfully searching hotels and rentals in the area for someone matching Kozlov’s description for the past couple of weeks.
Then I spend the first part of the afternoon interviewing school staff, but nobody remembers seeing anything out of the ordinary. Kozlov moved exactly how trained men move when they don’t want to be remembered, and the footage isn’t clean enough to provide a face to identify.
Elena tells me she’ll stop at the station before she goes home. Later, she texts when she’s on her way to let me know T.J. will be coming too, but when she knocks on my office door, Calder is the only one with her.
“Weston’s giving T.J. a more detailed tour of one of the engines,” she explains in response to my questioning look.
“Probably answering another long round of questions, too.” The corners of her mouth move, like she’s trying to smile, but can’t.
She looks more shaken than I’ve ever seen her, and I silently curse Anton Kozlov to hell.
Calder closes the door behind them, and I launch directly into a summary of my findings, then show her the footage. She watches all three clips without moving. When I cut the last one, she meets my eyes. “You’re sure it’s him?”
“As sure as we can be with this quality.”
“He was inside my school, and inside T.J.’s classroom.” She’s not asking, she’s telling, like she’s letting it fully sink in, even though she’s known it since this morning.
I let it sit for a moment, then say what needs saying. “We need to talk about getting T.J. out of here. Maybe to stay with his grandparents.”
Her head snaps toward me. “No.”
“Elena—”
“No.”
She gets to her feet, and I rise to meet her. “He’s targeted your house and now T.J.’s classroom. I’m not waiting to see what happens next.”
“What does sending T.J. away change?” she fires back. “You think this madman is going to stop just because my son is somewhere else?”
“Distance would make him harder to reach,” Calder says.
Elena turns on him, eyes narrowed. “I’ll be far apart from my child while this man keeps hunting.”
I brace my hands on the back of a chair. “Distance gives us room.”
“From what?” she shoots back. “He already knows who we are. He knows where T.J. goes to school and exactly where he sits. You think I can put my child on a plane across the country and just trust that ends it?”
“It buys us time,” I say. “Sending T.J. somewhere secure gives us options.”
“Secure,” she repeats. “You don’t know if he’d be secure, and your solution is to separate me from my son while a man obsessed enough to burn a child’s classroom keeps coming after us.”
“My goal is to keep him breathing.”
Elena sucks in a breath like I slapped her, and a useless flash of regret hits me.
“Don’t.” Her voice is shaking now. “Don’t stand there and act like I’m the one being irrational because I don’t want to hand my son over to someone else and hope distance keeps him safe.”
I’m willing to carry Elena’s hatred if it keeps her boy alive, but I don’t say that. Instead, I flatten my palms on the table between us. “I’m trying to keep our options from narrowing until we don’t have any left.”
“You’re trying to take the decision away from me.”
The accusation hits hard because she’s not wrong.
“I’m scared all the time,” she says, her voice shaking. “Every time T.J. is out of my sight. Every time the phone rings. Every time something is late or off or wrong. I can’t send him away and sit here wondering if I handed him over to danger somewhere else. I can’t.”
I move around the table and stop in front of her. When she doesn’t back away, I pull her against me with a hand on her back. “I know,” I tell her, my voice rough.
Then she does pull away. “No, you don’t,” she whispers. “You don’t know what it would do to me to lose him, too.”
“No, I don’t, but I know what it’s like to live with fear. I know how it is to plan for the worst because the worst already happened once.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and though I know she hates to cry, she doesn’t try to hide it. “I can’t keep running from him,” she whispers.
Behind her, Calder’s got his chin up, standing firm.
Elena blinks, and the tears slide down her cheeks.
“Then we make our stand here,” I say, straightening. “No more pretending cameras and lights are enough,” I say. “We treat this like what it is.”
“A hunt.” Calder’s tone is flat.
“We tighten everything. School, house, travel, routines. No solo movement. No assumptions.”
Elena stands taller. “T.J. stays with me.”
“He does.”
“And nobody makes decisions for me.”
I give her a grim smile. “You were never going to allow that.”
“No.” For the first time since she walked in, some of the panic leaves her face, and resolve takes its place.
I slide my hand up to her shoulder and squeeze once. “Then we do this together.”
She closes her eyes briefly. “Together,” she says when she looks at us again.
“Together,” Calder echoes.
I think about T.J.’s desk and the ruined science projects. About the glove hidden behind the shelf and the grainy footage of Anton Kozlov coming into the school like he had a right to be there.
Protective fury is too small a phrase for what lives in me now.
We’re done reacting. He wanted us scared and off balance. Instead, he gave me certainty.
This is war, and he’s not going to get another free shot.