The Battle of Bayport by Franklin W. Dixon Page B

them, then Mikey Griffin would be a good bet,” I affirmed.
    Joe nodded. “He said he was a good shot, and with his family’s history with the Don, it wouldn’t be hard to guess who Mikey was aiming at.”
    â€œMikey’s not the only one,” I said. “A lot of people probably aimed at the Don. Mr. Lakin basically told them to.”
    Not that people needed any encouragement. Even if they thought they were only shooting blanks, it would be hard to resist pretending to take a shot at the guy who’d messed up your life.
    Our job had just gotten a lot harder. It was tough enough already just trying to figure out which gun had fired theshot; now, even if we did, it might not be the real bad guy’s. We didn’t just have to look at who had motive, we also had to look at who had access to the guns of the people with motive. Joe was right about Mikey, though: If there was a fall guy, he was a good candidate.
    Joe had flagged the spots in the video where Mikey put down his gun or when someone else had it. He skipped ahead from Mikey receiving his musket to Mr. Carr helping Mikey with his gun to musketless Mikey goofing around with Amir. Joe was right: Someone totally would have had the opportunity to tamper with Mikey’s gun. Both Mr. Carr and Amir knew Mikey well enough to have his confidence, and both of them had the opportunity.
    It was common knowledge that Mr. Carr hated the Don, and he had the acting skills to pull off a deception. He also had a flair for the dramatic and a love of old English plays with intricate revenge plots and leading men with guilty consciences. The pieces fit, but could our own drama teacher really have used one of his students to exact his revenge for him? He would have had the chance.
    So would Amir, Mikey’s buddy from their time together in detention. When Aunt Trudy moved the camera away from Amir and Mikey goofing around, you could still see Mikey in the background, but Amir had stepped out of frame. When he reappeared, he was carrying Mikey’s musket along with his own.
    I liked Amir. We used to study together before DonSterling shut down the factory. After his parents lost their jobs, everything changed, though, and he stopped caring about class. You knew things must have gotten pretty bad at home, because he’d gone from one of Bayport High’s brightest students to one of its biggest troublemakers in no time flat. It was like he was a different guy. But murder? I didn’t like the idea of an old friend turning into a devious killer.
    Not that I liked the next possible Second Man suspect any better. Joe fast-forwarded to Mikey having his musket inspected in the drill line. By Mr. Lakin. The angle was on Mr. Lakin’s back, so we couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but he held the gun long enough to leave the possibility open. Thinking about our history teacher using a student to pull the trigger for him was even more disturbing than suspecting him of pulling the trigger himself.
    I took some comfort in the fact that Joe’s Second Man theory was still purely hypothetical. The second person could have been someone we suspected or someone we hadn’t thought of yet, or the killer could have acted alone and there might not be any “Second Man” at all. We didn’t have any proof, and for all we knew it was just another wild-goose chase.
    Even so, just the idea of it was enough to turn my stomach. And until we had some proof one way or another, we couldn’t eliminate the possibility that it was a valid hypothesis.
    â€œThere could be a lot more to this case than we figured,” Joe said.
    â€œYou mean one mystery shooter using a fake Revolutionary War battle as cover to secretly load a 250-year-old firearm with real ammunition and publicly assassinate Bayport’s most notorious businessman with the whole town watching isn’t enough?” I shot back. I should have known better than to even