The Competition (8 page)

Tuesday, late afternoon, October 8

Bailey started the
car but let it idle. “I think this Carson dude is exactly what the doctor ordered.”

“Agreed.” I snapped my seat belt into place. “Just because Liam didn’t see the tattoo doesn’t mean it wasn’t there—”

“Or it might be very recent. The kid could’ve even done it the night before the shooting.”

“Yep. I say we put the unis on Carson, find out if he’s shown up anywhere. In the meantime, we can ask around about him while we keep running on Otis Barney. Are Tom and Sonny still hammering Graden?”

“Every five minutes,” Bailey said. “Graden keeps telling them Otis isn’t the only one who’s still MIA, that they’re working twenty-four/seven to account for everyone, but—”

“They know he didn’t have any friends to run to, and he hasn’t turned up in the hospital or the morgue. And they don’t like what that means. But they haven’t gone public yet, right?”

“Not yet.”

“We need to whittle down that list. Is anyone going through juvy cases? Maybe one of our shooters has a record.”

“That would be refreshing,” Bailey said. “And of course we’re checking juvy cases. So far, all they found were some curfew violations and minor drug busts. All those kids are accounted for. The only thing we can do is move fast on the interviews. We’ve already got Liam’s student list, so we may as well start there. I’ll call Dale and get student lists for the rest of Otis’s classes. Start with this year and work our way backward.”

“Shit.” That might mean hundreds of interviews. While two murderers ran the countryside.

“You got a better idea, Sherlock?”

I folded my arms and tried to come up with one while Bailey made the calls.

We managed to line up immediate interviews with four of Liam’s students. One of the moms, Meredith Charnosh, volunteered to let us use her house. “I just think it’d be nice not to traumatize them any further by making them go to a police station,” she said.

I considered telling her it might actually be reassuring for them to see law enforcement at work, but I had the feeling she just didn’t want to let her son out of her sight. I didn’t blame her.

We gathered in the living room, which was overfurnished but oddly comforting. The three boys, Mark, Vincent, and Harrison, took the sofa. The only girl, Paula, perched on the matching ottoman. All of them had that hundred-yard stare usually reserved for battle-scarred soldiers.

“Were you all in the gym when it happened?” I asked. They were. I asked what they’d been able to see of the gunmen.

“Just that they were wearing camo jackets and masks with eyeholes,” Paula said.

The boys agreed. They’d all noticed that one was taller than the other. Estimates of the taller one’s height varied between six feet two and six feet six.

“One of them yelled something about jocks,” Mark said. Vincent and Paula heard that too.

In short, nothing new. Time to move on to Otis and Carson.

I had to be careful not to get too heavy with specific questions about them. If I did, it’d hit the grapevine in seconds and some kids might suddenly “remember” things that were more a product of imagination than reality. Not necessarily to get attention, but just because some people are susceptible to suggestion. Plant the idea and they’ll fill in the blanks. So I started by asking the open-ended questions suggested by our shrinks: did they know anyone who vented frequently about feeling persecuted and hating the world or talked about taking revenge—

“On who?” Mark asked. “Lots of kids feel screwed over and talk about payback against their teachers or”—he craned his neck to see if Mrs. Charnosh was within earshot—“their parents.”

“Or other kids,” Vincent Charnosh said.

A fair question. “I mean someone who was always venting about everyone screwing him over, and wanting to kill them. Not just someone who spouted off once about wanting to kill the math teacher because he got an F. Someone who’s angry at the world and talks about payback—a lot.”

“I can’t remember anyone talking like
that,
” Paula said.

“I’m pretty sure I would’ve turned in someone who went off like that,” said Harrison, the most conservative-looking of the group. “After Sandy Hook and that freak in Colorado, we all know what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Ever since Sandy Hook, they’ve been talking about putting in metal detectors.”

I’d been thinking about that when our shrinks gave us the checklist. Given how many shootings there’d been, and recently, I had a feeling most kids thought they were on top of it, could spot the dangerous types. But knowing that homicidal nutbags could walk among them didn’t mean they knew whom to take seriously. It was the typical hubris of youth to think they had it all figured out. If the shooters turned out to be Otis and Carson—or anyone else they’d actually known—what few shreds of false security they had left would dissolve like spun sugar in the rain. But they didn’t need to hear that right now, so I sat back and let Bailey take over.

“Do you know anyone who’s heavily into guns?” she asked. “Anyone who talks about going to the range a lot or about having a lot of military paraphernalia?” They didn’t.

She asked a few more gun questions, got more nos, and then asked whether they knew anyone who’d written about homicidal fantasies. When she again got a chorus of nos, I decided it was time to bring up Otis Barney and Carson James. I started by asking if any of them did the extracurricular team science project. I was betting Vincent, yes, the others, no. I was right. Sometimes, you just know.

“Did you get friendly with any of the other teams?” I asked.

“Some,” Vincent said. “Not a ton.”

“Did you ever hang with Otis and Carson?” I asked.

“No. They pretty much just did their own thing.”

“So they were tight?” I asked.

“I guess. I didn’t hear them argue or anything.”

I pressed on with a few more questions about Otis and Carson—and threw in a few about the other teams just for cover—but got nothing, so I had to let it go and move on. I played the recording of the weird laugh that Marnie had identified as Otis’s. “Do any of you recognize that laugh?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Vincent said.

Mark gave him a surprised look. “Dude, that totally sounds like Otis,” he said. He nudged Harrison. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Harrison said. “It does.”

“Vincent?” I asked. “You don’t think so?”

Vincent stretched his neck. “I guess, maybe. Yeah, probably.”

I guessed Vincent was nervous about tagging his classmate. The wonders of teen loyalty. I kept at it a little while longer, but just kept hitting dead ends, so I wrapped up by showing them the blowup of the tattoo on the shooter’s wrist. “Do any of you recognize this?”

They passed the photo around. Nada.

Four down, twenty nine hundred ninety-six students to go. We were cooking.

Dale Campbell had volunteered to set up the next batch of interviews. Based on our shrinks’ advice, Bailey asked him to make English class the top priority. He started with Otis’s current class. The teacher couldn’t make it. He had to fly back to Arizona to help his father, who’d suffered a heart attack. But Dale had managed to round up several students and even let us meet at his house.

As we pulled into his driveway, Bailey got a call from the unis working on Carson James. It was a brief call, and when she ended it she stared out the front window.

“And?” I said, impatient.

“No one answers the door or the phone at his house. When they called his cell it went straight to voice mail. None of the bodies at the morgue fit his description, and they haven’t found him at any of the hospitals so far.”

We exchanged a look. “I would say Carson James is looking good,” I said. “But I’m not going to because—”

“Yeah, don’t jinx us.”

Our hopes cautiously lifted, we got out and headed for Dale’s house. Nine students, four male, five female, had crowded into Dale’s family room. The parents had been relegated to the kitchen. They’d wanted to sit in with their kids, but there wasn’t room. These students didn’t look quite as shell-shocked. Did they feel more secure because it was a larger crowd? Or did they just not want to show how terrified they really were in front of the others? Even so, by no means did they look calm. The girls twirled their hair and hunched forward, some with arms wrapped around their bodies. The boys bounced their knees and cracked their knuckles.

They’d all been in the gym at the time of the shooting, but none had been able to see the shooters well enough to add to what we already knew. I moved on to the questions suggested by our shrinks. And got the same results as before: no, no, and no. I segued into Otis Barney. All they remembered was that he was pretty quiet and got real nervous when the teacher called on him. I played the snippet of footage with the shooter’s weird laugh. No one recognized it. We were getting nowhere. I tossed out one last question. “Do any of you happen to know Carson James?”

Nancy, a petite brunette in leggings and a long sweater that fetchingly exposed one shoulder, asked, “Is he kind of tall, has long, black, greasy hair?”

Bailey, who had pulled his school yearbook photo, said, “Yeah. You know him?”

“He sat behind me in my English lit class last year. He was always bitching about something. The other kids in the class, the homework, the teacher.” She shook her head. “What a loser—”

Carrie, who’d been groggy from taking antihistamines for her allergies, sat up. “Oh, is he the one who told you—”

“Yeah. One time, I asked him to keep it down and he told me to go fuck myself and said the next time I gave him shit, he’d shut me up forever.”

“Did you report that to anyone?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t take him that seriously. I thought he was just being an asshole.”

He was at least that. “Did he ever talk about guns? Or about shooting people?” I asked.

“He never said anything about guns,” Nancy said. “But he was always talking about how much he hated the school and how the kids were all loser assholes.”

“Who did he hang out with?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly go looking for him.”

Interesting that no one reported seeing Carson act like that in science class. I wondered what his project had been. If it was how to make a Molotov, that might explain his good behavior. All kidding aside, his project might’ve had some subtle connection to explosives. I made a mental note to check with Liam.

We kept at it for a while longer, but there was nothing more—from Nancy or any of the others.

I passed the tattoo photo around. Nobody recognized it.

Still, Bailey and I left Dale’s house feeling better than we had since we’d picked up the case.

When we got into the car, I looked at Bailey. “Okay, now I can say it: Carson James is looking good.”

“He is,” Bailey said. She pulled out her cell. “Let’s get ahold of Carson’s English teacher. See if we can get a few writing samples.”

We shared a grim smile.

A few phone
calls later, Bailey had a meeting set for five thirty at the teacher’s house in Tarzana, which would give us just enough time to drive through a fast-food joint and pick up a very late lunch.

“Feel like Taco Bell?” Bailey asked.

“Always.”

“She had no trouble remembering Carson,” Bailey said.

“She say why?”

“No, but the way she said, ‘Oh, yes,’ I’ll bet it wasn’t because he volunteered to clap erasers,” Bailey said.

“No one does that anymore.”

“Whatever.”

“They use whiteboards now,” I said. Bailey shot me a look. “Just saying.”

We found a Taco Bell on Ventura Boulevard, and Bailey pulled into the parking lot so she could eat without getting it all over herself.

I savored a big, crunchy bite. “Taco Supreme—the best fast food has to offer.”

“There’s also In-N-Out—” Bailey’s cell phone buzzed. She answered it with a mouthful of taco. “Keller.” Her chewing slowed, then stopped as she listened. When she ended the call, she wadded up her taco wrapper and threw it against the dash. “Son of a bitch!”

“What?”

“They found Carson. He’s in a hospital out in Santa Clarita—”

“Why the hell is he all the way out there?” That was at least an hour away from the school.

“His uncle’s a resident. His parents had him transferred straight out of the ER. They’ve been at his bedside this whole time.”

Which is why no one answered the phone or the door. But maybe he was just hiding in plain sight. Maybe he was just acting like a victim to fool us. “What’re his injuries?”

“Two shots to the gut. He’s stable, but they’re still worried about possible peritonitis. They couldn’t get all the shrapnel out of his intestines.”

That seemed a bridge too far. I could see shooting himself in the hand or the foot, but not in the gut. It was too dangerous. But if he was one of the shooters and his buddy did that to him, he might just be pissed off enough to talk to us. “Can we see him?”

“The uni said yes, but we need to get going. She said visiting hours for nonfamily end soon, and traffic’s going to be a bitch.”

Bailey canceled the meeting with Carson’s English teacher, and we headed for the Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia. The place was a labyrinth. It took less time to get there than it did to find Carson’s bed. He had just been moved out of ICU and into a private room. The natural light flowing in through his window softened the harsh glare of the standard fluorescent bulbs, but even candlelight couldn’t have masked the gray pallor of Carson’s face. His doctor (uncle) warned us not to push him, said he was not out of the woods yet—can no one think of a new cliché?—and told us we had fifteen minutes, max.

His parents insisted on staying for the interview, his mom hovering on one side of his bed while his father glowered at us from the other and pointedly looked at his watch. There was no time for open-ended questions, so I went straight at it.

“Where were you when you got shot?”

“In the gym.” His voice was thin and strained.

I asked him to be more specific. At the top of the bleachers? The bottom? I had him describe who sat next to him, what class he’d been in that morning—questions designed to tell me whether he could’ve been a shooter. The answers would be easy to verify. If he was lying, I’d know soon enough. But seeing him now, I had a strong feeling they’d check out. “Can you describe the shooters at all?” I asked.

“One looked tall.”

“Taller than you?”

He nodded.

“I’m going to play a part of a video taken by one of the students in the gym. Tell me if you recognize this voice.” I played the snippet of the crazy laugh.

Carson shook his head, a barely perceptible move. “Is it…one of the shooters?”

“Yes,” I said.

He mouthed, “Motherfucker.”

“Does it sound like anyone you know?”

“Kinda sounds like Otis. But it’s not.”

“Why not?”

Carson snorted. “Fucking wuss. Couldn’t even cut up a frog.”

The frog lesson plan didn’t seem to have a lot of fans. But it didn’t mean Otis wasn’t one of the shooters. Animal lovers can be psychopaths too. Hitler had scientists working on a more humane way to cook lobsters. Couldn’t bear the fact that they were boiled alive. “But you agree, it does sound like Otis’s laugh?”

“Sort of.”

“Did Otis ever talk about guns?”

“No…wait. He told me about someone…this dude who said he could get stuff online.” Carson’s voice was starting to sound like it was being squeezed through a narrow tube.

“What kind of stuff?”

“AKs and shit.”

“Do you remember who that was?” I crossed my fingers behind my back.

Carson closed his eyes. Suddenly, he gave a sharp inhale and curled into a fetal position. One of the monitors started to shriek. Papa James stepped forward and pressed the call button for the nurse. “Okay, that’s all. You’re finished.”

Just as abruptly, Carson’s body relaxed. He lay on his back, panting. “S’okay, Dad.” He took a few deep breaths and I found myself doing the same. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to a whisper.

I leaned toward him, winding my body around the father, who’d stepped in even closer. “I didn’t catch that. One more time?”

“Logan Jarvis.”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

Carson shook his head.

I stepped back, and his father held up a thick hand. “That’s it. I mean it. You have to stop.”

I was about to tell him we
had
stopped when a nurse trotted in and shooed us all away. “Officers, whatever it is you need, it’ll have to wait.”

As she began to check his monitors, Carson whispered, “That school…bunch of fucking assholes.”

“Angry young man,” I said.

The nurse raised an eyebrow. “You blame him?”

Not now I didn’t.