“This is the last of it,” Graden said, as he led us toward the library.
He pointed to a desk on our left and I saw a pink sneaker on the floor in front of it. “We found another two victims there. A teacher and a young girl. The girl had a close-range shot straight to the forehead.”
I didn’t even try to make myself look under that desk. Graden moved farther into the library, and I trailed behind, knowing I couldn’t take much more.
“And here is what passes for good news,” Graden said. He stopped outside a taped-off section of the room where photographers and coroner investigators were congregated. At the center of the activity were two dead bodies. It took me a few moments, but from what I could see, they looked like two teenage boys. It wasn’t that obvious at first. To call the sight gruesome wouldn’t do it justice. The faces were masses of red pulp and exposed bone, the features completely obliterated-no doubt by shots fired at point-blank range-and their bodies were just a couple of feet apart. Black balaclavas lay next to each of them and there was a handgun at each of their right sides.
“So the suspects shot each other?” I asked. “Or themselves?”
“We think they shot each other,” Graden said. “But we’ll have to wait for the coroner to give us a definite on that.” Graden stared for a long minute, then continued, his voice brittle. “At least you won’t have to sit in trial and listen to a bunch of shrinkers talk about how it was all mommy’s fault for giving them an Atari instead of an Xbox.”
“Yeah,” I said. But it was cold comfort. Their deaths wouldn’t bring all those children back.
Bailey pointed to the small handguns near the bodies. “I thought they used AKs.”
“They did,” Graden replied. “We found one on the floor just outside the gym. Looks like it might have jammed-”
“So he dumped it-” I said.
Graden nodded. “And we found the second one at the top of the stairs with an empty magazine.”
“So the other one kept firing the AK-” Bailey said.
“Until it emptied. But the one who’d dumped his AK downstairs had at least one, possibly two, handguns on him. We found shell casings from a forty-four caliber and a three-fifty-seven on the stairs.”
Bailey pointed to the guns that lay near the bodies in front of us. “But those aren’t forty-fours or three-fifty-sevens.”
“No. They’re both cheap twenty-five-caliber Saturday night specials.”
“Man, they were carrying an arsenal,” Bailey said.
I stared at the guns. “Doesn’t it seem weird that they’d use low-caliber, trashy stuff like that for their finale?” I asked. “I mean, why settle for dicey junk that might only wind up maiming them?”
“My guess is they wanted to use the reliable hardware on their moving targets,” Bailey said, her voice cold with anger. “They could afford to use the cheap stuff on each other. They weren’t going to miss at point-blank range.”
“And the dicey junk did do the job,” Graden added.
“Got ID on them?” Bailey asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “Haven’t had the chance to get their prints. Hopefully they have driver’s licenses-”
“Or rap sheets,” I said. If they didn’t, their prints wouldn’t be in the system.
“Any of the survivors get a good enough look to make an ID?” Bailey asked.
“Not yet. But we’ve got a few kids who had the presence of mind to take videos with their phones, and we’re checking into the school’s surveillance footage.”
“Anybody give a description?” I asked.
“All kinds.” Graden’s tone was glum. “The only consistent one-and it’s not totally consistent-is that they were wearing camouflage jackets.”
I pointed to the bodies on the floor. “I don’t see any on these guys.”
“I know. But like I said, even that description wasn’t consistent. Some kids didn’t notice any camouflage jackets. The video footage should resolve that question. And even if the suspects were wearing camouflage jackets, they could’ve taken them off and dumped them somewhere before they got to the library.”
The library, the talk of two bullied, disenfranchised losers going ballistic-it all seemed too familiar. “Doesn’t it kind of sound like a rip-off of Columbine?” I said. “With a different ‘uniform’?” The Columbine killers had worn trench coats and hadn’t covered their faces.
Graden nodded. “Yeah, it does. Like a deliberate copy, in fact.”
“Seems pretty obvious the suspects knew the layout of the school, and knew there’d be a pep rally in the gym today-” I said.
“Had to be students,” Bailey said.
I dredged up what I could remember about Columbine. “But no propane tank bombs?” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had set up propane tank bombs in the cafeteria of Columbine High, but they’d malfunctioned and never went off. If they had, the death toll would have topped three hundred-more than the Oklahoma City bombing. Their goal, according to Harris’s journals.
“No,” Graden said. “And we haven’t found any pipe bombs or Molotovs like the ones they used at Columbine either-”
“But they still managed to top the Columbine body count,” Bailey said.
Graden nodded. We stood in silence for a few moments. Finally, Graden spoke. “Seen enough?”
“For a lifetime,” I said.
We headed out of the Hellmouth.
5
Graden took us to an ambulance that was parked behind the school where a surrounding wall and steep hillside provided a measure of privacy and quiet. He gestured to a figure wrapped in a blanket sitting on the gurney inside. “This is Harley Jenson. He’s still a little shock-y, obviously, but he’s pretty coherent, all things considered.”
We walked over and introduced ourselves. Pale, baby-faced, and slender, his dark hair cut conservatively short, Harley was the quintessential studious high school nerd. But right now, huddled inside that blanket, he looked more like a frightened sixth-grader.
In halting sentences, he told us what he’d seen. As he described how one of the killers put the gun to the girl’s head, he began to shake and his teeth chattered so hard he had to stop. We waited in silence until he found his voice. Finally, speaking in a monotone, his eyes staring, vacant, he told us how he’d been momentarily deafened by the shots that killed the girl under the nearby desk, how he’d heard the killers do the countdown, and how he’d been sure he was going to die.
“Did you see their faces?” I asked.
“No, I-I was afraid to look.”
“Did you see what kind of shoes they were wearing?” I asked. “Or their pants?”
Harley shook his head and began to shake again. “I must have, right?” Harley said. “But every time I try to remember things, I just keep hearing that girl saying ‘Please, please don’t’…” Tears filled his eyes and he swallowed hard.
I knew the sights and sounds would haunt him for the rest of his life, so I didn’t offer any platitudes about the healing effects of time. I don’t lie to victims. They deserve the respect of honesty. I gave Harley a few moments to recover, then asked whether he remembered what the suspects said.
“They really didn’t say anything, except ‘Knock, knock’ and the things I already told you. And then the countdown.”
“Did either of the voices sound familiar?” I asked. Harley shook his head. “They didn’t say anything about jocks?” I continued. The “why” of this atrocity was going to be the focal point of the investigation. The more I could gather from the survivors about the suspects’ words and behavior, the more we’d learn about their possible motives.