We followed her into a bedroom that was surprisingly austere for a teenage girl. You could bounce a quarter off the perfectly made twin bed, and the two navy-and-red decorative pillows looked like they’d been positioned against the headboard with a T square. A few posters of bands I didn’t recognize were taped-not tacked-onto the wall. The oak dresser was bare of any cosmetics or jewelry, and there were no clothes on the floor or the bench at the foot of the bed. In fact, there wasn’t a hair out of place in the entire room.
Dating Evan-if you could call it that-seemed to be Amanda’s only wild move. But talk about hitting a home run right out of the box. Amanda pulled the chair away from her small desk and dragged it to the shelving against the wall in the far right corner of the room. She climbed up on it, reached behind some tall books on the top shelf, and started to pull down manila envelopes completely encased in heavy wrapping tape.
“Hold on,” Bailey said. She grabbed a box of Kleenex and covered her hands, then reached for the first envelope. I covered my hands and took it from Bailey, and placed it on Amanda’s desk. When we’d finished, there was a stack of nine envelopes.
“Is this all of them?”
Amanda nodded. “You can look around if you want to.” She swept her arm out to indicate her room.
“And he didn’t send you anything else? Pictures? Books?” Amanda shook her head.
“We’ll just check the rest of these shelves to make sure you didn’t miss anything, okay?”
Amanda nodded. “Go ahead. But he only sent me the nine envelopes. I’m sure.”
I felt reasonably certain she was telling the truth, but Bailey and I took a few minutes to look through the room anyway. We’d have officers do a more thorough search, just to check for any small things Amanda might’ve forgotten about. But right now, we needed to dig into those notebooks, and fast.
If these were the writings the shrinks had talked about, they might tell us where Evan was planning to strike next. And if there was a third party involved-I thought of the lead Harrellson was working in San Diego-they might give us that person’s name. I was eager to get going, but I had just a couple more questions for Amanda. “When did Evan start sending you these envelopes?”
“About a month after we moved here, I think.”
“And when did you get the last one?”
“Um…about a week ago?” Her brow furrowed, then she nodded. “Yeah, about a week ago because I asked him if he could come out for Homecoming, and he sent me a note with the last package saying he was going to be busy.”
Boy, was he ever. “Did you keep that note?”
Amanda nodded and went to her nightstand. She picked up a book-Girls: A Guy’s Perspective. I wanted to tell her that if she was trying to understand Evan, she’d have to get American Psycho. Amanda pulled out a piece of lined paper that had been folded and tucked into the middle. Bailey took the paper from her using the Kleenex. “Can you tell me where your mom keeps extra grocery bags?” Amanda told her, and while Bailey went to get them, I asked her my last few questions.
“When Evan sent you the letters to mail to me, did he send a note to you with them? Or did he call you and tell you he was sending them?”
“He called.” Amanda knew what the next question would be, and she didn’t wait for it. She pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and scrolled. She pointed to a number. “This is it. It’s around the right time, and I know all the other numbers on here.”
“You don’t have a number for him?”
“No. He uses burners. He says the government can track you on a cell phone, so he never uses a phone more than twice.”
A lie to keep Amanda from having access to him? Or true? Given his distrust of emails, it might well be true, which meant the chance that we might be able to track him with this number was very slim. But slim or not, it was worth a try. I copied the call history on Amanda’s cell phone for the past two weeks and emailed it to myself.
Amanda gestured to the notebooks piled on her desk. “Do you really think the plans for the Fairmont shooting are in there?”
“Yes.” I took in Amanda’s pallor. “Do you feel well enough to go to school?”
“I…yeah.” She turned away from the envelopes. “I want to be with my friends.”
I got it. She needed to reassure herself that she’d made some good choices too. And that there was a normal world out there. “Okay, we’ll take you.”
Bailey returned with paper grocery bags, and we put the envelopes into them, packing the note to Amanda separately to preserve prints. We told Janice we were done and that we’d take Amanda to school. She and Amanda held each other in a long hug.
We all trooped out to Bailey’s car. Amanda gave us directions to her school. It was past ten o’clock by the time we dropped her off.
I got out of the car with her. “Remember to call us immediately if you hear from him, okay?”
I didn’t think Evan would make contact with her now. He was in full attack mode. But you never know. If he got desperate, he might show up with some cockamamie story about how the psycho killers were after him. The kind of story she might’ve believed just a little over an hour ago, but surely wouldn’t now. I hoped.
Amanda nodded. “I will. I promise.”
I watched her move slowly up the front steps, bent forward under the weight of her backpack. She looked like the same girl who’d woken up that morning. But she wasn’t. She’d just learned that the boy she’d loved and trusted was a soulless monster who had used her and lied to her. The world would never look the same to her again.
73
Bailey put out the alert for Evan Cutter. When she ended the call, I gestured to the notebooks that were now packed in grocery bags in the backseat. “We can’t wait for Dorian. We need to tear into those things.”
“Definitely,” Bailey said. “And we’ve got to let Harrellson know-”
“I’ll try him now.”
I couldn’t get any signal. When we got back to the hotel, I got Harrellson’s voice mail and left a message-no details, just saying it was urgent. I hoped he’d cleared Mark Unger. One missing psychopath was plenty. Bailey called Graden and filled him in, while I found us a three o’clock flight back to L.A. Then Bailey took out her Swiss Army knife and sliced through the tape on all of the envelopes.
At Graden’s request we headed straight to his office with the notebooks. Now we reread them over his shoulder. The first line encapsulated the running theme throughout all of them.
“The world is filled with stupid, pathetic, inferior worms. They’re all a waste of precious resources.”
Evan, the brilliant, the amazing, had no use for the “shrimp brains” of the world. Except as fodder for his sadistic fantasies.
“I saw a movie once where they tied a guy’s arms to the bumper of one car and his legs to the bumper of another, then drove the cars in opposite directions. Just tore him to shreds. I loved it.”
Graden finished the fourth notebook. “Jesus,” he muttered. Bailey and I exchanged looks. We’d had a similar reaction. It was a bird’s-eye view into the mind of a raving psychopath. But these pages explained something that had always bothered me about the letters I’d received. Back when I thought they’d been written by Logan, I’d had a hard time squaring them with the eloquent writing style Logan’s teachers had described. I’d supposed Logan’s fury had stripped his prose of its usual poetry. But now, knowing that it was Evan who’d written the letters, and seeing the writing in these notebooks, it all made sense.