School Days

Chapter 16

"HOW MANY ROUNDS were fired in the school?" I said.

"Best count is thirty-seven."

"How many missed?"

"Seventeen," DiBella said.

"So some folks got shot more than once."

"One took four rounds," he said.

"Anything there?" I said.

"Nope, nothing we could find. Rounds came from two different guns, but whose and why four times? Don't know. One of them might have shot him twice with each of his two guns, or two of them maybe shot him twice each with one of their own guns."

"Who got the four hits?" I said.

"Ruth Cort, Spanish teacher."

We were in his car. Pearl, against all regulations, was in the back. She leaned her head into the front and sniffed DiBella's ear. He shook his head as if there were a fly in it.

"Anybody spots me with a hound in the car," he said, "I'll be running radar traps on the Mass Pike again."

"Claim it was my wife," I said, "and I'm insulted."

"Sure," DiBella said.

We were cruising through Dowling with the airconditioning on low and the windows up. In the cool silence, the thick, rural greenery and the white, exurban houses outside the tinted glass of the car windows looked like some sort of theme-park display. New England Land.

"Know anything about Hollis Grant?" I said.

"Wendell's grandfather? Sure, everyone in this part of the state knows about him."

"Tell me what you know," I said.

"Big developer in central and western Mass," DiBella said. "Shopping malls. Civic centers. That kind of thing. He's not much into residential, I don't beheve."

"Successful," I said.

"Yeah."

"Rich," I said.

"Yep."

"Connected."

"You bet," DiBella said. "Very active in politics. Donates a lot of money to a lot of people."

"He a gun guy?" I said.

"Hell," DiBella said, "I don't know."

DiBella pulled the car off the road and into an overlook area by a small river. The river dropped off some short falls and washed over some tumbled boulders, and made white water. The trees flourished near the river and stood high and thick above us. The moving water had a green tone to it. DiBella shifted in his seat a little and put his right arm over the back of the seat and patted Pearl.

"You think he's got something to do with this?"

"No idea," I said. "I'm just channel surfing. The guns bother me."

"Yeah," DiBella said. "Far as we can tell, there were no guns in either house, no shooters. Coming up with four nines is not all that easy for a couple of prep-school kids in Bethel County."

"And how to use them," I said. "We maybe forget, because we're used to guns. But you get a sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kid with no experience and no knowledge, give him a nine with an empty magazine and a box of bullets, and he's going to have trouble loading the bullets into the magazine, and putting the magazine into the piece, and getting a round up in the chamber."

"If he's mechanical and he has time, he could probably figure it out," DiBella said.

"Probably, but to hit twenty out of thirty-seven shots.... " I said. "In a real shootout, not on the range, with a handgun..."

DiBella nodded.

"I been shooting most of my life," he said. "I'd take that."

"There anyplace around here people shoot?"

"Local cops use our range in Talbot," DiBella said.

"Public welcome?"

"No."

"Any place where a private citizen could shoot?"

"Pretty good deer and pheasant around here in season," DiBella said. "I think there's a couple of hunting clubs got private range licenses."

"Names?"

"I can get them," DiBella said. "We haven't been chasing this as hard as you are."

"Of course not," I said. "You got one guy red-handed, and the other guy confessed. You got a slam dunk, why not take it?"

"It's not like they didn't do it," DiBella said. "We'll send them to jail."

"If they go," I said, "maybe somebody else needs to go with them."

"I got no problem with that," DiBella said.

"So where did they get the guns, and how did they learn to use them?"

"I thought you were supposed to clear this kid," DiBella said.

"I take what the defense gives me," I said. "I go where I can go, see what I find."