The Competition

22

Behind me, Sonny screamed. “No! How…? It can’t be!”

“I’m sorry, Sonny,” I said.

She sat down on Otis’s bed and hung her head. “I don’t believe it. No…it’s not right. It can’t be right. I know it.”

I put my hand on her shoulder and spoke to her softly. “We’re going to get a search warrant, Sonny. I’m sorry.”

Sonny grabbed my arm. “You don’t understand. I know my son! I know Otis! That isn’t him! Please, you’ve got to believe me!” She dissolved into tears.

I didn’t have any honest words of comfort. “We’re going to finish checking out Otis’s computer before we bring in a search team. You can stay and watch…”

Sonny struggled to her feet and shook her head. “No, I-I need to go lie down.”

I put my arm around her and led her down the hall to her bedroom. I gave her a glass of water, covered her with a blanket, and asked her for her husband’s cell phone number.

“No, don’t call him. Please don’t. Let him not know for a little while longer.”

I nodded and went to Otis’s room. I sat down in front of the laptop and typed “LJ314” in the search bar. There were six other emails from that address, but none with photos. And none mentioned any murderous plans. They were all just routine boy stuff about school, girls, and video games. But Otis might have deleted the incriminating messages up until that last night. By then he was probably too busy putting the final touches on their big plans to remember to get rid of the photo of Logan and his AK. I’d have our cowboy Nick look into it. In any case, the photo, and the timing of its receipt, was damning.

Bailey had been looking around the room and now she held up a binder.

“Don’t tell me we’ve got more musings about Amanda.”

“No, it’s poetry,” she said. “Or song lyrics. They all look like they’re about world peace and racial harmony.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.

“Nope.”

“Is it dated?” If he wrote it back in junior high it wouldn’t mean much.

“No. We’ll be able to take it with the warrant, see if there are any references that can show us when he wrote this. But I’d bet we’ll find more of the ugly stuff like that photo of Logan on the laptop once Nick gets into it.” Bailey sighed. “Let’s do another telephonic. You get the judge. I’ll get the search team.”

I should have felt some sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment. After all, we were pretty sure we’d finally identified both shooters. But all I felt was hollow. None of these parents were monsters. Hard as it was to believe, none of them seemed to have had a clue what was coming. They were shattered by what their children had done. When Tom finally showed up, I could barely bring myself to tell him what we’d found-or that a search team was on its way.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Tom stood white-lipped and silent for several moments. “No.” He shook his head slowly. “I know my son. Drinking? Smoking dope? Probably. Maybe even vandalism. But this? No way. I know he had some issues, but he could never hurt anyone.” He glared into my eyes. “You’re wrong.” And he walked out of the room.

I turned back to the task at hand. The sooner we got the work done, the sooner we could get out of their hair and let them grieve. “We got a criminalist coming?” I asked Bailey. She nodded. “Make sure to have him get DNA swabs from the parents.”

After an hour or so with no new discoveries, we bagged up Otis’s laptop and binder and headed back to the station. On the way, Bailey called Nick and told him to meet us at her desk in thirty minutes.

Even at this hour, traffic was fairly heavy. We moved slowly down the southbound 101 freeway and I stared at the river of red taillights that stretched out before us. “Remember how everyone hammered the parents after Columbine?”

“Yeah,” Bailey said. “About how they didn’t know what their kids were up to, making pipe bombs and buying guns?”

“That part never surprised me. A kid can hide things like that even if the parents routinely toss his room-which most don’t.”

“Wait, I thought Harris and Klebold left all their weapons out in plain sight-”

“Only on the day of the shooting,” I said. “When they left that morning they knew they weren’t coming back, so what did they care? The thing that I always wondered before was how could they not know how crazy their kids were? There had to be about a million signs. But now I think I get it. It’s one thing to know your kid has issues, but it’s a whole different world to think those issues might add up to mass murder.”

Bailey nodded. “Yeah. I see what you mean. So Sonny and Tom think, okay, maybe our kid got bullied and he vented by listening to hate music. There’re probably millions of kids like that who’d never do anything more than talk shit on a Facebook page.”

“Keyboard thugs. Exactly.”

When we got back to the station, Nick was lounging in Bailey’s chair, cowboy hat covering his face and boots crossed at the ankles on her desk. She swatted his legs off, and he jerked up in the chair, startled. “Hey!” Then he saw it was Bailey and took in the bag she was holding. “That it?”

“Yep, it’s been bagged and tagged. Just remember to write up that I handed it to you.”

“You get it looked at for prints and such yet?” he asked.

“No time for that,” Bailey said. “Just glove up and do your best.”

It was after Nick’s normal hours, so I’d expected him to take it back to his office and let us know what he found tomorrow. But he asked Bailey for a set of gloves and opened the laptop immediately. “You’re looking for mentions of Logan and any gun-related plans. That sort of thing, right?”

Bailey nodded. “I’m going to get some coffee. Want some?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Nick said.

“Want anything in it?” she asked.

Nick looked up and gave her a lazy smile. “Why don’t you just dip your little ol’ finger in it? That oughta sweeten it up for me, darlin’.”

It was a cheesy line, but Nick sold it. Maybe it was the accent, which sounded for real, but I had a feeling it was just Nick’s gift. And the proof was right there on Bailey’s face. She smiled and rolled her eyes. If any other guy had said that, she would’ve drilled him with a stare so cold his eyebrows would freeze.

For the next forty-five minutes, Bailey and I hovered as Nick worked on Otis’s laptop. Finally, he looked up and rubbed his face. “Other than that nasty photo of Logan, I’m not seeing anything suspicious. And I doubt he wiped anything. The kid didn’t even clear his search history. That’d be the least he’d do if he had anything to hide. I’ll take it deeper to make sure, but from what I’ve seen, if he wrote down any of his plans for the shooting he didn’t do it here.”

“Isn’t that kind of strange? I mean, wouldn’t you expect him to have something on his computer?” I asked.

“Back when not many folks knew how easy it was to find old emails and search trails I’d have agreed with you. But nowadays, everyone’s a lot smarter about that. Kids especially know there’s a good chance that anything they type can be found. Deleting don’t mean squat. So the long answer to your short question, ma’am, is no, I don’t think it’s strange. Not necessarily.”

I winced. “Nick, do you have to call me ‘ma’am’?”

“No, ma’-uh, no.” He smiled. “But why does that worry a pretty young thing like yourself?”

I tried not to smile back, I really did. But I could feel the grin spread across my face. And, of course, Graden chose that moment to walk out of his office, which was just ten feet from Bailey’s desk. There was no way he could’ve missed Nick’s flirty look, and I didn’t want to imagine what he could see in mine. “Hi!” I said, as I dialed up the wattage on my smile. “Nick’s checking out Otis’s laptop.”

Graden’s raised eyebrow said that wasn’t all Nick was checking out. “Anything?” he asked Nick.

Nick, smooth as glass, answered, “Not yet. Which means if there’s anything here, it’s buried pretty good.” He shook his head. “I’ll take this back to my office and keep working on it.”

Graden moved toward me and leaned in close. “How’ve you been?”

I shook my head. “Probably the same as you. And everybody else. Stressed. Angry. Frustrated. Sick.”

“You and Bailey going back to the Biltmore?” I nodded. “How about if I meet you there?”

“Sure,” I said.

Nick threw a glance at Graden and me as he finished packing up the laptop. It occurred to me that this was the first time Graden had acted like my boyfriend when we were at the station. I wondered if he was sending Nick a message. But Graden wouldn’t do that.

Would he?