The Competition

24

Wednesday morning, October 9

Morning, as usual, came too early for me. I had to fly through my shower and jump into the first thing I saw in my closet. Not Graden. Graden woke up at the crack of dawn as a matter of habit as well as choice. Probably his only obnoxious trait. When I went out to the living room, I found him reading the paper and drinking coffee.

He looked up and smiled. “Morning, sunshine. I don’t think you have time to order breakfast.”

“No.” I sighed, poured myself a large mug of coffee, and tried to slug down as much of it as possible.

He looked me over, noticing my outfit. “I take it you won’t need to be in court today.”

I was wearing black jeans and an ivory turtleneck sweater. “Nope. We’ll be out doing interviews, and I don’t want to freeze.”

Graden smirked. “Yeah, it could get down to sixty degrees. Better wear your snow boots.”

I threw my napkin at him, then walked over to the hall closet and pulled out my down puffer coat. Graden walked over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen, I need you to be very careful. Those kids are crazy-”

“No, not crazy. Personality disordered-”

“Whatever. Which makes them unpredictable. No one knows where or when they’ll surface. And remember, they still have guns.”

I opened my purse and pulled out my.38 Smith and Wesson. “But I’m a better shot, and I’m a little crazy myself.”

“A little.” Graden smiled and kissed me.

When I got downstairs, Bailey was parked at the front entrance and chatting with Angel. “Mind if we stop and get some coffee?” I said. I hadn’t had my two-cup daily dose.

Bailey pointed to a bag in the front passenger seat. “Got ya covered. Even brought bagels.”

I grabbed my coffee from the cup holder and took a sip, then rummaged through the bag. Coffee, bagels…even cream cheese? This kind of service I never got. Not from Bailey. “Okay, where’s the catch? What do you want?”

“Nothing. Friends buy friends breakfast, don’t they?”

“No.”

“But now that you mention it, we really should check in with Dorian. Let her know we didn’t preserve Otis’s laptop for her.”

See? “So let me get this straight. I’m supposed to incur the wrath of Dorian for a measly coffee and bagel?”

“And cream cheese. And there’s some jam in there too.”

I put in the call and got lucky: Dorian’s voice mail. I pumped a fist and gave Bailey a triumphant smile. Then I checked my own voice mail. There were fifty-seven messages. I listened to the first one. The producer of channel nine news was asking for comment on the search at the Jarvis residence. The next four were the same. I didn’t bother to listen to the rest, or wonder how the press got my cell phone number. They’d gotten it during the Antonovich case too. I made a mental note to change my number. Again. Northbound traffic wasn’t bad. By ten to eight, Bailey was pulling into the faculty parking lot at Robert S. Taft High School. Located on Ventura Boulevard-the busiest thoroughfare in the Valley-Taft wasn’t as big or as fancy as Fairmont High. It had that ’60s square-box, plain-wrap look. Also unlike Fairmont, it wasn’t an enclosed building. It was your typical Southern California school, with classrooms accessible from outdoor hallways.

A secretary directed us to the classroom that had been set aside for our interviews. The door had been propped open, and the room was downright frosty. Even Bailey rubbed her hands together and zipped up her jacket. The other problem was that the only furniture in the room was a few desks. The kind that are attached to chairs. If we sat at those desks, it would put a physical barrier between us and the students. We needed the kids to relax and open up.

“I guess we could sit on the floor, hippie-style,” I said.

Bailey shook her head. “A little too casual. We need to maintain some authority.” She pulled a couple of desk-chairs to the front of the room and sat on the desk. I followed suit.

Seconds later, a teenage boy with shoulder-length blonde hair poked his head in through the open doorway. “Are you the cop-I mean, officers we’re supposed to talk to?”

Bailey put on her warm interview smile and gestured for him to come in. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

He slid into the chair facing us and stretched out his legs. They stuck out past the edge of the desk by about a foot. His name was Kenny Epstein, and he’d known Logan since junior high. I asked if they were good friends.

Kenny shrugged. “We weren’t super close or anything, but we were friendly. We’d shoot the shit-uh, sorry.”

I waved him off. Yo, me and Bailey, we were the cool cops.

Kenny gave a nervous smile and continued. “Logan was always the smartest guy in the room. A real brainiac. But not a nerd or anything. Pretty much everyone liked him-”

“Would you say he was popular?” I asked.

Kenny tossed his head, flicked back his overgrown bangs. “He didn’t party a lot or anything. He wasn’t Joe Social. He was kind of the quiet type, you know? But he was a good guy.”

“Did you ever hear of him getting bullied or pushed around by the jocks?” Bailey asked.

“Logan? Nah.”

“Do you know Otis Barney?” I continued.

“Pasty little dude?”

Pasty. I pictured the face I’d seen in photographs in the Barney house. I guess he was sort of pale. “Yeah. A little bit shorter than you, medium build. Curly brown hair.”

“Yeah. Not real well, but I remember seeing him around.” Kenny paused and frowned. “You asked about bullying. I think that guy got knocked around by some punk on the football team. And I heard someone once threw his books in the toilet.” Kenny shook his head disapprovingly. “I don’t get shit like that. He never bothered anybody, so why mess with him?”

“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“No clue. Like I said, I didn’t really know Otis. Just saw him around school.”

“What about Logan? When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week ago?” Kenny dropped his gaze to the floor.

“Not since the shooting?” I asked.

Kenny shook his head. “But there’s lots of kids I haven’t seen since…” His eyes slid away, and a long moment passed as Bailey and I gave him a chance to recover. Then he looked at me with worried eyes. “I heard you guys are saying Logan’s one of the shooters. Is Otis the other one?”

Bailey gave him her poker face. “We’re just looking into everyone who hasn’t been accounted for.”

Kenny sat up in his chair and folded his arms. “I don’t know about that Barney guy, but Logan couldn’t have done it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because…Logan never got mad…at anybody. Never talked shit about anybody or anything. It just makes no sense.”

I asked him the standard shrink questions: did he know anyone who did “talk shit” about wanting to kill people or feeling persecuted? Kenny didn’t. Just the usual “my ‘fill in the blank’ sucks.”

“Did you know Logan’s brother, Luke?”

Kenny’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t even know he had a brother.”

“Do you know who hung out with Logan?”

“Darnell, Leo, I think Caleb.” Kenny shrugged. “That’s all I can think of.”

“So not Otis?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

I got the last names and descriptions of the friends he’d mentioned and then had him tell me what he remembered of the shooting.

“I, like, dived under my seat.” He described the gunfire, the remark one of the shooters had made about jocks, the horror of it all, but he had nothing new.

The next few interviews got us more of the same: Logan was a great guy, never got bullied that anyone knew of, and had never had a problem with jocks-or anyone else. A couple of others confirmed the tattoo and that it was a recent acquisition-within the past month or two.

They also confirmed that Otis was a strange guy who did get bounced around by at least one of the football jocks-Bryan Scofield-but Otis had never seemed like the violent type. I probed to find some connection between Otis and Logan, but no one had any recollection of seeing them together. At least not until we got to Caleb.

If anyone still wore a pocket protector, Caleb would be that guy. He was on the short side, but even so, his pants were floods. He had wavy hair that refused to stay in its side part and constantly fell into his eyes, and black-framed glasses. He’d known Logan since third grade and they’d bonded over their mutual love of math. This I could not relate to. Math was the reason I chose law school-lots of reading, no numbers. In spite of that, Caleb was a nice kid. Shy, quiet, but not abnormally so. Predictably, he was a Logan fan. But he’d also seen some dark spots on the halo of St. Logan.

“Back in junior high we studied together and stuff. But by around our sophomore year at Fairmont he got kind of…moody. Sometimes he’d just pop off at me for no reason.”

“Did he ever get violent? Hit you?” I asked.

“No, no. Nothing like that. He’d just be…upset.”

“About?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular. At least not that I could tell. He’d just get withdrawn and…down.”

It sounded like depression. But it also sounded like typical teen hormones and angst. “Do you know Otis Barney?” I asked.

Caleb wrinkled his nose and pushed his bangs back. “Yeah.”

“And?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing really. Just that he’s kind of weird.” Caleb made a face. “And kind of pathetic. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago. Logan and I were talking in the parking lot. He walked up and just interrupted us. Started telling Logan they had to get going. He acted like I wasn’t even there.”

“Did Logan say anything to him?” I asked. “Get mad?”

“No. Just told him to wait a sec.”

“But you never knew them to be friendly before?” I asked.

“Well, like I said, I didn’t see all that much of Logan recently, so they could’ve gotten to be buds without me knowing about it.”

“Was that your only contact with Otis?” I asked.

“Pretty much. Other than seeing him around school.”

We kept at it for another ten minutes or so, but didn’t get anything more. Still, we’d found another link between Otis and Logan. Progress.

Bailey glanced at her watch, then looked outside. “We’ve got three more kids out there. We can either tell them to come back and get lunch or power through.”

“I vote we power through.” After our mini-breakthrough with Caleb, I hoped we were on a roll.