The next day, Friday, February 8, he writes a check to himself for cash: $4,600, then changes that to $4,601. It might not track that way. He buys stamps for the packages he’s planning. He talks with Katie and finally gets her address in Seymour, Illinois. He arrives that night wearing his dark stocking cap. She’s lit candles. He’s brought cash. He doesn’t feel like talking. They have sex, and afterward, he tells her he’s going out of town.
He calls Elyse afterward, after midnight, calls Megan at 2:48 a.m. Does he meet both of them for sex? Has he been with three women that night? Has he also been with Jessica?
On Sunday, February 10, four days before the shooting, Steve talks with his father on the phone. He talks with his godfather, also, makes plans for the next weekend. He’ll visit. They’ll play chess. But this is just a cover, a lie. He needs an alibi. He tells Jessica he’s leaving tomorrow, Monday, to visit his godfather for the week, because his godfather’s health is poor.
He meets again with Megan that night at Walgreen’s. He drives behind a hotel and they do it in the car again. They’re back and forth eighteen times on the phone that night, dirty talk, and Steve also calls Elyse, which Megan doesn’t know about. Something about the secrecy is exciting. No one knows what he’s up to. He’s free to do whatever he wants, like Nietzsche’s superman. Except that he feels like shit, hates himself, is ashamed, has diarrhea, has to check five times that the car door is locked. He wants to die. He can’t sleep. Sends an email to Kelly, jokes “Hey, isn’t it black history month, and shouldn’t you be out celebrating?;-) For my celebration, I’m watching Beverly Hills Cop 2 on Spike TV while I doze off.”
In the morning, about 10:00 a.m., he tells Jessica not to go to work. “Just stay. Just hang out with me today.”
“I have to go to work,” she says. She doesn’t know, and he can’t tell her. If she knew this was the last time they’d be together, she’d stay.
“You can write a book about me someday,” he says.
“Why would I want to write a book about you?” she asks.
“I can be your case study,” he says.
And then she’s gone. He’ll never see her again. Does he cry? She was his confessor. At Thanksgiving, he showed her all his mental health records before destroying them, insisted she read them. He told her about Craigslist. There was a time when he wanted her to know everything, but not now.
In their apartment, he saws off the barrel of the shotgun with a hacksaw. The guitar case, the hacksaw, the two new pistols, the extra magazines and holsters — he’s hidden these things from her. He duct-tapes half of the inside of the guitar case, black tape — a riddle the police will never figure out. He puts the Remington 12-gauge inside, loaded. Picks up the case and it’s not too heavy. It’s strong. It’ll work fine. He leaves his old shotgun in the closet. It’s for skeet or birds, not designed for killing people, not a pump.
He’s bought longer ammo clips for the pistols. They hold thirty-three rounds each. He won’t have to reload. But the problem is they’re so long, he’ll have to carry the pistols in his hands. He won’t be able to use the holsters and hide everything under his coat. And he wants to use the shotgun first, to create confusion. And for theatrical effect. That’s Mark’s theory from their discussions about Columbine. “Personally, myself, I was very infatuated with Columbine,” Mark says, “just because of the whole process of how people did it, how they pulled it off, all that stuff. It’s more of a curiosity for me. Me and Steve have talked about it.” The word “infatuated” is interesting in relation to a mass murder. Is killing people sexy? Do we fall in love with mass murderers?
Steve leaves the long clips, leaves a lot of the extra ammo, too. He’s not going to have more than a couple minutes. After Virginia Tech, the police will come quickly. They’re not going to fuck up like that again and let someone walk around from place to place for hours.
He makes his bed, crisp, walks out to the kitchen to check again that he’s paid all of their bills ahead of time. He doesn’t want to leave Jessica with any problems. He walks back to his room and gathers everything. Puts the pistols and ammo in a duffel bag.
Does he pause and look at the Billy the Puppet mask again? Or the small doll, or the framed poster above his bed? Does he think about what he’s doing? Or does he just do it, using his OCD to move through the actions, checking everything three times?
He leaves in the afternoon, drives almost three hours to DeKalb, past farmland covered in snow, checks in to the Best Western Hotel at 6:44 p.m. Uses his Chase VISA and goes to his room, 134, then calls the front desk on his cell phone after five minutes and checks out ten minutes later, at 7:00 p.m. He drives to the Travelodge. Maybe the VISA was the problem. He shouldn’t have used a credit card. He could be tracked.
The Travelodge has a big black tarp out front covering the empty pool. Some kind of construction nightmare with chain-link fence all around. The place is a dump. The manager, “Matt,” is a pothead, red eyes, impaired, slow to understand, slow to speak. Steve pays cash for his room. No records.
Perhaps he grabs something to eat, paying cash again. Back in his room, he sends Kelly his email about the Manson concert. She’s written, “For my Black History Month celebration I plan to get a bucket of extra crispy chicken and a 2 liter of strawberry soda and have an In Living Color marathon.” So he starts off his email with “Don’t forget the watermelon! Sorry to hear about your sucky day, but things will get better! Right now I’m watching MSNBC and listening to Coma White.” This is her favorite Marilyn Manson song. He tells her he’s going to close his email account because of spam, asks her to call him later.
He erases everything in his email account and closes it. Jessica tries to email him and it bounces, so she calls him. It’s a short conversation, seven and a half minutes, at 9:56 p.m. “He told me how sorry he was for all the times he had hurt me and made me cry and that I should find someone better,” Jessica tells Mark later. “No matter how many times I told him that I loved him and how great he was, he never thought he was good enough.” Steve also tells her, “I’m sorry things did not turn out differently for us. Thank you for not holding anything against me. I appreciate what you have done for me. I love you.” He never says “I love you,” so she thinks this is odd. She thinks he’s getting depressed.
Steve has a call waiting from Kelly, so he hangs up on Jessica and talks with Kelly for half an hour. He tells her it was a bad idea living with an ex-girlfriend, because Jessica gets jealous when he talks with other women. They talk about the Manson concert, and he wishes she could have been there, but it would have been uncomfortable because of Jessica. He tells her he talked with and visited his godfather. He doesn’t tell her he’s in DeKalb. She asks what he’s doing for Valentine’s Day, and he says he isn’t going to be around. He also says he wishes he’d met her before things “got so fucked up.”
Steve talks with Jessica several more times that night, until midnight, and then he can’t sleep. His usual thing, lying awake from midnight to 3:00 a.m. He gets up and sends Kelly an email at 3:23 a.m., telling her to call if she wants to talk, because he’s cancelling this email account, too.