“Do you know anyone who’s heavily into guns?” she asked. “Anyone who talks about going to the range a lot or about having a lot of military paraphernalia?” They didn’t.
She asked a few more gun questions, got more nos, and then asked whether they knew anyone who’d written about homicidal fantasies. When she again got a chorus of nos, I decided it was time to bring up Otis Barney and Carson James. I started by asking if any of them did the extracurricular team science project. I was betting Vincent, yes, the others, no. I was right. Sometimes, you just know.
“Did you get friendly with any of the other teams?” I asked.
“Some,” Vincent said. “Not a ton.”
“Did you ever hang with Otis and Carson?” I asked.
“No. They pretty much just did their own thing.”
“So they were tight?” I asked.
“I guess. I didn’t hear them argue or anything.”
I pressed on with a few more questions about Otis and Carson-and threw in a few about the other teams just for cover-but got nothing, so I had to let it go and move on. I played the recording of the weird laugh that Marnie had identified as Otis’s. “Do any of you recognize that laugh?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Vincent said.
Mark gave him a surprised look. “Dude, that totally sounds like Otis,” he said. He nudged Harrison. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Harrison said. “It does.”
“Vincent?” I asked. “You don’t think so?”
Vincent stretched his neck. “I guess, maybe. Yeah, probably.”
I guessed Vincent was nervous about tagging his classmate. The wonders of teen loyalty. I kept at it a little while longer, but just kept hitting dead ends, so I wrapped up by showing them the blowup of the tattoo on the shooter’s wrist. “Do any of you recognize this?”
They passed the photo around. Nada.
Four down, twenty nine hundred ninety-six students to go. We were cooking.
Dale Campbell had volunteered to set up the next batch of interviews. Based on our shrinks’ advice, Bailey asked him to make English class the top priority. He started with Otis’s current class. The teacher couldn’t make it. He had to fly back to Arizona to help his father, who’d suffered a heart attack. But Dale had managed to round up several students and even let us meet at his house.
As we pulled into his driveway, Bailey got a call from the unis working on Carson James. It was a brief call, and when she ended it she stared out the front window.
“And?” I said, impatient.
“No one answers the door or the phone at his house. When they called his cell it went straight to voice mail. None of the bodies at the morgue fit his description, and they haven’t found him at any of the hospitals so far.”
We exchanged a look. “I would say Carson James is looking good,” I said. “But I’m not going to because-”
“Yeah, don’t jinx us.”
Our hopes cautiously lifted, we got out and headed for Dale’s house. Nine students, four male, five female, had crowded into Dale’s family room. The parents had been relegated to the kitchen. They’d wanted to sit in with their kids, but there wasn’t room. These students didn’t look quite as shell-shocked. Did they feel more secure because it was a larger crowd? Or did they just not want to show how terrified they really were in front of the others? Even so, by no means did they look calm. The girls twirled their hair and hunched forward, some with arms wrapped around their bodies. The boys bounced their knees and cracked their knuckles.
They’d all been in the gym at the time of the shooting, but none had been able to see the shooters well enough to add to what we already knew. I moved on to the questions suggested by our shrinks. And got the same results as before: no, no, and no. I segued into Otis Barney. All they remembered was that he was pretty quiet and got real nervous when the teacher called on him. I played the snippet of footage with the shooter’s weird laugh. No one recognized it. We were getting nowhere. I tossed out one last question. “Do any of you happen to know Carson James?”
Nancy, a petite brunette in leggings and a long sweater that fetchingly exposed one shoulder, asked, “Is he kind of tall, has long, black, greasy hair?”
Bailey, who had pulled his school yearbook photo, said, “Yeah. You know him?”
“He sat behind me in my English lit class last year. He was always bitching about something. The other kids in the class, the homework, the teacher.” She shook her head. “What a loser-”
Carrie, who’d been groggy from taking antihistamines for her allergies, sat up. “Oh, is he the one who told you-”
“Yeah. One time, I asked him to keep it down and he told me to go fuck myself and said the next time I gave him shit, he’d shut me up forever.”
“Did you report that to anyone?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t take him that seriously. I thought he was just being an asshole.”
He was at least that. “Did he ever talk about guns? Or about shooting people?” I asked.
“He never said anything about guns,” Nancy said. “But he was always talking about how much he hated the school and how the kids were all loser assholes.”
“Who did he hang out with?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly go looking for him.”
Interesting that no one reported seeing Carson act like that in science class. I wondered what his project had been. If it was how to make a Molotov, that might explain his good behavior. All kidding aside, his project might’ve had some subtle connection to explosives. I made a mental note to check with Liam.
We kept at it for a while longer, but there was nothing more-from Nancy or any of the others.
I passed the tattoo photo around. Nobody recognized it.
Still, Bailey and I left Dale’s house feeling better than we had since we’d picked up the case.
When we got into the car, I looked at Bailey. “Okay, now I can say it: Carson James is looking good.”
“He is,” Bailey said. She pulled out her cell. “Let’s get ahold of Carson’s English teacher. See if we can get a few writing samples.”
We shared a grim smile.
15
A few phone calls later, Bailey had a meeting set for five thirty at the teacher’s house in Tarzana, which would give us just enough time to drive through a fast-food joint and pick up a very late lunch.
“Feel like Taco Bell?” Bailey asked.
“Always.”
“She had no trouble remembering Carson,” Bailey said.
“She say why?”
“No, but the way she said, ‘Oh, yes,’ I’ll bet it wasn’t because he volunteered to clap erasers,” Bailey said.
“No one does that anymore.”
“Whatever.”
“They use whiteboards now,” I said. Bailey shot me a look. “Just saying.”
We found a Taco Bell on Ventura Boulevard, and Bailey pulled into the parking lot so she could eat without getting it all over herself.
I savored a big, crunchy bite. “Taco Supreme-the best fast food has to offer.”
“There’s also In-N-Out-” Bailey’s cell phone buzzed. She answered it with a mouthful of taco. “Keller.” Her chewing slowed, then stopped as she listened. When she ended the call, she wadded up her taco wrapper and threw it against the dash. “Son of a bitch!”
“What?”
“They found Carson. He’s in a hospital out in Santa Clarita-”
“Why the hell is he all the way out there?” That was at least an hour away from the school.