But what if you were the first guy? Lenhardt had wondered. What if you were there alone, outside a school, all by yourself? How could you wait for the others to show up? He didn’t think he would. He was no cowboy, but if the point was to get in as quickly as possible, then what was so magical about the number four? If he got there first, he didn’t think he’d wait for three others. One, maybe, as backup, but even that would be hard.
For now the question of how he would respond would remain moot. Lenhardt and his partner, Kevin Infante, had arrived at Glendale this morning forty minutes after the 911 call came in, summoned only once the first four officers had determined that there was, in fact, a homicide to investigate. The two wounded girls had been carted away, too, adding to Lenhardt’s frustration. There were things to be done, opportunities to be seized, even in seemingly straightforward shootings such as this one, with a suspect already identified. And while even a seasoned homicide cop couldn’t keep a scene pristine when paramedics were running around and victims had to be transported, Lenhardt and Infante might have been a little more vigilant.
“I just wish we had gotten here sooner,” he told Infante, and not for the first time.
“It’s a pendulum like anything else. It’s only a matter of time before a cop gets killed doing it this way, and then they’ll reinvent the wheel, go back to SWAT teams.”
Lenhardt was studying an odd blood trail that seemed to lead to the door. That should make sense-the wounded girls could have bled on the way out, even with paramedics in attendance, and these drops would then be smeared by people running back and forth.
“The theory is they lack focus, these young shooters. Attention deficit disorder, you know? They get a gun, they come to school, they spray some bullets around, and then their attention wanders. I bet if you checked, you’d find the typical high-school shooter doesn’t do well on the verbal section of the SAT.”
“What?” Infante was staring so hard at a stain in the corner that nothing could pierce his concentration. As Infante’s sergeant, Lenhardt had always admired the younger man’s single-minded approach to the job. As his temporary partner, however, Lenhardt was finding Infante’s one-track mind a bit of a drag. It killed a joke, having to repeat it.
“Never mind.”
Of the two girls taken alive from this bathroom, only one of them, a girl with a bullet lodged in her right foot, would be of any immediate help to the detectives. The other survivor, believed to be the shooter, had lost a part of her face, as Lenhardt heard it, and although Shock Trauma might save her life, it was less clear what else could be salvaged-her jaw, her teeth, her brain. Much of the blood around them was undoubtedly hers. She had leaked a lot in the twenty minutes or so before she was transported.
The dead girl, who was still here with them, had died swiftly, from an almost freakishly precise gunshot wound to the chest, maybe straight to the heart, so there was very little of her blood. Was this marksmanship the result of luck or skill? It didn’t jibe with Lenhardt’s knowledge of Glendale -upper middle class, liberal. But then there were still pockets of farms in the area, rural families with old-fashioned values. A girl raised in such circumstances might be comfortable with a gun. If she knew how to use a gun, however, and had always planned to use it on herself, why had she fired into her cheekbone instead of her temple? And why shoot the other girl at all?
One thing he was willing to bet on: The dead girl, the one on the floor, wasn’t the kind who knew anything about guns. She was a girly-girl, all in pink-pink sandals with cloth roses where the thong nestled between the big and second toes, pale pink pants, and a pale pink polo.
Lenhardt had the digital camera, one outfitted with software that made their photos impossible to alter. Infante was using the backup 35-millimeter because you wouldn’t want to hang a murder investigation on something as temperamental as a computer. Clumsily-he still wasn’t comfortable with the little Canon-he paged through the photos he had taken, looking at the blood, the scene, trying to find the story there. Something was off, but he couldn’t say what exactly. He walked over to the windows, the better to see his photos in the diffused light they allowed in, then looked back at the floor. It was such a gray room-gray tile floors, gray stalls, gray walls, a long gray shelf above three white sinks. The only color in the room, aside from the blood and the dead girl, was an uncapped lipstick standing on the ledge, pink and moist. Lenhardt gestured toward it, and Infante bagged it.
“Aren’t we meticulous,” he said. “It’s not exactly a fuckin’ whodunit.”
“No, it’s not a whodunit. But it has the potential to be a gigantic pain in the ass.”
“You can say that again. She was pretty, wasn’t she?”
“Pretty in pink.”
Neither one mentioned her body, although they might have if she had been a little older. She had a notable shape, with large, round breasts straining against the polo shirt, so much tighter and shorter than the polos Lenhardt remembered from the last time this preppy look was the rage. Not that the prep look ever went out of style in Baltimore. His daughter had wanted a shirt like this for Christmas, one with the little alligator, and he had almost fainted when he saw the seventy-dollar price tag. He was happy to spend seventy dollars on Jessica, but not for a polo shirt. “Dad,” she had whined, “it’s a limited edition.” How in the hell could a shirt be a limited edition? Had this girl’s parents balked at such an expense? No, a Glendale girl probably had a closetful of such shirts.
Her skin was pale, getting paler by the minute, but roses had probably bloomed in those cheeks, the round kind that grandparents pinched. Assuming she had grandparents. So many kids didn’t nowadays, as people started families later and later. His kids, Jason and Jessica, had never really known Lenhardt’s parents, although Marcia’s were still alive and very doting.
“Remember Woodlawn?”
The question would have seemed a non sequitur to anyone else. “Woodlawn” was shorthand for a murder they had worked late last year, in which four members of a drug gang were killed by a competitor. It had been a particularly nasty scene-torture marks on all the bodies, the floor slick with blood-and their work on the case had been nothing less than inspired. It had taken them six months to identify a suspect and make an arrest, working with nothing more than a fingerprint on the cellophane from a cigarette pack. But when they made the case, it did wonders for the department’s clearance rate. After all, four murders were one-eighth of the county’s annual caseload.