Authors: Maxime Chattam
Lamar emerged from the underground room, breathing out heavily.
He took out his cell phone and called Doris.
‘I found him,’ he said as soon as she picked up. ‘He’s put a bullet through his chin. His brain’s stuck to the ceiling.’
A few minutes later, the park had been cordoned off and the forensics team was bringing the corpse up in a black body bag.
Lamar found Doris standing to one side, away from the scrum of ambulances and journalists.
‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘Nothing concrete yet, just a kid who says it might be a guy named Mike Simmons. He recognised what the gunman was wearing, especially the black parka. But he couldn’t formally identify him.’
Lamar rubbed his face vigorously with his huge hands.
‘What’s going on, Lamar? Three high schools in three weeks. Three kids losing it, mowing down their classmates and then putting a bullet through their own brain. Don’t you find that alarming? Why do you think it is? Too many video games?’
‘No,’ he said, without explanation.
Doris held her notebook and pen in front of her. Her blonde fringe was blowing about in the wind. Lamar noticed she had eye make-up on, but her lipstick had worn off. She was so little. Tiny.
‘Well, what then?’ she pressed him.
Lamar fixed his dark eyes on his partner.
‘I think there’s a link between all these kids. Between the killers, I mean.’
Doris frowned.
‘Before I came back up, I checked out the weapon the kid used,’ he said, looking over at the body bag. ‘The serial number has been removed in exactly the same way as in the other attacks.’
‘Lamar, you shouldn’t have touched—’
‘Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I’m telling you we won’t find any more on that one than we have on the others.’
He bit his lip nervously.
‘Something doesn’t add up,’ he said after a pause.
‘What are you thinking? That these three guys knew each other?’
‘I don’t know yet; we’ll have to work that out. All I know is, if it carries on like this, we’ve got less than a week before the next massacre.’
Before he walked away, Doris placed her hand on her colleague’s sleeve.
‘But you don’t think this is … some kind of epidemic.’
‘That’s not what I’d call it. But what scares me is this might not be the end of it.’
‘But how can it carry on? I mean, they’re killing themselves every time.’
‘It’s just a feeling I’ve got. Now, I’d like you to carry out some enquiries here. Can you ask the students if they knew about this underground room? Push them a bit; I want them to talk.’
‘And what’ll you do?’
‘Try to understand. Try to see how three teenagers without a record, without any real history of troublemaking, could get hold of weapons which all seem to have passed through the same hands. Before going out and gunning down their buddies on a clear fall morning.’
Lamar started his Pontiac, his cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder.
‘Doug, could you do something for me?’ he asked. ‘Get me the names of everyone who’s known for handling firearms, fixing them up, selling them on, everything you’ve got. Call the Firearms Department if you need to. And if you find anyone with a background of mental health problems, would you put those on the top of the pile? I’ll owe you, Doug.’
Douglas’s gravelly voice came back down the line, made hoarse by the cigarette smoke that permanently wreathed his lips.
‘This for the high-school shooting? You got a lead?’
‘Until we have one, I want to be sure we’ve gone down every possible route. Let’s keep in touch.’
Lamar hung up and turned down Clinton Street. Doris’s idea of some kind of teen epidemic of murderous madness seemed out of the question. There was no rational basis for it.
Yet the short space of time between each attack, the clean records of all the perpetrators and the similarities in the weapons used did suggest a possible link. The idea of a connection was daring, certainly, but not outlandish.
Someone was working in the background. Someone
who could get hold of an untraceable gun. Someone with a knack for manipulating impressionable boys.
Lamar’s first instinct had been to think of a youth worker, or a teacher. Someone in regular contact with teenagers, who knew how to talk to them and take them under their wing. But now he wasn’t so sure. Convincing a teenage boy to open fire on his classmates before turning the gun on himself was a seriously twisted act – and not easy to accomplish. It would have to be someone with extraordinary powers of persuasion and charisma, willing to use whatever methods were necessary. In short, this person had to be one of a kind. Who could have pulled it off? Three times in a row!
Maybe Lamar’s theory didn’t stand up after all. But he couldn’t quite brush it aside. There had to be a link between these three suicidal kids. Just the guns, all made unidentifiable in the same way, were proof enough. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.
Lamar knew that real life was a long way from fiction or TV shows. Most people didn’t go to that much trouble to cover up their crimes. Very few of them knew that the police could glean a mass of information from a firearm and that it could lead them back to its last owner. A firearm is made and registered under its serial number and, when it’s sold, its owner becomes associated with that number. If this person sells it on, the new owner is in turn put on file, and so on. In the majority of cases, once the weapon is found, it leads straight to its owner. If it wasn’t the owner
who committed the crime, if he lent the gun to someone or sold it on illegally, rigorous questioning will usually dig up enough information to work out who had it last.
The most seasoned, well-organised criminals have seen all these police techniques before. Consequently, they buy their guns legitimately – contrary to popular belief, it’s easy to buy a gun in the USA but less easy to get your hands on one illegally, and, if you do, there’s always the chance you’ll get shopped for it – and try to get rid of the serial number by filing or hammering it off. But forensic techniques can usually uncover traces of the engraving and reveal the precious number.
All this helped Lamar to make one significant deduction: the man or woman who had supplied the guns to the youngsters was a real veteran of crime who’d seen it all and kept their hand in. There was no doubt they would be known to the police, probably for trafficking firearms.
The name of this person must be buried somewhere in the police files – the person responsible for this carnage, or the person who could at least lead Lamar to whoever was responsible.
Lamar came back onto First Avenue and passed the UN tower, heading north towards Harlem.
He got his phone out again to call Professor Gavensoort.
‘Professor,’ he began, ‘it’s Lieutenant Gallineo. I wanted to ask you something. There were fingerprints on
the weapon. Did you manage to lift them off?’
‘Yes, Lieutenant. Nothing out of the ordinary there; in both cases the fingerprints were those of the gunman. Which you’d know already if you’d looked at my report.’
‘Thank you. Just wanted to check.’
He hung up abruptly to spare himself further comment from the professor.
They had nothing to go on.
Three killers who’d killed themselves.
And a link between them: their weapons.
Lamar gripped the steering wheel.
They had to act quickly – he knew it.
They had to find a lead and work out what was really going on in the background, behind these child assassins.
Because Lamar was willing to bet things were not at all as they seemed.
A dark secret hovered in the shadows.
East Harlem Academy had reopened its doors, the yard and lino floors of the crime scene once again trampled under its students’ feet. Walking towards the entrance during the lunch break, Lamar was surprised to see smiles and laughter on these young faces. In adolescence, every day is a new dawn, not connected to what’s gone before. It occurred to Lamar that in adulthood we look back over our lives as a timeline punctuated with big events, whereas in childhood time is grasped in fragments, compartmentalised. It was making this transition that brought you to the age of reason.
Lamar veered off to the right in the hallway, towards the janitor’s room. A tall, gruff man in his forties, the janitor’s hair was cut so short he looked bald from a distance. Lamar had noticed this the first time he’d seen him, barely three weeks earlier. The janitor stood up so straight you’d think he’d just come out of the army.
‘Hello …’
Lamar wagged his finger and screwed up his eyes while trying to remember his name.
‘Quincey. Frank Quincey. What can I do for you, Detective?’
‘Do you know the kids pretty well? You’re here all the time …’
Quincey pulled a face.
‘Well, I guess I end up knowing more or less which one’s which. Why d’you ask?’
‘Russell Rod, the gunman. Know which one he was?’
‘Oh, him, yeah. Seemed nice enough. You know, they’re not bad kids here. Lots of ’em come to see me when they’re bored during recess. Don’t tell Principal McLogan, but every now and again they ask me for a cigarette. I try not to give them any, but when they’re really polite it’s hard to say no.’
‘How d’you mean, “really polite”?’
‘Oh, you know, they take time to chat, say hi when they walk past. A lot of people just see the janitor as the guy in the blue coat who keeps the building nice, like some kind of ghost. But some of them are really good kids. They even get me chocolates at Christmas!’
‘And what about Russell?’
‘Well, he kept himself to himself. Didn’t pick fights. Always wore heavy-metal-band T-shirts, with camouflage pants. Tell the truth, I don’t really know what he got up to
– he wasn’t the type to hang out in groups, preferred being on his own. But he never gave me any trouble. No scuffles, no graffiti, none of that stuff.’
Lamar scratched his chin, thinking. What he knew of teen killers fitted pretty well with this picture. Loners, often with no history of trouble. They build up steam like a pressure cooker, and then they explode.
‘Didn’t he have any friends here?’ the lieutenant continued.
‘Not that I know of, but then I’m not watching them the whole goddamn day! I only noticed Russell because he often used to sit on his own with his headphones on. I even went over to speak to him a few times, but he wasn’t much of a talker.’
A shadow appeared on the floor of the little room.
Allistair McLogan was standing in the doorway.
‘Detective?’ he said with surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’
Lamar raised his eyebrows.
‘My job.’
‘Yes, I can see that. Well, from now on, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop by my office before interrogating my staff.’
Lamar bristled, more annoyed by the principal’s
haughty tone than his throwing his weight around.
‘And why’s that? Do you need to “brief ” the whole place before I get here?’
McLogan shook his head fiercely.
‘Of course not, but I do like to know what’s going on under my roof. So, have you made any progress with the investigation?’
Lamar dodged the question. ‘It’s coming along. Since I’ve got you here, what can you tell me about Russell Rod?’
McLogan’s grey moustache twitched.
‘Nothing more than I’ve already told you. A well-behaved boy. Very rarely in my office and never for anything serious. I’ll say it again: there was nothing unbalanced about Russell Rod. No one could have predicted what happened. Have you spoken to his parents?’
‘A colleague of mine has.’
‘Well, perhaps you’d better go see them yourself. They’ll tell you the same thing: a perfectly normal kid. I don’t know what got into him.’
Lamar took a business card out of his wallet and put it down on Quincey’s desk.
‘If you think of anything at all …’ he added.
The principal wanted to see him out, but Lamar declined with a determined smile. As he walked back to his car, the air was getting icier. It wouldn’t be long before the first snow fell.
Lamar had to admit he wasn’t keen on this McLogan. The distraught white-haired man of the day of the massacre had given way to an inquisitor who wanted to rule his school as if it were his kingdom. But he was only trying to protect himself, concluded the lieutenant, which was entirely understandable. The media had laid into him as ‘the principal who hadn’t seen the threat coming’.
Lamar went back to his office to pore through the files on illegal arms dealers that had been put aside for him.
Since criminal cases were now all logged digitally, he could easily get hold of more detailed reports. He looked into the methods used by the best-known dealers in stolen goods. The first few hours of reading drew a blank.
Late in the afternoon, a note from the Firearms Department came in. It listed a dozen names of individuals known to have used a blowtorch to remove serial numbers from firearms.
Lamar spent the next three hours ‘placing’ these suspects.
Six of them were still in prison. Four had no permanent residence and of the last two, one had been dead a year and a half, and the other had left the state for Florida six months earlier.
Lamar let out a long sigh.
He went home around ten for a night of dreamless sleep, and was one of the first back in the office the next day. He caught up with Capparel in the late morning. The three suicides had been confirmed. Detectives had interviewed the parents, blended families or single mothers in all three cases. They had turned the kids’ bedrooms upside down.
There was no link.
Lamar pressed Capparel on the similarities in the weapons used, adamant it was too much of a coincidence to be just that. Capparel paused for a moment, before giving Lamar the go-ahead to dig deeper in that direction.
The giant, as his partners called him, was heading out for lunch when he passed Doris in the corridor.
‘Oh good, I was looking for you,’ she said. ‘I’m going to give this to Capparel. I’ve made you a copy. It’s my report on the students I spoke to yesterday.’
‘So what came out of it?’
‘Not much, although a lot of them knew about that underground room. They hid down there to smoke – marijuana, most likely. The gunman’s body has been identified, and it’s who we thought, Michael Simmons. One of the kids recognised him by what he was wearing.’
‘Anything else?’
‘That’s all for now.’
Lamar nodded gloomily. Things were not moving along as quickly as he would have liked.
Doris invited him to join her for lunch, and the two of them went down to eat a bowl of pasta at the little restaurant across the road. Lamar talked about the investigation. Doris talked about her date the previous night. Each was engrossed in their own subject.
They left the restaurant at around one o’clock. Lamar was about to cross the road when his cell phone rang. It was Gavensoort.
‘Lieutenant, I’ve got something for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘Come right away – this is big.’
‘Well, tell me then!’
‘I’m telling you, come over here and I’ll show you. I think you’ll be pleased …’
Lamar hung up, shaking his head.
The first snowflakes began to fall.