The Competition (23 page)

Bailey escorted Michael
to the elevator, and I waited for her in the interview room, thinking about what he had said.

“It is weird that Shane would go along for the ride and let this kid call the shots,” I said.

“Yeah, it is. But we don’t know that he is. It might be more mutual than that. Shane’s had a tough life. There’s a lot we don’t know and may never know. But even if Logan is calling the shots, it wouldn’t be the first time a younger, smarter perp winds up being the ringleader.”

How could anyone predict what might happen when two complementary psychos connect? It’s crazy to think there could be any concrete rules about anything, let alone which one might be the leader and which the follower. “Have we heard back from Harrellson yet about the Shane sighting up north?”

“So far, no dice. At least no credible dice. And our media relations guy is laughing his head off at how the press is getting a dose of his world. The reporters have been complaining to him about all the wing nuts phoning in their sightings. Mostly of Logan, but some of Shane too. He told them to cry him a river.” Bailey shook her head, with a little smile.

“But bottom line, no new information on Shane?”

“No,” Bailey said. “He’s not using credit cards, and I’d guess he’s switched cars by now since the Jetta hasn’t been spotted again. But we don’t have any more stolen reports we can tie to Shane.”

The blue Jetta had been reported stolen, but we hadn’t connected it to Shane until after our tipster spotted him at the gas station. Now, we had alerts for Los Angeles County and all points north on any cars reported stolen in the past five days.

“Tell you what,” Bailey said. “You call Dorian, see if she’s got anything else on Evan’s room. I’ll check on the security setup for Platt Junior High.”

I shot her a dagger look. “I can make the calls about security.”

“No, you can’t.” Bailey gave me a smug little smile.

She was right, I couldn’t. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t deliberately set me up to take the brunt of Dorian’s wrath. We bought snacks from the vending machine. I got a disgustingly healthy apple; Bailey got Doritos.

While Bailey worked her phone, I pulled out a swivel chair next to her desk, ate her chips, and punched in Dorian’s number on my cell.

“Yeah, what?” Dorian said.

“Hey, Dorian, it’s Rachel Knight. I was just calling to find out—”

“Whether I’ve got money on the Raiders’ game, right? I do not.” Dorian’s funny side showed up at the most unexpected times. “I can’t say the shoe prints I found near the house were left that night. They might’ve been, but there was dirt in the impression, so they could’ve been there from the day before. Bottom line: I can’t rule out the possibility that Evan was abducted, but my very educated guess is that there was no foul play here. The kid rabbited on us.”

“No hairs or fibers to work with?”

“So far, everything comes back to Evan or his mother.”

My line beeped with a call waiting. I signed off with Dorian and took it.

It was Graden. “Hey, what’s up?” I asked.

“We’ve got another letter.”

I felt the apple travel back up to my throat. I took a deep breath to force it back down. “At the school?”

“Yeah. The bomb guys are already on their way out there. Assuming it clears, we’ll have it in my office within the hour.”

“Call me when it gets there.”

He smiled.
It
made him happy to see the line of people waiting for the seven o’clock showing of
Hail of Metal.
They’d been right to pick a Saturday night at the Cinemark in Woodland Hills. No matter how crappy the movie, the idiots always had to have their “date night.” The place would be packed to capacity. A pimply young man dressed in a black shirt and trousers opened the doors, and the line slowly filed into the theater. Pathetic sheep.

It was hard to wait. The digital clock in the dashboard felt torturously slow. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. One minute crawled by. Then another. Then another. Finally, it was time.

Moving quickly up to the doors past the usher, then moving slowly, with deliberate nonchalance, into the theater. The clock above the concession stand read 7:15. Perfect. They’d planned it all so well. The movie would start any minute. This was it. Go, go, go! Up the staircase. Down the hall. To the door on the right.

Knuckles rapped hard, with authority, on the door of the projection booth.

A voice from inside the booth called out, “Who’s there?”

You’ll see, dickweed. “The manager. It’s important. Open up.”

The door opened just a crack. It was enough. Slam! The door flew back, throwing the projectionist to the ground. The knife plunged into his gut, right up to the hilt. He exhaled with a grunt. The knife plunged again, this time straight into his throat. Gurgling, choking sounds bubbled out of the projectionist’s mouth. It would’ve been fun to watch, but there was no time.

Ready.

Two assault rifles, locked and loaded, poked through the window to the theater.

Aim.

As the lights dimmed, the guns tipped down toward the audience. One shifted to the right, the other to the left.

The opening scene—a four-car pursuit—began to play. The sound track blasted the screech of tires, the clash of metal on metal as the cars careered through tight city streets, slamming into walls, parked cars, and mailboxes.

Finally, the cue: a long hail of bullets.

Fire!

The projection booth filled with manic laughter and gunshots.
Blam! Blam! Blam!

Down in the theater below, people began to scream.

Graden had the
letter brought into his office, so we gathered there. Nick had asked to be included in the meeting because he’d helped trace the postmark on the last letter. Once again, there were two envelopes. I put on latex gloves and took the folded paper out of the evidence box with shaking hands. Bailey and Nick read over my shoulder.

“So this is the guy who supposedly wrote eloquent poetry?” Bailey said.

“Not exactly Keats,” I agreed. “But he’s not aiming for an A in English.”

“How did he find out that we know Otis is dead?” Graden asked. “I don’t remember releasing that information—”

“You didn’t,” Bailey said. “He screwed up. He thinks he’s digging on his own private joke, making fun of us for calling Otis a ‘person of interest.’”

“Laughing at how we fell for the decoy,” I said. “Back when we first found out Otis was dead, we hit on the possibility that they deliberately framed Otis to throw us off. That the second shooter might’ve deliberately mimicked Otis’s laugh.”

“But we weren’t sure Otis wasn’t in on it, so we kept looking for more evidence to link him to the shooting,” Bailey said. “We’ve found nothing. All we have is what we started with: the weird laugh and Logan’s photograph on Otis’s computer.”

“So we figured they probably did set Otis up as a decoy—” I said.

“And this letter proves it,” Bailey said. “I’d bet Shane—or whoever the second shooter is—sent that photo the night before the shooting to frame Otis.”

“So the second shooter screwed over his buddy, Logan?” Nick asked. “’Cause that photo dumps Logan out big-time.”

“I thought so too at first,” I said. “But actually, it doesn’t. So what if Logan’s holding a gun? We couldn’t even prove the gun in the photo was real, let alone that it was his. And the upside for them was huge: it bought them time while we chased a dead boy.”

“Then Logan could’ve sent it himself,” Nick said.

Graden looked skeptical. “But how could they be sure they’d be able to find Otis near the library in all that chaos?” he said. “If he’d survived, we would’ve been able to clear him pretty fast. So how could they know Otis would be close enough to the library at just the right time?”

“Logan was friendly with him,” I said. “Remember, Evan said he saw Otis going over to talk to Logan that morning. So Otis might’ve said he was going to be in the library—or Logan might’ve told Otis to meet him there. But then again, maybe they didn’t know. It’s entirely possible they decided to use Otis as a decoy and then just lucked out to find him near the library. I don’t think they
needed
him to be dead. It just bought them more time that way.”

“True,” Nick said. “It was no biggie if they didn’t kill him. The mislead would work for at least a little while no matter what.”

“Well, at least we can finally clear Otis,” Bailey said. “You agree, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah,” Graden said. “Write it up. We’ll notify the parents right away.”

Finally, a piece of good news. I looked back down at the letter. Something else was bothering me. “That last line.” I studied it again. “It’s familiar somehow. But something’s off about it. It’s not right.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Nick said. He stared at the letter. “Wait, I think I’ve got it. It’s from that movie with Kevin Spacey,
Swimming with Sharks.
”

I looked at him, surprised. “You’re a movie buff?” Nick shrugged. I considered the line again. “I’ll be damned. You’re right.”

I turned back to the letter and tried to figure out what was wrong with the quote. Then I had it. An icy chill gripped my heart. “It’s everybody
lies.
Not everybody
dies.
”

A theater.
I’d figured it out. Just not in time. A movie’s take on the human condition. A movie about the movie business. A quote from that movie—with just one word changed. But we were set up to fail. By the time we got the letter, it was already too late. And even if there’d been some lead time, there was no way to know which theater, or even which city. Los Angeles? Or in Shane’s neighborhood, Camarillo? Or in Boulder? It was another needle in a haystack.

Bailey got the call within minutes. A shooting at the Cinemark in Woodland Hills. A theater Logan probably knew well, since it was close to home. We broke all speed limits getting to the scene. There were at least twenty squad cars and two fire trucks occupying all of the drivable space in front of the theater. Bailey double-parked next to a squad car at the far end, and we ran toward the police line. She badged us through and tracked down the detective in charge. It turned out to be Detective Gina Stradley—an old friend of Bailey’s from their Police Academy days.

“I heard this one’s yours, Keller,” she said.

“Yeah, lucky me,” Bailey said. “What have we got?”

“Same MO as the school. Twisted fucks.” Gina gestured for us to follow her into the theater. “And it was so easy for them. It’s sickening. They must’ve bought tickets, because there’s no sign of forced entry anywhere. Just walked in with everyone else. Assault rifles were SBR AR fifteens, like last time.”

A short-barrel rifle wouldn’t be hard to conceal under a coat, and this was coat weather. Gina turned right and led us up the staircase to a wide corridor on the second floor. She stopped just outside the crime scene tape that stretched across the hallway and pointed to a door on our right. Uniformed cops stood guard as crime scene techs worked inside the taped-off area. Most seemed to be grouped near the doorway Gina had pointed out. “They headed up here to the projection booth, got the projectionist to open the door, and stabbed him to death. They fired through the projection window.” A sniper couldn’t have picked a better spot. I remembered Jenny’s words: “‘fish in a barrel’ style.”

“Only two dead?” Bailey asked.

“In the audience,” Gina said. “Four, counting the projectionist and the manager, who ran to the booth when he realized where the shots were coming from.” Gina shook her head. “He called nine-one-one on his way up. If it hadn’t been for him, it would’ve been a helluva lot worse.”

“So they dumped the weapons again,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gina said. “But it looks like they shot the manager with a nine millimeter. We picked up a shell casing near the body.” It was crowded in the hallway with all the cops and techs, and we were three extra bodies that weren’t needed at the moment, so Gina led us back downstairs to the lobby. “Our gun expert says it looks like the rifles were rigged to go fully automatic, but one of them jammed.”

Bailey nodded. “One of them jammed last time too—”

“But last time they weren’t rigged to go fully automatic,” I said.

“Where the hell are they getting these guns from?” Gina asked.

“Probably the same person who altered them,” Bailey said. Shane checked both boxes. Bailey told Gina we thought he might be the second shooter.

“Well, thank God he screwed up,” Gina said. “If that gun hadn’t jammed, we would’ve had a higher body count than Fairmont.”

I nodded. “We got lucky.” I stopped even as I heard myself say it. This case had mangled all sense of proportion. Anything less than a double-digit body count felt like a blessing.

Bailey stared out through the glass doors at the throng of police. “Worse than Aurora. That’s what they were going for.”

“Right,” I said. I thought about the incident between Logan and the jocks in middle school. “We’d better shut Platt down.”

“I’ll get ahold of the principal,” Bailey said. “In the meantime, Gina, would you mind if I got our firearms guy, Ed Berry, out here? Just to keep things clean and simple?”

“No problem. I’ll make sure they don’t bag anything up. Your guy can put himself in the chain.”

The chain of custody is how we prove evidence wasn’t tainted or tampered with. The more hands on a piece of evidence, the more of a hassle it is in trial because I have to call every cop who touched, tagged, or moved something. So Gina was saving us a headache down the line by letting Ed handle the firearms evidence.

Gina moved off to see to it, and while Bailey put in the call to Ed, I called Nick. “Have you had any luck with the postmark on that envelope?”

“Same as the last one: Boulder, Colorado. And it was sent out by expedited mail yesterday.”

“I guess they could’ve sent it themselves—”

“It’s physically possible, but if you ask me, that dog won’t hunt. Too much exposure bein’ on the road all that time.”

“Someone’s helping them.”

“Has to be.”

It depressed me almost more than the existence of the shooters themselves to know that there was someone out there willing to help them.