The Competition (32 page)

I had to
be careful how I segued back into the subject of Evan’s letters to me. A sharp turn into serious territory like that could push Amanda into panic mode and make her clam up. I decided to approach it from the relationship angle. “Did Evan say he still wanted to be a couple after you moved? Or did you guys become just friends at that point?”

Amanda blushed a little. “He said he didn’t want to give me up.” She floated away for a moment. “Evan always told me I was special. That he could really talk to me—not like the other girls. He said they were lame, that they only cared about their clothes and their makeup and who was sleeping with who…”

“He made you feel special.” Amanda nodded. “What did you and Evan talk about?”

“Everything. How stupid politicians are and how the sheeple keep voting for them because they get taken in by campaign promises that’re obvious lies—”

“Any specific politicians?” The sheeple. Stupid. Lies. A grandiose indictment of both the voters and the candidates. Typical of a psychopath. And Amanda’s delivery sounded like it came straight from the horse’s mouth. If that horse was a sociopath.

Amanda frowned. “Probably, but I can’t remember. He said he wanted to go over to Iraq. He’d kill the bad guys and end this thing fast.”

No, he wouldn’t. It was too dangerous. Evan was no hero; he killed like a coward. “So you guys stayed close after you moved?”

“Definitely. We Skyped or talked on the phone.”

“You didn’t email?” I asked.

Amanda shook her head. “Evan had a thing about emailing. He said he didn’t trust it.”

“Did he stay with you during the gun show?”

“No. They drove out in Logan’s car and took off afterward. Evan said Logan had to visit his relatives in Utah.”

Or something. We knew that was a lie. The family in Utah said they hadn’t seen Logan in years. “Was that the last time you saw Evan?”

“Yeah.”

Time to get to the point. “And you guys never wrote letters to each other?”

“No, never.”

“So what did you think when he sent you those letters and told you to mail them to me?”

Amanda shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think anything. It was just a favor he needed, so I did it. I mean, it wasn’t that big a deal. He sent the letters along with his other stuff.”

Bailey and I exchanged a look. “What other stuff?”

“Um, notebooks.”

My ears perked up. “Notebooks? What was in them?”

“I don’t know. When he sent them to me they were all sealed up, and he told me not to open them.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He said they were poems and stories and stuff like that. He was going to send them to an agent, to get published. But he didn’t want anyone to see them because they might steal his ideas.”

“What did he want you to do with them?”

“Just keep them safe where no one could see them.”

“Did he just recently send them to you?”

“Not all of them. He started sending them to me a while ago. But the last two he sent were recent. Those were the ones that had the letters with them.”

“And you never thought to question why he needed you to forward those letters for him?”

Amanda shook her head. “I know it sounds stupid.” New tears gathered in her eyes. “I—he was my boyfriend. I trusted him. So I went along with it. And now I don’t know why.”

I gave her a sympathetic nod. “Those notebooks, do you still have them?”

Amanda tucked her hair behind her ear and began to play with the drawstring on her hoodie. “Yeah, but…I promised him.”

We could probably justify a search warrant and tear the place up looking for those notebooks, but that would take time. And time was exactly what we didn’t have. “Amanda, no you didn’t.” She looked at me, startled. “You made that promise to the person you
thought
was Evan. But that person doesn’t exist. The
real
Evan is a murderer. The real Evan lied to you about what was in those letters he gave you. And I have no doubt that he lied to you about what’s in those notebooks. You know what I think is in them?”

Amanda looked at me warily. “N-no.”

“Plans for the shootings. For Fairmont, for the Cinemark theater, and probably for the ones he’s about to do. You saw what he wrote in those letters to me. He’s going to keep doing it until we stop him. If you don’t give us those notebooks, you’ll be helping him kill more innocent people.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and began to sob. Bailey and I exchanged a look. We’d told her to forget what she’d believed—and wanted to believe for more than a year, that Evan Cutter was her Prince Charming—and believe what she’d just learned in the past hour: that he was a mass murderer. It was a hard turn for her to make. But after a few moments, Amanda swiped the back of her hand across her cheeks and stood up. “Come on.”

We followed her into a bedroom that was surprisingly austere for a teenage girl. You could bounce a quarter off the perfectly made twin bed, and the two navy-and-red decorative pillows looked like they’d been positioned against the headboard with a T square. A few posters of bands I didn’t recognize were taped—not tacked—onto the wall. The oak dresser was bare of any cosmetics or jewelry, and there were no clothes on the floor or the bench at the foot of the bed. In fact, there wasn’t a hair out of place in the entire room.

Dating Evan—if you could call it that—seemed to be Amanda’s only wild move. But talk about hitting a home run right out of the box. Amanda pulled the chair away from her small desk and dragged it to the shelving against the wall in the far right corner of the room. She climbed up on it, reached behind some tall books on the top shelf, and started to pull down manila envelopes completely encased in heavy wrapping tape.

“Hold on,” Bailey said. She grabbed a box of Kleenex and covered her hands, then reached for the first envelope. I covered my hands and took it from Bailey, and placed it on Amanda’s desk. When we’d finished, there was a stack of nine envelopes.

“Is this all of them?”

Amanda nodded. “You can look around if you want to.” She swept her arm out to indicate her room.

“And he didn’t send you anything else? Pictures? Books?” Amanda shook her head.

“We’ll just check the rest of these shelves to make sure you didn’t miss anything, okay?”

Amanda nodded. “Go ahead. But he only sent me the nine envelopes. I’m sure.”

I felt reasonably certain she was telling the truth, but Bailey and I took a few minutes to look through the room anyway. We’d have officers do a more thorough search, just to check for any small things Amanda might’ve forgotten about. But right now, we needed to dig into those notebooks, and fast.

If these were the writings the shrinks had talked about, they might tell us where Evan was planning to strike next. And if there was a third party involved—I thought of the lead Harrellson was working in San Diego—they might give us that person’s name. I was eager to get going, but I had just a couple more questions for Amanda. “When did Evan start sending you these envelopes?”

“About a month after we moved here, I think.”

“And when did you get the last one?”

“Um…about a week ago?” Her brow furrowed, then she nodded. “Yeah, about a week ago because I asked him if he could come out for Homecoming, and he sent me a note with the last package saying he was going to be busy.”

Boy, was he ever. “Did you keep that note?”

Amanda nodded and went to her nightstand. She picked up a book—
Girls: A Guy’s Perspective.
I wanted to tell her that if she was trying to understand Evan, she’d have to get
American Psycho.
Amanda pulled out a piece of lined paper that had been folded and tucked into the middle. Bailey took the paper from her using the Kleenex. “Can you tell me where your mom keeps extra grocery bags?” Amanda told her, and while Bailey went to get them, I asked her my last few questions.

“When Evan sent you the letters to mail to me, did he send a note to you with them? Or did he call you and tell you he was sending them?”

“He called.” Amanda knew what the next question would be, and she didn’t wait for it. She pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and scrolled. She pointed to a number. “This is it. It’s around the right time, and I know all the other numbers on here.”

“You don’t have a number for him?”

“No. He uses burners. He says the government can track you on a cell phone, so he never uses a phone more than twice.”

A lie to keep Amanda from having access to him? Or true? Given his distrust of emails, it might well be true, which meant the chance that we might be able to track him with this number was very slim. But slim or not, it was worth a try. I copied the call history on Amanda’s cell phone for the past two weeks and emailed it to myself.

Amanda gestured to the notebooks piled on her desk. “Do you really think the plans for the Fairmont shooting are in there?”

“Yes.” I took in Amanda’s pallor. “Do you feel well enough to go to school?”

“I…yeah.” She turned away from the envelopes. “I want to be with my friends.”

I got it. She needed to reassure herself that she’d made some good choices too. And that there was a normal world out there. “Okay, we’ll take you.”

Bailey returned with paper grocery bags, and we put the envelopes into them, packing the note to Amanda separately to preserve prints. We told Janice we were done and that we’d take Amanda to school. She and Amanda held each other in a long hug.

We all trooped out to Bailey’s car. Amanda gave us directions to her school. It was past ten o’clock by the time we dropped her off.

I got out of the car with her. “Remember to call us immediately if you hear from him, okay?”

I didn’t think Evan would make contact with her now. He was in full attack mode. But you never know. If he got desperate, he might show up with some cockamamie story about how the psycho killers were after him. The kind of story she might’ve believed just a little over an hour ago, but surely wouldn’t now. I hoped.

Amanda nodded. “I will. I promise.”

I watched her move slowly up the front steps, bent forward under the weight of her backpack. She looked like the same girl who’d woken up that morning. But she wasn’t. She’d just learned that the boy she’d loved and trusted was a soulless monster who had used her and lied to her. The world would never look the same to her again.

Bailey put out
the alert for Evan Cutter. When she ended the call, I gestured to the notebooks that were now packed in grocery bags in the backseat. “We can’t wait for Dorian. We need to tear into those things.”

“Definitely,” Bailey said. “And we’ve got to let Harrellson know—”

“I’ll try him now.”

I couldn’t get any signal. When we got back to the hotel, I got Harrellson’s voice mail and left a message—no details, just saying it was urgent. I hoped he’d cleared Mark Unger. One missing psychopath was plenty. Bailey called Graden and filled him in, while I found us a three o’clock flight back to L.A. Then Bailey took out her Swiss Army knife and sliced through the tape on all of the envelopes.

At Graden’s request we headed straight to his office with the notebooks. Now we reread them over his shoulder. The first line encapsulated the running theme throughout all of them.

“The world is filled with stupid, pathetic, inferior worms. They’re all a waste of precious resources.”

Evan, the brilliant, the amazing, had no use for the “shrimp brains” of the world. Except as fodder for his sadistic fantasies.

“I saw a movie once where they tied a guy’s arms to the bumper of one car and his legs to the bumper of another, then drove the cars in opposite directions. Just tore him to shreds. I loved it.”

Graden finished the fourth notebook. “Jesus,” he muttered. Bailey and I exchanged looks. We’d had a similar reaction. It was a bird’s-eye view into the mind of a raving psychopath. But these pages explained something that had always bothered me about the letters I’d received. Back when I thought they’d been written by Logan, I’d had a hard time squaring them with the eloquent writing style Logan’s teachers had described. I’d supposed Logan’s fury had stripped his prose of its usual poetry. But now, knowing that it was Evan who’d written the letters, and seeing the writing in these notebooks, it all made sense.

In Notebook 6 we found a mention of the car burglary charges in Lubbock, Texas. It was a chilling example of Evan’s skill in presenting a facade that was a hundred and eighty degrees from the truth.

“Dumbass fools! Not one of those stupid fucks in juvenile court has a fucking clue. I wrote that bullshit letter to that loser victim yesterday and my PO was all like, ‘Oh, Evan, y’all are doin’ so well. I wish all my probationers were like you.’ Really, rat face? Do you? Do you wish all your probationers were a thousand times smarter and better than you? And that dumb fuck victim. He DESERVED to have his shit stolen, leaving it on the dashboard in plain sight. STUPID chump-assed motherfucker!”

Stanley, the PO, had no clue. He’d been completely taken in by the act. As the PO put it: “He was a model probationer.” And all the while, Evan was laughing at the “chump-assed motherfucker” he’d duped so easily.

There was a mention in Notebook 7 of James Holmes, who’d done the shooting in the theater in Aurora, Colorado.

“Pathetic fucking loser, with that stupid orange hair. Fucking clown. It’s all in the execution, asshole! If you’d done it RIGHT, you could’ve taken out at least a hundred. Fool.”

In Notebook 8 we found a sneering reference to Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City.
“He sets up a bomb and hides like a little bitch. Where’s the art in that? Where’s the joy? The world is going to see how it’s done by the BEST. And when we get through, everyone will know we’re far superior to that little punk-assed bitch McVeigh.”

I pointed to the line. “That’s the first time I’ve seen him say
we.
So at this point he must’ve hooked up with Logan.”

“And started some actual planning,” Bailey said.

Evan made it clear that he didn’t intend to get caught “like that stupid clown douche in Aurora,” and that he wasn’t afraid to die. In fact, he planned to go out in a “blaze of glory.” Just as our shrinks predicted. But there was no mention of any plans for future shootings. Not even a specific mention of the plans for the Fairmont shooting.

When he’d finished reading the last notebook, Graden looked up at us. “I have never seen anything like this.”

“Who has?” Bailey said.

“But I don’t get this,” Graden said. “For a kid this young, with his background, to be such a cesspool of hate. I’m not saying his parents were necessarily perfect—we never know the whole story when it comes to family dynamics. But they didn’t seem
that
far off the beam. Where did it come from?” I shook my head. That was a question no one seemed to be able to answer. “And why didn’t he put his plans for Fairmont or the Cinemark in these notebooks? You think he didn’t trust Amanda?”

Bailey began putting the notebooks back into their manila envelopes. “Yeah. He couldn’t take the risk. If Amanda read about those plans, she’d have called the cops—”

“And also, he probably wanted to keep those plans close,” I said. “The shrinks did say these mass murderers get off on writing and reading their own master plans.” My eyes were gritty and my shoulders ached. I looked at my watch. Nine o’clock. I hadn’t realized how long we’d been at it.

“Guess we can pull back on the Platt Junior High security,” Graden said.

“Yeah,” Bailey said. “That was Logan’s thing, not Evan’s. We should probably keep a detail on it just in case, but I doubt Evan will hit there.”

Graden looked more than just tired. He looked drawn, spent. “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I went to another one of the funerals today.”

A lead weight pulled at my heart. I was no stranger to depravity—none of us were—but this case was enough to shake what little faith I had in humanity. I thought about naive, unsuspecting Amanda, all the innocent children and teachers at Fairmont High, the victims at the Cinemark, and all the others who were such easy pickings for monsters like Evan. Good people didn’t stand a chance against this kind of random evil.