The Morning Of

by S. B. Cody

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “Me? You look like a horse trampled you on your way in today. We’ve got a fucking job to do.”

  At that Brody began to dig around on his desk.

  Kara rolled her eyes and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Looking for my proctologist’s number, so he can remove that stick from your ass.”

  “Not everything needs to be a damn joke. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to find the SOB who gunned down twenty-eight people.”

  “Fair enough. Go do it, Serpico.” With that Brody stood up and headed towards Julie who prepared to set out on her patrol.

  “Lipton,” he said as he approached her. “I was wondering if I could have a few minutes before you take off.”

  Julie shut her eyes, and stifled back a moan. She wanted to take a run for it, avoid the issue, but knew that wasn’t an option. “Sure,” she said, resigning herself to the situation. The two of them walked back to an interrogation room. Both of them took a seat.

  “So you can probably assume what this is about,” Brody told her.

  Julie merely nodded.

  “Okay. Well, I don’t want you to think that we’re considering your son a suspect or anything at the time. We just can’t entirely rule anyone out until we’re sure of their whereabouts at the time of the shooting.”

  “I understand, but I know as much as you do about what he was doing.”

  “Of course. I was just wondering if you might be able to help us understand him. What is he like?”

  “Are you asking me to incriminate my son?”

  “Hardly. We just want a clear picture of who he is. His interests, his…”

  “My son isn’t an angel, but he’s certainly not a killer.”

  “Not saying that he is.”

  Julie stood up and continued, “So unless you have something concrete, I don’t really have anything to say.”

  “Fine. I’m sorry to bother you,” Brody said while flopping his head down onto the table listening. He sat there motionless, letting out a groan. He felt like a garbage truck kept backing up onto his head.

  Back at her desk, Kara had just received a phone call from Stanford’s Superintendent Sherri Hill. “Ms. Hill, nice to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, the school board just met to discuss when classes can resume at our schools. As you can understand, we are concerned about the possibility of them returning when we don’t even know who was behind this incident,” Sherri said.

  “Of course. I can understand that.”

  “So, can you give me any indication of when it might be safe for our students?”

  “Ms. Hill, you understand that I can’t discuss the investigation with you while it’s still ongoing. And even if I could, there’s no guarantee of when it would be resolved.”

  “Yes. Understandable. But should we be worried about further attacks if classes were to resume prior to you solving this case?”

  “Ms. Hill, again that’s almost impossible to say at this point. We have no reason to believe that further attacks are planned, but nothing can be ruled out at this moment.”

  Sherri said nothing to this, just sighed in exasperation. “Okay,” she continued after a moment. “Well, there are students who are in need of materials that were left at school. Would it be possible for us to allow them in to do that?”

  “I would recommend having a police presence there just in case,” Kara said, and then a switch flipped in her head. How the hell had she not thought of this before? Maybe they didn’t have enough for a warrant to see any student’s record, but they didn’t need one to search a locker. “But there is one thing I ask for before anything is done. There are some lockers that we’d like to search first.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “We won’t know that until we find it, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I don’t see that being a problem. When would you like for this to happen?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “I’ll talk to Principal Devin, but I imagine we could arrange for that to happen tomorrow. Will that be okay?”

  “Perfect. Thank you very much, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of more assistance to you.” They both hung up. Kara jumped from her seat and ran back to the interrogation room to find Brody sitting slumped down in his seat. He didn’t even look over at her when she entered. Kara shook her head at the sight. “Busy?” she asked.

  “Extremely. What can I do for ya?”

  “We’re searching lockers at West tomorrow. With any luck we’ll find something worthwhile.”

  “Sounds like a blast. Can’t wait.”

  Kara opened her mouth to say something else, but stopped herself, wanting to avoid another spat with him. Instead, she headed back to her desk.

  After a bit, Brody came back to their desk and both of them went about the task of looking busy. An hour passed before Barron headed up to them.

  “Morgan and Smalls. You have your warrant,” he told them, waving a sheet of paper in the air. “So get off your ass and go do some actual work.” Neither wasted a moment as they rose out of their stupor and headed towards the door. They gathered two officers to assist in the search and were on their way.

  On the ride over, Brody and Kara didn’t say a word to each other, just accepting the tension that rode with them. They pulled up to the crack in the wall that was the SSPA and charged inside, the two officers right behind them. They ignored the creaking and splintering of the stairs, both determined to find something in the midst of all this. At the bottom of the stairs stood Denise Liman, glaring them down the entire time.

  “Was there something else you needed, detectives?” she asked.

  Brody presented the warrant. “We have that warrant you requested. Now if you would please stand aside while we have a look around.”

  Liman grabbed the warrant from him, read through it with a look of doubt on her face. Everyone else just headed right past her and searched the tiny basement. Kara headed to a set of filing cabinets and yanked open the drawers. In one cabinet, every drawer had been lined with files about different police shootings through the years. She pulled each one of them out and instructed one of the officers to begin perusing them for anything that stood out. From there she moved on to the next cabinet. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what this one had been filled with. She started to rummage through it as well.

  “Okay, Ms. Liman. So how about I get a look at a list of your members,” Brody said at the other end of the room. Her only response was a glare of derision before she headed into her office and began digging around in her desk. She extracted a single sheet and handed it over. Brody looked it over to see a list of ten names. “So you’re not exactly bursting at the seams with people trying to get in are you?”

  “We make do with what we have, Detective Morgan,” Liman told him.

  Brody looked it over, looking for any standout names. “Is this really everyone you have?”

  “Other people come and go. Volunteers and such. Those are the ones who have contributed and are full members.”

  “So these volunteers and such… Any list of them?”

  “We may have sign-in sheets from some of our meetings. I can’t guarantee anything though. We don’t hang on to them for that long.”

  “Well, let me see what you do have,” Brody said with a smirk.

  They sifted through all the basement had to offer, packing up what they deemed valuable enough to take a closer look at. As all these materials got hauled out to the cars, a crowd had begun to gather to see the action. People clambered for a view, eager to see the proceedings, so they could relate the exciting story to their friends. None of them could truly say what was happening or why, but to everyone gathered, that didn’t seem necessary. The mere presence of the cops here said all that needed to be said. Why else would they be here unless it had to do with the shooting? For many who had had their doubts when the story first broke, thi
s would prove enough to convince. For those who believed it straight away, this was the confirmation they so desperately wanted.

  20

  The next morning, Kara and Brody got an early start and had arrived at West High by 7:00. They stood at the front doors waiting for Principal Devin to meet them. Other than a perfunctory greeting once they showed up, nothing was said. For the second day in a row now, Brody showed up looking like he’d had the shit kicked out of him. Meanwhile, Kara just tried to stave off the cold, this morning being far more brisk than it had been as of late.

  Devin strolled up to the two, pulling out a set of keys. “Good morning, detectives,” he said as he passed by them and unlocked the doors. “Do you really think you’ll find something worthwhile?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Kara said. She and Brody followed him inside. They went straight into his office where Devin flipped on his computer.

  “It feels strange being back here. Haven’t stepped foot in here since the morning of. I can’t even imagine how we’ll finish out the year. Whenever we do get back here that is,” Devin said as he waited for the computer to warm up. “So whose lockers are we going to be taking a look at today?” he asked as he signed in to his computer. Kara handed over a list with the five students’ names on it.

  “What makes you want to look into these five?” Devin asked.

  “Can’t really get into that,” Brody said, his voice sounding like a cement mixer.

  “I find some of these names a little hard to swallow for this.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well, Brandon Hoffman and Terrance Lipton are honor roll students. Plus, isn’t Terrance’s mother a cop? Larry Stuart and Johnny Lemming are the only ones who are frequent flyers, discipline-wise.” Devin typed away at his computer and brought up the records of lockers. He jotted down the locker numbers next to the names and then stood up. “All right. Here we go.”

  The three of them went around to the different lockers. The first one they came to belonged to Brandon Hoffman. He had been listed as absent the day of the incident and had stated he’d been home alone during the shooting, so they couldn’t rule him out. Devin pulled out a small key and opened the locker. Inside, a stack of books were all arranged, getting smaller as the stack grew. Tucked in beside the books were a series of folders. Brody stood, writing down all they found while Kara looked through them. Certainly nothing in there to suggest a psychopath in hiding. All of it got put back and they moved on.

  The next locker they came to belonged to Larry Stuart. Once it got opened, it seemed as if Larry was the Goofus to Brandon’s Gallant. Larry also hadn’t been at school the day of the shooting, but he seemed to have just decided to not show up. When interviewing him, his answer to why he hadn’t gone to school was a, “I don’t know.” Far from a neat pile, only a couple books were in this locker and looked to have been tossed in. The cover on one of them had started to rip away from the binding. Other than that, various papers sat in there, most of them torn or crumpled up. Kara went through them, seeing that they were mostly some incomplete homework assignments.

  Johnny’s locker had a backpack stuffed inside along with a few books. A couple notebooks filled the backpack that Kara threw to the side, but what did catch her eye was a flyer for an SSPA meeting. Kara held this up to Brody. He responded with a smirk and a nod and recorded it.

  Terry’s locker offered little of interest. Last, they came to Dennis’s locker. What they did find here was a sketchpad. As Kara flipped through it some of the pictures caught her attention. In one of them a man lay in a pool of blood with a large sword sticking out of his chest. In another, the Marvel character, The Punisher stood atop a pile of bodies with two assault weapons in his hands.

  “Well, that’s a bit disconcerting,” Brody mentioned. Kara turned to finish the search. She reached in and pulled out a small book. Looking at it, it didn’t appear to be one that she recognized at all. The cover read Rage by Richard Bachman. The image sent a chill down her as it featured a young man sitting on what appeared to be a teacher’s desk with a pair of legs on the ground, presumably belonging to a dead woman.

  “Any idea what this is?” Kara said, passing it off to Brody.

  He took it and turned it over, glancing at the plot summary. As he read, his eyes grew larger and larger.

  “What is it?” Kara asked, concerned that he seemed to be going pale.

  “This thing is about a school shooting,” Brody said, his eyes never leaving the book.

  “Are you shitting me?” Kara asked. Behind Brody, Devin shifted from foot to foot as if he might take off running at any moment.

  “I think this would certainly elevate the kid to a person of interest, wouldn’t you?” Brody asked as he handed the book back to Kara. She put it all back in place feeling a bit disappointed by what they had found.

  The next day, Brody walked in half an hour late. Kara looked him up and down, noticing that his 5 o’clock shadow now seemed to be an 8am shadow. His clothes conspicuously the same ones he’d had on yesterday. As he passed by Kara, it smelled as if he’d spent the night at an oil refinery.

  “Good of you to make it,” Kara said, not bothering to look up at him.

  “I looked up that book,” Brody said through a phlegmy throat.

  “And?” Kara said, looking up.

  “It’s a Stephen King book. Wrote it years ago under a pen name.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Thing has been out of print for a long time. It was found connected to a few different actual shootings so he asked that it get pulled. You can’t find it anywhere.”

  “Shit. But…”

  “But what?” Brody asked as he sank into his desk chair.

  “Whoever did this,” Kara responded as she sat. “They covered their tracks. They knew where to go. Knew where they wouldn’t be seen. Do you really think after going through all of that, he would leave a book like that in his locker? He’d have to have known we’d end up looking.”

  “Maybe he thought he’d have time to get it out of there. Maybe he forgot it was in there.”

  “Yeah. Possibly. What about the Lemming kid? He had the SSPA flyer in his locker. We’ve been looking for a connection between this and them. Maybe this is it. And besides, there’s two shooters. If the Clements kid is one of them, who the hell was the other? From what we hear, he’s not exactly the star quarterback.”

  “Get with the times, Breakfast Club. The dynamics have changed.”

  “Whatever. My point is, that we already know that Lemming is friends with Lipton. We can’t account for either of them at the time of the shooting.”

  “Well, we also have Lemming on video as having come out of the same classroom he went into. The shooters got out of the building.”

  “Maybe he climbed back in.”

  “You don’t think any of the outside cameras would have caught him if he’d done that?”

  “Not if he knew to avoid them. Which he certainly seemed to.”

  “Well shit. So basically we’re still back squarely at having fuck all. Where the hell do we go now?”

  “You think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that we get a warrant based on any of this?”

  “Based on a book and some drawings? Hell no. Based on a flyer? Fuck no.”

  “So what do we do then?”

  “Bring them back in, I guess. Maybe we can get them to talk.”

  “I don’t like Clements for this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a tough time buying him as a cold-blooded killer. Looks like if you touched him he’d break.”

  “It usually is the quiet ones.”

  “I don’t know. Just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Has any part of this case felt right?”

  21

  From the moment that Kristin got back from the hospital, other than to go to the bathroom, she had come out of her room four times. The first time was Friday night when her mother had demanded that she come eat her dinne
r at the table with her. She ate the entire meal in silence. Every comment Diane threw at her bounced off like a ball hitting a brick wall. For an hour, Kristin picked away at the pasta on her plate. She’d barely gotten half of it down when she announced that she felt full and headed back to her room. From inside the living room Diane would occasionally hear the sound of the TV. Seemed as though it never stayed on one channel for long. The steady beat of bass would thump the door. Beneath it the sound of Kristin’s tears bled through.

  The second time Kristin emerged from her cave was two days later. Diane’s knocks on the door had been ignored, so on Sunday Diane let herself into the room.

  “Kristin, I want you to come out with me today,” she announced.

  Kristin’s only response was a groan into her pillow.

  “I understand what you’re going through here, but…”

  “No you don’t!” Kristin screamed as she snapped into a sitting position on her bed. “You have no idea what this could possibly feel like!”

  It took everything Diane had to keep from crying. She choked back the tears and responded with a strained voice, “Fine. That’s fair. But you cannot spend all your time in your room. You need to get out of the house. Establish a routine or something so that you can start to feel normal again.”

  “Normal? Who says I want to feel normal? I don’t deserve to feel normal.”

  “So what are you going to do then? Spend the rest of your life in here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t an option. Whatever you do, you still need to live your life. And that starts today. Put on your coat. We’re going to go shopping.”

  Kristin looked across the room, her eyes dead. “Fine. Whatever.” She trudged her way out of her bed and put on some clothes. Diane looked on the entire time racking her brain, wondering if she had handled this well. Guilt had already seeped in for getting upset. It didn’t feel right, but she didn’t know what else to do. She just knew that the girl that stood before her now did not resemble her daughter. The walls had been adorned with pictures of Kristin with her friends from college. In each of them, she had a huge grin, oftentimes making some sort of goofy face. Diane remembered how rarely she ever saw Kristin during her college days. When Diane asked her if she felt like coming in for a weekend, Kristin would go on and on about the plans she had and how much fun she was having. It seemed as though every time they talked, Kristin was in the midst of some activity.