by S. B. Cody
Brian opened the door, grabbing on to the frame, keeping himself steady, afraid he might pass out. He ascended the stairs which looked like Everest at the moment. “Terry!” he belted out.
Terry perked his head up at the sound of his dad’s voice. He hurriedly scribbled down a few more names and stuffed everything away as he heard his father’s footsteps get further and further up the stairs. Tripping over his own feet, he crawled out of the room. He opened the door to come face to face with his father, ready to get a lengthy interrogation about why he had been in there. Instead, he simply saw his father trying to compose himself behind a visage of tears.
“We need to go to the hospital. Your mother’s been shot. Come on,” Brian said, struggling to make his voice sound normal.
Terry didn’t so much as flinch. He almost expected his father to tell him it was all a joke. Damn thing seemed impossible, so it couldn’t be true, could it? As he had scrambled out of the room, Terry had shoved the paper with addresses into his back pocket. It hung heavy in there now, feeling like a slap in the face of his mother. His mother who could very well be inches from death for all he knew. What would she think if she knew that her own son conspired against the police like this? Conspired against her? He found himself stomping down the steps, feeling the whole time like he needed to shower.
Julie was transported to the emergency room and went directly into surgery. The bullet got fished out of her chest. She ended up lucky in that she would be getting out of there with nothing more than a couple cracked ribs. Thankfully, the bullet managed to miss her lungs. Two hours after surgery, she woke up in recovery. The overhead lights scorched her pupils, but she could still make out her husband and son standing over her. Her throat felt like a desert. She tried to swallow, but felt like she’d start to bleed if she did. She grinned at her family and tried to greet them, but only the start of the words could be produced.
“It’s okay, honey. Don’t strain yourself,” Brian told her as he rubbed her shoulder. “We’re so glad you’re okay.” Julie looked over to Terry and saw him standing there, remnants of tears in his eyes. She reached up towards him. Terry shot out his hand and took hers, squeezing like one of them might fly away. Julie could almost feel her heart shatter at this, not able to remember the last time that Terry had ever held her hand. The whole time, he stared off into space.
28
Because of the attacks over the weekend, school had been called off once again, along with a number of businesses. Kara and Brody still had work to do, and the results of the hair analysis had come back, ruling out Johnny, Terrance, and Larry but saying it could be a match for Dennis or William. Given what had been found in his locker, Dennis shot to the top of the list, and Kara and Brody got the warrant to search his home. And thank God it did because after this weekend, they both knew that without something tangible, they would have both been shoved aside in favor of the FBI. They could only hope that they neared the finish line because they feared how much longer the town would survive.
The two drove to his house in silence, a few black and whites close behind. The entire time Kara looked as though she had a gun pointed at her head forcing her to go through with this. They pulled up in front of Dennis’s home and walked to the front door. A couple knocks brought Dennis’s mother to answer it. She pulled a robe tight around her body and sipped a cup of coffee. Her eyelids only opened about halfway.
“Hello?” she said, blinking against the sunlight that streamed inside.
“Ms. Clements. We’re Detectives Smalls and Morgan. Is your son at home?” Kara asked.
“What is this about? Why would you need to see Denny? He’s already spoken to you twice. What else could you possibly need from him?”
“We have a warrant to search your home and his car.”
“What? No, you can’t do that. My son didn’t do anything. Please leave.”
“Sorry, ma’am. But like I said, we have a warrant. You’ll need to let us in.” Dennis’s mother slid back as though on a conveyor belt. Kara, Brody, and the accompanying officers headed inside.
Just as they did, Dennis came pounding down the stairs. “Mom, who’s at the door?” he asked. He came to a stop and almost slipped down the remaining stairs when he saw who had come into his house.
“Hi, Dennis,” Brody said. “Remember us?”
“What’s going on?” Dennis asked with a shaky voice.
“We’d like to look around a bit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can we get the keys to your car, please? And show us to your room?”
In that moment Dennis seemed to emulate a small child. And much like a small child he looked over at his mother hoping she would tell him what to do. That she would make everything all right. But all she had to offer him was a small nod. Dennis shriveled up like a shamed puppy and led them upstairs. Kara and Brody followed him into his room. The walls were lined with drawn pictures featuring an array of characters from pop culture of which Kara and Brody only had a passing knowledge.
“Did you draw these, Dennis?” Kara asked. All she got in response was an embarrassed nod. Beside his bed there sat a pile of books. Up against a window which looked out on the backyard was a desk covered with a laptop and a few different journals. A couple of the officers went looking through it all. Dennis just went into the corner and sulked against the wall.
“Your keys, son?” Brody said, extending his hand. Dennis didn’t even look up at him. He just walked to his desk, snatched up the keys, and handed them over. Brody passed them off to an officer with instructions to look through the car.
Kara sifted through the mess on the desk and looked through the journals. First one seemed to consist entirely of half-complete drawings. Another had notes from what looked like a history class with doodles in the margin. The third she stopped on. Each page had every line filled with text. At the top of each page was a different date.
“This your journal?” Kara asked. Dennis simply looked away. Kara began flipping through it. Most of it seemed innocuous enough. Just rambling accounts of a day in the life of a painfully average teenager, but a couple did catch her eye:
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Shit has started all over again. What was I thinking that everyone was going to mature over the summer? A couple times today as I walked to class, people threw their hands up like I was going to shoot them or something. And if that wasn’t enough, when I was leaving school today, the handle to my car door was wet. Someone had peed all over the damn thing. Why do I even fucking bother? Sometimes I wish all those assholes would go away and leave me the hell alone.
Then there was another from the day before the shooting:
Sunday, October 14, 2017
My story has completely fallen apart. Feels like a random series of scenes at this point. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll ask Mr. Sullivan to take a look at it. He should be able to tell me whether it’s a rag or not.
They could be something worth looking at. Something she did find interesting was that this seemed to be the last entry. Since the shooting, he hadn’t written a word in here. Not a single reflection on what had to have been the biggest thing to happen to him in his short life. She handed it over to Brody indicating that it was worth a look. He took it and began to peruse the pages.
“Detective Smalls. Detective Morgan!” one of the officers called up from downstairs. “You’re gonna wanna take a look at this.” Dennis’s gaze darted all over the room, wondering what they could possibly have found. Kara and Brody both headed downstairs and followed the officer out to the car. On the way they passed Dennis’s mother who sat on the couch clawing at her hair. Once they both got to the car they saw one of the officers standing over the open trunk and looking at a rolled-out sheet the size of a poster.
“What do you have?” Kara asked. She turned down to see what looked like a blueprint. It showed three different floors and in the top right corner, it read, “Stanford West High School.” It was a floor pla
n of the school. That would have been bad enough, but the writing all over it cemented it. At the front entrance, the words “Enter here” had been written in black Sharpie. At one of the classrooms, it read “Exit here.” The kicker was the words, “Stash guns here,” written over one of the bathrooms. Kara looked down at the floor plan willing it to change. She shook her head as though it couldn’t be real. Everything in her had insisted that it wasn’t Dennis. But it appeared like she had been wrong all over again.
“Jesus,” Brody uttered. “This is heavy. Well, you know what we need to do.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Kara’s voice dripped with disappointment. She handed the floor plan back to the officer who slid it into an evidence bag. She walked back towards the house, dragging her feet the entire way. Dennis and his mother sat on the couch together, their hands entwined.
“Please tell me what’s going on,” his mother pleaded.
“Dennis, will you please stand up,” Brody said as he fished out a pair of handcuffs.
“What?” he whined. Inside he could feel his heart wrench. “I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything.”
“Please. We need to do this.” Dennis stood up like a puppet having his strings pulled. He then hung there as though the strings had been cut. Brody walked around behind him and slipped the cuffs around his wrists. His mother buried her face in her hands. Dennis wanted to cry but found that he couldn’t. He couldn’t feel much of anything at the moment, other than the cold steel enclosed around his wrists. Brody led him out the door with Kara close behind.
Dennis’s mother sprang from the seat and took off after them, but one of the officers held her back leaving her to do nothing but scream. “Please! Don’t take my baby!” Kara turned away from the scene, not able to look for another second.
Dennis got escorted to the car and sank into the back seat without struggle. At this point he couldn’t even tell where he was anymore. The entire world had turned into a blur of colors with no semblance of being. Kara just stood against the back of the car staring up at the sky.
“Come on, Smalls,” Brody said. “Let’s go.” Kara merely looked at him, not able to say a thing, but she didn’t need to. “I know you didn’t want this, but we can’t argue with something like that.”
“I know,” she whispered. “Just wish it had turned out differently.” But why? Did she truly believe it wasn’t him, or did she just not want to be proven wrong again?
The entire drive to the station was made in silence. Kara kept expecting Dennis to start crying or something, but he didn’t make a peep. She looked back a couple times almost afraid that he’d died of shock or something. Each time all that met her was the dead stare of a terrified young man. Once they got to their destination, they marched Dennis in. As soon as they entered, the entire place fell into a hush. Almost everyone stood up to get a look at the man behind the Stanford Massacre. A couple even looked like they may start to clap, but the look of confused rage on Kara’s face made it clear that such a thing would not be welcomed. Dennis got placed in one of the interrogation rooms and had his handcuffs removed. Kara and Brody stood before him.
“Dennis,” Kara began. “First of all, can we get you anything? Water, soda?”
Dennis shook his head without even looking up at the two detectives before him.
“Okay. Well first of all, you are under arrest at the moment but as of right now you haven’t been charged with a crime. Your mother followed us here, and you’ll be given a chance to see her. We’ll be back in a little bit to talk to you. At that time we’ll review with you your rights. Do you have any questions?”
In reality Dennis had all sorts of questions. Am I going to prison? What did you find? Will I ever get out of here? But at the moment, all he could manage was a simple shake of his head. Kara and Brody exited the room where they saw Ms. Clements come flying through the doors of the station.
“Where is my son? I want to see him right now!” she cried. She spun in circles, desperate to find someone, anyone who could give her the answers she searched for.
Kara strolled up to her and tried to soothe her. “Ms. Clements, please calm down.”
“Calm down?! You just hauled my son away in handcuffs! Is he being charged with something?!”
“No. Not at the moment.”
“Then let him go.”
“We can hold him for twenty-four hours before charging him.”
“But I don’t understand. My son didn’t do anything!”
“Well, we’re going to figure that out. Now you’re free to stay here in the meantime, but you’ll need to be calm. Now can we get you anything?” Kara could see Ms. Clements begin to deflate, her anger giving way to despair. She then flopped onto a seat and wept. Kara turned and headed back to Brody where he waited over by their desks.
“There is no part of this that I like,” Kara told him. She tried to block out the image of the devastated mother behind her.
“I know. But we go where the evidence leads,” Brody responded. He then threw a glance at where Ms. Clements sat. The sight brought back images of Christine crying in anguish when they found out about Mandy. He had an urge to just go ahead and release Dennis so as to save his mother the pain, but knew that he couldn’t. “Come on. Let’s go do this.” The two of them gathered the evidence they had collected; a laptop, and the security footage. They both walked back to the interrogation room where they saw Dennis sitting and chewing on his thumb, his eyes wide and unblinking. The tip of his finger had started to bleed.
“Dennis,” Kara started as they both took a seat. “We’re going to ask you a few questions. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand?”
Dennis gave a sharp nod while still chewing on his finger.
“We need you to say so out loud, if you will,” Kara said.
“I understand,” Dennis replied in a deflated voice.
“We have some things we’d like to show you, son,” Brody said. “All we want you to do is explain them to us to the best of your ability. Can you do that?”
“Sure.” Dennis’s voice sounded hoarse.
“Great. Okay, now we took some drawings from your home. The nature of some of them is concerning.” Brody brought out three of them and laid them out on the table. One showed an armored woman impaling a troll-like creature on a huge sword. Another displayed the character Deadpool holding a gun with smoke billowing out of the barrel. The third had some other masked character they didn’t recognize holding a bloody sword. “Now these pictures are rather morbid. Did you draw all of these?”
“Yeah. They’re just pictures though,” Dennis responded.
“What are they?” Kara asked.
“This one is a Dungeons and Dragons character,” Dennis said, pointing to the armored woman. “This is Deadpool. A comic book character. And this one is a superhero that I was trying to come up with.”
“Do you understand why these may concern us? They seem to show a fascination with violence.”
“I just like the stuff is all. I’ve never even held a gun or a sword or anything. Hell, I’ve never even been in a fight.”
“Okay. Well, what about this?” Kara proceeded as she pulled out the journal and turned to the entry from September 12 and began reading from it. Dennis had his face buried in his hands as he heard his words read back to him. “Why are these kids afraid of you?”
“I don’t know,” Dennis sniveled as he relived his mistreatment. “They just don’t like me because I’m different, I guess. I keep to myself.”
“Do you have any friends?”
“No. Not really.”
“That must be tough,” Brody said. “And them urinating on your car. That’s really messed up.”
“Whatever.”
“Is that kind of treatment normal?”
Dennis only nodded.
“What ab
out that last line?” Kara asked. “You wish they’d go away? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Just not around. I didn’t want them dead though. Jesus Christ.”
“Would you consider yourself an angry person?” Brody asked. “Given the way the kids treat you, no one would blame you for being a little angry.”
“I don’t know.”
“Your last entry in the journal was from the day before the shooting. Why haven’t you written in it since then? I feel like you’d have a lot to express after going through something like that.”
“I don’t know.”
“You need to give us more than ‘I don’t know.’ Or we can’t help you,” Brody told him.
“I guess I just didn’t know what to say about it. Just too much to process.”
“You know a few weeks ago, we looked in your locker at school as well,” Kara cut in.
“Yeah. So?”
“Well, we found a book in there that caught our attention.”
Dennis threw his eyes all over the room as he tried to think of what she could be referring to.
“Have you read a book called Rage?”