Fifteen Coffins
Page 3
Sydney gradually led Benton through the possibilities as suggested by Dexter Muller. Her friend remained tight-lipped throughout, his cheeks pinched.
‘And you believe that story?’ he asked when she had finished talking.
‘I’m not saying that. I’m asking you whether you gave it any serious consideration. Ben, I don’t know if that’s the way it went down. I don’t know if it happened exactly the way you say it did. But what I do know is that Dexter Muller’s theory is not an impossibility. In fact, I’d go as far as to suggest it may even be plausible. Especially when you factor in Kevin’s mental faculties. Dexter told me his son was known for being slow, and due to his nature and having few friends, could easily be manipulated. Ben, please answer my question. Did you give the alternative theory any credence whatsoever?’
‘No.’ Benton shook his head once and narrowed his gaze to a squint, wrinkles gathering at the corners of his eyes. ‘And for a very sound reason.’
‘Which is?’
‘We had ourselves a witness. We had someone who saw Kevin Muller, and only Kevin Muller, enter the art supply room through the window that day. And the kid was carrying that holdall when he did.’
Four
Weary, dispirited, and irritable by the time she got home that evening, the first thing Sydney did after stepping into the house was to kick off her suede ankle boots, remove her socks and massage some of the soreness out of her feet. She noticed that her socks were odd; two different shades of pale blue, one depicting the faces of tigers, the other penguins. Her bra came off next, pulled out from the sleeve of her blouse like a magician producing a length of handkerchiefs knotted together. Before carelessly discarding it onto the sofa, she whirled the undergarment around her head three times in celebration of once more being free and unfettered. The final stage of a familiar triumvirate of homecoming rituals was to twist the top off a bottle of Bud and settle on the rear deck with her legs raised up on a chair.
With each pull on the beer, Sydney’s body lost its tension; starting with her neck and working its way down the entire length of her slender frame, where bare toes flexing away the aches and pains of the day snagged her attention. When she was a child, her father had insisted that having a second toe longer than the first meant she was descended from the ancient Greeks. Sydney was well into her teens before she realised the slightly longer toe was like that because the connecting metatarsal bone was the longest of its kind in the foot, and not due to some mythical Mediterranean heritage.
The memory provoked a smile. Talking about him was still hard, all but impossible at times. Sadness and grief constricted her throat every time, and her mind started closing down whenever the subject arose – which it did all too often. Thinking about him was a different matter entirely, because her focus then remained firmly on the joys of his wise and good-natured face, the selfless generosity of his actions, and the full support and deep love of a father for his daughter. He was her sun and moon, whilst she had been his entire world.
It had felt so strange entering the bungalow for the first time following his death. By then she’d had more than a day to prepare herself, having received the ‘death knock’ from two San Diego PD officers who informed Sydney of his passing. Yet even the first sight of her childhood home knowing he would not be there to greet her, almost caused her to turn around, drive back down the hill into Moon Falls, and check into a hotel instead. The power of his presence had been so incredibly forceful, the absence of it was as if someone had removed the very air that she breathed.
Sydney looked out as far as she was able to see and tipped her bottle towards a horizon streaked with crimson. ‘Here’s to you, Daddy,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘Whatever kind of person I am today, it’s because you moulded me. If you’re looking down on me, I hope you approve of what I’m doing. It’s what I believe you would have done, despite all the inherent difficulties.’
Nursing the beer because she did not want to sink deep into an entire six pack so early in the evening, Sydney cast her gaze over the canyon created by two steep hillsides book-ending the property. The lure of this particular plot of land was obvious to all who gazed out from it; laying a good distance from its nearest neighbour, but not so far that it was isolated. The views all year round were spectacular, nature taking its course as the seasons unwound.
Any covering of snow and ice on the trees and plants eventually gave way to a thawing, and the first subtle regrowth of spring. As limbs became unburdened, they snapped back into place, the rustle creating a whispering sound along the full length of the valley that was both eerie and beautiful at the same time. Cooling winds and gentle rain then stepped aside to make way for unrelenting sunshine and scorching heat, before reluctantly yielding to the changing colours and defoliation of another fall. This was Sydney’s favourite season, one in which she so loved sitting on the deck surrounded by different shades of green, brown, gold and red. It reminded her of a childhood and youth during which the breathtaking majesty of her surroundings felt magical on a daily basis.
The peaceful setting had consistently worked its charms for both her and her father. Other than the occasional growl of mowers away in the distance, a neighbour’s dog yapping, and the sound of vehicles making their way up and down the hill, the air was still and punctuated only by chimes her father had hung out above the rear decking on her seventh birthday.
He had carved the chimes himself from bamboo, forming the approximate shape of Disney cartoon characters. After decorating them in familiar colours, her father preserved the paintwork with a thin rubbing of varnish. Sydney recalled him offering them up as her only present that year, and yet she had been beguiled by them and the beautiful series of notes they produced as the pieces clunked together. They would have been more than enough for Sydney, but of course he had been joking and later she unwrapped her real gift. Funny how all these years on she couldn’t remember what he had bought her, but she had never forgotten the chimes or what they meant to her.
Home was a three-bedroom ranch-style bungalow with gabled roofs above the porch and garage. It had been so since four-year-old Sydney moved with her parents up to Moon Falls from Arizona where she was born. Even in later years, when living in either Sacramento or San Diego having moved there for work, she regarded this house as her one true home. Memories lay buried deep inside every recess here, but only of her father and herself.
By the time they had moved north to live in the Falls, Sydney’s brother was long dead. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome claimed Stevie’s life before his sixth month. Then, an accidental stumble and fall in a supermarket parking lot in Sonora, caused her mother to strike her head on the hard and unforgiving concrete surface. The injury left her brain swollen and bleeding, diagnosed in a post-mortem following her death while being airlifted to hospital. The Merlot family had been in Moon Falls less than two days when tragedy struck.
Even so, Sydney’s memories of her home were generally happy ones. Her father had not taken the easy way out and crawled inside a bottle in order to drown his obvious and persistent grief. Instead he set about making a life for his little girl the best way a single man can. As Sydney grew older they talked about her mother and Stevie more regularly, and a number of framed photographs depicting both of them, either separately or together, hung on walls all around the bungalow. But her mother had not lived in this house for any length of time, her brother not at all, so their energy occupied no space in its rooms.
Sydney often wondered how differently her life would have turned out had her mother survived the accident, ultimately settling on the viewpoint that it would have been different rather than necessarily better. She had lacked for nothing other than a mother’s knowing touch and maternal love, and could not have wished for a better life otherwise. Looking around, with the sun fading and night rapidly drawing in, Sydney was grateful for so many things. Yet not for the first time she questioned why so much had been wrenched from her before she was even out of her thirties.
Solid and dependable, like her father.
And every bit as irreplaceable.
Her mind returned to the case Dexter Muller had brought to her. She was immediately reminded of Benton Lowe’s parting shot earlier in the day.
‘This is so typical of you, Sydney. You always were a contrarian.’
Those words stung only because of who had spoken them. He was wrong about her, and she was determined to prove it. She had not taken on the case because the local PD, sheriff’s department, and FBI had walked away happy and eager to wash their hands of it. She had done so because of a father’s heartache. A father who came across as a man neither diminished by grief nor wracked with guilt, but one driven by a sense of injustice. Muller had become ostracised by a town that blamed his son for taking fourteen of their children, when to his mind, Kevin was in many ways the fifteenth victim of the same killer.
This was not a contrary position for Sydney. Her standpoint was both compassionate and borne of a lifelong dedication to the truth. Benton Lowe ought to know that about her, and while he may have been striking out in anger, his attitude stoked her own indignation. If she needed fire in her belly, he had provided both the kindling and the spark to light the flame. They had continued arguing as she tried to obtain information from him about the witness he’d mentioned. The more she pushed him the deeper he dug his heels in, refusing to discuss the matter with her any further.
Relaxed, but no less infuriated by Benton’s attitude, she used the pad and pen to note strategies and lists of issues she needed to examine. There was no way anybody from local law-enforcement – not even Benton – was going to share details of the case report with her. And they were definitely not about to allow her sight of it. This meant she would have to do her own digging. The starting point probably lay online. In her experience, journalists often dug out more about an event than the cops ever did or could.
Law enforcers required sufficient evidence to arrest, detain, charge and, eventually, prosecute. Journalists had ways of obtaining most of the same information, but for as long as the story remained fresh they also sniffed out details the cops were not interested in. Reporters often referred to these details as “colour”. Sydney believed her way in lay in those additional aspects of the shooting and its aftermath.
The big question Dexter Muller’s theory posed was, if not Kevin Muller, then who?
In terms of the boy himself, it was vital for Sydney to speak to people who knew him well. He probably had a few friends, but over the past couple of months the minds of many of them would have been poisoned against him. Youngsters were not generally the best judges of character, and were so easily led by the most thoughtless of social media campaigns. Anonymous keyboard warriors could be the harshest of critics. She thought Kevin’s teachers were likely to consider meeting with her, and would know him in different ways to most other people.
Then there was the issue of the firearms used by the gunman. Dexter Muller claimed his son had no interest in weapons of any description. There were no guns in the home, and Dexter was unable to think of a single reason why his son would purchase one, let alone the several used in the massacre. He did not believe Kevin would ever have been able to afford them, and neither would he have the first clue how to go about purchasing the weapons.
That raised a few interesting questions for Sydney to check on. Had Kevin been to any local gun ranges? Had there been any reports of him target shooting in the woods? What was his online history like? Had Kevin ever used the dark web? Had he visited anywhere likely to have had gun sales? All potential leads to run down.
Sydney made a note to ask Dexter Muller about these issues when she next spoke with him. She was familiar with the various forensic tests technicians ran on computer equipment, and decided to request access to Kevin’s personal device. At this stage, Sydney neither believed in nor disbelieved Kevin’s innocence, but there was a chance that his computer would provide clues one way or another. One link to a nefarious online firearms seller was all it would take to convince her of the boy’s guilt. After all, if he was as slow as had been claimed, it surely wasn’t possible for him to have planned and executed such an attack and yet leave no digital footprint in his wake.
When she was finished, Sydney contemplated the list of items. There was a lot to do. Equally, there were several ways to obtain all of that information without having to ask Benton Lowe. Being a serving FBI agent, one of those methods was the most obvious of all. Yet Sydney recognised the potential for a conflict of interest if she spoke to agents assigned to the high school shootings, and if one existed it was bound to tie her up in legal red tape for months. None of which would necessarily prevent her from bending a few rules and asking for a professional favour or two.
As for the alleged witness, Sydney would deal with that problem when the time was right.
Five
Her mind made up, Sydney went to fetch her laptop from the bedroom, and brought up The Union Democrat online. The website provided local news updates. She used the search facility to bring up a string of articles connected to the Moon Falls school massacre. Starting with the first item, uploaded on the day the tragedy took place, Sydney read through each of them in chronological order. Every so often she paused long enough to make a note or two, drawing arrows between some of them, before plunging back in. A link to another piece caught her eye, and when she clicked on it she was diverted to a page by feature writer Roy Clement.
It begins like any other day at Moon Falls High. The school run drop-off functions like a well-oiled conveyor belt, pausing at regular intervals to allow the vehicles on it to decant their precious human cargo outside the main entrance with its wrought-iron gates standing wide open. Bright yellow buses lumber their way up the hill to do the same en masse at their own designated zones. Students enter school grounds bearing weighty backpacks and walk as far as their assigned clique bubbles.
There are the inevitable jocks tossing pigskin around, cheerleaders rehearsing routines, nerds and geeks who share the same cohesive community along with gamers, artistic types, plus a substantial band of general under-achievers who for some reason find sanctuary in one another. A number of children are both able and confident enough to wander from group to group and fall into whatever topic is up for discussion that morning. Others hover fretfully on the fringes, perhaps afraid to blunder into forbidden territory, many not knowing where they fit in at all.
Then there are those who choose not to conform; a conscious decision born of disdain for society as a whole, and government-sponsored systems specifically.
Irrespective of their pecking order, when the bell rings to announce the beginning of another day of institutionalised education, they all funnel inside as one, leaving latecomers to their tardy fate. From then on the schedule is set for long periods of silence and inactivity other than within the teaching rooms, though the imminent class change bell has the power to terrify the meek and mild as they prepare to be buffeted like pinballs during their swim upstream along the corridors.
It is during the first period of stillness that day when things go out of kilter in such a way that it will resonate across the entire country for several weeks afterwards.
The upright figure wearing dark clothing and a ski-mask initially appears when exiting the art supplies room at 9.20am. The figure’s build and gait suggests a male, and later when the crime scene investigators take measurements, they estimate the stride to be that of someone standing fractionally over six foot tall. He carries a navy blue holdall over his left shoulder, an
gled down and open outward, fully unzipped. His left hand clutches the holdall’s straps in place. In his right he holds a pistol, identified afterwards as a Heckler & Koch P9. He is unhurried in his movements, as if out for a stroll in the warmth of a pleasant summer day. The digital footage is brutally clear, but the lack of audio lends it an ethereal quality that chills everybody who sees it.
As the figure moves out of range of the first security camera, another picks him up turning right and entering the long central corridor running through the entire length of the main block of the school. At 9.21am, a female emerges from a classroom approximately twenty-two feet ahead of the gunman, whose right hand immediately raises to the horizontal. The girl stops in her tracks as she sees him, frozen to the spot like an animal caught in the headlights of an approaching vehicle.
Three rapid flares of flame and brilliant light are all that announce the first shots fired that day to those who watch the video. The female – seventeen-year-old Casey Fowler – initially reels and staggers sideways, then slumps back. Eventually she slides to the polished floor, leaving dark smears on the pale green paintwork of the wall behind her. At that moment, Casey has less than two minutes to live, her accelerated heartbeat pumping precious lifeblood out onto the cool vinyl beneath her.
The dark-clad gunman moves forward and steps over his first victim without so much as glancing down at Casey’s body. He pushes open the classroom door and slips inside. By the time he exits the room twenty-three seconds later, he has emptied the magazines of two weapons and cast them aside. No security footage exists to show what took place within the classroom, but when he is next revealed making his way further along the same corridor, the gunman has five further victims to his name. Three fellow school students were shot dead, another critically wounded, as was the class teacher who was the first to react to his presence in the room.