The Event

by McBride, Michael

  The corner had been excavated to create a larger working space. The discolored concrete below it served as a flat surface to stabilize a ring of stainless steel equipment connected by rubber hoses. Several larger hoses snaked out through the rear wall and into the yard. A half-dozen small fans had been clipped to the ceiling. She didn’t recognize any of the individual components of the setup, but their function was as plain as day. On top of the rough concrete ledge behind them was a plastic jug of isopropyl alcohol, a Clorox bottle whose label had been torn off, a white plastic bottle with a black lid, and a bottle of dish soap that now contained a thin, colorless fluid.

  Eighty-six minutes post-event.

  “This where he made it?” Lawton asked.

  One of the criminalists glanced up at her, his identity hidden behind the reflection of the lights on his face shield.

  “Believe it. One screwed up kid, some common equipment he could have swiped from the chem lab at school, one fairly simplistic chemical reaction and…voila. You have yourself a weapon of mass destruction.”

  “How does a seventeen year old get his hands on the precursor chemicals required to make a lethal nerve agent?”

  “You kidding me? We can’t even stop people from cooking meth? And something like sarin? It’s not as hard as you might think. It’s not even all that expensive. You can buy a kilogram of methylphosphonyl dichloride on the internet for like eight hundred bucks. Mix it with hydrogen fluoride, which you can buy at any industrial chemical retail outlet, and you have yourself a ready quantity of methylphosphonyl difluoride. Combine that with ordinary rubbing alcohol and toss in some isopropylamine—that clear liquid over there that smells like ammonia—and you have more than enough sarin to take out the Five Boroughs in one fell swoop. And all made in the crawlspace of a little prick who’s unhappy with the allowance his daddy gives him.”

  “Probably didn’t cost him much more than a grand, all told,” the other criminalist said. “Good thing he didn’t have more experience or he could have done some serious damage.”

  “He did,” Lawton snapped.

  “No offense, ma’am. Had he produced weapons-grade sarin rather than the bathtub variety, he could have done a whole hell of a lot worse. We’re talking casualties in the millions.”

  “I want you to track down the manufacturers of those chemicals and I want them strung up by their balls.”

  “You serious? Their names and phone numbers are on the labels of the bottles they came in. You can check their MSDS sheets online. We’re not talking about a kid getting his hands on some plutonium or something. It probably took him an afternoon online to find this stuff and order it. We’re not dealing with some closely guarded secret or something.”

  “What happened to the good old days when kids just used the ‘net to download porn,” the other tech said.

  Lawton bit her lip and scurried back out of the crawlspace. She shed the isolation suit and nearly screamed into the face of the crime scene photographer—flash, flash—as she shoved her way out of the utility room and into the rec room.

  Eighty-eight minutes post-event.

  This kid didn’t just stumble upon this information. He’d been led to it. And undoubtedly by the same person she’d been hunting for the last five years. The man she would track to the ends of the earth if she had to. No matter how long it took. She would see him held accountable for all of the death and suffering he had caused, held up for the world to see as the monster he truly was.

  Flash. Flash.

  And then she was going to kill him.

  Four

  Rutgers University

  New Brunswick Campus

  Piscataway, New Jersey

  October 26th

  Five Years Ago

  Lawton wasn’t entirely sure what she hoped to accomplish by coming here. Maybe, deep down, she thought she would miraculously find some crucial link that everyone else had missed, or perhaps she simply needed to exorcise the ghost of the man who nearly killed her partner and subsequently died by her hand. Whatever the case, if there was a connection between the broker and what happened here on the New Brunswick campus, she needed to find it. Unlikely though it seemed.

  Hargrove had arrived at New York-Presbyterian in critical condition and gone directly into surgery. In addition to clipping his lung, she had severed his subclavian artery and caused an inordinate amount of blood loss. He had remained in critical condition for three days, during which time her partner had gone from one facial reconstruction surgery into another and she had endured a departmental inquest into the shooting that was left unresolved until after the broker’s ultimate fate was established.

  He died at 2:16 a.m. on the third night.

  The lone man who could have answered all of their questions never regained consciousness.

  The shooting had been ruled righteous, and his death an unintended consequence of a targeted shot designed to incapacitate the perpetrator. The bullet had passed through the interspace between the second and third anterolateral ribs, struck the concave ventral surface of his scapula at such an angle as to be redirected anteriorly and superiorly, and severed the subclavian artery before embedding itself into the underside of the acromion. A fluke ricochet. A one in a million shot. Had she aimed a fraction of an inch in any other direction, he would have survived without complication.

  She had spent the following days being subjected to intensive and invasive psychological evaluations before being cleared to return to active duty. After a week’s unpaid convalescence, of course. Right now, she was on her own time and was starting to feel like she was chasing shadows, allowing herself to be manipulated by a psychopath from beyond the grave.

  It had only been three weeks since the slaughter and life had returned to normal on campus, or at least some reasonable approximation of it. She watched students hurrying past on their way to and from class and the student center and the residential apartments surrounding Livingston Commons. Whether consciously or not, they skirted the central area, giving the fountains a wide berth. She caught sideways glances from the corners of eyes, but even the phase of morbid fascination had given way to the grim reality of the situation. They all needed to find a way to acknowledge the massacre that had happened in their midst and the fate that could have befallen any of them had luck not been smiling on them the morning of September 30th.

  She turned to face the Livingston Apartments, which no longer even remotely resembled the kind of dorms that had been on campuses in her day. There were restaurants and a coffee shop and a movie theater on the bottom floors, along with comfortable lobbies and rec centers full of kids who fancied themselves adults, but knew nothing of responsibility. They lived a transient existence in the four stories above, an extended rite of passage that for seventeen innocent students ended at 9:07 a.m. when a sophomore accounting major from Hoboken named Philip Louis Mitchell shaved his head and painted his face to look like that of a pit viper and accessed the roof from the service elevator with a Browning BAR SherTrac Hog Stalker Realtree Max-1 rifle with a gas-operated autoloader and ten-round box magazine. He took his time to set up a tripod on the edge of the roof, consume a Monster energy drink, and take aim at a commons swarming with an estimated eight hundred students.

  He’d taken his time to select his targets. Only three of the twenty shots had been anything other than kill shots. Only one had missed. Forensics exhumed the slug from the three-inch trunk of the sapling maple that had saved the life of Arianna Worrell, who had almost comically taken refuge behind it amid the chaos. Two had been taken by ambulance to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and wouldn’t have survived were it not for the truly heroic measures taken by the paramedics in the field and the ER staff upon arrival, even though one was now permanently confined to a wheelchair. Philip Louis Mitchell had been in the process of loading his third of five magazines when a police sharpshooter took off the crown of his skull from the parking lot more than four hundred yards away.

  Lawton had stud
ied all of the reports. The first four victims had died right where she stood now. It had happened so quickly that they’d barely had time to look up in surprise. Where once their blood had diluted into the water from the decorative fountains there were now bronze placards to commemorate the lives cut short. The remainder had died while running in a blind panic, colliding with one another as bullets rained from the sky. Crosses stood from patches of grass, adorned with pictures and surrounded by flowers and candles and personal trinkets faded by the recent rain. She recognized the smiling faces of the deceased from the pictures she had seen on the nightly news and in the newspaper. There was something so incredibly tragic about the randomness of it that made her presence here feel sacrilegious, as though she were looking for some personal meaning in a tragedy that belonged exclusively to others, like a trespasser at an extended wake.

  The FBI’s investigation into Philip Louis Mitchell had revealed no extraordinary circumstances or recognizable triggers that could have been used to predict the massacre. He had been a solid, if unexceptional student from an upper middle class family. The eldest of two children from a home in which the parents were still married and there was no indication of strife or abuse, no matter how deep they dug. He had a group of friends, albeit largely one of convenience, and was neither visible nor invisible, according to everyone questioned. He was simply an average, reasonably well-liked kid from a good home where he learned to hunt from his father and his uncles on their annual deer and elk hunts. Even in retrospect, they could find no rational reason for him to have commenced with his horrible rampage.

  Her own investigations had turned up no connection between Mitchell and the broker, Anthony Hargrove. She couldn’t even find a single instance when they’d been in the same state at the same time. Hargrove completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford and then his master’s at Harvard, and appeared to have spent every waking moment since then in the pursuit of an eventual partnership at Webster & Lloyd. Regardless of their lack of demonstrable personal connection, there was no disputing the fact that Hargrove had made a veritable killing in the wake of the campus shooting that had cost seventeen innocent students—and one enigmatic shooter—their lives.

  Hargrove had been heavily invested in an aggressive portfolio featuring a handful of stocks widely considered left-for-dead. Advanced Micro Devices, Ford Motors, Genworth Financial, Tenet Healthcare, and XL Capital all took a serious beating during the financial crisis of the previous year, allowing him to amass a seemingly absurd amount of stock on behalf of his clients. And himself. It was a gamble that would have destroyed his career and undoubtedly led to an anonymous burial at sea if it failed, but instead proved to be a stroke of genius when each returned more than two hundred percent by the time of the shooting, which occurred the morning after the end of the third quarter. Moments before final call on the business day prior, Hargrove inexplicably liquidated his entire portfolio, seemingly in spite of the vast majority of pundits, who predicted those particular stocks would return record earnings in the fourth quarter.

  The following morning was one of chaos and indecision on the market. News of the shootings had just broken and it was yet to be determined whether or not it was an act of terrorism. The Dow opened twenty-two percent down from the previous day’s average amid the brief investor panic, during which time Hargrove picked up the same shares again in what his employers considered a serendipitous stroke of luck. Overnight, he made close to half a billion dollars for himself and his exclusive list of clients, who retained the same stocks and rode them to record gains. At the time of his ultimate breakdown, Hargrove’s portfolio had returned more than three hundred percent, more than a hundred percent above the point at which he’d sold it all. Plus the five hundred million he made while Philip Louis Mitchell was murdering his classmates.

  Lawton didn’t believe in luck or serendipity any more than she believed in coincidence. She’d done the research. The market always—always—opened low following catastrophic events. Earthquakes and hurricanes and natural disasters of all kinds. Wars and train derailments and plane crashes did the exact same thing. The market was an expression of investor confidence in the economy, and investors were prone to panic. They were willing to take a wait-and-see attitude with everything except their money. Hargrove couldn’t have done any better had he known what was about to happen on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, which, while wildly speculative, was the only connection she could draw between Hargrove and Mitchell. But how could he possibly have known that a normal kid from an average upbringing at an ordinary state school was about to dissociate and go on one of the bloodiest rampages in history before it happened?

  She was grasping at straws and she knew it, but she had nothing else to go on. No other even remote connection existed. These were two people whose lives intersected on the very site where she stood, but from an exclusively financial perspective. Anthony Hargrove had made half a billion dollars as a result of Philip Louis Mitchell massacring seventeen innocent kids and the guilt had driven him over the edge.

  Too bad she’d never know for sure now. Both Hargrove and Mitchell were dead, and if there had been a secret connection, they’d taken it to the grave with them.

  Five

  Billington Residence

  27 Cohawney Road

  Scarsdale, New York

  September 29th

  10:30 a.m.

  “I’ve got something over here,” a voice called from the boy’s bedroom.

  Ninety minutes post-event.

  Lawton crossed the rec room and nearly ran into the agent who’d been working the boy’s laptop in the doorway to the bedroom. He whirled and sat back down. She leaned over his shoulder and looked at the computer. It was an Apple. At least she thought that was what was beneath all of the Hollywood Undead stickers. Definitely not the cheapest of laptops. A gift from mom and dad, decorated the way boys had plastered their skateboards in her day. When computers hadn’t been personal, but shared between entire families. When defacing a two thousand dollar piece of equipment would have caused a father to suffer a stroke, if he hadn’t died from laughing so hard at the thought of spending that much money on a toy for his teenager first.

  “Walk me through it.”

  “You can erase your memory and delete your history, but you can’t ever make your tracks online totally disappear.” His name was Badgett and he was from the New York Division of the FBI’s Evidence Response Team. The best of the best. She hadn’t worked with him before, but his reputation preceded him. As did the joke that he looked like Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, only taller. “Think of the internet like a great big sandy desert. You walk across it and you leave deep impressions that will take years for the wind to blow smooth again. You can try to brush them away, but even that leaves impressions that can be found if you know what you’re looking for. The ghost of a trail.”

  “I get it. Just show me what you found.”

  “So here’s the thing. Kids these days? They all live two different lives. One in person: at school, at home, with friends. Another online. Social media? I’m telling you the concept had to have been designed by predators. They’re like enormous online retailers for stalkers and pedophiles. These kids blog their innermost thoughts, tweet their secret desires, and post all of the little windows into their psyches that you don’t need to be a psychic to interpret. And all in searchable databases. Combined, they serve as a blueprint for manipulation.”

  Ninety-two minutes post-event.

  “Now, people like us?” he continued. “We know all about the dangers of the internet. We’ve been around since its inception. Since the days of dial-up. But not the kids of this generation. They were born into a world in which the internet was just another facet of their daily existence. We may still view it as a kind of virtual reality—remember that term?—but to these kids, it’s an environment every bit as real as the world around them. Maybe more so since it can be organized to cater directly to them. Where they aren’t judge
d and they aren’t bullied. Where they find comfort in the company of other kids just like them, kids who look real and feel real, who talk and act just like them, but who could be some sick forty year-old perv in Pasadena who gets off on it or a seemingly harmless neighbor down the street whose little infatuation quickly turns into a dangerous obsession. And everything in between. I’ve seen all kinds—believe me—and I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing them. But this one? This one’s a work of art. As far as these kinds of things go, anyway.”

  “You think whoever’s responsible has done this before?”

  “I’m not qualified to make that call.”

  “Your gut?”

  He chewed his thumbnail while he thought.

  Ninety-four minutes post-event.

  “Yeah. That’s my feeling anyway. This guy targeted our subject and enacted what amounts to a very sophisticated plan. Check this out. He initiates first contact through a message board for this band. Hollywood Undead, right? Their early interactions are very public and involve a ton of other people. They become friends on Facebook. Follow each other on Twitter and Tumblr. For nearly a year.”

  “Jesus.”

  “No joke, right? This guy—known variously as DeadBite97, Ryan Beatty, DeadInDitches, and RYN BAT—weasels his way into our boy’s life. One day at a time. Until they’re the best of buddies. Finally—finally—our Ryan Beatty gets bold, and instead of meeting in chat rooms, they take advantage of technology and connect in person via FaceTime, the Apple app that supports real-time face-to-face video calls. Ordinarily, these things are essentially every bit as untraceable as interactions in chat rooms thanks to the Net Neutrality Act, but AT&T got its panties in a bunch over its customers using their unlimited data for what essentially amounts to another premium paid service and sent out a notice that it would block FaceTime access unless their customers subscribed to an expanded service. Illegal and unenforceable, for all intents and purposes, but dad here, being a law-abiding citizen and all, throws down on the expanded service plan.”