by Lisa Gardner
“Really?” Rainie gave him a dubious glance. “And here I thought I’d destroyed the case just this morning.”
“Sometimes the evidence comes together in spite of an officer’s best intentions,” Sanders assured her.
“I’ll remember that. What new evidence?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Sanders feigned surprise. “Got some info back from ATF today. Tracing Danny’s .38 revolver and .22 semiauto was simple. Both registered to one Shep O’Grady. Furthermore, the CSU recovered five .38-caliber slugs from the area of incidence last night. Today the ME confirmed that blood and fiber on the slugs are consistent with the two juvenile DOAs, and—drum roll here—ballistics determined that rifling on the slugs matches Danny’s revolver. You were right, Conner, we got at least one of the murder weapons.”
“So the .38 was used to kill the two little girls,” Rainie said with a frown. “That still doesn’t prove Danny was the one who pulled the trigger.”
“Yeah, but we also got Danny’s prints on all the casings recovered at the scene. A good lawyer will still argue that only proves Danny loaded the guns, not that he fired them, but at this point the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. We can tie Danny to the murder weapon. He has no alibi for the time of the shooting, and we have a witness—you—who places him in the school immediately after the shootings, holding his father hostage. Even if we can’t get his confession entered into evidence, I think we have enough for a jury to connect the dots.”
“What about Melissa Avalon? So far, the evidence ties him only to the girls.”
“Don’t know about Avalon yet. It appears she was shot once in the forehead with the .22 semiauto. No exit wound, of course, so we have to wait for the ME to retrieve the slug during tomorrow’s autopsy. Cases like this generally aren’t promising, though. Twenty-two-caliber slugs are only forty grains and made out of soft lead. Most of the time they’re too deformed from ricocheting around the skull to yield any rifling marks. We’ll have to see. On the other hand, I learned some dirt today when I got my hair cut. According to the rumor mill, Avalon and the principal were really tight … if you know what I mean.”
“Big deal,” Rainie said. “Quincy figured that out after a ten-minute chat with the principal. Go, fed.”
Quincy shrugged modestly. Sanders looked chagrined. “You knew he was stepping out on his wife?”
“His reaction to Miss Avalon’s death seemed overly intense for the circumstances.”
“Huh.” Sanders scowled, grabbed a fresh carrot stick, and then recovered. “It doesn’t matter to the investigation,” he said firmly. “I checked with the administrative staff, and Principal VanderZanden was in his office when the shots were fired. From what I can tell, Danny is the only one unaccounted for at the time. Something else to put in our reports.”
“There are still the students who were absent yesterday to consider,” Rainie said.
“Twenty-one students out sick,” Sanders reported. “Sixteen already have alibis in the form of anxious parents. I bet you the other five are cleared by tomorrow afternoon.”
“What about the computers?” Quincy asked. “Principal VanderZanden said Danny spent a great deal of time on-line. I’m curious about that.”
Sanders looked at him shrewdly. “You’re thinking outside influence,” he said.
“It’s been a factor in several of the shootings. And I am surprised by Danny’s sophistication in breaking in to what I would presume to be a state-of-the-art gun safe.”
Sanders grunted. “Don’t know enough yet about the gun safe to determine how hard he had to work to get into it. I do know Shep had a helluva gun collection. We’re lucky Danny went with two small handguns instead of the rifles. God knows what kind of damage he could’ve done then.”
“Do we know why he chose the .38 and .22?” Quincy asked.
Sanders looked at Rainie. She shook her head. “He didn’t comment and I didn’t think to ask. I guess I assumed because they were easier to fit into a backpack. Concealment.”
“But Danny was a hunter, wasn’t he?” Quincy asked.
“Sure. Since he was very young.”
“Did he spend a lot of time with handguns as well?”
Rainie had to think about it. In the meantime, their dinners arrived. Quincy’s salad looked fresh and crisp—the advantage of being in farm country. Rainie’s chicken-fried steak, on the other hand, was smothered in thick gravy, with a pat of butter melting on top. The smell made her stomach growl, but when she picked up her fork, she discovered that the conversation had already destroyed her appetite.
“Shep generally tells hunting stories,” she said after a moment. “I know Danny has some marksmanship awards, but I think they were with a .22 rifle.”
“First place, junior division,” Sanders confirmed. “We seized the trophy from his bedroom.”
Rainie grimaced. She didn’t want to think what it must have been like for Sandy and Shep to watch their son’s room be boxed up by Crime Scene Unit personnel. Or what kind of impression that must have made on Becky.
Quincy was talking. “So Danny’s most comfortable with a rifle but selects two handguns. He has a love-hate relationship with sports but goes after the teacher of the computer lab, whom he supposedly adores. He hides in a room so nobody will see him but never leaves the building after the shooting. Interesting.” He turned to Sanders again. “About the school computers …”
“Techies are examining them now,” Sanders said. “Looks like a main computer and three workstations. The school had a firewall server, so the good news is that it probably has a record of which workstation visited which Internet sites at what time. In theory, the lab rats will have a complete rundown for me of all the sites visited by the end of the week. I did get a call this afternoon saying that the computers have been messed with—the cache file purged, the Web browser’s history file deleted, et cetera—so it appears that someone made an effort to cover their tracks. The techies weren’t too concerned. Something about probably being able to find things in the cookies, or God knows what. They were going to start work on it in the morning.”
“If there are any problems, we have excellent recovery agents at the Bureau,” Quincy mentioned casually.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Sanders definitely had no intention of parting with his evidence. He waved his hand dismissively. “I’m sure we’ll be fine. We already got a lot of evidence in place. At this point, the computer stuff will just go to state of mind.”
“We don’t have anything connecting Danny to Melissa Avalon,” Rainie pointed out.
“Then the DA just pursues the charges for killing the girls. That’s fine by me. There are only so many consecutive life sentences a man can serve.”
“A boy can serve,” Rainie said absently, giving up on her dinner altogether and stealing a piece of Quincy’s lettuce. “Only so many consecutive life sentences a boy can serve.”
Sanders rolled his eyes. “Like age has anything to do with it these days. We’re about to be overrun by an entire generation of juvenile psychopaths. Isn’t that right, Quincy? Dual-income families have turned out a batch of superpredators who have no sympathy or remorse. Blast ’em up on Nintendo; blast ’em up on the streets. Murder pregnant women; run home to watch Bugs Bunny on TV. The New York Times ran a whole article on it.”
“I wouldn’t believe everything you read,” Quincy said.
“Why not? I read that article in the early nineties and we’ve had how many school shootings since then?”
“Half a dozen, I’m sure,” Quincy said mildly, “but we still had one of the safest school years on record in 1998.”
Sanders gave Quincy a dubious look. The FBI agent returned it levelly. “In the 1992–1993 school year,” Quincy said, “a time frame I’m sure that article quoted, there were fifty-five fatalities. As you point out, however, this is before we experienced the rash of school shootings. In the 1997–1998 school year, we saw three school shootings. And yet, total fatalities f
or that year were only forty, nearly a thirty-percent decline. The truth is, violence in schools is a lot like airline crashes—tragic and shocking and headline-grabbing, but by no means indicative of the whole sector. Children are still safer at school—and in planes—than in the family’s minivan.”
“But then again, these incidents aren’t magically going away,” Rainie countered. She stole a crouton from Quincy’s salad and gave him her own version of his hard, direct stare. “In the beginning, maybe you could dismiss this as a phase, but it’s been years now. One shooting is scary. Seven are downright terrifying.”
“We face troubling issues,” Quincy agreed, “but we shouldn’t lose perspective. Overall juvenile criminal offenses have declined in the last five years. And as we’ve cracked down on drugs and gangs, schools have become safer. That’s the good news.
“On the other hand,” he added as he saw their growing skepticism, “some teenagers are shockingly violent and lacking in remorse. And, unfortunately, the media distorts that fact. Normal Boy Kills Ten. Perfect Family Murdered by Fourteen-Year-Old Son. It leads us to rampant paranoia and, if we’re not careful, fear of all children. The truth, however, is that the overwhelming majority of children who commit these shootings aren’t, quote unquote, normal. Several have suffered from recognized mental disorders and were supposed to be on medication. Even the ones who weren’t under a doctor’s care probably had a strong degree of attachment disorder, making it easier for them to contemplate murder.”
“What’s attachment disorder?” Sanders asked.
“It’s the failure to bond,” Rainie said instantly, then shrugged and helped herself to more of Quincy’s salad. “I studied psychology in college. I remember a thing or two.”
“Very good,” Quincy assured her, then frowned and pulled his salad protectively to him. She stole another crouton. He gave up.
“Everyone needs to bond,” Quincy explained to Sanders. “In theory, as children we bond with our parents. We cry, our parents respond to our cry by feeding us, and we decide our parents are good people and love us—we bond. As we grow older, this bond extends to the rest of society, helping us be good friends, neighbors, husbands, et cetera. Unfortunately, not all children form bonds. The baby cries and is hit. In that case, instead of learning to trust or care about others, the child becomes egocentric, lying compulsively, manipulating others, being incapable of feeling empathy. For the most part, we see this phenomenon in abused or abandoned children. Lack of bonding, however, can happen in ‘good’ households too. It’s just not as common.”
“Good parents have bad kids?” Sanders asked, and rolled his eyes to show his opinion. Quincy wasn’t fazed.
“Absolutely. A mother suffers from severe postpartum depression and is unable to meet her infant’s needs. Or the newborn suffers from a painful medical condition and it’s not in his mother’s power to meet his needs. Or the newborn simply isn’t amenable to bonding. No matter how hard the mother tries, the baby pulls away. It’s rare, but it happens. So yes, good parents can end up with one child who is very social and one child who is very antisocial.”
Sanders gave Quincy another dubious look. “I don’t buy it,” he said bluntly. “You’re saying these kids are little freaking psychopaths from birth. Well, if that’s the case, why doesn’t anyone notice? Why do all the headlines read Normal Boy Kills Ten?”
“Think Ted Bundy,” Rainie offered conversationally. “Everyone thought he was a handsome, charming man. Only problem was that he raped and murdered young girls as a hobby. Oops.”
“Exactly,” Quincy said, and gave her an approving nod. Rainie found herself smiling back. The fed had warm blue eyes when he smiled like that—dazzling, Paul Newman eyes.
“Still sounds like psychobabble to me,” Sanders was harrumphing. “The kids are murderers. End of story. The best solution is to lock them up and throw away the key.”
“Age doesn’t matter?” Quincy asked mildly. He was still looking at Rainie. Belatedly, they both returned their attention to the salad.
“Nope,” Sanders said. “If the kid is capable of doing the act, he’s capable of paying the price.”
Quincy shrugged, obviously less convinced. He stabbed another bite of salad, then surprised both Rainie and Sanders by saying, “Maybe. God knows I’ve seen some things.” He paused. “Some kids are dangerous,” he said finally, more forcefully. “Some of the youths I’ve interviewed probably are beyond all help, let alone our ability to imagine. But not all of them are like that. And our legal system is based on the philosophy that we’d let a hundred guilty men go free before sending one innocent man away. It seems clear to me, then, that we have an obligation to try to identify which youths are amenable to rehabilitation. Not to simply lump all offenders together, then ship them out of sight.”
“Can you really help a kid who’s committed murder?” Rainie asked curiously.
“Sometimes. The younger the child is, the better the chances. Also, attachment disorder is a range. Some of the kids I’ve interviewed represented the extreme end of the spectrum. To put it in Sanders’s terms, they are ‘little freaking psychopaths.’ And I’ll agree with him there—it’s safer for us all to lock those ones up and throw away the key.” Quincy smiled dryly at the state detective. Then his voice dropped. He appeared more somber. “However, that’s not the case for all of our teenage offenders. As we discussed before, Officer Conner, mass murderers are not homogeneous. Some of the school shooters were definitely more followers than leaders. They were troubled, they were vulnerable. They let themselves be manipulated into performing a violent act, because they were hurt and disturbed and didn’t know how to deal with that. They did what they did, but afterward they also felt remorse and regret. I think these kids probably could be reformed. Given their ages, it seems a shame not to try.”
“And if we’re wrong and they kill again?” Sanders quizzed. “You gonna be the one visiting the family’s home to tell them how your failed science experiment murdered their wife, sister, mother? You gonna be the one on TV trying to explain why we thought it was such a great idea to let a known killer loose on society?”
Quincy gave him a faint smile. “It happens. Some of our more prolific serial killers—Kempner, for example—are graduates of the juvenile system. Killed young. Were sentenced to rehabilitation. Came of age. Killed even more people.”
“At times like this, I’m glad I don’t have a kid,” Sanders said.
Quincy finally sighed. He set down his fork and seemed to lose interest once and for all in the salad. “Things are becoming more complicated,” he murmured. “Do you know we’re now using our serial-killer profiling techniques in high schools?”
Rainie arched a brow. Sanders exclaimed more eloquently, “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not, Detective. In the wake of the recent shootings, several school districts have implemented ‘student profiling.’ School administrators have a checklist of ‘suspicious’ behavior to use to evaluate each student’s potential for violence. Things like animal cruelty, abusive language, writings containing graphic violence. A few of our agents are now teaching classes in behavioral science and psychological profiling to teachers.”
“What happens if a student is profiled as potentially dangerous?” Rainie asked with a frown. “Do they call the cops, pat him down, and confiscate his video games?”
“Most districts have a policy to notify the parents, then the student can be sent to counselors or be expelled. It’s being taken quite seriously.”
“So were the Salem witch trials.”
“Yes, but the witches never killed thirteen people. Schools are under pressure. Three years ago Principal VanderZanden rejected the notion that a shooting could happen here. How much do you want to bet he’s regretting it now? And if the school board hears of profiling next week, how much do you want to bet your teachers will be searching for future homicidal maniacs in between grading papers?”
They all grew silent. Sanders sh
ook his head. “Man, I could not be a teacher,” he said vehemently. “I see two to four homicides a week, nice fresh kills, and still the thought of what’s going on inside the classroom scares me to death. Half of these teachers are being bullied and harassed by their own students, and now they’re supposed to actively wonder which little boys are cold-blooded killing machines. Yeah, they’ll sleep well at night.”
Rainie shrugged. “Teachers should be used to it by now. When was the last time the PTA called for better parenting? It’s always the school’s fault. No matter what happens, my God, why aren’t schools doing a better job of raising our kids?”
Quincy smiled dryly. “Spoken as two people who don’t have children.”
“I wonder what did it for Danny O’Grady,” Sanders mused out loud. “He doesn’t seem so different from the other school shooters to me. Bit of a loner, spends all his time in a computer lab, and can’t cut it on the football field. I haven’t found a teacher yet who knows of any close friends. Then you throw in the fact that his father seems to have a God complex, his parents are fighting all the time, and little Danny pretty much cut his teeth on a hunting rifle.… Hell, maybe profiling would’ve saved the school from him. Seems like it was only a matter of time.”
Quincy shook his head. “I don’t think profiling would’ve identified Danny O’Grady. He was a good student, polite with his teachers, diligent in his studies. We’ve heard no stories of torturing pets and not even a fascination with fire. Danny is angry. But there’s still no evidence that he’s homicidal.”
“Oh, the kid did the deed,” Sanders said confidently. “Conner caught him red-handed with the murder weapons, and he’s confessed twice. Case closed. Now we just got to wrap everything up before this whole frigging town explodes. Redneck assholes. There oughtta be an IQ requirement for owning a gun.”
Rainie didn’t say anything. It was after nine-thirty, the diner was nearly empty, and in spite of Sanders’s big words, they all appeared pensive.