True Crime Fiction

by Michael Lister

  Continuing east, the shooter begins to try the doorknobs of the classrooms he comes to, finding them locked, moving on, occasionally firing into the rooms through the narrow glass pane.

  More explosions rocking the school.

  More smoke in the hallways.

  Another feed shows a young, skinny, long-legged boy running out of the upper boys’ bathroom and in the direction of the shooter, his bony arms pumping feverishly through the smoke.

  He doesn’t make it far.

  Rounding the north curve, he comes face-to-face with the shooter and tries to lock it up and turn directions.

  In the other frame, the shooter in the long black leather duster and expressionless white mask raises his rifle and fires.

  Back in the boy’s frame, his left ankle appears to be hit, his leg flying out from underneath him as he stumbles and falls headfirst into the cinderblock wall.

  And though the boy doesn’t move, the shooter fires more rounds at him before continuing on in the direction the boy has just come from.

  When the shooter reaches Janna Todd’s room and finds the door open, he goes inside, but quickly comes back out again.

  As he’s doing this, another feed shows Janna and her small class running down the short hallway toward the back exit.

  Finding the doors locked, they turn and begin to run back down the short hallway toward the main circular one.

  Like witnessing a horrific car collision in slow motion, we can see the shooter moving southwest, steadily approaching the area where the back hallway splits off the main one.

  Looking back and forth from frame to frame, we can see Janna and the students running down the back hall, getting to a little past the halfway point, as the shooter curves around and reaches the opening. The shooter stopping, turning. The students stopping, turning. The shooter raising his rifle. The students trying to run in the opposite direction though there is nowhere to go, tripping over each other, stumbling, flailing, falling. The shooter firing. Janna being struck in the head, crumpling to the floor, students collapsing around her.

  Even on the small, low-quality videos it’s as horrific as anything I’ve ever seen.

  With all the students on the blood-covered floor, dead or dying, the shooter continues west, disappearing as the hallway curves south and he reaches the section where most of the cameras have been destroyed.

  In other areas of the hallway where the security cameras are still functioning, more explosions, more smoke, more gunfire, more debris.

  We continue to watch the feeds but don’t see anyone else until I arrive and run through the commons and up toward the south side of the main hallway.

  I’m picked up on various security cameras as I jog through the smoke until I vanish into the southeast area of the hall where the cameras have been bombed.

  During this time we’ve not seen either shooter on any feed again.

  One has been in the southeast section the entire time and the other disappeared into it after the back exit hallway massacre.

  “Both shooters were in the part of the building that you ran into,” Tyrese says.

  “Yeah, but by the time I got there I think they had already changed clothes and joined the other students.”

  “Why didn’t they shoot Derek Burrell?” he asks.

  “They were probably already changed and hiding among the students when he came out,” I say, “but it could have been that they saw him and hid from him, hoping he would get blamed for the shooting or shoot someone or get shot by someone else, which is what happened.”

  “Is it possible he was in on it?” Tyrese asks. “He doesn’t seem like the type of kid who would be involved in something like this, but . . . I never figured any of our kids would really go through with something like this so I just don’t know anymore.”

  “It’s possible,” I say. “Right now we have to assume anything is.”

  “If he’s not . . . and was just trying to help . . .”

  “I know,” I say, frowning and shaking my head, as the hole inside me becomes a little more cavernous.

  “Did the shooters shoot Kim or did Derek?” he asks.

  “I think it was one of the shooters—probably the one who stayed on the south side of the hallway, but it’ll take ballistics for us to know for sure.”

  “I wish we knew how she and Derek are doing,” he says.

  “LeAnn’s supposed to call us as soon as she knows something.”

  “I hope it’s good news,” he says. “And I know you—”

  Before he can finish what he’s saying, one of the SWAT guys runs into the office and yells, “We’ve found undetonated explosives. We’ve got to get out of the building now.”

  304

  A lot of us go to school in daily fear of physical violence. It’s the cruelest of caste systems. Everybody has his place and once you’re in it you can’t leave it. Once you’re a slut or a faggot or poor white trash or slow or stupid or smelly or fat or a nerd or geek or a big ol’ mother-loving, thumb-sucking titty-baby. And don’t even get me started on the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, or Muslims.

  “They used a lot of explosives, but a bunch of ’em didn’t go off,” Kenneth Lee, the scruffy-bearded, Einstein-haired, middle-aged bomb squad tech is saying.

  “Thankfully,” Hugh Glenn says.

  He and Chip Jeffers, who have been missing for most of the morning, have joined our small group, consisting of Tyrese, myself, the SWAT team leader, the patrol lieutenant, a sheriff’s department investigator, a medical examiner investigator, and an FDLE crime scene tech.

  It’s early afternoon. We’re standing out in front of the high school. Students, teachers, parents, and staff have all gone home, taking their trauma with them.

  When the additional undetonated explosives were found, the entire area had been evacuated. The school campus is now mostly vacant, the parking lots empty except for a few random vehicles—most likely those belonging to the victims, some of whom are at the hospital, some of whom are still lying dead inside the school.

  The emergency vehicles now form a perimeter at the farthest edges of the school property, the massive media presence, local onlookers, and the few grief-stricken parents still waiting for word about their missing children are all on the other side of it.

  Unable to do anything more here, Dad and Merrill are out following up leads and gathering more information about our suspects and the kids who wore black boots today.

  While waiting for the bomb squad to finish searching and clearing the buildings, I interviewed as many teachers and students and staff as I could before they left, gathered as much information about every aspect of the attack as I could, and called LeAnn for updates far too many times—particularly considering all she could tell me each time was both Kim and Derek were still in surgery and she’d call me the moment either of them came out and she learned anything at all.

  “Most of ’em were pretty crude,” Lee says. “Simple, basic design, not very powerful. Not surprised so many didn’t go off. More surprised at how many did. Since Columbine a lot of rampage shooters try to use some explosives as part of their attack, but most of the time they don’t work. There were probably more that worked at this shooting than most.”

  He pauses, presumably to see if any of us have any questions, but continues before we’d be able to ask them.

  “We’re talkin’ mostly pipe bombs and a few IEDs on timers. Simple but effective stuff.”

  “How much more damage would’ve been done if they had all detonated?” I ask.

  “Hard to say. Nothing catastrophic. In terms of the building at least. Wouldn’t’ve brought it down or anything. But we’d be looking at more injuries, possibly fatalities, but only if the kids were close to them. I’d say the devices used were either deployed to be used mainly as diversionary tactics or more likely they didn’t know what they were doing and made big firecrackers more than anything else.”

  “Once we identify our suspects,” the sheriff’s investigator s
ays, “can you let us know what kind of supplies they would need to build with, so we can look for them at their houses?”

  “’Course,” Lee says.

  “Is it safe for forensics, ME, and investigators to go in?” Hugh Glenn asks.

  Lee nods.

  “Okay,” the FDLE tech says, “let’s get in there and get to work.”

  As the FDLE crime scene techs and the ME investigators enter the building, the leader of the SWAT team walks over to me.

  “We looked for what you asked us to,” he says. “Wanna see what we found?”

  I nod. “Absolutely.”

  So far no one has taken my weapon, put me on administrative leave, or asked me to go home. I plan to keep investigating until they do.

  We follow the techs inside but head in the opposite direction.

  He leads me through the commons, behind the curtain and backstage.

  There among the costumes and props from Tristan and Denise’s play is a pair of black paramilitary style boots. They are partially hidden behind the box of guns used in the play.

  “We haven’t touched them,” he says.

  I slip on a pair of latex gloves and lift the boots to examine the bottoms, as I make a mental note to make sure forensics and ballistics check to make sure none of the guns are real. There appear to be traces of blood on the bottoms of the boots.

  “Great work,” I say.

  “There’s more,” he says.

  I replace the boots where he found them and say, “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “Follow me.”

  He leads me back through the commons, up the hallway to the library.

  Carefully stepping through the shattered glass of the doors, he leads me behind the counter, past the back office, to the media department where Zach Griffith works and the room he came out of following the shooting.

  “We found another pair under the desk in here,” he says. “Under there.”

  He points to a desk with a computer and camera on it.

  I walk around it, kneel down, and look beneath.

  There on the carpet beside the plastic chair mat is another pair of black boots not unlike the ones they found behind the stage.

  I lift and examine them.

  There are no obvious signs of blood, but they look like they’ve been cleaned recently.

  “Great work,” I say, standing up. “We need to get the crime scene techs in here to process them.”

  When we exit the library, I thank him again, and he goes in one direction and I go in the other. Instead of walking back outside with him, I walk around the hallway to take another look at the scene and see how the FDLE techs and ME investigators are proceeding.

  As I pass Ace Bowman’s classroom, I see one of the ME investigators examining his body.

  In the classroom and all through the hallway, crime scene photographers and videographers are documenting every aspect of the surreal site.

  Most of the smoke is long gone from the building but the acrid odor remains.

  Passing the back hallway exit and seeing the bodies of the teacher and two students being processed by an ME investigator I realize we had far fewer fatalities than we might have had. There are many who are wounded and I have no idea if any of them have potential life-threatening injuries, but as of this moment only two teachers and two students have been killed.

  Nearing the place where I shot Derek Burrell my heart begins to beat arrhythmically and a cold, sweaty sheen begins to cover my clammy skin.

  I pause roughly where I had fired from and look over to where he had been standing. Even without the smoke and gunfire, pandemonium and adrenaline, the curve of the hallway wall and the little alcove he was in make it difficult to see.

  It’s no wonder, given everything that was going on that from his position and limited visibility, he shot at both Kim and me.

  I continue around the hall, avoiding the debris and blood and working crime scene techs, toward the lockers where the shooters’ things had been found.

  As I reach them, I can see that FDLE techs are already processing the lockers and the things in them.

  After examining the lockers and their relative position to everything else, I stand beside them and look in both directions.

  From where the lockers are located, Mason could have quickly jogged over and entered the library and Dakota could have run around the corner to join the bodies on the back hallway floor. And they could’ve done it without being seen by Kim or Derek—probably before Derek even came out into the hallway with his gun.

  “Look at this,” one of the techs says, holding up the outfit from the locker with the rifle in it.

  In the crime scene suit and mask, it’s difficult to tell if the blobish figure is male or female, and the small voice coming from behind the mask doesn’t help.

  I turn to study the clothes. And am surprised by what I see.

  The shirt, pants, and duster have all been sewn together to form one garment. They’ve also been cut down the middle in the back the way funeral homes do the clothes of dead people, but unlike the duds of the dead, these have velcro sewn in them.

  “Made it easy to get in and out of, didn’t they?” the tech says.

  “Yes it did,” I say. “They planned all along to discard their gear and hide among the other students.”

  “It’s ingenious,” the tech says. “Like a costume for an actor who has to be able to change quickly backstage.”

  “Both outfits are like that?” I ask.

  Another tech holds up the other one from the locker with the handgun inside it and nods.

  “They’re the same except for size and soil,” she says. “This one is shorter and smaller and, unlike the bigger one, has less damage to it, less blood on it.”

  A ballistic tech about five feet away examining the two guns used by the shooters says, “That fits with what I’m seeing here. The rifle has lots of empty magazines and was fired at an extremely high rate, but the nine wasn’t used nearly as much. Only has one clip—the one that’s in it—and looks to have only been fired about seven or eight times. Of course both weapons have the serial numbers filed off so they’ll be impossible to trace.”

  “So the little guy did less,” the tech holding the smaller outfit says.

  “A lot less,” the ballistics tech says.

  “Interesting,” I say. “I wonder if the bigger gunman knows and how he feels about it? If the smaller guy lost his nerve, didn’t do his part, that may be a wedge we can drive between them.”

  “That’s going to have to be something you let us do,” Hugh Glenn says, walking up beside me.

  I turn to face him, wondering again where he disappeared to earlier. The best I can figure is that he and Jeffers, if they hadn’t just been hiding out of fear, had been huddled somewhere planning a media strategy or actually talking to the media.

  An FDLE investigator wearing gloves and holding an evidence bag is standing next to him.

  “I’ve spoken with Reggie and as of right now you are on administrative leave pending the investigation into your use of deadly force.”

  I nod.

  “Will you lift your arms and let me remove your sidearm?” the FDLE investigator asks.

  “Of course,” I say. Then do.

  “Is this the weapon you used?” she asks.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Do you have any others on you?”

  “I have a Glock .40 caliber in an ankle holster on my right leg.”

  “I’ll need to take that too,” she says.

  I bend down and lift my pants leg but let her remove the weapon with her gloved hands.

  “We’re gonna need you to go to the station and write your report about exactly what happened here,” Glenn says. “Fill out some more paperwork. We’ll wait to interview you until tomorrow.”

  “I know your sheriff is going to reiterate it,” the FDLE investigator says, “but I can’t stress enough how absolutely vital it is that you don’t intervene or
interfere in either case—the one involving what happened here at the school and the one related to your use of deadly force. Come on, we’ll walk you out.”

  305

  Sooner or later, no matter what subculture you identify with—high school students, church attendees, movie theatergoers, country music concert fans, mall shoppers—a gunman is going to kill members of your group.

  I pull out of the Potter High School parking lot feeling sad and frustrated and anxious and knowing the location and hours of every package store in the area.

  As I pass the media vans and trucks, the camera crews and reporters all working near them, I am shocked at how many there already are. Local, regional, national, and even international news outlets have already descended onto our little town to broadcast to the world what has happened here in this tiny place that the rest of the world had never before even heard of.

  On my way to the Potter County Sheriff’s Department, I make a series of calls.

  The first is to Anna.

  “Are you okay?” she’s saying. “I’m worried.”

  “Right now I’m just trying not to think about it,” I say. “I’ve got several things I have to get through first.”

  “Will you be questioned this afternoon?”

  “Not officially, no. I’ll be interviewed formally tomorrow. If they have a question about something at the scene or a quick clarification, they’ll ask it, but today I just have to fill out paperwork and write my initial report. Allegedly it gives me time for the shock to wear off, but it’s also a way of comparing what I write in my statement to what I say in the interview.”

  “You think they’re really going to try to trip you up or—”

  “I’m just saying it’s a criminal investigation. And it’s conducted like one. We don’t have a union so it’s not like I have a union rep or anything.”

  “We need to hire you a good attorney,” she says.

  “We can’t afford that.”

  “We can’t afford not to,” she says.

  “It’ll be okay,” I say. “I’ll be careful. I . . . I might be able to get one from the Police Benevolence Association, but even then we . . . truly . . . we have zero money for a lawyer.”