To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “Still, you must have heard something more.” Alexa tried to pack a lot of weight behind those words, letting Eve know that she believed Eve was, if not an eyewitness, then someone who had seen or heard more than she was letting on. “Isn’t there anything else you can tell me, Eve?”

  Eve took on an air of injured innocence. “Why, Ms. Cunningham, you’re always saying we shouldn’t talk about things unless we know them firsthand or have talked to someone who has firsthand information.”

  Alexa let her go again. An ambulance, a helicopter, a gurney. She thought of three families and the news that awaited them. The parents of the student in the ambulance were the luckiest—the injuries must not be too bad if the police had decided the student could make the trip along north county’s congested roads. The helicopter was potentially bad, proof of life-threatening injuries, but at least those parents could hope for a good outcome. And everywhere else in Glendale, parents would be given the gift of learning that their dread was groundless, that their children were alive and well.

  Only one set of parents wouldn’t be let off the hook. Alexa had a mental image of these parents, alone in the middle-school cafeteria, seeing family after family reunited, watching the door nervously to see when their child would be returned to them.

  But surely Barbara would get to the parents of the dead child as quickly as possible, would not prolong this agony of wondering. Alexa could only hope that Barbara would manage to express herself warmly and openly, eschewing her usual bureaucrat-speak. Not a school shooting but a shooting at a school. What an utterly strange distinction to make in the midst of a crisis. She might as well have said, Not a bank robbery but a robbery at the bank. It was as if Barbara wanted to establish that Glendale High School could not be to blame for what had happened there, that it was as much a victim of circumstance as whatever students had been claimed by today’s events.

  Alexa glanced back at the building. It looked smug to her, as if it knew in what low esteem it was held and was happy for this moment of revenge against those who had reviled it.

  3

  When Baltimore County began training its police officers in the new response protocol for school shootings—“The latest trend, if you please,” as Sergeant Harold Lenhardt liked to say—Lenhardt knew he could never follow it to the letter. Not that the policy wasn’t sound, jokes about trends aside. Police departments across the country were all doing the same thing, under various names, abandoning the SWAT model that had proved so disastrous at Columbine. Some places called it homicide-in-progress. In Baltimore County they preferred to define it by the response, First-Four-In. This meant that the first four responding officers, no matter their rank, no matter their normal assignments, went in together, weapons drawn. The idea was to get to the shooter as quickly as possible, limiting the scope of casualties. Step over the dead, step over the wounded, the officers were told. Just stop the kid and contain the damage as soon as you can.

  But what if you were the first guy? Lenhardt had wondered. What if you were there alone, outside a school, all by yourself? How could you wait for the others to show up? He didn’t think he would. He was no cowboy, but if the point was to get in as quickly as possible, then what was so magical about the number four? If he got there first, he didn’t think he’d wait for three others. One, maybe, as backup, but even that would be hard.

  For now the question of how he would respond would remain moot. Lenhardt and his partner, Kevin Infante, had arrived at Glendale this morning forty minutes after the 911 call came in, summoned only once the first four officers had determined that there was, in fact, a homicide to investigate. The two wounded girls had been carted away, too, adding to Lenhardt’s frustration. There were things to be done, opportunities to be seized, even in seemingly straightforward shootings such as this one, with a suspect already identified. And while even a seasoned homicide cop couldn’t keep a scene pristine when paramedics were running around and victims had to be transported, Lenhardt and Infante might have been a little more vigilant.

  “I just wish we had gotten here sooner,” he told Infante, and not for the first time.

  “It’s a pendulum like anything else. It’s only a matter of time before a cop gets killed doing it this way, and then they’ll reinvent the wheel, go back to SWAT teams.”

  Lenhardt was studying an odd blood trail that seemed to lead to the door. That should make sense—the wounded girls could have bled on the way out, even with paramedics in attendance, and these drops would then be smeared by people running back and forth.

  “The theory is they lack focus, these young shooters. Attention deficit disorder, you know? They get a gun, they come to school, they spray some bullets around, and then their attention wanders. I bet if you checked, you’d find the typical high-school shooter doesn’t do well on the verbal section of the SAT.”

  “What?” Infante was staring so hard at a stain in the corner that nothing could pierce his concentration. As Infante’s sergeant, Lenhardt had always admired the younger man’s single-minded approach to the job. As his temporary partner, however, Lenhardt was finding Infante’s one-track mind a bit of a drag. It killed a joke, having to repeat it.

  “Never mind.”

  Of the two girls taken alive from this bathroom, only one of them, a girl with a bullet lodged in her right foot, would be of any immediate help to the detectives. The other survivor, believed to be the shooter, had lost a part of her face, as Lenhardt heard it, and although Shock Trauma might save her life, it was less clear what else could be salvaged—her jaw, her teeth, her brain. Much of the blood around them was undoubtedly hers. She had leaked a lot in the twenty minutes or so before she was transported.

  The dead girl, who was still here with them, had died swiftly, from an almost freakishly precise gunshot wound to the chest, maybe straight to the heart, so there was very little of her blood. Was this marksmanship the result of luck or skill? It didn’t jibe with Lenhardt’s knowledge of Glendale—upper middle class, liberal. But then there were still pockets of farms in the area, rural families with old-fashioned values. A girl raised in such circumstances might be comfortable with a gun. If she knew how to use a gun, however, and had always planned to use it on herself, why had she fired into her cheekbone instead of her temple? And why shoot the other girl at all?

  One thing he was willing to bet on: The dead girl, the one on the floor, wasn’t the kind who knew anything about guns. She was a girly-girl, all in pink—pink sandals with cloth roses where the thong nestled between the big and second toes, pale pink pants, and a pale pink polo.

  Lenhardt had the digital camera, one outfitted with software that made their photos impossible to alter. Infante was using the backup 35-millimeter because you wouldn’t want to hang a murder investigation on something as temperamental as a computer. Clumsily—he still wasn’t comfortable with the little Canon—he paged through the photos he had taken, looking at the blood, the scene, trying to find the story there. Something was off, but he couldn’t say what exactly. He walked over to the windows, the better to see his photos in the diffused light they allowed in, then looked back at the floor. It was such a gray room—gray tile floors, gray stalls, gray walls, a long gray shelf above three white sinks. The only color in the room, aside from the blood and the dead girl, was an uncapped lipstick standing on the ledge, pink and moist. Lenhardt gestured toward it, and Infante bagged it.

  “Aren’t we meticulous,” he said. “It’s not exactly a fuckin’ whodunit.”

  “No, it’s not a whodunit. But it has the potential to be a gigantic pain in the ass.”

  “You can say that again. She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “Pretty in pink.”

  Neither one mentioned her body, although they might have if she had been a little older. She had a notable shape, with large, round breasts straining against the polo shirt, so much tighter and shorter than the polos Lenhardt remembered from the last time this preppy look was the rage. Not that the prep look ever w
ent out of style in Baltimore. His daughter had wanted a shirt like this for Christmas, one with the little alligator, and he had almost fainted when he saw the seventy-dollar price tag. He was happy to spend seventy dollars on Jessica, but not for a polo shirt. “Dad,” she had whined, “it’s a limited edition.” How in the hell could a shirt be a limited edition? Had this girl’s parents balked at such an expense? No, a Glendale girl probably had a closetful of such shirts.

  Her skin was pale, getting paler by the minute, but roses had probably bloomed in those cheeks, the round kind that grandparents pinched. Assuming she had grandparents. So many kids didn’t nowadays, as people started families later and later. His kids, Jason and Jessica, had never really known Lenhardt’s parents, although Marcia’s were still alive and very doting.

  “Remember Woodlawn?”

  The question would have seemed a non sequitur to anyone else. “Woodlawn” was shorthand for a murder they had worked late last year, in which four members of a drug gang were killed by a competitor. It had been a particularly nasty scene—torture marks on all the bodies, the floor slick with blood—and their work on the case had been nothing less than inspired. It had taken them six months to identify a suspect and make an arrest, working with nothing more than a fingerprint on the cellophane from a cigarette pack. But when they made the case, it did wonders for the department’s clearance rate. After all, four murders were one-eighth of the county’s annual caseload.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Now, that was a scene.”

  “Looked like a scrapple factory. An abattoir.” Lenhardt savored the word, which had popped up on Jason’s vocabulary test a few weeks back. He loved words and loved running the vocabulary lists with his son. Abattoir, albatross, abdomen, aberrant.

  “Woodlawn was a good case,” Infante said, and Lenhardt agreed. It had been easier to walk among those four men’s disfigured corpses than it was to confront this one girl with a single bullet wound. Such men were supposed to die.

  “I’m still bugged by this,” Lenhardt said, pointing to the trail of blood that seemed to lead to the door. “The door was locked, right?”

  Infante checked his notes. “Yeah, responders said the bathroom door was locked when they arrived. They spoke to the conscious girl—girl number three—through the door, and she convinced them that the shooter was down, but she refused to get up and open the door because of her injury. They had to find a custodian to unlock it.”

  “She was here, right? The injured girl?” Lenhardt followed the trail to a corner by the stalls.

  “Think so.”

  “And she said she couldn’t get up?”

  “Right.”

  “So who locked the door?”

  “Presumably the shooter, when she came in.”

  “But here, just here.” He pointed to a faint mark, which had been smeared. “Doesn’t that look like a footprint? Not a shoe but a foot?”

  “It does look like someone’s big toe. Maybe the girl who was shot hopped around a little at first.”

  “But it’s leading away from the door. Wouldn’t you hop toward it?”

  “She might have been a little freaked out and disoriented.”

  Lenhardt revolved slowly, taking in the whole room. Except for the lack of urinals, it was no different from the boys’ room. Three sinks. Three stalls. One of the doors, the middle one, had a hand-lettered sign taped to it, declaring it out of service. The door to the right was ajar, but the door to the left, the one against the wall, was shut tight. He pushed it, but it didn’t give. Latched. What the fuck? It made sense that the out-of-service stall would be locked. But why this one? He bent down, saw loamy dirt on the floor.

  He glanced at Infante, who was now measuring the room with a retractable yardstick. He had rank and seniority. He could make Infante do it. But it would be an argument, with Infante trying to get out of it by insisting there was no reason to do it at all, and Lenhardt had no heart for an argument just now. Lenhardt wished briefly that Nancy Porter, Infante’s usual partner, were not on maternity leave. He had never put much stock in the idea that either gender brought anything special to detective work. If you were good at it, it was a personality type unto itself. But Nancy, with her keen eyes, might see something here that he was missing.

  And Nancy, being a woman, would probably be less freaked out by the prospect of sliding under a locked stall door in a women’s room.

  Sighing, he removed his jacket and folded it, laying it with great care on the window ledge, next to the digital camera. His knees creaked as he lowered himself to the floor, and he worried about his back. He went in headfirst, gingerly, straightening up as soon as he could. Funny, it took him a second to realize that he could unlock the door then, freeing himself from this confined and alien space. He sat on the toilet seat—actually, he hovered over it, using his thigh muscles to avoid contact—and looked around. There was no graffiti, although the door and walls bore the sign of having graffiti scoured from their surfaces over the years. A relatively full roll of toilet paper was in the dispenser. And—he stood then, turning around—the toilet was empty. So that was that—Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Locked Bathroom Stall. What did he think he might find anyway? There were no casings, not with the little six-shooter this girl had used. Her bullets were all going to be lodged in her victims, including herself.

  Then he noticed the metal box on the wall. Pulling a pen from his breast pocket, he used it to lift the lid slightly, promptly dropping it with a bang.

  “Shit,” he said. “Fuck me.” Then, “Hand me a Baggie, okay, Kevin?”

  “What could you possibly have found in there?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  This is no job for a man, he thought as he used tweezers to extract the tampon from the bag inside the metal box and sealed it in a Baggie. It was fresh, or reasonably so, which meant someone had been in this locked stall—and left it, without unlocking the door. Had the shooter hidden here, waiting? If you’re waiting to shoot someone, do you have the presence of mind to change your tampon? And why would you leave without unlocking the door? He tested it several times, slamming it shut to see if the lock engaged by itself. But, if anything, the door needed to be forced into position before the bolt could be engaged.

  “Infante…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. If anyone knows less about teenage girls than me, it’s you.”

  “I know a lot about teenage girls.” His tone was one of mock outrage.

  “You’re attracted to them. It’s not the same thing.”

  4

  The things we can do without thinking, Dale Hartigan decided, are nothing short of amazing. Breathing, for example. No, that was a bad example, because one didn’t have to learn how to breathe, it wasn’t a skill that one mastered and later did automatically. Breathing was instinctive, from that first whack on the backside, although doctors had stopped doing that, of course. Dale’s generation may have started life with that stern little pat on the rump, but his daughter had arrived in a private birthing room, full of soft colors and kind lights. That was a good day.

  So no, not breathing. Driving, on the other hand, started off as something that engaged every fiber of your being in the early going, then became unconscious over time. How often had Dale snapped to behind the wheel, the highway sliding effortlessly beneath his humming wheels, with no real memory of the last few miles? And he didn’t think he was unique in this way, far from it. Every day people climbed into these contraptions that you weren’t even supposed to operate while on ordinary cold medicine and never gave it a thought. It was a wonder there weren’t more accidents. Yet here he was, more conscious than he had ever been behind the wheel, and everyone—the cops, Chloe—had kept saying he shouldn’t drive, he mustn’t drive, please don’t drive.

  Couldn’t they understand that this errand was his only way of asserting his sanity? Every action—changing lanes, using his turn signal, braking, accelerating—proved h
e was functioning. Not that he was sure he wanted to be functioning, but what choice did he have? Dale was supposed to be the calm one, the capable one. And while his daughter’s death entitled him to be otherwise, he wasn’t sure he knew how to be anything else.

  But if he didn’t have both his hands on the steering wheel—“Two and ten o’clock, Kat, always at two and ten o’clock”—they would be engaged in some form of destruction, he was sure of that. One could literally tear hair, it turned out. And if one could grab one’s hair with enough force to rip it, then it followed that one could rend one’s garments, maybe even tear oneself from limb to limb, like those crazy Greek women, although weren’t they motivated by bliss and joy? The Man-somethings. The Furies? No, that was another myth.

  Until today Dale had never really believed that the human body could be shredded by human hands. In fact, he and Chloe had argued heatedly about it after seeing a production of Suddenly, Last Summer at the Mechanic several years ago, which she had found quite affecting and he had found profoundly stupid. (There was their marriage in a nutshell, Chloe responding passionately to things that Dale just didn’t get.) Now such an act seemed as simple as tearing a piece of bread from a loaf. His hands, if allowed, could destroy a person, perhaps even take a building apart. Which, strangely, had been his first instinct. To punch the wall of Deerfield Middle, to go mano a mano with a school, and not even the right school at that.

  Chloe, although long out of the habit of caring about Dale’s needs, much less anticipating them, had somehow sensed what he intended to do, grabbing his wrists and holding him, then allowing him to hold her. Chloe looked wispy, but she was a former athlete who could easily withstand the force of Dale’s embrace, as he squeezed and squeezed, taking in all the parts of Chloe that reminded him of Kat. Here was her hair, here were her eyes, except they weren’t and couldn’t be. He would never see his daughter again.