by Lisa Gardner
“Give him a six,” Sanders said. “He has motive and opportunity. The VanderZandens only have a .22 rifle registered in their name, but it’s not impossible to get your hands on an unregistered gun. I mean, as long as you’re climbing out your office window, why not stop at the street corner for a black-market semiauto?”
“Point taken,” Rainie observed dryly. She was about to turn to Luke when Quincy interrupted.
“What about Mrs. VanderZanden?”
“What about her?” Sanders asked.
“Any evidence that she knew about the affair? Neighbors report any tension in the marriage?”
“Umm . . .” For once the superefficient detective was caught off guard. “I’d have to get back to you on that.”
Rainie was impressed. So Sanders wasn’t all-knowing, after all. Who would’ve thought.
She returned to their rundown of current suspects. “Luke, bring Sanders up to date on Daniel and Angelina Avalon.”
Luke turned to Sanders. He didn’t have notes or handouts, and his expression made it clear he thought Sanders’s color-coded binders were a deep-seated cry for help. “Angelina Avalon is Melissa’s stepmom,” Luke reported off the top of his head. “Her real mom died during childbirth. Daniel waited thirteen years to remarry, and Quincy thinks he was having ‘inappropriate relations’ with his daughter.”
“Incest?” Sanders asked incredulously.
“Bingo,” Luke said. “Daniel Avalon gets a weasel factor of fifteen, if you ask me. Unfortunately, he currently has an alibi.”
“What kind of alibi?”
“Important business meeting. Two clients vouching for his time. One possibility is maybe he hired someone to do it, but I don’t know. Mr. Avalon has a hunting cabin in the area, and for the record, the Avalons have five guns registered in their names, though none of them is a .22.” Luke recited easily: “Smith & Wesson .357, a Glock .40, a Beretta 9-millimeter, and two Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns.”
“Holy shit, what are they preparing for?”
“Y2K. The guns were purchased in the fall of ’99. Mrs. Avalon probably feared for her china. Or maybe she’s afraid of all those clowns in Melissa Avalon’s room.” Luke shuddered again.
“In other words, we can’t count out the Avalons yet,” Rainie concluded. “You’ll push harder on it, Luke?”
“First thing tomorrow morning I’m paying a visit to the hunting cabin, then heading back to Portland and seeing if I can’t finagle some bank records.”
Rainie nodded. Luke planned on spending the rest of the evening guarding Shep’s house. He didn’t take his friendships lightly.
“That brings us to you, Quincy. Where are we with No Lava and Shep?”
“What?” Luke sat up tensely. He’d been absent during their last discussion, when Shep’s actions had been questioned.
“It’s okay,” Quincy said, raising a calming hand. “Nothing came of it—”
“Damn right!” Luke spat out.
“According to the school staff,” Quincy continued evenly, “no one saw Shep enter the building before the shooting. Plus, his patrol log puts him at Hank’s hardware store a little after one, which Hank confirmed. At that point, it’s questionable whether he had the time to drive to the school and commit murder before one-thirty.”
“You examined his patrol log?” Luke was still offended.
Quincy ignored him. “So we can count Shep out. That brings me to the person writing e-mails to Danny from No [email protected]. I did learn a few things there. One, according to Sandy O’Grady, the No Lava address was actually Melissa Avalon’s account.”
“Melissa Avalon was the one writing Danny e-mails?” Sanders interrupted.
Quincy shook his head. “I don’t think so. Melissa saw Danny every day, so there wouldn’t be a need for her to be sending him lots of mail. Plus, I tried checking AOL’s member directory on Thursday to see if I could find a record of a No Lava and nothing came up. This afternoon I followed up with an AOL technician. According to service logs, No Lava was listed in their directory until Monday at six P.M., when the account was canceled and the caller ordered all traces of the member name removed. I’m willing to bet that our shooter made that call at the same time that she was purging the hard drives of the school’s computers.”
“She?” Luke questioned.
Quincy pursed his lips. “According to Richard Mann, Danny had implied that his pen pal was female. It’s an interesting possibility. I just don’t like Mann as the sole source of information. On the other hand, that might explain a few things. We’ve certainly looked at a lot of suspects without coming up with any strong candidates. Maybe we are looking at the wrong gender. God knows Danny gravitates more toward women—both his mother and Melissa Avalon. In many ways, he’d be more vulnerable to a manipulative female than a male.”
“Maybe Mrs. VanderZanden found out what her husband was doing,” Sanders said slowly, finally understanding Quincy’s earlier line of questioning.
“And maybe Angelina finally caught on to her real role in her husband’s life,” Luke filled in. “Can’t be fun to figure out you’re nothing but a place holder for a too-old daughter.”
They all turned and stared at Rainie.
“What? Because I got double-X chromosomes I magically know what drives women to kill?”
Luke appeared abashed. Sanders, on the other hand, nodded matter-of-factly.
Rainie rolled her eyes. She said briskly, “Let’s bring this all together. Fact one, someone else was involved in the shootings on Tuesday.”
Everyone nodded.
“This person is at least five-foot-six, proficient with computers, and also gun savvy.”
“And how.” Sanders flipped to a gray-colored tab. Gray for guns? Christ, these state boys had too much time on their hands. “Got an update on the ballistics info. You’ll like this—at least, the ballistics department is very pleased with themselves. They want to write this up as a case study. Okay, so the ME identifies one .22-caliber slug with no evidence of rifling but containing a polymer residue. Also found, one .38-caliber casing with faint traces of polymer residue. Finally, also discovered—once the crime-scene technicians were told to look for it in the debris bags—three tiny pieces of plastic, which fit together to form a single unit about the size and shape of a pen cap. Anyone, anyone? What do we have?”
“I hate riddles,” Rainie said flatly.
But Luke Hayes breathed, with near reverence, “A sabot.”
“Nice work, Officer.”
“What the hell is a sabot doing in a school shooting?” Luke said with a frown.
“What the hell is a sabot?” Rainie asked.
Sanders looked at Luke, who did the honors. “I’ve heard of them for hunting. Basically you take something like plastic and wrap it around a smaller-caliber slug so it will fit in a larger-caliber gun. Then a big gun can fire smaller bullets with greater velocity and mushrooming capacity. You know, for large-game hunting.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Rainie looked at them all as if they’d gone mad. “You mean to tell me that someone is applying techniques for large-game hunting to school grounds?”
“We don’t think this has anything to do with hunting techniques,” Sanders supplied. “The ME is the one who first thought of the possibility, and that’s because she’d read about it once before—in a mob shooting in New Jersey. The other advantage of making a sabot, you see, is that it makes the slug hard to trace. No rifling marks, no matching with a murder weapon. Also, this answers Rainie’s question about why only one shot to the forehead—hardly a sure kill with a .22. Well, the slug was fired by a bigger gun, meaning greater velocity, more force. Whoever we’re looking for isn’t dumb.”
Rainie turned this over in her mind, trying to see how it was done. She spared a glance at Quincy, who had a curious look on his face, as if many things were becoming magically clear. She was happy for him. Personally, between the little scene with George Walker and now this, her temples were pound
ing and her hand had a tremor she hoped no one would notice.
“How do you make a sabot?” she asked Sanders.
“It’s involved. In this case, ballistics has determined that the .22-caliber slug recovered from Avalon’s body was actually fired from a .38-caliber gun.”
“Danny’s .38 revolver.”
“No. Rifling doesn’t match. Give me a minute, we’ll get to it. Okay, so we have someone, Quincy’s UNSUB, who wants to cover his tracks. He hits upon a great idea. He’ll shoot a .22-caliber slug from a .38 revolver. Given the entry wound and weight of the recovered projectile, everyone will be looking for a .22 semiauto. He’ll never get tied to the crime.
“But how to make a .38 fire a .22-caliber bullet? That’s where the sabot comes in. The UNSUB takes a plastic rod and turns it until it’s the diameter of a .38-caliber bullet. He then cuts the rod to the same length as a .38 slug and—this isn’t child’s play—center-drills the piece of plastic with a .22-caliber hole. He cuts the piece of plastic lengthwise in three equal pieces, then glues the pieces back together at the base. Voilà, he has made a sabot. Now he removes a .22 slug from its casing. Then he simply pushes the slug into the center of the sabot from the top, inserts the entire thing into a .38-caliber casing, and loads a .38-caliber-size bullet into his revolver. Upon being fired from the barrel of the gun, the sabot’s three pieces will fall apart, leaving the .22-caliber projectile to continue on and strike the victim. And the UNSUB ejects the shell casing, then walks away with his .38 revolver, leaving no one the wiser.”
“We’re talking serious thought here,” Rainie said.
“And knowledge of guns. Sabots have been around since the earliest firearms, but it’s not like everyone’s using them.”
“Now that we know what it is, can we trace the bullet?”
“Not the slug,” Sanders said, and got a wicked gleam in his eye. “But you can sure as hell trace the plastic. Ballistics has already reassembled the three pieces and they form a perfect model of a .38 projectile, right down to the rifling marks.”
“Don’t be an ass, Sanders. Tell us what we’ve got.”
The state detective’s face fell. “Yeah, well, that brings me to the bad news. So far the sabot doesn’t match with anything we have. Not with the .38 revolver recovered from Danny or with any other revolvers or slugs whose rifling marks we have on file.”
“DRUGFIRE,” Quincy said.
“Noooo,” Sanders groaned. “Not again!”
“Absolutely,” Rainie overruled him. “Face it, Sanders, you can only check statewide. Through the DRUGFIRE databases, Quincy can cover the whole country for a match with another .38 slug used in a crime. The sabot goes to the fed.”
“And what has he done with my computers lately?”
“It’s only been twenty-four hours,” Quincy said mildly.
“I’d have given you updates within twenty-four hours. Hell, I just delivered a sabot to you in fifty-six!”
“Let it go, Sanders,” Rainie told him kindly. “The feds have better toys. It’s a fact of life.”
Luke had a perplexed look on his face. He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees, and peered at Sanders intently. “You’re saying this person went out of his—or, I guess, her—way to make a special bullet to kill Melissa Avalon. A bullet that couldn’t be traced back to . . . the person?”
“A bullet that conceivably couldn’t be traced back to him or her. Yes.”
“Why?” Luke asked bluntly. “Danny’s there. Danny’s brought two guns covered in his fingerprints and registered to Danny’s father. What’s with the third weapon? Isn’t that more dangerous? Someone might see this person armed and mention it later. Or maybe something goes wrong and this person ends up dropping the gun, or dropping the sabot, or God knows what. Seems to me that the margin of error is higher with the additional .38.”
They all studied one another. Sanders had brought up the question before. They still didn’t have an answer.
“Symbolism?” Rainie tried after a moment. She glanced at Quincy, the resident expert in criminal behavior. “Maybe there was a personal reason behind the .22 slug as well as a practical one. The person had a reason to kill Melissa Avalon, and the choice of bullet is tied in to that.”
“Christ, it’s not like she was a werewolf and had to be killed with a silver bullet,” Sanders muttered. “A .22 slug is as common as it gets.”
“What about the gun? Maybe the .38 revolver was a special gift from her husband, with the barrel engraved, To the One I Love, which had really touched her heart—until she found out he’d given it to her out of guilt over doing the hokeypokey with another woman.”
“Doing the hokeypokey?” Sanders pressed with a raised brow.
“Fine, fucking. He was fucking another woman. Does that work better—”
“I think we’re missing something,” Quincy said quietly.
Rainie and Sanders shut up. They all turned to him. His face was remarkably composed, but there was a light in Quincy’s eyes Rainie had never seen before. He was excited. He had figured out part of the riddle, and he was thrilled to death.
“Let’s look at the elements of this crime,” Quincy began evenly. “First, our UNSUB utilizes manipulation. He or she identifies a troubled youth—Danny O’Grady—and approaches him, probably first via the Internet but then meets him in person to cement the relationship. This person needs someone like Danny. He learns his buttons, and he begins to push.
“The UNSUB also enjoys complexity. I think Luke and Sanders are correct. Why use a sabot when Danny’s .38 would’ve done? Maybe because he or she could. In all probability, the .22 slug would deform, making it impossible to test and leaving us none the wiser. But in case it didn’t, the UNSUB left another little riddle for the police to solve. Another way for law enforcement to be impressed by his or her skills.
“Which also brings us to the computers. It would appear that the UNSUB has been using Melissa Avalon’s e-mail account to contact Danny. So why erase the school computers? Any correspondence, downloads, et cetera, would only show Danny talking to his teacher. Even if the contents of the e-mails were questionable, Melissa Avalon is dead. How is she going to defend herself? But again, one level of diversion is not enough for our UNSUB. He or she also tampers with the school computers. I’m almost positive now that when data-recovery agents delve into the hard drives, they will find everything overridden by zeroes. Our UNSUB seems obsessed with being thorough.”
“But what about Danny?” Rainie objected. “Once you’ve introduced another person into a crime, it’s no longer efficient. He’s scared now, sure, but sooner or later he’s bound to talk. That seems like a huge loose end. If the UNSUB really wanted to be untraceable, he or she should’ve acted alone.”
“No.” Quincy vehemently shook his head. “This UNSUB absolutely would not do everything alone. After all, what’s the point of being so ridiculously clever if no one ever learns about it?”
Rainie went still. She saw comprehension slowly washing over Luke’s and Sanders’s faces, and she knew they had arrived at the same conclusion she had when their eyes suddenly widened in horror.
“You mean . . . you mean this person wanted someone to admire his efforts?”
“Yes.”
“And if Danny does crack, does one day tell everything . . .”
“What’s one of the biggest factors we’re already seeing in school shootings? Ego. Boys trying to assert their identity in a crowded world. Confused children who equate being infamous with being famous. Are you kidding? The UNSUB is hoping that someday Danny will crack. Not right away. Our shooter needs time to get out of Dodge. But one day he hopes to pick up the paper and read about a thirteen-year-old boy whose sole line of defense in a triple-homicide case is that the bogeyman made him do it. And all the crime experts will say this proves how today’s youths refuse to take responsibility for their actions, and the legal experts will say this proves how today’s defense attorneys go out of their way
to confuse juries with conspiracy theories, and our UNSUB will have a good laugh. Our UNSUB will clip every article on Danny O’Grady’s trial and have a ball.”
“We’re no longer talking a crime of passion, are we?” Rainie asked weakly.
“No. Not at all.”
“But why Melissa Avalon then? The special bullet. The single shot to the forehead. Those are all signs she wasn’t a random victim.”
“Oh, she wasn’t random. The selection process was simply different from what we thought. I should’ve seen it earlier, when everyone kept saying how close Danny was to Miss Avalon and how patient she was with him.”
“I don’t get it—”
“Danny loved her, Rainie. That’s why the UNSUB chose her. Because what better way to demonstrate your control over a troubled child than to make him assist in the murder of the one person who’s been good to him. The only other person he trusted.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Sanders burst out. “No one’s going to turn on someone they like. You want to lead a kid over to the dark side, you play on something he already hates. You know— ‘You think your daddy’s an asshole? Well, so was mine. Now, let me tell you what I did about it, little boy.’”
Quincy shook his head. “You can do that, Detective, but the bond isn’t as strong—not as strong as our UNSUB needs. In classic indoctrination technique, you get the initiate to turn on the things he loves the most. That’s when you know you have him. In fact, a Canadian serial killer cemented his homicidal partnership with his wife by making her participate in the rape and murder of her own sister. After that, she couldn’t turn against him. That would mean having to face what she’d done. The guilt’s too high.”
“Danny,” Rainie whispered. “Already under suicide watch. Oh my God, the things that must be going on in his mind.”
