The Competition - [15]

“Which one is Chuckles?” I asked. “The short shithead or the taller one?”

Bailey pointed to the shorter of the two. “Him, I think.” She held up the phone that had the most close-range footage. “See how his head tilts up when you hear the laugh?”

I wanted to tilt his head up myself. Up and off. I picked up another cell. This one seemed to have been held by someone who was on the floor just inside the doors to the gym, behind the shooters. A brave soul who might already be dead. At first, the images were jumbled, a bouncy montage of students running, stumbling, and screaming. Then, the taller of the two shooters came into view. I recognized the motion he was making from the surveillance video. He was shaking the assault rifle. I now knew it was because the gun had jammed. He extended his arm and the skin of his wrist was exposed. I saw something on it-a dark spot. I hit “pause” and tried to enlarge the image. Something was definitely there. A bruise? A birthmark? A tattoo? It was too blurry to make out. I showed Bailey.

“We’ll get the lab to work on this,” she said.

“Is the kid who took this…?”

“Alive?” I nodded. “Is there a name on the evidence bag?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hugh Filoma.”

“I’ll check right now.”

“Did you get any footage with a better shot of the shorter guy?” I asked.

“No. But I think I know why. It looks to me like he was doing most of the shooting. The kids closest to him are either hiding, on the run, or already down. The only reason this Hugh kid could get a shot that close is because the shorter one was gone and the taller one was right in front of him. This is the best lead we’ve got so far.”

It was also the only one. We packed up the cell phones and headed out to start our interviews. We’d just reached the main entrance when a small, slender man in a black parka waved us down from the front steps of the school.

Bailey smiled. “Hey, Ed. Since when do they let you out in public?”

“Since they lost the key to my cage.” He glanced at me. “That your partner?”

“Sort of. Rachel Knight, Special Trials, DA’s office, meet Ed Berry, senior firearms examiner.”

We shook hands. His was leathery. “You here to check out the weapons?” I asked.

“And all the casings. Got more brass here than a shooting range.” He shook his head.

“Can you tell us anything?” Bailey asked.

“I can tell you that one of these assault rifles was fired a hell of a lot more than the other. They both had fifty-round magazines, but one rifle about emptied the clip in that gym. Only had a few left by the time he got out to the hallway. The other one only fired a few in the gym before it jammed.”

That would’ve been the taller shooter’s gun. “And outside the gym, on the stairs and second floor?” I asked.

“So far, it looks like a mix of forty-four- and three-fifty-seven-caliber casings. Mostly forty-fours. Those guns haven’t shown up-”

“I think they hung on to them,” Bailey said.

“Well, maybe we’ll find some prints on the guns they left behind,” he said.

“Hate to tell you this, but we looked at the footage,” Bailey said. “They wore gloves. But hey, feel free to check the casings for prints.”

Bailey was being sarcastic. They always try, but I have yet to see anyone get prints off casings.

“And you feel free to lift some prints off your victims,” Ed said. Finding decent prints on skin is another near impossibility. Cop humor. “Sorry I can’t do much more for you right now, but if you get hold of that forty-four and three-fifty-seven…”

Bailey clapped him on the back. “I’ll bring them to you myself.”

Bailey had arranged for us to interview the first batch of witnesses from the gym at the home of one of the students, Charlotte Kerrigan, who lived just a couple blocks away. I wouldn’t ordinarily be all that thrilled to have witnesses hanging out together until I’d gotten each of their statements recorded, but there was no way to keep them apart. The ones who hadn’t been injured had banded together from the moment they’d escaped. And it probably didn’t matter anyway. According to the first responding officers, no one had seen the shooters’ faces or had any idea who they were.

The house was a sprawling ranch style, and Charlotte’s mother ushered us into the den. “I feel so fortunate that my Charlotte wasn’t hurt…but those poor parents who…” She stopped and swallowed hard. “Anything I can do to help, just let me know, okay?”

I took in her pale face and shaky voice, knowing that from this day forward, every time Charlotte left the house, her mother would choke on the fear that it might be the last time she saw her.

We ushered in groups of three and four at a time, mainly to let them have one another for support. Any more than that and we wouldn’t be able to keep the statements straight. When we’d arrived, I’d estimated there were about fifty students lined up outside for interviews, but I was wrong. It was more like a hundred. And we saw what we were in for after the first six: disjointed glimpses of figures in camouflage jackets and ski masks, seemingly endless gunfire, students flying or falling down the bleacher stairs…or dropping to the ground like broken puppets. Some thought there were four gunmen; most remembered hearing them yell something, but weren’t able to make out the words. A few said they were sure the gunmen shouted something about jocks. But they couldn’t add much to the general descriptions of height and weight we’d already gotten from the cell phone and surveillance footage.