The Competition - [27]

“On who?” Mark asked. “Lots of kids feel screwed over and talk about payback against their teachers or”-he craned his neck to see if Mrs. Charnosh was within earshot-“their parents.”

“Or other kids,” Vincent Charnosh said.

A fair question. “I mean someone who was always venting about everyone screwing him over, and wanting to kill them. Not just someone who spouted off once about wanting to kill the math teacher because he got an F. Someone who’s angry at the world and talks about payback-a lot.”

“I can’t remember anyone talking like that,” Paula said.

“I’m pretty sure I would’ve turned in someone who went off like that,” said Harrison, the most conservative-looking of the group. “After Sandy Hook and that freak in Colorado, we all know what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Ever since Sandy Hook, they’ve been talking about putting in metal detectors.”

I’d been thinking about that when our shrinks gave us the checklist. Given how many shootings there’d been, and recently, I had a feeling most kids thought they were on top of it, could spot the dangerous types. But knowing that homicidal nutbags could walk among them didn’t mean they knew whom to take seriously. It was the typical hubris of youth to think they had it all figured out. If the shooters turned out to be Otis and Carson-or anyone else they’d actually known-what few shreds of false security they had left would dissolve like spun sugar in the rain. But they didn’t need to hear that right now, so I sat back and let Bailey take over.

“Do you know anyone who’s heavily into guns?” she asked. “Anyone who talks about going to the range a lot or about having a lot of military paraphernalia?” They didn’t.

She asked a few more gun questions, got more nos, and then asked whether they knew anyone who’d written about homicidal fantasies. When she again got a chorus of nos, I decided it was time to bring up Otis Barney and Carson James. I started by asking if any of them did the extracurricular team science project. I was betting Vincent, yes, the others, no. I was right. Sometimes, you just know.

“Did you get friendly with any of the other teams?” I asked.

“Some,” Vincent said. “Not a ton.”

“Did you ever hang with Otis and Carson?” I asked.

“No. They pretty much just did their own thing.”

“So they were tight?” I asked.

“I guess. I didn’t hear them argue or anything.”

I pressed on with a few more questions about Otis and Carson-and threw in a few about the other teams just for cover-but got nothing, so I had to let it go and move on. I played the recording of the weird laugh that Marnie had identified as Otis’s. “Do any of you recognize that laugh?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Vincent said.

Mark gave him a surprised look. “Dude, that totally sounds like Otis,” he said. He nudged Harrison. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Harrison said. “It does.”

“Vincent?” I asked. “You don’t think so?”

Vincent stretched his neck. “I guess, maybe. Yeah, probably.”

I guessed Vincent was nervous about tagging his classmate. The wonders of teen loyalty. I kept at it a little while longer, but just kept hitting dead ends, so I wrapped up by showing them the blowup of the tattoo on the shooter’s wrist. “Do any of you recognize this?”

They passed the photo around. Nada.

Four down, twenty nine hundred ninety-six students to go. We were cooking.

Dale Campbell had volunteered to set up the next batch of interviews. Based on our shrinks’ advice, Bailey asked him to make English class the top priority. He started with Otis’s current class. The teacher couldn’t make it. He had to fly back to Arizona to help his father, who’d suffered a heart attack. But Dale had managed to round up several students and even let us meet at his house.

As we pulled into his driveway, Bailey got a call from the unis working on Carson James. It was a brief call, and when she ended it she stared out the front window.

“And?” I said, impatient.

“No one answers the door or the phone at his house. When they called his cell it went straight to voice mail. None of the bodies at the morgue fit his description, and they haven’t found him at any of the hospitals so far.”

We exchanged a look. “I would say Carson James is looking good,” I said. “But I’m not going to because-”

“Yeah, don’t jinx us.”

Our hopes cautiously lifted, we got out and headed for Dale’s house. Nine students, four male, five female, had crowded into Dale’s family room. The parents had been relegated to the kitchen. They’d wanted to sit in with their kids, but there wasn’t room. These students didn’t look quite as shell-shocked. Did they feel more secure because it was a larger crowd? Or did they just not want to show how terrified they really were in front of the others? Even so, by no means did they look calm. The girls twirled their hair and hunched forward, some with arms wrapped around their bodies. The boys bounced their knees and cracked their knuckles.

They’d all been in the gym at the time of the shooting, but none had been able to see the shooters well enough to add to what we already knew. I moved on to the questions suggested by our shrinks. And got the same results as before: no, no, and no. I segued into Otis Barney. All they remembered was that he was pretty quiet and got real nervous when the teacher called on him. I played the snippet of footage with the shooter’s weird laugh. No one recognized it. We were getting nowhere. I tossed out one last question. “Do any of you happen to know Carson James?”