The Competition - [41]

“Logan? Nah.”

“Do you know Otis Barney?” I continued.

“Pasty little dude?”

Pasty. I pictured the face I’d seen in photographs in the Barney house. I guess he was sort of pale. “Yeah. A little bit shorter than you, medium build. Curly brown hair.”

“Yeah. Not real well, but I remember seeing him around.” Kenny paused and frowned. “You asked about bullying. I think that guy got knocked around by some punk on the football team. And I heard someone once threw his books in the toilet.” Kenny shook his head disapprovingly. “I don’t get shit like that. He never bothered anybody, so why mess with him?”

“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“No clue. Like I said, I didn’t really know Otis. Just saw him around school.”

“What about Logan? When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week ago?” Kenny dropped his gaze to the floor.

“Not since the shooting?” I asked.

Kenny shook his head. “But there’s lots of kids I haven’t seen since…” His eyes slid away, and a long moment passed as Bailey and I gave him a chance to recover. Then he looked at me with worried eyes. “I heard you guys are saying Logan’s one of the shooters. Is Otis the other one?”

Bailey gave him her poker face. “We’re just looking into everyone who hasn’t been accounted for.”

Kenny sat up in his chair and folded his arms. “I don’t know about that Barney guy, but Logan couldn’t have done it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because…Logan never got mad…at anybody. Never talked shit about anybody or anything. It just makes no sense.”

I asked him the standard shrink questions: did he know anyone who did “talk shit” about wanting to kill people or feeling persecuted? Kenny didn’t. Just the usual “my ‘fill in the blank’ sucks.”

“Did you know Logan’s brother, Luke?”

Kenny’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t even know he had a brother.”

“Do you know who hung out with Logan?”

“Darnell, Leo, I think Caleb.” Kenny shrugged. “That’s all I can think of.”

“So not Otis?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

I got the last names and descriptions of the friends he’d mentioned and then had him tell me what he remembered of the shooting.

“I, like, dived under my seat.” He described the gunfire, the remark one of the shooters had made about jocks, the horror of it all, but he had nothing new.

The next few interviews got us more of the same: Logan was a great guy, never got bullied that anyone knew of, and had never had a problem with jocks-or anyone else. A couple of others confirmed the tattoo and that it was a recent acquisition-within the past month or two.

They also confirmed that Otis was a strange guy who did get bounced around by at least one of the football jocks-Bryan Scofield-but Otis had never seemed like the violent type. I probed to find some connection between Otis and Logan, but no one had any recollection of seeing them together. At least not until we got to Caleb.

If anyone still wore a pocket protector, Caleb would be that guy. He was on the short side, but even so, his pants were floods. He had wavy hair that refused to stay in its side part and constantly fell into his eyes, and black-framed glasses. He’d known Logan since third grade and they’d bonded over their mutual love of math. This I could not relate to. Math was the reason I chose law school-lots of reading, no numbers. In spite of that, Caleb was a nice kid. Shy, quiet, but not abnormally so. Predictably, he was a Logan fan. But he’d also seen some dark spots on the halo of St. Logan.

“Back in junior high we studied together and stuff. But by around our sophomore year at Fairmont he got kind of…moody. Sometimes he’d just pop off at me for no reason.”

“Did he ever get violent? Hit you?” I asked.

“No, no. Nothing like that. He’d just be…upset.”

“About?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular. At least not that I could tell. He’d just get withdrawn and…down.”

It sounded like depression. But it also sounded like typical teen hormones and angst. “Do you know Otis Barney?” I asked.

Caleb wrinkled his nose and pushed his bangs back. “Yeah.”

“And?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing really. Just that he’s kind of weird.” Caleb made a face. “And kind of pathetic. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago. Logan and I were talking in the parking lot. He walked up and just interrupted us. Started telling Logan they had to get going. He acted like I wasn’t even there.”

“Did Logan say anything to him?” I asked. “Get mad?”

“No. Just told him to wait a sec.”

“But you never knew them to be friendly before?” I asked.

“Well, like I said, I didn’t see all that much of Logan recently, so they could’ve gotten to be buds without me knowing about it.”

“Was that your only contact with Otis?” I asked.

“Pretty much. Other than seeing him around school.”

We kept at it for another ten minutes or so, but didn’t get anything more. Still, we’d found another link between Otis and Logan. Progress.

Bailey glanced at her watch, then looked outside. “We’ve got three more kids out there. We can either tell them to come back and get lunch or power through.”

“I vote we power through.” After our mini-breakthrough with Caleb, I hoped we were on a roll.