Chapter 9

Steele removed the 8x10 photographs from the manila envelope Deputy Sheriff Millwater had given him and spread them out on Elena’s kitchen table like he was getting ready to play a game of solitaire. He picked up the police report and read it, from time to time checking the photographs of the crime scene to get a visual. He studied how the bodies lay. Put himself in the shooter’s body. Imagined where the shooter fired from. Other than Mr. Blackburn, there were no bodies near the classroom doors. Steele would have expected a pile of bodies there as they tried to escape. Did it happen that fast, or did they freeze? In combat, he had witnessed even trained soldiers freezing. These were children.

Steele only had to read through the report once. The contents would now forever be available in his mind. He had stopped wondering years ago where all that information was stored in his brain. He couldn’t remember being born or circumcised—thankfully—but recalled his first day of kindergarten and everything that had happened since. Not that it was all floating around in his head, cluttering it up, but if he needed to recall something it was there. It was futile to try to explain it to others. They weren’t capable of understanding. It was like explaining the color purple to a person blind from birth.

The police report was skimpy. It contained the time and location of the shooting, the names of the victims, and that Pete Bargas had done it. Case closed. The survivors had said it was Pete. All three of them. Steele kept referring to the photographs as a visual guide to what was written since the crime scene no longer existed. It had been cleaned and sanitized, so all Steele had were the photographs and the insufficient police report. They had the gun and the spent brass. Ballistics identified the pistol found with Pete’s body as the weapon that killed him and the others. But no fingerprints. Not even on the shell casings. Was Pete that good? He was wearing gloves at the time of the shooting, but was he smart enough never to have handled the ammo barehanded? That takes a lot of planning. And that means it was premeditated. So he didn’t just go crazy. But why did he do it? What was his motive?

Lifting the photographs up one at a time, Steele studied the carnage in the two classrooms. At the dead children. Blood everywhere. Some faces unrecognizable from bullets that blasted them to pieces. Steele had seen that before. Bodies blown apart by bombs or shredded by .50 caliber machine guns. But these were innocent children in school, not a war zone.

Steele picked up the last photograph, the one of Pete lying dead. His head was hooded and his lower face was covered with a blood-soaked scarf. The sunglasses were on the floor, but at the time of the shooting they had masked the rest of his face. How did anyone identify the shooter as Pete Bargas? Steele held the photograph closer. But it was Pete. Elena had identified him. He studied the dead face.

Why? Steele thought. What caused him to go on a rampage? What doesn’t Elena know about her son?

The front door opened. Steele slapped the photograph of Elena’s dead son upside down on the table and then swept the others into a stack and flipped them over on top of it.

“What’s that?” Elena said.

“The police report.”

“Anything in it you can use?”

“It’s a starting point.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Ask around.”

“Isn’t that what the sheriff did?”

“I’ll ask different questions.”

“Who first?”

“A girl named Hope Langer.”

“Why her?”

“Need to start somewhere. Her name was the first on the list of survivors.”

“She’s a sweet girl. A gymnast. And what a dancer. She was going to audition for America’s Got Talent later this year in Phoenix.” Elena lowered her eyes and said almost more to herself than to Steele, “Too bad this happened.”

“I have her home address. I was going to pay her a visit.”