Nineteen Minutes Read online

  *

  At the traffic light, Patrick fell asleep. He dreamed that he was running through the halls of the school, hearing gunshots, but every time he turned a corner he found himself hovering in midair--the floor having vanished beneath his feet.

  At a honk, he snapped alert.

  He waved in apology to the car that pulled up alongside him to pass and drove to the state crime lab, where the ballistics tests had been given priority. Like Patrick, these techs had been working around the clock.

  His favorite--and most trusted--technician was a woman named Selma Abernathy, a grandmother of four who knew more about cutting-edge technology than any technogeek. She looked up when Patrick came into the lab and raised a brow. "You've been napping," she accused.

  Patrick shook his head. "Scout's honor."

  "You look too good for someone who's exhausted."

  He grinned. "Selma, you've really got to get over your crush on me."

  She pushed her glasses up on her nose. "Honey, I'm smart enough to fall for someone who doesn't make my life a pain in the ass. You want your results?"

  Patrick followed her over to a table, on which were four guns: two pistols and two sawed-off shotguns. They were tagged: Gun A, Gun B--the two pistols; Gun C and Gun D--the shotguns. He recognized the pistols--they were the ones found in the locker room--one held by Peter Houghton, the other one a short distance away on the tile floor. "First I tested for latent prints," Selma said, and she showed the results to Patrick. "Gun A had a print that matches your suspect. Guns C and D were clean. Gun B had a partial print on it that was inconclusive."

  Selma nodded to the rear of the laboratory, where enormous barrels of water were used for test-firing the guns. She would have test-fired each weapon into the water, Patrick knew. When a bullet was fired, it spun through the barrel of a gun, which caused striations on the metal. As a result, you could tell, by looking at a bullet, exactly which gun it had been fired from. This would help Patrick piece together Peter Houghton's rampage: where he'd stopped to shoot, which weapon he'd used.

  "Gun A was the one primarily used during the shooting, Guns C and D were left in the backpack retrieved at the crime scene. Which is actually a good thing, because they most likely would have done more damage. All of the bullets retrieved from the bodies of victims were fired from Gun A, the first pistol."

  Patrick wondered where Peter Houghton had gotten his armory. And at the same time, he realized that it wasn't hard in Sterling to find someone who hunted or went target shooting at the site of an old dump in the woods.

  "I know, from the gunpowder residue, that Gun B was fired. However, there hasn't been a bullet recovered yet that confirms this."

  "They're still processing--"

  "Let me finish," Selma said. "The other interesting thing about Gun B is that it jammed after that one discharge. When we examined it we found a double-feed of a bullet."

  Patrick crossed his arms. "There's no print on the weapon?" he clarified.

  "There's an inconclusive print on the trigger . . . probably smudged when your suspect dropped it, but I can't say that for certain."

  Patrick nodded and pointed to Gun A. "This is the one he dropped, when I drew down on him in the locker room. So, presumably, it's the last one he fired."

  Selma lifted a bullet with a pair of tweezers. "You're probably right. This was retrieved from Matthew Royston's brain," she said. "And the striations are consistent with a discharge from Gun A."

  The boy in the locker room, the one who'd been found with Josie Cormier.

  The only victim who'd been shot twice.

  "What about the bullet in the kid's stomach?" Patrick asked.

  Selma shook her head. "Went through clean. It could have been fired from either Gun A or Gun B, but we won't know until you bring me a slug."

  Patrick stared at the weapons. "He'd used Gun A all over the rest of the school. I can't imagine what made him switch to the other pistol."

  Selma glanced up at him; he noticed for the first time the dark circles under her eyes, the toll this overnight emergency had taken. "I can't imagine what made him use either of them in the first place."

  *

  Meredith Vieira stared gravely into the camera, having perfected the demeanor for a national tragedy. "Details continue to accumulate in the case of the Sterling shootings," she said. "For more, we go to Ann Curry at the news desk. Ann?"

  The news anchor nodded. "Overnight, investigators have learned that four weapons were brought into Sterling High School, although only two were actually used by the shooter. In addition, there is evidence that Peter Houghton, the suspect in the shootings, was an ardent fan of a hard-core punk band called Death Wish, often posting on fan websites and downloading lyrics onto his personal computer. Lyrics that, in retrospect, have some people wondering what kids should and should not be listening to."

  The green screen behind her shoulder filled with text:

  Black snow falling

  Stone corpse walking

  Bastards laughing

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  Bastards don't see

  The bloody beast in me

  The reaper rides for free

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  "The Death Wish song 'Judgment Day' includes a frightening foreshadowing of an event that became all too real in Sterling, New Hampshire, yesterday morning," Curry said. "Raven Napalm, lead singer for Death Wish, held a press conference late last night."

  The footage cut to a man with a black Mohawk, gold eye shadow, and five pierced hoops through his lower lip, standing in front of a group of microphones. "We live in a country where American kids are dying because we're sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn't see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people start pointing a finger at heavy metal music. The problem isn't with rock lyrics, it's with the fabric of this society itself."

  Ann Curry's face filled the screen again. "We'll have more on the continuing coverage of the tragedy in Sterling as it unfolds. In national news, the Senate defeated the gun control bill last Wednesday, but Senator Roman Nelson suggests that it's not the last we've seen of that fight. He joins us today from South Dakota. Senator?"

  *

  Peter didn't think he'd slept at all last night, but all the same, he didn't hear the correctional officer coming toward his cell. He startled at the sound of the metal door scraping open.

  "Here," the man said, and he tossed something at Peter. "Put it on."

  He knew that he was going to court today; Jordan McAfee had told him so. He assumed that this was a suit or something. Didn't people always get to wear a suit in court, even if they were coming straight from jail? It was supposed to make them sympathetic. He thought he'd seen that on TV.

  But it wasn't a suit. It was Kevlar, a bulletproof vest.

  *

  In the holding cell beneath the courthouse, Jordan found his client lying on his back on the floor, an arm shielding his eyes. Peter was wearing a bulletproof vest, an unspoken nod to the fact that everyone packing the courtroom that morning wanted to kill him. "Good morning," Jordan said, and Peter sat up.

  "Or not," he murmured.

  Jordan didn't respond. He leaned a little closer to the bars. "Here's the plan. You've been charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder. I'm going to waive the readings of the complaints--we'll go over them individually some other time. Right now we just have to go in there and enter not-guilty pleas. I don't want you to say a word. If you have any questions, you whisper them to me. You are, for all intents and purposes, mute for the next hour. Understand?"

  Peter stared at him. "Perfectly," he said, sullen. But Jordan was looking at his client's hands.

  They were shaking.

  *

  From the log of items removed from the bedroom of Peter Houghton:

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