‘Thanks, Chief,’ said Thiery, nodding his gratitude.
Fatigue permeated the room like a Port-O-Potty air freshener. The combined scents of gun oil, leather, Kevlar, and sweaty bodies covered in polyester uniforms wafted about. Thiery could hear stomachs growling and watched officers rubbing tired, red eyes. Most of them had been there for fifteen hours, or more.
‘Okay, people,’ said Thiery, ‘let’s wrap it up for tonight. You have my number. Please call if you think of anything pertinent. I’ll touch base with all of you tomorrow. Try to have a good night, and get some rest.’
Everyone filed out of the room and headed to their cars. Thiery saw Logan talking to Conroy off to the side and paused, then decided to keep moving. At that point, he didn’t want to talk to either one of them.
It was three o’clock in the morning at the tiny Sun Beam Motel, a clean but dated motor court that offered HBO, free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool, and close proximity to Legoland. After settling in, Thiery called his sons. Both lived in California: one in the Navy, twenty-one-year-old Leif, stationed in San Diego; the other, Owen, a twenty-three-year-old firefighter in San Francisco. After seeing the devastation at the school, Thiery ached to tell them he loved them.
Neither answered their phone. He tried not to take it personally. He wondered if they’d heard about the shooting, wherever they were. It would be midnight in California. They were both young and probably partying. Maybe they were both on shift at work.
He had felt a distance develop as they had grown up with him, their only parent. It was difficult to be both loving caregiver and disciplinarian, and he’d wished he had someone to tag team with. He believed, at times, they blamed him for their mother leaving them so young. They were there, in the house, when some of his co-workers, FDLE agents, stopped by, from time to time, to ask him more questions about her disappearance. She had packed a few items – enough for a weekend away – then vanished.
For a while, Thiery was the primary ‘person of interest’ in her disappearance. Newspapers printed the story of the cop whose wife was missing, and it had created problems for his sons at school. It was no secret to anyone that surviving spouses were the first suspect in missing or murdered partners. He felt people thought he was guilty of something and the burden weighed heavily on him.
When Adrienne hadn’t returned after a few weeks, Thiery’s initial reaction was to assume the worst: she had left him, but something bad had happened along the way. Following that instinct, he’d gone to New York, where his wife had grown up in Brooklyn, the daughter of Albanian immigrants. Though he hadn’t spoken to Edona Manjola since he and Adrienne were married – Adrienne’s mother had never cared for him, for reasons he didn’t understand – he located her apartment, but it was empty.
He learned Adrienne’s mother was dead. When he made further inquiries, neighbours told him that, a few weeks earlier, she had killed herself by leaping from the building. The suicide reinforced his notion that something had happened to Adrienne, but a check with every hospital in New York, and even the coroner’s office, turned up nothing. With no other living relatives, Thiery hit a dead end.
After she’d been gone for over two years, after Thiery had spent every waking moment trying to find her, and then hired several private detectives to continue the search, he was no longer a suspect. He was just alone. Case closed. There was no formal announcement as to his innocence, any more than there had been that he was a suspect. The case, like his wife, just faded away. After seven years, he finally had her declared deceased, allowing him to collect a small life insurance policy she’d carried. He’d placed the funds in an account for his sons’ college savings.
He often wondered if he should have remarried, but that wasn’t something he was going to do just to have a built-in babysitter. In any case, it was too late, now. His sons were who they were, and, to them, he was who he was. All the regret in the world wouldn’t change that.
By four o’clock, Thiery was in bed, poring over reports he’d gathered from the Sebring and Lake Wales Police Departments, as well as the Calusa County Sheriff’s Office, whose SWAT had yielded the most reports.
The reports from the departments who’d arrived first on the scene, Sebring PD and the School Board police, stated in dry, legal terms how and what they did to secure the building, set up a command post, and assist in the evacuation that was underway when they arrived. The Sheriff’s SWAT team recorded the team’s entry at 8:42 a.m., immediately followed by the discovery of both the victims’ and perpetrators’ bodies.
The Fire Rescue reports comprised brief medical statements that included patient treatment – four treated for wounds and six more for chest pain, shock, or trouble breathing – and recorded which hospitals the patients were transported to. There were reports from each forensic team that entered the building and dealt with each of the bodies, the location, nearby weapons, bullet casing trajectory, and various gun blasts. All in all, the local law enforcement agencies had done an outstanding job, doing what they were supposed to do. The problem was that reports were just that: reports. Facts, times, data. There were no leads in them that would take the investigation to a point of conclusion. It was all paperwork formality, but, as lead investigator, he had to read every one of them thoroughly, in case something popped up.
Thiery wondered again about the response time. According to the dispatch log, Calusa County SWAT arrived at 8:42. The initial call came in at 8:26. A sixteen-minute response? Maybe that was normal for this area, but Dunham had arrived at 8:38. Technically, the Calusa County Sheriff Office was ‘outside the city limits’ but it was still in very close proximity to the school. How did a police chief from a neighbouring city several miles away beat a SWAT located a few blocks away? Maybe protocol had them meet at the main department before responding? Maybe they had to go there for their SWAT gear? In most cities, officers kept their response gear in the trunk, but it might be different here. Thiery made a note to himself to audit the dispatch tapes and call times.
Deadened by fatigue, Thiery wondered if he was making something of nothing. Maybe the governor was right, he thought. Maybe there wasn’t an investigation, other than to determine what triggered the two men to do the shooting. What was their common fuck up? Abused as children? Bullied in school? Too many violent video games? Could anyone ever really know what caused these – what had they called them on the news? – Human Tornadoes?
Still, something bothered Thiery. Something that, every time he began to doze off, woke him like a new lover trying to sneak out of bed. Why was a forty-one-year-old man hanging out with a nineteen-year-old kid? How and where did they meet? And what about Erica Weisz? What was her story? How did she get a gun? Why would she chance taking a loaded weapon to school? And what gave her the wherewithal to aim and shoot it? Most people couldn’t do that, even once. She managed to do it twice. He made a note on his iPad to check with the school board’s human resources department to see if her employment background revealed anything.
Thiery’s head slumped to one side. The reports and his ever-present iPad slipped from his hands as sleep overcame him. He welcomed the coming slumber and managed to slip off his loafers and slide his feet under the covers, though still dressed. The mattress was too soft for his liking, but felt like a mother’s embrace as the window-banger AC unit hummed a soft lullaby.
His slumber lasted about one minute before his mind, as weary as it was, clicked back on, repeating the questions: What did Frank Shadtz and David Coody have in common? A mature, adult man from out of town and a nineteen-year-old, pimple-faced, hayseed kid. How had they met and joined together with the common idea they should shoot up a school?
‘Shit,’ he said aloud, rolling out of bed, his head swimming. ‘Goddamnit, man! Turn it off,’ he admonished himself. He got up, went to the bathroom, and unwrapped a tiny bar of soap. He washed his face and rinsed, then looked at himself in the mirror, though he had to squat to do so. His brown eyes were bloodshot, his face salt-and-pepper-whiskered, and his hair greasy. Someone once told him he looked like George Clooney on steroids. Right then, he was closer to Mickey Rourke on a bender.
He shuddered and looked at his watch: 5:15. He couldn’t