Marcia Clark: The Competition

“Twenty-four hours?” I rolled my eyes.

“They tell me that’s only one day. One day to make sure you don’t die of a brain bleed. Is that so much to ask?” I started to say yes, but he glared at me, then turned to Bailey. “She always like this?”

Bailey shrugged. “Pretty much.”

He muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like “wing nut,” then turned on his heel and walked out.

After the doctor left, I remembered the sight of Principal Campbell as he fell face-first onto the stage. I asked Bailey if she knew how he was.

“I’ll call around, see what I can find out.”

I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, Bailey was across the room, curled up in an armchair, covered with a blanket. Graden was standing at the foot of my bed, whispering to my warden, the Asian doctor.

Graden smiled when he saw I was awake. “How many of me do you see?”

“Just two. But one of you has a ponytail.”

The doctor chuckled. “Not bad for a few hours after a concussion.” He gave me a stern look. “But you’re still not going home.”

I started to fold my arms across my chest, but it hurt, so I let them drop. “You’re a real buzz kill, you know that?”

“Yes.” He patted my foot and walked out.

Graden came over and kissed me on the forehead. “You’ll have to start giving your statement pretty soon.” He nodded toward Bailey. “She’s already given hers a few times.”

I knew we’d both be giving statements for days to come. No matter how obvious it was that shooting Evan Cutter was justified, there would be a full investigation. And that meant endless questioning.

But I had some questions of my own. “Have you been able to find out what kind of bomb he used at the amphitheater?” I asked. I told him about seeing Evan on the hill with the trash can.

“They’re pretty sure it was a propane bomb.” Graden saw my expression and nodded. “Same as Klebold and Harris.”

Klebold and Harris had put propane tanks with alarm-clock timers in the school cafeteria. The timers had been set to go off when the cafeteria was at its most crowded, but something went wrong. The bombs malfunctioned and never detonated.

“How’d he make it work?” I asked.

“I didn’t get all the details. But from what I heard, it can be done if the valve on the tank is jammed and unable to release pressure-for example, by putting the tank upside down in a trash can. Then, all he had to do was start a fire in the can. The pressure builds and…”

So Cutter had managed to “outdo” Klebold and Harris once again.

Graden’s phone buzzed. He looked at it and frowned, then looked away.

“What?” I asked.

He sighed and took my hand. “I don’t want to give you this news right now, but I don’t want you to get blindsided. There were two more casualties.”

A lead weight dropped into the pit of my stomach. “Who?”

“Officers. They were patrolling the hillside behind the stage. I don’t know if you know them. Craig Silvers and Dwight Rosenberg. Silvers is critical, but Rosenberg didn’t make it.”

Dwight. I couldn’t believe it. Hot tears pricked my eyelids. My voice was thick. “How?”

“We had security patrols set up around the entire amphitheater. But we only had a few on the sides of the hill because it was the least likely point of entry. Dwight came here straight from the Taft High scene and saw we were a little shorthanded there…” Graden paused and took a deep breath. “Silvers wasn’t able to say much, but it seems Evan was dressed like a volunteer. He rolled up with the trash can, and when Silvers asked to see some ID, Cutter shot him. Dwight came running when he heard the shot. Silvers passed out at that point, but based on what we saw, our guess is Evan Cutter got the drop on Dwight.”

I was so miserable I could barely move my lips to speak. I stared out the window. “And so that despicable piece of shit gets his damn blaze of glory, doesn’t he? They’ll write about how he got the jump on the police and managed to set off a bomb and got killed in a shoot-out with a prosecutor and a cop.”

“They were going to write about him no matter how it ended, Rachel. He bought himself a place in history with the very first shots he fired at Fairmont High.”

Fame is amoral. It was such a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. “And right now, there’s another monster out there, salivating over his chance to show the world how he can do it better.”

“There probably always will be. We can take them out when we find them, but we can’t stop them from being born.”

Graden worked throughthe night, but Toni and Bailey stayed in my hospital room with me. The next day, before I was released, Graden came by to tell us the rest of the story. We figured Evan had been living in his car all along, and we were right. A car had been found parked at the side of the hill near the amphitheater. It had been stolen early on the morning of the memorial from a location near Taft High. Clothing, food, three handguns, and a notebook that had the plans for all the shootings, plus a detailed diagram of the San Juan amphitheater, were found in it. The writings in that notebook revealed that Evan and Logan had planned to do the Cinemark shooting together, but that Logan had lost his stomach for the killings after Fairmont. He’d committed suicide. Evan had waxed eloquent in his disgust for Logan’s “pathetically inferior weakness,” saying that he didn’t need that “fucked-up loser.” He would win this “competition” on his own.

Evan used Charlie’s car as the decoy at Taft. And there had indeed been a body in that car. A canvass of the neighborhood near the school turned up a good lead as to whose it was. The cashier at a 7-Eleven on Ventura Boulevard saw a white male matching Evan’s description talking to a Hispanic man who regularly hung out at the store, looking for work. The Hispanic man was last seen getting into a car with that white male. The car matched the description of Charlie’s beige Chevrolet. The charred remains in the car hadn’t left much to work with. They were still trying to get a positive ID.

Bailey and I were both taking time off. We hadn’t slept much in the past two weeks, and that plus the endless rounds of interrogations had left us thoroughly depleted. My gunshot wound was healing, but it was no picnic.

We probably could’ve slept for the next two weeks straight if we’d had the chance. But we didn’t. From the moment we left the hospital, Bailey and I had been besieged by requests for interviews and appearances by every news program in the country.

Neither of us had much love for the spotlight, and after so many had died, we didn’t feel like there was anything to celebrate. We kept our appearances to the bare minimum. The City of Los Angeles had voted to award us a sort of medal of valor-or, as the mayor put it, a “warm, heartfelt thanks for your courage and bravery.” It was a big honor. Beyond that, it had the unexpected charm of annoying the hell out of Vanderhorn. That camera-loving, face-time-sucking publicity whore, who would’ve had a hard time choosing between seeing me and suffering a bout of food poisoning, was forced to stand on the stage and clap for us. His smile was so strained he looked constipated. I asked one of the friendlier reporters to see if he could get me some still photos that’d be suitable for framing.

The following week, with police interviews and most media appearances done, we finally had the chance to wind down. Bailey was going to spend the time with Drew, which meant she’d be hanging around the Biltmore a lot. That worked for me.

But Graden was swamped. The fact that both suspects were dead didn’t end the investigation. How they’d acquired their weapons, where they’d stored them, and, most important, how to prevent this atrocity from happening again were among the many questions that still needed answering.