Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

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:

Dell laptop computer.

Gaming CDs: Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Three posters from gun manufacturers.

Assorted lengths of pipe.

Books: The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger; On War, Clausewitz; graphic novels by Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman.

DVD-Bowling for Columbine.

Yearbook from Sterling Middle School, various faces circled in black marker. One circled face x’d out with words LET LIVE beneath picture. Girl identified in caption as Josie Cormier.

The girl spoke so softly that the microphone, hanging on a boom over her head like a piñata, had trouble picking up the unraveled threads of her voice. “Mrs. Edgar’s classroom is right next to Mr. McCabe’s, and sometimes we could hear them moving their chairs around or shouting out answers,” she said. “But this time we heard screaming. Mrs. Edgar, she took her desk and shoved it up against the door and told us all to go to the far end of the classroom, near the windows, and sit on the floor. The gunshots, they sounded like popcorn. And then…” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And then there wasn’t any more screaming.”

Diana Leven hadn’t expected the gunman to look so young. Peter Houghton was shackled and chained, wearing his orange jumpsuit and bulletproof vest, but he still had the apple cheeks of a boy who hadn’t come through the far side of puberty yet, and she would have bet money he didn’t have to shave. The glasses, too, upset her. The defense would play that to the hilt, she was certain, claiming some myopia that would have made sharpshooting an impossibility.

The four cameras that the district court judge had agreed on to represent the networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN-hummed to life like a barbershop quartet as soon as the defendant was led into the room. Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts, Peter turned immediately toward them. Diana realized that his eyes were not all that different from those of the cameras: dark, blind, empty behind the lenses.

Jordan McAfee-a lawyer Diana didn’t like very much on a personal level but grudgingly admitted was damn good at his job-leaned toward his client the moment Peter reached the defense table. The bailiff stood. “All rise,” he bellowed, “the Honorable Charles Albert presiding.”

Judge Albert hustled into the courtroom, his robes whispering. “Be seated,” he said. “Peter Houghton,” he began, turning to the defendant.

Jordan McAfee stood. “Your Honor, we waive the reading of the charges. We’d like to enter not-guilty pleas for all of them, and we request that a probable cause hearing be scheduled in ten days.”

This wasn’t a surprise to Diana-why would Jordan want the whole world to hear his client being indicted on ten separate counts of first-degree murder? The judge turned to her. “Ms. Leven, the statute requires that a defendant charged with first-degree murder-multiple counts, at that-be held without bail. I assume you have no problem with this.”

Diana hid a smile. Judge Albert, God bless him, had managed to slip in the charges anyway. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

The judge nodded. “Well then, Mr. Houghton. You’re remanded back into custody.”

The whole procedure had taken less than five minutes, and the public wouldn’t be happy. They wanted blood; they wanted revenge. Diana watched Peter Houghton stumble between the hold of two sheriff’s deputies and turn back to his lawyer one last time with a question on his lips that he didn’t utter. Then the door closed behind him, and Diana gathered her briefcase and walked out of the courtroom to the cameras.