“I HAVE BECOME DEATH!” he howled as he tore down the steps toward Titus and his deputies.
Later, as Titus replayed the scene over and over again like a film on loop inside the theater of his mind, he’d come to this part in the movie and pause. The moment would become a turgid series of movements that seemed hidden by an opaque sheen. Had Latrell pointed the rifle at them? Had he begun to point the rifle at them? He’d close his eyes and strain for the memory, but it dissolved even as he grasped it, like a cobweb.
Titus heard the first shot before Latrell had taken his third step. Buckshot from Roger’s riot gun turned half of Latrell’s head into a red mist. Tom Sadler popped off five shots from his .357 Smith & Wesson six-shot. Tom was an excellent marksman. All five bullets found their target in a tight grouping in Latrell’s chest.
“HOLD YOUR GODDAMN FIRE!” Titus screamed at the top of his lungs. Davy hadn’t fired a shot yet, but he holstered his gun so quick it might have been a magic trick. Carla pointed her sidearm down but held on to it with a tactical grip. Davy was muttering, but Titus couldn’t make out the words. The gunshots were still echoing in his ears.
Latrell’s body rolled down the last nine granite steps of Jefferson Davis High like a rag doll discarded by a child. The .30-30 clattered to the ground far out of his reach, as if that mattered anymore. As Latrell came to rest at his feet, Titus saw the trail of blood his journey had left behind. It stained the steps with streaks and slashes like rose-colored calligraphy.
THREE
They found Mr. Spearman at his desk.
He was leaning back in his chair with his mouth agape and his tie askew and the tail of his gray mullet spilling over his collar. Anyone who’d taken ninth-grade geography in Charon County in the past thirty years was familiar with that frazzled blue tie with the Rorschach-inspired coffee stains. If a poll were taken at Jefferson Davis High asking who was your favorite teacher, Jeff Spearman would most likely have come in at number one for twenty-five out of his thirty years as a member of the Jefferson Davis faculty.
If it weren’t for the dime-sized wound in his cheek and the cavernous hole in the back of his head, you could be forgiven for thinking he was taking a nap.
The section of the blackboard that was directly behind Mr. Spearman was painted in bits of bone and clumps of brain matter and gray hair. The pieces were held in place by a patina of blood.
Titus thought that part of the blackboard resembled an arts-and-crafts project inside an abattoir created by a lunatic.
Titus went over to the body and put two fingers on his neck. There was little doubt Jeff Spearman had shuffled off his mortal coil, but Titus believed in being thorough. In college in an anatomy class, he’d read about a man who had taken a two-foot iron rod through his brain during an industrial accident and driven himself to the hospital.
“Clear the rest of the school. Room-by-room. Go,” Titus said.
No one moved.
“The fuck he shoot Mr. Spearman for?” Davy asked. The hurt in his voice made Titus wince. He wondered about that himself, but the time for questions would come later. Right now they had to secure the scene.
“Fucking terrorist. Hear what he hollered when he came at us? Some Islam shit,” Roger said. He was breathing hard, like a bull. Titus spun on his heel and stepped inside Roger’s personal space.
“We don’t know anything about anything yet. We don’t know why he did it or if he even did it. Maybe he has an accomplice. Maybe Mr. Spearman shot himself and Latrell just picked up that rifle. Maybe we are dealing with terrorists. Maybe we are dealing with someone with a mental health issue who should never have had access to a rifle that can take down an elk. We don’t know shit. So, what we’re gonna do is secure the goddamn scene. Now go. I’m not gonna tell y’all again,” Titus said. He used a plural noun but he was talking to Roger. He stared into his eyes until Roger dropped his head and turned away.
Roger moved toward the door to the classroom. The rest of Titus’s deputies followed him. He and Davy shared a brief moment of eye contact before Davy too headed toward the door.
“And what he was yelling wasn’t Arabic. It was Aramaic. Don’t make any assumptions about what’s happened here,” Titus said to the empty room.
* * *
An hour later they were in the parking lot joined by ambulances and fire trucks and throngs of terrified parents searching for their traumatized children. Dozens of husbands and wives holding their spouses, many of whom had probably logged their last day as an employee of the Charon County school system. Coming face-to-face with the possibility of your imminent demise forces you to reckon with the career path you’ve chosen.
“They both need to go to the ME?” a large, light-skinned man asked Titus. He was from the funeral home. Virginia was still a largely rural state, interspersed with medium-sized cities surrounded by great swaths of forest and nestled in the bosoms of hills that were just a few feet shy of being mountains, and mountains that were old when the pyramids were new. Even large counties like Red Hill or Queen didn’t have a local coroner’s office. The state appointed a local doctor as a medical examiner. This medical professional pronounced unattended deaths. Aunt Emma dead in her bed after swallowing a peanut the wrong way or Mama Jane finally succumbing to a stroke as she canned peaches for the fall. Anything that could be called natural and expected was handled by the local medical examiner.
People with bullet holes went to Richmond to be dissected by the state medical examiner’s office.
“Yeah, both of ’em gotta go, but Maynard’s is gonna take Spearman,” Titus said. The light-skinned man nodded and bent down to grab the stretcher with Latrell’s body on it. He squeezed a lever and stood at the same time. The foot of the stretcher came up with him. He went to the head and repeated the action. Once he made sure everything was locked and loaded, he started pushing the stretcher into his van.
“Hey, hold on a minute,” Titus said. The funeral home attendant paused. Titus unzipped the body bag.
“Can you give me some gloves?” Titus asked. The attendant leaned into his van and then tossed him a pair of black latex gloves. Titus put them on and opened Latrell’s coat. He ignored the sickly pungent scent of voided bowels and the metallic aroma of spilled blood. A memory so powerful it felt like a hallucination tried to force its way into his mind, but he held it at bay by focusing on Latrell’s body. He unbuttoned the man’s coat. There was a bleeding honeycomb in the center of his sternum. He went through Latrell’s pockets with a practiced thoroughness. After a few moments he found Latrell’s phone. Latrell had mentioned Spearman’s phone in his ramblings. Had they been communicating before the shooting? One way to find out was to let the body go to Richmond and let the evidence sit in a drawer for four weeks. Another was to take Latrell’s and Spearman’s phones back to the office and go through them.
“Carla, get me an evidence bag out of my truck,” Titus said. Carla nodded and jogged over to his SUV. When she came back, Titus dropped the phone in the evidence bag.
“You can take him now. Carla, tell Maynard that Spearman can go too, but check and see if he has his phone on him first,” he said. He dropped the “Mister.” Latrell was a broken soul with troubles he couldn’t begin to imagine. He was also a thief, a drug addict, and could be an irritating nuisance anywhere in the county he happened to appear. Common sense said Titus shouldn’t trust a thing Latrell had to say. Common sense said if Latrell Macdonald told you it was raining you should probably stick your head out the window and see if it got wet.
But Titus couldn’t reconcile common sense with the look in Latrell’s eyes when he’d started talking about archangels and Jeff Spearman. The darkness in those eyes that expanded like a black hole as he ran at them screaming about the Angel of Death contained no lies. Titus knew that for a fact. Knew it in his bones. His instructors at the FBI Academy would have chided him for that kind of thinking.
“Gut feelings are full of shit,” Bob McNally, his behavioral science instructor, was fond of saying. That idea, that only empirical evidence had any investigative value, was a philosophy that Titus had espoused with enthusiasm at the Academy. That same idea was shown to be as fragile as new ice on a pond, when you were in the field.