The Survivor (10 page)

The tape continued.

The two gunmen marched across the cafeteria towards a girl who was huddled in the corner. She wore no Halloween costume, just the standard school uniform – a pleated skirt, drab in the black-and-white footage, and a white shirt, school emblem embossed. The gunmen shoved their weapons into her face, and again it looked like they were demanding something. She opened her mouth to say something, cried out, raised her hands in futility. One of them pulled a different handgun from his waistband and shot her twice in the chest, then once in the head. She fell face down onto the cafeteria floor. No twitching, no spasms, no movement at all.

Just stillness.

Striker felt off balance as he watched. Everything looked fake on the small screen. Like kids playing. Children falling over and lying still. Sprays of black liquid colouring their clothes and the tables and the floor, looking more like motor oil than blood. And the longer the video played, the deeper and darker the fascination became. He just couldn’t look away.

The gunmen stood above the fallen girl, facing each other as if the dead girl did not exist. As if she were nothing more than a lump of clothes or a discarded gym bag. They seemed to be talking under their masks. Communicating. After a long moment, they turned as one and marched on through the cafeteria, shooting students, seemingly indiscriminately. Striker counted five kids go down as he waited and watched, desperate for the image of him and Felicia to appear on the screen.

But it never did.

And then, abruptly, the feed ended.

He looked up, startled. ‘Ich, what happened?’

The previously smug look on Ich’s face was replaced by a sick expression. ‘What? Nothing happened. That’s all we got.’

‘All we got?’

Ich shrugged. ‘The system is brand new, Detective, and in the process of being configured. The cameras were set up only as a trial run. A test. They were never intended to be used as anything else. Hell, it was a fluke they were even recording when the shooting started.’

Striker gripped the back of the chair and cursed. ‘The sound. What about the sound?’

‘All we got right now is a garbled mess. Totally useless. I’ve forwarded a copy to my assistant in Forensic Video to see if we can clean it up. I’ll check on it when I’m done here, but it’s gonna take a while. This is Com-Tech material. They use their own digital codecs—’

‘You’re speaking geek again, Ich.’

Ich sighed. ‘Simply put, it’s not just a matter of the feed needing to be uncompressed
and
transcoded – it’s totally garbled.’

Striker looked at his watch. ‘How long is “a while”?’

Ich shrugged helplessly. ‘Days.’

‘We don’t got that kinda time. Shit, I thought you were the Bill Gates of this stuff?’

‘More like Steve Jobs,’ Ich corrected, and failed at forcing a grim smile. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but that’s what it takes. It’s all math, compressed data, and number crunching. You can’t make miracles out of numbers. They are what they are.’

Striker leaned back on the desk and studied the screen. The programme used a graphical slide-bar for time control. He reached down and grabbed the mouse. Used it to scroll back through the timeline until he got to the moment where the two gunmen yanked the boy dressed as the Joker out from under the table.

The tape time read 362.

Striker replayed the scene until the two gunmen shot the girl.

The finish time was 451.

He wrote down both times in his notebook, then copied them onto a piece of paper and handed it to Ich.

‘Make a second copy of the feed, using only these time intervals. Get me audio here, during this time period, that’s what’s most important. The rest can follow later.’

Ich said nothing. He just nodded and wiped the beads of perspiration off his long hooked nose and swallowed hard, like his throat was as dry as Striker’s. He grabbed another Blu-ray disc from the top shelf, stuck it in the disc drive, then initiated the burning programme.

Striker headed for the door, then stopped. He turned and waited for Ich to meet his stare, and didn’t speak till he had the man’s full attention.

‘Let me know the minute – the second – this thing is done, Ich. Got it? That tape is crucial, my best lead. I need to find out who these guys are. Whether they’re even students or not. And I need to know what they’re saying to each other, even if all we get back is a word or two.’

‘It’ll be done, Boss.’

‘And I need to know who that kid is.’

Ich looked at the screen, confused. ‘You mean, the boy they talked to? The kid dressed like the Joker?’

‘No, the girl,’ Striker corrected. ‘There’s no doubt about it. She was
targeted
.’

Eighteen

Striker cut through the school foyer, the heels of his boots sounding loud in the empty antechamber. He was headed for the cafeteria, to check out the gunmen he’d shot – a task which was causing his stomach to rise and his heart to clench. He’d liked to have done it hours ago, but nothing this day had gone well.

He’d barely made it halfway across the foyer when the school’s front doors swung open and Felicia walked inside. A soft wind followed her. The air was clean and cold and crisp; it smelled of fall leaves.

Striker breathed it in – to counteract the smell of old, dried blood. The metallic stench was all around him. On the walls, the floors, in the air. Even on his body, making him feel sticky, grimy.

He wiped the thought from his mind, waved Felicia over. ‘How’d it go?’ he asked.

She had a pissed-off look on her face, and a stack of yellow papers in her hands. She walked over, not bothering with the pleasantries, and said, ‘Here you go. You can rule out Nava Sanghera. She’s in Saint Paul’s Hospital getting her appendix out as we speak.’

‘And the other kid, that student helper, what was his name – Sherman Chan?’

Felicia shook her head. ‘Can’t locate him. He hasn’t reported in with any of the teachers and he isn’t on the list.’

‘What list?’

‘This one.’ She held up the yellow bundle of papers and beamed. ‘List of the dead.’

‘Jesus, Felicia, you don’t have to say it with such enthusiasm,’ Striker said. ‘These are dead kids we’re talking about.’

For a moment the words just hung there. Then Striker reached for the list. ‘Let me see that.’ He took the pages, and Felicia gave them up, almost unwillingly. Lists of injured and lists of the dead. The bundle felt thick in his hands.

The list of the dead was sorted by surnames, with the additional info of where the body had been found. Striker ran his finger down each page, stopping on page six where he found the heading:
Cafeteria
. Just the sight of the word made his stomach queasy. When he read on, he saw that only three girls were listed in this section, and before he could figure out which was the one from the video, Felicia spoke up.

‘Chantelle O’Riley.’

Striker looked up from the list. ‘What?’

‘The girl from the cafeteria. The one they shot in the corner. Her name is Chantelle O’Riley.’

‘But how did—’

‘I talked to Ich.’ She pointed at the stack of papers. ‘All the names are right there, updated as little as five minutes ago. I got it directly from Principal Myers.’

Striker ruffled through the pages, stopped, let out a heavy breath. ‘How is Caroline holding up?’

‘She’ll make it.’

Striker nodded absently. ‘She’ll have to.’ He scanned through the names. There were now twenty. But only three names stuck out to him:

Conrad MacMillan.

Tina Chow.

Chantelle O’Riley.

The first two kids were ones he knew; the last one was a stranger. These three had been targeted. After talking to the witness, Megan Ling, he was sure of that. But why? What was the connection? He stared at the pages, desperately hoping for something to jump out at him. A familiar ethnicity, a social link, a similar age or class.

But nothing did.

He had no idea what Chantelle O’Riley was about as a student or a person, but he did know Conrad MacMillan and Tina Chow. At least, he had four years ago. And they couldn’t have been more different. Conrad was in Grade Twelve now, and by all accounts, popular; Tina was a Grade Ten kid and relatively unknown.

Polar opposites.

So why these two?

There was something there. An unknown connection lurking somewhere beneath the violent surface. There always was. The body of the iceberg, so to speak. Striker took out his pen and circled their names.

‘We’re missing something with these three.’

Felicia crossed her arms. ‘There’s over twenty dead kids on that list, Jacob, not to mention the dozens injured. There could be a hundred different connections.’

‘But these three were singled out.’

‘We’re assuming.’

He didn’t respond right away. He just looked over the pages with a despondent feeling. This was no longer just about the case, it was about these kids’ lives, and the lives of their families. Striker wondered how many of their parents had even been notified yet? Being a father himself, he could understand the devastation the news would bring, and the thought of informing these parents was unbearable. It hurt even to imagine it.

‘Follow me,’ he finally said to Felicia.

‘Where we going?’

‘To the cafeteria. I need to see the bodies.’

Striker moved quickly down the halls, and Felicia followed silently. The mention of the cafeteria had done something to her; Striker could see it, as easily as the deepening lines under her eyes.

And he understood it completely. He felt it, too.

Now, filled with cops and paramedics, the entranceway seemed ordinary and safe, if not a little cluttered and disorganised. It certainly felt nothing like the war zone it had been earlier this morning. Striker stopped. He turned and looked into Felicia’s face.

‘You okay?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

‘Good, good.
We
okay then?’

She gave him a sideways glance. ‘Why wouldn’t we be?’

‘You acted kinda funny back there, in Caroline’s office. When I sent you to check up on that Nava Sanghera kid.’

Felicia sighed, like he just didn’t get it, then said, ‘You gave me an order, Jacob. A fucking
order
. And in front of everyone.’ When he didn’t apologise, and instead looked back at her in confusion, her face darkened. ‘I’m not being mentored here, Jacob, I work here. And I have for the past six months. I’ve been the primary on more files than anyone else in the office and I’ve got the highest solvability rate – you’d know that if you’d been around for ten seconds.’

She finished venting, and Striker let the air clear for a moment.

He smiled. ‘Wow, you really go for the jugular, don’t you?’

‘Hey, I’m part-vampire, right? What do you expect?’ She crossed her arms, went on: ‘And don’t talk to me about being fair. You’re never fair. Not once, in as long as I can remember, have you ever been fair.’

‘We talking about work again, or our relationship?’

‘There you go again, always with the jokes.’

‘I was just trying to lighten—’

‘You can’t lighten
this
. I’m not the rookie any more. Not in Homicide, and certainly not on the job. And I don’t like being treated that way. Hell, you’re the one who just came back. If anyone should be giving orders around here, it’s me.’

He let out a bemused chuckle. ‘I’m a ten-year Homicide vet, Feleesh, what do you expect? Shit, I got more time on lunch than you got on the job. Which makes me senior. I’m the primary on this case and I always will be.’

‘Self-appointed.’

‘Maybe so, but by right.’

Felicia opened her mouth like she was going to say more, then gave up. Her posture sagged, as if all the fight had drained out of her system. She looked down the hall, in the direction of the cafeteria, and when she spoke again, the fire in her eyes had gone out, and her voice was quiet.

‘Let’s just get this over with.’

Striker agreed. He reached out, touched her arm. ‘Look, Felicia, I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean a thing by it. I didn’t even know I was doing it.’

She just nodded.

‘I talked to some kids,’ she said. ‘They knew where Courtney was. Said she’d taken off to Metrotown Mall. Gone looking for costumes for the Parade of Lost Souls party on Friday. She’s been seen there since the shooting started. So she’s fine, Jacob. She’s safe. She’s just ignoring you like always.’

He exhaled slowly. ‘Thanks.’

‘I thought you should know.’ When he didn’t respond, Felicia gave him a puzzled look. ‘You know, it’s okay to be relieved. You’re human, after all. Far as I can tell.’

He tried to smile at her comment, but couldn’t. Learning that Courtney was safe was paramount, even if he had believed it from the beginning. But it didn’t relieve the stress he felt, the burden that weighed heavily on every decision he made. He looked back at Felicia and said, ‘I tagged him.’

‘What?’

‘The gunman, the one who escaped – Red Mask. I tagged him once, when I shot out the rear window of the car. I know it, I can feel it. I got him. And he’s hurt.’

‘I know,’ Felicia said. ‘That’s great.’

‘It’s
not
great, it’s a disaster.’ When Felicia gave him a confused stare, he continued: ‘There’s nothing more desperate than a wounded animal. If he was planning on killing more kids, I’ve just done the worst thing possible – I’ve sped up his plans.’ As Striker finished speaking the words, a cold, dark feeling filled his core. And he knew instinctively that something bad was going to happen. Something for which he would be responsible. Something he would regret.

There was no doubt about it. More death was coming.

Nineteen

Red Mask lay on a table. He opened his eyes. Looked around.

The room he was in was small, lit by bulbs bright as the winter sun. In the far corner by a greyish wall stood a small, old man. He was bald. With wrinkles carved so deep his face looked wooden.

It was the doctor. Jun Kieu.

Red Mask ignored him. He lay, staring up at the glaring whiteness above. Suddenly, Kim Pham blipped into view, snapped his fingers at the two men who stood guard by the door and said, ‘Get the fuck out.’