'Healy says the Clark kid's grandmother hired you to get him off.'
'I like to think of it as establish his innocence,' I said.
DiBella shrugged.
'Grant fingered him,' DiBella said. 'He confessed. You got some heavy sledding.'
'But nobody actually saw him in the school,' I said.
'He was wearing the ski mask.'
'So you only have Grant's word.'
DiBella grinned. 'And his,' DiBella said. ''Course, he could be a lying sack of shit.'
I nodded.
'Where'd they get the weapons?'
DiBella shook his head. 'Don't know,' he said.
'Not family weapons?'
'Nope, far as we can tell, neither family kept weapons.' 'So two seventeen-year-old kids in the deepest dark center of exurbia come up with four nines,' I said.
'And extra magazines,' DiBella said.
'Loaded?' I said.
'Yep.'
'All the same guns?'
'No,' DiBella said. 'A Browning, a Colt, two Glocks.'
'Same ammo,' I said. 'Different magazines.'
DiBella nodded.
'The magazines and the guns were color-coded with Magic Marker,' he said.
'Sounds like a plan,' I said.
'Yeah. The thing is, they planned how to do it pretty good. But they didn't seem to have any plan for afterwards.'
'You mean to get away,' I said. DiBella nodded.
'They explain that?' I said.
DiBella smiled. 'They don't explain shit,' he said. 'All they say is we done it, you don't need to know why.'
'Or how the second kid got away with the cops around the building.'
'My guess? He took off his mask and ditched his guns and ran out with the other kids early in the proceedings.'
'Must have been a Chinese fire drill,' I said.
'Especially before our guys showed up. When it was just the local cops.'
'Did you get there?'
DiBella nodded.
'Me, everybody. I came in with the negotiation team. SWAT guys were already there. The bomb squad showed up a little after me. There were two or three local departments on the scene. Nobody in overall charge. One department didn't want to take orders from another department. None of them wanted to take orders from us. Took a while for the SWAT commander to get control of the thing. And when he did, we still didn't know who was in there, or how many. We didn't know if the place was rigged. We didn't know if they had hostages, or how many. We'd have shot somebody if we knew who to shoot. Kids were jumping out windows and running out fire doors.'
'Who went in?'
'Hostage negotiator. Guy named Gabe Leonard. Everybody was milling around, trying to figure how to get in touch inside, and the bomb-squad guys were trying to figure how to tell if the place was rigged. I was trying to get a coherent story from anybody, a student or teacher who'd been inside and was now outside, and Gabe says, `fuck this,' and puts on a vest and walks in the front door.'
`And nothing blew up,' I said.
'Nothing,' DiBella said.
We were out of coffee. I got up and got us two more cups.
'Gabe walks through the place, which is empty, like he's walking on hummingbird eggs. There's nobody else in there except the bodies, and finally the kid, in the president's office, with the door locked. They establish contact through the locked door and Gabe eventually gets the kid to answer the phone. Kid says he will, and Gabe calls out to us and one of the hostage guys calls the number and patches Gabe in, and they're in business. Gabe, and the kid, and us listening in.'
'How'd he get him out,' I said.
'I'll get you a transcript, but basically, he said, 'Be a standup guy. Whatever you were trying to prove, you need
