Carnage by Maxime Chattam Read Free Book Online Page A

wearing hoods to hide their faces. The handful of witnesses who thought they recognised them based it on their clothes every time. But it was DeRoy wearing their clothes! That’s why the supposed gunmen shot themselves out of view of everyone else.’
    Lamar braked suddenly, spotting a red light at the last minute. The Pontiac skidded off course again, sliding into the middle of the intersection. Two vans started honking their horns. Lamar carried on explaining his theory, while slowly reversing back behind the line.
    ‘Chris DeRoy may be crazy, but he’s smart too. He played the victim so he could mow down his classmates and teachers, then he snuck off to where the guy whose identity he’d stolen was waiting for him. They changed clothes, and then he shot him through the head.’
    ‘I guess that makes sense …’
    ‘Of course it does! The first time, at the Harlem high school, he arrived early in the morning with Russell Rod. He made him go into the closet while he went around shooting at everybody, wearing Russell’s clothes. Whenhe was done, he went back into the closet and swapped the clothes back, which is why it was a couple of minutes before the gun went off.’
    ‘Machiavellian …’
    ‘Doris, come meet me as quick as you can. I don’t want to call the local cops. You never know how a kid like DeRoy might react if he sees a heap of police cars screeching up to his door.’
    ‘I’m on my way, Lamar.’
     
    The windscreen wipers cleared the layer of snow that was slowly building up on the Pontiac’s windscreen. For ten minutes, Lamar had been sitting outside the three-storey building where Chris DeRoy and his parents lived.
    Doris walked along the pavement towards him, accompanied by a stocky Puerto Rican-looking man sporting a bushy moustache. Lamar got out of the car to meet them.
    ‘D’Amato was twiddling his thumbs so I brought him along,’ explained Doris.
    ‘It’s the house across the road there. Doris, come with me, we’ll take the front door. D’Amato, you go round the back, in case he tries to get out that way. We’ll give you a couple of minutes to get in position.’
    D’Amato nodded and jogged away, leaving deepfootprints along the snow-covered pavement.
    While they waited, Doris tried to pick holes in her colleague’s line of argument, though she had to admit it was pretty convincing.
    ‘How could Chris DeRoy have gotten Russell Rod to come to school early and follow him into this closet then later gotten Mike Simmons to follow him down to that underground room?’
    ‘He could have told them anything. That he had a surprise for them, or wanted them in on a joke or some trick he was going to play – who knows?’
    ‘But nothing came up in the toxicology reports, so he can’t have drugged them to get them to stay put while he went out shooting his classmates. There were no marks found on their wrists to indicate they’d been tied up either.’
    Lamar stared back at his partner. He put two fingers together in the shape of a gun and mimed shooting himself in the head. He’d thought of everything. And for every question he’d asked himself, he’d come up with a logical answer.
    ‘First off he hit them over the head to knock them out,’ he replied. ‘Then he took off wearing their clothes and went on a killing spree. He picked these guys out because they were loners, which made them easy targets, but also because they had a similar build to him. When he came back, he shot them with a large-calibre bullet in the same place he’d struck them earlier, to cover up the evidence.
    It all fits. The first time, here in Harlem, he arrived early with Russell Rod and led him into the closet. He hit him once, maybe more, on the back of the head with the butt of the gun, in exactly the spot where he’d later put a bullet through his brain. Then he went all the way downstairs, waiting for the place to fill up before heading back up on a trail of destruction. Once he’d done the job, he