Premeditated Murder by Ed Gaffney

thing.”
    “Well, we can't very well say that he didn't fuck the duck, because let's face it—he fucked it good. So if he won't let us say he was crazy, I guess that leaves us with ‘But I can explain.'”
    “Great.”
    On the list of things juries loved to hear defendants say, “I was insane” was only slightly below “But I can explain.” Zack had heard some dandies.
    “I had to shoot him. He wouldn't give me his money.”
    “I didn't think anybody would be home.”
    “My brother told me it would be easy. We were gonna be in and out of there in two seconds. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
    “So I shot him. Big deal. I been shot before. Twice.”
    “I was so drunk I had no idea how hard I hit him.”
    “What was I supposed to do? He called my girl a slut.”
    What could possibly explain the machine-gun shooting of six college students? Zack looked back at the file. There had to be something else. “What about the gun that guy used to shoot Thompkins? Was it registered?”
    Terry shuffled through some papers until he found what looked like one of the police reports. “Let's see. It was a nine-millimeter handgun, completely legal. He got off one shot, which hit Cal in the leg.” Terry flipped through some other reports. “Meanwhile, Mr. M.I.T. fired off somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred twenty rounds, using an illegally modified AK-47, which was found five feet from him in the hallway. Good thing we have gun control,” he muttered, continuing to scan the report.
    Zack inhaled sharply. “He fired a hundred and twenty bullets?”
    “Go big or stay home.”
    Zack pulled out a few photos from a box at his feet and studied them. “No wonder the place looks like somebody went at it with a chain saw.”
    “Have you seen the video yet?”
    “What video?” Zack asked.
    “It's in the box with the other thing,” Terry responded helpfully, rummaging around in a carton Zack hadn't gotten to yet. “I peeked at it a little last night,” he said, handing a tape to Zack. “I don't recommend popcorn.”
    Zack brought the tape over to the VCR he had set up in his office and started it. Then he turned the TV on and watched with Terry as the screen flashed to life.
    Like most of the police videos Zack had seen, the camera operator wasn't trying to do anything but slowly sweep over everything, stopping on important details. The idea was to try to give the viewer a sense of the whole scene, something that even the best still photos often failed to do.
    This whole scene looked like the set of a silent horror movie. Lifeless, bloody bodies, mutilated by multiple wounds, were strewn across the floor and furniture like garbage.
    “The one on his back near the kitchen is Marc Nathenson,” Terry said, as an image came into view of a skinny guy in a yellow T-shirt with his legs awkwardly bent. Marc Nathenson was wearing old-fashioned white Converse All-Stars. “He was a grad student in chemistry. Helped out in freshman chem, I guess.” The camera continued to crawl around the room, stopping and zooming in on the body of a young woman sprawled facedown, one arm trapped beneath her. There was an incredible amount of blood around her. Zack was having trouble focusing. Terry seemed to be reading from some file. “The two women were both seniors. Marianne Duhamel was majoring in French, and the other one …” Terry kept on speaking, but the humming in Zack's ears drowned him out. He needed to concentrate. This was evidence that needed to be analyzed. He needed to do more than gape at carnage, like a motorist who slows down to watch the paramedics attend to a driver in a head-on collision.
    One of the victims was wearing a silver bracelet and had apparently been drinking a Diet Pepsi.
    Another had a chipped tooth.
    Terry said something about a biology teaching assistant.
    A third had been wearing glasses with thick black frames when he was killed.