May 2
Overland Park Police Department
12400 Foster Street
Overland Park, Kansas
4:47 P.M. CDT / 5:47 P.M. EDT
Brian Fisker was still the nominal lead in the investigation, though protocol ensured that he would be “assisted” in a case as high-profile as this.
That assistance came in the form of an Overland Park colleague—Captain Fleiss, no amateur when it came to cases with the potential for both headlines and career advancement, had nominated himself—along with a trooper investigator representing the Kansas State Police, and an overworked FBI liaison dispatched from the Kansas City field office. The latter was an East Coast transferee who had deeply annoyed the Kansans with his repeated mispronunciation—“Missour-E”—in his self-introductions around the table.
Still, the FBI man had already compensated for that not-insignificant gaffe by his utility, most notably in the speed with which he ramrodded Fisker’s request through the system: It took but four hours for the Bureau to respond with the data, though three of those had been the fault of the bureaucrat lawyers—first at the Justice Department, then at NSA—who had examined, argued against, and finally approved transfer of the information.
The printout totaled almost forty pages’ worth of visitors to the Solidarity And Fairness Forum’s main site, and that was limited to the previous six months.
The sub-set at issue—those who followed the link to Adaala Al Thar’s webpage—weighed in at eleven pages of agate-type IP numbers and associated names, when the latter could be determined.
Many could not; of those, a significant number were the online identifiers registered to public libraries, Internet “café” venues, or other general-access computers whose use was promiscuous and whose users were relatively anonymous.
“Jeez—lotta pissed-off people on the Internet these days,” Fisker muttered.
The FBI liaison nodded, though in a distracted manner. His attention was fixed on the laptop, where the electronic version of the list resided. His fingers tapped the keyboard at regular intervals, as the link to far larger, far more powerful government computers pawed through the unimaginably immense volume of filed data on each of the names that were discernable.
“So,” said the KSP trooper, “while we wait, let’s talk about the gun Chaz Campbell used. Glock 17, 9mm, manufactured in 1993. Second-gen model. Sold new, it comes with two thirteen-round magazines, so we’re backtracking to see where he got the others found on his body. As for current ownership of the Glock, Campbell’s parents swear it wasn’t theirs; we’ve got no reason to doubt them.”
“Why’s that?” Fleiss frowned.
“Clean records, both of ’em. Neighbors claim they’re the salt-of-the-earth types. Plus, Dad Campbell was a conscientious objector back in the day when there was a draft.”
“Kind of old to have a son in high school,” Fisker observed.
“Ask the psych guys,” Fleiss grunted. “Might have been contributory to being a fucked up kid.”
The trooper shrugged. “Anyway, we’ve got the Glock’s import license from ’94, when it entered the U.S. Initially sold to a ‘Lawrence Gerard Mansfield’ in Rockford, Illinois. No criminal record, and he checks out as possessing the required state firearm-owner’s card at time-of-purchase. Moved to St. Charles, Missouri”—here, the trooper emphasized it as “Missour-UH,” with a peeved glance at the still-otherwise-focused FBI agent—“in 1999. Illinois has no record of Mansfield selling the pistol, so we assumed it was still in his possession at that time.”
“You check with him personally?” Fisker asked.
“Retired to Florida in 2003,” the trooper replied. “We reached him by telephone. Says he gave the gun to his son back around 2001 or so. The kid lived in St. Louis, still does. We called him, and he remembers the pistol. Said it scared his wife to have it in the house. So he sold it, thinks it was in ’05, to a guy who worked at the Anheuseur-Busch plant; guy named ‘Buster’ Taugman, he says. A drinking buddy.”
The trooper sighed. “‘Buster’ is a nickname. ’Sides, Missouri”—again, a sideways glance—“doesn’t require any paperwork to sell a gun. We had to go to the personnel people at Busch, who came up with the name of a ‘Morgenthau J. Taugman’—explains why he went by ‘Buster,’ I guess—who retired to Scottsdale, Arizona thirteen months ago.”
“And?”
“And that’s where it comes to a dead end,” the trooper said. “Literally. We talked to Mrs. Taugman by phone, and it seems that Buster has been dead a year. Heart attack. Pitched off a stool in his favorite bar. The Widow Taugman had a lot to say about her husband’s drinking—and she says she didn’t know nothing about any gun. Said she’d have given him hell if he had tried to bring one into her house. Wasn’t one in his personal effects either, or so she says.”
“So he sold it to persons unknown,” Fleiss grumbled.
“According to his wife, he may have just left it on a bar top some night. Or, she says, maybe somebody took it off him when he was passed out in an alley. Like I said, she had a lot to say about that.”
“A drunk with a gun,” Fleiss said. “What could ever go wrong there?”
Fisker took a deep breath.
“Okay, so let’s move on to Chaz Campbell’s circle of friends. Not much there so far, aside from the Halvorsen girl, but we’re still—”
“Holy shit,” the FBI man murmured, wide-eyed at the laptop’s screen.
“What?” demanded Fisker.
The FBI man looked up, startled at his abrupt re-entry to the non-virtual world.
“A sixteen-year-old kid … one of the names—visitors to that Adaala Al Thar site, I mean—it just red-lighted on the file search,” he said. “A news story on the AP wires. Today. This morning, that is. Someplace called Decatur, in Illinois.”
“Okay. And? Do we need to get one of your guys out to interview—”
“It’d be a pretty one-sided conversation,” the agent said—trying, failing, to regain a professional composure in even lame humor. “He tried to shoot up a hamburger joint. Some guy with a gun of his own stopped him first. Stopped him dead.”