The toll at Parker Hall was five dead, one wounded. Quinn had killed two history professors on the first floor near the entrance, one of whom had tried to tackle him after the other was shot. On the floor below ours, he’d shot a graduate student before he could successfully barricade himself in the copy room. On our floor, he had killed poor, texting Estella and shot Juno Dromgoole in the shoulder as she was trying to hide amid the cubicles. That’s who had been moaning. The other few faculty who had been in the cubicles escaped being shot, but one suffered a stroke during the ordeal and was unlikely to recover.
The fifth fatality was Quinn himself.
When the police raided Quinn’s apartment in downtown Michiganapolis, they found a scene right out of a stalker movie: a room where an entire wall was papered with articles and photographs of Stefan and me, both together and individually. There was also a crazy diary in which he’d made all kinds of elaborate plans to destroy us, including the call that set the SWAT team on us. There wasn’t any hint, though, of why he hadn’t worn a police vest on his killing spree, and whether or not he expected to be arrested or killed. A police investigation was launched, but I had no hopes it would be definitive or even a hundred percent truthful.
Had his wife called Quinn after I left her house to have him follow me? Or was he keeping tabs on her? Or simply following me again? We’d never know. All I cared about was that we were free. The persecution was over.
Despite killing a cop, Stefan became a national hero overnight because the headlines dubbed Quinn a “psycho.” A bill to commend Stefan for defending himself was introduced in the state legislature, but quickly quashed by the governor, who obviously thought any more attention to the story would hurt tourism in our state.
Stefan wisely refused to do any media interviews, which may have been one reason why the district attorney did not charge him with anything, not even carrying a concealed weapon. That particular part of the story was successfully kept quiet. I’m sure the university’s lawyers and PR people worked overtime on suppressing whatever they could, and no reporters bothered to investigate whether Stefan’s gun was his or if he had a license to carry. And outside of the police, nobody but me, Celine, Stefan, and Father Ryan knew the provenance of the gun that he’d used to kill Quinn.
The Walther PPK was off the books, had never been registered. It was a war souvenir that Father Ryan’s grandfather had brought back from Germany in 1945, and was actually worth several thousand dollars because it was in excellent condition. I don’t know if the converted-to-Catholicism son of Holocaust survivors defending himself with what might have been a Nazi’s gun he obtained from a priest is ironic, or just bizarre. I guess it doesn’t matter.
Everyone wanted the story to disappear. But if there had been a trial, most likely for second-degree murder because Stefan had killed a cop, he would have had an unlikely assortment of defenders aside from Vanessa Liberati: everyone from the NRA to the ACLU, since both organizations were among the many that issued public statements praising his heroism. The ACLU used his story to call for more gun control, and the NRA used it to call for arming all university professors. Stefan could have been the darling of Fox News and MSNBC.
A trial would have brought protest marches and demonstrations and Facebook pages dedicated to his acquittal, and t-shirts and bumper stickers and endless tweeting. That kind of publicity would have made Michiganapolis and the university look terrible. And possibly hurt St. Jude Church and Father Ryan as well.
The publicity storm based on what was known led to Stefan’s memoir hitting the best-seller lists all over again.
Right after the SWAT raid, Father Ryan had suggested we take a cruise or trip to get away from the scene and clear our minds, and that was even better advice now. It was the height of summer, but we decided to escape to Europe anyway despite the hordes of other tourists we’d likely encounter. Marco stayed with Binnie down the street for a month while we made our leisurely way from Venice to Nice to Bruges, soaking up sun, wine, and culture. Stefan relished the churches, I favored the museums; we both adored the food, and Stefan with his good ear for languages picked up an amazing amount of both Italian and Flemish, which startled the natives who couldn’t believe he was from the U.S.
Traveling Americans sometimes recognized Stefan from covers of Time and Newsweek, but if anyone did try to get him talking about the “Michigan Massacre,” we walked away. Near the end of our vacation, dining on Belgian beef stew, we discussed writing books about what had happened. He’s still thinking about his.
Mine, of course, is done.
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