Gordon nudged Andy down so that he would be the one who was directly across from Palazzolo.
“Okay.” Palazzolo took out her notebook, but not her pen. She flipped through the pages. “The shooter’s name is Jonah Lee Helsinger. Eighteen years old. High school senior. Early acceptance into Florida State University. The young girl was Shelly Anne Barnard. She was at the diner with her mother, Elizabeth Leona Bernard; Betsy. Jonah Lee Helsinger is—was—the ex-boyfriend of Shelly. Her father says Shelly broke up with Helsinger two weeks ago. Wanted to do it before going to college next month. Helsinger didn’t take it well.”
Gordon cleared his throat. “That’s quite an understatement.”
She nodded, ignoring the sarcasm. “Unfortunately, law enforcement has had a lot of these cases to study over the years. We know that spree killings aren’t usually spur of the moment. They’re well-planned, well-executed operations that tend to get worked over in the back of the killer’s mind until something—an event like a break-up or an impending life change like going off to college—jumpstarts the plan. The first victim is generally a close female, which is why we were relieved to find Helsinger’s mother was out of town this morning. Business in Charleston. But the way Helsinger was dressed—the black hat, the vest and gunbelt he bought on Amazon six months ago—all that tells us that he put a lot of thought into how this was going to go down. The spark came when Shelly broke up with him, but the idea of it, the planning, was in his head for months.”
Spree killings.
The two words bounced around inside Andy’s head.
Gordon asked, “His victims were all women?”
“There was a man sitting in the restaurant. He was struck in the eye by shrapnel. Not sure if he’ll lose it or not. The eye.” She went back to Jonah Helsinger. “What we also know about spree killers is, they tend to plant explosive devices in their homes for maximum casualties. That’s why we got the state bomb squad to clear Helsinger’s bedroom before we went in. He had a pipe bomb wired to the doorknob. Faulty set-up. Probably got it off the internet. Nothing went boom, thank God.”
Andy opened her mouth so she could breathe. She had come face-to-face with this guy. He had almost killed Laura. Almost killed Andy. Murdered people. Tried to blow them up.
He had probably attended Belle Isle High School, the same as Andy.
“Helsinger,” Gordon said. “That name sounds familiar.”
“Yeah, the family’s pretty well known up in Bibb County. Anyway—”
“Well known,” Gordon repeated, but the two words were weighted in a way that Andy could not decipher.
Palazzolo obviously got their meaning. She held Gordon’s gaze for a moment before she continued, “Anyway—Jonah Helsinger left some school notebooks on his bed. Most of them were filled with drawings. Disturbing images, weird stuff. He had four more handguns, an AR-15 and a shotgun, so he chose to take the six-shooter and the knife for a reason. We think we know the reason. There was a file on his laptop called ‘Death Plan’ that contained two documents and a PDF.”
Andy felt a shudder work its way through her body. While she was getting ready for work last night, Jonah Helsinger was probably lying in bed, psyching himself up for his killing spree.
Palazzolo continued, “The PDF was a schematic of the diner, sort of like what you’d see an architect draw. One of the docs was a timeline, like a bullet point: wake up at this time, shower at this time, clean gun here, fill up car with gas there. The other doc was sort of like a diary entry where Helsinger wrote about how and why this was going to go down.” She referred to her notebook again. “His first targets were going to be Shelly and her mother. Apparently, they had a standing lunch date every Monday at the Rise-n-Dine. Shelly wrote about it on Facebook, Snapchatted her food or whatever. Mr. Barnard told us the lunches are something his wife and daughter decided to do together over the summer before college.”
“Were something they decided to do,” Gordon mumbled, because everything in the two women’s lives was past tense now.
“Were. Yeah,” Palazzolo said. “Helsinger planned to kill both of them. He blamed the mother for the break-up. He said in his diary that it was Betsy’s fault, that she was always pushing Shelly, blah blah blah. Crazy talk. It doesn’t matter, because we all know it’s Jonah Helsinger’s fault, right?”
“Right,” Gordon said, his voice firm.
Palazzolo held his gaze in that meaningful way again before she referred back to her notes. “This was his plan: after he killed Betsy and Shelly, Helsinger was going to take hostage whoever was left in the diner. He had a time noted—1:16, not the actual time but a notation of timing.” She looked up at Andy, then Gordon. “See, we think that he did a dry run. Last week, at approximately the same time as the shooting today, somebody threw a rock through the plate glass window that faces the boardwalk. We’re waiting for the security feed. The incident was filed with burglary division. It took the first mall cop about one minute, sixteen seconds, to get to the diner.”
The mall cops weren’t the usual rent-a-cops, but off-duty police officers hired to protect the high-end stores. Andy had seen the guns on their hips and never given it a second thought.
Palazzolo told them, “In Helsinger’s predicted timeline of the shooting, he allowed that he would have to kill at least one other bystander to let the cops know that he was serious. Then he was going to let the cops kill him. Helsinger must have thought his plan was fast-forwarded when he saw your uniform and assumed that you were law enforcement.” Palazzolo was talking directly to Andy now. “We gather from the other witnesses that he wanted you to shoot him. Suicide by cop.”
Except Andy was not a cop.
Get up! Do your job!
That’s what Helsinger had screamed at Andy.
Then Andy’s mother had said, “Shoot me.”
“He’s a really bad guy. Was a bad guy. This Helsinger kid.” Palazzolo was still focused on Andy. “We’ve got it all in his notes. He planned this out meticulously. He knew he was going to murder people. He hoped that he would murder even more people when somebody opened his bedroom door. He packed screws and nails into that pipe bomb. If the wiring hadn’t been switched on the doorknob end, the whole house would be gone, along with whoever happened to be inside. We would’ve found nails two blocks away buried in God knows who or what.”
Andy wanted to nod but she felt immobilized. Screws and nails flying through the air. What did it take to build such a device, to pack in all those projectiles in hopes that they would maim or kill people?
“You’re lucky,” Palazzolo told Andy. “If your mom hadn’t been there, he would’ve killed you. He was just a really bad guy.”
Andy felt the woman looking at her, but she kept her eyes directed toward the floor.
Bad guy.
Palazzolo kept repeating the phrase, like it was okay that Helsinger was dead. Like he had gotten what he deserved. Like whatever Laura had done was completely justified because Jonah Lee Helsinger was a bad guy.
Andy worked at a police station. Most of the people who got murdered would fall into the bad guy category, yet she had never heard any of the detectives harp on the fact that the victim was a bad guy.
“Mr. Oliver,” Palazzolo had turned to Gordon. “Has your wife had any military training?”
Gordon did not answer.