Public Enemy Zero

19

Simmons and Rios bandaged up people who needed less immediate attention while paramedics worked on the more seriously injured. They moved through the crowd and helped out wherever the fire captain pointed them. Mostly they were there to reassure people. Rios watched as Simmons went from person to person and gently prodded them for information as she sprayed disinfectant on scratches and found pillows for sprains and bruises. It wasn’t an official questioning, just her way of getting some facts and trying to understand what happened.

Rios sat down and leaned against a checkout counter next to where Simmons was wrapping a woman’s ankle. He hadn’t trusted himself to ask questions in that situation outside of an official capacity. Sooner or later his supervisor would come to them and tell them what to look for. Until then he just told people they were working on it and did what he could.

Simmons finished taping the woman’s ankle and leaned back against the counter next to him. The entire second floor was a mixture of the wounded lying on mattresses pulled from displays and storerooms, stretchers and emergency personnel trying to make sure the living were being taken care of.

She brushed a lock of dark hair out of her eye and readjusted the band holding her ponytail. “Every situation is different. I know that. But this is just really odd.” She shifted a little closer to Rios. “This many people, I get that they are still in shock, but with this many people, you’d expect a lot of different stories. People should be begging to tell you something. Not here. They seem just as baffled as we do.”

“What are they saying? Do they know how they got up here?”

“Some of them say they were trying to catch up with ‘him.’ When I ask who ‘he’ is, they don’t know. They just say that they felt threatened and they felt attacked.”

Rios looked at the turned-over displays and wrecked merchandise. “Well, I don’t think ‘he’ did this by himself.”

Simmons shook her head. “No. No, he didn’t.”

She pointed toward a middle-age Hispanic woman leaning against a bed frame. She was wearing jeans and a blue blouse. She was looking at something in her hand that wasn’t taped up. From where Rios was sitting it looked like the chain to a crucifix.

“A few people like her, mostly religious, say that they weren’t chasing after a man. They say they were chasing after the devil.”

“The devil?” repeated Rios.

Simmons pointed out a heavy-set girl with too much eye makeup crying next to a shelf full of towels. “She said the same thing.” She pointed out an elderly man in slacks and dress shirt leaning against a mirror. “He said Satan. Crazy, I know.”

Rios remembered something at the back of his mind. “My grandmother was from Chile. Before she died she told me a story. I guess because she was too afraid to tell her priest but thought a cop was second best. I know, it’s a stretch.

“She was from a real small town. They were very poor. To get to the market, they had to rely on the one man who had a truck. Mr. Carlos. Anyway, she said Mr. Carlos was a mean man and used to take advantage of the fact that he was the only one in the village that had a truck.

“He’d make them pay more money than they could afford. He once refused to take an old woman to the hospital because she didn’t have any money for gasoline. The town hated him, but they needed him. He was more important than the mayor who only had a horse.

“One day a young girl was coming back from visiting her cousins in the next town. She was a pretty girl and sang very beautifully in the church choir. My grandmother said they wished they could be that girl because they knew some rich man would come marry her and move her away to a big house with an automobile.

“Mr. Carlos sees the girl walking on the road. He offers her a ride but she refuses because she has no money to pay for it. He says that was OK. It would be a free ride. So she got in.

“Nothing with that man was free. He drove her a little farther and then forced himself on her. He then left her on the side of the road and drove back to town. He went to the one bar in town, my grandmother says it was just two tables and a man with a bottle of whiskey, and he sits there gloating.

“When the girl got home, she told her mother. Her mother ran out to the bar and confronted the man. He just sat there and laughed and waved the key to his truck.

“Soon the whole town gathered to see what was going on. When the girl came out to get her mother, they saw her ripped clothes and her tears. They knew.

“Mr. Carlos held up the key to his truck and laughed at them all. What are you going to do about it? He asked them.

“A woman threw a rock. It hit his glass of whiskey. He laughed at them all. Then without a word all of the women and then the men ran to him. They attacked him with their fists, their teeth. My grandmother said they tore the man to pieces. There was nothing left that looked like a man to bury.

“She was just a little girl, but she said she was part of it. I asked her how she could have been a part of it? This was the one woman in my family that never hit me. She said it was easy. Mr. Carlos was the devil. To her and the rest of the town, they weren’t killing a man who had raped a little girl. They were sending the devil back to hell. This was what god wanted.

“When I asked her if she wanted to talk to the priest for forgiveness, she told me no. She didn’t need forgiveness for putting the devil back in his place in hell. She just wanted to know that like me, the policeman, she’d seen evil, she’d seen the face of the devil.”

Rios looked across the room at the dead and confused injured covered in the blood of the people around them.

“Between you and me, does this look like the work of a man or the work of the devil?” he asked.

Simmons shook her head. “It looks like the work of a lot of angry, scared people, Rios.” She looked at their faces. “People more scared by what they saw inside themselves.”

Simmons’ cell phone began to vibrate. She answered it and then hung up. She stood up and dusted off her slacks. “Brooks in the security office. They got someone to pull up the mall security footage. He wants us downstairs.”

The security office had a wall of 20 screens showing different parts of the mall centered around one large screen. When Rios and Simmons got there, the office already had a dozen people inside and a dozen more outside looking in through the glass. Rios didn’t recognize most of them. He looked around and saw state and federal ID badges from various departments.

A detective from the police department, Jeff Oliver, was operating the control board. On the largest screen they were looking at footage of people running down the main corridors of the mall. Although he couldn’t make out individual expressions, the first thing Rios noticed was the posture of the people. This wasn’t a crowd running away from something. This was a crowd chasing someone. Their hands were outstretched and their fingers curled into claws.

Detective Oliver spoke up. “The department store footage is in its own system. Someone is bringing those drives here. This is the sequence for now. I can show you different camera angles for some of the shots.” He pressed a button.

On the large screen they saw an overhead shot of the food court. Toward the lower right they could see the back of a man’s head. He was seated at the farthest point away from the main area. From out of frame on the upper right side of the screen they saw a woman running in the direction of the man. The tables and chairs prevented her from making a straight line but they only slowed her down a little bit. Rios thought she looked angry as hell.

“Watch this,” said Oliver. He pointed to a spot in front of the seated man. A chair came skidding out and toward the woman. She tripped over it. The man jumped to his feet.

“Now you can see the crowd react to what happens.” All of the people in the food court turned to the man and began running toward him. The detective changed to another view. From that angle Rios could see the man running from the crowd and push an older man over as he tried to block his exit. He clicked another button.

A wide shot of the atrium showed the man running toward a group of women in the department store and then changing direction. A kiosk got knocked over. The man ran out of frame.

In the next shot the man was running down the main corridor as more people started chasing him. The next camera, looking toward the atrium, showed him knocking over displays and throwing things in the path of the people behind him.

“If assaulting a woman and the elderly isn’t enough, check out this one.” He clicked another button. The screen showed the man running toward a group of teenagers and knocking down a young girl to get through them. On the last camera angle, the man ran into the department store and the entire mall followed him in.

“So what caused this panic?” Oliver had a rhetorical tone to his voice. He pressed another button. “How about mob justice?”

On screen they saw video of a furious child screaming at the man and rocking its high chair back and forth.

Oliver turned to the people watching the screens. “Some asshole starts yelling at a kid. The mother comes running and he knocks her down with a chair. He takes off and the rest of the mall decides to catch him. The guy keeps knocking people down and the crowd only gets more angry.” The detective leaned back in the chair with a smug look.

“There’s your devil,” whispered Rios.

Simmons wasn’t convinced. Technically everything the detective said was true, but it just didn’t feel that way. That wasn’t a crowd that wanted to catch somebody. They had blood lust.

She spoke up. “Can you show us the part right before he kicked the chair at the woman?”

Oliver nodded and then pressed a button. Rios looked at the screen and tried to see what Simmons was looking for. All he saw was the man kick the chair at the woman.

“Do you want another angle?” asked Oliver.

Simmons shook her head. “Forget the chair and the woman. Roll it back before she ran. Now look at the screen and tell me at what point the crowd turns on the guy?”

Rios saw it, too. The crowd was already beginning to move toward the man. Throwing the chair at the woman may have tipped them over, but they were already focused on him.

“All right,” said the detective. “They saw him yelling at the kid.” He pressed another button.

For the first time, they got a good look at the man from the front as he sat at the end of the food court. Several tables away, the child was having a fit. To Rios it didn’t look like the crowd even noticed the child. They were just looking at the man.

“Can you go back to when he sat down?” asked Simmons.

Oliver clicked another button. On screen they saw the man hurry into the food court and stare into space. The mother spilled a drink and ran to get napkins. The man looked at his phone but otherwise just sat there. The child started screaming and then the man finally looked over at him but never said anything. He looked away when the mother came running and kicked the chair toward her.

“I don’t see him yelling,” said Simmons.

Brooks spoke up. He was still wearing his blood-stained shirt. “Whether or not he instigated this, he didn’t handle it in an appropriate manner and we need to speak with him.” He paused. “A lot of people were hurt today because of him. And someone has to answer for that.” Brooks turned to the room. “Do we have any leads yet?”

Rios finally spoke up. “His name is Mitchell Roberts. He’s our guy from the assault on the parking officer earlier today.” He reached into his pocket for the photo on his phone he’d gotten off of Rachel’s Facebook. He handed it to Simmons.

Simmons looked at the photo and nodded. “Well, that makes things interesting.”

“Looks like we have a one-man rampage here,” said Oliver.

“Let’s bring him in,” said Brooks. “Assault on an officer and … and now this. Let’s put everyone we can on getting him sooner than later.”