Mr. D. ended his speech by telling them he loved them. Each and every one of them. They needed to hear that, too.

Kids were having trouble with their parents, especially their moms. "It's kind of hard for me to sit at home," a boy said. "Like when my mom comes home, I try to stay out of the house." Lots of other boys nodded; more and more told the same story. Their mothers were so scared, and the fear hadn't abated when they'd found their kids; now they just wanted to hug them. Hug him/her forever Hug him/her forever--that was the refrain Tuesday. Wednesday, it was My mom doesn't understand My mom doesn't understand. Emotionally, their mothers were wildly out of synch. At first, the kids needed the hugs badly; now they needed them to stop.

Most of the student body wandered the park, desperate to unload their stories. They needed adults to hear them, and their parents would not do. They found their audience: the press. Students were wary at first, but let their guards down quickly. Reporters seemed so understanding. Clement Park felt like an enormous confessional Wednesday. The kids would regret it.

In the midst of it, a shriek pierced the media camp. Mourners froze, unsure of what to do. More screams: different voices, same direction. Hundreds ran toward them: students, journalists, everyone within hearing range. They found a dozen girls gathered around a single car that remained among the satellite trucks in a small lot on the edge of the park. It was Rachel Scott's car--the first girl shot dead. Rachel didn't have an assigned spot, so she had parked half a mile from the school on Tuesday. No one had come to claim the car. Now it was covered front to back with flowers and candles. Messages to Rachel in heaven had been soaped across the windows. Her girlfriends held hands in a semicircle around the back of the car, sobbing uncontrollably. One girl began to sing. Others followed.

The Harrises and Klebolds both hired attorneys. They had good reason: the presumption of guilt quickly landed on their shoulders. Investigators didn't expect to charge them, but the public did. National polls taken shortly after the attack would identify all sorts of culprits contributing to the tragedy: violent movies, video games, Goth culture, lax gun laws, bullies, and Satan. Eric did not make the list. Dylan didn't either. They were just kids. Something or someone must have led them astray. Wayne and Kathy and Tom and Sue were the chief suspects. They dwarfed all other causes, blamed by 85 percent of the population in a Gallup poll. They had the additional advantage of being alive, to be pursued.

Their attorneys warned them to keep quiet. Neither family spoke to the press. Both released statements on Wednesday. "We cannot begin to convey our overwhelming sense of sorrow for everyone affected by this tragedy," the Klebolds said. "Our thoughts, prayers and heartfelt apologies go out to the victims, their families, friends and the entire community. Like the rest of the country, we are struggling to understand why this happened, and ask that you please respect our privacy during this painful grieving period."

The Harrises were more brief: "We want to express our heartfelt sympathy to the families of all the victims and to all the community for this senseless tragedy," they wrote. "Please say prayers for everyone touched by these terrible events."

Dylan's brother stayed home from work for several days. Byron was nearly three years older than Dylan, but because of Dylan's early enrollment, just two years out of school. He was doing gofer work at an auto dealership: washing cars, shoveling snow, moving inventory around the lot. "It was an entry-level job, but man, he's good," a spokesman for the store told the Rocky Mountain News Rocky Mountain News.

His employers understood the need for time away. "It's shocking for everyone," the spokesman said. "We're a family here and we look out for each other. Our hearts go out to Byron. This kid's great."

Supervisory Special Agent Fuselier's concern Wednesday morning was the conspiracy. Everyone assumed the Columbine massacre was a conspiracy, including the cops. It was just too big, too bold, and too complex for a couple of kids to have imagined, much less pulled off. This looked like the work of eight or ten people. Every attack of this magnitude spawns conspiracy theories, but this time they appeared sound. The legacy of those theories, and Jeffco's response to them, would haunt the Columbine recovery in peculiar ways.

Wednesday morning, Fuselier entered the ghastly crime scene. The hallways were scattered with shell casings, spent pipe bombs, and unexploded ordnance. Bullet holes and broken glass were everywhere. The library was soaked in blood; most of the bodies lay under tables. Fuselier had seen carnage, but still, it was awful. The sight that really stunned him was outside, on the sidewalk and the lawn. Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott were still out there. No one had even covered them. Years later, he shuddered at the memory.

Fuselier arrived at Columbine as an FBI agent, but he would play a more significant role as a clinical psychologist. Altogether, he had spent three decades in the field; he'd started in private practice, then worked for the air force. A hostage-negotiation course in Okinawa changed his life. He could read people. He could talk them down. In 1981, Fuselier joined the FBI. He took a $5,000-a-year pay cut for a detective job, just to get a shot at the Bureau's Special Operations and Research Unit (SOARU)--the leading center of hostage-negotiation study in the world.

Agent Fuselier worked his way up through standard casework and discovered he liked detective work, too. He got the assignment at SOARU, finally, and began a new career defusing gun battles. He would handle some of the nation's worst hostage crises, including the 1987 Atlanta prison siege and the Montana Freemen standoff. He was the FBI's last hope at Waco, and the final person to talk to David Koresh before the tanks rolled in. Fuselier spent most of his time at SOARU studying prior incidents and analyzing success rates. His team developed the fundamental tactics for hostage standoffs employed today. Fuselier became known for steadiness under pressure, but his heart was weakening, his temples were graying, and eventually he sought a quieter life. He moved his family to Colorado in 1991, and they settled into a tranquil neighborhood in Littleton.

Fuselier would play the leading role in understanding the Columbine killers, but it was luck that drove him to the case. If his son Brian had not been attending that high school, Fuselier would not have even been assigned to the investigation. In fact, it's unlikely that the FBI would have played a major role. But because Fuselier arrived on the scene, established a rapport with the commanders, and offered federal support, FBI agents would play a major role on the team. Fuselier was one of the senior supervisory agents in the region and already had a relationship with local commanders, so he was placed in command of the FBI team. Before April 20, Fuselier headed up the domestic terrorism unit for the FBI in the region. For the next year, he delegated most of that responsibility. This was more important.

Columbine was the crime of the century in Colorado, and the state assembled the largest team in its history to solve it. Nearly a hundred detectives gathered in Jeffco. More than a dozen agencies loaned out their best minds. The FBI contributed more than a dozen special agents, a remarkable number for a local investigation. Agent Fuselier, one of the senior psychologists in the entire Bureau, headed up the FBI team. Everyone else reported to Jeffco's Kate Battan, a brilliant detective, whose work unraveling complex white-collar crimes would serve her well. She reported to Division Chief John Kiekbusch, a rising star who had just been promoted to senior command. Kiekbusch and Fuselier each played an active daily role and consulted regularly about the overall progress of the case.

The team identified eleven likely conspirators. Brooks Brown had the most suspicious story, and Chris Morris had admitted to hearing about bombs. Two others matched the descriptions for third and fourth shooters. Those four perched atop the list, with Dylan's prom date, Robyn Anderson, close behind.

Bringing them to justice would require a Herculean effort. Detectives planned to question every student and teacher at Columbine and every friend, relative, and associate of the killers, past or present. They had five thousand interviews ahead of them in the next six months. They would snap thousands of photographs and compile more than 30,000 pages of evidence. The level of detail was exacting: every shell casing, bullet fragment, and shotgun pellet was inventoried--55 pages and 998 evidence ID numbers to distinguish every shard.

The Jeffco command team hastily reserved a spot for Fuselier in the Columbine band room. The killers had made a mess of the place without setting foot inside it. Abandoned books, backpacks, sheet music, drum kits, and instruments were strewn among the shrapnel. The door was missing--blown away by the SWAT team searching for gunmen.

Much of the school looked considerably worse. Pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails had burned through stretches of carpeting and set off the sprinkler system. The cafeteria was flooded, the library unspeakable. Veteran cops had staggered out in tears. "There were SWAT team people who were in Vietnam who were weeping over what they saw," District Attorney Dave Thomas said.

The detective team was moving in. Every scrap of wreckage was evidence. They had 250,000 square feet of crime scene--just on the inside. Footprints, fingerprints, stray hairs, or gun residue could be anywhere. Crucial DNA evidence might be floating through the cafeteria. And live explosives might still be present, too.

Detectives had stripped down Eric and Dylan's bedrooms, left the furniture, and hauled out much of the rest. The Klebold house yielded little--some yearbooks and a small stack of writings--but Dylan had wiped his hard drive clean. Eric's house provided a mother lode: journals, more computer rants, an audiotape, videotapes, budgets and diagrams and timelines... Eric had documented everything. He'd wanted us to know.

Adding to the sense of urgency--and conspiracy--was a cryptic message suggesting more possible violence to come. "We went scrambling for days trying to track that down," Fuselier said. They searched the school for explosives again. They raised the pressure on the probable conspirators.

The detectives conducted five hundred interviews in the first seventytwo hours. It was a great boost, but it got chaotic. Battan was worried about witnesses, who were growing more compromised by the hour from what they read and saw on TV. Investigators prioritized: students who had seen the shooters came first.

Other detectives headed to the suspects' childhood hometowns.

21. First Memories

It didn't start with a murder plot. Before he devised his massacre, Eric settled into a life of petty crime. Earlier still, even before adolescence, he was exhibiting telltale signs of a particular breed of killer. The symptoms were stark in retrospect, but subtle at the time--invisible to the untrained eye.

Eric wrote about his childhood frequently and fondly. His earliest memories were lost to him. Fireworks, he remembered. He sat down one day to record his first memory in a notebook and discovered he couldn't do it. "Hard to visualize," he wrote. "My mind tends to blend memories together. I do remember the 4th of July when I was 12." Explosions, thunderclaps, the whole sky on fire. "I remember running outside with a lot of other kids," he wrote. "It felt like an invasion."

Eric savored the idea--heroic opportunities to obliterate alien hordes. His dreams were riddled with gunfire and explosions. Eric relished the anticipation of the detonator engaging. He was always dazzled by fire. He could whiff the acrid fallout from the fireworks again just contemplating the memory. Later the night of the fireworks display, when he was twelve, Eric walked around and burned stuff.

Fire was beauty. The tiny eruption of a cardboard match igniting. A fuse sputtering down could drive Eric delirious with anticipation. Scaring the shit out of stupidass dickwads--it didn't get much better than that.

In the beginning, explosions scared Eric even as they exhilarated him. He ran for cover when the fireworks started in his "earliest memory" account. "I hid in a closet," he wrote. "I hid from everyone when I wanted to be alone."

Eric was a military brat. His father moved the family across five states in fifteen years. Wayne and Kathy gave birth to Eric David Harris in Wichita, Kansas, on April 9, 1981, eighteen years and eleven days before Eric attempted to blow up his high school. Wichita was the biggest town Eric would live in until junior high. He started school in Beavercreek, Ohio, and did stints in rural air force towns like Oscoda, Michigan, and Plattsburgh, New York. Eric enrolled in and was pulled out of five different schools along the way, often those on the fringes of military bases where friends came and went as fast as he did.

Wayne and Kathy worked hard to smooth over the disruptions. Kathy chose to be a stay-at-home mom to focus on her boys. She also performed her duties as an officer's wife. Kathy was attractive, but rather plain. She wore her wavy brown hair in a simple style: swept back behind her ears and curling in toward her shoulders in back.

Wayne had a solid build, a receding hairline, and very fair skin. He coached baseball and served as scoutmaster. In the evenings, he would shoot baskets on the driveway with Eric and his older brother, Kevin.

"I just remember they wanted the children to have a normal, off-base relationship in a normal community," said a minister who lived nearby. "They were just great neighbors--friendly, outgoing, caring."

Major Harris did not tolerate misbehavior in his home. Punishment was swift and harsh, but all inside the family. Wayne reacted to outside threats in classic military fashion: circle the wagons and protect the unit. He didn't like snap decisions. He preferred to consider punishment carefully, while the boys reflected on their deeds. After a day or two, Wayne would render his decision, and it would be final. It was typically grounding or loss of privileges--whatever they held dear. As Eric grew older, he would periodically have to relinquish his computer--that stung. Wayne considered a conflict concluded once he'd discussed it with Eric and they'd agreed on the facts and the punishment. Then Eric had to accept responsibility for his actions and complete his punishment.

Detectives discovered gross contradictions to Eric's insta-profile already cemented in the media. In Plattsburgh, friends described a sports enthusiast hanging out with minorities. Two of Eric's best friends turned out to be Asian and African American. The Asian boy was a jock to boot. Eric played soccer and Little League. He followed the Rockies even before the family moved to Colorado, frequently sporting their baseball cap. By junior high he had grown obsessed with computers, and eventually with popular video games.

In his childhood photos Eric looks wholesome, clean-cut, and confident--much more poised than Dylan. Both were painfully shy, though. Eric "was the shyest out of everybody," said a Little League teammate from Plattsburgh. He didn't talk much, and other kids described him as timid but popular.

At the plate, one of his core personality traits was already on display. "We had to kind of egg him on to swing, to hit the pitch sometimes," his coach said. "It wasn't that he was afraid of the ball, just that he didn't want to miss. He didn't want to fail."

Eric continued to dream. Major Harris inspired military fantasies, but Eric usually saw himself as a Marine. "Guns! Boy, I loved playing guns," he wrote later. The rustic towns he grew up in provided fields and forests and streams where he could play soldier. When Eric was eight, the family moved to Oscoda, Michigan, where the scenic Au Sable River meets Lake Huron in the rugged northern region of the state. Wayne and Kathy bought a house in town so the boys could grow up with civilians. Oscoda was dominated by the air force base; population 1,061 and dropping. Work for adults was sparse, but it offered a world of adventure for little boys.

The Harris house sat near the edge of Huron National Forest. It seemed vast, empty, and ancient to Eric's young eyes. The air was thick with the scent of musty white pines. This was early lumberjack territory. The state proclaimed it Paul Bunyan's home, and the Lumberman's Monument had been erected in bronze nearby. Eric, Kevin, and their friend Sonia would spend afternoons hunting down enemy troops and withstanding alien invasions. They built a little tree fort out of sticks and branches to use for a base camp.

"Fire!" Eric screamed in one of their enactments. The three young heroes rattled off machine-gun fire with their toy guns. Sonia was always fearless--she would charge straight into the imaginary rifle fire. Kevin yelled for air support; Eric tossed a stick grenade into the trees. The three defenders took cover and felt the earth shudder from the convulsion. Eric hurled another grenade, and another and another, taking wave after wave of enemy troops down. Eric was always the protagonist when he reminisced about those days in high school. Always the good guy, too.

When he was eleven, id Software released the video game Doom, and Eric found the perfect virtual playground to explore his fantasies. His adversaries had faces, bodies, and identities now. They made sounds and fought back. Eric could measure his skills and keep score. He could beat nearly everyone he knew. On the Internet, he could triumph over thousands of strangers he had never met. He almost always won, until later, when he met Dylan. They were an even match.

In 1993, Wayne retired. The family moved again, this time to Colorado, and settled down for good in Jeffco. Eric entered seventh grade, and Kevin started at Columbine. Wayne eventually took a job with a defense contractor that created electronic flight simulators. Kathy began part-time work at a catering company.

Three years later the Harrises upgraded to a $180,000 home in a nicer neighborhood just north of the beautiful Chatfield Reservoir and two miles south of Columbine High School. Kevin played tight end and was the kicker for the Rebels before heading off to the University of Colorado. The color gradually drained out of Major Harris's thinning hair. He grew a thick white mustache, put on a few pounds, but maintained his military bearing.

Eric loved a good explosion, but treasured his own tranquillity. Fishing trips with his dad were the best. He captured the serenity in a vivid essay called "Just a Day." The night before, he had to go to bed early, which would normally provoke "a barrage of arguments and pouting," but on these occasions he didn't mind. He'd wake up to black skies and rich ground coffee vapors wafting up to his room. Eric didn't like to drink the stuff, but he couldn't get enough of the smell. "My brother would already be up," he continued, "trying to impress our father by forcing down the coffee he hadn't grown to like yet. I always remember my brother trying to impress everyone, and myself thinking what a waste of time that would be."

Eric would scamper out to the garage to get his tackle together and help load the cooler into the back of their'73 Ram pickup. Then they headed into the hills. "The mountains were always peaceful, a certain halcyon hibernating within the tall peaks & the armies of pine trees. It seemed back then that when the world changed, these mountains would never move," he wrote. They would drive out to a mountain lake in the wilderness, almost deserted, except for "a few repulsive suburbanite a$$holes. They always seemed to ruin the serenity of the lake."

Eric loved the water. Just standing back on the bank and gazing at it: the waves dancing around the surface in peculiar patterns, getting caught suddenly by a burst of current, forming unexpected shapes and vanishing again--what a glorious escape. When his eye caught something interesting, Eric would cast into it, presuming the fish might have been attracted to it, too.

Then it was over. Back to shithead society, populated by automatons too dense to comprehend what was out there. "No regrets, though," he concluded. "Nature shared the secret serenity with someone who was actually observant enough to notice. Sucks for everyone else."

22. Rush to Closure

Healing begins, the Denver Post Denver Post announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page 1 thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment The paper was trying to be helpful, but its rush to closure did not go over well in Jeffco. With every passing week, more of the community would grumble that it was time to move on. The survivors had other ideas. announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page 1 thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment The paper was trying to be helpful, but its rush to closure did not go over well in Jeffco. With every passing week, more of the community would grumble that it was time to move on. The survivors had other ideas.

The bodies were finally returned to the victims' families on Thursday. Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died. There were plenty of witnesses, but a few were tempted to inflate their accounts, and the more dramatic versions of their stories tended to travel.

A heroic version of Danny Rohrbough's death quickly gained currency and was widely reported in the media. "[He] held the school door open to let others escape and laid down his life for his friends," the Rocky Mountain News Rocky Mountain News reported. reported.

"You know, he might have lived," the Rohrboughs' pastor would tell fifteen hundred mourners at Danny's funeral. "He chose to stay there and hold the door for others so that they might go out before him and make their way to safety. They made it and Danny didn't."

The story was later disproved. Danny's father, Brian, said he never believed it. "I know that Dan and his friends wouldn't have been standing there if they had thought they were in danger," he said. Brian was irritated by the urge to juice the story to make Danny's death more tragic or meaningful. It was tragic enough, he said.

A hundred students in Clement Park crushed together in a throbbing teen prayer mosh. They stood on their toes, reached toward the heavens, and pressed their arms together in a mass human steeple. The mood was rapturous, the faces serene. They sang sweet hymns, swayed as one body, and cried out to Jesus to pull them through. They named The Enemy. "We feel the presence of Satan operating in our midst!" a young girl declared.

The school set up a second official gathering for students on Thursday afternoon. The megachurches were among the only structures in the area big enough to accommodate a crowd that large, so the gathering was held at West Bowles Community Church. This session was to be informal, just a designated place for students who wanted to find each other in one place. Mr. D wasn't planning to speak, until a counselor interrupted his meeting with faculty down the hall. "Frank, they need you," he said. "You need to go out there."

Frank walked the hallway to the nave of the church, contemplating what to say. And again he faced the dilemma of how to act at the microphone. Several of his friends, and staff, too, had warned him not to cry again. "God, you're going to be in the national media," they said. "You can't show that, it's a sign of weakness." He had gotten away with it once, but the media would crucify him if they discovered he was buckling.

The trauma specialists disagreed. These kids had been raised in a western mentality, they argued: real men fend for themselves; tears are for weaklings; therapy is a joke. "Frank, you are the key," one counselor advised him. "You're an emotional person, you need to show those emotions. If you try to hold your emotions inside, you're going to set the image for other people." The boys, in particular, would be watching him, DeAngelis felt. They were already dangerously bottled up. "Frank, they need to know it's all right to show emotion," the counselor said. "Give them that permission."

The students were awaiting his appearance, and when he walked in, they started chanting the school's rallying cry, which he'd last heard at the assembly before the prom: "We are COL-um-BINE! We are COL-um- We are COL-um-BINE!" Each time they yelled it more loudly, confidently, and aggressively. Mr. D hadn't realized until he heard them that he had been longing to draw strength from them, too. He'd thought he was there just to provide it. "I couldn't fake it," he said later. "I walked on that stage and I saw those kids cheering and the tears started coming down."

This time he decided to address the tears. "Guys, trust me, now is not the time to show your manliness," he told them. "Emotion is emotion, and keeping it inside doesn't mean you're strong."

That was the last time Mr. D worried about crying in public.

The big question facing the school was how to finish out the year. These kids needed to get back together fast. But the cops weren't going to open the building for months. The administration decided to restart classes a week later at nearby Chatfield High School, Columbine's traditional rival. Columbine would take over the school in the mornings, and Chatfield would resume use in the afternoons. Classes would be shortened for both groups until the end of the school year.

The long-term solution was trickier. Some people suggested that the building be demolished; some parents insisted that their kids would never set foot in that murder scene again. But others pointed out that the psychological blow of losing their high school entirely would be much worse. The Rocky Mountain News Rocky Mountain News led its Thursday edition with a letter from the publisher stating, "If students, teachers and parents feel there is no way they can return to the classrooms of Columbine, the Denver led its Thursday edition with a letter from the publisher stating, "If students, teachers and parents feel there is no way they can return to the classrooms of Columbine, the Denver Rocky Rocky will lead the charge to raise the funds to build a new school and urge legislators to help. If they decide that they do not want to be driven from their school, we will support the community in rebuilding the campus." will lead the charge to raise the funds to build a new school and urge legislators to help. If they decide that they do not want to be driven from their school, we will support the community in rebuilding the campus."

Reverend Bill Oudemolen began preparing two funerals. John Tomlin and Lauren Townsend had been faithful members of the Foothills Bible Church. The pastor walked through Clement Park and sniffed the air. Satan. The pastor could smell him wafting through the park. It was an acrid odor--had it been a little stronger, it might have singed his nose hairs. The Enemy had swept in with this madness on Tuesday, but the real battle was only now under way.

"I smell the presence of Satan," Reverend Oudemolen thundered from the pulpit Sunday morning. "What we saw Tuesday came from Satan's home office. Satan had a plan. Satan wants us to live in fear in Littleton. He wants us to see black trench coats or people in Goth attire and makeup and here's what he wants us to feel: Look how powerful and scary Satan is! Look how powerful and scary Satan is!"

He'd watched an ABC special examining the fallout in West Paducah, Kentucky, thirteen months after its school shooting. West Paducah was still riven with hostility, Oudemolen told his congregation. "I know what Satan wants Littleton to look like in thirteen months," he said. "He wants us to be angry. Satan wants us to stay right here, with uncontrollable grief. He wants evil to be repaid by evil. He wants hatred to be repaid by hatred. Satan has plans for Littleton."

Cassie Bernall's pastor, George Kirsten, charged the same culprit. This was so much more than two boys with guns or even bombs, in their eyes. This was spiritual warfare. The Enemy had taken the battlefield in broad daylight in Jeffco, and Reverend George Kirsten was eager to see Christ reappear to smite him. When Kirsten addressed his congregation at West Bowles Community Church, he likened Cassie to the martyrs calling out to God at the onset of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation: "How long? How long will it be until my blood is avenged?" he cried.

It's a pivotal scene Reverend Kirsten was invoking. Immediately after the appearance of the four horsemen, the fifth seal is broken and all the Christian martyrs since the beginning of time appear under the altar, pleading for enemy blood to be spilled in return. Shortly thereafter, all true believers are raptured and the Apocalypse commences.

Reverend Kirsten happened to be teaching Revelation--one chapter a week--to his Bible study group at West Bowles. He believed, as they did, that the great signs of the Apocalypse were already under way and the moment might be at hand.

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their hearts and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why--fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating.

Marxhausen had managed to reach the kids at the Light of the World assembly. He led the large Lutheran congregation near Columbine, and for years he'd headed up a council of mainline Protestant clergy--mainline being the common term for the large, moderate denominations such as Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists outside the Southern Baptist Convention. Marxhausen was only forty-five, but widely regarded on as the old wise man of the western suburbs. Mainliners were outnumbered by the Evangelicals, and probably even the Catholics, in Jeffco, but they maintained a strong presence, and Marxhausen's thousand-seat church was packed solid every Sunday. being the common term for the large, moderate denominations such as Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists outside the Southern Baptist Convention. Marxhausen was only forty-five, but widely regarded on as the old wise man of the western suburbs. Mainliners were outnumbered by the Evangelicals, and probably even the Catholics, in Jeffco, but they maintained a strong presence, and Marxhausen's thousand-seat church was packed solid every Sunday.

Most of the mainliners and the Catholics were averse to pinning the Columbine tragedy on Satan, but they were determined not to fight about it. Local ministers agreed very quickly that they needed to pull together and put factional bickering aside.

Barb Lotze faced her first test barely twenty-four hours after the massacre. She arranged a huge prayer service for Wednesday evening at Light of the World Catholic Church, where she served as youth pastor. Students from all faiths had been invited, and every pew was packed. She wanted to make them all feel welcome.

Midway through the service, an excited youth minister from an Evangelical church approached Lotze about performing an "altar call"--the practice where new or renewed believers are summoned forward to be born again. It was a decidedly un-Catholic ritual, and it seemed like an inappropriate time, but Lotze was determined to establish some sort of reciprocity with the Evangelical churches.

She reluctantly agreed.

The young pastor rushed to the microphone and proclaimed the power of Jesus. Who was ready to accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior? he cried.

No one moved. He was astonished.

"Nobody?" he asked.

He sat down, and the audience moved on. "They just want to be hugged," Lotze said. "They want to be loved, told that we're going to get through this together."

The kids kept pouring into the churches. What began Tuesday night as a means to escape from their parents and find each other quickly became a habit. Night after night they returned to the churches in vast numbers--kids who had not seen an altar in years. For some it was a conscious choice to look to God in desperation, but most said it was just a place to go.

The churches organized informal services at night. In the daytime, they just opened their doors and gave the kids the run of the place. A handful saw a recruiting opportunity. Anyone who drove to Clement Park and stayed a few hours would find several flyers stacked under their wiper blades: "WE'RE HERE TO LISTEN AND ASSIST YOU," "If you need: prayer, counseling, meals prepared...," "FREE!! HOT CHOCOLATE COFFEE COOKIES, COME BE WARM AT CALVARY CHAPEL." Boxes of pocket-sized Bibles were trucked to the park and distributed to passersby. Scientologists handed out Way to Happiness Way to Happiness booklets to mourners filing past Rachel Scott's car--still abandoned in the parking lot where she'd left it. booklets to mourners filing past Rachel Scott's car--still abandoned in the parking lot where she'd left it.

Eventually, investigators would escort dozens of witnesses back through the school to help re-create the attack. Mr. D was the first. A few days after the massacre, detectives walked him down the main hallway. Dr. Fuselier was with them. They passed the remnants of the trophy case and DeAngelis described it exploding behind him. They proceeded down the corridor and he indicated where he'd intercepted the girls' gym class.

He re-created everything: the shouts, the screams, the acrid smell of the smoke. None of that fazed Frank DeAngelis. He was cried out by this time, as stoic as the boys he was hoping to open up.

They turned the corner, and Frank saw bloody smears on the carpet. He knew Dave Sanders had gone down there. He had not anticipated the stains. "You could see the knuckle prints," he said. "He actually was on all fours and there were his knuckle prints--he was struggling. It tore me up."

A trail of blood traced Dave's path around the corner and down the hall. Detectives led Frank DeAngelis to Science Room 3. Nothing had been disturbed.

"They took me into where Dave died," Frank recalled. "And there were sweatshirts there full of blood. That got to me." In the science room, Frank broke down again. He turned to Fuselier. "I was glad he was here," DeAngelis said later. "Most FBI guys wouldn't have done anything. Dwayne gave me a hug."

Aside from witnesses, the best hope for cracking the case seemed to lie in the physical evidence: the guns, first and foremost. Dylan was a minor; Eric had just turned eighteen. They had probably gotten help securing the weapons. Whoever turned up at the front end of those acquisitions would likely be co-conspirator number one.

Investigators worked parallel tracks hunting them down. ATF agents took the technical angle: they came up with a solid lifespan on the semiautomatics. Eric's carbine rifle was less than a year old; it had been sold originally in Selma, Alabama, and had made its way to a gun shop in Longmont, Colorado, less than an hour from Denver. They traced Dylan's TEC-9 through four different owners between 1997 and 1998, but then the records disappeared. The third owner said he'd sold it at the Tanner Gun Show but had not been required to keep sales records at that time. The shotguns were a bigger problem. They were three decades old, before serial numbers were required. They were impossible to trace.

The bomb squad disassembled and studied the big bombs. The centerpiece of Eric's performance was a complete mess. "They didn't understand explosive reactions," the deputy fire marshal said. "They didn't understand electrical circuitry."

Officials refused to be more specific, arguing that they didn't want to give copycatters any hints. The deputy marshal summarized the primary mistake as "defective fusing."

Detectives were having more luck working the suspects. Chris Morris had implicated Phil Duran the first day. If they could believe Morris, that could explain several guns, possibly all four. Duran was playing innocent, but they knew they could crack him. And then they heard from Robyn Anderson.

Unloading her secret to Kelli on Tuesday night had not appeased Robyn's conscience. Wednesday morning, she called Zack again. This time, she told him. And she told him another small lie--that he was the only one who knew. Then she told her mom.

Robyn's mom brought her down to the school. Jeffco had setup its Columbine Task Force inside the crime scene, headquartered in the band room. Detectives interviewed Robyn, with her mom by her side. Two detectives traded off questioning--one from the DA's office, one from a nearby suburb's police force. They videotaped the session. And they were harsh. The first time they asked about the guns, Robyn "visibly recoiled," according to the detective's synopsis of the videotape. And she looked to her mom for support. Did she buy the guns? they asked. No, she did not. She went to the show with them, but they bought the weapons No, she did not. She went to the show with them, but they bought the weapons. Why did they want them? Dylan lived out in the country, so she assumed they wanted to hunt. No, they never talked about hunting people, not even as a joke. Dylan lived out in the country, so she assumed they wanted to hunt. No, they never talked about hunting people, not even as a joke.

Detectives asked her about the prom, the Trench Coat Mafia, the killers' personalities, and then returned to the guns. It was a private dealer, she said. The boys paid cash. They didn't try to bargain, they just paid the asking price--somewhere around $250 to $300 apiece. No one signed anything, and she never showed an ID. The shotguns had very long barrels, but the dealer said they could cut them down.

The detectives began to press her harder: Dylan and Eric didn't really seem like hunters, did they? Dylan lived in the mountains, there were deer all over the place. And her dad owned a gun--he never used it, but he had one. Lots of people have gun collections. Eric and Dylan were into that kind of stuff--why wouldn't they want one? Dylan lived in the mountains, there were deer all over the place. And her dad owned a gun--he never used it, but he had one. Lots of people have gun collections. Eric and Dylan were into that kind of stuff--why wouldn't they want one? She'd actually asked the boys if they were going to do something stupid with the guns, she said. They'd assured her they would never hurt anyone. She'd actually asked the boys if they were going to do something stupid with the guns, she said. They'd assured her they would never hurt anyone.

Did Eric and Dylan tell you to keep the guns secret? the detectives asked. Yes. Yes. And that didn't raise your suspicions? And that didn't raise your suspicions? They were underage. It was illegal. They had to hide it from their parents. They were underage. It was illegal. They had to hide it from their parents. And where did they hide them? And where did they hide them? She didn't know about Eric. Dylan dropped him off first, and Eric put his guns in the trunk of his Honda. She assumed he stashed them in the house later. Dylan tried to hide his in his bottom dresser drawer, but it was too big. He stuck it in the closet, but he told her later that he cut the barrel down and made it fit in the drawer She didn't know about Eric. Dylan dropped him off first, and Eric put his guns in the trunk of his Honda. She assumed he stashed them in the house later. Dylan tried to hide his in his bottom dresser drawer, but it was too big. He stuck it in the closet, but he told her later that he cut the barrel down and made it fit in the drawer.