The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  George’s roughed-out autobiography made Peter feel that his own career had been hollow, without any equivalent triumph on his record. It was a sign that the son was still in the intimidating shadow of the father that, as Peter toiled in the air raid shelter, he failed to ask some obvious questions. Why had he never been told these stories, and was Lionel’s request entirely benign? On this point, Joan, happy that her husband had retired from his “life of crime,” understood what he failed to see: that a distinguished detective must expect to encounter ghosts — including family ones — and learn to live with them.

  As months rolled by, Peter saw no end to the project, and the tedium and complexity of editing the manuscript only increased his unease with his own recently completed career. He had told himself, and his father’s and brother’s ghosts, that his task was to set the record straight on GF’s heroic contribution. He now admitted to the concrete walls and to his golden retriever, Jasper, that he wasn’t sure where he was going with the reams of notes and documents he had assembled.

  He spent too much time in the claustrophobic shelter, and Joan looked for an opportunity to point out his declining sense of proportion. The one time he confided his sense of inadequacy to her, she didn’t hesitate. “What do you mean? You helped capture the Yorkshire Ripper, the Kray gang, that Unabomber fellow, and how many other killers and terrorists?”

  “Yes, but I killed men along the way. Offset by what?” Peter countered.

  Joan, never receptive to self-pity, treated this as the non sequitur it was. She encouraged him to abandon that gloomy hole in the ground for the renovated shed at the rear of the garden. The bomb shelter, she said, had become a metaphor for “bombardment-by-kinfolk.”

  Peter turned a bit dopey. He began to latch on to small auguries. One evening, they went out for dinner at an Italian place, and he noticed on the menu: “Try our signature veal parmesan!” That’s what I lack, a signature accomplishment as a career detective.

  To Peter’s credit, he soon pinpointed his dilemma, although his insight did not bring him much closer to finishing the manuscript. George’s and Lionel’s exploits had imprinted the idea of evil on his mind. Oswald Mosley and Joseph Stalin, fascism and communism — they had been wicked. Thinking back over his career, Peter couldn’t swear that any of the men he stopped had been purely evil. Not like Mosley or Stalin.

  When the post arrived with the Salt Lake City address and the outline of a mountain on the upper left corner of the envelope, Joan had Jasper carry it out to the air raid shelter. She knew it was important. She had been at the funeral of Henry Pastern’s wife in Ogden and, not always telling Peter, had chatted with Henry at length the few times he had called England over the winter.

  The retriever sat at the top of the stone steps with the package in her jaws and waited for her master to notice her. Jasper no longer kept Peter company in his bunker; it was too boring even for a loyal dog. Peter called her down, took the envelope, and kissed Jasper on her head. He hefted the padded mailer and noted Henry’s name on the return label. He climbed the steps and strode — a little faster than he might have, Joan noted from the kitchen window — to his work shed. Jasper trotted behind Peter to the building, which had once been a chicken roost. “We flushed out the chicken shit,” Peter would tell people, “and I keep my own in it now.” They christened it Hispaniola; his side was Haiti, and her potting shed next door, the Dominican Republic. Now, in the pleasant and spacious room, he pondered why he had bothered to work in the cramped underground shelter; no one was going to buzz-bomb his father’s records.

  Jasper jumped onto the long trestle table by the window. She was an old dog, and the effort strained her joints. Peter looked again at the outline of the mountain on the package. He regarded Jasper, slobbering and pleased with herself, and felt his excitement growing. Jasper had never leapt onto the table before, but now she posed with her ears perked up. If I need a sign, my dog hears the high notes I can’t.

  Peter spread the contents out on the work table. There wasn’t much: a police report stamped with a Utah state police logo, a headshot photograph, and a drawing of a man’s face. The latter, Peter noted, was a police artist’s sketch, a face-on portrait. There were two photocopied affidavits, one Henry’s and the other signed by Detective Phillip Mohlman; Peter remembered the wounded cop from Theresa Pastern’s funeral. Finally, Henry had included his own typed ten-page narrative, and clipped to the last page was a stiff card with the handwritten plea “Can you come to Utah?”

  He read through Henry’s narrative before examining the other materials. It summarized the blood-soaked chaos on Hollis Street, the manhunt, Theresa’s death, and the demise of Ronald Devereau; the González meeting in Wendover had been dealt with perfunctorily. Peter understood that Henry had begun the gruesome tale with the hope of achieving some form of catharsis, but that it now climaxed in his request to his old British friend.

  Peter also caught a whiff of his father’s story in Henry’s violent account. George Cammon’s wartime career may have amounted to a Gentleman’s Lark most of the time, but his memoir was honest about the dread he had felt in confronting malevolence, and Peter tasted that horror in the tragedy of the Pasterns. He moved the police report out of range of Jasper’s drool, but at key points in Henry’s chronicle he scratched the retriever’s noggin and muttered affectionately to her.

  Henry’s notes were rumpled, he hadn’t used spell-check, and he seemed to have lost the shift key. Peter concluded that the typist had been drunk at the keyboard. This bit of fussy detection made Peter feel better.

  He turned to the police report, which he merely scanned for now.

  He laid out the two pictures side by side. Two men with similar faces stared out at him, both with neutral expressions. The photo was an arrest mug shot of a clean-shaven Caucasian man in his mid-forties. On the back, someone had jotted “James Riotte, taken June 13, 1994.” The sketch was of a different man, whom Peter judged to be age fifty-five, quite possibly older.

  Peter got up from the table to gain a better perspective on the pictures. Jasper barked at him. The sketch, said Henry’s notes, was of the man responsible for the death of Theresa Pastern, and on the obverse of the drawing Henry had written “KILLER = RONALD DEVEREAU.” Peter’s detective powers might have been rusty, but his instincts were available to him, and his synapses made an astonishing connection. The KILLER portrait was remarkably close to the famous wanted poster of the Unabomber issued nationwide by the UNABOM Task Force in 1994, though the KILLER figure was much older and did not sport a hoodie or aviator sunglasses.

  With trepidation and a sense of fatefulness, Peter went to the filing cabinet next to his desk and pulled out his Unabomber file. He riffled through the dossier and removed two pictures, adding them to the identity parade on the trestle table. One was Peter’s copy of the famous Unabomber poster from 1994. He shivered as he looked at it for the first time in eighteen years. Devereau, as portrayed in the KILLER sketch, shared the aquiline nose, thin lips, and sharp jawlines of the man in the wanted poster. The other image in Peter’s dusty file was a police drawing of yet another man. Here were four similar-looking suspects: James Riotte, Ronald Devereau, the Unabomber, and a fourth one. But, for Peter’s practical purposes, and accounting for age differences, they amounted to a single portrait of evil.

  At the funeral in Ogden, Peter had got the feeling that the Hollis Street case wasn’t over, wasn’t complete. He was right, the evil hadn’t been expunged.

  He gathered Jasper in his arms and helped her down. With the old dog in tow, he shut the door to his side of the shed and crossed the garden to lock the portal to the air raid shelter. He walked up the steps of the cottage to the kitchen. Joan stood in the centre of the room.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  Joan nodded. She saw the change in his face, the fading of worry and guilt and the arrival of grim determination.

  And s
o, at that moment, he became once again Peter Cammon, Chief Inspector, New Scotland Yard (no longer retired).

  CHAPTER 22

  “I’m flying to America as soon as I can book a ticket. I expect I’ll be staying a month.”

  Peter sat Joan down at the dining room table, which struck her as overly formal given how much she already knew about Hollis Street. She was slightly annoyed at his non-negotiable utterance. She wasn’t invited, and he wasn’t contrite about his abandonment of the cottage, her, or the dog.

  But Joan saw the new spark in his eyes. She had watched Peter trudge to the shelter every morning to work on his father’s papers. She had worried that he was falling back into old, reclusive ways. No, it wasn’t exactly that. She admitted that Peter was amiable enough once he completed his morning’s work. But retirement had not changed him the way it should. He needed to break cleanly with the past. For example, he owned six identical, stuffy black suits, and he had retired only three of them; it was an example of half measures. He even refused to toss out his bowler hat.

  Peter produced the two pictures from Henry’s package.

  “The mug shot photo is James Warder Riotte. West Valley Police say he killed the Watsons and the Proffets, attacked Henry and his partner, and then committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart while burning down his house. This picture was taken in 1994, when Riotte was arrested for buying large amounts of fertilizer and trying to sell it to a militia group in Colorado. He disappeared without a trace in ’95. Investigators believe he took the name Ronald Devereau and bought a house on Hollis Street in 2002, just after the neighbourhood was built.”

  “Where was he between 1995 and 2002?”

  “No one knows. The police have given up on all aspects of the case.”

  “But why does Henry believe that Riotte didn’t commit the killings?”

  “Because the police sketch of Devereau, this one here, is a different person. It’s based on Henry’s recollection of Devereau, as well as the efforts of Phil Mohlman and two or three residents on Hollis Street. Riotte and Devereau are — were — different people.”

  “You don’t find that a bit thin? The second face isn’t too far off the first. Except the second man has a mole on his neck. You believe Henry?”

  “Yes, but the authorities don’t, except his partner.”

  Joan sat back, waiting for Peter to expound his own theory. The faces were similar, very close if you factored in aging. She worried that he was getting carried away by this new puzzle. She had seen Henry Pastern in mourning, seen Theresa’s father at the gravesite. No matter how intriguing this emerging manhunt was, a cloud of bitterness hovered above Salt Lake that perhaps distorted common sense.

  There was something else in play here. Peter’s last case, the Carpenter Affair, had drawn in the whole Cammon family, exposing Maddy and Michael, Peter’s son, to considerable danger. Peter had understood this, and he subsequently opened up to Joan about his police work in a dozen or more conversations at this table. This time, she was wary of his reticence to include her. Did he know that she wanted to accompany him to Utah, that her talks with Henry gave her a stake in the matter? Also, he seemed unaware that leaving England without consulting Maddy, their daughter-in-law, would certainly give offence. And was there another dimension to the case, a factor that rendered it personal?

  “There’s something else, isn’t there, Peter? Another reason to reject the official scenario.”

  Tapping the sketch labelled “KILLER,” he said, “Does this face remind you of anyone famous?”

  She picked up the picture and set it down again. “Not really.”

  Peter juxtaposed the Devereau sketch with the Unabomber wanted poster. “Remove seventeen years or so and add sunglasses, you have the Unabomber.”

  That’s it? Joan thought but did not say. She was confused. The Unabomber was in custody. That case was closed, and so was Hollis Street. One man locked up forever in a prison, and the other immolated in a house. Peter was running off to chase phantoms, and who knew what mental state Henry Pastern was in.

  Peter launched into his theory of the Unabomber. “Ted Kaczynski sent or planted sixteen explosive devices between 1978 and his capture in 1996. From the eighties on, there were rumours that Kaczynski had help in manufacturing his bombs. He was a second-rate carpenter and, we can never forget, hostile to technology, so, allegedly, he must have had assistance. In 1994, the investigators generated this sketch on the basis of an interview with a bystander in Salt Lake City at one of his target sites. Everyone in the world got to know this face. Now, Joan, look at this fourth portrait.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s a witness composite from another case.” He hesitated. “From the Oklahoma City bombing.”

  Joan saw distinct similarities among the four pictures, also some differences. Devereau, the man in the wanted poster, and the fellow in Oklahoma could be the same man. The one in the photograph, said to be Jim Riotte, was different. She didn’t even want to consider the final picture, with its implication that Devereau was involved with Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City tragedy.

  “Ted Kaczynski’s brother turned him in, and the FBI made the arrest in Montana in 1996, which is not long after Jim Riotte disappeared. What if Riotte and Devereau, fearing they would be tied to Kaczynski, disappeared together?”

  “And there’s more to this trip than consoling your friend, I’m assuming?” she said, almost to prompt some form of confession from her husband.

  “I believe Henry when he says Riotte died in the fire and Devereau is out there, and I have an idea how to find him,” Peter said.

  Joan was suddenly anxious about his intentions.

  “But you don’t know who this Devereau is.”

  The pause seemed endless to her. “I know two things. I know I can find him, and I know that he’s evil.”

  Fear for Peter’s safety, for what was to come, made her bold. “What exactly are you planning on doing?”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  CHAPTER 23

  In the main concourse of Salt Lake City International Airport, Peter encountered his own reflection. A spectral figure in a black suit and white shirt, no tie, stood by the luggage carousel, looking his way. He offered the benign smile of a religious shill, or someone knocking at the door with a vacuum cleaner to sell. Peter wondered at his own harsh judgement, for the man seemed open and friendly enough. It took Peter a moment to make an important connection: not only did he recognize the fellow from the Ogden funeral, but he concluded, correctly, that this was the Mormon elder, Tynan, whom Henry had mentioned in his report, the one who for reasons unclear had driven Theresa into West Valley that deadly night. Peter, his brain funked from five thousand miles of flight, continued checking the arrivals throng for Henry Pastern’s shaved head.

  Against Joan’s advice, he had worn one of his remaining black suits out to Utah. He eyed the desert sun blasting the glass walls of the air terminal. He was out of sorts from his London–Chicago–Salt Lake relay and expected to bake in the heat outside. But, he told himself, as his daughter Sarah said, sometimes his uniform was what held him together. He felt a tad better at this thought but then realized that he had left his trademark bowler hat at home. I am befuddled, he decided.

  The man in black stepped forward, and Peter prepared himself for a homily of some kind. He was being unfair; he reminded himself that he knew nothing about Mormon clerics.

  “Mr. Cammon?”

  They shook hands. Bemusement inflected the corners of the Mormon elder’s smile.

  “How do you do,” Peter said. “You’re Elder Tynan. You live next to Henry?”

  “Down the road. I would have addressed you as ‘Chief Inspector,’ but I wasn’t sure if you appreciated the title.”

  “Right. Well, I am retired.”

  “Me too.”

 
The smile broadened. Peter began to like the man.

  “We don’t usually apply the honorific,” Tynan continued. “Henry just calls me Tynan. But I am ordained in the LDS.” They collected Peter’s valise, and Tynan said, “But you weren’t really asking if I was an elder, were you?”

  “What was I asking?” Peter replied.

  “What a Mormon churchman is doing picking you up at the airport instead of Henry.”

  “Do you always try to get out ahead of questions?”

  “Sometimes. When I’m addressing a chief inspector who Henry says is the best detective he ever met.”

  “That’s flattering, coming from a churchman who likely faces tougher sinners than I do.”

  The banter had turned cute, and the two old veterans of life’s wars fell silent. It was odd they hit it off at all, Peter reflected. He didn’t go for religious types, found their agendas obvious, and there was an undercurrent of the proselytizer about Tynan. But Peter, who anticipated a lonely pursuit of Ronald Devereau, was quick to embrace allies, and he felt a kinship taking seed. It will be interesting to watch Tynan’s demeanour with Henry, he thought.

  “Excuse me,” Peter said as they reached Tynan’s grimy truck, “but is Henry well?”

  The smile did not vary. “Henry is what we teetotalling Mormons call indisposed.”

  As Tynan drove onto Coppermount Drive, the airport and the city far behind but the Wasatch Front still visible like a movie set backdrop, Peter realized that he would need to rent a car to get around. “Isolated” did not begin to describe the neighbourhood into which they were heading. The streetscape was doing battle with the desert and wasn’t necessarily winning. Most lots were marked out, wired and plumbed at the foundation level, with crude address posts but little more. The windswept emptiness had begun to absorb several parcels. The asphalt ended abruptly a hundred yards down the slope from Henry’s house, where a last home, far from complete, anchored the street as best it could.