The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  “If you insist. Why not? This is the last-but-one resting place of Jim Riotte.”

  “Say what?”

  “Why do you think that the body survived as a solid mass, like baked Alaska? Everything else was devoured by fire. Devereau poured accelerant all around, dumped acid into his three computers. He kept his doppelganger on ice and transferred him to the cellar to roast in the fire he was setting. Murdering Mr. and Mrs. Proffet smells of panic, but who knows how far in advance he had Riotte in the icebox, ready for a post mortem performance?”

  Peter’s effort to shock Henry out of his lethargy was working. A brightness came into the young man’s eyes, displacing the alcohol in his system as he began to re-engage.

  “Maybe not long, Peter. I reckon Riotte was the one who picked up Devereau in the Wasatch. Then Devereau killed him.”

  “Sounds about right. On the other hand, that freezer’s been sitting here for a while.”

  “I’ll get a team to scour the interior for trace …”

  “I wouldn’t bother.” Peter saw little importance in the timing of Riotte’s execution.

  He pivoted back to the freezer and fully opened the broad lid. An image had stuck in his short-term memory. Leaning half inside the appliance, he stretched down to the corner where the ice pack lay. Levering back out, he held up a tiny figurine. It was four inches long, moulded in off-white plastic or Bakelite, but it had no moving parts.

  It was Yoda.

  “A toy,” Henry said.

  “Maybe.”

  Peter closed the freezer and pocketed the figure. He shifted his attention to the narrow metal shelves that covered six feet of the south wall of the garage. The racks above held handsaws and power tools; some of the plastic grips had melted, but none had fallen off its perch. Peter dropped to one knee and felt along the floor-level shelf, conscious that even obsessives allow junk to filter downwards. Feeling in behind a container of WD-40 that somehow hadn’t exploded in the conflagration, his fingers rolled over a pair of objects, neither larger than the toy Yoda. He fished them out and held them up for Henry to see.

  They were airplanes, oddly shaped, each made of the same material as Yoda. One crumbled to dust in Peter’s hand. The other stayed together, although Peter observed that it was missing half its starboard wing.

  They picked up fried chicken at the Chicken Yard on Highway 15.

  “Last stop before cardiac arrest,” Henry announced.

  The mood in the SUV wasn’t exactly light, Peter assessed, but at least Henry wasn’t catatonic. Hoping to keep his friend talking, Peter took the Yoda figurine from his pocket and balanced it on the dash.

  “No, Peter,” Henry said. “For the record, I never had a dashboard Jesus in my car.”

  But once they were back in the house on Coppermount Drive, the atmosphere changed for the worse. Yes, the young widower had every reason to wallow in his misery; even so, Peter had thought he’d made progress, having persuaded Henry back onto Hollis within hours of arriving and started a discussion. But the trek to West Valley had amounted to a concession to a guest, little more. Henry homed in on the granite bar and brought out the silver tray.

  “Ever had an absinthe, Peter?”

  Peter, jet-lagged, had a sensation of rewinding. He was ready for a nap in the desert air, but now his gains with Henry had been reversed. They hadn’t truly reacquainted. Peter represented a distant world known as the Past; he was an old friend intruding on a newly bereft household. Peter didn’t even know which bedroom was his.

  Henry began the procedure of mixing the absinthe, while Peter stood on the edge of the living room in his ridiculous shirt and watched. It took Henry twenty minutes to mix one glass. This was a sad ritual for the departed. It reminded Peter of nothing so much as a cooking show on the telly. Absinthe contains thujone, a stimulant, and alcohol, a downer. It is a self-contained speedball yet is not a fermented drink like the uninitiated usually believe. Worse, more alcohol in the form of brandy is often added. Peter knew from the French and English poets he had read that the Green Fairy produces a euphoric cloud in the drinker and heightens perception, eventually pushing the user into terrors and depression.

  “It’s very much a bohemian thing, Peter. Your English poets used it for inspiration. Try one, my friend?”

  Peter shook his head. How did a Utah resident get hold of obscure French grog? A drive out-of-state, no doubt, and an up-yours to the Mormon church and state liquor laws.

  Henry uncapped the tall bottle. “This is Le Perroquet — the Parrot. Good stuff.”

  The harsh herbal scent, mixed with the grease from the bucket of fried chicken, was nauseating. Literary allusions floated to the surface of Peter’s mind. Melville had Ishmael in the Spouter-Inn tavern observe the sacrament of pouring the liquor into “villainous green goggling glasses.” That was about right. The accoutrements on the granite bar were fashioned for the ceremony. The Pontarlier glasses had been etched with Plimsoll lines to show the dosage; Henry poured carefully to the first mark. Next, he sat the leaf-shaped slotted spoon across the rim of the glass and put a single cube of sugar on the spoon, as if placing the final card atop a card house. He dripped green liquid onto the sugar and set fire to it. Peter was aware that purists avoided the flaming, but men like to set fire to food, and Henry was enjoying himself. Peter observed in silence, almost dozing off.

  Henry rambled on. “The timely addition of ice water clouds the absinthe into a mixture known as a ‘louche.’” Henry raised a toast to Peter. “Thank you for coming.”

  The sun outside the big patio doors was beginning to lose its force, and the evening loomed. Peter gathered cutlery and placemats and arranged the dining room table while Henry brought out the chicken. Glum about the chances of finding beer in the kitchen, Peter opened the fridge anyway and met a six pack of Bud Light, with Tynan’s note taped to it: “Don’t know from beer. Seen the ads for this one. Told me green beer is only for St. Patrick’s Day.”

  The dinner was unpleasant. On the table, the emerald absinthe clashed with the iridescent green coleslaw, and Peter lost his appetite. He sat the Yoda figurine and the crippled airliner between their plates. They felt to Peter like childish mascots.

  The carb-heavy food revived Henry momentarily, and he went to his bedroom and retrieved a bundle of files, which he brought back and plunked down on the table.

  “This is everything I have.”

  Henry seemed annoyed, and Peter understood why: he suspected that Peter was hiding a personal agenda. His reply to Henry’s package had cryptically mentioned the Unabomber. Despite Henry’s visible irritation, Peter began to doze off.

  “What the hell’s that about?” Henry broke in, his speech slurred.

  “What, Henry?”

  Louder, Henry said, “What does the Yoda mean, Peter?”

  “I don’t know yet, but it meant something to Devereau.”

  “He isn’t the whimsical type.”

  “I agree.”

  Henry himself suddenly fell asleep. Peter propped him up against the table. Five minutes on, Henry came awake and cried out, “Do you know who Devereau is?”

  “Sleep on it, Henry. We’ll start our search in the morning. Where’s your room?”

  “Down there. Yours is the other direction.” He stood and drained the last quarter inch of the green syrup. Peter aided him along the hallway.

  Peter returned from Henry’s room intent on sleep himself, but the sunset performance outside the patio doors caught him up short. Yellow and orange bands of sky backlit vermilion and mauve wisps of clouds. The borders of the cloud layer blurred, and within minutes darkness overwhelmed the darts of light with a last flare. The sunset felt decisive, night complete.

  He was no longer sleepy. The light show had invigorated him, and now the hollow, dark house spooked him. Feeling mildly paranoid, he removed his laptop from his valise an
d cued into Henry’s Wi-Fi to check his email. He wondered if somehow his former boss at New Scotland Yard, Sir Stephen Bartleben, had got wind of his expedition to America. This was unlikely, and Sir Stephen had no residual control over Peter, but still he chewed on it. Peter didn’t doubt that Homeland Security would be complaining to London sometime before all this was over.

  He sent a short email to Joan and Maddy, telling them he had arrived safely. Joan would expect nothing more, but he felt guilty about his daughter-in-law. Maddy had helped him during the Carpenter investigation, and although with the baby she couldn’t have accompanied him to Utah in any case, he should have briefed her before he left. He sent a separate message to her: “Will call or Skype in three days to update. May have research for you. Okay?”

  He unpacked in the guest bedroom, placing his own notes and the new bundle from Henry on the carpet under the bed. Dipping further into the bag, he was surprised to find a folded document. Joan, no doubt at Maddy’s suggestion, had slipped in the map of the United States that had hung on the wall of the garden shed at the cottage during the Carpenter Affair. He was glad he’d sent the email. He and Maddy had often gathered in the shed to speculate on which of the fifty blue-bordered states the murderous fugitive Alice Nahri had chosen for sanctuary. He found some tacks in the kitchen and pinned the map to the bedroom wall.

  Still restless, he lay on the bed and pondered the map. The pillowcase gave off a fusty odour. Peter was likely the only guest to use the room since Theresa’s death; perhaps she had last made this bed. The condor-eye map pleased him, and he decided that in the morning he would buy a packet of labels and annotate the map with known “terrorist” occurrences that bore any resemblance to the incidents on Hollis Street. Including the Unabomber’s many attacks, the array would touch Utah and a half-dozen nearby states. Oklahoma had to be featured, and McVeigh and his co-conspirators had committed crimes in Arizona, too. Painting with a broad brush would draw in Idaho, for Ruby Ridge, and Texas, for the Waco disaster. The Homeland Security Office of Domestic Terrorism could provide Peter with dozens more incidents — should he decide to reveal his presence in Salt Lake.

  Peter hadn’t informed Henry of the potential link between Hollis Street and Tim McVeigh, nor had he fully explained the Unabomber connection. He believed that two decades ago, Devereau, or whatever his real name was, had styled himself the Unabomber’s tactician, perhaps his intellectual mentor. Peter was less confident of a link to the Oklahoma City plot. After the Murrah bombing, which had occurred only five months prior to the publication of Ted Kaczynski’s Manifesto in the New York Times, investigators found indications of a spectral character who had hovered around McVeigh and Terry Nichols as they planned their attack. Peter suspected that man was Ronald Devereau. Back in the nineties, a few contrarians had tried to link these monstrous plots, but as McVeigh’s accomplices went to ground and a few arrests and convictions were registered, no one listened any longer. Now a key player had surfaced on a nondescript street in West Valley.

  There were several ways to hunt down Devereau. He appeared to hate drug dealers, but did he steal drugs in order to finance his terrorist plans? Peter would get Maddy searching for telltale drug incidents in the western states. He believed the arson angle also held promise. Devereau’s pipe bomb and his torching of his own home had been perverse and well planned, signs of a criminal pattern. Did he have a history with fires? Finally, almost eighteen years in hiding had not soothed Devereau. His crimes bore the marks of an unmitigated psychopath.

  Peter turned off the light in the guest room. Lying there, he realized what was agitating him. How do you find a ghost? He craved momentum, knew he had to move fast — faster than Henry was capable of going. The expanse of Hollis Street, with its sad houses, formed an elaborate crime scene. How could there be no fingerprints? No group snapshots? The investigators had given up on Hollis too easily.

  His jet lag swept over him and he fell asleep above the covers.

  CHAPTER 25

  Between 1978 and 1996, the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, mailed or planted sixteen explosive devices across the United States and caused twenty-two injuries and three deaths. He stands as the greatest solo act in American domestic terrorism history.

  Ted was both lucky and moderately skilled. Most of his pipe bombs detonated on schedule, although a few did not or were defused before they could explode. He was observed twice in the act, but neither occasion led to his capture. Never did the FBI find a fingerprint or trace a component from any of his box bombs.

  He dispatched his devices to targets from coast to coast, to Illinois, California, Michigan, Utah, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Washington; he shipped a package on an American Airlines flight out of Chicago. The authorities christened him the UNABOM for his attacks on universities and airlines, although Peter Cammon always felt that he should have been called the “Postal Service Bomber,” since he used the mail so much. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service was a main player in the task force set up in 1979 to solve the “UNABOM” case, as it was known at the beginning, and during that period Peter came to believe that law enforcement would find him by analyzing his use of the postal system.

  Ted Kaczynski lives in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

  Some would maintain that the Unabomber was hard to catch because his targets were haphazardly chosen — they didn’t truly represent the technological society so hated by Kaczynski — and because he demanded nothing from his victims. Ted’s motives remained obscure. His attacks were irregularly spaced over eighteen years and followed no rational pattern. More significant, until Ted won publication of his Manifesto in 1995, he never seemed to be aiming for any particular result other than wanton harm to individuals. In Industrial Society and Its Future, he stated, “Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal.” In Peter Cammon’s view, Kaczynski was a petty, small-time terrorist.

  A typical Unabomber device was a pipe bomb in a carved wooden box, most of the components homemade and untraceable, and the whole package compact enough to mail through the nearest post office. The Unabomber was a Luddite who nonetheless used mechanical, electrical, and chemical technology in his devices. Some on the task force thought it possible that his homemade bombs were artfully rudimentary and deceptively naive; but, Peter wondered, what would have been the point of that? Kaczynski’s devices weren’t unsophisticated if you considered the objective. He had created havoc with them, and almost brought down a plane. They got the job done.

  Peter’s first exposure to the case came in 1985, just after Kaczynski had killed for the first time. His victim was a passerby who unluckily picked up one of his pipe bombs. That was in Sacramento, and the attack is known as Incident Number 11. In that year, the UNABOM Task Force invited Scotland Yard to sit in on its weekly conference call, and Sir Stephen Bartleben anointed Peter as his rep. The reason for his assignment was always unclear to Peter. He had visited the States twice on other files and worked with the FBI on one joint investigation, but that hardly qualified him to comment on the Unabomber. Someone, he heard, had told the Americans that he had contributed to the Yorkshire Ripper case and figured he could help in profiling the postal killer.

  Deputy Director Lattner from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service chaired the conference call, which included a dozen police agencies. Even over the phone, Peter felt the frustration in the room. There was much discussion of where the Unabomber lived, with a consensus that he resided in the West or in California, although it was evident that he ranged widely. It must be remembered that this was before DNA, the internet, the Twin Towers, and the formation of Homeland Security. One tool the authorities did have was profiling; law enforcement had fallen in love with profiling techniques after Son of Sam in the mid-seventies.

  Peter had studied the task force dossier on the Unabomber and was unimpressed with the profiling effort. When
his turn to speak came, he said, “If I were you, I would look at the connections between where the bombs exploded and where they were sent from. The map of the latter is quite different from the former. We’re all asking ourselves where the Unabomber lives, urban or rural. If you look at the postmarks on his packages and analyze the bus and train routes to those post office locations, I think you’ll find he lives in a rural setting.”

  Eleven of the devices had been mailed or planted up to that point, and his theory came across as glib to the Americans in the room. Deputy Lattner, seemingly offended by Cammon’s alien English accent, snapped. “Okay then, Inspector” — Peter wasn’t a chief inspector yet — “what do you think the Unabomber wants?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, sounding too dismissive, “but we all agree that he’s a recluse who spends a lot of hours carving and moulding parts to fit into his box bombs, all of which are customized to some degree. I also think there might be two perpetrators. The bomber may be a recluse and have a co-conspirator who eggs him on and assists with his devices.”

  He had ignited a flare in the room from thousands of miles away. Lattner asked him to elaborate, and Peter backtracked a step. “Well, we are all drawn to the lone-assassin premise, and it seems to apply here. The bomber hasn’t been in a hurry, has no distinctive timeline. And, the most infuriating factor of all, he doesn’t appear to have a set of demands. So he’s a loner, neurotic, lacking affect, taking his sweet time. But I’d be worried. We’ve all seen crimes where the culprit has been pushed by someone else to act out his grievances. However haphazard the Unabomber’s bombing schedule, it seems to me that he’s building to something. I don’t know what. But what if he does have a partner?”

  He had posited at least three wild theories in his screed: that the Unabomber lived in a rural setting, that he had help, and that he was getting more aggressive in his bombing pattern.

  Lattner spoke up righteously. “So what if he does?”