The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  “Now you’re telling me, Inspector, that you think you can find Devereau without involving the Bureau, ATF, or DEA.”

  “I’m doing it for Henry.”

  Mohlman absorbed the truth. “You plan to kill Devereau!”

  Peter conceded nothing. “Henry’s your friend, too.”

  Phil Mohlman stretched his bum leg and said, “Taser messed me up. Here’s the deal. I’ll do it your way until it all goes to hell. I’m as sure as Henry that Riotte and Devereau are different men. I met Devereau three times and Henry encountered him just once, so maybe my conclusion is more credible. But the bottom line is, we’ll stay lonely. No one is going to believe us, and there’s plenty of ways the higher-ups can browbeat us into letting it go. Henry, for example, won’t be allowed back until he gives it up. Also, the moment we shift the case into the realm of counterterrorism, the JTTF will swoop in and snatch control. So take your shot while you can, Peter.”

  “I could use your help.”

  Mohlman painfully levered himself up. He took a business card and scribbled on the back.

  “This is where I’d go next. Jim Riotte’s charming brother.”

  Peter took the card. He agreed, nodding. But Mohlman was still staring at him.

  “Okay, Cammon, you want me to do something else, don’t you? It could get me in trouble, right?”

  “Yes. I need you to access the Unabomber files. I’m looking for a witness. A waitress named Alma May Reeve.”

  It wasn’t yet noon, and Peter took his time returning to the house. He was enjoying Henry’s Subaru, and he considered arguments he might employ to borrow it for a trip to Kansas the next day. He planned to travel early and alone; he feared that Henry might assault Mark Riotte, and that would certainly be counterproductive. He set the GPS for Temple Square and swung the Subaru into a U-turn on the broad avenue, up to North Temple, past Brigham Young’s gravesite and the cathedral and out to the Great Salt Lake Desert.

  As Peter turned onto Coppermount, he saw Henry pacing in front of the house, his stubbly pate turning red in the noon sun.

  “Where the hell have you been with my car?” he said before Peter was out of the vehicle.

  There was no avoiding the truth. “Sorry. I went to see Phil Mohlman.”

  “Without me?”

  “Without you. You were asleep.”

  Henry was keyed up, probably into the absinthe already (one glass of the concoction could swing the drinker from euphoria into militancy), but it was tepid anger. Henry sat down on the asphalt driveway and started to weep. “I thought someone had stolen it.”

  Peter let him recover on his own. “Sorry. I need to rent a car.”

  Henry wiped his bleary eyes. “Why would you want to do that? Just ask me, or Tynan will lend you his truck, I bet.”

  “I have to go to Kansas tomorrow to interview Jim Riotte’s brother. I’m going alone.”

  Tynan’s dusty truck jerked to a stop at the end of the driveway. He got out but didn’t try to help Henry to his feet; if Cammon had failed to reach out, Tynan wouldn’t presume. Henry stood up without aid and Peter handed him his keys.

  To Tynan, Peter said, “I need a car.”

  “You need a truck,” Tynan countered, and Henry appeared to agree. “Randy,” Tynan said.

  Henry perked up. The announcement of Peter’s solo trip hadn’t upset him, Peter noted, but a visit to “Randy” sparked real enthusiasm. “I’m coming. It’s out on the desert road, Peter. I’ve never been there but I gotta see it!” Peter would have to get used to Henry’s mood swings.

  “Peter, you’ll want to wear that flowered shirt of yours,” Tynan said drily.

  “I’ll drive,” Henry pledged, if only to assert that he was sober.

  Randy’s Rides lay thirty miles out west in the desert. It sprawled along a two-lane that appeared to have no purpose other than to bring errant car nuts to Randy’s lot. The vanishing point ahead ended in misted, isolated mountains, increasing the impression that this was a road to nowhere.

  The first thing Peter noticed about Randy’s Rides was that it used up a lot of desert. Cars and pickups of all vintages had been parked across corrals where horses once were confined, and there were enough tires, in beanstalk towers, to equip them all twice over. Randy’s notional office was a weather-beaten shed, and Henry honked for him to come out, which he did with no urgency. The eponymous owner displayed two weeks’ growth of beard. Navy tattoos of women decorated each bicep, and his stomach bulged like a steam boiler. He nodded to Tynan with evident respect, and Peter made a guess as to whether Randy was Mormon. He thought not. Randy made Henry for a cop and Peter for what he was.

  “You’re an Englishman. I got a Rolls somewhere out there.”

  “I had a rugged sedan in mind,” Peter said, knowing he was feeding a straight line to the Utahans.

  “He wants a truck,” Henry said.

  “He wants a truck,” Tynan chimed in.

  “I got a nice 1999 F-150. No serious collisions,” Randy stated.

  Peter tried again. “To rent.”

  Randy clapped him on the back. “Mr. Winston Churchill, why rent when you can buy? Or, as folks say out on this stretch, why rent when you can steal? My price is a few farthings. We sell gift cards, too.”

  “Give him a deal on a rental, Pastor,” Tynan said. Peter raised an eyebrow and Tynan explained. “Randy is an ordained minister of … what faith is that?”

  “The Church of Perpetual Motion. Keep moving fast enough and the Devil can’t corner you. Used to be the Keep on Truckin’ Church.”

  They went outside to examine the truck, but evaluation was a minor issue, since Randy assumed he had a deal. Now he was more determined to show off his “church.”

  “Come along with me.”

  The four men strode through the salty desert for about five hundred yards to a semicircle of Lincoln Town Cars that emerged from the sand like leaping ocean leviathans.

  “You like whale watching? Look at these humpbacks,” Randy proclaimed.

  “Where have I seen something like this before?” Henry said.

  “They got Carhenge off in the high plains, in Nebraska, I think, and Cadillac Ranch down in Amarillo, but those cars fire down into the ground. Look like they’re crashing out of the sun.”

  “I know how that feels,” Henry said.

  “But these luxury vehicles are reaching for the stars. Ain’t nothing like that in Great Britain.”

  Tynan volunteered to head back to Coppermount Drive in the Subaru while Peter and Henry tried out the truck, which all agreed was a bargain at $600 for a month’s rental, insurance included.

  “The deal’s renewable, or don’t even bother,” Randy stated. “Bring ’er back when you can.”

  A mild celebration seemed right. Peter drove the F-150 with Henry in the shotgun seat, while Tynan followed in the car. Henry guided them to a Mexican restaurant in a shopping plaza in the West Valley on the edge of Highway 15. After lunch, Peter walked across to a Shopko and purchased a Magellan RoadMate GPS. At a nearby Walmart, he bought a pack of blank rectangular address labels and six Sharpie pens.

  Peter’s energy remained high, even if Henry had by now conked out in the passenger seat. Here I am, he mused, in a mud-spattered pickup truck in a Walmart parking lot in Utah, with a Mormon drunk and a desert mystic. Why did he feel the need to reinvent himself each time he came to America? Because America is always surprising me.

  He sent Henry off with Tynan and, alone, drove around the city for a while. He was extraordinarily restless, thinking of the interstate to Kansas. The snow-tipped mountains that pincered Salt Lake City from three sides both enlivened him and made him feel hemmed in.

  When Peter reached the house, Henry was washing dishes. The act of domesticity failed to dispel the gloom. Theresa Pastern’s spirit wandered the desert house as sure
ly as the ghosts of the Watsons vexed Hollis Street. The green bottle was out of sight.

  “Do you like your new truck?” Henry called.

  “Yes. Many thanks.”

  Henry finished the dishes and drifted off to his bedroom. Peter waited five minutes and went to his. He broke out the labels he had bought, and for the next hour he annotated his U.S. map to reflect his research. If Devereau’s breakout from Hollis Street signalled a return to his terrorism career, it would be useful to clarify where he might slot into the modern world of “domestic terrorism.”

  Peter broadened his labelling effort to most of the country:

  Georgia: Atlanta Olympics, 1996 — bomb

  Michigan: Michigan State University, 1999 — arson

  Various: anthrax letters, 2001

  Various: mailbox pipe bombs, 2002

  Kansas: abortion clinic, 2009 — shooting

  Arkansas: recruiting office, 2009 — shooting

  There were more. Judges assassinated. Prosecutors taken out answering their front doors. Caches of weapons seized. He also parsed the list by organization and motive: anti-abortion fanatics, anti-government militias, animal rights radicals (the arsons by the Earth Liberation Front in Michigan and Washington), Aryan Nations, other religious extremists. Method counted, as well: bomb, anthrax, gun, kidnapping.

  There were intentional absences, too. He ruled out attacks by radical Islamists and episodes on the East Coast. For the moment, he wanted to believe that there was a distinctly Western take on terrorism.

  Henry entered the guest bedroom and glanced indifferently at the wall map. He was sober, but his face was pallid. “You know, I don’t mind your going alone.”

  “Thanks. I’d like to review the files with you as soon as I return.”

  “Peter, do you know what they say about you in the training course at Quantico? They say you would have found Kaczynski if his brother hadn’t turned him in first.”

  Few police colleagues knew the full story of Peter’s exploits. “But I didn’t find him, did I?”

  “I wish I’d been there,” Henry said in a self-pitying tone.

  There was no answer to this, and Peter, impatient to get on the road to Kansas, had no time for such self-absorption. He gathered his files from beneath the bed. “Here. Study these while I’m gone.”

  “Peter, I’m not sure I can kick the Green Dragon.”

  “Do your best. I’ll need your help very soon.”

  “You know the French loved the stuff? Rimbaud, Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec.”

  “Verlaine, as I recall, referred to the ‘green pillars’ of absinthe,” Peter threw in.

  “Rimbaud used to mix it with Jell-O. Green Jell-O, presumably. Think of it, Jell-O shots made with absinthe.”

  Peter was uneasy. He wanted to connect with Henry, but the common ground of a long-past literary education was a shallow premise. The French poets and painters were a far too morose bunch for a grieving husband to adopt as models. For another thing, Peter wasn’t ready to sink into his own history. He thought like a cop and not a professor of literature. There had been a point at Oxford when he had almost ditched his plan to join the Yard. He might now be a retired teacher, never having killed anyone.

  Never planning to execute anyone.

  Henry noticed Peter drifting. “Looking for patterns on your map, Peter? Here’s one. Ernest Hemingway shot himself with a Boss & Co. shotgun in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho, just up the road from here. J. Edgar Hoover had been tapping his phone for years. Oh, yes, Hemingway was a heavy absinthe user.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Peter rose early to the lure of the eastern sun. The night before, he had set the GPS to the quickest route into Kansas, and he was pleased with it: head north first, to Wyoming through the Rockies, then let the I-25 guide the truck south to Denver, and from there run a straight line on the I-70 to the Sunflower State.

  He loaded his valise with a night’s clothes and selected papers, including the Unabomber and Hollis Street sketches, and placed it on the passenger seat of the F-150. He sat the GPS on the dash, flanked by the polymer figures of Yoda and the broken plane.

  Peter felt comfortably solitary. Never did he get bored on the road. He listened to weather reports, country music, and abstruse talk shows about growing corn (“How to keep your cobs standing up”), and absorbed the view as it shifted from magnificent mountains to flat, peaceful plains. At 6 p.m., he reached the turn for the hamlet of Crispin Breach, although the immediate horizon offered nothing that qualified as civilization. The cornfields and amber waves were soon relieved by a shallow gorge cutting through nubby, sunburnt hills. Flash floods must be a constant concern, Peter judged.

  Crispin Breach, forty miles on, turned out to be a two-sided row of clapboard buildings sitting on dusty ground. He stopped at the gas pumps on the edge of the hamlet to ask for directions to the Friendly Trailer Park, which he had expected to see from the road. Flatlands stretched infinitely in three directions. The gas station operator, a grizzled philosopher from central casting, pointed him to the fourth, a dirt road winding into the gentle hills.

  He picked up on Peter’s accent. “You a tourist, or an anthropologist, maybe? Looking for the Friendly Trailer Park, you must be a digger for old bones. Half-alive bones. Beware of any American business with ‘friendly’ in its name. The place is rude and mean.”

  Peter thanked him for the string of non sequiturs.

  “You are welcome, my English amigo. My name’s Crispin.”

  The Friendly Trailer Park crouched less than two miles away, sheltered behind some small hills. No one challenged or welcomed him as he entered via the never-locked front gates. He drove slowly down the gravel lane and scouted for Number 17. Several trailers seemed abandoned. Mark Riotte’s pale blue double-wide stood at the end of the path. There was no one around to ask regarding Riotte’s whereabouts, and so he honked lightly. No one emerged from the unit, and he got out and tapped on the aluminum door, then again.

  The younger Riotte brother was thirty-five or so, wiry and about five-foot-six, and mangy overall. Peter at once wondered if Jim had been as short. Hollis Street consensus put Ronald Devereau at just under six feet, but Peter could not call to mind Jim Riotte’s height as recorded on his arrest sheet. Short enough to fit into a freezer, Peter supposed.

  “Who’re you? You police?” said Riotte through the door.

  “Yes. About the death of Jim. I need to pin down a few loose ends.”

  Peter was always surprised at how the direct approach got him through doors in America. Riotte let him inside. The place was as jumbled and unsanitary as Peter expected of a trailer park bachelor; also, it was larger than the few trailers Peter had been inside before, almost too big for one slovenly squatter. Riotte shifted a pot of Kraft Mac and Cheese to the back burner of his narrow stove, as if this gesture would improve the décor.

  “You can have a seat, if you can find one.”

  Peter stood. He scanned the room for guns. “When was the last time you saw Jim?”

  “I told the FBI agents. It was just after Oklahoma City went down. Middle of 1995.”

  Peter had to be careful. The more he prodded, the more likely Riotte would demand to see his credentials. He tried to avoid any hectoring tone that would imply an “active” investigation. But young Riotte seemed neither surprised by the visit nor afraid of cops. But he might be afraid of Devereau, Peter speculated.

  “No contact at all since then?”

  “I was only eighteen back in ’95. He weren’t my role model. Didn’t make me think one way or ’nother when he went missing.”

  Peter was never sure what Americans meant by the expression “gone missing.” Did he mean that Jim Riotte had made a choice to disappear, or had he been forcibly removed from the scene? It was hard to believe that the brothers hadn’t made contact. Then again, the hermit life seemed
to be a Riotte specialty.

  “Is it Marcel? Should I call you Mark?”

  “It’s both … either. Are there loose ends?” His look suggested that he was worried about something. Peter tried to see his point of view. The FBI agents had braced him already about his sibling’s disappearance. Perhaps, therefore, he should be afraid.

  Peter was sure that the cops hadn’t hammered on the theory that Devereau and Jim Riotte were different people, but Peter counted on them having mentioned it. He handed Mark Riotte the police sketch of Ronald Devereau. “This is a police artist’s rendition. Does this man look familiar?”

  Riotte cast him a condescending smile. “Mister, you know what ‘rendition’ means? It’s what they do to terror suspects.”

  Peter was torn between provoking this redneck and asking diversionary questions to keep him from challenging the unexpected arrival of a British-accented cop in his trailer park.

  “Your name is Marcel. Was Jim’s birth name Jacques or Jean?”

  “Jacques. Our old man was from the north of France, came over after Normandy, after the Liberation. I speak some French.”

  Peter resolved to keep him off base. He spoke faster. “Was it here you saw Jim for the last time?”

  “No. Over in Denver.”

  “Were you living here then?”

  “No way. Drive from here to Denver? Shit, no. We was in a house in Pueblo.”

  “Your family home?”

  “Yessir. Lost it to the bank after Jim vanished.”

  “Look at the picture, please.”

  It took a minute, but Mark Riotte began to nod. “That man is Shaw. Older now. Chin’s wrong. Eyes definitely off.”

  “First name?”

  “Casper. Met him just two times. The second time was in Pueblo … No, it was in Denver. Jimmy’s truck popped a gasket and I had to tow him to Denver …”

  Peter was breathless. Mark Riotte had just given a name to Theresa Pastern’s killer.

  “Did Jim tell you much about him?”

  “Really, not much at all. But Jimmy respected him. Called him inspiring. Talked about the Posse Comitatus, World Government. The Trilateral Commission. Sounded like a lot of empty theory, but Jim wouldn’t hear criticism of the guy.”