The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Peter’s wife had always maintained that her husband was quite capable of excitement but that he was always careful about it. Now here he was, driving to consult one evil killer/terrorist about another one, and he was both excited and wary. He had begun this journey to America with an unbridled resolve to trap and expunge this evil, yet the facts had begun to chip away at his image of the killer as a terrorist mastermind. He wished that he knew more about Devereau, whose behaviour displayed pettiness and impulsive violence as much as diabolical control. Peter remained convinced that Devereau was a psychopath, frustrated and pathologically ever more desperate. Could Peter still manage to kill this man? Would he be content with merely bringing him into custody?

  The Supermax worked hard at creating a force field of isolation. It sat out of sight of the town of Florence, although a golf course bordered the prison grounds. Penitentiary facilities, in Peter’s experience, mimicked ancient forts, with an outward calm and silence masking the expectation of a direful attack — except that no one had ever breached the Supermax, in or out. Peter pulled up to the long entrance road, with its small-font, mundane sign announcing “Administrative Maximum Facility, United States Penitentiary.” He eyed the complex of low-slung buildings. An architect can only do so much to beautify a maximum-security prison. Rolls of razor wire topped double fences to confront any escapee with a steel maze, and cylindrical guard towers set up cross-hatched lines of sight across every foot of the grounds. There was no exercise track for the high-security inmates. All life was controlled. Here the prisoners endured in cruel amber.

  Peter left the truck in the visitor’s lot, which contained about forty cars. The layout of the complex channelled everyone to the reception room and commanded them to sign in with the institutional duty officer. Peter entered with a group of families, all of them hot and frazzled. He had to wonder how often they made this journey.

  A six-foot-tall, barrel-chested African-American correctional officer was taking details from a weary woman and her mother. He looked up and made Peter for a cop. Finishing with the women, whom he buzzed through a heavy door, he wandered over, and Peter presented his ID. Calling up the appointment, the big man announced, “You have a Law Enforcement Interview scheduled. I’ll give you an attorney-client room. However, since you are not the inmate’s counsel, Chief Inspector Cammon, he will be in leg and hand restraints and a belly chain at all times. Your escort will collect you here. Please read these instructions while you wait. Shouldn’t be five minutes.” He inked Peter’s hand with a rock-concert stamp.

  Peter was startled by the arrival of Corporal Youngman in a fashionable suit; he had expected a Bureau of Prisons uniform. Youngman displayed a square jaw, cold eyes, and very controlled amiability. The Special Investigative Service officer smiled. “We must have almost followed each other down from Denver.”

  He reviewed the sheet of institutional rules with Peter but treated them cursorily. No contact, no cursing, no publication of inmate statements, and so on. “But you knew all that stuff, Chief Inspector, I’m sure. Here, put on this ID badge. Wear it at all times. I’ll escort you to the interview space.”

  Peter followed Youngman through a dozen doors, buzzed open in sequence by anonymous hands. Soon he was lost, disoriented in a windowless world. That could be the point, he mused.

  “We have to talk about one thing,” Youngman said as they stop-started down corridors from one iron door to the next. “It’s not happenstance that we’re giving you a lawyer’s room. We want Kaczynski to open up to you. He knows all his legal rights intimately, so he’s certainly aware that attorney-client confidentiality doesn’t apply when a police officer gets friendly. But he was extremely keen to talk to you, and we’re curious why.”

  Perhaps because he’s bored and crazy, Peter thought.

  “You intend to record our discussions?” Peter prompted.

  “Yeah, we will be doing that, sir. I admit, we’re walking a legal tightrope here. Inmates know that any conversation is subject to recording, other than with counsel or a priest — that’ll be the day with Kaczynski. We believe we’re not misleading him by arranging this environment. What do you think?”

  “I have no objection,” Peter answered, although he knew that nothing he could say would alter the plan. He realized why Youngman had shown limited curiosity about Peter’s questions. He would soon have it all on tape anyway. Peter had no idea what Youngman hoped for and didn’t particularly care. Recording the interview wouldn’t affect Peter’s interrogation style.

  The consultation room was a large concrete box with a table and two chairs and a small, square one-way observation window. There was a door at each end; as Peter took his designated chair, he understood that guards would usher Kaczynski in through the far portal. Youngman repeated the most important of the advisories: “Don’t get physically close. Watch for mood changes. Don’t make promises.” He looked abashed at the last instruction, aware of Peter’s vast experience as an interrogator. “Good luck,” he said, and left Peter in featureless solitude.

  Twenty minutes passed. Peter never wore a wristwatch, and the guards had retained his mobile, along with his truck keys, money, and comb. A number of vagaries, including a change of heart by Kaczynski himself, might nix the meeting. But Peter remained patient and intrigued: the Unabomber had pushed to see him at the first opportunity, and if all he had wanted to give over was Ronald Devereau’s birth name, he could have mailed a letter (although, Peter considered, perhaps Kaczynski harboured an aversion to the U.S. Postal Service). No, Ted had an agenda. Twenty-three hours a day in solitary conditions, and you tended to conjure up elaborate agendas, Peter reasoned.

  Ted Kaczynski entered in chains through the far door, a guard moving him along by the shoulder. The prisoner’s orange jumpsuit surprised Peter, and with the restraints, it seemed punitive. Ted had resided here for many years and must have mastered the rules. Had he breached them lately? The tug and pull of small privileges doled out by the prison administration was important to the Supermax inmates, and Peter hoped that Kaczynski was in a benign mood.

  The Unabomber was clean-shaven, and his face had thickened on all planes over the years, but he had retained his dense mop of wiry, uncombable hair, now gray — and he suffered inevitably from prison pallor, like a disease.

  Ted’s sidelong look at Peter began the dance. Peter knew that he wanted something, and he might well get it in return for the information he had to offer. Peter had prepared strategies to create a rapport.

  He deliberately spoke first. “My name is Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, New Scotland Yard.”

  The Unabomber jangled to the other chair and sat down, waiting while the guard locked him to the ring welded to the table. Judging that all would remain peaceful, the guard left them alone.

  “You’re English. I like the English.”

  Kaczynski’s voice was raspy (from disuse?) but Peter heard educated notes in the timbre. He recalled that Kaczynski had a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. The prisoner made eye contact, although his expression offered little access to his thoughts. Peter let him talk and tried to concentrate on each word.

  “I often listen to National Public Radio in my room at night. Early morning, it switches to the BBC, sometimes Radio Australia. I like the accents of the announcers.”

  Peter offered a wan smile. “You may be wondering why I’m here, all the way from England.”

  But Ted lived full-time in an elaborate memory palace whose geography did not include present-day England. “Do you time-travel back to the old days, Inspector?”

  Peter adjusted quickly. “February 23, 1987. The incident in the parking lot at East 900 South in Salt Lake City. I investigated it.”

  Kaczynski nodded, with a touch of arrogance showing. “You worked the Yorkshire Ripper case. Scotland Yard loaned you to the FBI because of it.”

  Peter had fully expected Kaczynski to show off his int
ellect, but this was just internet research.

  “Why did they equate me with a sex predator like Sutcliffe?” Kaczynski added.

  Ted had a point — granted, he wasn’t a pedophile like the Ripper — but Peter wasn’t interested in rhetorical debates about long-faded issues. The Unabomber tensed and fought to conceal his anger from the watchers at the square window. Peter watched the cogs turning as the madman indulged his bitterness.

  “The federal police are despicable, taking my house and possessions for selling.” The Unabomber’s mock-Thoreau cabin had travelled around the United States for years since its uprooting from the Montana woods, ending up in the Newseum in Washington.

  Peter moved to insinuate himself into Kaczynski’s memories. “February 1987. A cool and clear day. You took the bus down from Helena to Salt Lake. You carried a device in a white canvas bag. It was pretty heavy, being made of two steel pipes and blocks of hardwood. Tell me, was the computer store your original target?”

  “I did not intend to kill anyone,” Kaczynski rushed to say.

  Peter fell silent, allowing the bomber his tidbit of justification. No doubt the prisoner remembered that day well. The parking lot attack stood out in the evolution of his terrorist career, not to mention the deterioration of his mind. It had been as vicious as it was irrational, and Ted knew it. Psychopaths forget nothing; slights and blunders in particular lurk close to the surface.

  Peter continued to call up the details. “I think you originally targeted the University of Utah, which lies just up the road. You’d tried there before, hadn’t you?” The UNABOM, as he was then called by law enforcement, had planted a device in a corridor in the university complex in 1981, but police defused it.

  Kaczynski was stolid as a tombstone. Any minute, Peter expected, the aging terrorist might cut off their conversation. Peter went for broke.

  “But first, you had arranged to meet up with Jim Riotte and the man I know as Ronald Devereau, but you probably called Casper Shaw, in a diner around the corner from the computer shop. Why? Did they promise to drive you to the university?”

  “No. Are they alive?”

  “Riotte is dead. Shaw killed him.”

  “Casper Shaw is alive?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “You never trusted Shaw, am I right? And it wasn’t your idea to go after the computer store owner, was it?”

  Peter readied himself. Now came the challenge to Ted’s ego.

  “No,” Ted answered. “Shaw was weak.”

  “You knew him as Shaw?”

  Ted, adopting a sly look, said, “Shaw? … We’ll call him that.”

  Although they had only an hour, Peter let a full minute of silence pass. Kaczynski was embarrassed. His marathon of mail bombs and planted devices had been indiscriminate and heartless but the small computer business had been an odd target even by his standards. It certainly did nothing for his legacy. No one had been impressed by the attack, so petty and arbitrary.

  And Peter knew what Ted was thinking. Shaw is weak but I’m the one locked up in here.

  “It was winter. The diner was warm,” Peter continued.

  Kaczynski acknowledged this, but riposted, “You don’t understand. My plan was to mail the bomb. I won’t tell you where to. The diner was two miles from the post office. Shaw refused to drive me there. He tried to persuade me to leave it on the ground outside.”

  Peter leaned forward, but not within range of the dog chain. “There was something else. Who arrived at the diner first that morning?”

  “I did. What does that matter?”

  “You brought along a copy of The Turner Diaries to read in case you had to wait. The waitress saw it. Let’s talk about the manifesto.”

  This time Kaczynski jerked back in his chair. A look of mixed anger and fear came over his pallid face. “I got it published,” he croaked.

  “That’s not the one I’m talking about.”

  Ted pulled reflexively against his chains. The guard opened the door, sized up the dynamics, and went out again.

  Peter had been allowed to bring in a soft bag to hold his papers. He took out Alma May’s unstapled photocopy of Fire and Brimstone. The Unabomber gaped.

  “Ted, am I right that one of the reasons you allowed Shaw to change your mind was his promise to give you his essay-in-progress? It was a cold day. You might as well leave the bomb around the corner, he argued. He invited you to collaborate on a revolutionary manifesto. Move the revolution forward. It was easy. He promised to be your ally, your first collaborator.”

  Ted snapped back, “Oh, I’d met him before, in Montana. He wanted to be my friend then. Lent me some books …”

  His tone was defensive. From his years of interviewing witnesses, Peter knew that criminals with something to hide tend to fall into formal phrasing. Kaczynski gathered himself. “It is true that his short manifesto gave me, in part, the idea of writing and publishing my own statement of my philosophy. His never achieved publication.”

  “And it never will,” Peter said, tossing Fire and Brimstone onto the table. Ted smirked. “But Ted, I want to know exactly what happened next. Let me see if I’ve got this in order. When Shaw arrived with Riotte and offered to give you one of only two copies of his treasured manuscript, you had a fight. He made an excuse to leave.”

  “I went for a piss. He was already out of there when I returned. He never asked my permission to leave. It wasn’t the plan.”

  Peter thought he knew the sequence of events but wanted to hear it from Kaczynski. “What, then?”

  “Detective Cammon, you’re missing the big thing! While I was in the bathroom, Shaw took the bomb with him. He planted it in the parking lot. Cold bastard. Riotte confirmed what his buddy was doing. When Shaw returned, I was long gone, and with my copy of his essay.”

  “Why didn’t you go after him when you came out of the loo … the toilet?”

  Kaczynski looked embarrassed. “I was in the can fifteen minutes. I had a case of the runs. Diet up in Montana … Now you tell me he left his own copy behind, too!”

  Peter fought to keep the rapport. “The witness saw Casper Shaw, but you didn’t see him again?”

  “No. I just took off.”

  “Shaw arrived that day wearing a hoodie, am I right?”

  “I never wore a hoodie, and after that, made sure I never did. He had a pencil-thin moustache and shades, never me.”

  “I always wondered why the figure in the wanted poster looked nothing like you when you were arrested. I came across a sketch of Devereau in the context of two other crimes and realized that it was the wanted man from the poster. Or maybe Jim Riotte; they looked similar.”

  Kaczynski remained fixed on Fire and Brimstone. “Yes, they did. But it was Shaw who wrote that half-assed document and Shaw who left my package out there.”

  “The waitress filled me in on the rest. Do you want to know?”

  “Yes, I certainly do, Inspector.”

  “Riotte stayed behind in the diner after you left. When Shaw returned, he was angry and must have realized that he was in danger now that you had his manifesto.”

  Ted guffawed. “They gave me the photocopy and forgot the original from under the table. How’s that for a Freudian slip? He leaves behind his only two copies! Some revolutionary. He came looking for me a week later, but I avoided him, hid away my duplicate of his essay. Can’t call it a true manifesto …”

  “Do you still have your copy?” Peter said.

  “Nope. I used a few ideas from it in my Manifesto. Ignored it, mostly.”

  Peter knew from Maddy’s thorough text comparison that this was a lie. He had borrowed extensively from Fire and Brimstone, no doubt infuriating Devereau. The Unabomber dodged him for the next decade. Devereau must have searched, but like everyone else, he didn’t know about the one-room cabin in the Montana forest. The publication of Ted Kaczyns
ki’s Industrial Society and its Future in the New York Times and the Washington Post in September 1995 must have alarmed Devereau, but by then Ted was out of reach. Ted’s rivals decided that their only option was to fabricate a new persona and vanish.

  There was one more issue to cover, and both men went for it. Ted, apparently gratified that someone else now knew about the Utah mess, crossed his legs to the rattle of the chains. It was hard to appear insouciant in an orange jumpsuit, but at least he looked self-assured.

  “What has Mr. Shaw been up to recently, Chief Inspector?”

  “Murder. Arson. Aggravated assault. Misuse of firearms. Drug pushing.”

  “Anything in the line of what they now like to call ‘domestic terrorism,’ as if Islamists don’t operate inside this country?”

  Peter, struggling in the last minutes available to find a way to get Ted to offer up Devereau’s birth name, didn’t answer. He took out the broken-winged polymer plane that he had found in Ronald Devereau’s garage and set it on the table, where Ted could reach it if he wanted. This risked the guard barging into the room.

  “You like to carve things, especially out of wood, Ted. This is a toy made with a 3-D printer by your rival, Shaw. I believe he was practising making bomb components out of polymer resin. Of course, they don’t approach your artistry. But we found residue on the scene of two bombings in the last two months.”

  “What did he attack?”

  The air was heavy. They were moving to an ending, after which they would never see one another again.

  “Two narcotics operations. To finance his terrorism plans,” Peter lied.

  “So he’s back in the terrorism business,” the Unabomber said flatly.

  “Maybe.”

  Kaczynski sneered, ugly as only a burning-out psychopath could be. He felt superior, Peter could tell. He could read Ted’s mind. The last copy of Ronald Devereau’s tract was sitting on the nailed-down table, and Devereau would never be able to transform Fire and Brimstone into a blueprint for attacking industrial society, nor ever steal Kaczynski’s notoriety. Ted smiled, a man with all the time in the world, who could wait for this British policeman and his ilk to complete the final dirty work of catching his rival.