In Henry’s bedroom, Wanda had tired of holding the .45 in position, yet she refused to move, staying in her zone and resting the gun butt on the rug, still pointed at the doorway. Joan observed Wanda’s determined gaze. She instinctively became the younger woman’s spotter, and Wanda instinctively let her.
The shooting outside puzzled them. “That’s a pistol shot, but it’s at the front … A machine gun … A different pistol now,” Joan whispered.
Wanda grunted. “I think that one was that fancy-pantsy .45 Jackson bought last year … And that one, too.”
“I don’t hear the door splintering,” Joan breathed. “The gunmen aren’t trying to blow through the front.”
“Thank God we locked the door.”
Joan wished that she could tell which shots were Peter’s — maybe none of them — yet she felt her confidence rising. She guessed that he would come in from the desert side, relentless and with a big gun blazing. Anytime now. The thought gave her strength. She wasn’t looking for omens — no roadrunners on the patio now — but she glanced over at Henry’s bedside table and caught sight of three rolls of gauze bandages. How many bleeding men are lying around this building, she thought mordantly.
Joan had seen the panel fall. The subsequent pistol and shotgun detonations at the back of the house were menacing, but she now guessed that Peter was responsible for some of them. He was on the scene, getting closer, and she tried to think of a way to buy her husband a bit more time. She hissed, “One way or another, that window is going to help us. We need to listen for the crunch of shoes on glass.”
When Vyne came, Joan and Wanda heard his slow steps. The attacker paused in the outer room, and the crackle of glass stopped. “Calm before the storm,” Wanda voiced. “Do you think your husband is close?”
Joan was gratified that Wanda seemed to understand that Peter was near. “He’ll announce himself. The bad guys won’t. Shoot whatever appears in that doorway.”
Wanda adjusted her bead on the door. “Motherfucker.”
Shards of glass tinkled, scuffed by clumsy feet. The aggressor paused. Wanda seemed to expect this, and exhaled as Vyne turned the corner.
The killer knew his business. His machine pistol worked best when held at the hip and by someone who understood how effective short bursts could be against any defender. What he didn’t count on was the avenging woman in white lying on the carpet. Too late: he fired high. Wanda’s first shot took him in the collarbone at an upward angle, spinning him back and left; a fragment of bone whirled up into his throat. Her second shot penetrated his stomach and doubled him forward — causing him to grimace, despite the fact that he was dead.
Peter followed. He shouted “Joan!” to warn them, and reached down for the machine pistol, which Vyne clutched in his stiffening grip. There was no time to look at the man he’d been chasing since he arrived in America. No one knew how many attackers remained, front or back, but Peter felt a subsidence in the tension. He swivelled towards the patio and raised the Versa Max to guard the glass-strewn space, just as Henry and Jackson entered through the front. He turned to offer assurance and saw that they were in control. Pivoting back, he almost shot Tynan, who was unarmed, coming in from the desert. Peter noticed for the first time the polished wood box resting on the bed of glass outside Henry’s bedroom. Tynan rushed past Peter, grasped the container in both hands, and pelted back out the doorway.
Peter deposited his weapon on the floor and ran in pursuit. He was only seconds behind, but Tynan knew the desert better than anyone, and Peter foundered in the dark. He turned and gauged that he was at least 150 yards from the house, which glowed as a tiny square in the desert night.
The explosion happened another three hundred yards farther out.
“Tynan must have flown to get that far,” Phil Mohlman said later.
“Flown to his fate,” Henry replied, though under the words there was gratitude and respect.
“No,” Joan said. “He stayed earthbound. But fast as a roadrunner.”
PART 4
KILLER
Wealth dies,
Kinsmen die,
A man himself must likewise die;
But one thing I know That never dies — The verdict on each man dead.
Hávamál (Words of the High One), Viking poem.
CHAPTER 45
The Cammons left for England three weeks later, after furnishing sworn statements to the Utah State Bureau of Investigation. These, and their testimony by Skype a month later, with supporting declarations, satisfied the demands of the many agencies that aspired to a role in the investigation of the Coppermount rampage. Peter volunteered to return to Salt Lake City, but that proved unnecessary.
The shootout was wrapped up quickly and began its slow fade into the graininess of myth. Just like the Denver raid, it prompted mixed reactions. West Valley colleagues congratulated Henry, Phil, and young Jackson on the takedown of the resurgent terrorist but looked askance at the death toll. When asked why he hadn’t called 9-1-1 that night for backup, Phil Mohlman replied, “You mean, other than the four cops already on the spot?”
Chief Grady was grateful that the Hollis Street case hadn’t duplicated the Susan Powell tragedy, and he rewarded Officer Jackson with a promotion, while welcoming Phil back to the West Valley force on full operational duty.
Henry Pastern pursued new directions. Like Peter, he recognized that the victims of Hollis Street deserved a much better explanation of Kelso Vyne’s bizarre hermit life. Taking over the project started by Peter, he gave it a new title:
Kelso Vyne
A Biographical Essay
by Henry Pastern
with input from Chief Inspector Peter Cammon
and Maddy R. Cammon
Henry decided to approach this criminal profile less as a police affidavit and more as a literary product. He wasn’t about to romanticize his subject, but from the outset he grasped that, at his core, Vyne had been a compulsive wanderer, rootless and possibly friendless all his life. The essay would chart his nomadic life and eventual descent into uncontrolled anger and bitterness. Two months after the shootout, Henry embarked on this new form of manhunt.
In this effort Maddy proved invaluable. From Leeds, and sometimes Peter’s cottage shed, she engrossed herself in internet research in support of Henry’s fact-finding trips. She hovered benignly over his Subaru as he drove the Western states, town to town. Each night he emailed her with his map coordinates and a list of secrets he hoped to disinter up ahead. She worked magic for him, accessing primary-school records from Texas and Kansas, military service files from Colorado, Vyne’s incomplete transcript from the University of Michigan, tax records for 13 Hollis, and so on.
Henry fixed on a theme: Vyne’s uncanny ability to vanish, his will-o’-the-wisp persona. With every revealed fact, the young detective hoped, his quarry would gain focus.
Kelso Vyne was the unwanted son of an unsuccessful cowboy and an alcoholic mother. He was born in a shack in the Texas Panhandle but moved with his rambling father and camp-following mother to Kansas when he was two. Had this uprooting marked the beginning of his identity problem, Henry wondered? Had his “Western” bona fides quickly worn thin as he admitted to the Kansas farm boys in the schoolyard that he had lived in the Lone Star State only two years? Henry decided that early on the boy had developed uncanny instincts for reinvention and self-preservation. How else to explain his ability to disappear with minimal marks on, and from, his surroundings?
Henry was attuned to coincidences between the lives of Kelso Vyne and Theodore Kaczynski, for they might help to explain Kelso’s radicalization. Maddy exhumed an application to the political science program at Berkeley by young Vyne in the early seventies, and in a eureka moment Henry concluded that the two must have crossed paths there. But the dates did not coincide: by the time of Kelso’s application, Kaczynski had already quit his teachi
ng position and retreated to a factory job in Chicago. Henry and Maddy pursued them to Michigan and soon discovered an incomplete transcript for a “K. Vine” in the undergraduate philosophy program at Ann Arbor. They concluded that the two nascent revolutionaries might have met in the Buckeye State. Henry drove to Ann Arbor but was unable to discover the reason for Kelso’s abrupt departure, although it didn’t appear that the university had expelled him.
The trail thinned out for a few weeks, and part of the reason was Vyne’s proclivity for aliases. He left no criminal record under Vyne or Devereau and, according to Maddy, never registered at any university west of the Mississippi, and certainly not under his birth name. As Henry criss-crossed the states, he began to understand Kelso Vyne’s spectral anonymity. Here was an aspiring revolutionary on the make in the pre-9/11 era of the eighties and early nineties, who somehow ingratiated himself with Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh while gaining the loyalty of the evanescent Jim Riotte. This should have been a period of action and reputation-making. Yet, Henry saw, Vyne came to value his namelessness above all. It was the key to his interaction with the militia groups that sought to advance the varied demented objectives that were lumped together by the FBI as “domestic terror.”
Was Kelso ever fully committed to terrorism?
Since the Twin Towers, the spread of Facebook and Twitter, and, at the government level, the advent of data mining and National Security Agency worldwide information gathering, Americans had had a hard time believing that anyone could remain anonymous — or would want to. Vyne made anonymity his first principle.
Vyne had to consider where he fit into the universe of domestic revolutionaries. He would have known Mao’s cliché about the guerilla having to move silently among the people as a fish swims in the sea, and he may have embraced Abbie Hoffman’s principle that the first task of a revolutionary is to get away with it. Somehow, self-preservation became paramount. Perhaps one day he stood back and realized that no one had his fingerprints on file anywhere. He was well positioned to become the hidden theoretician of the anti-government movement, an intellectual in the mould of Trotsky or Frantz Fanon, working from the unphotographed background.
Henry and Peter discussed Vyne’s dilemma: What real impact could an abstract theorist like him achieve if he couldn’t infiltrate the paranoid right? Both detectives cashed in favours with former colleagues at the FBI to obtain militia membership rolls from 1980 to 2001, along with lists in the Extremist Crime Database, which covered the modern era of domestic terrorism. No names set off bells. Henry gave it up, not because he lacked a name to bounce off the crazies who populated the militant groups but because he grew to understand that Kelso hadn’t ever officially joined them. He was a mystery man to the radicals themselves.
Henry could feel Vyne hovering in the shadows. Even as Vyne tried to influence radical conspiracies, he had kept a certain arrogant distance. These cultish groups were too narrowly focused to suit his grandiose vision. He had become a snob. It was hard to imagine him adapting his theory of revolution to the animal rights movement or the anti-Semitic agenda of the Aryan Republican Army. Henry reread Fire and Brimstone, and it wasn’t there — no reaching out for coordination and no plea for a consensus on a new government.
Kelso learned the drug business — or, more precisely, the drug rip-off business. Many small-time dealers dealt under the radar of the cartels, and Vyne and Jim Riotte were fast and decisive when they swept up the cash-and-stash assets of these amateurs, selling off the drugs within twenty-four hours. Avelino González lived a long way off, and there was little he could do; cost-benefit analysis led him to write off the losses.
Vyne was so good at this that Henry, Peter, and Maddy rarely discerned his footprints in drug raids from that time, let alone his fingerprints.
That was another thing: he channelled his ill-gotten cash to individuals rather than the amorphous, shifting groups themselves. He saw that their leaders were too corrupt, greedy with funds, and resentful of competing revolutionaries. Better to find men of action with concrete plans who would serve as proxies for his own revolutionary ambitions.
Henry revisited the Vyne-Kaczynski connection, hoping that the Unabomber might offer the key to Vyne’s actions and perhaps his demise. Another visit to the Colorado Supermax was out of the question, so Henry worked with what he knew. Kaczynski dispatched his first homemade bomb in 1978. No one was impressed by this revolutionary strike, least of all the Postal Service, which only twigged to his pattern after the third or fourth device. But, Henry concluded, Kelso Vyne discovered Ted Kaczynski early in his bombing career and recognized a potential ally.
Had Vyne been involved from the beginning of Ted’s rampage?
Henry scrutinized the list of bombings until the overlaps began to glow. The first four Unabomber devices ended up in Illinois or Michigan, which Vyne and the bomber had in common. Kaczynski’s grandest assault in this first phase was the American Airlines flight in 1979, his third overall. It interested Henry for several reasons. Did Vyne, with little risk to himself, press Ted to attempt something big, like blowing up an airliner? He might have shaped Ted as the point man for anarchistic destruction of the established order. But even more interesting was the fact that Ted gave up on this kind of thing after one try and began to launch only perverse, individualized attacks. It seemed that the split between Ted and Kelso opened early. Ted’s stubborn streak of independence must have alienated Kelso.
The two had their final falling-out in 1987. This was Ted’s twelfth effort, which Alma May Reeve witnessed. Henry thought it significant that the seventh through twelfth incidents occurred in Western states, with the exception of another mailing to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Peter had been right. The Unabomber had shifted his efforts westward onto Kelso’s home ground.
Vyne had always despised Kaczynski, but when did jealousy set in? Vyne must have been astonished when the Unabomber achieved fame across the nation with his crude attacks on civilians. At the Spector Diner in 1987, he presented Ted with his spare copy of his anti-government screed, with “Fire and Brimstone” handwritten on the cover. He thought he had scooped his rival. Then Ted announced that he had started his own Manifesto. Vyne was so angry that he rushed out to plant Ted’s explosive device, meantime forgetting both copies of Fire and Brimstone. Only later did he realize the danger of giving the text to the demented bomber. Vyne would have turned him in, but Ted hunkered down alone in the Montana woods for the next seven years while he wrote his own magnum opus. It was another lesson to Kelso Vyne in the art of anonymity. The two never met again.
Up until the moment Vyne disappeared, he yearned for the big score. He had made dashing raids on drug operations, but the militias hadn’t noticed his élan or his grand design for revolution. His discovery of Timothy McVeigh revived his ambitions. McVeigh was a solo revolutionary with a plan of action, so extreme that the ultra-right militias in Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona were wary of him. He promised spectacular results through indiscriminate violence. Henry never figured out how the two met, but the files noted that Jim Riotte was convicted of buying large amounts of fertilizer in 1994. That September, McVeigh himself bought hundreds of pounds of fertilizer, along with incriminating quantities of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane. Henry presumed a Vyne-McVeigh hookup occurred at this time.
Ted Kaczynski was obsessed with technological oppression by corporate America and the U.S. government, and McVeigh remained a white supremacist to the end. Vyne must have had to swallow hard to ally himself with these losers, Henry thought.
Vyne’s disenchantment with Kaczynski and McVeigh mirrored his disillusion with himself. He had proven that he was capable of action, even killing five men in a drug raid — all Mexicans, it turned out, including Avelino González’s brother — and didn’t these high-risk high-noon skirmishes show that he qualified as a bold revolutionary?
But the militias rejected him, while his two proxies spun out of
control. The bombing on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City killed Kelso’s dreams of leading the revolution. Maddy put together the picture of his mindscape that spring: “The Oklahoma City attack was breathtakingly vicious, and Vyne realized that he had never possessed the guts for true anarchy. While Kaczynski and McVeigh hurtled towards exposure and self-destruction, Kelso retrenched and soon trapped himself in a new idealistic dream of middle-class life. Vyne would no longer work from the shadows; rather, he decided to merge with the background.”
Vyne and Jim Riotte vanished two months after Oklahoma City. Henry and Maddy were unable to track their wanderings between 1995 and 2003, when Kelso purchased the two-storey on Hollis Street. With his love for aliases, he likely ran through several false names and kept moving across the states, perhaps back to Texas. Vyne and Jim Riotte kept in touch. Henry doubted that Vyne’s stockpiled cash sustained him over those eight years, and he must have resorted to ripping off drug houses again with Riotte. When Maddy offered to crunch the numbers on all drug investigations — this time, a full study of huge data sets from 1995 all the way to 2013 would have required sophisticated regression analysis — Henry told her not to bother.
After Oklahoma City, Vyne turned his cunning mind to self-preservation. Henry read and reread the data on Kelso Vyne. Did he see the irony of embracing the lifestyle that McVeigh rejected and the Unabomber so heartily despised in his Manifesto? No matter; Vyne sat back in his new house and watched as Ted was sent to prison for life and Tim McVeigh shambled in chains to his execution.
He cultivated a fresh start in what he saw as a permanent sanctuary. He put cash into a down payment and signed “Ronald Devereau” on the mortgage papers. He embraced HASA, the street association, and though Jerry Proffet was a loudmouth, Kelso found common ground with him in setting and enforcing property standards along the quiet street. Early on, he served as president for a term before realizing that such a profile risked giving himself away. From then on, as was his style, he influenced the street committee from behind the scenes. In that respect, it resembled his old low-profile existence.
The Verdict on Each Man Dead Page 35
