I Kill Rich People: New Edition Released 11/27/14

by Mike Bogin

  They also knew his transportation. Motorcycle. “Mamaroneck’s forensics doc is a motorhead. Says the tires were Metzeler or Dunlop, 90 percent sure they are off a Harley-Davidson. That’s it for the official take, but guess what was called in to emergency services at 9:35 last night? An anonymous caller reported a motorcycle driving with no headlight in a single-vehicle crash on West Cove Road not two miles from the shooter’s position. Mamaroneck PD took the call and drove to the area. Nothing. They didn’t put two and two together at the time. So we’re going to check out West Cove Road.”

  Al drove the Long Island Expressway to 678, passing within a mile of Owen’s North Corona house. Owen had a bad feeling about that. The way Callie had said her kids.

  He should have gone home. Al could have picked him up and driven out from there.

  They drove 678 to 95 through New Rochelle. Owen felt queasy. May have been the driving. Maybe no breakfast. But eating didn’t sound good.

  “Can you work that thing?” Al asked, pointing at the GPS unit. “I’ll get us to Mamaroneck. See if you can make it work to get us onto West Cove Road.” Good technology, but Al still hated it. Damn thing took him halfway to Timbuktu most of the time.

  Five more dead.

  “Two uber-rich,” Al said. “Celeste Olstead was running Endeavor Associates. Rich from the get-go and very plugged in. Private company, assets apparently north of $5 billion. Khozirsky, the other billionaire, is a rags-to-riches story that might not stand a lot of scrutiny. Emigrated from the Ukraine in 1991 with a useless medical license. Went into hospital administration, started a software company, ends up buying more than twelve hundred hospitals with over twenty thousand beds after going public. Niche markets all over the country—ten thousand deliveries a year in California, started out with the Korean charter business and now minting American citizenship for babies from across Asia. Pretty much every tummy tuck and lap band in Georgia goes through his two Atlanta hospitals. The other three victims don’t appear to have worked for income. Trust babies. Janice Simpson wrote books on Jesus and spent a couple years on baby-killer siege outside a Hartford abortion clinic. Faradi was funding some alternative medicines work in Peru that might be a euphemism for cocaine trafficking except why would anybody do that when a fat check comes in every month? No idea what the other one, Marcus, was up to. Degree in Art History from William and Mary, music from Middlebury, philosophy from Amherst. Looks like a professional student for life. Forty-eight years old, probably never did a day of work.”

  Something occurred to Al, and he made a mental note to check into whether there had been any significant options trading or short-selling in any of the publicly-traded companies run by the victims. At least four entities had placed major bets against Keaner’s public entity and sold off at a huge profit, leaving an age-old motive for that killing. SEC data was pointing toward greed. This shooting was strange. One bullet casing found. The shooter had retrieved the others. Keaner’s shooter had left the one casing. The MO looked more Bigfoot, but why the mistake? Bigfoot didn’t make them.

  11:20. Traffic moving well. They could be there before twelve.

  After more than a half-hour in the car, Owen had not said a word.

  “You doing all right?” Al asked. “If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.” I talked Eamonn’s ears off too many times to count them all, he thought.

  Callie had been pushing hard to move for two years, ever since Liam had entered kindergarten. She had volunteered in his classroom that first week and came home crying. Liam was already reading. Only five children out of thirty-four even knew their letters. That was just the way it was. The teacher wasn’t even upset.

  “Thanks, Al. But I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Not even Mike knew about the mortgages.

  “With the first step,” Al responded. “Every journey starts with the first step.”

  Highway 95 swung west, making a wide loop northward before turning back to the east toward Long Island Sound. Owen considered Al’s offer, but he had no idea how to even begin. For

  all he knew, Callie might even be packing bags right now. He had never seen her quite this way. They should have sold the house and used the money to take care of Eamonn. That was Callie’s thinking, but he had dug in his heels. Their whole situation was on him.

  “Our next-door neighbors are moving. Now the wife wants us to move, too.” Owen’s voice trailed off. When did he ever call Callie ‘the wife’?

  Owen looked down at his hands where they were dropped against his thighs. There were still scabs healing on three of his fingers where they had been nicked by wires. He bent his fingers inward and examined his fingernails. Red sores beneath where he had cut them too short when he had tried getting at the grime underneath. Al glanced over, saying nothing, leaving Owen to take his time. They were approaching New Rochelle: factory outlet mall, warehouses, shitty shacks, and old apartment blocks.

  “You’re in your dad’s house, right? Some women need to make a nest of their own.”

  “I’d move. I wouldn’t, but now I would. Only we can’t do it.” It wasn’t like with Mike and Shelley, just getting a real estate agent and putting up a sign.

  “What stands in the way?” Al wasn’t sure whether to get off at 125 or keep going to Fenimore Road, but asking Owen for directions was going to close the little crack in the window that Owen had opened up. He decided to keep going to Fenimore.

  “When Dad started going downhill, we moved back into the house. Liam was still in a crib. It was OK at first, really good some of the time. Dad used to hold him and sing, too, like I hadn’t heard him since I was a little kid.”

  Even near the end, when he didn’t recognize anyone, Eamonn would sometimes connect to those songs. Just like when he was a child in Ireland, if they had nothing else, they had the songs.

  “After Dad got worse, about a year on, we had to move him downstairs and I set up a bed in the front room. We had to put things away: pictures, tea cups my gran sent over. Things were getting broken a lot. Dad could go a month not noticing and then, out of nowhere, he’d get yelling about people stealing. Sometimes he would search for his service revolver.

  They finally did an MRI and tested him for the Alzheimer’s. After that, Callie couldn’t go back to work. We had to unplug the stove so he couldn’t use it or he’d have burned the house down.” Owen gulped and stopped for a second, feeling surprised at hearing all of the words pouring out from his own mouth.

  He smashed his own TV to pieces and Liam was crawling right on the glass. The baby was bleeding and crying and Dad didn’t even know. We had no choice then; we had to get him into a home. Seven thousand dollars every month just for the room and food and 24-hour care. Seven thousand.” Overnight, the cost had broken them.

  Al winced from the image of the Big Man brought down so low.

  “No power of attorney,” Owen continued. “No living will. Nothing.” The hurt Owen still felt came across like it was yesterday. “We had to get court approval just to use retirement funds to pay his bills. It took us ten months to get back the money we laid out. Everything Callie made by going back to work went straight to the credit cards. Thirty thousand dollars. We never owed anything before that.”

  At Fenimore, Al pulled off the Thruway, turning right for Mamaroneck with only a half-mile to go. The tank showed two-thirds full, but Al moved into a gas station so Owen would keep talking. Owen hardly noticed that they were stopped.

  “Dad was too much for them, so they forced us to take him to another facility that cost even more. Callie told me to sell the

  house and use the money for Dad. But I wouldn’t do it. I took out a mortgage instead, which we co-signed, along with a line of credit.”

  It was so easy. The notary even came to the house when Owen signed the final paperwork. He wasn’t worried. Home prices were always going up.

&n
bsp; “We reroofed the house, we replaced the water main, and got the porch rebuilt,” Owen continued. “They were falling apart. Then Dad died and there were the funeral expenses. So, in a nutshell, now we have the two kids in a rattling old house with no garage and bad wiring with mortgages for a lot more than the place is worth. The only thing we have to show for it is a Chevy Tahoe with sixty-one thousand miles and new tires. I did that to my wife and kids.”

  Owen pictured every detail of the facility, the one where Eamonn had finally ended up. It had looked like an old motel: one story, concrete block walls, the gray linoleum hallway, old lighting fixtures, two people to each room with hospital beds separated by a curtain. Not even a chair to sit on.

  When he looked out the car window at the gas station, Owen was momentarily disoriented. He looked at the strange car and then across to Al before remembering where they were going and why.

  Al pictured his mother, Trudy. All five feet of her. Survivor of Auschwitz. Kennedy Democrat. Still watching CNN and using her magnifying glass to read every page of the paper every day. Still a Yankees fan. She was slowing fast, but always worried more about him than about herself.

  Owen’s tone shifted. “Our best friends next door bought the kind of house Callie dreams about,” Owen said angrily. “Just last night they told us.” He turned to Al and asked, “So what you think, Al, maybe I should sit down for a dozen or so boilermakers? That would be about right.” Owen wished that he had not said what he did about getting hammered the moment it came out. Running his mouth.

  “Let me, an old man, tell you this one truth. Houses, cars. They don’t matter. That house, it’s a thing. Your home is your wife and your children,” Al said. “Hang onto family.”

  * * * * *

  Spontaneous memorials sprouted along Fenimore and at the corner of West Boston Post Road. When they reached the beach club, Al engaged one of the Mamaroneck police officers. Owen felt himself drawn toward the spot where the victims had been killed. The shift was complete; he was back in working mode. He walked around the building and stepped over the yellow police tape. Advancing toward the tent, he could see white beach lounges on green lawns across the bay. He raised both arms as if holding an imaginary rifle and sighted over the water. The shots seemed impossible. Bigfoot had killed five people…from there.

  Al caught Owen staring down the imaginary rifle barrel and scanning across the water.

  “This guy killed five people with five shots, from there,” Owen emphasized. “From there,” he repeated himself, pointing to the far side of the water.

  “Six shots,” Al corrected, feeling breathless in the glaring sun and stepping back underneath the tent. “He missed with one.” An errant bullet had shattered the ice sculpture that was now just a puddle of water inside a shallow pan and a dripping tablecloth. All the same, a chilling wave washed over both of them. Until that moment, the distance between sniper and victim had been a number. It was an abstract thing—until now, as it was put into scale.

  Owen felt afraid. He didn’t like it.

  From the beach they drove back into the town and south past the marina and both coves before turning left to catch Rushmore out toward the shooter’s position at a property for sale on the Sound. More yellow police tape was around the real estate signpost and tied across the top of the driveway to the closest

  tree. They parked in front of the tape and walked back along the driveway, past the small red flags demarking the location of the tire marks. Another hundred feet ahead, the yard opened out to a staggered line of tall trees that had been topped to allow expansive views from the upper windows. The sellers had wanted to tear out the trees and open up the entire water view, but their real estate agent put them on notice that doing so would violate local ordinances and potentially land them in court. Now, after television crews had been showing their empty house across every news channel, they were sickened, ready to throw in the towel and pull the listing. They were in the midst of a heated discussion with their agent inside the house. More red flags were stuck into the soil all around the shooter’s hide. If the camouflaged screen had not been shifted to expose the shallow hole, it would have been easy to walk right past. Tufts of beach grass had been placed in front, leaving only six inches of area open for the gun barrel. The Mamaroneck police officer there pointed out the depressions made by the shooter’s bi-pod, a two-legged stand wherein the rifle itself becomes the third leg. He went further to point out that the distance between the bi-pod and the aperture between the grasses would indicate the use of a suppressor attachment. The suppressor, like the name implies, decreases both sound and flash, thereby protecting the shooter from detection. “The weapon measured approximately 40 inches. The recovered cartridge is a NATO 7.62mm, meaning he was most likely using an M110.”

  No, he himself wasn’t a sniper, the officer explained. He had done two sniper training courses. Two tours of duty in Iraq. Military police. This was light-years beyond anything he could do, shooting across the water at night and hitting five targets. The camouflage alone was art. “Sonofabitch is a stone-cold killer, but the man has skills. Serious skills,” he said.

  An impression in the flowerbed was demarcated by a thick yellow circle of spray paint. Al had no need to ask the measurement. The mud had cast a perfect imprint of size- thirteen Nikes.

  “This guy needs to be dead,” the PD officer said aloud. “Mamaroneck is a good place. Who is going to feel safe here again after what he’s done?”

  The real estate agent, a carefully-dressed woman nearing sixty, was stretching and leaning to wrestle her signpost out of the ground as Al and Owen returned to the car.

  There were four Cove Roads. Starting at the corner of Orienta, Al drove with the windows open, telling Owen to look for skid marks, scratches into the asphalt, anything broken. Whatever looked like there may have been an accident. They drove the entire loop, 0.6 miles. Nada. Al counted sixteen houses, some mansions amongst these, two greens, one tee, and the country club. Again. Nothing.

  They drove through the parking lot to the doors of the country club, parked under the porte-cochère, and walked in past the valet, who jumped up to try to take their keys. A doorman dressed in crisply-pressed dark green pants and a kelly green polo quickly wiped the sweat off his forehead as he led them inside the oak-paneled lobby. The carpeting exactly matched the doorman’s pants.

  Al walked fast, straight to the reception desk where the golf club assistant manager, Marty, asked, “May I help you?” His gold nametag was pinned onto a dark green jacket.

  “Last night. There was an accident.” Al pointed outside. “Out there.”

  “I would have heard of it, sir. I was right here from three until half-past eleven. Members and staff reported nothing about any accident in the lot.”

  “Not in the lot. Out there! On the street.”

  “Sir, there is no need to shout. Nothing was reported.” Marty

  waved to a foursome coming past from the bar. Everything was A-OK.

  Al jammed his fist inside his pocket, retrieving his

  identification. FBI. Owen, likewise, offered up his temporary FBI ID.

  “I don’t know if this is anything,” Marty responded, “but maybe seven or eight people were right over around here when I was coming in to work.” He pulled up the course map and highlighted a spot on the street behind the eighth tee.

  Cove Road had a posted speed of 25 miles per hour. Al drove 45, stopping abruptly at the intersection of East Cove Road and Cove Island Road. Five Cove Roads. He left the car in the middle of the street and got out with the motor running. Owen was still buckled in the passenger seat.

  Across an area twenty by thirty feet, Al picked up on something that he had missed earlier.

  Owen came around to the driver’s side, got behind the wheel, and pulled the car to the edge of the lawn across the street. “Are you going
to tell me what it is or you going to keep this to yourself?”

  “Damn it,” was Al’s only reply.

  At the nearest house, one of the four garage bay doors opened up as an older man drove out from the garage aboard a yellow and green zero-turn John Deere lawnmower, using the steering arms to maneuver toward one of the flowerbeds in his manicured acre of front lawn. He was wearing beige Bermuda shorts, a white golfing shirt, tan loafers, a golfing hat, goggles, and headphones. Owen left Al in the street and approached the mowing man, waving to get his attention. He continued mowing until Owen was standing beside him.

  “What!?”

  Yes, there had been people outside, the man said. They were working on the street for over an hour that morning. Woke his wife up at 6 a.m. Before breakfast! No, nothing last night, not that he knew about.

  Owen caught a whiff of bleach but couldn’t see anything unusual.

  Al banged both hands on the hood. “Damn it!” he yelled, angry at himself. “I should have been here last night with a Bureau forensics team in tow. Somebody put two-and-two together.”

  Owen shrugged. He failed to understand.

  “Bleach!” Al walked over to the edge of the man’s prized lawn and pointed out where the grass was chemically burned by the alkalinity. Next he swept his finger around a wide area where the asphalt was newly pressure-washed and looking pristine.

  “Nobody cleans up unless there is blood,” Al thought out loud. “Blood equals DNA.