Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  Horowitz nodded. “I guess the hell you did. Looks like all the ingredients for half a dozen men to dress up in fishing-vest bombs and blow themselves—plus anybody who happened to be nearby—into smithereens. You figure that was Shaw?”

  “I think it was Trapelo,” I said. “I think Gus just let Trapelo store his stuff here. I doubt if Gus even knew what was in those boxes.”

  “Trapelo,” he said. “So he killed Shaw?”

  I nodded. “And Pedro Accardo.”

  “Why?”

  “I think Gus and Pedro figured out what Trapelo was up to,” I said. “He thought they were going to turn him in, so he killed them. He might’ve thought Pedro told me about it. So he followed me here and tried to kill me and Herb Croyden, too.”

  “But you shot back at him.”

  I nodded.

  “And missed.”

  “Looks like I did,” I said.

  “Too bad.”

  “Guess it scared him away, anyway,” I said. “Luckily, he missed me and only nicked Herb.”

  “Yes, lucky.” Horowitz shrugged. “What else can you tell us?”

  I told the two homicide detectives that Pedro emphasized the number eleven, eleven, eleven, and I thought that Trapelo might’ve had something planned for Veterans Day, which was just a few days away.

  “Symbolic, huh?” said Horowitz.

  “Profoundly disturbed, if you ask me,” I said.

  He asked me a lot more questions, and Marcia Benetti chimed in with some of her own from the front seat. I answered them all as well as I could, and then they asked me to go over some things a second time, and to elaborate on some details, and they probed me with some questions that I couldn’t answer, and by the time they decided they were done with me, I felt like I’d been sucked dry.

  They did not ask about Gus Shaw’s photographs. I hugged the envelope holding the CDs inside my shirt and didn’t mention it to them.

  Maybe I was withholding evidence, but I doubted it. That box of C-4 was evidence enough to keep the police occupied for a while.

  Horowitz told me to keep my cell phone with me at all times, as he was positive he’d want to talk with me again in the next couple of days, and he wanted to be sure that I’d be available.

  It was after two in the morning when they dropped me off at my car where I’d left it in Concord center near the Inn. I got in and headed for home.

  I wondered if Alex was still upset with me. Knowing her, I guessed she probably was. But I figured that when I told her all about my evening’s adventures with suicide bombs and gunshots and police and ambulances, and when I showed her the envelope that held Gus’s Iraq photographs, she’d feel different.

  I parked on Mt. Vernon Street and went in my front door. Henry was waiting there with his tail wagging, and when I scootched down, he came over and lapped my face, then turned and trotted toward the back door.

  I let him out, then went to the living room.

  The television was not turned on, and Alex was not curled up on the sofa.

  I went upstairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t there, either. Nor did I find her on the daybed in my den.

  I looked out the front window to the Residents Only space on the street where she’d left her car the previous evening. It was gone.

  She was gone.

  I stood there for a minute feeling sad and alone. And then I smiled. Of course she was gone. She was Alexandria Shaw. She didn’t put up with a lot of shit—from me, or from anybody. That was one of the things I loved about her.

  I realized that in a small but important way, if I’d found Alex sleeping on the sofa or waiting upstairs in my bed when I’d come back home at close to three in the morning, or even if she’d been awake and pacing the floor angry and worried about me, my pleasure would have been mingled with a vague feeling of disappointment.

  I liked feisty, confrontational, independent, competent, autonomous, self-contained women. I liked women who knew what they wanted and went after it. I liked women who thought they were at least as important and capable and valuable as men.

  Like Groucho, who said he’d refuse to join any organization that would accept him as a member, I tended to lose interest in women who were overly tolerant of me.

  I looked on the kitchen table and counters for a note. I didn’t think Alex would leave one, and she didn’t disappoint me. She knew I could figure it out without having it explained. It was simple. I’d treated her badly, and she wouldn’t put up with it.

  I let Henry in. I realized that as late as it was, the evening’s adrenaline was still zipping through my veins. I was wideawake.

  So Henry and I went into my den. I fished the manila envelope out from inside my shirt and tore it open. Six flat plastic boxes slid out. Each held a plain CD on which someone—Claudia, I guessed—had used a black indelible marker to write “GS” and what I figured was a date, day and month—7/16, 9/12, 9/18, 9/19, 10/22, 12/8. I guessed those were the dates that Claudia had received each batch of e-mailed images from Gus and had transcribed them onto these CDs.

  I popped one of the CDs into my computer, and when it loaded I saw that there were 174 images. I clicked on one of them at random. It showed several men wearing military camouflage squatting on some sandy ground talking with a dark-skinned boy. The child was propped up by an improvised crutch. He had only one leg.

  Another image showed a skinny, dark-haired girl—she looked maybe thirteen or fourteen—leaning back against the exploded remains of a building. She wore a skimpy tank top and a denim skirt so short that it barely covered her hips. She had the bony legs and flat chest of a preadolescent, but the look on her face was old and corrupt, made more so by bright red lipstick and big round sunglasses decorated with rhinestones and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.

  If an ordinary picture is worth a thousand words, this photo of Gus Shaw’s was a whole novel.

  Each of the six CDs held between 142 and 179 images. Those I chose randomly to enlarge on my computer screen portrayed something Gus had seen in Iraq. Every one of them was painful to look at. Each managed to capture a psychological as well as a physical element of the human destruction that Gus found over there. Each had its story to tell.

  I put the CDs back into their boxes and slid the boxes into a big padded mailing envelope and stuck the envelope into the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. I shut the drawer and re-locked the cabinet. Then I leaned back in my desk chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  Phil Trapelo said he doubted the impact of Gus’s photographs. Trapelo was convinced that public attention could only be grabbed and held by something as stunningly dramatic and shocking as American veterans turned suicide bombers.

  I wished I felt more confident that he was wrong.

  Henry, who’d been snoozing on his dog bed in the corner, whimpered, stirred, got to his feet, and walked stiff-legged over to where I was sitting. He plopped his chin on my thigh and looked up at me with his big loyal eyes, as if he sensed that I was having Deep Thoughts and wanted to reassure me that all was well because he loved me.

  I gave his muzzle a scratch. “I wish it was that simple,” I told him.

  The shrill of the phone on the bedside table awakened me. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. I was surprised that Henry had let me sleep that late.

  I groped for the phone, pressed it against my ear, and mumbled, “Yes? Hello?”

  “I’m on my way over.” It was Horowitz. “I got the doughnuts. Be sure there’s coffee.” Then he hung up.

  I rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, splashed water on my face, and let Henry out. I’d made the coffee before bed, so the pot was full.

  I was halfway through my first mug when the doorbell rang. I went to the front door and opened it. Horowitz stood there wearing an old ski parka and holding the kind of cardboard box that would contain a dozen doughnuts.

  Beside him was a balding man of around sixty with a neatly tied necktie showin
g under his camel-hair topcoat. He was carrying a slender oxblood attaché case.

  I held the door open, and the two of them came inside. Henry shuffled over, sniffed their cuffs, found nothing interesting, and wandered away. Both men ignored him.

  Horowitz handed me the doughnut box. “This is Agent Greeley,” he said. He took off his parka and hung it in the hall closet.

  The bald guy held out his hand. “Martin Greeley,” he said. “FBI.”

  I shook his hand. “Brady Coyne. Family lawyer. Let me take your coat.”

  Greeley turned his back to me and let me slip his topcoat off his shoulders. He was wearing a neatly pressed charcoal suit under it, and he kept his grip on his attaché case.

  I hung up his coat beside Horowitz’s, then the three of us—four, actually, including Henry, who came trotting along beside me—trooped into the kitchen. Horowitz and Greeley sat at the kitchen table. Henry curled up under it. I poured coffee for the three humans, put out plates and napkins, and sat down.

  We all plucked doughnuts from the box, took bites, dropped little surreptitious hunks down to Henry, sipped our coffee, wiped our mouths with our napkins. Then Greeley reached into his attaché case and took out a manila envelope. From the envelope he slipped an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. He laid it on the table, looked at it for a minute, then turned it around and pushed it toward me. “Do you recognize this man?” he said.

  The photo was a waist-up shot of a young guy—late teens, early twenties, I guessed. He had suspicious eyes and a small mouth, with a scruffy pale beard and long blondish hair held back in a ponytail. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed a building in flames along with the words VIOLENCE IS AS AMERICAN AS CHERRY PIE. H. RAP BROWN.

  I looked up at Greeley and shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this person. Who is he?”

  He didn’t answer me. Instead, he took another photo from his envelope and showed it to me. It was a head-and-shoulders shot. “How about him?”

  This photo showed an older man with an angular, creased face and thinning gray hair combed straight back. I stared at the face for a minute, then looked up at Horowitz. “You know, this could be Philip Trapelo’s brother. There’s something about his eyes.” I turned to Agent Greeley. “Who are these guys? What’s going on here?”

  Greeley put the first photo of the young ponytailed guy beside the second photo. “This,” he said, poking the first one with his forefinger, “is a man named John Kinkaid. And this”—he tapped the photo of the older man—”is how our computer aged him thirty-five years.”

  I looked at Horowitz. He shrugged. I looked back at Greeley. He shrugged, too.

  I took another look at the two photographs. Then I got it. “Your computer has the right idea,” I said. “The shape of the face, the eyes, the set of the mouth.” I tapped the computer’s rendition of the older John Kinkaid. “Phil Trapelo’s face isn’t quite this wrinkled, and he wears his hair in a kind of military brush cut.”

  “You see it, then,” said Greeley.

  “I do, yes,” I said. “You’re telling me that the man I know as Phil Trapelo is somebody named John Kinkaid. And this”—I tapped the photo of the young guy with the ponytail—”this is Kinkaid when he was a young man.” I stopped. “Wait a minute.” I looked at Horowitz. “When Pedro Accardo called me that night? Right before he was killed? He mentioned the name John Kinkaid. I even Googled it. Got dozens and dozens of hits. So Accardo figured out who Phil Trapelo really is, huh?”

  Horowitz nodded. “You got it. Trapelo is Kinkaid,” he said. “Agent Greeley here has been on his tail for over thirty-five years.”

  “They extended my retirement from fifty-seven to sixty,” Greeley said, “so I could keep at it. I’ve got less than a year left, and I’ve never been this close.”

  “A lifetime’s work,” I said.

  Greeley nodded. “Go ahead and say it. It’s been an obsession.” He cleared his throat. “John Kinkaid was a brilliant student. Graduated high school in Keene, New Hampshire, a year early. Scholarship to Princeton. Double major, history and philosophy. Like a lot of young, um, idealists at the time, he dropped out at the end of his sophomore year and enlisted. So let me ask you something. You know this man calling himself Phil Trapelo, right?”

  I nodded.

  “How tall would you say he is?”

  I shrugged. “Not very tall. Five-eight, I’d say.”

  Greeley nodded. “Does he walk with a limp?”

  I frowned for a minute, then nodded. “Yes. He said he had a bad knee.”

  “Which leg?”

  I tried to picture Trapelo the night I’d met him at the VFW hall. “The right leg,” I said.

  “Eye color?”

  “Brown, I’m pretty sure.”

  Greeley looked at Horowitz. “It’s him.” He turned to me and smiled. “John Kinkaid was responsible for the explosions of two campus buildings in the early seventies,” he said. “The first, in 1970, was at the University of Wisconsin, the second a year later at the University of Massachusetts. Several people died. These were supposed to be anti-war protests. Kinkaid was the leader. He was a young Vietnam vet. He lost three toes to a booby trap over there. He was radicalized by the war, and then by poor care in the VA hospital, and then by some people he fell in with when he was discharged. Nowadays we’d diagnose him with PTSD. Back then, they called it shell shock and didn’t know how to treat it, so instead they tended to stigmatize those who suffered from it. Needless to say, that tended to radicalize them. The army had trained Kinkaid in demolitions. He was an expert. The Wisconsin blast was crude, though quite powerful—fertilizer and fuel oil loaded in a vehicle—but the second one at UMass was quite a bit more sophisticated. Plastic explosive and remote electronic detonation.” Greeley looked at me and shook his head. “I never for one minute believed that Kinkaid died in that explosion. We found a young man’s body in the rubble of that building. He was wearing Kinkaid’s dog tags, and he had Kinkaid’s driver’s license in his wallet. There wasn’t much left of him, but he was about the right size, shape, color, and age, so officially John Kinkaid was dead. Everybody was happy to believe he was dead and wouldn’t be blowing up any more buildings.” Greeley shook his head. “I never bought it. Kinkaid was smart and meticulous. I’d been studying him and hunting him for a year, since he got away with the Wisconsin explosion. He’d never screw up a detonation like that. But he was perfectly capable of murdering somebody and setting up his explosion to look like an accident.” Greeley smiled. “For most of my career I’ve been known as a crackpot obsessive by my colleagues. I’ve traveled to England and Canada and Argentina and Mexico, not to mention all over the United States, tracking down reported John Kinkaid sightings. I’ve never come close to him until now.” He looked at Horowitz and nodded. “Now I can taste it.”

  “You haven’t found him, then,” I said.

  Greeley shook his head. “In our computers, Philip Trapelo simply doesn’t exist. And we have very good computers.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I met him that one time at the VFW hall in Burlington. Everybody there seemed to know him. And then last night he apparently followed me to the Croydens’ place, shot Herb in the shoulder, and disappeared. I gave you his cell phone number. That’s all I know.”

  “Did he say anything about killing Shaw or Accardo?” said Greeley.

  I shook my head. “Not really. But I’m sure he did it. I think Gus and Pedro figured out what he was up to with the suicide bombs. Pedro evidently even figured out that Trapelo was really John Kinkaid.”

  “So last night in the garage,” said Horowitz. “What did he say?”

  I shook my head. “The man was holding a gun on us. There was a carton of plastic explosive on the floor. You expect me to remember what he said?”

  “Damn fuckin’ right,” said Horowitz. “Think, Coyne. Come on.”

  “Did you talk with Herb?” I said.

  “They’ve got him on
some big-time painkillers,” he said. “His shoulder got ripped up pretty good. He’ll be useless for another forty-eight hours.”

  “I’m not sure we’ve got another forty-eight hours,” said Greeley.

  “It’s Veterans Day,” I said. “That’s when Trapelo plans to do whatever it is he’s got in mind.”

  “Help us out, Mr. Coyne,” said Greeley.

  “You’re thinking he’s still going to do this?” I said. “Some kind of suicide-bombing demonstration?”

  Greeley nodded. “We have to think that way.”

  “But he left all his supplies in Herb’s carriage house.”

  “John Kinkaid would never store all his supplies in just one place,” said Greeley. “Decentralization is one of the first principles of terrorist warfare. My guess is he’s got small stashes of ingredients scattered all over eastern Massachusetts.” Greeley looked at me. “We’ve got to track this man down, Mr. Coyne.”

  “I’m trying to help,” I said. “Trapelo was ranting about how somebody needed to take the initiative—fire the first shot, was how he put it—and then he said …” I shut my eyes, trying to remember. “Actually,” I said, “what he said was ‘Let it begin here.’”

  “Fire the first shot,” said Greeley. “He said that?”

  “He used the term ‘the first shot,’” I said. “Yes.”

  “And he said, ‘Let it begin here’?”

  I nodded.

  Greeley turned to Horowitz. “Ring any bells with you?”

  Horowitz narrowed his eyes. “Sounds kind of familiar, but …” He shrugged. “Nope. Sorry. No bells.”

  “The Lexington village green,” said Greeley. “April 19, 1775. Remember Paul Revere’s ride? Remember the Shot Heard ‘Round the World? The first musket shot of the American Revolution was fired on the Lexington green. And the leader of the Minutemen, Captain Parker, said to his troops, ‘Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.’ They do a reenactment there around sunrise every April 19. Remember?”