In the Evil Day

  So Couture, more astonished than frightened, turned right around, retreating with the others to a grassy knoll at the south end of the snack bar, a spot that offered less cover but at least a line of sight to any approach from the gunman’s direction. They couldn’t see the parking lot from there, though.

  They waited, listening, their blood and nerve ends singing. The gunfire had stopped, and none could say how long it was—probably thirty seconds or so—before Breton said he was going to circle through the woods and brush below the cemetery and then come up behind the guy.

  Albert Riff was still at the supermarket door, opening it when necessary for other ashen-faced refugees from the parking lot and directing them back to the stockroom in the rear of the store. The glass of the windows and doors was like a membrane separating two different universes. In that other universe, a predator stalked as fearlessly as it might in a video game.

  Riff couldn’t see what happened in the grass at the end of the parking lot, but he heard the four shots. When the gunman came back into view, Riff saw him climb in a leisurely manner into the orange pickup and try to start it. Riff could hear the motor turning, but it wouldn’t catch.

  That was when he saw a Colebrook police cruiser speed down the ramp and stop near the second state police cruiser. Riff stared as the gunman got out of the pickup and drove a cop and another man up to the snack bar dumpster. He heard around five rounds whistle into the dumpster, and he didn’t know if the cop and the other guy were still alive.

  In either event, the gunman was done with that. He started to walk back to the pickup, hesitated, and turned instead toward the first cruiser. That trooper’s overturned Stetson lay on the pavement. The gunman stooped to pick the hat up, looked into the cruiser from its passenger side, glanced back up in the direction of the dumpster, and then circled over to the driver’s side.

  Still carrying the Stetson, he climbed in, closed the door, and started the vehicle. Someone from the J. K. Lynch disposal company had parked a garbage truck across the IGA’s entrance and exit ramps, but Riff saw that now the truck was gone. The gunman maneuvered the cruiser carefully past other cars and eased it toward the exit ramp.

  Dan Couture would have no memory of Breton stealing away to flank the gunman. He does remember someone saying, “He’s getting into the cruiser.” He thinks that was Lenny Dennis.

  And he remembers thinking over and over, “What the fuck is going on?” In his brief career as a cop, there had been plenty of times already—conducting interviews in that sexual assault investigation, for example—when he felt as he had as a teenager at the wheel of a bus full of school kids in a blizzard: too callow to be good yet at something this important. Now multiply by ten, twenty, a hundred. He only knew that somebody was shooting a gun—he had no idea who or why or at whom, other than at him, Breton, Dennis. He hadn’t even caught a glimpse of this guy who for some unfathomable reason wanted to kill him. And nothing in his twelve weeks at the Police Academy had prepared him for a situation in which he was so outgunned and so defenseless.

  Couture heard that the shooter had gotten into a cruiser, but he heard it in that fog of war that had wrapped itself around him as it had Breton. The rifle shots had ceased, at least for now, and he was standing on a different part of the knoll. For the first time, he could see the whole parking lot, which was empty except for the vehicles it contained, some scattered groceries, a few plastic bags lifting in the breeze, and a couple of unarmed men, civilians, running toward the lot’s east end.

  Then he saw a state police cruiser heading south on Route 3, back toward town. The vehicle passed within sixty feet of him, moving at around forty miles per hour. He can still remember noticing that its rear driver-side window was blown out. For a while, he remembered the house he saw on the opposite side of the road behind the cruiser—but later forgot it. He has no memory of its driver.

  At the time he thought it was Scott Phillips at the wheel of the vehicle, but then he wasn’t sure. The whole sequence seemed bizarre and off-kilter—a cruiser just puttering along, as if this were any other day, but heading away from the scene of a violent crime with a window blown out.

  Even at just forty, the cruiser blinked past him like an image in a rapid-sequence slide show. Then he heard a voice he firmly remembers as Lenny’s: “That’s him! That’s the guy—he shot two troopers!”

  Co-op lineman Woody Crawford, pushing his way through the grass, was the first to get to Scott Phillips. Sexton Roland Martin arrived a moment later.

  Phillips, as usual, was not wearing any body armor. Pale as new snow, the trooper lay on his back with his hands at shoulder height, fingers clenched, palms to the sky, his hands sliced by what appeared to be glass cuts. There were several nearly adjacent bullet holes to the heart, so crisp they looked to have been cut with a drill, and what would be tallied as eight wounds to the hips and legs, which somehow had carried him this far nonetheless. His .45 Smith & Wesson lay at his side in lock-back position, all its bullets expended. Two full magazines of ammunition hung on his duty belt, useless to a man so badly wounded.

  He might have had help, Crawford realized, had he run toward the store. But then he would have drawn fire to bystanders. Instead Phillips had fled to a place where no one else would die.

  Crawford remembered that it was just last month that a friend on Pleasant Street had hired him to clear a tree limb off his roof. Crawford was having a tough time of it until Phillips—who lived right there on Pleasant—came out of his house to hold Crawford’s ladder and pass tools up to him. Phillips and Scott Stepanian used to go jogging past the warehouse across the road, and Crawford and other Co-op men would shout, “You guys ought to get real jobs, so you don’t have to run to stay in shape.” Phillips just laughed.

  Martin knelt and, without a shred of hope, felt for a pulse in Phillips’s neck. An ambulance turned into the supermarket entrance and came bansheeing past Lord’s cruiser. The two men lingered at the side of EMT Margaret Smith as she bent over the body. Smith had come in her own car, ahead of the ambulance. Crawford overheard little more than a whisper: “Oh, Scott—he’s gone.”

  Two troopers shot—Dan Couture had no inkling of this until Lenny Dennis had shouted as much as the gunman had fled. The dazed patrolman made his way down to Les Lord’s cruiser, which was still running. Lord had died with his foot on the brake pedal—which he so rarely touched in life—and it remained there yet.

  Couture limped toward where Scott Phillips lay, but by then nausea had nearly overcome him. “I shouldn’t go up there, right?” he said to the EMT. She looked at him with eyes like dust and nodded.

  Couture turned, and there was Steve Breton. “We’re too late,” he said.

  Another ambulance came skidding into the lot. They’re too late as well, Couture thought. Then he thought again about the clear shot he had—how long ago?—at the perpetrator, a killer who was going somewhere else now at the wheel of Scott’s cruiser. In a certain way, Couture did have the benefit of a field training officer, at least unofficially. That was Scott Phillips, who had had infinite patience with the dozens of questions about methods, procedures, and protocol that Couture pestered him with. Scott had this habit, though, of never just answering the question outright. Instead he’d turn it back on the rookie—“Well, what do you think? What would you do?” As a rule, this annoyed Couture, but it taught him good lessons about where his instincts lay in relation to that stuff.

  So what about that clear shot at the perpetrator—well, the alleged perpetrator—that he had had on the road? Couture thought about what he knew at that moment, which already seemed like it was years ago. There was a shooting in progress. Then someone got into a cruiser, and then a cruiser went by.

  What if Lenny had yelled out an instant earlier? What if Couture had known as the cruiser approached that this was the bastard who had murdered Scott and Les? He had a moving target, and behind that a house, maybe with people inside. A civilian had yelled that this guy was the killer, but
Couture had no confirmation of that. So—if Lenny had yelled earlier—he would have been drawing his sidearm on a suspect who was fleeing the scene in a stolen police vehicle, certainly, but who may or may not have killed two troopers, who could have been someone else entirely, for all he knew.

  At the Police Academy they had hammered this into him, over and over: once you send a bullet on its way, you can’t call it back. And then get ready, because there are going to be questions, a lot of them. You’re going to go through the wringer. You’d damned well better be sure, beyond the wisp of a doubt, that deadly force was the only option and that no one else was endangered.

  Or on the other hand, even with as little warning as he had from Lenny, maybe he could have done the Dirty Harry thing—reflexively drawn and squeezed off a shot. What would have happened then?

  Couture could almost hear Scott’s voice in his ear again, as if this was all hypothetical—“Well, what do you think? What would you do?”

  “What if both answers are wrong?” he asked, nearly whispering it aloud. But Scott wouldn’t say anything more.

  Steve Breton, picking his way through brush, abandoned his flanking maneuver once he saw from activity in the parking lot that he no longer had anybody to flank. He came out of the woods and scared the hell out of Mike Martin. Martin caught his breath and told Breton that the gunman had gotten into a cruiser and driven away. But Martin didn’t know whose cruiser, and Breton knew hardly more than Dan Couture about what exactly had happened.

  “Both dead,” Dick Marini told him.

  “Who?”

  “Les Lord, Scott Phillips—both shot to death.”

  Breton was up near the snack bar, and Marini was a state liquor enforcement officer from Gorham, a thirty-year veteran of police work at various levels. He knew all the Troop F officers and happened to have been working on a licensing investigation in the area. Marini was just nearing the IGA when he heard sounds he thought were backfires from a truck. Then the Code 1000 came over his radio.

  Breton shook his head, trying to clear the haze inside it. He walked like a pilgrim to Lord’s cruiser and then to that place in the grass where Phillips lay. Roland Martin was still by the body with the EMT, and Roland said that the guy who did all this had been driving that Dodge pickup over there.

  Breton had a good idea who that was. After some delay, he managed to get through to Dispatch on his portable radio. He asked Lynn to run a registration check on New Hampshire plate 737243. Lynn confirmed that the truck belonged to Carl Drega.

  Marini and Dan Couture met the enraged Breton at his cruiser, just as he was pulling the 12-gauge shotgun out of the trunk. “I know who this fucker is,” he said, “and I know where he lives. So let’s get the son of a bitch before anybody else gets killed.”

  They talked. No, they shouldn’t take the cruiser to chase him—Drega wouldn’t be pulling over to the side for any wigwags today. They’d stand a better chance of approaching him unawares in Marini’s unmarked vehicle, a ’92 Plymouth Acclaim. No, Dick wasn’t packing a sidearm. Liquor inspectors don’t carry weapons for routine work. There was no sense in having three guys in the car with just two guns between them, and someone needed to secure the crime scene here. That should be the kid who couldn’t run.

  Couture fished the Ruger out of his shorts and handed it to Marini. Breton told Dan to report in to Dispatch. Then he jumped into the passenger seat of the little green sedan. He told Marini to turn south onto Route 3. “We’re going to Columbia,” he said.

  At 2:50 p.m., only eight minutes after Dan Couture had received the first call about an incident at the IGA, the patrolman reported in using the radio in the Colebrook cruiser. He wasn’t surprised that this took a few repetitions: “Signal 1000 on Colebrook frequency 18B to Colebrook.”

  At last: “Go ahead, 18B.”

  “Notify Troop F that the individual—well, he took Trooper Les Lord’s vehicle and is heading down South Route 3. Notify all units who might be listening.”

  “He took Les Lord’s cruiser? He’s in a cruiser?”

  Couture confirmed that, added that an unmarked unit was in pursuit. With his thoughts still ricocheting inside his head, he signed off. By then people were coming out of cars and odd corners of the parking lot like earthquake survivors. An adolescent boy had spilled out of that Thunderbird near Drega’s truck and had run like he was on fire into the arms of the first adult he saw, a wide-eyed woman who had wandered out from behind the supermarket. Several others had gathered around Lord’s cruiser.

  Couture went to shoo them away, and then he knew what he had done. Shit, he thought, Les’s cruiser is right here. You just reported the wrong stolen vehicle, you dumb fuck. But in this he forgave himself, thinking it wasn’t really that important anyway—it would be the only cruiser in the state of New Hampshire heading south.

  It bothered him that Les’s motor was still running. He wanted to turn it off, let the cruiser and its operator rest there in peace until the Major Crime Unit arrived, but he wasn’t so callow as to touch anything that was part of a crime scene.

  Les’s radio was running as well. Couture overheard traffic between Colebrook Dispatch and 911: “Yeah, this is operator 113 with 911. That abandoned call came from Ducret’s Sporting Goods. He’s reporting a shooting as well.”

  “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “Okay. Ducret’s Sporting Goods. I took the callback because there was an abandoned phone call. The guy said there’s a shooting going on outside the store.”

  The 911 operator got another call from Ducret’s and plugged it directly through to Dispatch. Someone at Ducret’s was shouting, “We need some help here now!”

  An ambulance driver on his way to the IGA broke in, wondering if the scene at the supermarket was safe yet. After a pause, Lynn replied, “I need another ambulance at the front of the News and Sentinel. We have two people down at the News and Sentinel.”

  Nightmares happen, thought Couture, going numb. You think you’ve hit bottom, and it couldn’t get worse, it must be time to wake up, but instead—it gets worse. He looked around. He knew he didn’t look like a cop, but it was a small town. Some of these people knew him, and others, somehow, could just tell, and they were looking at him. He was a cop—no matter what he looked like, no matter what he had done, or hadn’t done, or what was happening somewhere else.

  He got a clipboard and some witness report forms out of the cruiser. Then he turned to a woman with raw, weeping eyes. “Excuse me, ma’am—Colebrook police. Were you a witness to what happened here?”

  Reporter Claire Lynch of the News and Sentinel was among those shooed away from Lord’s cruiser by Dan Couture. She had parked her Blazer at the snack bar and then hastened down to the vehicle hung up on the curb opposite the median. She could tell from a distance whose cruiser it was. Were it not for his clothes, she could not have known it was Les inside.

  She didn’t need to be told to back off. She staggered away, nearly lost her balance. Her notebook fell to the pavement, and she left it there, its pages riffling in a soft breeze. She couldn’t take notes on this, nor could she take a photo. John Harrigan’s voice, but different, a whisper wrapped in barbed wire, unspooled from the back of her mind: “We can’t have this today.”

  She heard from someone else that Scott Phillips lay dead at the other end of the lot. She had seen enough. She didn’t need to go there. The hill up to the snack bar felt like the slopes of Calvary. Her estranged husband, Ken Knapper, stood among the onlookers on the bluff.

  Knapper still worked for Claire’s father’s company, J. K. Lynch Disposal, and he had been the driver of the garbage truck that had sealed off the parking lot. But he and partner Bobby Noyes had stayed only a few minutes. Knapper had looked inside Lord’s cruiser in the hope of plucking out his sidearm, but Lord had fallen to his right and lay atop the pistol. Then they drove the truck to Noyes’s parents’ house, which was nearby, where Noyes begged in vain for the loan of a rifle. Knapper told Claire that
he had pretty much seen the whole thing, that the guy was still on the loose, that the Colebrook police force had buckled at the knees and didn’t even try to stop him. Claire could tell he was suffering almost as much as she was. She couldn’t help thinking how much both of them could use someone to come home to that night.

  A moment later, at the wheel of her Blazer, Claire fought to make the turn onto Route 3, and then to stay on the road long enough to get safely back to the newspaper building, her hands shook so. She tried, but couldn’t imagine who in the North Country would want to kill these men. There were enough sirens going off to suggest an air raid. An ambulance hurtled by in the opposite direction.

  At work she was in the habit of parking her SUV on the side of the building abutting the Getty station, while everybody else on the staff parked in the municipal lot behind the News and Sentinel Building and Memorial Park, a lot that you entered through an entrance between the apartment house and Ducret’s Sporting Goods.

  Right now Claire wanted to park with the rest of the staff. She forced the Blazer into the alley, and then—wonder-struck, but unable to stop right there—she worked the SUV around the form of what looked to be a woman who had fallen facedown on the pavement at the end of the alley. Nobody had come to help her up yet.

  9

  IN THESE DAYS OF CARNAGE

  CHARLIE JORDAN’S Northern New Hampshire Magazine was a magazine in tabloid newspaper clothing, published monthly on newspaper-style paper stock and with longer features than a small newspaper could run on the region’s news and cultural affairs—like a tribute to Robert Pike, who had died in July. Pike was the foremost historian of the North Country logging industry, author of classics like Spiked Boots and Tall Trees, Tough Men, and Donna Jordan needed information on him for the piece she would write for the September issue of the magazine.

  So all the Jordans adjourned to the Colebrook Public Library on the afternoon of August 19. Charlie’s car was in the shop, and they went in his mother’s car instead, an old Plymouth Duster that smoked and rattled and ran as if on dust. Charlie parked it in a lot behind Hicks Hardware on the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets. Then he, Donna, and seven-year-old Tommy crossed Pleasant and strolled to the library, which stood roughly opposite Ducret’s Sporting Goods on Main.