In the Evil Day

  Clerk Dave Robidas was from southern New Hampshire and had worked in a housepainting business Phil had going while the elder Ducret still ran the store. Vickie had recently done wills for Robidas and his wife, and last winter it had been Dave who suggested that Vickie buy a Taurus .38, a good value for ease of use and reliability. Vickie didn’t say why she wanted a handgun, and Robidas didn’t ask.

  Ducret was at home that day, and Robidas was manning the store with another clerk, Richard Paquette. There were two customers out front—John Brunault, who was a guard at the Coös County Jail, and his friend Matt Rosi—but the staff was in the back. Paquette was listening to reports from the IGA on the store’s police scanner, while Robidas was on a backdoor cigarette break.

  The cigarette must have dropped from his lips at this explosion of people out the back door of the Sentinel, the four women who ran straight toward him as though their lives depended on it. Immediately—from the shriek of those bullets hitting the doorframe above his head and the women’s screams—Robidas understood that this was just what it looked like. He backed into the doorway as Vickie staggered, rose, and fell. He threw the door open for Jana, Chandra, and Susie.

  He and Paquette followed the three survivors into the store. Robidas called 911 and then called Phil Ducret, as Brunault and Rosi herded the women into a place behind a table in back. Meanwhile Paquette started loading handguns from the store’s inventory. Once the four men were armed, they ranged themselves on either side of the back door as more shots came from the parking lot. They could see where Vickie lay motionless on the pavement, but not the blood rising in a rose-colored pool on her other side. They assumed they were under attack by a second gunman, maybe allied with the one they had heard about at the IGA.

  They waited and heard no more gunfire, but they could hear people yelling and moving about. A Chevy Blazer, Claire Lynch’s, eased through the alley between the buildings, past Vickie, and into the parking lot. Once the car went by, the men, one by one, slipped out the door and ran to Vickie.

  From the rectory kitchen of the Baptist church on Bridge Street, next to the town offices, Pastor Charles Collins stared like Blake’s Los, howling in fire, as the gunman walked across the grass of Monument Lot to the driver-side door of a state police cruiser. The killer walked with the stock of the rifle on his hip, the barrel pointed to the sky, the gun’s sling over his shoulder. He slipped his arm out of the sling, entered and started the cruiser. He pulled it slowly forward until he was opposite the town hall and police station, and nearly opposite the church. There he stopped to put one hand out the window and wave two westbound cars on ahead of him.

  Collins also saw Susan Zizza kneeling by a man who lay facedown on the grass. Susan had appeared as soon as Drega had finished with Dennis. She didn’t know that the gunman had arrived by cruiser, and when the vehicle pulled into sight from behind the building, she thought Les Lord had come to help. She nearly called out, but something stopped her. Later she would believe that Drega had paused in front of the town offices in the hope of picking off whatever policemen came out.

  Perhaps so. By then Collins had joined his wife, Yvette, on the front steps of the church. He and the gunman locked eyes for a time that stretched, Collins said, to “some fifteen or twenty very awkward seconds.” If so, this was a length of time nearly as great, it would be determined, as that which separated the first shot Drega had fired at Vickie and the last he fired at Dennis—thirty-five seconds.

  Yvette thought at first she recognized this man, thought him the butcher who cut meat at the IGA, but then she knew he was a stranger to her. The killer stopped, stared at her husband for that awkward, pregnant moment—the minister and the devil, the temporal world like a bone between them—and then he steered the cruiser in a slow U-turn in front of the church. The vehicle eased past the town offices, past Lazerworks and the camera shop. At the corner, it flashed a right turn signal, waited for a break in traffic, and then swung south.

  Afterward the pastor was nearly as shaken by that encounter on the steps, by the rank pitilessness of that gaze, as he was by the events across the street. “God help us in these days of carnage,” he would write at the end of his statement to the Colebrook police, “when man kills without conscience.”

  Karen Lamontagne, a registered nurse, had no idea there was another victim besides Dennis. She was by Dennis’s side just seconds after Susan, and she saw that among his multiple wounds—seven—was an exit wound to the spine, which made her reluctant to turn him over. She clawed at the grass and dirt around his face, clearing a trench through which he could breathe. She heard someone, probably Yvette Collins, say, “Oh, my God, my God—it’s Vickie.”

  Karen left Dennis, thinking that Vickie might have a better chance. Vickie was still breathing when Richard Paquette reached her. Paquette had knelt by her side while Robidas, Brunault, and Rosi fanned out into the parking lot with handguns drawn—just as Drega was completing that U-turn. Yvette had heard Vickie gasp for air, seen her eyes roll white and vacant. Karen saw that among Vickie’s several wounds was one to the neck, a sliced carotid artery. It was already too late, and Karen ran back to Dennis with a hollow wind blowing in her head.

  Beno was by Dennis as well, and so was Charlie Jordan. Then Charlie was up taking photographs as a Colebrook ambulance arrived in front of Monument Lot, as a pair of EMTs hurdled the low stone wall that fronted the lot. Soon there were others: Cherie Leavitt, an RN who had been using the ATM at the First Colebrook Bank when she heard gunshots; Bill Bromage, president of that bank, also an EMT and volunteer fireman; Brenda Marquis, an EMT who had been paged to go to the IGA but then told no, go instead to the Sentinel—who feared she had been given the wrong location when she saw a state police cruiser driving south out of Colebrook; and several others.

  Leavitt and the EMTs confirmed that Dennis was running a pulse, but it was way too low. They had to turn him over, and did so as if they were handling a soap bubble. Karen sent Susan running into the Sentinel Building for paper towels to sop up blood. They saw that Dennis’s eyes were open and dilated. There was not nearly as much blood as they anticipated.

  Charlie Jordan never saw who had shot Vickie and Dennis. He arrived just as the cruiser was turning onto Main, during a lull in which a pedestrian strolled alongside the wall and then a cyclist pedaled by.

  He knew immediately that Dennis had better help than he could provide. He could endure only a glance at Vickie. Almost twenty years before, he had seen Bunny and Irene sharing a booth at Howard’s Restaurant with a young woman and, after introductions, been charmed to learn that he and Vickie both had Hungarian blood on their mothers’ sides. Now all that blood had been emptied from her.

  He understood no more than anyone else why this had happened, and to these two, of all people. He shared with everyone else the dread that whoever did this might be back for more—or that someone else might be coming, if there was more than one killer on the loose. He was glad to see that Brunault and Rosi had weapons and were searching the bushes around the area. But here we are right in front of the police station, he thought, and there’s not a cop in sight.

  On the grass, Brenda Marquis and Cherie Leavitt were performing chest compressions on Dennis. Paula Chapple, who had arrived with the ambulance, was trying to get a breathing tube down his throat while Bill Bromage held an oxygen mask to his face. Dennis was struggling, and Beno had to hold his legs.

  Charlie got shots of that, and everything else too. He was turning like a windlass, shooting in all directions, shell casings crackling under his shoes, because a news photographer had told him once to do it like that, to make sure he didn’t miss anything—and also, he said, because “the camera viewer gave me a distance from the reality I found myself in the midst of. It was my ‘protection,’ such as it was.”

  Margaret Smith, a volunteer EMT for fourteen years, was still at the IGA when she was paged for two subjects down at the News and Sentinel. She left Penny Henry, another EMT, with the bod
y of Scott Phillips, and she arrived on Bridge to find several people already at work on a man lying in the grass, but no one tending to the woman on the pavement.

  Alas, Vickie Bunnell was an old friend—just as Scott Phillips had been. Margaret swooned and fell to her knees. She lingered that way a moment, overcome not just by sorrow but by the nothingness that lay beneath it, these many years of finding the flesh of her friends and neighbors broken and bloodied. She had never seen anything as bad as this, though—or so inexplicable. When she got back on her feet, she went to the other victim, who by then had been hooked to a defibrillator, and she recognized Dennis Joos as well.

  Margaret had nothing to do there, and she went back to Vickie, just to be with her. That was when Steve Breton, with an older man in civilian clothes—she didn’t know him—arrived on foot. They stopped at where Dennis lay, hurried over to her and Vickie, and just as promptly turned and disappeared across the street. She had hoped that Breton was there to provide security, but soon Chief Mike Sielicki arrived, in civilian clothes, and also Phil Ducret, who was carrying a handgun.

  From where she stood, Margaret could hear Brenda Marquis say that the defibrillator’s readings weren’t making any sense. “That’s enough,” Brenda said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  Dennis moaned as hands, many pairs of them, lifted him from the grass and into a gurney. They put him into the ambulance just as a second one arrived. Margaret saw Bill Bromage climb into the first ambulance with Dennis, along with Paula and the EMT who had come with her. Then the ambulance peeled away, wheeling left on Main for the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, just a few minutes distant.

  Once the ambulance was gone, Margaret saw Susan Zizza go weeping into the Sentinel Building, come out again a moment later, climb into her car, still weeping, and drive out of the parking lot, also turning left on Main. So she’s not going home, Margaret thought.

  Then she wondered about disturbing Vickie, about performing CPR on her corpse for no other purpose than to get her onto a gurney, loaded into the back of the second ambulance, and taken away. She hated to think of Vickie just lying here, as if abandoned. She saw Paul Nugent, who lived on Bridge Street, who often brought drinks and appetizers to Vickie’s office at cocktail hour, walking this way. Other people besides Susan were starting to come out of the Sentinel Building.

  Just the same, Margaret was about to go to work on Vickie when her pager toned again at 3:10 p.m. She was needed in Bloomfield, Vermont, across the river from North Stratford, where, God help us, another officer was down.

  In the parking lot of the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital—just off Route 145, on the way up South Hill to John Harrigan’s place—Bill Bromage watched as Dennis was hustled through the doors of the emergency room. That’s when he was paged to respond to a house fire in Columbia.

  10

  KILL YOUR BLUES

  STILLNESS REIGNED at Vickie’s house on the slope of Blue Mountain—no vehicle in the driveway, no sign of disturbance or forcible entry. Forest ranger Bert von Dohrmann, wielding a shotgun borrowed from Chief Sielicki, knocked on the front door. Deputy ranger Scott Owen provided cover.

  Von Dohrmann had been using the restroom at the fire station on Pleasant Street when the scanner went off. He saw Scott Phillips’s cruiser coming the wrong way, saw in his mirror that its rear window was gone. He parked by the other cruiser in the IGA parking lot. EMT Margaret Smith had to tell him that this was all that was left of Les, that Scott lay over in the grass.

  Von Dohrmann thought he was the only law officer on the scene. He hadn’t noticed Dan Couture taking the names of witnesses in his civvies. Others came: Sielicki and Jules Kennett, a part-time Colebrook cop; Troopers Scott Stepanian, who was Phillips’s best friend, and Tom Yorke; Border Patrol agent Dave Perry; and Scott Owen.

  Someone—Stepanian?—said that Drega might be looking for Vickie Bunnell, that someone should get to her house ASAP, provide protection if she was there. Von Dohrmann was unarmed, and Sielicki gave him that shotgun. Owen climbed into the passenger seat of von Dohrmann’s cruiser, and they drove past some sort of commotion on Bridge Street. They heard nothing on the radio about trouble there, and for Vickie’s sake, they couldn’t stop. They turned left on Parsons Street and east on Route 26, to a northern access road to the Bungy Loop, a more likely route for Drega if he didn’t want to be noticed on the way to Vickie’s.

  There was no answer to von Dohrmann’s knock. From here the sirens in Colebrook were barely audible. They walked to the back of the house, and from the fire pit von Dohrmann could see church spires and the southern spine of Monadnock. “Not unless you’ve got a shovel,” Les had told him, and that was why von Dohrmann was still alive to gaze at Monadnock. A telephone, a radio, a pile of papers, and some food wrappers—that was why Liz, whom von Dohrmann had called from the IGA pay phone, still had a husband.

  How much sense did that make? Not enough.

  Dick Marini and Steve Breton weren’t strangers to each other. Marini got around, and recently he had ridden as backup with Breton to some place he remembered only as a swamp somewhere around Colebrook. A woman had gone there to commit suicide, but Breton talked her out of it. The young cop did a good job, Marini thought.

  Breton had a feeling Drega was headed straight home to Columbia, but just in case Drega was waiting in ambush instead, he had Marini edge the Plymouth slowly into each intersection on the way into the Colebrook business district—even Edwards Street, where Breton, his wife, Christine, and four-month-old Nicholas lived a few doors away from Audrey Noyes.

  Past Clarkeie’s, they saw people walking the sidewalks as usual, going in or out of stores, in what struck Breton as some lewd imitation of normal life. Something abnormal, though, was happening at Bridge Street—there was an ambulance, a crowd of people. Whatever it was, they didn’t want to drive blithely into the middle of it, like Les had. They drove one more block, entering the parking lot for the town hall and police station from the backside.

  They crossed Bridge on foot. EMTs were ministering to a shooting victim Breton learned was Dennis Joos. The woman facedown in the parking lot was Vickie Bunnell, and the EMT with her said she was gone. Someone else said that the gunman had turned around on Bridge and headed south on Main. Breton noticed two empty banana clips of ammunition on the ground and asked a bystander, a friend, to make sure nobody touched those.

  The two men checked the perimeter of the town hall and the court chambers.

  No one was in the police station except Lynn Jolin, the dispatcher, who said that Mike Sielicki was on his way from the supermarket. Lynn was working hard to hold herself together. “Drega’s headed down Route 3, and we’ll be in pursuit in an unmarked car,” Breton told her. “Make sure everybody knows that, okay?”

  As they passed the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace and then Dan Ouimette’s logging and excavation business, and as the road opened up, Marini pushed the Plymouth to seventy-five. He heard Lynn announce to all units that they were in pursuit of cruiser 719, and Marini radioed a correction: “That’s 608—repeat, cruiser 608.”

  Meanwhile Breton went undercover. He unpinned his badge and slipped it into a pocket. He thought about taking off his blue shirt as well, but decided against it. Instead he slid down far enough in his seat so that the blue shirt disappeared, so that only the top of his head appeared over the dashboard. “Can this go any faster?” he said to Marini.

  COLEBROOK DISPATCH, 2:53 P.M.

  Caller 8: I know that there’s an emergency. This is Lori Berry. I just wanted to let you know that Trooper Phillips’s car 608 just went through my driveway, and it wasn’t Scott Phillips that got out of the car.

  Dispatch: Okay, all right—thank you, Lori.

  Caller 8: At Owen Park, at Kenneth Parkhurst’s.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 8: Thanks.

  Dispatch: All right.

  COLEBROOK DISPATCH, 2:57 P.M.

  Caller 12: Hi, it’s Lori Berry again. I just went over
to my uncle’s house next door. The house has—the door’s been kicked open.

  Dispatch: Okay, who’s your uncle, Lori?

  Caller 12: Kenneth Parkhurst.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 12: That’s where I told you I just saw the cruiser leave—the 608 cruiser.

  Dispatch: Uh-huh.

  Caller 12: And I went over there, and I called, and nobody answered, and I just saw that the door’s been forced open.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 12: And I didn’t dare go in.

  Dispatch: All right, I will tell them, but you need to stay in.

  Caller 12: Okay, I’m going up the end, but there’s—it was unusual for them not to answer their phone.

  Dispatch: Right, right. And it’s very—well, don’t be out there.

  Caller 12: Okay.

  Dispatch: All right—bye-bye.

  Caller 12: And you’re gonna send somebody? I know everybody is busy, but—

  Dispatch: Yeah, um—we’ve got people down.

  Caller 12: Okay, well—I’m scared.

  Dispatch: Lock your doors and stay inside.

  Caller 12: Thank you.

  Dispatch: Okay—bye-bye.

  He cut off most of his beard with scissors. Then he lathered and shaved. The face that was revealed to him in the mirror, he thought, was that of a stranger, a pasteboard mask that would serve well enough. He wanted to keep cutting, to angle the razor so it bit into his skin and peeled it like wood shavings away from his skull, to let the eternal part of him come clear. But there wasn’t time. He had more to check off on his calendar before he met Rita.

  Still in the cabin’s basement living quarters, he donned the police surplus ballistics vest he had ordered from a dealer in Miami. He could have sworn he heard one of his sewing machines running, a foot on its treadle, as he climbed the stairs to the ground floor, but at the top everything was still. He stood there a moment in that quiet, on that plywood floor, the light slanting in from the west over the river, the motes of dust like broken glass in the air. Now that his ears no longer rang with the reports of his rifle, whose barrel was now a few inches shorter, he could hear the murmuring tick of the clock on the wall. He noticed he’d left his coffee mug on the workbench next to where he’d hung laundry this morning. He admired that bench he built, its heft and squareness and finish.