In the Evil Day

  Julie went first, telling Polly that something had happened and that Dennis was badly hurt. After a few moments, Julie went inside to make a call to the hospital. Susan was left to offer what comfort she could to Polly, which was hard because Polly was already swooning and Susan was so comfortless herself.

  When Julie came out, Susan knew from the tread of her foot on the stone steps, like the slow clicking shut of a door, that there was no longer any cause to hurry.

  County jail director Norm Brown knew just a little more than Frank Prue about what was happening. His radio at the House of Corrections had reported an armed robbery at the IGA. Familiar with the behavior of fleeing felons, he had gotten in his car and driven directly into Vermont from West Stewartstown. He cruised south down 102 from Canaan to Lemington, and its bridge into Colebrook, without seeing anything.

  He turned there and was passing the Sentinel Building only a moment after the gunman had fled. Matt Rosi waved him to a stop and told him that two people had been shot, a cruiser stolen. Brown drove on to the stop sign, then down Main Street to the edge of town, and turned back. There would be a lot of cops on the gunman’s trail, he figured, and he had only his sidearm, as good as a water pistol against the sort of weapon Rosi mentioned. Brown returned to protect the crime scene at the Sentinel.

  He was sure somebody would arrive from Troop F to do that, but he didn’t know who or when. In the meantime this was a tough exercise in crowd control, and Brown was glad one of his guards, John Brunault, had been in Ducret’s when hell broke loose, and was still here. They still had help as well from Rosi, and also Phil Ducret and Dave Robidas. They were keeping most people at the edge of the premises and already stringing up yellow caution tape taken from the shelves in Ducret’s. At the same time they scoured bushes for any sign of Jana Riley, whose shoes had been found in the parking lot and who was still unaccounted for.

  Vickie’s friend Paul Nugent stood guard at Vickie’s body. Ducret had given Nugent a camo-pattern blanket from the store, and he had laid it across her. Dr. Bob Soucy arrived a little before four, and it was from Soucy that Brown learned what else had happened. Brown and Scott Phillips, besides being running partners, had shared the same birthday in January and the same background in military police work, Scott in the army and Brown in the air force. Since they had ended up in different branches of civilian law enforcement, they could talk frankly with each other without fear of it bouncing around the workplace. They were supposed to run together the next day.

  Bob Soucy had come to know Vickie working with her on the board of trustees at Camp E-Toh-Anee. He grieved audibly as he lifted the blanket, as did Brown as Nugent turned away. The examination was swift. Soucy saw that Vickie lay as she had fallen, without subsequent movement. “Well, she died almost instantly,” he said. “At least there’s that.” He filled out his report and went back to the IGA, where he said he had unfinished work.

  Vickie was left alone again with Nugent—at least until the arrival of her brother. Earl ducked under the caution tape and walked heavy-footed in the direction of where she lay. Brown intercepted him, however, and guided him to a quiet spot behind a parked car. “What do you want?” Brown said. “You want to live with the memory of how she looks now? Vickie wouldn’t want that—for you to see her like this.”

  Earl was tall and rangy and strong, and there was no stopping him if he wanted this memory. But he hesitated­—turned away—nodded his head. Brown called Nugent, and Paul and several others took Earl in hand. They walked him back to his house, where the driveway and curb were jammed with cars, including those of Earl’s friends Woody Crawford and Mark Monahan. The electric linemen had gone on to fix that power outage on Hughes Road. Then they heard about this next catastrophe.

  Brown stood near Vickie and looked up at the sound of a medevac rig coming from the hospital and sweeping downriver to Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Inside the Sentinel Building, Claire Lynch heard it also and rose to stand at a window. She whispered a prayer for Dennis, whom she thought must surely be aboard.

  John Harrigan’s daughter Karen had grown into a reporter, a destiny nearly as unforeseen as John’s. “Dad never made any attempt to cram the family business down our throats,” Karen said later. “In fact, he might have overcompensated in the other direction.”

  Once John won his custodial share of the children, Karen had split her school years between New Hampshire and New Mexico. Then there were different jobs: four years in the U.S. Army, intercepting and translating North Korean radio signals; waitressing in Texas; cleaning rooms at the Balsams. She tried college in Idaho while waitressing full time at an Olive Garden franchise. She lasted only a semester, but she met her first husband, who was a chef at the restaurant.

  Just before she went to college, John took her on briefly as a reporter at the Democrat. She was surprised by how much she liked finding out about the way things worked and writing stories about it. The couple moved to New Hampshire in April 1997. Russ found a job at a restaurant in the state’s booming Seacoast Region, and Karen landed a reporting job at the Union Leader in Manchester. She covered the outlying towns of Newmarket, Newton, and the Rockingham County Court.

  On August 19, she was working on a story at her desk at home when the phone rang. It was John, on his car phone and hurtling up Route 3 again after being turned around in Guildhall. He had to hang up after just a few words to put two hands on the steering wheel. But those few words were enough to yank Karen out of her chair. John called again a moment later. “You’re not kidding, are you?” Karen said.

  “They’re still working on Dennis. I don’t know about him.”

  She was a reporter, so she wrote the names of the three murder victims on a pad of paper, including the one who had been nearly a second mother to her. Karen had once spent a summer living with Vickie on Bungy Loop. She sat motionless for some time after John had hung up. Then she stood and paced the empty house.

  Her brother, Mike, was visiting—he was between jobs and had stored his belongings in their basement—and he and Russ were at a nearby driving range. She went back to her desk and called the driving range, asking that someone find Mike and Russ and send them home. Her next call was to Charlie Perkins, the executive editor of the Union Leader. “Charlie, I just heard that four people have been shot up in Colebrook.”

  “Yeah, we’ve just gotten reports on that. We’re getting someone up there.”

  “Charlie, I know these people.” The tears came upon her unawares, and the fishhook catch in her voice.

  “Okay, yeah—you go on up there too, then.”

  She heard a helicopter outside her window as she hung up. She didn’t even need to look. It was the WMUR-Channel 9 helicopter, and if she had known just a little earlier, she could have hitched a ride on that. She rushed to pack some things for a stay of more than a few days, including clothes for a funeral—for three of them, at least.

  Mike decided to come as well. The radio in Karen’s car was tuned to New Hampshire Public Radio, and its first report on the incident was both a personal and professional affront to Karen: “Bunnell” was said with an accent on the second syllable, Dennis’s last name was pronounced as though it went with “orange” or “grapefruit,” and Carl Drega was identified as Vickie’s ex-boyfriend.

  “Oh, Jesus, that’s so fucked up!” Karen cried. “We’ve got to stop at that radio station.”

  Mike persuaded her otherwise. It wasn’t easy.

  The law offices of King and Waystack occupy a small brick ranch house facing Route 3 in Colebrook. This house was first the home in which David King, the son of longtime New Hampshire state senator Fred King, grew up. Then it was David’s and his wife’s home in the first years of their marriage, and finally the house was bought by the law practice.

  The building sits opposite Brooks Chevrolet, north of town, and near enough the IGA for King to hear what he thought were firecrackers. Twenty minutes later, a colleague, a lawyer with an office in Lancaster, called to ask him about
the shootings up there. King said he wasn’t aware of any shootings. Fifteen minutes later she called again, this time from the county sheriff’s office. She listed the victims and named the alleged perpetrator. King felt a snake crawl down his spine.

  He knew from the Lancaster police about Drega’s request for his tax assessment cards. These included a sketch of his house and property. As soon as he got off the phone, he sent his secretary and clerk home—Phil Waystack was on vacation in Cape Cod. Then he called his wife and told her to lock the doors, take their two boys down to the basement, and stay there. Finally he knocked on his next-door neighbor’s back door.

  He returned with a borrowed 12-gauge shotgun, which he laid across his desk. The gun was loaded with buckshot, and King had a Ziploc bag filled with more buckshot. It wasn’t that much by way of firepower, but better than nothing, and it was all his neighbor had.

  King realized that Drega had driven past his office at least twice that day already. He didn’t dare go home, and so tempt Drega into going there to look for him. He thought Drega would come here first, and King would rather be found here.

  The phone kept ringing, but King let the answering machine take the calls. One was from the Colebrook police. Somebody had reported seeing Drega hiking on foot up the railroad tracks, traveling north. That sighting was unconfirmed, but since those tracks ran right behind the King and Waystack office, David should keep an eye out.

  Another call was from the Boston Globe. They had heard that Mr. King was familiar with Carl Drega. Could they get a little background information on him, please?

  Word got around fast, thought King, who found the irony of an interview request about the man who might be coming to kill him to be, well, piquant.

  Nobody on the News and Sentinel staff could tell Charlie Jordan who the gunman had been. He had swiftly used up the roll of black-and-white film that was already in his camera. Then he had run to Collins Video and Photo on the corner. Charlie burst through the door, made hand gestures to a wide-eyed Michael Collins that Charlie hoped would suggest a shooting in progress, grabbed a fistful of boxes of color film off the rack, and raced out.

  Then, once the ambulances had left, nobody could tell him who was guilty of all this. Jeannette Ellingwood, Leith Jones, someone else he had asked—they all felt they should know, but they were in some sort of haze, some sealed-off vestibule of the trauma ward, that prevented them from calling up that name or face. Eventually the scanner near Gil’s desk had reported a fire at the Carl Drega residence in Columbia, and someone had shouted to Charlie, maybe it was Leith, “Oh, yeah, that’s the guy.”

  That didn’t make the killer’s motives any clearer to Charlie. One thought was that Drega had a grudge of some sort against newspapers, and therefore might be on his way to the Coös County Democrat office. So did John Harrigan know about this? Charlie got on the phone with Gene Ehlert, who told him that John had left twenty minutes ago and that Lancaster police had posted an armed guard at the door.

  Then he called Charlie Perkins at the Union Leader in Manchester to say that he had photos of the immediate aftermath. Charlie said he was sure John would want the Union Leader to have some of the shots. Perkins said he could give them to the reporter coming on the WMUR helicopter.

  Charlie was still on the phone with Perkins when he saw the Lincoln pull up in front of the building. John had covered the thirty-six miles between Lancaster and Colebrook in twenty-six minutes. The front door was locked, and Charlie hurried to let John in. “I want to help,” he said.

  John nodded a greeting to the people around the scanner, a group that now included Monty Montplaiser, a customs agent and Vivien Towle’s boyfriend; and Kenn Stransky, the Sentinel’s Essex County correspondent in Vermont. Kenn had gone to the hospital and come back with the news—shared at that point only with Claire Lynch—that Dennis had died. When they had opened him up in the intensive care unit, Kenn told her, they had found his body cavity awash in blood. Dennis had bled to death internally.

  On the scanner, reports of Drega sightings were popping up all over the map: on a motorcycle on Route 3; stowed away on a northbound freight train; driving through Jefferson; fording the river at a shallow spot between Groveton and Stratford. One report had him circling back to Colebrook. That was why Gil Short had locked the front door again.

  John walked around the front desk and peered down the hallway past Chandra’s desk into the newsroom. Jeannette Ellingwood was at work again there. Jeannette looked like a prim Yankee granny in her white hair, spectacles, and print blouse, but she had an earthy sense of humor, loved a fast snow machine, and wore monkey-themed socks every day of her life. She had been cutting out columns of newsprint for pasteup when Drega arrived, and she was doing so again, as if none of this had happened, as if Dennis had gone out for ice cream. But the scissors shook in her hands.

  Norm Brown crouched at the back door, stretching a length of caution tape across its width. John looked like a man who had come home to find his house on fire and his family inside. “Well, I’m going to need some help,” he said to Charlie.

  “I’ve got pictures.”

  John turned and stared. “You’ve got pictures?”

  “I got here just a minute after he left. I shot—I don’t know—half a dozen rolls maybe.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Leith’s developing the black-and-white stuff now. I took the color rolls to Collins. I also talked to Charlie Perkins and told him he could have some photos. I figured you’d want that.”

  “Oh, sure.” John looked up the hallway again. “Where’s Vickie?”

  Charlie led John down the hallway, past Vickie’s door and Dennis’s empty desk, and through the newsroom—Jeannette glanced up, murmured a greeting to John, returned to her work—and then Charlie stopped. “Norm’s going to have to let you through,” he said.

  Norm looked up and said something about a hell of a bad day, John. He undid enough tape for John to open the door. Norm followed him. His first glimpse was of a small, lifeless foot, wrapped in pink tights and extending from one corner of the blanket, and, near it, the shoe it had donned that morning.

  Charlie waited inside. In his recollection of that moment, he heard a sound that ordinarily he wouldn’t have recognized as human, that he might have deemed an animal’s in its last extremity. John would have no memory of such a cry. Norm Brown would only say, “Lots of emotion.”

  Jeannette’s scissors came to a halt, and for a moment she sat still. Then the blades completed their cut and another swath of paper fell to the floor.

  That rumored Drega sighting at the old river ford between Stratford and Groveton? Eric Stohl could have told you it wasn’t true. He’d been watching.

  Stohl had been off duty and working—felling trees, cutting brush—at his son’s new place in Columbia. The house was on Route 3, and Stohl had noticed neither the orange pickup headed north nor the stolen cruiser coming south. He did see the fire trucks race past. He followed one to an assembly of trucks parked at the top of Drega’s driveway. Smoke plumed into the sky above the bluff as Stohl heard what had happened.

  He arrived at the hospital before Saunders was airlifted to Dartmouth. There he was told the CO needed surgery for the repair of extensive vascular damage. Stohl went on to Bloomfield, where the cruiser he had driven just a few months ago still lay snagged on the riverbank, cordoned off by tape. Dick Marini had been relieved at last and was being debriefed in Colebrook by somebody from the state attorney general’s office. Vermont authorities were in charge of the scene, and from them Stohl heard that New Hampshire troopers Steve Hersom and Chuck West, traveling in opposite directions on 102, had met in the middle. Vermont’s Paul Fink wasn’t far behind Hersom, and Fink had been put much on edge by a high-speed U-turn Hersom had made.

  So the fugitive had ducked down a dirt side road somewhere between Bloomfield and Guildhall—either a short dead-ender to the east and the river or else into those winding nests of roads around Dennis P
ond or Maidstone Lake. Only the Maidstone roads offered access to another paved road to the west, but a cruiser might not have enough road clearance to get through.

  Or Drega might have ditched the cruiser by then and be on foot. One of the Vermont troopers had suggested posting a pair of snipers at the only nearby place on the river where a man might wade across. Stohl was in his civvies, driving his pickup truck, but he had a spare uniform jacket in his truck—albeit his winter wool one. Someone loaned him a .308 rifle, and he went with that trooper to the New Hampshire side of the ford.

  They slipped into a thicket of sumac and settled down to watch. Stohl was soon swimming in sweat inside that jacket, but it was better than being mistaken for Drega by someone else with a rifle. He thought about who had died, and who might yet die. He remembered loaning his .38 to Vickie last February, on what must have been the first day that his old friend Carl showed up outside her office window. He wondered if Drega thought it was he at the wheel of the Fish & Game cruiser in Bloomfield. Drega would have hoped so. He thought about Bunny and Irene and wondered who was with them.

  A good part of the river in front of Stohl was dimpled with rocks and the featherings of stones just below the surface. That much was ankle-, knee-, thigh-deep. There was a channel closer to the Vermont side, though, where the water would come to shoulder height or so, where a man, if he were carrying a rifle, would have to raise both arms above his head in the manner of someone surrendering himself. Drega wouldn’t be doing that, though.

  Stohl wiped sweat from his eyes. Then he lifted the .308 to his shoulder and sighted through its scope to a point in the channel. It wouldn’t be a difficult shot, a man’s head at this distance. Stohl was a God-fearing man, and he dared not pray—that might be blasphemy—but he hoped it was God’s will that he might have that shot.

  COLEBROOK DISPATCH, 4:31 P.M.

  Dispatch: Hello—hello?