In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Caller 33: Hey, who’s this? Hey, John, how are you doing? Is Pickering there?

  Dispatch: He’s at the scene.

  Caller 33: He’s at the scene?

  Dispatch: Yeah.

  Caller 33: All right, listen—here’s some information from Captain O’Brien. Can you pass it on to the guys?

  Dispatch: Sure.

  Caller 33: A guy by the name of Gerald Upton.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 33: U-P-T-O-N.

  Dispatch: Sure.

  Caller 33: He lives in Hardwick, Vermont. That’s all I know about him.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 33: He’s Drega’s best friend. The last time Drega gets arrested, this Upton bailed him out. We’re passing this on—have somebody maybe find out where this Upton lives in Hardwick. It might be a good check.

  Dispatch: Okay. And the photo—can you kick somebody in the ass down there?

  Caller 33: I got it coming. I got it coming right now. I just got it off the license.

  Dispatch: Okay.

  Caller 33: We’ll fax it up to you.

  In Hardwick, Gerry Upton parked his pickup near the outbuilding that served as a garage, workshop, and warehouse for his heavy machinery. He had been running a bulldozer for the town that day, shoring up a recently washed-out section of road.

  He went up the driveway to the house in nearly a run. He wanted to tell Margaret about something on the radio, something about shootings in Colebrook. He didn’t know the details yet—but Margaret did. She came racing out to meet him. “Gerry, my God, come in and watch this on the TV,” she cried. “Something terrible—awful—has happened in New Hampshire, and they’re saying Carl’s responsible. Hurry!”

  Upton had not spoken to Carl since he had asked two months ago if he could use Upton as a reference in applying for work at a nuclear plant. Then Carl wanted to get together with him and Margaret as soon as that job was done. Upton had never objected to Carl using him as a reference, and Carl had done so often before, but he always called each time to ask. Go ahead, Upton told him, and then yes, whenever you’re free, come on over.

  Inside, Upton stared at news images of familiar places: LaPerle’s IGA, Bridge Street, DeBanville’s, all of them now swept by flashing lights, cross-hatched by yellow tape, crowded with cops and weeping people. The most disturbing image was shot from the head of Carl’s driveway. Fire engines were at rest, firefighters standing around and fidgeting, as smoke billowed from the roof of Carl’s cabin. The firefighters were there only to make sure that the fire didn’t spread, the news anchor said.

  Then appeared an image, in scratchy black and white, of the alleged perpetrator, a fax of a photocopy of a license photo. At that point the image was almost abstract. But Carl confronted the camera like he was standing for a mug shot. His eyes were hidden by his dark glasses, which he had probably refused to remove, and his right eyebrow arched sardonically higher than his left. The mouth looked thin and cruel, seemed to be flirting with a sneer. This was central casting’s mold for a pitiless killer. To Upton, it was just Carl looking like Carl, for Christ’s sake.

  The news anchor mentioned that the fugitive was last seen fleeing across the Connecticut River into Vermont. Upton turned to look at Margaret. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Do you suppose he could be coming here? Oh, my God.”

  The door was locked, the lights off, at the headquarters of the Hardwick Police Department. A handwritten sign said that the department was closed and offered a number to call in the event of emergency. Upton might have guessed—every cop in town had joined in the hunt for his best friend.

  The Uptons returned home, locked their own doors, turned on the TV again, and dialed that emergency number. This had to be a case, Upton thought, of mistaken identity.

  John Harrigan got help from Norm Brown in getting back on his feet. He looked around as though surprised to find himself where he was. Someone came from up the street to tell him that Bunny and Irene were at Earl’s house, and they wanted him to come over. “They’re asking for you,” John was told. He wanted to do that and promised to be there soon, but first he had to walk back through the door into the newspaper building again.

  Charlie Jordan was still in the newsroom, and so was Jeannette. John looked over her shoulder at the story she was cutting into strips. It was the one about last week’s restoration of the first settlers’ gravestones in the Canaan Village Cemetery. John rubbed salt from his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “Who else is here?” he asked.

  “I heard Chandra went home,” Charlie said. “Susan went to the hospital with Dennis. We don’t know what happened to Jana. She must be all right, wherever she is. Everybody else is here, along with Monty and that guy from Norton—what’s his name?—Stransky. Kenn Stransky.”

  “You said you’ve got photos?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “You gave them to the Union Leader?”

  “No, not yet. I told Charlie Perkins he could have a few of them. But nobody from the Union Leader has gotten here yet.”

  “Vickie?” John didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. “Did you take photos of Vickie?”

  “I did, a few—but I made sure she was covered. You only see the blanket.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Like I said, Leith’s working on that first roll right now.”

  John remembered that even in a normal week—like this was until an hour ago—press day at a weekly newspaper was, to his mind, like the last leg of the Dixville Notch Race, a half-marathon event he used to run in each year. You start at the peak of the Notch, and you hope that you’re still running a good pace, seven minutes or so per mile, as you come into Colebrook on Colby Street. By then your mind has shut down, even though there are still decisions to be made about positioning and the timing of your kick, if you even have one. You just hope, by the grace of God and Valhalla, John would say, that your decisions are good ones.

  That point in the race is right about where his staff would have been now if this week had ended the way that it started. But now this.

  John wasn’t sure if he was thinking right, but maybe what he thought had nothing to do with it. Charlie shot those photos, and nobody else had them yet. In the darkroom Leith was up to his elbows in developing fluid, stop bath, and fixer. All these columns Jeannette had cut out should be waxed and pasted up. His daughter Karen, a good reporter, was coming up from Newmarket. Almost everybody else, and an extra body or two, was still here—waiting for what?

  “All right—can you tear up the front page?”

  “What?” said Charlie.

  “Claire can go out and get the rest of the story. Karen can help. If I write it up and write a new editorial, can you run the production stuff out here? Can you get it all put together?”

  Charlie thought about this. “Well, we’d have to hurry.”

  “Susan’s probably got the front page all done. Pick two stories to pull off of there—I don’t care which two—and move them to the middle. Then make a jump page in back for the rest of this story. Tear me a hole in the editorial page and leave room for sidebars.”

  Charlie said, sure, he could do that. Then John started rounding up people for a meeting in the newsroom.

  13

  NO INKLING OF CAT AND MOUSE

  KEVIN JORDAN could think of a couple reasons he might get drummed out of Fish & Game once this day was over. That might be for the best, he thought, given how he had let Wayne Saunders go off alone in pursuit of that cruiser.

  Jordan, John Wimsatt, and Jim Kneeland had still been at Jordan’s home in Groveton and talking about the dog days of summer—and a deer poaching bust Jordan and Saunders had made the previous week in the Stratford Bog—when they heard Saunders’s voice on Jordan’s scanner: “Yeah, I’ve got 608 right in front of me—turning west on the Stratford Bridge.” A moment later they heard some other unit shouting that Saunders was down.

  Wimsatt had meant to compete in one of the shooting con
tests at Field Day, and his duty belt was in Kneeland’s truck: pistol, handcuffs, knife, pepper spray, extra magazines. But Kneeland was unarmed. Jordan shared with both men the heavy weapons he’d been issued and was officially qualified to use: a 12-gauge shotgun and a .308 deer rifle. For himself, from his own gun collection, he grabbed a Ruger Mini 30, an assault rifle like the AR-15 and a weapon he knew very well how to use—but for which he had no permission to use on duty. Well, he didn’t want to find himself, or either of these two guys, outgunned in a firefight. He also knew that if he ended up firing the Ruger, there would be hell to pay with the brass in Concord.

  Kneeland jumped into Jordan’s cruiser while Wimsatt, with his duty belt, followed in Kneeland’s pickup. They crossed into Vermont at Guildhall, but then the pickup got stopped at a roadblock set up a mile north of the bridge. Jordan and Kneeland had flown through, continuing up 102 and expecting at any instant to be met by 608 and its gun-wielding occupant.

  They had traveled ten miles north of Guildhall, nearly to Bloomfield, when they were met instead by a convoy of law enforcement vehicles. Jordan learned that Saunders, still breathing, had been taken to the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital by a civilian, that Scott and Les and Vickie Bunnell were dead, that the assailant, probably, was hiding somewhere off this road.

  Inside Jordan’s cruiser, all twelve of its radio channels were jammed with competing traffic, and opportunities for contact occurred like quick breaks in cloud cover. Jordan couldn’t get through to his lieutenant, Eric Stohl. But he heard from Wimsatt—John had left the roadblock and was driving north. The two vehicles rendezvoused at the wooded entrance to one of the many old logging roads branching off 102, this one about a mile south of Bloomfield, just over the Brunswick town line and almost kitty-corner to the turn into Dennis Pond. By then other vehicles were stopping at roadside homes or dispersing down other side roads.

  At the Brunswick line, Kneeland and Wimsatt switched places, with Kneeland taking his pickup north to the hospital to check on Saunders. He took Jordan’s deer rifle with him, just in case, and he reached Bloomfield in time for Dick Marini to tell him to hurry. “Wayne wasn’t looking too good,” Marini said.

  Meanwhile Jordan and Wimsatt prepared to join the search on 102. Jordan had done some nighttime deer-poaching stakeouts with Scott Phillips before Saunders came aboard, and as he tried to work the radio, he felt his emotions roiling in his gut: guilt and shame about what had happened to Saunders; wonder that a couple of pros like Scottie and Les could be taken down by anybody; grief and the muffled rage with which a cop pursues a cop killer; and a sharp unease about his role in this pursuit.

  “Are you sure it’s okay for us to be over here?” Wimsatt asked. “I mean, in Vermont?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not,” Jordan said. That was the other thing, besides his illegal Ruger. In general terms, conservation officers have the same right as other cops to pursue suspected felons across state lines. But with Fish & Game there were always restrictions and procedures to observe, and they kept changing.

  Jordan tried once more, in vain, to get through to Stohl. “Well, we’ll probably all get fired,” he sighed, throwing his cruiser into gear. “But first let’s get this son of a bitch.”

  The clear-cut summit of Carlton Hill, with its panoramic view to all corners of the compass, is close enough to Columbia for Vickie Bunnell to have thought it was on her side of the town line when—once she was named an associate judge in 1995—she asked her friend Steve Brooks, fifty, to take her place on the Columbia Board of Selectmen. Brooks had a house on the top of that hill, but as a Colebrook resident he couldn’t stand in for Vickie. Instead he became a Colebrook selectman in 1996.

  Brooks had grown up on a Colebrook dairy farm, working 365 days a year, attending school a couple years behind Vickie, and determined to live in the North Country as anything but a farmer. After college at the University of New Hampshire, he drove trucks for the Tillotson Rubber Company and worked part time for the Colebrook Police Department. In 1982 he joined the Border Patrol, serving a long stint on the Rio Grande before transferring back home in 1988.

  He was home that day on annual leave, enjoying the view, when the scanner in his kitchen went off. There was no time to get into uniform. He grabbed his gun belt and badge and dropped his nine-year-old daughter off at the Colebrook Police Department. Brooks’s wife, a schoolteacher, arrived within a few minutes to take Erica back home. Brooks drove first to the IGA, where Lord’s cruiser had been blanketed with a blue tarp. Bert von Dohrmann told him what had happened there and who had done it.

  Brooks knew where Drega lived. He parked at the head of the driveway, where several people had gathered to look at the smoke rising from down near the river. One of the bystanders, a neighbor of Drega’s, told him that a state trooper had come out of the driveway just a short while ago. “Yeah, but that was no trooper,” Brooks told him.

  Keeping his head down, Brooks advanced to the crest of the driveway, just to be sure that Drega was gone. The cabin was almost entirely engulfed in flames, and one corner of the barn looked to be smoldering. There were no vehicles in sight. Brooks lingered a moment at the spectacle, at the almost biblical vision of this pillar of flames.

  A fire engine pulled into the driveway and wheeled through the grass around Brooks’s pickup. The crew wanted Brooks to go down there with them, but Steve saw Denny Welch, his commanding officer at the Beecher Falls station, headed down Route 3 in a marked Ford Bronco.

  “It’s safe,” Brooks said. “There’s nobody there.”

  Brooks waved the Bronco down and left his pickup parked in the driveway. “We’re going to Bloomfield,” Welch said. As they pulled onto Route 3, Brooks saw in his side-view mirror that the fire truck wasn’t moving.

  Once Jim Kneeland had left for the hospital and Kevin Jordan had given up on trying to get orders or authorizations of any kind, he and John Wimsatt turned around on 102. “We’ll just join the gang checking out the dirt roads,” Jordan said.

  They would have started with the road at which they had rendezvoused, but Jordan remembered there were three farmers at work haying a riverside meadow just south of that entrance. He stopped in front of the meadow with his blues flashing. Then he and Wimsatt got out and waved the men over. The farmers climbed off their tractor and baler and approached—two middle-aged men in plaid shirts and covered in grass, one of them in a trim black beard, and a young guy in his twenties.

  Yes, they had seen a lot of cruisers, but they hadn’t noticed one with broken windows or seen anybody on foot. Jordan said this was a manhunt for an armed and dangerous fugitive and to please get inside. “And whatever you do, don’t go looking for this guy, okay?”

  Inside the cruiser, as he pulled away, Jordan remembered that he had said almost the same thing to Wayne Saunders a long time ago, or so it seemed. He shook his head. “Those guys were staring at me like I was nuts—like I had two heads on my shoulders.”

  “You’ve got to admit it’s hard to believe,” Wimsatt said.

  Dean Hook represented the second generation of his family to work 365 days a year on this tidy dairy farm abutting the Connecticut and straddling Route 102 in Brunswick, population a hundred or so. Dean’s son Dan, working at his side that day in the hay meadow across from the farmhouse, would be the third, if he kept with it. And it was a good day for haying—bone dry and no rain in the forecast.

  The Hooks had help from their friend Dick Moulton. By late afternoon a good portion of the meadow was dotted with sweet-smelling and evenly spaced bundles of timothy, rye grass, and clover. They were curious about all the police activity, but too busy to pause—until a New Hampshire Fish & Game cruiser stopped in front of the meadow.

  Both men who climbed out were in plainclothes, blue jeans and T-shirts. Dean Hook couldn’t hide his disappointment at being told to shut down. He hated to leave that much hay in windrows under this sun, but he promised to do so and get his machinery out of there.

 
; As Hook watched the cruiser pull away, he gave his beard a thoughtful tug. He was, after all, constable of the Town of Brunswick. And to reach the road, he’d have to drive the tractor and baler back through Brunswick Springs, that fifty-acre patch of woods on the north side of the meadow. Just to be safe, he thought, maybe he and Dan should take a look around in there first.

  By 4 p.m., Julie Roy, Kim Richards, and other customers at the IGA had been freed from the supermarket’s stockroom, but none were free to leave until the police had taken down their statements. Some would be kept until eight that evening.

  Ian Venne, the boy trapped in the Thunderbird parked next to the gunman’s abandoned pickup, had been tearfully reunited with his mother and sister. The Vennes joined the people waiting to submit statements, some of whom were making phone calls. Kim Richards tried without success to reach her husband. Then Guy LaPerle said he had a call for her. Kim went to the manager’s office expecting at last to speak to her husband. Instead it was a reporter for Channel 9 News in Manchester. Someone had given the reporter Richards’s license plate number in the parking lot, and her name had been obtained from that. Kim wept as she declined to be interviewed.

  Julie Roy wished she hadn’t been present for the arrival of Bev Lord, a woman she admired as someone “strong as a threefold brick wall.” Chief Sielicki had tried to keep her away from Les’s cruiser, but Bev, frantic, broke away and ran to its window. “To hear someone like Bev break down like that,” Julie said later, “well, I don’t know—that was a sound I never want to hear again in my life. That was about when it all sunk in.”

  The man who had vanquished Christopher Wilder thirteen years before was enjoying a day off and on the back nine of a golf course near Mt. Washington. Chuck Jellison had been a state police detective in 1984, while Wilder was a wealthy, charismatic thirty-nine-year-old businessman, photographer, and sometime Formula I race car driver. Found to be a murderer as well, a predator who tortured young women before he killed them, Wilder had kept murdering as he fled from Florida to New Mexico and then back across the country and into the Northeast, aiming for Canada. The fugitive had stolen a Pontiac Firebird in New York, and on an April afternoon Jellison happened to notice such a car pulled up to a gas pump at the Getty station in Colebrook.