In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Some of the local people still swear by the water as a cure for a variety of ills. It has a metallic, though not unpleasant, taste, but the alleged diversity of elements in each of the six springs has not proved out, with the water displaying uniform levels of sulfur dioxide. In the years since 1997, there have been two suicides in the woods: a logger who hung himself in a tree and a woman who drove her car into Silver Lake.

  On the day of the manhunt, Dean Hook wasn’t looking to tempt fate in a place he considered haunted. But he had to go through there anyway, and he did have that tingling hunch. He sent his friend Dick Moulton home, and then he and his son Dan went across the road to the farmhouse to fetch a pair of deer rifles, just in case.

  They went in on the road out of the hay meadow with Dennis Pond Brook running briskly on their left. Within a quarter mile or so, that road comes to a tee. You can go left to a frayed but sturdy wooden bridge over the brook and out to Route 102 or right, along a road that follows Black Creek, a slow little rill that seeps from Silver Lake. Soon that road fades into a footpath to the side of the lake opposite the springs. A ridge of high ground, blanketed in hemlock and pine and mixed hardwoods, borders the road and creek on their south side, but the Hooks never came to the tee. Instead they abandoned the road along Dennis Pond Brook and bushwhacked up the back of the ridge to high ground. Even before they had reached the summit, they could hear the sound of a police radio rising from the other side.

  They crept a short distance down from the ridgetop and saw the cruiser through a lattice of trees at a distance of forty yards. It had been driven along the creek for as far as that section of road was passable and then had been turned around in the tight quarters of a small clearing to face out again toward 102. “It looked like it was pointed so it could leave fast,” Dean Hook said later.

  They could see the bullet-pocked windshield, and the open driver-side door, and what looked like a pair of shirtsleeved arms stretched forward on the dashboard ahead of the steering wheel. The radio had been cranked to maximum volume, or near to it. Voices were flying back and forth, all talking about the search for this very thing the two men were staring at. It was loud enough that the Hooks knew they wouldn’t be able to hear anybody moving in the woods behind them. And it was a spooky thing to see in a place like that. “It looked like the end of civilization,” Dan Hook said.

  Father and son jacked shells into the chambers of their rifles and—moving quietly as Abenakis, scanning the woods in all directions—retraced their steps up the ridge and down the other side. They avoided the road on their way back to the hay meadow, preferring to slip through the woods that hugged the Connecticut. Then they hurried across the meadow, back to the house, and into Dan’s Chevy Cavalier. They had to go only half a mile up 102 to Dennis Pond Road and Chuck Jellison’s command post—where an armed, bearded man and his similarly armed companion were nearly shot by a posse of very edgy Vermont and New Hampshire lawmen.

  Border Patrol agent John Pfeifer, thirty-three—an economics major at Vermont’s St. Michael’s College before being recruited directly into the Border Patrol, now with a wife and ten-year-old daughter at home—was becoming a little more nervous with each step down this road and into these woods.

  Pfeifer had been getting first-aid training at the agency’s Newport station when calls for help came in, and he thought things probably would be wrapped up by the time he got down to that stretch of 102. Not so—he met fellow agent Dave Perry at the turn into Maidstone Lake. There they debated who would help search the lake roads and who would secure the turnoff. “This is more my fight than yours, John,” said Perry, distraught in particular over Phillips. “You stay here, and let me go in.”

  Then Pfeifer had been at the command post, the CP, when that little Chevy and its two farmers had come out of nowhere and scared the bejesus out of everyone. That was how he found himself part of the entry team, what had become a six-man detail walking along this creek on their way to the stolen cruiser’s reported location. And the ground was rising sharply on both sides. They were marching into a valley, Pfeifer realized. Tactically, this wasn’t good.

  The team had taken shape at the CP, when Captain Mark Metayer of the Vermont State Police ordered one of his K-9 units, Russ Robinson and a German Shepherd named Major, to go in with a Border Patrol agent—Eric Albright—and secure the cruiser. Chuck Jellison pitched in with his own K-9 unit, state trooper Rob Haase and Rowdy, with backup from Jeff Caulder, thirty-four, the SWAT team member who had attended the Police Academy with Scott Phillips. Haase and Caulder had been on separate assignments below the notches and had driven up I-93 in tandem at 105 mph. They stopped at Troop F in Twin Mountain, where Howie Webber told them that Scottie and Les were dead. “And watch yourselves. This guy is a real badass.”

  Amos Colby was added to the team because of his knowledge of the area, and the team was completed by the nearest at hand, all of whom happened to be Border Patrol agents: Pfeifer, Steve Brooks, and a third, Ben Batchelder. They drove in convoy to the area’s southern entrance, the one that led directly across the bridge over Dennis Pond Brook. Colby led the way in his Jeep, which he drove across the bridge and parked a quarter mile in at the intersection where the road split, either straight ahead down Black Creek or off to the right and the hay meadow.

  Dean Hook remembers advising against a direct approach to the cruiser, that rather they should go over the ridge, as he and Dan had. But there was no one formally in command of the detail, and that advice—if it was heard—was only partially adopted, with Brooks and Batchelder splitting off from the rest and heading to the right, behind the ridge. Pfeifer and the other five followed the creek.

  Nor was there thought to be much probability of trouble. Rob Haase remembers Caulder telling him this should be a Sunday stroll. They both knew that, in the usual run of cases like this, the perpetrator would be found to have committed suicide, and the Hooks’ report of arms stretched out on the dashboard seemed to suggest that. If not, then the guy would have fled on foot, and Major could track him.

  Pfeifer reminded himself of all this, took comfort too in this detail’s being well armed. Russ Robinson had only his sidearm, but Caulder packed an M16 assault rifle and had loaned a Remington .870 pump-action shotgun to Eric Albright. Haase and Colby carried shotguns as well, while Pfeifer had his M16.

  They set off in pairs from the crossroads. Robinson and Haase had decided that two K-9 units were redundant. “It was their state, so we used their dog,” Haase said later. He locked Rowdy in his cruiser, and Robinson took the lead with Major. Caulder, who was on his first hot call since qualifying as a SWAT team member, and whose SWAT-issued tactical vest boasted a one-inch steel plate in front, followed a short distance behind. Twenty feet behind Caulder, in staggered formation, one on each side of the road, came Pfeifer and Albright, and finally Colby and Haase.

  The woods were silent except for their own rustlings and the faint buzz of radios from the CP. The trees grew thick as jail bars on either side, with patches of blue showing in streaks through their branches. Black Creek is aptly named, a crooked ribbon of darkness winding between shoots of pickerel weed and sedge. Caulder, the former U.S. marine, scanned the ground as it rose on both sides, and Haase kept an eye on the woods behind as they advanced, step-by-step, up the road.

  A hundred yards in, Major hit a scent. Five gun muzzles swung in front of the dog as it buried its nose in something at the foot of a maple. Robinson pulled the dog off, inspected some tissue that might have been left by a hiker. The handler shrugged and marked the spot.

  They were three hundred yards from the fork when they rounded a bend and caught their first glimpse of the cruiser, some ninety yards ahead. Caulder didn’t know that the vehicle had been parked facing out, and he felt the hair lift on the back of his neck to see its grille and open door and hear its radio. Somebody just looking to kill himself, he thought, wouldn’t trouble to arrange things like that. Pfeifer was close enough to see those arms flung across
the dashboard. He relaxed, until he saw that the blue flannel shirtsleeves were empty.

  Robinson and Major were still ahead of Caulder and had advanced beyond that bend. By then, so had Pfeifer. Caulder raised his hand—the team halted.

  Then Major alerted a second time, more vigorously, spinning to the right and yanking Robinson across a dirt-and-gravel berm, about two feet high, that ran like a parapet around the base of the ridge, the edge of the road.

  Again, the gun muzzles swung right. About thirty yards up the slope ahead—“at two o’clock,” Caulder remembers—the first three members of the team saw a man step from behind the trunk of a thick hemlock. He was clean-shaven—not bearded; wearing a plain denim shirt—not checkered blue flannel; and a state police Stetson. Pfeifer sighted on the man, but hesitated—there might be other cops in the woods besides Brooks and Batchelder. Caulder hesitated as well.

  Robinson was the first to see the man’s black rifle, to see that it was trained on them. “He’s got a gun!” Robinson cried. “State police—let me see your hands!”

  Rob Haase had come up behind Caulder and was astonished to see a thread of fire, what looked like the path of a tracer bullet, drawn from the slope to his foot. The bullet was still burning as it struck the ground in front of Haase and ricocheted, creasing the toe of his boot and spoiling his aim as he fired his shotgun. Haase’s toe felt as if someone had dropped a fifty-pound weight on it and set it ablaze.

  The second round hit Caulder, flabbergasted by the crashing thunder of gun reports in this narrow valley. It seemed to the trooper that he’d been hit above the knee. The M16 flew from his hands, pinwheeling into Black Creek, and he felt his left foot curl up like a snail in his boot as his leg went crazy. It kicked up in a fast twitch that somehow knocked his ankle against his rib cage.

  Caulder felt not so much pain as a burning sensation. His mind went to work as he danced on one leg: Fuck, I’m shot. That thought ran several times before the next arrived: Hey, stupid, get down or you’ll get shot again.

  What seemed to unfold in slow motion for Caulder was eyeblink swift to John Pfeifer. He had fired a dozen rounds in the direction of that hemlock when he heard a yell, saw Caulder lying facedown on the road, then crawling hand over hand toward the berm.

  Other members of the team were there already, hunkered down and firing in narrow sight lines, or blindly, through the mesh of trees. Albright’s borrowed shotgun had jammed after three rounds, and he took out his sidearm, emptying a clip.

  Robinson had turned Major loose, but it looked to the rest like the dog was still leashed. Major was trained to attack in the direction of gunfire, but since gunfire came from everywhere, the animal was baffled. Robinson fired several times with his sidearm as he pulled Major by the collar down to the berm. There he had to lie on top of the dog to keep him contained.

  Pfeifer knelt over Caulder and fired up the slope while the wounded man sought cover. Then Pfeifer was behind the berm too, asking Caulder where he was hit.

  “I think my leg’s shot off,” Caulder said. He could feel blood pulsing in a freshet along his thigh, and Pfeifer saw Caulder’s camouflage pants turn red. Pfeifer put down his M16 and shouted into his portable radio, his handi-walkie: “Shots fired, trooper down, need to get him out of here.”

  Ben Batchelder answered from the other side of the ridge and said he would get help. Amos Colby was already headed that way, splashing his way down Black Creek. Meanwhile bursts of tracer fire from up the hill rocketed into the berm and tore holes through the air.

  Caulder twisted to one side and yanked his .45 Smith & Wesson out of its holster. Pfeifer had a hand on Caulder’s leg, feeling for a place to apply pressure to stanch the bleeding, and as he did so, he felt something touch his shoulder. His arm contorted crazily, like Caulder’s leg had done, and all the way down at the end of the berm, Rob Haase heard the moan that escaped from Pfeifer.

  Caulder knew that if his leg’s femoral artery had been cut, he had less than a minute to live. With storm drains roaring in both ears, he started counting. He heard Pfeifer tell Batchelder on the handi-walkie that he’d been hit too, saw Albright and Haase firing up the hill as if they were at the end of a tunnel. He turned to see Pfeifer lying on his back in the road next to him. Was he in shock? Caulder asked Pfeifer to say his name, and he did so, but with pink foam bubbling at his lips. Pfeifer’s bullet had spun through a lung.

  Caulder ticked off the seconds, exceeded a minute—and found himself still alive and conscious. Pfeifer had discarded his handi-walkie and was struggling with one good arm to get his sidearm, a .40 Beretta, out of its holster. Then the two men lay side-by-side, pistols clutched to their chests, with the same thought in their minds—sooner or later, the gunman would come down the hill or along this road to finish them off.

  The three others behind the berm felt nearly as helpless. They knew it would be a simple matter for Drega to flank them, for him to slip away from that tree, angle down through the brush to the end of the clearing, and fire unimpeded down the length of the road. But so far the shots were still coming from two o’clock uphill.

  Pfeifer heard someone calling him on the handi-walkie, but he couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak. His left side had gone numb, and he could taste the blood in his mouth, feel more of it coming up his throat. He knew his lungs were filling like sponges, that he had only so much time before he drowned in blood. But no one could reach him where he lay in the road without also being an easy target. During lulls in the shooting, Pfeifer knew the gunman could hear him coughing, could hear the static hiss of his walkie.

  He wondered how long it had been since he’d been hit. Five minutes? Pfeifer stared at the heavens through crows’ nests of tree limbs.

  He turned his head to the right and was amazed to find that Caulder had vanished. Pfeifer decided he must have passed out and woken up after Caulder’s rescue.

  He wondered how long ago that was and if Caulder had been alive when they took him. He wondered if death could be something so intangible as this—a mere touch on the shoulder, like the brush of a wing, and then just a sneaky lapse in awareness.

  Chuck West, forty, knew Les Lord when Yogi Bear was still the young police chief in Pittsburg. West, a Pennsylvania native, had just gotten out of the air force. He had been stationed at a base in New Hampshire’s Seacoast Region and wanted to stay in New Hampshire. He got into the state police, Troop F, and soon the convivial Lord invited him to share one of Bev’s home-cooked meals. Later West, Lord, and two other guys took a motorcycle trip to Martha’s Vineyard. Lord, so sure at the controls of a car or snow machine, was just learning to ride a motorcycle, and West remembered how he steered white-knuckled through the traffic on Route 1 near Boston.

  By 1997 West was a detective, a member of Troop F’s Drug Task Force. That day he was undercover, in plainclothes and driving an unmarked Mercury Cougar, when he flew up from Twin Mountain with Steve Hersom. West had been at the command post with Chuck Jellison when Steve Brooks arrived to tell him that Lord was gone, and who else had died as well: the good-natured judge who signed some of his search warrants, the newspaperman to whom it was safe to speak frankly, and Scottie. West stared and shook his head, and poor Brooks had to say all of it again. Meanwhile Jellison looked at these two men in plainclothes, and at West’s unmarked Cougar, and told them to pair up—they might be able to approach the fugitive unawares, like Breton and Marini had.

  West and Brooks joined the search up and down 102 and were returning to the CP when they saw several vehicles turning into the road that led to Brunswick Springs. West figured they were all checking out a reported sighting, imagined this would be another in a string of false leads, but he followed them in, just in case.

  They arrived as the entry team, with all those Border Patrol guys, was forming. Brooks was grabbed for that team as well, paired with Ben Batchelder and sent off down the right-hand spur. West, wearing a state police raid jacket and with his .45 Smith & Wesson in hand, walked up Black C
reek some distance in the wake of the entry team.

  Then the shooting broke out. He sprinted up to the bend in time to see Caulder fall, to see the rest take cover at the berm, and Pfeifer take a hit. Like Pfeifer, West had a handi-walkie on his belt, but he couldn’t raise anybody on it. He ran back to the bridge, to the phalanx of vehicles parked on its far side. On the Cougar’s radio, he was able to reach the CP and shout that at least two officers were down, the rest in bad trouble.

  Then it was back to the firefight. West came up to the bend and saw that Jeff Caulder had turned on his belly and was hauling himself down the road by his elbows. A trail of blood colored the dirt behind him.

  Caulder yelled twice, then once more, for West to get the hell down, but to no effect. Instead the detective ran into the line of fire, grabbed Caulder by the carrying strap on the neck of his ballistics vest, and began dragging him up the road like a steamer trunk. Caulder was no easy load—a fit two hundred pounds and wearing another fifty pounds of gear and armor. It was slow going, terrifically so.

  They cleared the bend, which got them out of immediate danger. Then came the long stretch back to the bridge. West was doing a number of things at once: still trying to raise someone on the handi-walkie, moving Caulder up the road, asking him where he was hit, and promising—with obvious lack of conviction—that he was going to be all right.

  Caulder, for his part, no longer feared that he’d bleed to death, and he still felt more of a burning sensation than real pain in the leg. “Take it easy, Chuck,” he said. “I know I’m gonna make it.”

  They saw Steve Brooks running down the road to meet them, along with Batchelder and another Border Patrol agent, Marty Hewson. Behind them came a pair of white-faced EMTs, one of whom was Penny Henry, carrying a stretcher-like backboard.