In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  But the photos of Vickie were more problematic. Charlie had waited until she was covered, but even so . . . “Maybe this one?” Charlie said.

  In black and white, the camo-pattern tarp that Dave Robidas had laid over Vickie looked like leopard skin. Paul Nugent stood over the body and looked back at Robidas and John Brunault, both of whom stood stunned, fifteen or twenty feet distant. The pool of blood that trailed toward Brunault seemed to reflect his face and shoulders.

  John was straining at the seams as he looked at this, and Charlie was suffering as well. “They need to see what happened,” Charlie said eventually. “They need to see what it looked like, at least in some way. It’s part of the story.”

  “Yeah—I suppose.”

  “And, you know, the story in these photos, either one of them, isn’t people dying—it’s people helping, or trying to help. Doing their best.”

  John sucked in a long, empty breath. “Okay—we’ll use this one. Yeah, okay.”

  They went on to picking out photos to send to the Union Leader, but they chose to share none of Vickie with the Union Leader or any other press organization. That part of the story was just for Colebrook.

  Late that afternoon, John Harrigan nearly got arrested—along with everybody else in the Sentinel Building.

  State police corporal Scott Champagne, in his mid-thirties with hair to his shoulders and wearing a T-shirt and old blue jeans, was in an unmarked car and doing undercover narcotics work in Littleton—specifically, trailing a suspected pot dealer, with Chuck West nearby for backup. Then Champagne got a call on his cell phone from Howie Weber at Troop F. Weber told him the names of the people murdered and ordered him to Colebrook to secure crime scenes at both the IGA supermarket and the News and Sentinel.

  Champagne argued for permission to help with the manhunt, but Weber stood firm. Champagne arrived on Bridge Street as Norm Brown and some others were stringing tape around the area. He went on to the IGA, where Tom Yorke was interviewing witnesses and Dan Couture was keeping a log. So that scene was already secure. Still fuming about this backwater assignment, Champagne returned to the Sentinel.

  With his badge and ID on a chain around his neck, he began taking photos of the scene—and stopped short when Brown showed him five bullet casings scattered like cigarette butts near the back door of the building. “So shots were fired right here,” Champagne said.

  “That’s right,” Brown replied.

  “How many gunmen?”

  “I’m pretty sure there was just the one.”

  “Were there any shots fired inside the building?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well—”

  At precisely that moment, John burst through the door, skipped over the casings, and rushed to fetch something—he can’t remember what—from a vehicle in the parking lot. He hastened back into the building past an open-mouthed Champagne. “Who was that?”

  “That’s John Harrigan. He owns the newspaper—and the building.”

  “So there are people in there?”

  “Yes, there are.”

  “And what the hell are they doing?”

  “Putting out a newspaper, it looks like.”

  “In the middle of a crime scene? Where this lawyer had her office? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you’d better have a word with Mr. Harrigan.”

  “Have you gone through there yet? Checked it out?”

  “Talk to John.”

  Suddenly Leith Jones was at the back door, and Champagne nearly took a bite out of him. Then Champagne’s conversation with John went off the rails within its first few words. “You’ve got your job, and you’re doing it,” John said. “And we’ve got our job, and we’re doing it, no matter what you say. There is no way in hell we’re leaving.”

  Champagne emphasized the importance of protecting a crime scene, the uselessness in court of mishandled or contaminated evidence. “Crime scene?” John cried. “This is a dead scene—four people are dead. The crime’s been done. Why aren’t you out chasing this guy?”

  That touched a nerve. “I can shut you down, Mr. Harrigan.”

  “You do that, and you’ll have to live with the consequences—if you can figure out how to stop me, or anybody else who wants to stay. You want to try that?”

  That was exactly what Champagne wanted to try. But he took a step back and considered—the whole town in chaos, one or more perpetrators still at large. He conferred out of earshot with Brown, who said he was nearly certain that no shots had been fired in the building. “But I can take a look around,” Brown promised, “talk to people while they work.”

  In his report, Champagne would ascribe John’s “poor attitude” to “the shock of the circumstances that were unfolding.” He added that “there was no time or available resources that permitted this writer to argue with or arrest these people.” Instead he went back to John and proposed a deal—everyone could stay in the building so long as no one went out the back door, where the shell casings lay, or into the parking lot.

  John agreed—grudgingly, still angry. The problem with the front door was all those other reporters gathered on the other side. Half an hour later, when Monty and Vivien said they needed something from Vivien’s car, John sent them out the back.

  That was just as Champagne was explaining his handling of the situation to a skeptical Sergeant Guy Kimball of the state police. Kimball marched into the building and assured John that the newspaper would indeed be shut down, and he arrested, with another instance of traffic through that door.

  At 5:39 p.m., with an okay from the Major Crime Unit’s John Pickering, Guy Kimball lifted the tarp that had been thrown over Les Lord’s cruiser at the IGA.

  Kimball had gone from the Sentinel Building to the supermarket and had met Pickering in the parking lot. Lord was still in that cruiser, and its motor was still running. Kimball reached breathlessly across the body of the driver and turned the ignition switch off.

  With that, the cruiser lurched forward as Lord’s foot slipped off the brake pedal. Kimball lunged to throw the transmission into park, holding the body away from him with his right elbow. Then the vehicle was still. In a place where the mutter of its engine had become white noise, the sudden hush was palpable. It was as if Lord’s soul had fled.

  At seven, in Hardwick, Vermont, Gerry Upton was outside and seated in his car, in the driveway, listening to the car radio as the color started to drain from the sky, as the surrounding trees faded to black. Above the voices on the radio and a chorus of crickets from the pond in back, he heard footsteps. He looked up to see his next-door neighbor, a friend who had done some jobs together with him and Carl, coming down the driveway. “Did you hear about Carl?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Upton said. “I did.”

  Margaret appeared at their home’s front door. She had been watching TV. “Who are they talking about?” she called. “Do you suppose it’s Carl?”

  “Yes, it’s Carl,” Upton said. “They just killed him.”

  “Oh, God help us. Did they have to?”

  Earl Bunnell, Jr., and his wife, Pam, were doing for Earl’s parents what Kenn Stransky was doing for the Sentinel staff: shielding them from the press—even the New York Times. “The Times had a girl there who was especially nice,” Bunny said. “But we said no, we’d rather not do any interviews. We didn’t want to be treated like the only ones who had lost someone. Others were grieving too.”

  Friends were let in, other grievers, people nearly as enmeshed in loss as the Bunnells. Electrical lineman Woody Crawford was typical. He had counted Vickie as both his friend and his lawyer, and her brother, Earl—who was still Pearly to Woody—was his daughter’s godfather. Lord’s wife, Bev, was his cousin, and he had painted Scott and Christine Phillips’s house. When Dennis and Polly had decided they wanted to be on the electrical grid, it was Woody who had done the work on that.

  The Reverend Peter Dyer—a chubby, amiable man
who suited up convincingly as Santa Claus each holiday season—came from the Congregational church, along with his wife, Rosalie. Like Earl, Bunny and Irene had been prevented from going to Vickie, but as the evening wore on, they grew upset that Vickie had yet to be moved. Lawyer David King heard Bunny cry, “Can’t they at least get her off the pavement?”

  At 7:10, nearly an hour after the gunfire had ceased at Brunswick Springs, the Vermont State Police issued a press release: “It has been confirmed that the suspect in this incident, Carl Drega, has been located and apprehended. The suspect has suffered a gunshot wound. Three more police officers were injured during this incident. . . . It is unknown at this time as to the seriousness of their injuries.”

  A young state trooper, Eric Johnson, new to Troop F, had been posted to Pam’s house to stay with Bunny and Irene until they went home. He was more candid about the status of the suspect. “They got the son of a bitch,” he whispered into Bunny’s ear. “They killed him.”

  Bunny nodded and bowed his head, weeping. He didn’t know why. He guessed later that it was because they had killed the only man who could tell him why his daughter—or anyone else—was dead.

  John Harrigan couldn’t remember who got through to him on the telephone in his office. John took a reporter’s notes on the events and circumstances. Then he went out to tell his staff.

  “There wasn’t anything like applause or jubilation,” Kenn Stransky said. “It was just another fact to add to the story—and an opportunity to exhale, since in the back of our minds we’d been afraid all along that he’d be back.”

  16

  PATIENT IN AFFLICTION

  WITH THE DEATH OF CARL DREGA, John Harrigan’s headline story in the News and Sentinel had a beginning—albeit a mystifying one; all this from a traffic stop?—a middle, and an end. John was a first-draft writer anyway, and it was one of those leads that nearly writes itself: “It was a crime of unbelievable proportions, that left at least five people dead, a newspaper and a police fraternity in shock, and a community stunned to its core.”

  The editorial was tougher. Here John eschewed mentioning the “deranged gunman” by name—indeed, John would vow to never utter Carl Drega’s name again—and he punctuated the fate of each victim with question marks: “Dennis Joos, this paper’s co-editor, a newspaperman’s newspaperman who loved rural and small-town life, gunned down as he tried to stop a madman? Vickie Bunnell, a small-town lawyer in the classic sense of the term who kept her dog in her office and saved the lives of everyone else in the building by shouting out a warning with her last words, lying dead in the parking lot? Scott Phillips, one of our all-time favorite troopers, cowlick and all, taken from his wife and kids and the town that he loved, and loved him? Les Lord, a great guy with a landmark laugh who was about the most likeable guy around, shot down in cold blood?”

  Each question mark was a spike of incredulity. “Yes, it happened here. Yes, these wonderful people are gone. It is a nightmare from which there is no waking up. God love these people as their families and their town did—and God help us all deal with what has happened, and remember these fine and cherished faces, and their smiles.”

  The column ended with an account of what was happening as John wrote the piece, as his staff—“Some had narrowly escaped the volley that killed Vickie Bunnell,” he wrote, without hyperbole—put it all together. “We left the photos and stories and bylines that Dennis did this week in the paper,” John continued. “It was, after all, his last work, and he put his best into everything that he did. We’ll do a better job with the loss and what this has all meant in next week’s paper. Right now it’s just too much, and getting this paper out is all we can manage.”

  In the newsroom, Charlie Jordan pasted in a headline in a font size much larger than the Sentinel’s usual: “Four Gunned Down in Colebrook; Editor, Lawyer, Two Officers Dead.” His photos of Dennis in the gurney and Vickie beneath her blanket rested above brief articles by Claire Lynch about the vandalism at the post office and the runaways from Camp E-Toh-Anee. There was also a Leith Jones photo from the West Stewartstown Old Home Day parade: two young boys on a float with their arms around a docile black calf.

  John hadn’t quite finished his editorial when his children Karen and Mike arrived at eight thirty. They had to tap on John’s office window, since the front door was locked and the back door taped off. Kenn Stransky let them in, and soon Karen settled into helping Kenn on the phone lines.

  She found that some people were still calling to ask if her father was dead. Then Karen couldn’t help getting angry at a reporter calling from the Philadelphia Inquirer. “What are you doing at the newspaper now?” the woman asked. “Are people standing around in groups, hugging and crying?”

  “No, we’re not, and you need to think about how you phrase your questions,” Karen snapped. “We’re busy getting the paper out.”

  Lieutenant Rick Estes of New Hampshire Fish & Game was proud of Eric Stohl’s men and how they had conducted themselves that day, but none of the men felt proud—least of all Kevin Jordan. At the top of the foul-up list he recited to Estes was letting Wayne Saunders drive off alone. “I screwed up. I left him,” he said.

  “Well, you didn’t leave him,” Estes replied. “Everything you did, Kevin, was right. It turned out okay. Unfortunately, yes, some guys lost their lives here. That’s the nature of this business.”

  They sat alone at 8:30 p.m. with a tape recorder between them at Fish & Game’s Region 1 office in Lancaster. Estes himself was not at all reconciled to these deaths—but he had to be, and somehow he had to bring Jordan around to that point as well. Jordan, for his part, was not to be persuaded that any part of what he did was right, or enough. He didn’t mention the Ruger assault rifle he wasn’t qualified to carry. He had never used it, but just the same, at Brunswick Springs he had had to hand it over to Eric Stohl, who accepted the weapon with raised eyebrows and no comment.

  Then Stohl—an old-school kind of guy, with nothing touchy-feely about him—astonished Jordan by giving him a hug and insisting on chauffeuring him and John Wimsatt to this debriefing session. They became part of something that still seemed eerie to Jordan: a funereal, bumper-to-bumper parade of law enforcement vehicles of every stripe and size, along with an ambulance or two, plodding north on 102. Some of those drivers were blinking through tears, especially since word had gone around that John Pfeifer had died.

  “There’s nothing we can do about those guys who died,” Estes said. “There were a couple of guys whose number was up, and there was just no way around it, and this guy wasn’t fooling around. This wasn’t somebody running scared.”

  “Nope.”

  “This was a guy who wanted to hurt somebody.”

  “Yeah, and he wanted to get killed.”

  “Probably he did.” Estes paused, stubbing out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table between them. “And I don’t want to be the pathetic guy here, but I’m going to tell you something—somewhere, somebody’s going to take his side in this. Somebody’s going to say, ‘Oh, poor Carl, and all those bad police officers, hundreds of them, shooting at him.’ And he’s going to become a Robin Hood. But Kevin, he’s no Robin Hood. He was a nut with a gun, and he was wrong. You guys did the right thing.”

  Jordan nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You know in your heart.”

  Jordan looked into his heart and saw how much he had had in common—at least at that time—with Carl Drega. “I set out to kill this guy,” he said. “But luckily, none of us had to do it. I don’t think any of us did it. I think he did it on his own.”

  “Well, it damned sure wasn’t you, because you never fired a shot.”

  Jordan was glad of that, at the same time ashamed of it. “No, I never fired, so—”

  “And we’re all just a phone call away. I don’t care if it’s me or Eric, all you have to do is call, and I’ll go meet you anyplace you want and we’ll sit down. We’ll talk, we’ll drink, we’ll smoke, we’ll do anything you wan
t to do.”

  “I’ll be okay. I got a good wife.”

  That good wife had known only that a New Hampshire game officer, name withheld, had been shot in Bloomfield. At home that night Louise wrapped her arms around her husband and wept.

  At the same time that Kevin Jordan was meeting with Rick Estes, Patrolman Dan Couture was at the Colebrook Police Department providing his official account of the day. The lights around Monument Lot were bright as flares. Vickie still lay in the parking lot, and Bridge Street—with its throng of camera-wielding strangers from away—looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Still in his shorts and T-shirt, Couture had breasted his way through the crowd unmolested.

  His statement was taken by an officer up from Concord, Sergeant Dave Crawford of the Major Crime Unit. “I inquired how far away Patrolman Couture was when the cruiser drove by him, and Patrolman Couture said about sixty feet,” Crawford wrote. “I asked if Patrolman Couture had a clear shot at the cruiser, and he said for a short time he did.”

  A lot had happened since then, and more people had died. Couture, even more so than Jordan, was unreconciled to those deaths. Crawford was sympathetic, but it was sympathy from someone Couture would never see again.

  “It should be noted,” Crawford added to his conclusion to the statement, “that Patrolman Couture was very emotionally upset by the sequence of events, and I encouraged him not to blame himself and to seek counseling.”

  From the crime scene report of Sergeant Guy Kimball: “At 2100 hours on August 19, 1997, the body of Vickie BUNNELL (dob 7-9-52) was removed from the scene by Robert Moore and Neil Couture of the Newman Funeral Home, 136 Main Street, Colebrook, New Hampshire, for transportation to the Concord Hospital, 250 Pleasant Street, Concord, New Hampshire.”

  That was after Jana Riley—kicking and screaming, as it were—had come back to the Sentinel Building to provide her own witness statement. Jana had run straight through Ducret’s, out the front door, and into a hair salon, where her cries and exhortations were greeted as the ravings of a mad woman. Friends had picked her up there and taken her by car to their own business on Main, which happened to be another hair salon. Jana’s car was among those impounded in the parking lot, and eventually her boyfriend had to give her a ride to her mother’s house, stopping first at the Sentinel Building. Determined never to enter there again, Jana sent the boyfriend in to find her purse. The front door was locked, however, and Charlie Jordan had to hand the purse out to him.