In the Evil Day

  Norm Brown of the county jail persuaded the National Guard to install three hundred cots in the Pittsburg school gym. Helen Lord, Les’s mother, worked in the kitchen at that school and was busy at all hours feeding her tenants. Frank Prue and Gerry Marcou were in Pittsburg frequently that week, checking in with Helen, Bev, and Les’s sisters, helping to shield them from the media, to “keep the wolves from the door,” Prue said. Next month Frank, no longer the Park Ranger without Yogi Bear to play off of, would be granted his request to take over Lord’s patrol and would spend the next two years, until his retirement in 1999, keeping a park ranger’s guardian eye on the Lords.

  Calling hours on Friday for both Phillips and Lord were held in the Colebrook Elementary School gym. The Balsams, the big hotel at Dixville Notch, donated food for the wakes, which was served by volunteers from the Catholic Women’s Club and the Colebrook Garden Club. Coffee was kept hot in maple syrup buckets and evaporators. Balsams manager Steve Barba had ordered seven thousand rolls to be delivered with other items via refrigerator truck through Franconia Notch, but when the truck was unloaded early that morning, the rolls were found to be absent. No matter—Barba and Sergeant Howie Weber called all the bakeries and grocers in town, including the IGA, and in the nick of time a sort of miracle of the loaves was achieved.

  The gym was a riot of flowers, a hush-spoken hubbub of mourners circulating past the caskets. These included John Harrigan and his staff, all wearing the black armbands they would also wear to Vickie’s wake tomorrow. Trooper Steve Hersom, who had been first to the body at Brunswick Springs, noticed that Scott was wearing gloves. He wondered aloud about that, and someone reminded him that Phillips had been shot several times in the hands—hands raised trying to protect himself as Drega loomed over him. Hersom felt ashamed for not having been there to protect Scott himself. He saw Christine Phillips but was too ashamed to approach her, speak to her. He joined a group of troopers clustered around Chuck Jellison—Rob Haase, Chuck West, some others. “You could see it in his eyes,” Hersom said about Jellison. “The wind had gone out of his sails. It was time to retire.”

  Rain was in the forecast for Saturday, but the day dawned cloudy and dry and stayed that way. The parade formed on Bridge Street, and its files of uniformed men—their dress blouses a North Country quilt of brass-buttoned blue, green, red, and gray—stretched from Vermont to the corner of Main. Mixed into that quilt were Governor Jean Shaheen and her husband, Bill. At its rear, Trooper Tom Yorke led two groups of pallbearers, a pair of riderless horses—empty boots reversed in their stirrups, Stetsons laid backward on their saddles—and the hearses.

  It took half an hour for that assembly to move itself onto Main, turning south past silent, crowded sidewalks, hands over hearts as the color guards passed, and then a right turn on Colby, back to the elementary school. Court clerk Jan Corliss remembers the thunderous percussion of that many boots on pavement and the skirling strains of the bagpipes above, echoing off storefronts hung with black bunting: “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again,” “Amazing Grace.” Karen Harrigan was darting about the sidewalks taking photos, not for the News and Sentinel, but rather New Hampshire Trooper magazine. She regretted taking the assignment, wanting instead to simply stand and mourn. “And now I just can’t handle bagpipes,” she said. “I fall all apart.”

  Seated near the front during the service in the school were two of the wounded officers. Jeff Caulder, using a wooden cane and wearing a suit, not his uniform, entered with his wife, Stacy. Wayne Saunders had put on his dress red blouse, but had left it partly unbuttoned to accommodate a left arm in bandages and a sling, the sleeve hanging empty. Meanwhile, at the hospital in Burlington, John Pfeifer had lapsed into a coma.

  The gym filled up like a room at the Northern Comfort, and many had to be content with listening to the loudspeakers outside. An uneasy murmur rippled through the throng when the Reverend Albert Bellefeville of St. Brendan’s Catholic Church in Colebrook said, “And we must not forget Mr. Drega. The world can be a lonely place if you have no family, no love.”

  Claire Lynch would write Les Lord’s obituary. Susan would pick that photo taken by Charlie Jordan as an advertisement for the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital. It was taken, Susan thinks, on the very day the Department of Safety was gobbled up by the state police. Maybe so, but Les’s grin, as he stands in his DOS uniform behind the open door of his cruiser, seems too warm and authentic for that particular day.

  Scott Phillips’s obituary, written by Karen Harrigan, would include a photo taken by Dennis. It was an image that could have been used as a recruiting poster for the state police, Scott looks so trim and male-model perfect, so sunlit Mr. Wonderful, in his short-sleeved summer uniform, smiling and raising an unblemished hand in greeting. Dennis took the photo at the scene of a minor traffic accident, and a line of yellow tape bisects the image at Scott’s hips. Scott waves from the other side, from a place where we can’t go.

  Susan Zizza wrote Dennis’s obituary, and he likely would have hated the photo she chose, a headshot she took of him once in tousled hair and reading glasses, a tie and an outdoor jacket, a wry half grin as he confronts the camera lens. Dennis despised those glasses, Susan knew, but that Mona Lisa smile so nicely captured all at once his irony, humor, toughness, compassion. It occurred to Susan that on Monday she had been talking to Dennis about how to handle the layout on the obituary page. As quickly as that he had disappeared into it himself.

  On the morning of the police funerals, there was a private ceremony at the Jenkins and Newman Funeral Home in Colebrook. Aaron Joos was still home from Alaska. He was there with Polly and a few other family members from away.

  The Reverend Bud Hulse of St. Stephen’s Episcopal, a veteran of many funeral services, presided. The onetime communications officer, sixty-eight, had never “cracked,” as he said, at any of those others, never himself broken down into tears, but it happened this time when Hulse came to these lines from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  There was no respite. The graveside ceremonies for the fallen troopers—Scott was interred at St. Brendan’s Cemetery, near the turn to Fish Pond Road into Bungy Loop; Les at the Indian Stream Cemetery south of Pittsburg, where the rebellious Republic once stood—were succeeded that Saturday afternoon by calling hours for Vickie at the Jenkins Home on Main Street.

  The line out the door seemed to stretch to eternity, and lawyer David King thought it might be almost that long before he and his wife would get inside. In September, David would be appointed by the state’s Supreme Court to close out Vickie’s practice. For years to come, sitting in his chambers in Lancaster as Coös County’s probate judge, King would get a clenching sensation in the heart whenever he came across a will with Vickie’s signature on it. Then he would sit and wonder what she would have been doing by then, if she were alive. That day, stuck in a long line, the Kings noticed that at least they were ahead of Governor Shaheen and her husband. They would stay that way too. When someone from the funeral home offered to conduct the governor immediately inside, she said no thanks, she’d wait in line.

  The calling hours extended long past schedule, into Saturday night and very early Sunday morning. Bunny and Irene, Earl and Pam, shook all the hands that come through. One woman, at some time near midnight, asked Bunny how he was managing to hold up this long. Bunny replied—hoarsely—that he drew a little more strength from each hand that was extended, each familiar face that appeared.

  On Sunday morning, at the Monadnock Congregational Church on Main, there was again an absurd overflow, a thousand inside and three hundred out the front and into the street, where loudspeakers were hung. It had rained Saturday night, but the rain had dwindled to a stop before dawn, and across the river, above and beyond the belfry and steeple, the green whaleback of Monadnock was wreathed in gossamer wisps of fog.

  During the prelude, tunes from The Sound of Music floated from the organ to the stamped tin cei
ling inside the church, a ceiling that Bunny had helped paint some years before. Put on the armor of God, exhorted the Reverend Peter Dyer, whose sermon was taken from the reading he had chosen from Ephesians 6: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”

  John Harrigan’s eulogy, the second of the service—“When first I walked with this great woman . . .”—described the hike they took together in early spring, into the woods on Blue Mountain, when John swung on a birch from one side of a swollen stream to another and coaxed Vickie into doing the same. Having done all, Vickie stood, triumphant, on that other side. In a middle pew, Karen Harrigan thought that Vickie had always deferred too much to John, that on that day, for example, she should have told him, “Screw you—go find me a log to cross on.” But Karen couldn’t help it—the story caught her, swung her aloft, and she grieved for how beautiful the white and yellow birches are in the spring woods on Blue Mountain, how hungry we are for love, how we yearn to lay aside our armor and put trust in one another.

  During the offertory, Beno and Karen Lamontagne were much surprised to see the commander of the state police rise from his pew, struggle his way to the aisle, and hasten out the front door of the church. That was Colonel John Barthelme, whom Les had once taken on an on-duty, out-of-jurisdiction joyride across the border into Maine. “Holy cow,” Beno whispered to Karen. “And he did that right in front of the governor.”

  Governor Shaheen took a turn with members of the family in ringing the steeple bell at the close of the service, as people filed out. Then she and her husband joined a long caravan to the Village Cemetery. The cemetery sprawled across a wide bluff between Route 3, the Connecticut River, and Monadnock on one side, the woods, meadows, and old farmhouses of South Hill on the other. Immediately to the north, with its parking lot unusually sparse of cars and trucks—as had been the case all week, actually—lay LaPerle’s IGA supermarket. The cemetery was crosshatched by single-lane gravel roads, dotted with stands of birch and cedar, mountain laurel and lilac.

  There were two Bunnell family plots. The second, the newer, was set apart in open space on the northeast quadrant, on the edge of the cemetery and not far from the spot where Roland Martin, his grandson, and one other were taking a break from mowing grass only five days ago. Then Roland heard shots from the IGA. And then he was drawing the shades on Scott’s eyes, which had been spared at least the sight of his friend’s cruiser with blood seeping out the seam of its passenger door.

  So was complete a circle in time and space. And another: John Harrigan sat behind the wheel of the Lincoln Town Car and remembered the first time he thought Vickie was beautiful, the day some twenty-five years ago when he swung his truck into this very cemetery to say hello to Roland Martin, and she was home from school and working with Roland that summer. Clad in a dirty T-shirt, she rose grinning out of the grave she was digging, and John sucked in his breath. He had seen pictures of a lovely Irene Bunnell when she had been Vickie’s age. She looks just like her mother, he thought. In the car that day, he thought of her popping out of the grave, as young and pretty as she was then, when he thought he had a million years at his disposal, but still not enough time to look at her.

  In an hour or so Karen Harrigan would be among throngs of well-wishers at the Bunnells’ house in Canaan. Bunny would direct parking and then the seating of people in the tent out back. Irene would manage the many women helping her to serve food. Both would be wild with grief, both eager to make sure everyone was comfortable and attended to. Karen would see Bunny sprinting up the steps that led from the driveway into the mudroom and kitchen, and Irene hurrying out and down the steps in the opposite direction—and she would see them halt and take each other’s hand for one unhurried, one eternal instant, before continuing their errands.

  Now, however, the gravel lanes were filling up, space by space, as people pocketed their keys, or just left them in the car, and struck out on foot. Vickie’s friend Rob Roy—who had flown Eric Stohl over that stretch of the Connecticut in Columbia where Carl Drega lived and who had meant to go flying with Vickie on Tuesday—had just taken off in his plane from Gifford Field, the little airport named in honor of the doctor whose memorial service that day had been postponed.

  Roy would stay under the clouds as he flew over the church and on up the river. He’d loop down to a hundred feet or so, dip each wing as he passed over the crowd encircling the gravesite, and then climb, rising over their heads and above the mountain, over powers and principalities, as if strands of gossamer were all that held us to earth.

  18

  TIME IS THE FIRE

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Beno and Karen Lamontagne—and everyone else in town—to learn why Colonel Barthelmes had to hurry out of the Congregational church during the service on Sunday.

  Among the officers present in Colebrook for the police funerals the day before was Jeremy Charron, twenty-four, a rookie municipal cop from Epsom, a little town in central New Hampshire. The president of his senior class at Hillsborough-Deering High School, Charron had served four years in the U.S. Marines before joining the Epsom police.

  After the funerals, Charron had gone home to work the overnight shift. At 5:00 a.m. Sunday, he was called to check a suspicious vehicle in Epsom’s Webster Park, a popular swimming hole on the Suncook River. The Nissan Sentra contained two young men, both asleep. Charron tapped on the window, asked the driver if he had been drinking, requested that he get out of the car. Gordon Perry, twenty-two, climbed out with a handgun hidden behind his back and fatally shot Charron in the face.

  Perry was on parole from the New Hampshire State Prison for being an accomplice to robbery. Companion Kevin Paul, eighteen, had been in the Hillsborough County House of Correction for assault and was also on parole. They fled the park and within a mile abandoned the Nissan and stole a Ford pickup.

  Then they sped north up I-93, along the Connecticut River. In the foothills of the White Mountains, they robbed a convenience store of a few hundred dollars. In Franconia Notch, with police in pursuit, they stopped for an exchange of gunfire. Then the pickup crossed the highway’s median strip and continued north in the southbound lane, sending oncoming vehicles skidding off the road.

  Colonel Barthelme, sitting in a pew in the middle of the church, heard via his pager that yet another officer had been murdered. And once the fugitives came out this side of the Notch, Lieutenant Chuck Jellison found himself in command of another manhunt for a cop killer. He set up this command post in Littleton, in the Elks Club Building, and the media entourage covering the Bunnell funeral moved there en masse for this next event.

  Still heading north, in between Bethlehem and Littleton, the fugitives steered the Ford across the highway median again, but this time the truck spun out of control and into a stand of trees. Paul was quickly captured and disarmed. Perry managed to disappear into the brush.

  Officers formed lines, shoulder to shoulder, and made long sweeps up the median. It took three hours. Norm Brown was the acting chief of police in Bethlehem that day and a member of that detail. He wasn’t as nervous as he should have been—he thought he was looking for a mere robbery suspect.

  “I looked down, and there’s this guy’s feet right in front of me,” Brown said. “So I reached down to grab him and cuff him, and I see all these guns drawn and stuck in his face. I said, ‘Guys, do we need this much firepower?’”

  “A Week of Terror” read the front-page headline in the Union Leader on Monday the twenty-fifth. John Harrigan was relieved at least that the murderers didn’t get far enough north for him to have to cover the incident in the News and Sentinel.

  Karen Harrigan’s article in the August 27 issue of the Sentinel was headlined “Bunker of an Angry Man.” “State police and fire marshals allowed the
press to view Carl Drega’s property in Columbia last Thursday, where the remains of his barn were still smoking from a fire the night before,” she wrote. “The media group was led to where a gruesome display was laid out on the ground, items of destruction found in Drega’s bunker behind the burned-out barn.”

  By then the dailies and television stations had found members of the Drega family, as had the FBI. In East Haven, Connecticut, Drega’s sister Sophia Linnane told FBI agents that “her brother was harassed by the town from the first day he moved to Columbia. She is very angry at the town officials and feels they take part of the blame for what happened. A lot of good people were lost.” Drega’s eldest sister, Jane Drega, told reporters that her brother was certainly not deranged: “He was harassed by the police, by the officials, and what-have-you,” she said. Then she stopped answering the door and the phone with such steely resolve that even the FBI gave up trying to contact her.

  Early reports of underground bunkers and booby-trapped tunnels on the Drega property proved wrong, but not those of a great arsenal. One of Karen’s photos showed ranks of media ranged behind a rain-jacketed John McMaster on Thursday and, in front of them, placed in neat rows on a tarpaulin, all the ordinance found behind a false wall in the barn’s ten-by-twenty-foot root cellar. This included plastic jackets for 86 six-inch pipe bombs, each capable of dismembering a car or, if put in a building, being lethal to a range of a hundred yards; twenty pounds of gunpowder; assorted fuses and homemade blasting caps; eleven gallons of nitromethane, a fuel used in the manufacture of C-4 plastic explosives; the sixty-one gallons of diesel fuel—which becomes explosive when mixed with the ammonium nitrate Jack Meaney had found—purchased at the Blue Mountain Variety store Tuesday morning; twelve pounds of just such a potent mix; a hundred rounds for an M79 grenade launcher; steel boxes containing thousands of rounds of ammunition—.223, .30-30, 12-gauge; a couple of military surplus steel helmets; a second AR-15 rifle (not the gun Mark Pappas had once owned); and one pair each of high-caliber rifles and shotguns.