White River Burning

by John Verdon

  “This is Girder Street,” said Torres. “The footage is from a security camera on the front of a check-cashing place. We’ve edited it down to a few key moments. Watch this next car.”

  A small, dark sedan entered the frame. Just before reaching the intersection, it made a turn into what appeared to be a driveway or alley behind an apartment building.

  “That’s the building where the shot came from. That alley leads to a back entrance. The time code embedded in the video shows that the car arrived twenty-two minutes before the shot was fired. Now we skip ahead twenty-six minutes, exactly four minutes after the shot, and . . . there . . . you see the car emerging . . . turning . . . proceeding to the intersection . . . and making a right onto Bridge Street.”

  The screen showed a wider but equally dismal street with steel-shuttered storefronts on both sides. “This segment comes from a CPSP installation colocated with the intersection traffic light.” He glanced over at Gurney. “Crime Prevention Surveillance Program. That’s an initiative we—”

  He broke off his explanation and pointed at the screen. “Look . . . there . . . that’s our target vehicle, driving west on Bridge Street. See . . . right there . . . it passes the Bridge Closed detour sign and keeps heading toward it.”

  Kline asked if that road led anywhere except to the bridge.

  “No, sir. Just the bridge.”

  “Is it possible to drive onto it?”

  “Yes, simply by moving the cones blocking it off. And they had, in fact, been moved.”

  “How about the other side? Could the vehicle have driven over the bridge to some other destination?”

  “The stage of demolition would have made that impossible. We figured the most likely reason for driving out onto the span at that time of night would be to dump something in the river. And it turned out we were right. That’s where we found the tripod used to steady the rifle.”

  He pointed to the screen. “There . . . the same vehicle . . . returning from the bridge.”

  Kline’s smile returned. “Nice work, Detective.”

  Gurney cocked his head curiously. “Mark, how do you know what the tripod was used for?”

  “The proof is in the photos we took at the apartment used by the shooter.” He tapped a few keys, and the scene switched to a still photo of an apartment door with a security peephole. The apartment number, 5C, was scratched and faded. The next photo appeared to have been taken from the same position, looking into the apartment with the door open.

  “The photos I really want to show you are a little farther on,” said Torres, “but I didn’t have time to change the sequence.”

  “Who let you in?” asked Gurney.

  “The janitor.”

  Gurney recalled his own aborted investigation at the Willard Park site and the trajectory indicated by the bullet’s penetration of the tree. That trajectory included multiple windows in three different buildings. “How did you zero in on one particular apartment?”

  “We got a tip.”

  “By phone?”

  “Text.”

  “Anonymous or from a known source?”

  Beckert intervened. “We have a policy against discussing sources. Let’s move along.”

  The next photo had been taken from inside the apartment door looking through a small foyer into a large unfurnished room. There was an open window on the far side of the room. In the next photo, taken from a position near the center of the room, the open window framed a view of the city. Beyond some low roofs, Gurney could see a grassy area bordered by tall pines. As he looked closer, he could just make out a yellow line—the police tape demarcating the area where he’d just had his confrontation with the local cop. It was clear that the apartment would offer a sniper an ideal perch from which to pick off anyone in the vicinity of the field where the demonstration had been held.

  “Okay,” said Torres with some excitement, “now we’re getting to the key pieces of evidence.”

  The next photo, taken in the same room at floor level, showed the lower half of a steam radiator and the cramped space under it. In the radiator’s shadow, back against the wall, Gurney noted the soft sheen of a brass cartridge casing.

  “A thirty-aught-six,” said Torres. “Same as the recovered bullet.”

  “With a clear print on it?” asked Kline.

  “Two. Probably thumb and forefinger, the way you’d chamber it in a bolt-action rifle.”

  “Do we know it was a bolt-action?”

  “That’s the action in most thirty-aught-sixes manufactured in the past fifty years. We’ll know for sure when ballistics takes a closer look at the extractor and ejector marks.”

  The next photo was of the wooden floor. Torres pointed out three faint marks on the dusty surface, each about the size of a dime, positioned about three feet from each other, the corners of an imaginary triangle.

  “See those little impressions?” said Torres. “Their positions correspond exactly to the positions of the feet of the tripod we found in the river. The height of the tripod placed in that spot would have provided a direct line of fire to the impact location.”

  “You mean the back of John Steele’s head?” said Gurney.

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  Torres proceeded to the next photo—a small bathroom containing a shower stall, a dirty washbasin, and a toilet. That was followed by two close-ups—the chrome handle on the toilet tank, then the inside of the toilet bowl. A crumpled ball of colored paper and a discolored Band-Aid were submerged in the water.

  “We got lucky here,” said Torres. “We got a good thumbprint on the flush handle, and the items in the bowl not only have prints on them but even some DNA material. The paper is a fast-food wrapper with an oily surface that preserved three good prints. The Band-Aid has a trace amount of blood.”

  Kline was energized. “You’ve run the prints? Any hits?”

  “Nothing at the local or state level. We’re waiting on IAFIS. Washington has over a hundred million print records, so we’re hopeful. Worst case is that the shooter has never been arrested, never been printed for any reason. But even then, once we zero in on the right guy, we’ve got overwhelming evidence tying him to the apartment, the casing, the tripod. And there’s one more piece I haven’t mentioned—a security camera out on Bridge Street recorded a side view of the shooter’s vehicle, with a dark image of the driver visible through the side window. It’s unreadable in its current condition, but the computer lab in Albany has some powerful enhancement software. So we’re hopeful.”

  His statement was punctuated by the muted bing of a text arriving on Beckert’s phone.

  “A facial ID would be damn near game-over,” said Kline.

  Torres looked around the table. “Any questions?”

  Beckert appeared preoccupied with the message on his phone.

  The sheriff was smiling unpleasantly. “If our other inquiries ID the user of Devalon’s vehicle, Albany’s enhancement abracadabra could nail the boy to the wall. A photo is a beautiful thing. Very convincing to a jury.”

  “Mr. Kline?” said Torres.

  “No questions at the moment.”

  “Detective Gurney?”

  “Just wondering . . . how deep was the water?”

  Torres looked puzzled. “In the toilet?”

  “In the river.”

  “Where we found the tripod? Roughly three feet.”

  “Any prints on the window sash or sill?”

  “Some very old and faded ones, nothing new.”

  “Apartment door?”

  “Same.”

  “Bathroom door and basin faucets?”

  “Same.”

  “Were you able to find anyone in the building who heard the shot?”

  “We spoke to a couple of tenants who thought they might have heard something like a shot. They were pretty vague about it. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where people talk to the police or want to admit being witn
esses to anything.” He turned up his palms in a gesture of resignation. “Any other questions?”

  “Not from me. Thank you, Mark. Good work.”

  The young detective allowed himself a small look of satisfaction. He reminded Gurney of Kyle, his twenty-seven-year-old son from his first marriage. Which in turn reminded him that he owed him a call. Kyle had inherited his own tendency toward isolation, so their communications, though enjoyable when they occurred, were sporadic. He promised himself he’d make the call that day. Perhaps after dinner.

  Beckert’s voice brought him back to the present.

  “This would be a good time to transition to our progress on the Jordan and Tooker homicides. We had a breakthrough this morning in that investigation, and we expect another development within the next half hour. So this would be a reasonable time to take a short break.” He glanced at his phone. “We’ll reconvene at twelve forty-five. In the meantime, please remain in the building. Goodson, do you need any assistance?”

  “I do not.” He ran the polished nail of his forefinger along the length of the white cane that lay across the table in front of him.

  20

  The meeting was reconvened at precisely 12:45. It made Gurney wonder if Beckert ever deviated from his strict notions of order and procedure—and what his reaction might be if someone disrupted his plans.

  Beckert had brought a laptop with him, which he placed on the conference table. He chose as usual the chair in which he was framed by the room’s window and the landscape of prison architecture beyond it.

  After syncing his computer with the wall monitor, he indicated that all was ready.

  “We’ll begin with this morning’s discovery—the website of a white-supremacist group that claims to engage in vigilante activities. They maintain that blacks are planning to start a war with whites in America, a war that neither the police nor the military will be capable of stopping, since both have been infiltrated by blacks and their liberal supporters. The group believes it’s their God-given duty to eliminate what they call ‘the creeping black menace’ in order to save white America.”

  “Eliminate?” said Kline.

  “Eliminate,” repeated Beckert. “They included on the same web page an old photograph of a lynching with the caption, ‘The Solution.’ But that’s not the main reason our discovery of their website is important. Look at the screen. And listen carefully. This is their anthem.”

  The screen turned bright red. A window opened in the center, and the video began. A four-man heavy-metal band was producing a cacophony of stomping feet, tortured musical notes, and barely intelligible lyrics. A few words, however, came through loud and clear.

  “Fire” . . . “burning” . . . “blade” . . . “gun” . . . “noose.”

  The video was grainy and the sound quality dreadful. The faces of the leather-clad, metal-studded band members were too ill-lit to be recognizable.

  Kline shook his head. “If those lyrics are supposed to be telling me something, I’ll need a translator.”

  “Fortunately,” said Beckert, “the words appear on their site.” He clicked on an icon and the rectangle that had framed the video now framed a photo of a typewritten page.

  “Read the lyrics carefully. They answer an important question. Detective Torres, for the benefit of Sheriff Cloutz, you might want to read them aloud.”

  Torres did as he was told.

  We are the fire, we are the flood.

  We are the storm cleansing the land,

  the burning light of the rising sun.

  We are the wind, the burning rain,

  the shining blade, the blazing gun.

  We are the flame of the rising sun.

  Death to the rats creeping at night,

  death to the vermin, one by one,

  death by the fire of the rising sun.

  We are the whip, we are the noose,

  the battering club, the blazing gun.

  We are the knights of the rising sun.

  We are the storm, the raging flood,

  the rain of fire whose time has come.

  We are the knights of the rising sun.

  “Jesus,” Torres muttered as he finished reading. “These people are goddamn off-the-scale crazy!”

  “Clearly. But what else do the words tell us?” Beckert was addressing everyone at the table—in the tone of a man who likes asking questions he knows the answers to. A man who likes to feel in charge.

  It was a game Gurney didn’t enjoy playing. He decided to end it. “They tell us what ‘KRS’ stands for.”

  There was a baffled silence around the table. “I see it now,” said Torres finally. He turned to Cloutz. “In the lyrics they call themselves the ‘knights of the rising sun.’ The main initials of that would be ‘KRS.’ ”

  “You boys gettin’ all excited over a coincidence of three letters?”

  Beckert shook his head. “It’s not just that. The whole website incriminates them. Anarchist insanity. Terroristic threats. Glorification of vigilantism. Plus the final clincher. On a page titled ‘Battle News’ there’s a description of the situation here in White River. That plus ‘KRS’ being branded on the feet of Jordan and Tooker has to be more than a coincidence.”

  Kline looked alarmed. “You think these people are here in White River? Do we have any idea who they are?”

  “We have a good idea who two of them may be.”

  “God Almighty,” cried Cloutz, “don’t tell me it’s the two I’m thinkin’ it is!”

  Beckert said nothing.

  “Am I right?” asked Cloutz. “Are we talkin’ about the goddamn twins?”

  “Judd is looking into that right now.”

  “By payin’ them a visit?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “God Almighty!” Cloutz repeated with the unseemly excitement of a man anticipating a spectacular calamity. “I hope Judd realizes them boys are stone-cold crazy.”

  “He knows who he’s dealing with,” said Beckert calmly.

  Kline looked from Beckert to Cloutz and back again. “Who the hell are the twins?”

  Cloutz emitted a nasty little laugh. “Fire, brimstone, explosions, every kinda insane shit you can imagine. You got anything you want to add to that, Dell, to flesh out the picture for Sheridan here? I know them boys have a special place in your head.”

  “The Gort twins look like cartoons of mountain men. But there’s nothing funny about them.” There was acid in Beckert’s voice. “Gorts, Haddocks, and Flemms have been inbreeding and raising havoc in this part of the state for two hundred years. The extended clan is huge. Hundreds of people in this county are connected to it in one way or another. Some are successful, normal people. Some are well-armed survivalists. A few are moonshiners, or meth manufacturers. The worst of them all are the twins. Vicious racists, probable extortionists, possible murderers.”

  “What am I missing here?” said Kline to Beckert. “I’m the county prosecutor. Why haven’t these people been brought to my attention before?”

  “Because this is the first time we’ve been in a position to have a real chance of putting them away.”

  “The first time? After what you and Goodson just said about them?”

  This was the closest Gurney had seen Kline come to challenging Beckert about anything.

  “Theoretically, we could have arrested them a number of times. The arrests would have been followed by dismissals or weak prosecutions and no convictions.”

  “Weak? What do you mean by—”

  “I mean people who make accusations against the Gorts invariably retract them or disappear. At best, you’d have a case that would be dismissed immediately or fall apart halfway through. Maybe you’re thinking that we could have put more pressure on them . . . brought them in every week for questioning . . . provoked them into hotheaded, ill-advised reactions. That might be a workable approach with someone other than the Gorts. But there’s an a
spect to this I haven’t mentioned. In the polarized world of White River, the Gorts’ racial opinions have made them folk heroes to a large part of the white population. And, of course, there’s the religious angle. The twins are joint pastors of the Catskill Mountain White Heritage Church. And one of their devoted parishioners is our ever-popular home-bred white supremacist Garson Pike.”

  “Jesus,” said Kline.

  The name Garson Pike rang a bell with Gurney. For a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he remembered the RAM-TV debate between Blaze Lovely Jackson and a stiff-looking man with an intermittent stutter—a man whose main point was that blacks were responsible for all the problems in America.

  Kline looked troubled. “The decision not to go after them was essentially political?”

  Beckert answered without hesitation. “All our decisions are ultimately political. That’s the reality of democracy. Government by the will of the people. Attacking popular heroes does no one any good. It just raises everyone’s anger level. Especially when evidence evaporates and there’s no chance of getting a conviction.”

  Kline looked less than satisfied, a mark of some intelligence in Gurney’s opinion. “What’s so different now?” he asked.

  “Meaning?”

  “You said Turlock was going after the Gort twins. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a warrant?”

  “Yes.”

  Kline’s frown was deepening. “Issued on what basis?”

  “Reasonable certitude that the Gorts are members of a vigilante group called Knights of the Rising Sun, that they may have been directly involved in the Willard Park homicides, and that we expect to find evidence supporting both assertions in the Gorts’ private compound.”

  “What changed the political calculation that kept them off-limits until now?”

  “Popular as the Gorts may be in certain quarters, leaving dead bodies in a children’s playground is a game changer. It makes their arrest and prosecution acceptable to a majority of our citizens. And achievable—as long as we act quickly.”

  “And as long as you find some hard evidence linking them to this Knights of the Rising Sun group. And to the murders.”