by Julie Cave
Isabelle stared at him with eyes that were hot and wet. "Are you a psychiatrist now?"
"It's simple: I know how you feel," said Michael. "Instead of hurting myself, I hurt others."
"I've never seen you hurt anyone!" she protested.
"I always hurt women before they can get too close," said Michael, by way of explanation. "I have been cruel so that they wouldn't get too close. I've burned friendships by being closed and uncaring. Look at the relationship I have with my own mother."
Isabelle almost didn't want to ask the next question, but she knew it was important. "Michael ... is that all you've done?"
She could plainly see he was deeply conflicted, but finally he said honestly, "No, it isn't. I can't tell you," he said, unfolding his tall frame and pacing in the small kitchen.
"Come on, Michael," she said encouragingly.
Michael stood in the doorway, a silhouette that was suddenly frightening.
"You want to know what I've done?" he said softly. "Come here."
"What do you mean?" How well do I know my own brother? All at once this question seemed vital.
Michael used a remote control to turn on the television. "Come here and watch this. Then you'll see what I've done."
"What are you talking about?" Still, Isabelle was inexplicably drawn toward the screen now flickering in the dark room.
"Watch this. You'll see what I've done," said Michael as the newscast began.
Chapter 15
It was past midnight, and Isabelle had watched the news in horror, unable to believe her own eyes. Over and over, the image burned into her brain, she saw her brother walk casually from a car laden with explosives into a church, knowing full well he was about to kill some people therein. "Michael ..." she said finally, "what have you done?"
"I don't know," he said miserably. "I don't know."
Isabelle leaned back in an armchair, unable to take it all in. "You're the bomber?" she asked. Her own problems paled in comparison. "But why?"
"I told you I can't control it," he said. He spoke slowly, weighing his words carefully. This was the first time he'd spoken out loud of the dark things that had always been kept close to his heart. "I'm a bad person."
"You're not!" protested Isabelle, instinctively. "Look at all the things you've done for me: you stand up for me against Scott, you're loyal, you try to protect me! Those are things a good person does."
"A good person does not kill people in a church with a bomb," said Michael flatly.
That was true and hard to argue.
"So tell me why," said Isabelle. "Why do you want to kill people in a church?"
Michael stood and paced the dark room. "I look at them, and I see hypocrites. I see people concerned with their own happiness, their own prosperity. They didn't care about me when I was a kid, and they don't care about me now."
Isabelle nodded. "Okay. But you killed people you didn't even know."
"Luckily for the people I did know," muttered Michael darkly. "Look, I can't explain it well. Maybe I should put it in these terms. You feel pain and anger from our childhood, right?"
"Of course. It doesn't go away," admitted Isabelle. "Somehow you have to learn to live with it."
"Right. In your case, when you feel your emotions getting to be too much, you turn inward and cut yourself," said Michael. "Apparently quite common among females. But me ... when I feel the anger, I just want to hurt somebody. It sounds awful, but it's the truth."
"Why didn't you just visit Dad when he was still alive and ask him to fight you or something?" Isabelle asked. "You could've taken out your anger on the person who truly deserved it!"
"I wish I could have," agreed Michael. "Somehow, I could never shake the fear of him. It was like I was always a little kid around him."
They fell silent. Isabelle knew how that felt — she'd been the same. Even as an adult, her father losing his temper had reduced her to a quivering, helpless, frightened child. She had barely begun to understand what Michael had done: her brain simply couldn't process it. It felt surreal to be sitting in his ordinary living room, discussing the most extraordinary situation. She felt like she was looking through a haze, a fog of incomprehension. "Why did you wait until Dad died to start doing ... this?" she said at length.
"I have been planning this for a long time," said Michael. "But I'd always hoped that when Dad died, the hatred and anger would die with him. I hoped that I would finally begin to heal once he was dead. But it didn't work. In fact, I felt worse."
"So why not Mom, then?" Isabelle asked. "She should have protected us, and she didn't. You would have a legitimate anger toward her."
"Perhaps," agreed Michael. "But then, she suffered as much as we did. She didn't escape the abuse."
"So you saw churchgoers as a legitimate target, then?"
"I can hardly call them legitimate," said Michael. "But it made the most sense to me. I knew I was going to be violent. I could feel it build up inside me to a point where I could no longer control it. But I didn't want to be random about it. I thought if I did it in a measured way, with a message, that people would understand."
Isabelle sighed. "People aren't going to understand, Michael! You killed innocent people on a personal vendetta!"
Michael started out the window moodily. "I knew this day would come," he said. "They're going to come for me."
Isabelle now tried to wrap her mind around this truth. They would come, with SWAT teams and sniper rifles and stun grenades. If he made one false move, they would shoot him — and they would mean to kill him.
"They're going to kill me, Isabelle," said Michael, his voice echoing her thoughts.
"No. If you cooperate with the authorities, they won't kill you," she said. "You just have to...."
"They'll kill me with a gun or by lethal injection," said Michael. "It doesn't matter. Either way, I'm dead."
Isabelle was suddenly seized with fear. She couldn't lose her only brother, her protector, the only person who'd ever tried to keep her from harm. He'd done something awful, something mind-bendingly shocking, but he was her brother and she loved him. She couldn't let him die! "It doesn't have to be that way," she said desperately. "We can get a good defense attorney and...."
"Don't you see?" Michael interjected. "I'm already dead."
Isabelle stared at him in horror as his words hit home. He had started to die the very first time Reginald McMahon had left a bruise on his small body. His spirit had withered in an environment of fear and brutality. Who he could have been was slowly and methodically extinguished.
How was she any different? She vented her pain on herself, enjoying the power pain gave her. But when she finally made a cut too deep, too far, and her very life began draining down the bathtub, she would be no different from Michael. She, too, was the walking dead.
Neither had known what it was to live. They were biding time until death claimed them. No light had ever pierced the darkness that surrounded them, and she suddenly understood the desperation in which Michael lived.
"I understand," she said quietly. "I'll stay with you, until the end."
He reached over and grasped her hand. "Thank you."
* * * *
Very early the next morning, Dinah was jerked from a deep, dreamless sleep by the shrill chatter of her cell phone.
"Yes, what ... hello?" she mumbled into the phone, not certain of where she was or what time it was.
"Harris, wake up," ordered Ferguson. "We've just received a phone call from a relative of our bomber."
That shook the final sleepy cobwebs from Dinah's head. "What?"
"The bomber's mother has contacted us. We're picking you up in 15 minutes."
Dinah showered quickly, dressed, and spent several moments vacillating over whether to wear makeup. Finally, she gave up — she no longer wanted to impress Sinclair, and he was clearly no longer impressed.
Ferguson and Sinclair screeched up to Dinah's block, and she jumped in the back seat. Sinclair handed her a
small tape recorder, and didn't meet her eyes.
"Listen," ordered Ferguson, as he accelerated down Dinah's block.
The conversation taped was between Ferguson and a woman who claimed to be the suspect's mother.
"Hello, FBI," rasped the familiar voice of Ferguson over the tape.
"Yes, hello? I'm calling about the footage on the news," said a quavery female voice. She sounded like she was at least middle-aged, possibly older.
"Yes, ma'am." Dinah could detect a trace of frustration and impatience in her boss's voice.
"The bomber? The footage of the bomber? I know who he is," said the woman.
"And how's that, ma'am?"
"He's my son."
There was a tiny pause, and then Ferguson suddenly sounded very interested. "What is your name, ma'am?"
"Rosa McMahon. It's my son. His name is Michael McMahon."
"Are you sure?"
"You think I don't know my own son?" Here, Rosa McMahon dissolved into a flood of tears.
"We're going to visit you this morning," said Ferguson. "What is your address?"
That's where they were headed — the tidy, scrupulously neat home of Rosa McMahon. It exuded a cottage charm: though small, the porch was decorated with hanging baskets of flowers and a shabby rocking chair, the garden beds were well-tended with a deliberate overgrown feel, and the lush green lawn was spotted with stone bird baths.
Rosa McMahon, a small woman in her sixties, was waiting anxiously on the porch, wringing a handkerchief in her hands. She led them into a living room, decorated with floral carpet and heavy drapes. It was dark and cool, giving the investigators some respite from the muggy weather outside. She gave the detectives a recent photo of Michael, a young man in his late twenties with a rather expressionless face. It was, without doubt, the bomber in the CCTV footage.
"What can you tell us about Michael?" Ferguson asked gently. Rosa McMahon, they could see, was teetering on the edge of hysteria. How would you even begin to process the fact that a child of yours is a mass murderer? wondered Dinah.
"He was a good boy," said Rosa. "A lovely child, so quiet, never in any trouble. I started to lose him in high school."
"Lose him?"
"He refused to come to church with us anymore. He told me that church was full of hypocrites. He started exploring other religions and philosophies," Rosa remembered. She looked haggard in the dim light; she probably hadn't slept at all the previous night. "He stopped talking to me. He distanced himself from all of us."
"Did he get into trouble as a teenager?" Ferguson asked.
"No. He never got into fights or drugs or trouble with the law," said Rosa. "In fact, he continued to get good grades. He just stopped doing the things I asked of him."
"What sort of philosophies did he explore?" asked Dinah, thinking of the last case on which she'd worked. A killer had wholeheartedly believed in eugenics, the science of improving the human race, and considered it a favor to humankind to kill those he deemed unworthy of life. Having a dangerous set of beliefs could easily lead to extreme violence.
"He started with Buddhism, if I remember correctly," said Rosa. "He also tried Hinduism and some old, African animism-witchdoctor type of thing. Eventually, he declared that all the religions' gods were the same and that he didn't believe in God at all."
"What church had you been going to?"
"We're Catholic," said Rosa. "I was deeply shocked when he told me he didn't believe in God."
Dinah exchanged glances with Ferguson. The first church bombed had been Catholic — was that symbolic of something Michael felt for that denomination?
"Did something happen as a teenager to make him start questioning his beliefs?" asked Dinah.
Rosa stared at her hands miserably. "It wasn't just one thing. It was all my fault. I'm the one who drove him away from the Church."
"Why do you say that?"
Rosa wept silently for a few moments and then tried to pull herself together. "I was married to a violent man," she said. "Their father would beat me and the kids for any slight infraction, or for no reason at all. My kids grew up in fear and it changed them forever."
Dinah nodded. Domestic violence often perpetuated a vicious cycle through the generations, of continuing violence and abuse.
"Yet we pretended everything was normal at church on Sundays," continued Rosa, her voice betraying the heartbreak she felt inside. "Even though I'd turn up with a black eye or busted lip. I'd make up some excuse and everyone believed it. Reginald — my husband — was so charming and likeable that they probably didn't want to believe he was capable of violence."
Rosa wiped her eyes with her sodden handkerchief. "I know as they grew up my kids probably wondered why I stayed in the marriage," she said. "But they didn't understand that divorce isn't an option. I tried to protect my kids from the worst of it, and I failed miserably."
Dinah pressed her lips together. "Do you think Michael resented the fact that the church turned a blind eye to what was happening in your house?"
"Yes, he probably did. He told me on a number of occasions that he couldn't correlate the 'love-thy-neighbor' message on Sunday with the reality of life on every other day. I know he certainly resented me."
"Is your husband still alive?" asked Dinah.
"No, he died just over four weeks ago," said Rosa.
Dinah carefully filed this away. The dominant, violent patriarch of the family had died four weeks ago, and the son — possibly full of resentment, rage, and hatred — had commenced bombing churches only a week later.
"How did Michael take his father's death?"
Rosa sighed. "It's hard to say. He doesn't show much emotion and he doesn't speak to me about anything more than superficialities. I didn't think he felt grief; I think he was relieved."
"What does Michael do for work?" Ferguson asked.
"He's a paralegal for a legal firm here in D.C., and he's also a freelance writer," said Rosa.
Ferguson cleared his throat. "Mrs. McMahon, we need your son's address and phone number. We'll be going over there to visit him with a warrant for his arrest. You need to be prepared for that."
Large tears fell from Rosa's eyes. "I have already prepared for that. I've just turned in my own son. No matter what happens to him, he'll never forget that I betrayed him, one last time."
* * * *
A makeshift office was set up in the car outside Rosa's home. Ferguson started the car and began driving with reckless abandon toward headquarters. Sinclair, on the phone to the first judge they could think of, began his quick argument for a search and arrest warrant. Ferguson, on his own cell phone, one hand to his ear and one hand on the wheel, began notifying the SWAT team leaders of their intention and set up meetings for later that morning.
Dinah felt quite helpless until her own cell phone rang. "This is Dennis Flynn," a man introduced himself. "I'm returning your call."
Dinah had no idea who Dennis Flynn was or why she'd wanted to talk to him. "I'm in my car," she said apologetically. "So please jog my memory — where are you from?"
"I'm from Vermont Stone and Granite Company," he explained. "I'm the site foreman on a granite quarry up here in Vermont. You called wanting to know if we'd had some problems with some explosive slurry being stolen." Dinah suddenly remembered. After she'd explained her theory to Sinclair that the ANFO slurry had been pre-mixed, she'd called around a dozen or more mines, trying to discover where the ANFO explosives had been sourced.
"Right. So have you had any problems?"
"The only problem we had was when there was one particular employee," explained Flynn. "He came to work in munitions and was mostly responsible for setting the charges in our granite quarry. Unfortunately, he was also responsible for ordering supplies."
"That's how you mine granite, I understand?" Dinah asked. "You use explosives to dislodge it and then transport it to be cut and polished?"
"Right. We had a few munitions guys working for us," said Flynn. "But this on
e guy was in charge of stocking the explosives. There was always a problem with an order — a bag missing here, some dynamite missing there. It was always a very small discrepancy that was explained away. The supplier had sent the wrong amount, or the order hadn't been entered properly."
"How were the explosives packaged? Did they come pre-mixed or did you mix the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on site?"
"No, we didn't mix anything. We bought the stuff pre-mixed, in these big, heavy bags. All we had to do was attach the primary explosives, fuses, and timers."
"And those bags started to go missing?"
"Right. Just a couple at a time, over a long period of time," said Flynn. "We called the police, of course — we're talking about explosives, after all. But we never caught anyone red-handed. I could never substantiate my suspicions. And when the guy left, the thefts stopped."
"How many bags were stolen in all?"
"Maybe 25?" Enough for five bombings, thought Dinah.
"And what was the guy's name?"
"Michael McMahon."
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Dinah thanked Flynn for getting back to her and relayed the news to the front seat.
Ferguson screeched into the parking lot of the J. Edgar Hoover building and explained to Dinah that the meeting with the SWAT teams was about to begin. "You want me to be there?" she asked, referring to her long and painful history with the Bureau.
"Yes," said Ferguson, panting a little at the pace Sinclair set in front of them. "Anyone got a problem with it, they'll have to get over it."
Inside a nondescript conference room, the bulky forms of an FBI Hostage Rescue Team and a SWAT team sat at attention, ready for their next mission. Ferguson had called in the HRT because they were experts in dealing with terrorism and could begin negotiations with the bomber, and the SWAT team for their ability to storm the building as the need arose.