Henry and Maddy could only speculate on Vyne’s residual links to terrorism. The polymer drone in his freezer might have indicated a continuing interest in bomb making, but Peter suggested that this had the quality of a hobby pursued to counter boredom. Even if Vyne was refreshing his skills, that was a far cry from planting bombs around the country.
“He watched the evolution of society with rising anger,” Maddy suggested. It was hard for him to admit that the playground for terrorists had changed at the millennium. In the year after Oklahoma City, he had smugly watched the Unabomber’s arrest; the pitiful sight of the Thoreau cabin stiffened his resolve to settle into his suburban refuge. The 2001 destruction of the Twin Towers drove him even further underground. By 2003, he was ensconced in Number 13 and well pleased with his domain. But then Homeland Security began its empire-building, bolstered by the Patriot Act. Iraq. Afghanistan. Drone surveillance. Drone attacks. All these were so much worse than the old days.
Henry and Peter debated Vyne’s hopes of re-entering the world of domestic terror. Peter saw little evidence that the hermit of Number 13 kept up contact with the militias.
“He didn’t have trouble recruiting militia types for Wichita, Denver, or Coppermount, did he?” Henry argued. Peter reminded him that Vyne had recruited the dregs of the militias, whose understanding of the Constitution stopped at the Second Amendment.
When Tom Watson established his grow house, Kelso Vyne recognized it right away and was outraged.
Maddy provided the psychoanalysis. “Tom Watson’s grow op was nothing less than a betrayal of Ronald Devereau personally and an invasion of his sanctum sanctorum. From the first he considered burning out the Second House. It was up to him to cleanse by fire and bloodletting. It is amazing how fast his rage drove him to that scenario.”
“Yes, fire and brimstone,” Peter added.
The viciousness of the attack on the Watsons showed how easily his fury took over. Henry recalled the frequent question posed by investigators in the days after the slaughter: Did he carefully plan to behead Gabriella, move the body and the head next door, wait there in the dark, and then eviscerate Tom Watson in front of his wife’s disconnected corpse?
“What’s the difference?” Maddy maintained. “It’s his limitless capacity for violence we’re discussing here. One way or another …”
But it was Peter who saw that more than indignation drove Devereau to kill the Watsons that night. His greater fear was exposure. For a decade he had committed to playing by the bourgeois rules of the smug and high-handed HASA executive. Bureaucrats deal with problems in measured stages, and Jerry Proffet was a particularly fussy president. Devereau watched him dance around the grow op threat, and finally began himself to lobby his neighbours to clean up Number 5.
“At what point did he mention marijuana to Carleton Davis?” Henry asked on one of their Salt Lake–U.K. calls. “And when did Davis consent to be his spotter on Hollis Street?”
“Davis is lucky Vyne left him alive,” Peter responded.
Again Maddy honed the scenario. “I think Vyne gave Tom Watson one last chance to repent, to be reasonable. He threatened to turn Tom in to the police …”
Echoes bounced through the telephone links from Coppermount Drive to Leeds and the Cammon cottage. The policemen knew the truth.
“No, it was the other way, dear,” Peter said quietly. “Tom Watson had figured out who Devereau really was, or at least part of his history …”
“Devereau betrayed too much familiarity with the drug trade,” Henry said.
“Watson made the mistake of blackmailing Devereau,” Peter added.
Ronald Devereau knew that his idyll on Hollis Street couldn’t last, but he held on to a final hope. The small pipe bomb was designed to eliminate evidence in the Second House without burning the place down. The house could be rebuilt and maybe his own suburban idyll sustained.
When Vyne screwed up the timer on the box bomb, he made it almost inevitable that the police would trace the device to him. Desperation grew. He read about Whitey Bulger’s sudden discovery after several complacent decades in hiding and imagined his own vulnerability.
And Jerry Proffet could stay that dumb only so long.
It was time to leave.
Henry, Maddy, and Peter agreed that Jim Riotte was doomed from that moment. While no one knew where he had holed up for two decades, and none of the Hollisites had seen him visit Number 13, he must have stayed in touch.
“You keep secrets that haunt you and have only one person you talk to about them, you either get unnaturally close or you grow to despise your Siamese twin,” Maddy posited.
“I’d say both,” Peter suggested. “Psychos don’t make close friends.”
The friendship ultimately was one of convenience, the freezer probably invoked the day after Riotte picked up Devereau at the roadhouse lay-by up in the Wasatch. If Riotte had closely thought about the corpse and the blood-soaked electrical cable in the back of the van, might he have avoided the cooler?
Henry refused to psychoanalyze Vyne any further, but he unreservedly passed harsh judgement on his record as a terrorist. Kelso had been outshone by Kaczynski and McVeigh, two tougher men. His plans were spectacularly overtaken by the 9/11 hijackers. He was yesterday’s terrorist. As to whether Kelso Vyne was purely evil, Henry was no longer willing to say.
Henry and Maddy had bonded so well that when Peter invited him to visit England, it seemed perfectly appropriate. They settled on a July date.
It never happened.
On a sunny, innocent afternoon, ten days before Henry was scheduled to fly to Heathrow, Chief Grady died in a rollover on the I-80 outside Salt Lake City. The funeral occurred three days later.
CHAPTER 46
And on that day, it was discovered that Carleton Davis had vanished from his home at Number 10 Hollis.
Henry had already called Peter to postpone his visit. He missed his friend and the disappearance of Davis provided an excuse for calling Leicestershire again. He expected indifference — Davis had been as reluctant to cooperate in the manhunt as any of the residents — but Peter immediately responded with a Sherlockian flourish. “The disappearance of Carleton Davis happened before Grady’s crash, am I right?”
“Yup. How’d you know?”
“Davis was a semi-recluse. If he disappeared it would take a while for anyone to go looking for him. Daughter or son?”
“Niece. Dropped by. She’d tried to reach him on the phone. She had a key. It appeared he’d left several days before, without packing.”
“I’ll be there by week’s end,” Peter said.
Henry, in his refurbished living room on Coppermount Drive, stammered and said, “What do you see that I don’t see, Peter?”
“I’ll email my ticket times. Find out all you can about Boog DeKlerk’s movements. Under the radar.”
Henry hung up. An ominous chill moved up his spine. The house was silent. He was wearing his suit from Grady’s funeral, and now, as he caught his reflection in the new patio door panels, old feelings returned. It was the first time he had sported a tie since Theresa’s memorial service and just for the whiff of a moment, he was drawn back into the church’s embrace.
Henry took a walk through the dunes — reflexively, he looked for Tynan out there — and when he re-entered the house, the computer was beeping. Peter would arrive in two days.
The phone rang; it was Phil Mohlman. Henry, who always appreciated Phil’s advice, noted the coincidence in timing, but then realized there was no coincidence: Phil had seen precisely what Peter had, that Grady’s death and Davis’s vanishing were connected.
“Henry, Boog DeKlerk wasn’t at the funeral today.”
Evil was blossoming again in its shape-shifting way, Henry thought. It begged to be finally crushed.
“Come on over,” Henry said.
Phil b
rought pizza and they ate it on the patio. The older detective didn’t acknowledge the bullet marks in the back wall.
“Maybe it was instinct that made me call DeKlerk yesterday to see if he was attending. We hadn’t talked in three weeks. Grady never quite fired Boog, you know.”
Pushback from the union had caused the chief to content himself with indefinite suspension. Furst and Ordway were still working on their wrap-up report, which would touch on DeKlerk’s role in the Hollis Street investigation, so Grady had had an excuse for inaction.
“He swore he would definitely attend the funeral. Attendance was compulsory, wouldn’t you agree, Henry? You know what got me thinking? Boog’s voice. He was full of the old, old bluster, cocky, ripping everyone else, Grady included. Like he had received good news and didn’t care about the chief. He was never that cocky during the Watson investigation.”
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “He tore into us those times at Rocco’s.”
“Mostly he tore into you. With me, he was conciliatory, more restrained about what he tried to control. Did you notice, bottom line, that he wasn’t ever really helpful to either of us? For example, he let us lead the charge on the grow house but did nothing to help us with the forensics report on the bags of grass and the drug residue in the house.”
“You’re right. He did argue that the cartels took out the Watsons, but he never came up with anyone who ever did business with Tom Watson. But why did he agree to the meeting in Wendover? Holy shit!”
“Don’t curse, Henry; you’re a Mormon. Yes, he said he reluctantly agreed to González’s request. Think about the timing of that. Weeks had gone by without our getting anywhere. Grady was considering shifting the case over to the Narcotics Unit, something DeKlerk didn’t want, since there was a flurry of talk around the precinct that Boog was on the take with the cartels. González must have flabbergasted poor Boog when he called him, but here’s the thing: it was Boog who suggested the meeting in Wendover, not the other way around.”
Henry nodded vigorously. “Boog made sure to get Rogers onto the two-man team, and not himself. I was the patsy representing the West Valley force. I didn’t know a lot about the drug networks, and Rogers was a volatile character. DeKlerk hoped for a shootout in which the Mexican would perish.”
“Not to mention you,” Phil continued. “Which is also the story of the Denver raid. Think of it this way, Henry. Boog tried twice to get you killed. He isn’t stupid, and he’s got an uncanny talent for self-preservation.”
“Almost as intense as Devereau’s,” exclaimed Henry.
“Consider how perverse Boog has been. If he figured out that Carleton Davis was in touch with Kelso Vyne, it would have been a simple matter to track down Vyne and arrest or kill him. Instead, he manipulated Davis, learning from him that the Denver raid was in the works. It was another chance to bump off González. The Mexican was always Boog’s target.”
“And it worked. The question now is, what are we going to do?”
“Okay,” Phil said. “We wait till Cammon gets here in two days but I’m not willing to delay much longer.”
For Peter, it was the lock box that led him to the same stream of deductions. The Narcotics Squad’s extended control over access to Number 5 Hollis told him that DeKlerk feared further scrutiny of the crime scene by Phil and Henry and the West Valley forensics team. Peter never learned what the incriminating item inside was. He didn’t understand why the Narcotics Squad had missed this crudely concealed grow operation. Was it possible that Tom Watson had been paying off Boog all along?
Peter agreed that Boog had engineered the Wendover and Denver confrontations to get rid of González; the elimination of Henry and Peter along the way would have been a bonus. Boog must have been in steady contact with Vyne, perhaps through Davis, to set up these sucker plays. Peter himself had stimulated the assault on Coppermount Drive by manipulating Davis. His re-interview led directly to the Vietnam vet alerting Vyne. Or did DeKlerk himself contact the killer?
Peter had a hard time explaining to Joan why he was flying back to Salt Lake City in such a rush. Just as he had established a new protocol of honesty and openness (at least in his own thinking), he found himself lying to her. He was going over for a final review and sign-off of Henry’s biographical sketch, he said.
How could he confirm that he had found an unequivocally evil enemy?
Joan saw the lie right away, though she didn’t yet grasp his intent. “Are you helping Henry with the investigation into Chief Grady’s death? Is that it?”
“Yes, right. Henry thinks he was murdered. No one else thinks so. I’m not sure, but Henry can only cruise on his six-gun reputation for so long. If he stirs this up without evidence, he’ll squander all his goodwill.”
“What caused the car wreck?” Joan asked mildly. She knew when Peter was dissembling.
“Fell asleep at the wheel.”
The gun battle in Henry’s house had changed Joan. Another time, she would have gone on asking how the chief’s death might be connected to Kelso Vyne — for she guessed that much — but Coppermount imprinted on her the importance of completion. Police work offers catharsis — an arrest, a conviction, a punishment — but what makes a detective a good detective is the awareness that closure is not easily achieved. Joan knew that truth, even as Wanda was blowing away Kelso Vyne with Henry’s pistol. Peter was going to finish this. She stared at him.
“Go. Come back alive. And when you return, tell me everything, Peter.”
He hadn’t succeeded in his prevaricating, but there was one thing he did avoid explaining: Henry and Phil were the wrong men for this job. Utah-born, Henry had wandered from his church and his home state. The search for Vyne’s history had had an unexpected impact on Henry; he had rejoined the canyons and the deserts and the Great Salt Lake. For his part, Phil had declared his decision to stay in the West.
They were no longer outsiders.
Peter was the only one rugged enough for what had to come. The only outsider left.
Peter fell silent beside Henry in the new truck he had borrowed from Randy’s Rides. He had a moment of mild regret that he had given up his trusty F-150 — he had returned the rental riddled with bullet holes. But now he was content and grew calmer by the mile. The blasting sun welcomed him back to Utah. He had missed the heat and sand and cactus.
On the back patio they had argued, the three of them, Peter and Henry and Phil, grimly and loudly but without recrimination. Their shouting disturbed no one, but they were sharply cognizant of Thomas Abraham Tynan’s ghost listening.
At first Henry insisted that it be him with the gun, since he had arguably suffered most from the machinations of DeKlerk. Mohlman pointed to his leg and countered with a claim that his betrayal by DeKlerk was worse, and this was all about professional perfidy. Peter could hardly claim that he deserved to exact revenge more than they did but he argued that Henry and Phil wanted to stay on the West Valley force, and another shootout would ruin their careers.
Peter eventually wore them down. He maintained that he had killed seven men and knew what had to be done this time. (All of the detectives accepted that this had to be a gunfight, not an ambush, an arrest, or a coerced confession.) Henry and Phil pointed out that they too had shot opponents recently, and were ready to do it again, but perhaps what persuaded them to Peter’s view was the cold look of determination in his eye.
They toasted Elder Tynan; Henry drank orange juice. They fell quiet, three bruised detectives who had agreed on what had to be finished.
They drove the straight highway to Wendover. Henry turned to his passenger. “You know, Peter, this reminds me of our first car ride together, back in D.C., when we drove to the Quantico morgue that morning.”
Peter saw no need to reply. As they passed the Bonneville Salt Flats, he said, “If he walks out that door, let the Mexicans finish him.”
That silen
ced Henry.
They pulled into the parking area more than a half hour early, but five Mexicans were already there, heavily armed, ignoring the heat. Where had they stowed their vehicle, Peter wondered? Henry and Peter sensed that they were safe with the Mexicans. They recognized two of González’s brothers in the group — all the siblings had the same features — and went over to talk to them. This was about respect. It wasn’t that the gringos needed to explain the arrangement, not at this point, but Henry wanted the brothers to know about the Wendover discussion he had had with Avelino. Peter told them about his time with the drug boss at the Denver stakeout.
Peter saw that they had a few minutes. He entered the Quonset hut through the small door and noted, as Henry had, the pinging of the arched corrugated roof in the sun. The strung bulbs provided a sepulchral light. Peter assumed that the big garage doors at the far end were effectively sealed, leaving the single exit. He began to walk the length of the interior as he considered where to position himself. The table and the two wooden chairs stood where Avelino González had left them weeks ago. He strode to the end of the building. The logical positioning would be to stand by the table and wait for DeKlerk to enter through the small door and come to him.
Peter walked back along the crumbling cement floor but halted before reaching the egress. The hard pad had disintegrated twenty yards from the door, and someone had compensated by infilling with a mixture of sand and oil-soaked sawdust that not only stank but also left a choppy, caked surface that dragged on his shoes.
He exited and squinted against the sun. One of González’s brothers handed him a .45 pistol, and Peter thanked him, though it was an old weapon. He turned to Henry and said, “Give me your .45 but empty the chambers.”
Peter carried the loaded pistol in his right hand and shoved the empty one in his belt. He noticed one of the Mexican soldiers with a piece that intrigued him: the same calibre as the other two, but with a longer barrel.
The Verdict on Each Man Dead Page 36