Wayne exited the church and hurried to the corner of Wisconsin and Q St. There, and at a safe distance from the church, he took out the third of the three cell phones he’d bought and dialled the first of two numbers stored in its memory. There was a loud but distant boom and Wayne punched in the second of the two numbers. Another boom!
It was time to go dig up Kevin.
‘You done good, buddy boy, real good,’ Kevin said after Wayne returned to the basement. ‘There’s folks down here with smiles on their faces big as bananas. Was the tank guy there?’
‘I don’t rightly know, Kevin, but Larry said he would be. Said he had a crush on the Pastor woman and wanted to show off his dog to her.’
The news heartened Kevin. He begrudged all tank commanders and blamed them for his untimely death: if the tanks had got to Fallujah on time – and when they were supposed to – he would still be alive today and not stuck below the basement of Larry’s house. If not divine retribution, then Tank’s presence in the church would hopefully be his.
Wayne took hold of the sledgehammer and brought it down on the concrete floor. The blow was skewed and the head skidded to the side without doing damage.
‘You ought to get some shuteye and fix yourself a meal,’ Kevin advised. ‘You’ll need to get your strength back before you start on the floor. And do me a favour, will you? Stop sucking those damned mints! I can smell your breath down here.’
Wayne didn’t argue. He was on the home stretch now and from what Kevin had told him the digging would be easy once he’d smashed his way through the concrete. He stretched out on the narrow camp bed and was soon fast asleep. He slept for fourteen hours.
Two things happened before the police broke into the house on Wednesday afternoon. About 9:30 on Monday morning there was a loud banging on the door, and 48 hours later another explosion.
11
The St Francis Day Massacre
Larry was sentenced to 99 years’ imprisonment, which would, with time off for good behaviour and advances in medical science, make him eligible for parole in 2066, shortly before he turned 119. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded, his lawyer, Osmo McNulty, assured him, and he’d be surprised by how quickly time passed when life went on hold. And on the plus side he’d never have to buy groceries again or pay any more utility bills. Think of the savings he’d make. The way Osmo described things, it was as if he’d just scored Larry the deal of the century.
Throughout his trial Larry was depicted as an eminence grise, a Svengali of evil intent who had manipulated a vulnerable young man into doing his bidding. Wayne had planted the bombs and killed Dr Young, but he’d done so only at Larry’s request. It was Larry who was responsible for the destruction of the church, the deaths of four people and seventeen pets – and the deathbed testimony of his accomplice confirmed this: ‘Kevin told me to do it,’ Wayne had told the FBI.
And there was only one Kevin the FBI had identified in their inquiries.
An explosion in any city would have sent the FBI scurrying, but this one had them running a four-minute mile. Georgetown wasn’t a neighbourhood of Joe Lunchbuckets and plain Janes; it was the home of foreign embassies, important government officials, legislators, the rich and the powerful. An attack on Georgetown was an assault on the vital organs of the nation. But who would want to blow up a church on the Feast Day of St Francis? And why the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans?
Explosions were usually the handiwork of terrorists and if not, then the act of disaffected loners. When no group either known or unknown had claimed responsibility within the first forty-eight hours, and preliminary examination of the bomb fragments had shown them to be amateurish and with no discernible signature, it was decided that the perpetrator was probably of the latter grouping. Having come to this conclusion, however, the FBI was no nearer to identifying that person.
From eyewitness accounts, the Bureau pieced together the following picture.
About fifteen minutes after the service had started, and towards the end of the singing of All Things Bright and Beautiful, a dog dressed in the garb of a mediaeval crusader had walked into the church. The dog had disappeared under a rear pew for about two minutes and then padded down the aisle towards the Pastor, who had just lifted a small tortoise from a white plastic bucket and was trying to find its head. The dog, whose breed and owner had yet to be confirmed, was seemingly recognised by Laura Parker – a witness injured in the explosion and currently without memory – who called attention to the thick vest underneath its heraldic surcoat. On hearing the word vest, a man identified as Theodore Newbold had leapt from his seat and gathered the dog in his arms. He’d been moving towards the exit when the dog exploded. There then followed more explosions when eighteen of the Moller’s twenty-one organ pipes rocketed into the air. Although three people had been killed and the church badly damaged, the potential for greater destruction was forestalled by the crude nature of the bombs and the sparse number of nails in their construction.
A breakthrough in the investigation came on the Wednesday morning when a witness came forward and identified Wayne – though not by name – as the man seen leaving the church and crossing Wisconsin shortly before the explosions. He described him as a neighbourhood character, a challenged man who delivered free sheets and usually pulled a cart. ‘I didn’t get my copy of the Current last week and I wanted to ask him why. Usually he likes to chat but that day he rushed straight past me.’
The FBI visited the halfway house and learned that Wayne was house-sitting a dog on Dent St. What kind of dog? A Basset Hound, the director thought. (A Basset Hound had been mentioned by one eyewitness, but others had suggested the dog was more likely a Dachshund, a Beagle, a Springer Spaniel or Bloodhound.) The agents drove to the house on Dent St with no real expectations. They parked on the street opposite and were about to knock on the door when there was an explosion. Immediately their spirits lifted.
A bomb disposal unit arrived within minutes, but a good hour passed before the door was broken down. They entered the premises to find dust and smoke rising from the stairs leading to the basement and through a six-foot hole in the lounge floor, and the body of a man lying on the kitchen floor with his head resting on a cushion. All other rooms on the first and second floors were empty, but under a pile of rubble in the basement they found another man, unconscious but still breathing. In the same cellar they found quantities of black powder, fertiliser, an opened bag of nails and ten sticks of dynamite.
In the days that followed, the FBI put the pieces of another picture together. Wayne Trout, a local paperboy, had used the basement of the house on Dent St to assemble a dog’s suicide vest and the bombs placed in the organ pipes of the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans. He’d then, for an unknown reason, tried to blow a hole in the floor of the cellar and unintentionally brought down the ceiling. The house belonged to Laurence MacCabe and the body of the man lying on the floor was that of his neighbour Dr Eustace Young, who had either been lured to the house or gone there of his own accord.
Wayne regained consciousness in the hospital but died soon afterwards. He had breath enough only to answer three of the FBI’s questions. Why did you blow up the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans, Wayne? Why did you kill Dr Eustace Young, Wayne? To both questions Wayne had answered that Kevin had told him to do it. And who is Kevin, Wayne? Kevin’s my best friend, sir, Wayne had replied before inconveniently dying.
The more complete picture would have been this. The floor of Larry’s basement wasn’t a simple pick and shovel job as Kevin had thought. It was eight inches thick and made of reinforced concrete, and only a man with a pneumatic drill would have been able to break through it. A pickaxe and sledgehammer barely scratched its surface and only served to disturb Dr Young’s sleep. The next morning he’d banged on the door and, unaware that Larry had gone to Israel, was surprised to be greeted by a strange-looking man with a sledgehammer in his hand and a torch strapped to his h
ead. He’d brushed past him and started shouting for Larry.
‘MacCabe, you damn fool, where the hell are you? How’s a man supposed to sleep at night with you making all this goddamn noise? I’ve a good mind to call the police!’
‘What’s the man want?’ Kevin called.
‘He wants to call the police, Kevin. He says we’re making too much noise.’
‘Then tap him on the head and tell him to mind his own business!’ Kevin said.
A tap on the head with a sledgehammer would have been difficult for any person to gauge, never mind one suffering from dyspraxia, and Wayne’s gentle tap simply caved in Dr Young’s skull. Within seconds the retired plastic surgeon was singing duets with Frank Sinatra.
‘Aw shoot!’ Wayne exclaimed. ‘I’ve gone an’ done it this time, Kevin. I think I’ve killed him.’
‘Serves the man right,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s got no business sticking his nose into matters that don’t concern him. You might want to think about speeding things up, though. People might come looking for him.’
After two more days of fruitless hammering Wayne decided to use the dynamite…
As it was his house where the bombs had been assembled Larry was a person of interest from the start, and the more the FBI learned about him the more convinced they became that he was the Kevin behind the St Francis Day Massacre. They found their first clue in the hallway restroom of Dr Young’s house. On its wall was a framed letter from Larry: Dear Dr Young: One day, I hope someone puts you down. Yours sincerely, Larry K MacCabe (Professor). It was the note he’d pushed through Dr Young’s letter box on the day Loop had been euthanised.
It wasn’t so much the threat to Dr Young as Larry’s middle initial that caught their attention – K. It was an initial that turned up on Larry’s bank statements, on invoices, on correspondence of an official nature and on a restraining order preventing him from delivering any further shopping trolleys to Madeleine Albright. And then they found his birth certificate and the mystery was solved. The K stood for Kevin. Larry’s middle name was Kevin! And despite Larry’s later protestations that it was a name he neither used nor was called by, and that the Kevin Wayne had referred to was, in all probability, his childhood friend killed in Iraq and that Laura Parker could confirm this, his words fell on deaf ears – especially as Laura now had no idea who Kevin was. She also had no memory of ever having met Larry, and this proved a problem for his defence.
Laura had emerged from the church with a nail in her head, and it had taken the doctors a full day to recognise this. Apart from a small cut on the forehead treated in the emergency room, it appeared that she’d survived the explosions unscathed. The next day, however, she’d started to feel nauseous and her speech became slurred, and when she returned to the hospital for a scan it emerged that she had a 3 1/4 inch nail lodged in her brain.
‘You’re joking!’ Laura said. ‘I don’t even remember being hit by a nail.’
‘I never joke about 3 1/4 inch nails stuck in a person’s brain,’ the neurosurgeon replied. He was a man without humour and tactless. Life and death were his next-door neighbours and he’d yet to decide which of them he preferred. He then went on to explain that she wouldn’t have felt the nail because there were no pain-sensitive nerves in the brain.
The surgery lasted for two hours and the neurosurgeon replaced a part of her skull with a titanium mesh. ‘You were lucky, Ms Parker,’ he later told her. ‘The nail came within millimetres of destroying your motor function. You’re going to make a full recovery.’
‘A recovery from what?’ Laura asked.
‘From the extraction of the nail in your skull.’
‘What nail?’
‘Get some rest, Ms Parker.’
He left the room and walked down the corridor muttering: ‘Shitshitshitshitshit!’
While Laura’s motor functions had been spared, the surgery had inadvertently wiped the events of the previous year from her memory. She was experiencing what was called retrograde amnesia. Her memory would return, the neurosurgeon told her, but without timetable. It might take six months or it might take a year.
‘Where’s Alice?’ Laura thought to ask on one of his visits. ‘I’d have thought she’d have come by to see me.’
‘Alice is in Junction City,’ the neurosurgeon replied.
‘At her parents’ house?’
‘Only if she was cremated.’
Alice had been one of the Massacre’s three fatalities. Her claims to being a marked person had been borne out that Sunday and her usual close encounters with death this time intimate. The cat with nine lives was now without life, buried in a cemetery close to the centre of the United States.
‘Try not to think about it,’ the neurosurgeon advised Laura.
‘But, but what about Repo?’ Laura asked between sobs. ‘Who’s looking after Repo?’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about Repo,’ the neurosurgeon said. ‘He’s dead, too.’
Laura wailed and the neurosurgeon told her not to touch the titanium mesh in her head.
In telling Laura that Repo was dead, the neurosurgeon had been wrong. Repo was in fact in better health than he’d been for some time, living with Mike and now free from canine dementia. It was difficult to determine if it had been the vet’s pills that had won the day for Repo or the explosions that had shaken him back to his senses, but for Laura – when she regained her memory – it would always be the intervention of St Francis of Assisi, the kindliest saint of all.
While rummaging through the papers in Larry’s house the FBI had also found a file of documents pertaining to the murder of Lydia Flores. It had never been one of their cases but it now suited them. Who but the person who shot Lydia Flores would keep a file on the crime? Larry’s explanation that he’d gathered the information solely for the benefit of his wife who was a neighbour of hers in the Willow Columbarium again cut no ice, especially when Larry could provide no alibi for his movements on the day of her murder. It also appeared that he had motive for killing her as her husband, Herb Flores, was the biggest local importer of the brand of vodka favoured by Helen that had apparently hastened her death. It was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a wife for a wife.
The FBI had come across a treasure trove of the empty vodka bottles while searching Larry’s backyard for the remains of Rutherford and Grover, the MacCabes’ twin sons who had mysteriously disappeared shortly after they’d graduated from college: neither had filed a tax return or taken out a credit card, married, crossed the border or registered to vote. It appeared the two men no longer existed, and Larry’s matter-of-fact musings that he too had often wondered where they’d got to, struck them as cold.
They started to think that Larry might be a psychopath, a view encouraged by the testimony of a young girl who worked at Barnes & Noble and with enough metal in her face to set off the shop’s security alarms whenever she entered or exited the store. She volunteered that Larry had once come into the shop and asked for a book on Washington psychopaths. ‘I remember him because he was real strange and creepy-looking; the kinda guy who leaves you feeling like you’ve pissed your pants.’ Larry, of course, had refuted this and told the FBI that the girl was mistaken. What he’d asked for was a book on Washington cycle paths because his friend Laura – who still had no idea that she was his friend – had once shown interest in the subject.
Further background checks cemented the FBI’s belief that Larry was the man they were looking for. They started by interviewing his neighbours, most of whom either claimed not to have known him or known him only well enough to avoid. Only Mr Cotton, the neighbour Larry had once tried to befriend, was more forthcoming. He told the FBI that Larry had once made light of his wife’s death and likened her to a pigeon, and that he’d seen him and a younger man unloading a large number of cardboard boxes from his Volvo shortly before the church exploded. He was no expert on explosives h
e said, but if he had to put money on it he’d wager that they came in cardboard boxes. Larry never tried to hide the fact that he and Wayne had returned from West Virginia that afternoon, but insisted that the cardboard boxes had contained Wayne’s jam making equipment. When the FBI visited Zion Episcopal Church they found not only the jam making equipment Larry had supposedly brought to Georgetown (one large pan and thirty jam jars), but also traces of black powder.
Next they interviewed the faculty and staff of the university’s History Department. They learned from them that Larry was a loner, a man without friends and again a person others chose to avoid. Scott Clayton, the man now teaching The Emergence of Modern America, described Larry as a nutcase and recalled the day he’d visited his office unannounced and tried to make him change his syllabus. ‘It was unpleasant,’ he said. ‘There was malevolence to the man and he made veiled threats. I wish now that I’d punched the sonofabitch.’ Clive’s testimony was even more damning. He described how Larry would interfere with his janitorial duties and tell him he was using the wrong cleaning products and how his mop technique was faulty. ‘He walked around as if he owned the place,’ Clive said, ‘and there were times when I’d lock myself in the closet and be afraid to come out.’ Bill Parish, the Head of Department, who probably knew Larry better than most, told them he was an acquired taste and that, for Larry, was about as good as it got.
When Osmo McNulty got wind of Professor Parish’s statement he asked him to be a character witness for Larry, and when he refused, sent him a subpoena. (Larry had been hoping that Clive would also be a character witness and was surprised when McNulty told him that Clive had already signed up for the prosecution.)
It was unusual for a character witness to be deemed hostile and McNulty trod carefully.
Larry & the Dog People Page 26