Whack Job

by Mike Baron

  “Who knows about this?”

  “Gus Alvarez, the Larimer County Coroner and me. The coroner signed the secrecy act. He’s ex Air Force.”

  “Keep it that way. Anything you need,” Yee said.

  “Did you receive the video?”

  “Yes. This is very troubling. However, for the time being, we’re going to keep this among ourselves. I want to give Hornbuckle enough rope to hang himself, and there are bigger fish to fry.”

  “I understand.”

  “You are doing an excellent job, Mr. White. Goodbye.”

  Yee hung up. The jitney driver watched Otto from fifteen meters. It was six-thirty. It would be five in L.A. Otto phoned Winner. He got Winner’s voice mail.

  “Gabe, just wanted to thank you for your service to your country. I’ll be in touch when this winds down. You have my number.”

  He wanted to call Stella but for what? He couldn’t tell her what was going on. He really had nothing to say to her except I love you, I was wrong, please come back. He’d tried it and it hadn’t worked.

  Alvarez walked toward him pocketing his own cell phone.

  “Still no sign of Witherspoon and Casey. They identified a vehicle rented to Ralston Goldfarb. If the car’s still there, where’s Goldfarb?”

  “They must all still be up there,” Otto said.

  “Come on. Let’s go find them.”

  ***

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  “By Reason of Insanity”

  Monday afternoon and evening.

  Stella accompanied Lester Durant from the Harriet Kramer Detention Facility in Manassas to the Clempson County Courthouse in Alexandria. The state-appointed board of forensic psychiatrists was about to deliver their verdict.

  Durant looked younger than his twenty-six years, as if a high school kid caught up in events he didn’t understand. His curly black hair was cut to the nub. A bullet crease formed a puckered pink valley over his right eye. His prison-issue day-glo green jumpsuit hung on his thin frame like a tent. He was shackled at the wrists to a chain around his waist. His legs were chained together. They rode in a Virginia Dept. of Corrections van with an armed guard and the driver.

  “How you doing, Lester?” Stella asked.

  “I’m good, ma’am,” he said in a soft southern drawl. “Whatever happens I can deal with it.”

  For Durant, this was a major speech.

  Stella had kept Durant off the stand to prevent him from talking about the spiders. A bolus of dread crouched in her gut that they would find him sane and ready to stand trial. There was a free-floating consensus that far too many mass murderers were escaping justice via the insanity defense. It would become a media circus. Durant had already inspired countless internet chat groups and pages, disturbed individuals genetically prone to conspiracy theories as well as late-night comics. The van stuttered through traffic to the courthouse, a Georgian revival with Doric columns and a marble floor.

  The carnival waited. Four major networks, Fresh Young Faces pushing forward pushing microphones. Stella and Durant circumvented this by entering the underground garage guarded by federal marshals.

  Accompanied by an armed guard they took the elevator from the basement parking garage to the fourth floor and entered the Miriam C. Rosenkranz Courtroom. The board of experts were already seated in the jury box: four men, two women and at least two dozen doctorates. Stella and Durant took their seats at the defendant’s table, chains jingling. The seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia hung on the bench. Behind the judge’s seat, flanked by American and Virginian flags, was a gilt-framed painting of early settlers fighting savage Indians. Many groups had tried unsuccessfully over the years to have it removed for “insensitivity.”

  “All rise for the right honorable Justice William Graves.”

  A squat black man in judicial robes with white hair and glasses emerged from his chambers and took his place behind the bench.

  “Judge,” the bailiff said, “this is Case 43,209, Commonwealth of Virginia versus Lester Durant.”

  The judge peered over his specs. “Will the defendant please approach the bench.”

  Stella and Durant stood in front of the judge.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, have you reached a decision regarding the defendant’s ability to stand trial?”

  The head of the committee, a tall woman in a navy pantsuit, stood. “We have your honor. We find the defendant incompetent to stand trial and recommend that he be remanded to the state for a period of observation until such time that he is ready to stand trial, if ever.”

  “Thank you ladies and gentlemen of the jury. You are dismissed.”

  The judge turned to Stella. “Does the defendant have anything to say before I issue my ruling?”

  “No, your honor,” Stella said.

  “Very well. The defendant is remanded to Tuscadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane until such time as he is either judged competent to stand trial or no longer deemed a threat to society. Thank you all. You’re free to go.”

  Durant remained unaffected by the ruling as if he’d already checked out. Stella squeezed his arm.

  “Lester--this is good news!”

  Stella and Durant rode the elevator in silence, each with their own thoughts. They reached the basement parking level. Stella walked with Durant to the van. They had little in common. He was a black boy from the South. She was a princess from the West.

  “Lester, I’ll be checking in with you in a few days when you get settled. If you need me for any reason you have my numbers.”

  No response. Lester was on another planet.

  Stella turned to go. As Lester was getting into the van, he turned. “Mizz Darling, there were spiders in the courtroom.”

  Stella was relieved he hadn’t spoken up, not that it would have affected the judge’s decision. Normally when she won a big case like this--and getting Lester ruled insane was a big deal--she celebrated. But there was no one with whom to celebrate. She hadn’t heard from Gabe since he’d gone up to Pawnee Grove. Winner hadn’t answered her calls.

  She didn’t have any girlfriends. It bothered her. She wondered what was wrong with her. It wasn’t that she was unlikable. She just hadn’t gotten to know anybody well enough in the ten years she’d been in D.C. How pathetic was that? The women she met were either obsessively career-oriented or married or both.

  Her sixty hour work week precluded hanging out at athletic facilities or bars, the two biggest meet and greet venues in the city. Business-related parties usually involved the same old corporate clients and the unlovely Washington criminal defense corps.

  Lawyers. Brrrrrr!

  As long as her job was her life, she was unlikely to develop any strong friendships here. She pined for Gabe even as she told herself it couldn’t last. They were two ships passing in the night. Their worlds were mutually exclusive. Stella knew a few show biz lawyers and they were even creepier than criminal defense attorneys.

  Stella took a taxi to her offices at Bing, Adolfo and Thompson in the Gerhardt Building on K Street. She met with two clients. At six fifteen, Stella left the office and had dinner by herself at the Husun Grill. She tried Gabe again and went straight to voice mail. He’d warned her that there would be no reception in the mountains but she couldn’t stifle a jagged little shard of worry.

  She over tipped the waitress and took a taxi to her condo at 2020 12th St. NW.

  She took a hot bath, cracked open a bottle of Coppola Chardonnay, and tilted back in her Barcalounger in her living room to watch the news.

  A stern-faced male reader informed her that astrospace genius Mel Tyler had disappeared while hiking alone in the Rockies. When they mentioned the location, she put the pieces together. She didn’t believe the cover story for one second, More likely Tyler was another burn victim.

  She felt profoundly uneasy. Two men with whom she was close were up there and she hadn’t heard from either of them all weekend. She had that edge-of-your-seat anxiety knowing she would be un
able to sleep. She checked the TV listings--it was all shit as far as the eye could see. Two hundred and twelve channels and nothing to watch.

  Stella debated taking a Nembutal given her by a client but they sometimes left her groggy in the morning. Fortunately, she had a light schedule that week that meant she was only working fifty hours or so. She turned off the TV, went into her bedroom, sat on the bed, and took the Nembutal from her side table drawer, weighing the little capsule in her hand.

  She was exhausted. What the hell. She reached for the glass of water she kept bedside. Her phone chirped. She glanced at the little window. Her heart went pitter-pat.

  “Gabe! They found Durant crazier than a shit house rat! How are you?”

  “Can you come up here?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Have you seen a newspaper?”

  “What, about Tyler? I saw it on the news.”

  Winner told her about the aerospace engineer’s immolation. “The police are here now. I think you should take a look at what we found. I think Otto’s gonna need a lawyer.”

  “Gabe, you sound funny. Are you all right?”

  “Frankly I’m gob-smacked by what we found. Besides. I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. I’ll fly out tomorrow.”

  At last she was able to sleep.

  ***

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “Rabbit”

  Tuesday afternoon.

  Hornbuckle had been haunting the Nuggets chat rooms for two days. Spider was all over the place offering advice to players and coaches, calling games, arguing with other fans. But was it the right Spider? There were spiders on the football, hockey and baseball chat rooms as well. He was monitoring a discussion on the NBA site when the following exchange occurred:

  Quizguts: Hey--26 points--not too shabby!

  Spider: Afflalo still sucks dead squirrel meat.

  Spider appeared to be friends with one Quizguts, sex and age unknown. Spider and Quizguts had been going back and forth for days about man-on-man vs. zone. Finally, they agreed to meet at three p.m. Tuesday. Code language indicated they might be making a transaction.

  Now that Colorado had legalized medical marijuana, dispensaries had sprung up on the fringes of every town that didn’t specifically ban them. Fort Collins had recently booted all their MMJ shops, many of which moved to Boulder.

  Boulder would never boot its MMJ shops.

  The MMJ situation made Hornbuckle sick to his stomach. Everybody knew that the medical part was a load of horse shit. Too many people in Colorado enjoyed getting high. Too many people were making big bucks off home grows. Once the state got a taste of the tax revenue Katy bar the door.

  Kleiser was meeting Quizguts at the Full Throttle Coffee and Internet Bar in Arvada. Kleiser was a child of the suburbs. Strip malls and internet cafes were his native habitat. Hornbuckle tied a blue bandanna around the top of his head and wore mirrored gargoyles and baggy saggy cargo pants. He looked like a gang banger. He wore an Avalanche hoodie with a voluminous front pocket in which he stashed a .25 automatic.

  He carried his laptop in an REI backpack. He went through a McDonald’s on the way, stuffing two double cheeseburgers down his gullet while he drove. Hornbuckle cruised the Full Throttle on Schenk Blvd., a bistro-bright coffee shop with blinding yellow trim and a number of round black tables on the sidewalk, separated from the hoi polloi by a wrought-iron fence.

  Hornbuckle parked around the corner in front of a tattoo parlor. His ankle throbbed with every step. Punks rolled by on bikes and boards. A gangly youth on a long board headed his way with a cig dangling from his lower lip. Hornbuckle walked straight at him, daring the kid to run into him. The pierced and inked punk jumped off his Hellboy board at the last minute, executing a crude twist and bonk that brought the board down on the edge and sent him stumbling into the wall of an insurance agency. That punk was pissed. He rounded on Hornbuckle.

  “Hey asshole!”

  Hornbuckle stopped and turned. The punk took one look into his fathomless gray eyes, lowered his eyesight, grabbed his board and pedaled away like a one-legged soap box derby car. Halfway down the block he turned, raised his middle finger and fired his Carpathian shot: “Fuck you!”

  It put a spring in Hornbuckle’s step and a smile on his face. A half dozen students and punks occupied the outdoor tables. Hornbuckle went inside, stood in line behind a girl with a nice ass, ordered a double cappuccino with whipped cream and retreated to the corner table in the back from where he could see the entire cafe and out into the street. Above him hung a framed Toulouse-Lautrec print of a woman riding an old-fashioned bicycle with an enormous front wheel.

  Typical socialist watering hole. Stacks of Westword and other seditious free newspapers sat on the cold fireplace mantle. Hornbuckle picked one up. It was filled with ads for marijuana dispensaries and sex services.

  Framed quotes from Gandhi and Chairman Mao hung on the wall as if the joint had been preserved since the sixties. Of course, the wireless, iPads, Blackberries, Nooks and laptops were new. Hornbuckle brought out his own laptop and spooled up, switching quickly from its FBI home page although he was in no one’s line of sight.

  Behind his hunter’s blind Hornbuckle scanned the patrons dropping them into slots. Earnest pre-med. Junkie/musician. Eco-activist. Hornbuckle hit his hot spots: stratfor.com, MEMRI.com, hackersanonymous.com. Drudge and Huffpo. The horse had left the barn. Americans now lived in fear that anyone at any time could burst into flames. An editorial on one of the left wing hate sites said that the plague of spontaneous human combustions was Gaia’s Revenge. All the victims were white heterosexual males except for two conservative black men reviled by the black community, and in that sense the burnings were to be welcomed.

  BURN BABY BURN! read the headline.

  Another site theorized that it was a sexually-transmitted disease.

  The over-all consensus favored terrorists.

  According to Drudge, hardware stores and Walmart were selling out of fire extinguishers and couldn’t keep up with demand.

  Hornbuckle looked up. A strapping young man in a Nuggets hoodie wearing wrap-around shades and carrying a backpack stood at the counter. The afternoon sun hung in the window behind the man whose face was hidden in shadow inside the hood. Hornbuckle’s pulse quickened. He quickly closed his laptop, slipped it into the backpack and hitched the backpack over one shoulder.

  Hoodie took his drink and went outside taking a seat at a table against the window. It was either Spider or Quizguts, and the other would be along in a minute. Hornbuckle dawdled at the magazine rack, one eye out front. And here came the other cruising up an on long board like the Silver Surfer. Hornbuckle was glad he waited because the board punk was Kleiser, skull gleaming. Kleiser wore a wife beater exposing the extensive tribal tattoo on his left arm.

  Easy as pie.

  Hornbuckle sauntered toward the door as Kleiser entered. Hornbuckle put a hand on his shoulder. “Black Widow?”

  Kleiser looked at him with an expression of shock. Gripping Kleiser by the arm Hornbuckle turned him around and marched him out of the coffee shop. The man in the Nuggets hoodie stared.

  “Special Agent Hornbuckle, FBI. Let’s take a walk.”

  With a Vulcan death grip on Kleiser, Hornbuckle marched him out of the wrought iron enclosure and steered him down the sidewalk toward his car.

  “How do I know you’re a federal agent?” Kleiser whined.

  Hornbuckle reached into his front pant pocket for his badge. He had a split second adumbration of disaster before his backpack was ripped savagely from his shoulder throwing him off-balance and breaking the strap.

  The board punk whom Hornbuckle had stopped sprinted diagonally across the street between traffic. The laptop contained highly classified information.

  “Shit!” shouted Hornbuckle giving chase.

  ***

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “The Antiseptic Crib”

  Tuesday afternoon and
evening.

  Alvarez drove to his home across the street from the Botanical Gardens in his Ford Explorer. Otto rode shotgun. Alvarez had three kids. The two older boys were out but fourteen-year-old Carrie was home on the broad veranda tweeting, texting and Facebooking in a chain-supported rocker. Like the window surrounds and details, the balustrade and rocker were painted forest green. A kidney of perfect lawn surrounded a mound of small fir and a couple aspen.

  Alvarez spent a few minutes with his daughter while Otto fetched Steve. In the backyard, Steve was trying to hump one of the English setters, who turned on him and snarled. Steve was fixed but he tried to hump other dogs. Otto wondered if Steve could achieve orgasm, and whether it was wrong for him to think of jacking off his dog.

  He put Steve in the vehicle. Alvarez came out the front door with a bulging gym bag. They stopped at Petco where Otto picked up a bag of Science Diet for Dogs. They drove up through Lyons and Estes Park, through a brief rain shower. It was three-thirty when they arrived at the lodge. A Larimer County Deputy waited at the gate to check their identification. He phoned the lodge to let them know.

  The parking lot contained an FBI crime lab and several unmarked vehicles. Three expensive luxury vehicles including Goldfarb’s rented Infiniti remained cordoned off with yellow tape.

  Lon Barnett was happy to cede control of the operation to Otto.

  “Any sign of Goldfarb, Witherspoon or Casey?” Otto asked.

  “Nada,” Barnett said.

  “What about Gabe Winner?”

  “I think he got a ride down with one of the other campers,” Barnett said.

  Otto went inside, Steve at his heels. Alvarez and Barnett remained on the front deck comparing notes. Otto used the land-line behind the counter to call Winner. It went straight to voice mail. He phoned Stella and it went straight to voice mail. Otto left a message to call him back.

  Alvarez and Barnett entered the lodge. Barnett motioned for Otto to join them at some overstuffed furniture in front of the massive fireplace. Otto filled a plastic ice bucket with water and set it down next to his chair. Barnett pulled out an iPad and brought them up to speed.