by Greg Sisk
Burton explained, “This is a security video from a burger place down the road from your Insignia Construction site in Boulderville. We got very lucky with this. Security video typically is on a continuous loop and thus is overwritten with new video when the hard-drive fills up with video data. But the restaurant was new and the hard-drive pretty large, so the video recording was not yet full and starting to over-write. As a consequence, we were able to get video going back more than three weeks. To add to that luck, the video camera at the drive-through window of the burger place is pointed directly to the northwest with a largely unobstructed view of the construction site.
“Now here’s where our luck runs out. As you can see in the video, we have only a partial view of the site, and it is at a great distance, so we can’t see people very well and certainly can’t tell exactly what they’re doing. And the video runs for days, so we’ve had to try to narrow our observations down to what seem more likely to be significant moments. We’ve focused it on the two days in which you’ve told us explosives we’re being used at the site. We hope you might guide us through what we’re seeing.”
The video was fast-forwarded, and then stopped at a point where a van pulled up on the road alongside the construction site.
“Mr. Peterson,” asked Burton, “can you identify the van?”
“Yes, that’s the van in which we transport the explosives.”
“That’s what we thought,” said Burton. “Now we’ve put bookmarks on this video at every point during those two days in which a lone person is in the vicinity of the van. When there’s a group of people near the van, we assume no one would be up to ‘no good,’ because others would be watching. But when someone appears alone next to the van, that might be significant. Or it might not. It turns out that happened only four times. Given the half-mile distance, and the fact that the rear of the van is pointed away from the camera, we can’t actually see if anyone is opening the back door to the van. But at least we can narrow things down by seeing who would have been alone near the van and thus have had the opportunity to do something improper.”
“By ‘something improper,’” Peterson said, “I assume you mean stealing TNT from the van.”
“That’s a possible theory, yes,” replied Burton.
The computer technician forwarded the video to the first bookmark. A figure entered the camera’s range and moved behind the van and then came back out again. The technician froze the image and zoomed in on it, which did little to clarify the image.
“Even at this distance,” said Peterson, “I can see some of his face and tell by the way he walks that he’s my son-in-law, Bill Klein. But there’s nothing surprising about him being alone near the van. He was in charge after all.”
“We understand that, Mr. Peterson, keep watching.”
The video leapt forward to the next bookmark. Again, a lone figure could be seen walking toward and going behind the van. Again, the video was stopped, and the technician magnified the figure.
“That’s Olin Pirkle,” said Peterson confidently. “No doubt about it. You can see how the head is pretty big and the body’s quite slim. He’s a pretty distinctive figure.”
“One more, Mr. Peterson.” And again the video fast-forwarded to a bookmark, then froze, and the image once again was enlarged.
Peterson stared intently at the screen, squinting as though he could adjust for the poor quality of the video. Eventually he said, “I just can’t tell who that is. I’m ninety-five percent sure it isn’t Bill or Olin. Remember there were about a dozen workers at the site. I don’t know all of them well.”
“That’s okay,” said Burton.
The video was restarted and that figure moved out from behind the van and then quickly out of the camera’s range.
The video kept rolling, not fast-forwarding to another scene. Within a couple of minutes after the person Peterson couldn’t identify had exited from the frame, another figure moved toward the van.
“That’s Bill again, I’m pretty sure,” said Peterson.
“You’ve been a big help,” Burton told Peterson. He and Kramer stood up, shook hands with Peterson again, and saw him out the door.
After Peterson left, Burton and Kramer walked down the hall and sat down in Kramer’s office.
“Good work, Burton!” said Kramer.
“Just luck,” said Burton. “The burger place happened to have security video, the video hadn’t been overwritten, and the camera happened to be pointing in the right direction. And, anyway, it is hardly definitive evidence of anything.”
“No, but it is another piece to add to the puzzle. We now know both Bill Klein and Olin Pirkle had access to the van when no one else was around. Given that Klein seems unlikely to have been trying to kill himself or his wife, Pirkle is starting to look like a real suspect.”
“But,” Burton said. “We can’t see whether Pirkle took something from the van. And there’s that third person Peterson couldn’t identify.”
“Yeah, but that probably means nothing. As Peterson said, it could be one of the other dozen workers. Or for that matter, it could be a random passerby.”
“A passerby? Out in an undeveloped area? Next to a construction site where they were setting off explosives?”
“Does seem unlikely. Still, it could just be a coincidence.”
I don’t like coincidences, thought Burton. But he kept his feelings to himself.
Chapter 8
[FIVE WEEKS AFTER THE TRAGEDY]
For centuries, good and wise people have known that nothing soothes the troubled soul more than devoting oneself as a servant to other people who are also in trouble. One of those good and wise people was Sharon Tipplett.
Sharon Tipplett was an exceptionally tall, lean, and physically fit black woman in her mid-forties. She looked like a basketball player—and indeed she had been a star basketball player at her Chicago high school and had been recruited to play basketball for Northwestern University.
Being a star in high school, however, proved not to be a predictor of athletic prowess in the highly charged and hyper-competitive world of NCAA Division I sports. After a disappointing performance and progressively less playing time during her freshman and sophomore years, Tipplett surrendered her athletic scholarship. She left the basketball court to focus all her energies on the classroom.
She was committed to completing her studies at Northwestern, which meant finding financial support to replace her athletic scholarship. Coming from a line of military service members going back to her grandfather, Tipplett joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Navy ROTC program at Northwestern had a long and distinguished tradition.
After graduating from Northwestern, Tipplett served her country in the Navy for more than a decade, including service on a non-combat supply ship in the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War. When the Navy began to assign women to combat vessels in the years immediately following the Gulf War, Tipplett was among the first so commissioned. She served as an officer on an aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, while it was deployed in the Mediterranean to enforce the United Nations no-fly-zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina against aggressive incursions by Serbian aircraft.
Tipplett left active service with the Navy at the rank of lieutenant. She decided to return to Northwestern University—this time for a law degree.
After a few years in practice with a small firm in the suburbs of Chicago, she heard an increasingly louder call to help her fellow veterans. As servicemen and women returned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them were suffering injuries both visible and invisible. Tipplett saw first-hand the growing need to provide legal representation for those seeking veterans disability benefits, struggling with mortgage and debt problems (especially for those who had been in the National Guard or Reserves and thus had
to leave ongoing civilian jobs when called up for active duty), and encountering marital and family difficulties.
Her small law practice was devoting more and more time to representing vets. Because many of these vets and their families could afford to pay little or nothing in legal fees, Tipplett found it difficult to sustain a for-profit law firm.
The University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis happened to be looking for a new faculty member for its clinical programs, when Tipplett happened to be looking for a place to establish a pro bono law practice serving veterans. The faculty at St. Thomas was attracted to Tipplett’s mission, and she was hired to direct a new Veterans Clinic.
With law students working under Tipplett for class credit, the Veterans Clinic at St. Thomas had become a beacon of hope for financially strapped veterans and their families. The clinic charged no legal fees and covered most court and related expenses from the law school budget, which occasionally was augmented when the clinic could recover legal fees from the government in successful veterans disability cases.
About three weeks after Candace had lost J.D., Tipplett gently encouraged her to assist in the clinic for a few hours each week, if she was looking for something to occupy her attention. Tipplett reminded Candace of the words of St. Francis of Assisi that “it is in giving that we receive.” By giving comfort to those in need, Tipplett told her, we receive comfort ourselves.
During the summer when there were no law students working for class credit, Tipplett had to carry the full load herself on those cases not yet concluded. Tipplett was delighted to have the help—and she knew that it would be therapeutic for Candace.
Tipplett invited Candace to work on a case involving an Iraq War vet who had suffered a back injury when the vehicle he was riding in was damaged by one of the improvised explosive devices that were a constant hazard for American military transports in Iraq. Although his most immediate and obvious injuries had healed, and x-rays indicated no abnormalities in his spine, he still experienced severe back pain, which made it impossible for him to hold on to a job and support his family. His physicians explained that back pain often is difficult to diagnose by objective medical tests and frequently cannot be connected to anything that would show up on x-rays or even a CT scan. Nonetheless, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals at the Department of Veterans Affairs had denied the man’s request for disability benefits, ruling there was not sufficient medical evidence of his claimed back pain.
To add to his troubles, the man’s youngest child, a boy about J.D.’s age, had been diagnosed with acute childhood leukemia, which Candace learned was one of the most common childhood cancers. While his wife did have health insurance for the family from her job, the amount of the deductible, uncovered charges, and various other non-medical expenses were more than the family could handle.
In an effort to overturn the negative decision of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Tipplett was working on an appeal of the denial of disability benefits to the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, a special federal court created by Congress for these kinds of cases. Tipplett had prepared a draft of an appellate brief, which she knew was decent. But, she candidly had to admit, the brief was not yet great. Given that Tipplett had to devote time simultaneously to working with the vet’s creditors to negotiate more reasonable payment schedules, she had feared she would not be able to further polish the brief before the filing date.
Enter Candace.
Just as Tipplett had sagely predicted, Candace found that working on the legal problems of other people in a miserable situation made her feel less miserable herself—at least for a while. She spent several hours with this vet and his family as she worked on the appeal, including taking a trip with the family to the hospital to visit the boy. Candace came to see not only a family in trouble, but a family with hope. And she realized she and Tipplett were bolstering that hope. As she had seen the family’s faith grow over the past several days, she found her own faith being renewed as well.
Candace had been working diligently on the brief for two weeks now. The overarching theme to the brief was drawn from a 1946 Supreme Court decision in Fishgold v. Sullivan Drydock & Repair Corporation, which held that veterans benefits are “to be liberally construed for the benefit of those who left private life to serve their country in its hour of great need.” Relying on the “veterans friendly” interpretive approach directed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Candace had strengthened the argument made by Tipplett that the Department of Veterans Affairs had the duty to assist the veteran in substantiating his claim, not to reject it because precise medical evidence could not be found.
Today was the day before the brief was due to be filed in the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Crunch time was here. So on this day, Candace had planned to work late into the evening to make sure the brief was perfect—or as perfect as she could humanly make it—so that it could be printed and filed the next day.
On other days, Candace had been careful not to work late into the evening, so as not to leave Bill alone in that house. They were talking again, a little more each day. And she seemed to be the only one who could get through to him, as he otherwise moped around the house by himself. But she could not avoid a late night session today, on the eve of the due date of the brief.
Since she’d be away until late that evening, she’d encouraged Bill to do something outside the house as well. A neighbor family had invited them over for dinner and a movie. She urged him to go, even without her. Bill was reticent, but said he’d think about it.
As she left for the law school that morning, Bill told her he was planning to go. She hoped he would. She didn’t want him to spend another evening in his chair at the breakfast nook watching television.
• • •
At 10:30 p.m., she decided the brief was as good as it was going to be. She printed off a final copy to leave for the clinic support staff. They would arrange for it to be printed into a bound booklet and filed with the court. At last, the brief was finished and would be filed tomorrow.
She arrived back at the house in Eden Prairie at about 11:00 p.m. It was raining. Water ran down the driveway of the house and into the street.
Both the driveway and the front windows to the house were brand new. Her father, George Peterson, had insisted on taking care of all repairs. After all, he’d said reasonably, he did run a construction company. The least he could do was have his crew make simple repairs.
Still, as Candace drove the mini-van over the place in the driveway where the car had exploded, the now unblemished condition of the blacktop looked wrong to her. Somehow, she thought, there should still be some sign, some marking, that this was the place where her baby, her J.D., had died. It shouldn’t be so easy to sweep away the debris and replace the blacktop. Things should not return to normal.
She pulled the mini-van into the garage. She noticed that the other car stall was empty and, for a moment, thought, oh, good, Bill must not have come home yet. Then she remembered that the stall was unoccupied because they now had only the one vehicle.
The empty car stall in the garage did strike her as right and appropriate. The vacancy bore silent vigilance that something . . . someone . . . was missing.
Then she shook her head and said out loud, “Come on, Candace, you’re becoming maudlin.”
She opened the door from the garage to the house, hoping Bill would not be there, that he would have gone to the neighbors’ place as he said he would, that he would still be there watching a movie.
But no.
Bill was sitting in his favorite place at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, with all the lights off. He was settled there in the shadows, not even watching TV.
Candace sighed. “Bill,” she said, in a tone she hoped sounded sympathetic rather than frustrated, “it’s really not good to sit alone in the dark.”
He lo
oked up at her. Diffuse moonlight permeating the window at the back of the house illuminated part of his face.
It wasn’t Bill.
“Why can’t you all leave me alone?” the man in the kitchen said, softly at first. Then in a loud voice, he insisted: “LEAVE ME ALONE!”
With that exclamation, he stood up. The moon beams shining through the window flashed on metal.
He had a gun in his hand. It was a small gun. But to Candace, it looked so big, it could have been a bazooka.
As he shouted again, “LEAVE ME ALONE,” he gestured wildly with his right hand, which held the gun.
Candace found her eyes following the gun, seeing only the gun. Her head was turning back and forth as the gun moved back and forth, almost hypnotically.
Then, abruptly, she ordered herself: snap out of it, girl. If you’re going to survive this, you have to keep a clear head.
She knew who it was immediately, although she had never met him. She’d seen the picture in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And her husband had described him.
There he was in their kitchen—Olin Pirkle—with his large head teetering on top of his skinny body.
Pirkle became aware he was waving the gun around and dropped the hand holding the gun down next to his right leg. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said in a quiet, morose voice. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone. Everything’s such a mess now.”
The anger in his voice and manner had melted away. He sounded tired. He looked tired. In fact, he looked like he could barely stay on his feet. His eyes were bloodshot. He swayed as he stood. Then he fell back into the chair.
Candace began to back away toward the hallway that led to the front door of the house.
“Oh, no,” said Pirkle, twitching to alertness and leaping to his feet. “We’re going to have a talk. You’re not going anywhere. We’re going to wait right here until your husband comes home. Yes, and then we’re going to have a talk. Just the three of us.”