The Everman Journal

by Clark E Tanner

  “What?” he asked with an innocent tone but still grinning widely.

  “Sam Runyan, what concern is it of yours if I date or don’t date, marry or don’t marry? I’m a professional and my job comes first. It’s a choice, just like Eileen Brandenberg has made a choice, and…”

  “Ok, ok,” he jumped in. “Calm down. Sorry I asked. Like I said, it was a sexless question so it doesn’t fall under sexual harassment or anything like that…”

  “Oh, it doesn’t? Tell you what, Agent Runyan, if I ever decide to date someone seriously, I’ll check in with you first. Ok?”

  “Mon… c’mon. I was just curious that’s all.”

  “Curious. Yeah. Ok.” She turned back to face front and folded her arms, still feigning anger.

  “Hey, Mon, could I just say one more thing?”

  “No, Sam, I think you’ve said enough.” She continued staring ahead.

  “No, really, just one more thing. It’s just…”

  “Sam!” she almost yelled.

  “Monica, really. Please? Just one more thing?”

  “Is it another sexless statement?” she asked sarcastically

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “Ok”, she said, “just be careful. What?”

  Putting his little finger to his own teeth he said, “I think you have a little bit of raspberry stuck, right there…just a…”

  The punch almost made him jerk the steering wheel and his right arm was numb for about as long as it took him to stop laughing.

  A few minutes after silence had returned to the car, Monica muttered, “Sexless question…”

  They drove into Stockton a little after 1pm so they stopped for lunch before returning to the office. When they arrived there they briefed Special Agent Muncey on the results of the Quincy trip. He agreed that what they had learned there justified a continuation of the investigation. “If this guy has turned more lives upside down like that,” he said, “then it’d be a good idea to go on and try to straighten out his mess as much as we can and give some more folks some closure. Agreed?”

  Sam and Monica were both prepared to follow the trail where it led. Besides, something was nagging Sam in the back of his mind and he couldn’t put a finger on it. It was like an itch that was only going to be scratched by closing these cases and finding out everything possible to learn about Cole Everman.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent on chairs pulled up next to Monica’s desk, going over the next Everman file on the stack. Chronologically they had finally come to a place in the history he provided where there might be a picture available of him as an adult. Therefore, while Sam made arrangements for a flight and hotel rooms and a rental car, Monica contacted DMV in Colorado Springs, Colorado to ask them if they had driver’s license photos on file for Cole Everman for the years 1981 – 1987.

  The Memoirs of Cole Everman, 1981 – 87, Colorado Springs, CO

  There’s not much you would want to know about the years between High School and my stay in Colorado. You already know I went to Nam. Not much to tell about it. It did allow me to pursue my career of choice, only it was government sanctioned then, wasn’t it?

  The Viet Cong were Communist bullies, terrorizing the lives of people who only wanted to farm their rice paddies in peace. So we were there to take care of the bullies. I even got to be a sniper. Seems all that time spent plinking from the bell towers of my dad’s churches paid off.

  Well, I was only in the Army a little over two years. So I was out in March of ’72. You can check on all that if you want, but you’ll be wasting your time. There’s no cold cases to follow up on during my military time. Too difficult to do things without being noticed when there’s officers and non-coms with their nose in your business all day every day.

  There might have been some things of interest in the next nine years after that, but since I’m not going to share them with you there’s really nothing to go on, is there?

  So we come to Colorado Springs. Now you’re looking at a thirty year old Cole Everman, and at this point I’m assuming you have obtained a picture of me from somewhere. Handsome devil, wasn’t I?

  Well, you will get my picture and the address of an apartment I used to rent, but that is all. I kept my nose clean. I didn’t even get a ticket for having a tail light out. You might trace down some administrative info about me through the work I did there but I’m about to tell you that story anyway. So let me save you some time and effort.

  In 1981 I moved to Colorado Springs. That was in the fall of the year. I had some extra money in my pocket so I rented an apartment and took my time looking for work in the area. The Springs always was a clean little town. In 1981 it had a population of about 215 thousand, about half of what it is today, and even then it was a place that anyone who went there could see was going to grow and become a very popular city in which to live and raise a family or pursue a profitable career.

  After the holidays, in February of 1982, I landed a job at a place called, Military Professional Personnel & Resource Supply (MPPRS).

  As ex-military I could have secured a much more lucrative position there than I eventually did. They were hiring former military personnel and they especially seemed to like Viet Nam Vets. But the positions available were a little too much like being back in the military and I had had enough of that kind of regimen of scrutiny.

  Therefore, using my status as a veteran to get my foot in the door, I got a job in security of the facility itself. I worked the night shift.

  MPPRS was a company started by retired military men who hired ex-military men and used them to train and equip civilian and para-military agencies. They trained personnel, they provided and trained in communications equipment and techniques, electronic security systems, intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance, and they provided defense products and services to purely civilian companies that just needed something more than a security guard strolling the grounds.

  I have just told you pretty much everything I know about the company that employed me, and that is all information I got off the handouts and policy manuals I was required to read through when I was hired. I was facility security and the information available to me was limited to what I needed to know in order to protect and preserve company resources and property.

  The part of my story that will interest you, involves one department manager named, Thurston Treen. I don’t know exactly what his job entailed and never really cared. He was a manager in marketing and distribution, but the marketing and distribution of what, I didn’t know.

  I was more concerned with him as a person because it was the kind of person he was that drew my professional attention. There were others like him over the years. It seems like wherever a person goes, wherever a person works, there’s always at least one like Thurston Treen. He bullied his office staff and made their lives miserable.

  As I said, I worked the night shift while I was there. Four years and three months total. But my shift overlapped the morning and afternoon shift so for an hour to an hour and a half on weekdays I had opportunity to sniff the air, so to speak, to observe the behavior of people coming and going around the offices and their occasional interaction with Mr. Treen.

  It seemed like everyone walked on eggs around there most of the time. Whenever I was in the proximity of Thurston Treen, whether moving through the same hallways or passing by his office door, more often than not he was speaking sharply to someone. He barked orders. He criticized performance openly. I remember one day, seeing a young lady, one of his office clerks, leaving his office in tears. He was not a nice man and his presence always made me tense.

  There was a woman assigned to Mr. Treen’s department. And here I am, sitting here typing this all out for you and I cannot come up with her name. It has been so many years. If I think of it later I’ll come back and insert it here. I cared for her very much. I only saw her for a very brief time each morning that I was getting off shift on a weekday and she came in. But those moments were enough t
o realize that she was a very special person.

  She was a single mother. There was a small frame on her desk with a photo of her and a young boy in a park somewhere. During the middle of the night when making my rounds I often stopped to take another look at that picture.

  Had I been given more time I might have found out where the father was and why she was raising that poor boy alone. I never got the chance. One night I came to work and as I made my first round through the building after everyone had gone home, I passed by her desk and the photo was not there. In fact, there was nothing left on her desk to mark it as hers. Walking around to the front I saw that her name plate was gone.

  Isn’t that ironic? I remember noticing that her name plate was gone but I can’t remember her name.

  Well, it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together. She was a beautiful, unassuming young woman trying to survive without a man in the home and her job had been snatched from under her. I could almost see her, coming out of that office as had the other young clerk I had witnessed, crying, then packing up her few personal belongings and leaving the building for good.

  That was when I decided Mr. Treen had to be dealt with, for the sake of all the other young people in his department who only wanted to do their job and take home their paltry pay and be left to live their lives unmolested.

  Now I have to explain some things about the work routine at MPPRS so you will understand how I was able to devise such a simple yet safe plan, and how it all went down.

  Due to the sensitive nature of so much of the information passing through MPPRS every day, there had to be a frequent purging of documentation and communications, almost all of which was on paper. Keep in mind that emailing was still a few years in the future.

  It was the common practice there that department heads, once per week unless special circumstances made it necessary to do a special purging, would be the ones responsible for shredding.

  Now there was an industrial sized shredder in the basement of the facility. By industrial, I mean big. This machine virtually filled the room that contained it, and there were actually six steps of a metal staircase leading up to a platform from which a person could throw materials into a large bin that housed the teeth of the shredder. It was actually called a ‘Shredder-Baler’, because once shredded, the materials were gathered into another portion of the machine where it was made wet with a water and soap mixture, then compressed into bales about three feet cubed and tied. From there the baled materials were transported to another facility for recycling.

  The machine was so large and so efficient that a person could literally throw a cardboard box containing as many as six reams of paper into the shredder and the bulk wouldn’t even slow it down. It was also so loud that there was a pair of ear protectors draped on the top railing with instructions posted to wear them while destroying materials.

  Everyone in the building called the machine Jaws. It wasn’t very imaginative, but someone said it once and it stuck.

  It was Thurston Treen’s routine to do his shredding on Friday nights. I never knew his reasoning and didn’t need to. It wasn’t my business. Maybe he just didn’t want to have to stand in line to use Jaws during work hours. Maybe that was his way of going home for the weekend knowing nothing had been left around the office to get snooped into between then and Monday morning. Whatever his reasons were, that was his routine. Since we had to sign people in and out of the building from 5PM to 7AM and all weekends and holidays, I knew that Mr. Treen left work at 5:30PM on Fridays, then came back at 7:30. He would usually be in his office for two to three hours, then take his disposable materials down to Jaws. When he was finished there he would sign back out and leave.

  It was the middle of November, 1984, that I had finally had enough of Thurston Treen. Shortly after the beautiful girl I cared about was fired.

  Friday night came and the routine did not change. If there was anything at all different from other weekends it would be that less people stayed in the building after hours due to the following week being Thanksgiving. But Thurston was there.

  I reported to work at 9pm to begin my twelve hour shift. Employees were not required to sign out prior to 5pm, so if he left the building prior to that time it would not be documented. However, I did check the log when I began my shift and I saw that Treen signed into the building at 6:38pm. He was in the building.

  By the time my shift began at 9pm the cleaning crew was finished and gone and I seldom saw another soul until 7am, when the early birds began to show up to get the proverbial worm. On this particular night there was no one else signed into the building that hadn’t subsequently signed out, so I felt confident that I was alone for a while with Mr. Treen. My luck of the days of my youth was holding out.

  Now there were cameras located in the elevator lobbies and at hallway intersections. There was also one aimed at the front entrance. But there was a door in the rear of the building that exited at the side of the loading dock and no one had ever thought to mount a camera there. There was also no security camera posted in the basement, as all rooms down there were purely for storage or maintenance equipment.

  I went out on a patrol as soon as I was checked in, leaving through the front door so I would be recorded on camera, and I began a tour of the building’s perimeter. Once I was around the side of the building I was no longer in view of any camera, so I sprinted to the back door and using the building’s master key I unlocked it. Then I continued around the building coming back to the front and in view of the camera from the opposite direction so that it would be clear I went all the way around the building.

  Once inside I sat at the security desk and monitored cameras. At 9:23pm I saw movement on one of the screens. It was fuzzy, as they always were, but I recognized the back and head of Thurston Treen. He was pushing a cart laden with boxes, and I knew he was on his way to visit Jaws.

  Once he entered the service elevator that would take him to the basement, I casually walked out the front door to make another patrol of the outside. The security supervisors liked for us to keep an eye on the parking garage and in their eyes there was no such thing as too many checks.

  As soon as I was out of camera range I trotted to the rear door and let myself in. Just inside the rear door there was a stairwell going down to the basement. Wasting no time, I took the stairs two and three at a time and made my way to the shredding room door. There could be no doubt that Mr. T was in full shredding mode because the entire hallway echoed with the sound of the machine eating its way through company secrets.

  Opening the door just a crack, I peeked in to be certain the man was concentrating on his work and wearing his ear protectors. When standing on the platform at the machine, his back would be to the door. It was, so I slipped in and eased the door back to its frame.

  Thurston was busy at work, picking up one small box at a time and feeding it into the monster. Glancing at his tray I saw that he was very near being finished. I had no time to waste.

  Keeping an eye on his back in case he began to turn, I eased my way up the steps behind him. The so-called safety bar that ran between the platform and the gaping yaw of the machine was, for the average person, at waist level. Thurston, being on the tall side, leaned a little bit more over it than a shorter person. As I reached his location he picked up the second to the last package of documents with his right hand and began to toss it.

  In one swift movement, I placed my left hand in the center of his back and grabbed his right upper arm just above the elbow with my right hand. Pushing as hard as I could with the hand on his back, I squeezed my grip tight on his extended right arm and pushed his hand toward the grinding teeth of Jaws.

  He let out a yelp of surprise and began to stiffen, but it was too late. My shove had caught him so off guard that he was falling forward over the safety rail and was too off balance to recover. He tried to catch himself with his left hand, but there was nothing for him to grab hold of so he flailed backward with his left arm as though seeking s
omething behind him to hold. But there was only me. He turned half around to his left and looked back and just for a moment, our eyes met. His eyes were large with abject terror and his mouth was open wide although he didn’t seem able to get any sound out. For a split second his eyebrows curled as though he had an important question he wanted to ask, then Jaws got a mouthful of his right hand.

  That was when he really began to scream. I can’t describe the horror I heard in that man’s cry. It was more like a series of short screams, than one long one; if you can imagine that.

  As soon as the machine had a good grip on his forearm and was pulling him in without my assistance, I stood back to avoid the rain of blood. I didn’t want to have to explain something like blood splatter on my uniform. That would have ruined everything.

  I quickly hopped back down the steps to the ground floor and looked back up. By then only his feet and legs were sticking up out of the machine and his screams had stopped. From that vantage point I couldn’t tell how much of him the teeth had sunk into, but I did observe that by its sound it was having a difficult time chewing.

  I left the room and ran to the end of the hall to the doorway that led back up to the first floor and the loading dock door. Once outside, I relocked that rear door, then jogged around to the front of the building again. As I entered the camera’s view I slowed to a casual walk, re-entered the building, then patrolled the hallways of all three of the upper floors, checking office doors and making sure everything was secure.

  When I returned to the security desk, as was our policy I checked the security tape for the time I was away to make sure there was no activity recorded and that no one had either come in or gone out the front entrance in my absence. Employees working at night were supposed to sign themselves in or out in the absence of the security officer, but sometimes they forgot. So it was my duty to make sure Mr. Thurston Treen hadn’t departed the premises without signing out. I didn’t see him anywhere on camera, so he must have been pulling an all-nighter in his office. That wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary either; especially for the more conscientious and dedicated department managers like Mr. T.