White River Burning

EPILOGUE

The classic clusterfuck predicted by Hardwick did indeed take place. In the narrative that subsequently took hold in the media, the White River case and its messy denouement had no clear heroes. “Colossal Law Enforcement Fiasco” was a typical headline. One of the punchier news blogs called it a “Fatal Fuckup.” Focusing on the bloody final events, the RAM-TV news shows spoke of “the Rapture Hill massacre.”

District Attorney Kline came out of it badly. He was widely portrayed as the man whose repeated mistakes led to the catastrophe. Uniformly negative press coverage, rumors that he’d suffered a breakdown at the crime scene, and a growing public outcry led to abandonment by his political allies and soon thereafter to his resignation.

Cory Payne’s ill-advised alliance with the Gort twins ended badly. His scattered remains, torn apart by the Gort pit bulls, were found in a pine thicket at the foot of Rapture Hill. In his manipulation of the twins to kill Turlock—and to provide him with the dynamite for his plan to blow his father and all his father’s enablers to kingdom come—he’d evidently overestimated the Gorts’ trust in him. Daytime TV psychologists opined for weeks on Payne’s wounded life and dark motivations. A book titled Blind Revenge was written about him. It was optioned for a film.

The Gorts and their dogs vanished. The unanswered questions surrounding their disappearance and their ill-fated relationship with Payne provided fodder for many tabloid articles. There were claims of occasional sightings by backwoods hikers, and stories about them could give overnight campers gooseflesh, but there was no tangible evidence of their presence. It was as though they had melded like a malignant force of nature into the wilderness that had always seemed so much a part of them.

The Rapture Hill death toll rose to four when Marvin Gelter died in the hospital a week later of a massive infection.

Members of the Black Defense Alliance, temporarily leaderless, declined to make any public statement. So did Carlton Flynn, who apparently couldn’t come up with a sufficiently provocative political slant on the case.

Gurney’s role in the affair was treated in a muted but generally positive way. His accurate final assessment of the situation and his fearless confrontation of Cory Payne were acknowledged. Haley Beckert in particular lauded his attempts to warn Kline of the truth of what was happening at Rapture Hill.

As Gurney was falling asleep one night, the déjà vu experience he’d had when he looked at Beckert’s CBIIWRPD license plate suddenly became clear. The CBII part, standing for Cordell Beckert II, had prompted the half-conscious recollection that Cory Payne’s real name was Cordell Beckert III. Which would make his equivalent initials CBIII. Which looked very much like “C13111.” A severely injured person on a stretcher trying to scribble a note might very well end up making a B that looked like 13. So Rick Loomis’s note, which said in its entirety “T O L D C 1 3 1 1 1,” was an effort to let Gurney know that he’d told Cory Payne something. It raised questions that Gurney knew he’d never get the answers to. But that wasn’t unusual in a murder case. Too often the only people who knew the entire truth were dead.

Lines of grief became a permanent part of Kim Steele’s face. The weight of sadness in her was palpable. But she kept functioning.

Heather Loomis, on the other hand, seemed more deeply damaged. After learning of her husband’s death, her condition declined from a depressed state to a near-catatonic one. She was transferred to a major New England mental hospital for long-term treatment. She gave birth prematurely, and the baby was put in the care of her brother and sister-in-law. She showed no interest in the baby or the arrangements made for it.

Mark Torres confided to Gurney that he intended to resign from the WRPD to pursue a degree in social work. Gurney suggested he give the department another year. He believed it was cops like Torres who could brighten the future of policing.

Tania Jordan left White River without a word to anyone.

Dell Beckert, for the first time in his adult life, persistently refused all contact with the media. He appeared to have aged years in the days of his captivity—and the stress promised to continue as investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General’s office launched an extensive review of his personal involvement in alleged civil rights violations, evidence tampering, and obstructions of justice.

Within a month of replacing the late Goodson Cloutz, acting sheriff Fred Kittiny was arrested and charged with seven counts of suborning perjury.

A specialist in turning out instant books on sensational crimes, disasters, and celebrities created one titled Lovely that focused on Blaze Lovely Jackson’s fatal alliance with Cory Payne. The cover depicted a helmeted leather-clad figure on a red motorcycle—just like the one belonging to Judd Turlock that Jackson rode away from the Poulter Street sniper site as part of Payne’s elaborate framing scheme.

The statue of Colonel Ezra Willard was quietly transported from the public park to the private estate of a self-described Civil War buff. The man made no secret of his sympathies for the Confederate cause, which left a lingering discomfort in the minds of many about the solution to the controversy. There were those who would have been far happier had the thing been pulverized and dumped in the county landfill. But the majority of the city council was content to approve the less dramatic transfer and be rid of at least one racial flash point.

Maynard Biggs was appointed by the governor to serve as acting attorney general until the upcoming special election, which he was now favored to win.

The Reverend Whittaker Coolidge delivered a series of well-received public lectures on the destructive power of hatred. He described hatred with a phrase that Maynard Biggs had used to describe racism: a razor with no handle that cuts the wielder as deeply as the victim. His other description of it: a suicidal weapon of mass destruction. And he always managed to work into his lectures an eight-word summary of Cory Payne’s life and death: His hatred drove him. His hatred killed him.

For some time after the bloody culmination on Rapture Hill, followed by Gurney’s extensive debriefing by the state and federal investigators who descended on White River, he and Madeleine seemed to have little appetite for discussing the case.

There was often a preoccupied look on her face; but he knew from long experience it was best not to ask about it, that she’d share what was on her mind in her own time.

It happened one evening in early June. They’d just finished a quiet dinner. The French doors were open, and the warm summer air carried the scent of the season’s fading lilacs. After a period of silence, she spoke.

“Do you think anything will change?”

“You mean the racial situation in White River?”

She nodded.

“Well . . . things are happening that weren’t happening before. The rotten apples are being removed from the police department. Old cases are being scrutinized, particularly the Laxton Jones incident. A more transparent citizen complaint process is being installed. The statue is gone. Discussions are under way to create an interracial commission that would—”

She stopped him. “I know all that. The announcements. The press conferences. I mean . . . doesn’t it sound like just another example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?”

Gurney shrugged. “That’s what deckhands do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t that what most of the people we elect to solve our problems really do? They don’t solve anything; they just rearrange the details to relieve the political pressure and make it look like something significant is being done. Real change doesn’t happen that way. It’s less manageable, less predictable. It only happens when people see something they never saw before—when the truth, for whatever reason, hits them hard enough, shockingly enough, to open their eyes.”

Madeleine nodded, seemingly more to herself than to him. After a while she got up from the table and stood in the open doorway, looking down over the low pasture toward the barn and the pond. “Do you think that’s what Walter Thrasher wants to do?”

The question surprised him.

He thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I think so. He has a natural fondness for bringing things to light, for discovering the truth, even when it’s ugly—maybe especially when it’s ugly.”

She took a deep breath. “If we let him do what he wants to do . . . he might not find anything at all.”

“That’s true.”

“Or he might find dreadful things.”

“Yes.”

“And then he would write about those dreadful things.”

“Yes.”

“And people would read what he wrote . . . and some of them would be horrified.”

“I would think so.”

She gazed down toward the area of the excavation for a long minute or two before saying, almost inaudibly, “Maybe we should let him go ahead with it.”