‘The FBI?’
‘You got it.’
‘And he was killed on duty?’
‘You got it again. In Kingwood City, Texas. Little place no one ever heard of, even people in the USA. Even people in Texas, maybe. Just like Bulverton. In fact exactly like Bulverton, except it couldn’t have been more different. You ever hear the name Aronwitz, John Luther Aronwitz?’
‘I’m not sure, I—’
‘Aronwitz lived in Kingwood City,’ she went on, talking over him. ‘No one knew him, he lived a quiet life. Stayed at home with his mother. People down the store saw him sometimes, but he had no friends anyone knew of. He had a few minor felonies on his record. Starting to sound familiar? Well, this was Texas so he drove around in an old pick-up, kept to himself, carried a couple of rifles in his gun-rack. Nothing unusual for Texas. Real quiet guy, a bit like Gerry Grove? Last year he went berserk, for no reason anyone could ever understand. Picked up his guns and started shooting. Killed and killed and killed. Men, women and children. Just like Grove. Didn’t care who he shot, only that he shot them. Ended up holed up with a couple of hostages in some goddamned shopping mall, some half-empty place on the edge of town, out on Interstate 20. That’s where Andy caught up with him and that’s where Andy died. You got the picture, Nick?’
‘Yes.’
‘You ever hear of this, Nick? Because if you have, you’re one of the few people in England who have.’
‘I heard about it,’ he said. ‘The press tried to make something of it. I couldn’t remember the name of the town. It’s better known than—’
‘Listen, OK, you’re one of the few. Do you know when it happened?’
‘Last year, you said. That’s right…the same date.’
‘June third last year. That’s the day Andy died, and all because a hairball called Aronwitz picked up a gun and lost his mind.’
‘The third of June was when—’
‘Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? That was when Gerry Grove flipped his lid. Same day, Nick. The same goddamned day. Quite a coincidence, right?’
Later, when Mrs Simons had tottered off to her room, Nick closed the bar, locked the doors and turned out all the lights. Upstairs, the hotel was silent. He let himself into the bedroom. Amy was still awake, sitting up in bed and reading a magazine. Her mood had changed; yelling at him seemed to have vented some of the pressure.
CHAPTER 12
At the time of his death Andy Simons was forty-two years old and working, as he had worked for the previous eighteen years, as a Special Agent with the FBI. He specialized in offender psychology, with particular reference to outburst events, spree killings and relocatory serial killers.
Andy saw himself as a good Bureau man, believing in its methods and dedicated to its causes. He knew how to relax when away from the Bureau, but while he was on duty he kept his mind closed to anything but the immediate demands his work made upon him. Although he was still an active enforcement agent, in recent years his work had to a large extent moved off the streets and into the laboratory.
In the Offender Psychology Division attached to the Fredericksburg field office he and thirteen other federal agents were slowly and painstakingly constructing computer models of the psychoneural maps of the known or suspected mentality of disturbed spree killers. Their data had been drawn from the Bureau’s own National Crime Information Center, police and ranger records of every state in the country, as well as from many countries in Europe, Latin America and Australasia. The psychopathological profiles they mapped—the basis of the computer models—extended not only to those of the killers, but also to those of their victims.
The theory under investigation was that in cases of crime traditionally considered to be motiveless—in which people became victims apparently only through the mischance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—there was in reality a psychoneural connection between perpetrator and victim.
A psychological trigger appeared to be involved. It was not yet entirely clear what that might be, but in effect it was the last straw, the last step, which converted the socially maladjusted or psychopathically unstable from misfit to murderer. The apparently innocent victim was increasingly thought to make a contribution to the release of the trigger.
There were also the more conventional links of cause and effect, which were known and had been studied for most of the century. Resentment at long jail sentences was often cited by captured serial killers as the last straw, turning them on release into murderous sociopaths. However, the reliability of this was never absolute. It was obviously not the whole story, otherwise every released long-term prisoner would become a serial killer. Other more local or personal factors were thought relevant: a growing grievance against some institution, person or event, an increasing pattern of offending, which frequently included sexual offending, a reduction in socioeconomic status due to unemployment, relocation or domestic upheaval, and so on.
Andy Simons took a special interest in one case, which had become the starting point for the Division’s research.
In 1968 an unemployed car worker in Detroit called Mack Sturmer had shot and killed three of his former workmates during their lunch break. Sturmer had been sacked by the Ford Motor Company management two days before the incident, the reason being that he had for the last six weeks been persistently late or non-attending at work. On the day of the shooting he had managed to gain entry to the Ford plant during the lunch hour, where it was likely he knew off-duty workers would be, even though, as the trial established, the actual victims were not known to him.
Sturmer was not a native of Detroit, having been born on the opposite side of Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio, moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1962, or not long afterwards. After a series of increasingly violent crimes, including several of sexual harassment or abuse, Sturmer moved to Detroit, where he found employment. Although by this time he had a long police record, and had served several terms in the state penitentiary, Sturmer was given a job by Ford and for the first few months at least was an acceptable worker. He lived alone in a rooming house in the Melvindale area of the city, and did not mix socially with any of his workmates. At weekends he was a frequent visitor to bars and drinking clubs, where he sometimes bought favours from hostesses.
He was a collector of firearms, and at the time of his arrest was found to possess thirteen different pieces of varying sizes and power. The most formidable weapon he owned was the Iver Johnson M1 carbine he used on his victims, but he also possessed several handguns, one of which he also carried on the day of the crime.
It was relevant to Sturmer’s case that the only thing he knew about his victims was that they too worked for Ford, because in this sense his victims were randomly selected. He shot seven of them; three died from their wounds, while the others eventually recovered after stays of different lengths in hospital. After the shooting Sturmer was overpowered by Ford security staff, and handed over to the police. Under interrogation, he said that one of the men had repeatedly made a sniffing noise whenever they were on the same shift, this being done deliberately to aggravate him. It was the only clue he ever gave about his motives.
Sturmer’s case history was the first one Andy Simons post-investigated in detail when he began working for the Division. Because at the time he first looked at the records most of the people involved were still alive, he was able to re-interview them with modern hindsight, and use the experimental techniques then being developed to map the psychoneural connections between all the participants in the shooting.
For example, the wife of one of the victims had made a deposition that she had frequently seen Sturmer in a particular bar, where she happened to work as a waitress. This evidence was not admitted during the trial, because the District Attorney’s office had not considered it relevant to the murders. There was no suggestion that Sturmer knew the woman or had even noticed her, or, if he had, that he would have been able to identify her as the wife of someone on the same Ford shift as his. However, from the
hindsight view taken by the Offender Psychology Division it provided a mappable link between Sturmer and one of the men he had murdered.
From the same unfortunate woman, second and third links could be mapped to Sturmer: she also happened to be known to the woman who owned the lodging house in Melvindale where Sturmer lived.
Finally, she and her husband had, significantly, moved to Detroit within twelve months of the time that Sturmer had also arrived in the city. Again, in traditional forensic investigations such a snippet of information would have no relevance to the eventual crime, but in psychoneural mapping terms it was of considerable importance. Relocation, by the perpetrator, the victims, or all of them, was a common circumstance in many spree killings.
In commonsense terms, a perpetrator would of course have dozens of links with people who did not ultimately become his victims. At first glance, these non-significant connections seemed to provide no clearer insight than any other forensic work. But Sturmer’s case was paradigmatic, in the Division’s terms: he had a past record of escalating seriousness, he had made a significant area relocation prior to the incident, he lived and worked in proximity to his victims and there had been a culminating spree event.
Several years of work ensued, in parallel with Andy Simons’ regular duties with the Bureau.
The Division’s purpose was no less than to produce an integrated database of violent crime in the USA, the emphasis being on what appeared to most civilians to be unpremeditated outbreaks, ‘random’ attacks on harmless victims, drive-by shootings, chance encounters with serial killers, outbursts of spree attacks in which passers-by were wounded or killed.
If patterns of violence emerged they did so unreliably, a fact that seemed constantly to undermine the Division’s credibility within some other parts of the Bureau.
While no one involved with the work would ever accept that they were trying to predict such attacks, that was inevitably how it came to be seen. It became a tiresome habit that agents from other field offices around the country would think it funny to call in to Fredericksburg, with the news they had just cleared up one case and could they have directions to the next one? As with all predictable workplace jokes, the amusement content declined rapidly.
Agent Simons, part of whose job was to give briefings to authorized visitors to the Fredericksburg field office, described the ultimate purpose of the computer models as ‘area anticipation’.
The Division would eventually be able to show trends, he said, based on geographical, economic and sociological data, in which the likelihood of an outbreak could be measured statistically. Many such results could already be determined from routine police and Bureau intelligence, which again tended to undermine the unique quality of their work, but the principal claim the Division made, using Bureauspeak, was that as data accreted so their anticipatory functions would be more sharply honed.
The reality, Andy had often admitted to Teresa, was that maybe within ten or fifteen years they would have a more accurate picture of the social and other conditions which gave rise to the phenomenon, but that no amount of computer modelling would ever be able to take into account the sheer unpredictability of human nature.
Events on a worldwide basis were also closely monitored by the Division, and where circumstances seemed relevant they made careful assessment of the evidence, followed by a first adumbration of psychoneural mapping. However, it was in the US, crime capital of the world, that most of their data was found.
It was this kind of work, unexciting, detailed, technical, with no immediate end in view, that Andy Simons was engaged in when an area of Texas to the west of Fort Worth and to the north of Abilene slowly grew into what the Division called psychoneural significance.
This part of the Texas panhandle had traditionally been a farming and ranching area, with high incomes for some and low incomes for most. In the 1950s it had been designated ILI—Industrial Low Intensity—with no state or federal incentives available for corporations. There were few exploitable oil resources. At the beginning of the 1980s, though, a number of computer and microchip manufacturers moved into the region, attracted by low land prices and taxes. An influx of middle-class population soon followed, which swelled through the middle of the decade, while the oil-price rise brought a new economic boom to what had always been a prosperous state.
From the Division’s perspective, area relocation, the first step in creating the environment for outburst crime, had begun. Towards the end of the decade, when there was a slump in oil prices and the whole taxation and land macro-economy shifted in emphasis, the newly prosperous silicon industries entered a phase of downsizing and restructuring, with a consequent creation of a large new underclass. The second stage in the process had been reached.
Soon this region of north Texas was suffering a crime wave: aggravated assaults, rapes, armed robberies and homicides. By the beginning of the 1990s, the area had moved in the Division’s terms from statistically negligible to statistically acute.
Andy Simons and his team started making trips to the Abilene area, liaising with the Bureau field office and the police department there. Andy kept himself and the rest of his team updated with information about policing numbers, crime statistics and patterns, gun ownership, court sentencing practices, state parole policies.
It was therefore not entirely a coincidence that Andy Simons should be in Abilene on June 3, a day when a man called John Luther Aronwitz decided to drive his pick-up truck to church, with his collection of firearms stashed in the back, ready for use.
CHAPTER 13
‘Did you ever use a gun, Nick?’
He had been balancing a spirit bottle on the glass server, the thing that dished out those incredibly small British servings, but when she asked the question she saw him freeze momentarily. Then he finished, and turned towards her. She was on the bar stool again, her arms stretched out across the surface of the counter, her hands surrounding the highball glass without touching it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Did you ever want to?’
‘No.’
‘What about now?’
‘It’s an academic question. Guns have been outlawed in this country.’
‘They’ve tried banning them in some places in the US. Never worked. People go across the county line, get what they want anyway.’
‘You can’t do anything like that here. They’re illegal right throughout the country.’
‘You could go across to France, couldn’t you?’
‘Some people do.’
‘Then why don’t you?’
Nick said, testily, ‘Look, I’m not interested in guns! It would never occur to me to do that.’
‘OK, calm down. I’m sorry.’ She glanced around the room, which at this early hour of the evening was still empty. An early hour, but she had already drunk three large bourbons. She was bored with being in Bulverton, and in spite of all the work she had done she was beginning to feel she was wasting her time. ‘I’m just making conversation.’
‘Yes.’ He picked up two empty beer-crates. ‘I have to bring some stuff up from the cellar. Excuse me.’
He left the bar. She wished she had ordered another drink before he went, because her glass was nearly empty. She had come down to the bar this evening with only one thought in mind: to get wiped out as fast as she could, then fall into bed.
She was, though, still sober enough to realize how she must be sounding, and didn’t like it. What on earth had possessed her to start in on him about guns? She clenched her left fist, digging the nails into the palm of her hand. All her life she’d been saying the wrong thing; all her life she had been resolving to be more careful with what she said. Here, of all places! Are you into guns, Nick? Oh yeah, ever since that maniac blew away my parents, and everyone else. Bigmouth American’s in town. She felt her neck and face prickling with embarrassment, and she sat rigid, praying that Nick wouldn’t return until she was back in control of herself.
Sh
e need not have worried. For whatever reason, he was staying down in the cellar longer than she expected, so she had plenty of time to sweat away her mortification.
She remembered a control technique she had sometimes used: make a list in your mind, straighten your thoughts.
What had she done in the town so far? Local newspaper accounts: done. National newspapers: some done, but the Guardian and Independent computer archives had been down when she tried to access the websites. She’d try again later. Police interviews: completed, but why had so many officers moved away to other towns since the massacre? Did they jump or were they pushed? Video footage: a lot viewed and a lot more on hand, but she found that most of it had already been shown on CNN and the other US networks.
Witnesses. Ellie Ripon’s vagueness about where Steve could be found was explained: he was in Lewes Prison, remanded in custody on a charge of burglary. His lawyer had told Teresa she was hopeful she could get him out on bail when he was taken back to the magistrates the following week. Teresa hoped to interview him then. Her second attempt to talk to Ellie Ripon had been as unsuccessful as the first. She had interviewed Darren Naismith, Mark Edling and Keith Wilson; Grove had been drinking with them before the shooting began. Margaret Lee, the cashier at the Texaco filling station, would not agree to be interviewed, but Teresa had on video a long interview the young woman had given last year to a TV reporter, so that didn’t matter too much. Tom and Jennie Mercer, the parents of the grievously injured young girl Shelly, had agreed to meet her the following day. She had located and interviewed about a dozen eyewitnesses of the shootings; again, many of them had been reluctant to speak, but Teresa had managed to piece together a fairly good descriptive account of what had happened in the streets. She was still trying to locate Jamie Connors, the little boy who had been trapped in his parents’ damaged car, and had watched the last stages of Grove’s spree in Eastbourne Road.