By 6:30 Thursday evening, five hours after the attack, the snow began to taper off and the streetlamps came on. In the glare of emergency work lights, the smoke rising from the half-collapsed and burned-out Veblen Hotel, once black and dense, issued now white and thin, suggestive of ethereal presences, of spirits ascending from this place of fiery death. Snowflakes, grown larger here at storm’s end, spiraled slowly down with the solemn grace of flower petals cast by mourners into an open grave.
Sheriff Luther Tillman stood on the corner of Fitzgerald and Main, across the street from the devastation, hands in the pockets of his quilted Thermoloft-insulated uniform jacket. From time to time, the rhythm and velocity of his dragon-smoke exhalations changed visibly, evidence of his mood phasing from anger to sorrow and back again to anger. He was thankful that the buildings flanking the hotel had sustained less damage than might have been expected, but that was meager solace in light of the scale of destruction. The death toll currently stood at forty-two, including the governor and the district’s congressman, but that number would surely climb as searchers raked the ruins.
He stood there in frustration, having been nudged aside first by the state police, then more aggressively by FBI agents from their Minneapolis field office, and most recently by Bureau specialists who flew in from Quantico, primarily from Behavioral Analysis Unit 1, which dealt with terrorism, arson, and bombings. He didn’t resent them. They possessed the special knowledge and the resources to investigate this event more thoroughly than any county sheriff’s department could have done. And that a congressman was among the victims meant it had become a federal crime. However, this was his jurisdiction, too, and too many of the dead were his friends and neighbors. He was heartsick, and his grief was sharpened by his feeling of uselessness.
In spite of the cold and the foul fumes that came and went on the vagaries of the evening air, townspeople had gathered in the area to watch and to stand a vigil for the dead. Luther’s deputies gently advised them to move back when they got too close, and gave patient counsel to those who worried about the fate of loved ones. But there was little else that anyone from his department could do in the face of the overwhelming presence of federal authorities.
He was a figure of interest to the crowd, because he stood six-feet-three, remained still ramrod straight at fifty-one, had been a local high-school football star back in the day, and was as black as anyone in Minnesota, where less than five percent of the population was African American. He took pride in having been elected county sheriff four times. But it wasn’t the kind of pride that would lead to a fall; it was shaded with humility and a sense of responsibility to the people who entrusted him with the job.
Besides, his wife of twenty-six years, Rebecca, was able to detect oncoming arrogance when it was still just smug presumption, and she could chasten him with a look or a few loving words. He tried never to forget that his actions reflected on her and on their two children as well, which was another reason why he was dismayed that the higher authorities had left him with so little to do when locals would expect—rightly—a great deal from him.
He worried that the investigation had too quickly narrowed to a single track: Cora Gundersun. He’d known Cora for twenty years. She wasn’t capable of such horrific violence.
Yes, but. Every human being was a mystery, each mind a maze of passages and secret rooms. No one ever really knew anyone or what they might be capable of doing. Except for a spouse. And even then, not always.
Cora worked wonders with special-needs kids, and no one had an unkind word to say about her. Nevertheless, as much as Luther might not want to believe that either a worm of evil or madness had curled in the core of her, he was too much cop to rule it out.
Little remained of her SUV, a twisted mass of steel and melted fiberglass, and even less remained of Cora, too little to make a positive identification other than by DNA. Numerous witnesses who knew her well were willing to testify that she had been driving the burning Expedition, that she had appeared to be laughing as she accelerated, and that no one else had been in the vehicle.
Her house, in a more rural area of the county, was also being searched by the FBI. Right now, Luther could do nothing there but observe—and be made to feel underfoot.
At 6:42, after he had crossed the street to talk with the county fire marshal, more to have something to do than to gather any vital information, his phone rang.
The caller, Rob Stassen, was the deputy whom Luther assigned to Cora’s house, to assist the Feds.
“Sheriff, if maybe you’re not too busy there, you should come on out here.”
“Right now,” Luther said, “the only difference between me and a hibernating bear is I don’t have a cave. What’s happening?”
“Nothing. That’s just it—they’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The FBI.”
The Feds had established an incident-response staging center in the library on Main Street, half a block from the Veblen Hotel. From there, a contingent of four had set out for Cora Gundersun’s house at 3:30. Two additional special agents, among later arrivals from Quantico, laden with cases of equipment, had followed at 4:30.
The house was not the scene of a crime; but the assumption had to be made that it was where planning had been done and preparations made. A first comb-through of the premises, if as thorough as a case of this importance required, should have taken the forensic team at least until midnight.
As Luther looked down at his snow-caked boots and worked his cold toes to keep them from growing stiff, he turned away from the fire marshal and lowered his voice when he spoke into his phone. “Did they say when they’re coming back?”
“I don’t think they are,” Rob Stassen said.
Luther’s intuition told him—had been telling him for a while—that something wasn’t quite right about some of the federal agents. A few of them seemed dispassionate to a disturbing degree, detached from the horror all around them. Of course, investigators, like first responders, needed to remain composed and subdue their sharpest feelings. But even the most professional of them, hardened by dark experience, should be shaken and moved by such a scene as this; and though they might not express their distress and pity in words or give way to tears, their feelings should have been easily read in their faces. At least four of these faces, both men and women, were cemented with indifference, as though the minds behind their eyes were not capable of recognizing a common humanity between them and the blast-torn, fire-charred, broken victims pinned and lifeless in the rubble.
“I’m alone here now,” Rob Stassen said. “There’s a weird feeling about the place, Sheriff. You better come have a look around.”