A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

man with glasses. His hair wasn’t shot with gray and he was neither tall nor slender. “I’m Stewart Coltrane,” he acknowledged. “How can I help you?”
    Coltrane gave his birthdate, and it wasn’t even close to the ones given by the man at the public pool in Lynnwood. He looked as puzzled as the investigators until John Nordlund mentioned the name “Coole.” Coltrane nodded. He knew a man named Cool.
“Silas Cool,”
he said. “You must mean Silas Cool. He’s one of the tenants here. I hardly know him, but let me take a look at his records.”
    Coltrane checked the rent ledger. “Cool moved into Apartment 209 on June 18, 1985. He pays rent of $475 a month.”
    “What’s he like?” O’Leary asked.
    “I couldn’t tell you.”
    “He’s lived here for more than thirteen years, and you don’t know what he’s like?”
    “I never see him. He keeps to himself. I see him maybe two, three times a year, tops.”
    Ironically, the real Stewart Coltrane’s career dealt with people who were mentally and emotionally disturbed and he considered himself fairly good at recognizing people who were on the edge. He had never seen anything that unusual about Silas Cool, save for the fact that he was a loner. Coltrane said Cool paid his rent on time, minded his own business, and always kept his windows covered. As far as he knew, nobody in the apartment house knew Cool any better than he did.
    It was with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension that Coltrane and the three homicide detectives headed up the stairs to the south side of the building. They noted two small windows in the back of the unit as they stood outside the door to Apartment 209. They knocked, but no one answered. They hadn’t really expected that anyone would. Then Coltrane slipped the master key into the lock and turned the knob.
    Ramirez, Nordlund, and O’Leary entered a dark apartment that smelled of dead air, dust, dirty clothes, and a strange sweet-sour mediciney odor. Even when they switched on a light, it was still dim; the bulbs were only forty watt. But they could see that this was a very small one bedroom unit. A short entry hallway led to the living room. There was a combination dining-room/kitchen area adjoining that, and a door led back to a bedroom and bathroom. The place was unkempt and dreary, and it had only a few cheap pieces of furniture. It looked lonely, and had a flat, lifeless quality about it.
    Nordlund, Ramirez and O’Leary were looking for answers to what seemed an unsolvable mystery. If Silas Cool
was
the second fatality of the bus crash, they would never be able to ask him what had happened. All they could do was hope that there were some clues in his drab apartment.
    They didn’t have to move far inside before they spotted something that gave them goosebumps. There on the cluttered divider between the entry hall and the dining area were stacks of Metro Transit schedules, far too many for an average bus rider to have kept. They towered more than a foot high, and had begun to tumble down onto the dining room floor. They were for many different bus routes, all over the City of Seattle, and for other cities, too. Here, too, were notes Cool had written to himself, reminders that if he missed a Number 6 bus, he could catch a Number 40 within minutes. It looked as if Silas Cool’s life had revolved around buses.
    A man’s wallet lay on the divider, too, with a driver’s license inside made out to Silas Garfield Cool, born on May 14, 1955. That was a familiar date; the suspect at the pool had apparently given his correct birthdate—but with the wrong year, and his apartment manager’s name instead of his own. However, this driver’s license had expired in 1987,
eleven years earlier.
    The whole apartment had that lifeless feeling, like a place out of a William Faulkner story. The picture on the license was of a very handsome young man, a man probably in his late twenties. He
looked
like a younger version of the man in the ER, but it was hard to be sure.
    They walked through the apartment, aware of their own footsteps, half-holding their breaths against the stale odor. There was a jumble of papers on the dining room table. Among them, O’Leary found a card from an attorney in North Plainfield, New Jersey. On the back, someone had jotted down a man’s name and a Bainbridge Island, Washington, address.
    The living room was sparsely furnished, although it was cluttered with papers, clothes, bags and boxes. There