A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

was a single, uncomfortable-looking chair with an ottoman in the living room, and two black-and-white television sets. There was a bookcase, but there were no books or magazines, no newspapers—nothing to keep the man who lived in the apartment up with current events. On one of the bookcase shelves, Gene Ramirez located a gun holder for an AMT .38 caliber pistol, a holster for a derringer, and a cigar box that held nine live rounds for a .38 caliber weapon.
    The detectives photographed the room and the items of interest with a digital camera, and moved on to the bedroom.
    There was no bed; rather, they found a blow-up mattress of the sort that campers sometimes carry on hiking trips. It was leaning against the south wall of the bedroom. A jerry-rigged screen made of a blanket hanging on a wire covered the north bedroom wall. When they moved the air bed and pulled the blanket aside, they saw that the walls were covered with photographs of naked or half-naked women. They looked up at the ceiling and found that it, too, was covered with nude photographs. When the doors were closed, there were more naked women on the other two walls; most of the shots appeared to have been torn from
Penthouse, Playboy,
or similar men’s magazines; they weren’t overtly salacious, but more the kind of thing that a teenage boy might collect.
    “When he went to bed,” Nordlund said, “He had his own gallery of women to stare at anywhere he looked.”
    “Yeah,” O’Leary said. “He could choose his date for the night.”
    In the corner of the bedroom, they found both Beta and VHS video recorders and a stack of pornographic video tapes. It looked as if Cool had been rerecording the Beta tapes onto the VHS machine. The man, who had apparently communicated with no one in the real world, had led a rich fantasy life behind the door to his apartment.
    Thong underwear, like that the dead man tagged “Whiskey Doe” had worn, but in garish patterns of animal prints and exotic colors, was scattered in the bedroom. “I wonder if he posed in that mirror?” O’Leary mused.
    All of Cool’s windows were covered, some with aluminum foil and some with dark green plastic garbage bags so that no natural light could get in and, perhaps most particularly, to prevent anyone from looking into his world.
    The mediciney smell was explained when the investigators checked the bathroom. They had seen a number of containers of drugstore items in the living room, but nothing like the proliferation of bottles, jars, boxes and vials of nonprescription vitamins, pain-killers, herbal remedies, sports rubs, patent medicines, skin tonic, mens’ cologne, hair dressing, and lotions that littered the counters and the sink and were jammed into the bathroom cabinets. The sink was too full to use, and to accommodate the overflow of products, Cool had fashioned a box that fit in the shower and he’d piled more of the stuff in there. The containers in the medicine cabinet had been there so long that their bottoms had rusted to the shelves. Most of the tops were also rusted or dried shut. This looked more like the bathroom of a very old man than it did that of an athletic-looking man in his early forties.
    They found two pellet guns, and several knives—both hunting knives and switchblades. The man who had lived here seemed prepared to protect his bleak lodgings.
    The kitchen was pretty much what they expected; dirty dishes and accumulated boxes covered the counter tops and filled the sink. The refrigerator’s contents looked as if no one had really made a home here. The crowded shelves had the remainders of take-out dinners from a supermarket deli—fast food, half-eaten and moldering. There were many tiny bottles of alcoholic beverages, the kind that airlines serve. The oven and stove were filthy, covered with baked-on grease.
    Only the refrigerator gave a clue about the man who had lived here. He had left notes to himself, anchored with magnets, some of which must have made sense only to him.
    Who
was
Silas Cool? Or, rather, who had he been? Where had he worked, and with whom had he spent his time? Did anyone else know about this musty, pornography-filled apartment where he had apparently lived for almost fourteen years?
    Silas Cool was dead, quite probably by his own hand. Seeing the .38 caliber bullets and the gun box, the three detectives suspected that he had also killed Mark McLaughlin, and attempted to take a bus load of thirty-three strangers down into the