A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

depths of the Lake Washington Ship Canal with him.

    *   *   *

    It was very late. After a last check with the hospitals to query the condition of the survivors, John Nordlund, Steve O’Leary and Gene Ramirez signed out of Homicide for the night. Tomorrow, they would hope to find someone who had actually interacted with Silas Cool—someone who might explain what forces had driven him. The man had lived in Seattle for at least thirteen years.
Somebody
had to know him.
    “It was strange,” Steve O’Leary would recall. “Usually, we get lots of calls after something like this from people who have something to share with us. Not one person from his neighborhood ever called us about Silas Cool—not one clerk at the supermarket to say she had rung up his groceries, nobody who knew him from the Laundromat, no one who talked with him on the corner. No neighbors. No one who should have been at least tangentially close to him. It was almost as if he had existed in a vacuum. An invisible man.”

    By Saturday morning, the reality of the bus tragedy had begun to sink in. Miraculously, there had been no more deaths although many of the survivors were still in critical condition. When the bus was lifted by cranes, the worst fears of the rescue teams didn’t come true; there was no one underneath. Those who had literally walked away from the bus to nowhere caught themselves wondering if it had all been a nightmare. But the headlines on the
Seattle Times
and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
blazed that it really
had
happened. Color photographs of the destroyed sections of the articulated bus took up half a page. It rested there so close to the apartment house, so close to the giant Troll who lived under the Aurora Bridge, the wreckage like two sides of a giant triangle, its accordioned midsection stretched and torn.
    Still, it had landed on the ground amidst the last browning leaves of autumn and not in the deep water beneath the bridge. The ruined hulk would be lifted onto a truck and taken to the bus garage where it would be treated as a crime scene by Seattle detectives.

    The postmortem examination on the body of Silas Cool was performed by King County Assistant Medical Examiner Dan Straathof shortly after 7 A.M. on Saturday. The body still wore the yellow identification band around the right wrist reading “Whiskey Doe.” It was simply an accident that he had happened to get the “Whiskey” label from the paramedics. There were so many “Does” at the accident scene that they all had to get names that went with letters of the alphabet. There was no odor of alcohol about his body. The triage team who had moved swiftly through the accident scene locating victims and evaluating their condition and had placed a strip of white adhesive tape on his right chest that read “13.” As it turned out, he had, indeed, been unlucky 13.
    Silas Cool weighed 198 pounds and measured just under six feet—although earlier descriptions had listed him as several inches taller. His hair was brown with thick swatches of gray, he was clean-shaven with clipped sideburns, and his teeth were in good repair. His body was clean and well-kept. He looked for all the world like a normal man in his early forties, who was in good shape and good health, but who had been in a very bad accident.
    Silas Cool had suffered numerous wounds, commensurate with that accident; the question was whether they had occurred before or after his fatal gunshot wound. His spinal column was fractured at the C-6 level due to a blunt force injury. Had he lived, he might well have been paralyzed to some extent. Other passengers had suffered similar injuries; it was what happened to a body if it fell from a great height.
    Cool had bitten through his tongue, and his lungs and liver had hemorrhages from impact wounds. There were multiple abrasions and contusions. He had probably been brain-dead, but technically alive, as the bus fell to earth.
    But Dr. Straathof determined that Silas Cool had not perished because he was in a bus that tore through a guardrail and plunged several stories to the ground. The fatal wound was the gunshot wound. That point of entry was just above his right ear. The skin around the wound had the familiar “stellate” tears that come with a contact gunshot as the skin itself is drawn momentarily into the gun barrel by the gases there, torn, and released. The bullet’s path was one of massive destruction through the brain itself, exiting