A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

to dinner—when he was here a month ago—and he seemed a little irritated about the service. I think that was at the International House of Pancakes.”
    Silas had always come back once a year to see his parents on the East Coast. “We saw Silas last October,” his father said, “when he came to see us for twelve days. We find it really hard to believe that he shot a bus driver. This would have been
totally
out of his character. I bought him a BB gun once, way back when he was a sophomore in high school. I don’t know what ever happened to that, but he wasn’t interested in guns. Never.”
    As O’Leary tried to find
something
that might account for the tragedy on the bus, he elicited only “normal” things in Silas Cool’s childhood. His father remembered that he had been a Boy Scout, and had gone to Bible school. He had never been in the service. He was never interested in guns at all.
    “In the last several months,” O’Leary began, “can you think of anything different in his behavior?”
    “He was slightly agitated—but more on his own, again, like he’d be lying on the bed with his back problem in the afternoon, and he’d take a little walk somewhere. He could only go so far, and then he’d have to lie down again. He had that ‘twitching’ in the neck. The back situation was what he mostly complained about.”
    As far as Daniel Cool knew, his son had no friends in Seattle. He never talked about anyone. No dating, no interaction with anyone at all. This had not, apparently, seemed strange to the old man. This was how Silas had always been.
    “Did he talk about the buses?”
    “Never mentioned them—except to say they had good bus service in Seattle.”
    “Any hobbies?”
    “Oh, he used to have a bicycle. I don’t know if that’s still in the apartment. He used to do bike riding when he first went out there. He used to go to the library a lot. He swam for his back. He used to swim a lot. That’s how he got in trouble on the sixteenth.”
    “Do you know why he gave the officer a false name?”
    “He was just a little irritated with the arresting officer. And he didn’t have any ID. And then he slurred his name so it sounded like ‘Steve’ instead of ‘Silas.’ ” Daniel Cool said he had arranged for the bail bondsmen to get his son out of jail after the misunderstanding at the pool.
    “And, until last Friday,” O’Leary tried again, “he never exhibited any anger toward anyone, and he never expressed any interest in getting back at anyone?”
    “Not at all,” the old man sighed, utterly defeated by the catastrophe and loss that had come to him in his mid-eighties. “Boy, that’s what surprises us. All of a sudden, flip your lid, and shoot a bus driver . . . . It’s astounding to my wife and me. We can’t figure that out. There’s [got to be] a motive behind that. You go on a bus with a couple of guns? My wife and I can’t understand that.”

    Nor could anyone else.
    Steve O’Leary thought that it must have taken an incredible amount of sheer will for Silas Cool to keep a “lid” on his rage when he visited his parents. Or it may have taken a tremendous amount of denial for
them
not to see that the perfect, well-behaved son was losing his mind. It was probably a little of both.
    But maybe Silas’s asocial behavior wasn’t strange to his parents.
They
had no close friends in New Jersey, or anywhere. Daniel’s sister in Wisconsin was the closest person to him, outside of his wife, Ena. The Cools had never been mixers. They had one son. One cat. They had their own interests.

    During the processing of the wrecked shell of Bus Number 359, a loose .38 pistol was found where it had apparently skidded along the floor. That gun was tested for fingerprints, and on November 30, a single print on the magazine proved to be that of Silas Cool. That was good physical evidence linking Cool to the gun, but now the gun had to be tied to Mark McLaughlin’s murder.
    The .38 was test-fired in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab and the bullets were compared to those taken from McLaughlin’s body. The lands and grooves that striated the metal were identical. A gun with Silas Cool’s print on it, and an AMT .38 caliber pistol that came from the box in his living room, had been used to shoot Mark McLaughlin. It was all there.
    Gradually, the picture of the man who had sent a busload of human beings over the Aurora Bridge was becoming three-dimensional. A county worker who had