A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

been Silas Cool’s supervisor a decade earlier when he worked for the King County Building Department called the investigators. “He was a weird fellow,” the man recalled, adding that Silas had had few social graces and didn’t get along with his fellow workers. “He was a racist, too,” the man said. That was totally against policy in King County. The supervisor said that Cool had been allowed to resign from his job, but in reality his presence in the department was so controversial that he had been forced out.
    Pictures of Silas Cool had been posted at bus stops and stations to see if anyone recognized him. It remained hard to determine if Cool had had a particular beef with Mark McLaughlin or if his vengeful act had been directed at the world in general. A female Metro driver called the investigators to say that Cool’s face was very familiar to her. He’d been on her bus a couple of times. “At the end of last winter, he got on my shuttle route near Green Lake,” she said. “He immediately started complaining about the temperature inside the bus. He wanted no heat on. He actually walked up and down the aisle opening windows. He was complaining about germs in the air . . .”
    Cool’s behavior had been bizarre enough to frighten her, she said, and she was relieved when he got off after a few miles. “But I saw him again when I was driving downtown. He wanted to go to the University District and I told him I was the slowest bus to get there. That time, he was very well dressed.”
    Another Metro driver remembered Silas Cool, who had gotten on his bus in the downtown area. “He was unruly and obnoxious,” the male driver said. “I’ve seen him on my bus three or four times this year.”
    It appeared that Silas Cool’s obsession, passion, avocation, hobby—his whole life—had been spent riding the buses of Seattle. He had acted as if he owned them, and he was frequently abusive with the drivers.
    Still another driver called John Nordlund. He knew Silas Cool, too. “He would just stare at me—a blank intimidating stare. And I would just stare back at him. He had a reduced fare permit, but I haven’t seen him since last summer.”
    A second female driver notified the homicide detectives that she recognized Silas Cool. Her voice was a little shaky as she recalled how he had boarded her bus at the north end of Seattle only one week before the bus crash. “He got on my bus and immediately started harassing me. He made comments about my ‘beautiful face and eyes,’ and I had to forcefully tell him to be quiet and sit down.” She said she hadn’t reported him; he had seemed like just another person who was either drunk or mentally disturbed, and every bus driver in the city had to deal with those problems every day.
    More and more calls came in from bus drivers. Silas Cool hadn’t been a
big
problem but he had been a problem all over the city. A woman driver recalled that he’d been on her bus, which had a route that went east and then south of downtown—the opposite direction from Cool’s apartment. “He got on the bus, sat in the middle, and he was checking out teenagers,” she said. “I noticed him especially because it was dark out and he was wearing sunglasses. He scared me—enough so that I called my coordinator and reported it.”

    Nobody at North Plainfield High School had thought much about Silas Cool in the years since graduation. Apparently, he hadn’t drawn much attention when he
was
in school. He had been sent an invitation to his class’s twenty-fifth reunion, which was to be held on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Because Silas was one of the “lost” graduates, the invitation was sent to his parents. There was no response.
    The welcoming cocktail party for The Class of 1973 was just warming up in New Jersey at six P.M. on Friday, November 27. In Seattle, it was, of course, three P.M. , moments before the shots sounded on Bus Number 359.
    By Saturday afternoon, the reunion in North Plainfield was buzzing with the news of one of their former classmates. They couldn’t help but speculate that Silas Cool might have made some kind of statement meant to shock them. If that was the reason behind the shooting, it had worked. His name was on everyone’s lips at the reunion. Silas Cool was not someone who stood out in anyone’s memory. He wasn’t memorable for anything
but
his name.
    “Cool” was slang that seemed to get recycled every generation or so. But Silas Cool