A Time of Torment (13 page)

For a time.

L
ater, Jerome Burnel recalled that, as he stood over the dead man in the parking lot of the gas station, he was overcome by a fit of shivering, followed by a light-headedness that quickly became active nausea. He threw up in the weeds at the edge of the lot, then sat down hard among them and gently placed his gun on the ground, as though it were a dormant entity that might yet somehow be wakened into another burst of murderous activity by any sudden movement. But as the rain fell, it struck him that the police would want the gun as evidence, and leaving it on the filthy concrete of the forecourt might tarnish it in some way. He thought about putting it back in its holster, but he didn’t want to be armed when the police arrived. He checked his pockets, and discovered that he had nothing with which to protect the gun.

Jerome Burnel realized that he was sobbing.

Paige Dunstan walked across the forecourt and stood before him. She had her cell phone in her hand, and Burnel assumed that she had just called the police. Behind her, Bryce was placing a dish towel over the face of the dead sheriff’s deputy. Burnel watched Paige come, but couldn’t remember quite who she was, and found himself unable to connect her with what had just occurred. It was, he told the three men in the Great Lost Bear, like coming out of a movie and meeting one of the actresses from it on the street.

As for Paige, she noticed that the dead man had bled a lot. She was glad. She hoped that wherever the sonofabitch was, he was still feeling the pain of those bullets, and would continue to do so until Satan himself grew bored of that particular torture and found another, more inventive one to replace it. The thought of what might have befallen her if he had managed to get her into the storeroom made her want to get to a toilet fast.

She turned her attention from the dead to the living.

‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said to Burnel.

‘Jerome.’

‘Thank you, Jerome,’ she said. ‘I’m Paige.’

‘I don’t know what I did,’ said Burnel.

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t fire the gun. I didn’t kill those men. I watched someone else do it, and he looked just like me.’

Paige reached out a hand to him.

‘I think you should come inside,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death out here.’

Like him
, Burnel thought, and his eyes alighted on the body lying only feet away. He heard himself giggle, and wondered if Paige had heard him too. He hoped not. That would be bad. He covered his mouth with his right hand to hide the sound.
He caught his death. The man who looked like me threw it, and he caught it, right in the end zone
.

‘Jerome, are you—?’

Lights were flashing to the north as the police approached. Meanwhile a car had pulled up by the pumps, and a woman and a man were asking if everyone was okay, but the woman was already filming the proceedings with her cell phone. Meet the Buttinskys, Snoop and Nosey.

The sight of them brought Burnel back, and he was almost grateful to them. If he’d started laughing aloud, he might never have stopped. Burnel didn’t want to be on film. He didn’t want pictures of him with puke on his shirt to appear on the news, but most of all he didn’t want to be on the news, period. Common sense was rapidly returning now that he had taken a step back onto dry land from the old Insanity River. He was concerned that the dead men might have friends, the kind to take it very much amiss that a jewelry salesman named Jerome Burnel, forty, married (for now), a resident of Portland, Maine, had splattered the brains and skullcap of one of their buddies all over a milk cooler, and put four holes in the other, including two in the back to finish him off. He thought about going over there and snatching the phone, but suddenly police cars and uniforms filled his vision, and guns were being brandished and orders shouted. He lost sight of the woman with the phone, but he would become very familiar with the video she had shot, just as many other people would. And all the while, a little voice whispered:

But what if they have friends?

What if they have family?

Burnel didn’t want to be a hero, didn’t believe himself to be one, but he became a hero anyway. He’d asked if his identity could be protected, but there was little hope of that, even before the woman from the car sold her video to the TV stations. He declined interviews, but still the journalists called him. He refused an accolade from the Portland Police Department at their annual awards breakfast, but it was later delivered to him by a young officer who shook his hand and thanked him for what he had done. People stopped him on the street and asked to have their picture taken with him. Customer orders soared, but he no longer felt comfortable making road trips while carrying any quantity of gems, just in case someone took it into his head to target him. As a consequence, he was forced to spend more time working from home, which meant more time in Norah’s company, and only she remained unimpressed by what he had done.

Because she knew.

‘Big shot,’ she would say, her words distorting the accompanying cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Big man with a gun. Now you’re so afraid you can’t even leave the fucking house.’

And she was right: he was afraid. He didn’t like being known. He didn’t want to have to carry the gun anymore, but he’d need it with him if he left the house because everyone and his mother now knew that Jerome Burnel was in the jewelry business and—

What if they have friends? What if they have family?

The dead men’s bodies went unclaimed, and their corpses were eventually buried in the indigent section of Augusta’s West View Cemetery. Their drivers’ licenses, identifying them as Henry Forde and Tobin Simus, were high-quality fakes that wouldn’t have got past most cops but would have sufficed for casual use. Their vehicles – a ’98 Saturn and a 2000 Chevy Express Cargo Van – were recent cash purchases from dealers in Virginia and New Hampshire but title transfers had not yet been initiated.

The police returned Burnel’s gun. There was no question of charges being filed against him, although one state police detective, a man named Gordon Walsh, was curious about the final shots fired, and made Burnel go through his story a couple of times before leaving, if not satisfied, then not dissatisfied enough to investigate further.

Gradually, once the public had moved on, and if only to get away from his wife, Burnel went back on the road.

But the events at Dunstan’s Gas Station were only part of the story, and just one of the reasons why Jerome Burnel became a hero. When the police opened the back of the van they found, amid a wide variety of stolen items, a girl named Corrie Wyatt. She had restraints around her arms and legs, and a ball gag in her mouth. A chain around her waist anchored her to a ring that had been welded to the inner body of the van, possibly for that precise purpose. Wyatt directed police to a house in Gorham, where they found the bodies of Mason Timard, his wife Doreen, and their son Nathan, along with the remains of Todd Peltz and Barry Brown.

Later, Corrie Wyatt would be one of the few non-family visitors to Jerome Burnel at the state prison in Warren, along with Paige Dunstan. Dunstan stopped coming to visit Burnel less than a year into his sentence. She married and moved to Oregon following her father’s death from heart disease and the sale of the gas station, although she continued to write to him until shortly before she disappeared.

‘Disappeared?’ said Parker.

‘It was in the newspapers,’ said Burnel. ‘She was a librarian in Ashland. One day, she didn’t come home from work. Her husband was questioned, but he was in San Francisco on business when she vanished, and I don’t think he was ever really a suspect. If they ever found out what happened to her, then I didn’t notice, and I was looking.’

Corrie Wyatt’s visits had simply ceased a year after Burnel’s imprisonment. He received no explanation, for she had never written. One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t.

B
urnel still had a couple of mouthfuls of beer in his glass – enough to finish his story, if he needed some lubrication. Only a scattering of customers remained at the Bear. It had been a quiet evening.

‘About two months after the shooting, I got a call from my wife telling me to come home, that the police were at the house and wanted to talk to me,’ said Burnel. ‘She didn’t say why. I thought it had to be something to do with those two men. I figured that maybe they’d identified them at last, or what I was afraid of had finally come to pass, and their friends had found me.’

Burnel grew distracted for a moment. He followed the progress of a young guy who was heading for the men’s room, and immediately began picking at his skin. His lips moved, but no sound emerged. Parker could see Angel watching Burnel. He believed that Angel’s expression might have softened, but he could not be certain.

‘Mr Burnel?’ said Parker.

‘Huh?’

Burnel stopped picking.

‘I thought I recognized that man,’ he said. ‘Or he recognized me. But I was mistaken. Probably.’

They waited for him to continue.

‘Where was I?’ he asked.

‘The call from the police,’ said Parker.

‘The call. Right. I was in Kennebunk, so it didn’t take me long to drive back. On the way home, I kept thinking about what I’d do if it turned out that I’d been targeted for revenge because of the shootings. What if they were Russians, or Chechens? I’d heard those people were pretty mean, worse than the Italians. If that was the case, the police might have to hide me somewhere for my protection, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to be stuck in some apartment with my wife for months or years on end. By then our marriage really was in its death throes, and I’d have been tempted just to let the Russians or Chechens have me, as long as they promised to shoot me and make it quick.

‘But the police weren’t there to protect me at all. They had all of this …
material
, these pictures and films of children. They showed it to me. They asked me if it was mine, and I told them it wasn’t, but I could see that they didn’t believe me. I saw some of the policemen who had talked to me after the shooting, who’d patted me on the back and called me a hero, and I could tell how disappointed and disgusted they were. I was arrested, brought to the Portland Police Department, questioned, then taken to the Cumberland County Jail. The next day, I appeared before the district court, and bail was set at forty thousand dollars, because the district attorney said that the nature of my business, and the ease of transportation of gemstones, made me a potential flight risk.

‘But I didn’t have that amount to hand. Norah’s store had gone bust, and I wasn’t bringing in the kind of money that I had before. Looking back, I think I might have been suffering from PTSD, and my father had been forced to take back a lot of the day-to-day running of the business. Between us, we managed to pay bail, and they let me go.’

So Jerome Burnel’s name was now once again in the news, but for very different reasons than before. His house was daubed with red paint, and the tires on his car were repeatedly slashed. His wife moved out and filed for divorce. They agreed to price the house for a quick sale, and his share went toward paying his legal bills. He moved back in with his parents. He did not work. His father retired officially and permanently from the jewelry business, his reputation tainted by the crimes that his son was alleged to have committed.

Eventually Jerome Burnel went to prison.

‘Do I need to tell you what happened to me in Warren?’ he asked.

‘Only if you want to,’ said Parker.

‘You can figure it out for yourself, but the beatings were the least of it. Even in protective custody, I wasn’t safe. For more than four of those five years, I lived in hell. For the last few months, it was just purgatory.’

‘What changed?’ asked Angel.

‘I was everybody’s punch, if they could get to me, but I had a core of tormentors, and their ringleader was a man named Harpur Griffin. He was released five months before I was, although he left me something to remember him by. On the day after his release, five men took turns raping me. They told me it was Harpur’s treat.’

Burnel finished his beer.

‘This is what I believe, Mr Parker: everything that happened to me was a result of my actions at Dunstan’s Gas Station. I was set up so that I would go to jail, and be punished for what I’d done. It’s also likely that those same people found Paige Dunstan, and Corrie Wyatt, and made them vanish from this earth. Pretty soon, the same thing will happen to me.’

He dipped into an inside pocket of his jacket and produced a brown padded envelope. He slid it across the table toward Parker.

‘Inside there is all the money I have left, minus a few dollars to keep me going until they come for me. When I’m gone, I’d like you to look into what happened, if not for me then for Paige and Corrie, and for the family killed by those two men, and those friends of Corrie’s that were shot.’

Parker didn’t touch the envelope. At best, Burnel was a damaged man; at worst, a self-deluded one. He was looking for a reason for all that had occurred. He wanted to believe that there was a logic and purpose to his suffering.

And Burnel, guessing his thoughts, said, ‘Why would I lie about the child pornography, Mr Parker? Why now? What purpose would it serve? I’ve done my time. Those lost years can never be returned to me. My reputation will never be restored. Were I to live long enough, maybe I’d get some sympathy job that the state or my lawyer helped to arrange for me, surrounded by others accused of the same crimes, all of us clearing garbage and weeds from public lots, but that existence will never be a reality. I did nothing wrong. All I did was stop for coffee at the wrong gas station, and soon I’ll pay for it with the last thing I have, just like Paige Dunstan and Corrie Wyatt paid. And here’s the rub, Mr Parker: I don’t mind paying that price, because I’ve paid all the others. I just don’t want it to be for nothing.’

Louis called for more wine, and he was the first to speak again after it came.