It would be easiest to steal a tanker from the company yard, but stealing an oil truck would definitely get noticed. Even the UPS trucks had GPS trackers on them now. And nobody sold bulk fuel oil anymore, not to a walk-in customer. You couldn’t just show up with ten pickle barrels.
Boomer had wanted racing fuel originally, which was what McVeigh had used, but that was impossible now, too. And gas stations all had cameras. He’d considered kerosene or paint thinner, bought a gallon at a time, but that would have taken forever. Midden had used up his patience buying ten thousand pounds of fertilizer in fifty-pound bags. And time was getting short. Veterans Day was only two days away.
He saw the legs of the driver through the high foundation windows. It was hard work to pull that hose all the way to the back of the house. He wasn’t quite there yet.
In truth, thought Midden, this way would make things easier. He could put the empty drums in the van again and fill them right there, straight from the tanker. No heavy lifting.
But standing in the basement in the light of a lantern, thinking through each step as he always did, it weighed on him. It was almost too much to carry now.
It was one thing to kill a man in combat, to protect yourself. Or to kill a man who you knew would be a threat because of incompetence, like the man who had driven the van. He had proven himself unreliable. A danger.
But it was another thing entirely to kill an innocent man in cold blood. A man whose only fault was that he kept an evening appointment to fill an oil tank, and had the principles to do his job well. To not take the money.
It was wrong, Midden knew that. Midden had thought he’d done so many wrong things that it didn’t matter anymore. That nothing mattered.
He wasn’t sure that was true anymore.
He thought he might be starting to unravel.
He looked around the basement. The concrete blocks were cracked and buckling inward with the pressure of the soil. It smelled musty and damp. That basement leaked every time it rained, and had for years. Black mold climbed the walls. How anyone had lived in that house was beyond him. But it hadn’t started out such a ruin. It had been like any other house once. Someone’s pride and joy. Now it was at the edge of collapse, and its owners had fled.
Midden had killed more people than he could remember. More than he could count.
So what was one more? Just one more, he told himself.
Of course, it would be more than one, before they were done.
His path was laid long ago. He was committed to this course. He already knew what the end would be.
He took the target pistol from under his jacket and looked at it.
It was light in his hand, an assassin’s weapon. The .22 had no stopping power, not unless the bullet went into the skull. Then it would bounce around inside like a Ping-Pong ball, turning the brain into scrambled eggs. It was a very efficient weapon. Little blood. Almost no mess.
He held the grip in his fist and put the barrel to his temple.
Just to see.
There were other ways, of course. He hadn’t decided yet.
And he had work yet to finish.
He would not be unreliable.
He moved to the bottom of the stairs and waited for the driver.
PART 4
29
The next morning, Peter decided to risk the library to read the newspaper accounts about the murder of Skinner’s wife.
It was a high-profile killing with a great deal of press but not, as it turned out, much information. Most of the discussion revolved around Martha Skinner herself, who was widely considered to be a saint and had used much of her considerable family fortune to fund her charitable works in the city.
The early articles were detailed and intent. It seemed as though every quote came from a friend of the deceased or the department spokesperson, who gave a thin account of the killing and repeated that the Milwaukee police were sparing no effort to find the killer. There was discussion of a task force to combat home invasions, but it turned out that home invasions were not such an epidemic, and perhaps a special team of investigators would be enough.
After the first few days, the articles moved off the front page, and the sparsity of information became more apparent. The MPD spokesperson continued to repeat that all possible leads would be followed, but that there were few clues, no apparent motive, and random killings were the most difficult to solve.
As the weeks passed, the articles became sparser yet, until they were just short status reports noting the lack of progress in the investigation. The final article was a few paragraphs noting the disbanding of the special team of investigators. The case was still officially open but unsolved.
On his second time through, Peter found something.
At the very end of an early article, there was a single statement, probably unauthorized, by a Detective Frank Zolot, who told the reporter that it was standard police procedure to consider members of the family as potential suspects until cleared.
But nothing else from Detective Zolot in the articles that followed.
Peter went to the Milwaukee police website, found the Criminal Investigations Division, and called the number.
“Hi, I’m trying to reach Detective Frank Zolot. Can you give me a phone number?”