A Rage to Kill (8 page)

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 near the top of the head. Any signs of life thereafter would have been mostly reflexive as the body struggled to live. That would explain the agonal gasps noted by the rescuers who struggled to free him from the bottom of a pile of people who had been thrown onto the bus steps.

If there is a classic gunshot suicide pattern, Silas Cool’s wound fit the criteria. It would probably be impossible to know just when Cool shot himself. But it would have to have been just after he shot Mark McLaughlin. He could not have done it after the bus crashed to the ground; he had been beneath a pile of passengers, his arms pinned.

In an attempt to answer at least
some
questions, a blood screen was done for alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, PCP, marijuana, methadone, propoxaphene, benzodiazapene and barbiturates—in short, all the possible drug groups that might have an effect on the central nervous system. Every single test came back negative. The
only
thing that Silas Cool’s blood tested positive for was caffeine. Cool might have collected tiny airplane bottles of liquor, but he had not drunk from them the day of the accident. There would be no easy explanations for the tragedy on the bus.

This man had been in the peak of physical condition when he died. He had no ailments. Despite the fast-food diet in his refrigerator, he still had only very minor streaks of atheroma (fatty deposits) on his coronary arteries. All things being equal, he probably would have lived to be a hundred.

The postmortem examination of bus driver Mark McLaughlin’s body yielded some sadly ironic truths. He had been struck twice by .38 bullets. The wound that looked the most dangerous from the outside wasn’t; that bullet had entered his right abdomen and passed through soft tissue behind his vital organs, ending benignly in his thigh. It was the bullet fired into his upper right arm that had killed him. And that was because it went completely through McLaughlin’s arm, exited, and reentered his right chest. That wound track was through the seventh intercostal space, through his liver, through the transverse colon, and then, tragically, it had pierced the aorta—the major artery of the body. Seconds later, already hemorrhaging fatally, he had been catapulted through the bus windshield to the roof of the apartment house.

Mark McLaughlin had had no chance at all to live. Like the man who shot him, the bus driver was in good shape when he was shot, his arteries clear and healthy, his heart valves unmarked by anything more than minor fatty deposits. He had been somewhat overweight, but he was in excellent condition. He, too, would probably have lived to a ripe old age if he hadn’t been the victim of Silas Cool’s inscrutable rage.

At noon on Saturday, Gene Ramirez started searching over the Internet for any relatives Silas Cool might have had. He checked Plainfield, New Jersey. That was where the lawyer’s card was from, and Cool had told the Lynnwood officer that he was from New Jersey. Ramirez found a listing for a couple named Cool living in Plainfield, and copied down the phone number of Daniel and Ena Cool. It was possible they were Silas Cool’s parents, or perhaps his aunt and uncle. He gave the number to Kathy Taylor in the M.E.’s office for possible notification of next-of-kin. Twenty minutes later, she called Ramirez back. The Cools in Plainfield were, indeed, the parents of Silas Garfield Cool. She had told them that their son was dead, and it had, of course, been devastating for them. They were expecting a call from the homicide detectives who might explain to them what had happened to their son.

Steve O’Leary placed a call to Daniel Cool. This was one of the most difficult parts of being a homicide detective, but he had to find out as much as he could about Silas Cool. The elderly man was both upset and baffled when O’Leary told Daniel Cool that the detectives believed that his son had caused the bus crash. Cool said he had never known Silas to own any firearms. It was absolutely incomprehensible to him that Silas could have deliberately hurt anyone. That just wasn’t like his boy.

“Where does Silas work?” O’Leary asked.

“He can’t—couldn’t—work,” Cool replied. “He has had a serious back problem for many years.”

Silas had played golf in high school, his father said, but somehow he had injured his back and it had plagued him ever since. But no, he hadn’t seen a doctor about it in many years as far as the elder Cool knew.

As tactfully as he could, O’Leary asked if Silas had been under psychiatric care. His father said he never had, as far as he knew. “We knew he was a loner,” Cool said, but they had never thought Silas had any real problems.

His father said that Silas had worked until about 1987 or 1988 for King County in Seattle in the King County Building and Land Use Department. He had an associate degree in civil engineering from Middlesex County College in New Jersey.

But then Silas’s back had just become too painful for him to work full-time. He had wanted to move back to New Jersey, but his dad said he had talked him out of that. It was arranged for his parents to send him $650 a month until he found something that he could work at. O’Leary learned that Daniel Cool’s sister, who was in her nineties, had also helped Silas out for two decades—ultimately sending him over $30,000 in Certificates of Deposit. Somehow, the years had stretched, and ten years later his parents were still sending Silas monthly checks.

Steve O’Leary let the old man go to try and deal with the loss of his only child. They would have more talks as the detective tried to form a more complete picture of what Silas Garfield Cool had been like.

The next phone call into Homicide was from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, had died of his injuries. Like Silas Cool, Liebelt had found his way to Seattle from the East Coast. Beyond that, they were so different. Liebelt, the one-time saxophone-playing bandleader, sailor in the Korean War, purchasing agent, had begun life in Amsterdam, N.Y. His last years were spent reading everything from popular fiction to deep philosophical works. He had lived on the shoe-string that many seniors do, but he’d been a happy man with friends and myriad interests. He had found joy in little things and in new friends, and now he was gone. His painful injuries were too severe for a man nearly seventy to survive.

In the early afternoon of Saturday, November 28, two men who worked at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle arrived at the Homicide unit. Bill Wippel and Peter Davis said they had heard the name “Silas Cool” on the news. Finally, someone had recognized him and wanted to talk about how they had known him. They asked to see a picture of the man known as Silas Cool, and Nordlund and O’Leary showed them the booking photo taken in 1994 after a shoplifting arrest.

They recognized Cool. He was one of those who had come to the mission to eat a meal now and then. “He’s eaten with us several times,” Wippel said. “At least twice this past month. He never caused any trouble, was very neat and clean, and polite to our staff.”

Still, Wippel and Davis had known Silas Cool only on a very surface level. He must have been hungry; simple arithmetic would substantiate that. His folks sent Cool $650 a month; his rent was $475. That left him $175 a month for food, utilities, clothing, and transportation. They found no record of any Certificates of Deposits in Cool’s name. He had spent it all, maybe on his scores of medications. “Those Union Gospel meals must have helped him out,” O’Leary commented.

Records at the mission, which had helped thousands of homeless and down-on-their-luck people in Seattle for many years, showed that Silas Cool had filled out meal tickets on October 20 and November 20; he had attended chapel, but he had never spent a night in the mission.

“I remember him,” Wippel said, “because the guy stood out in the crowd. He was clean-cut, handsome. He didn’t look like a street person. He kept to himself, didn’t talk to anyone. I do know I looked him in the eye and made contact with him, and he smiled. He gave no indication that he was a violent person.”

The mission staff knew that the people who came to them for food and lodging often guarded their past from prying eyes, and they never pressed. Wippel and Davis knew nothing at all about Silas Cool’s world outside the food lines, but he had always seemed as though he could have made a success of life. He
looked
like success.

In reality, Silas Cool, either unwilling or unable to work, had lived his life close to the bone. On Monday, the homicide investigators checked with the State Department of Public Assistance to see if Cool had received benefits of any kind, and they found he didn’t get any Social Security payments for being disabled, or any state Labor and Industry benefits.

Steve O’Leary talked in more detail with Daniel Cool, Silas’s father and, with his permission, took a taperecorded statement.

Silas Cool’s early life had been anything but average. Daniel Cool’s career as an accountant for a petroleum company had taken him all over the world. He had met and married Ena, four years younger than he and a native of South Africa. Silas was born in Palenbang, Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1954. They had moved to Pakistan when Silas was a very small boy. Finally, they had come back to the U.S., settling in North Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1960, when Silas was five years old. He was their only son, their only child. They were nearly old enough to be grandparents when he was born.

“What kind of child was Silas?” O’Leary asked.

“A very good child,” Daniel Cool said, “Well-mannered, quiet. The neighbors used to comment and say, ‘He’s such a good boy,’ but I guess all kids are good.”

Silas had graduated from North Plainfield High School in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1973. He had always earned respectable—if not spectacular—grades. If Silas had a passion, it was golf, although he had never played on a high school team. “He played at local clubs,” Daniel said.

In his yearbook, Silas gave his plans as “playing golf at the farm.” But his father was convinced that he had hurt his back severely during one of his mighty swings.

Girls? Daniel couldn’t recall that Silas dated girls in high school. “My wife and I thought that was because of his ‘scoliosis problem.’ It made him on the shy side. I wish we could have caught that earlier . . .”

The only job Silas had had in New Jersey hadn’t lasted long. He had worked as an usher in a theater. “He lost that one because they caught him leaning against the seats,” his father told O’Leary. “But that was because of his back problems hurting him.”

Silas moved to Seattle in 1979. “He just wanted to explore the West Coast and he ended up in Seattle. He had a little Mustang then, and he drove out there—straight from New Jersey to Seattle.”

Even though he had no friends in Seattle, Silas hadn’t had trouble getting a job, not with his civil engineer training. “He had lots of different jobs—all different jobs. But he lost most of them because of his back problems,” Daniel Cool recalled.

In about 1985, Silas had gone to work for the county. Cool didn’t know why that had ended, but it had. He thought that Silas’s back must have gotten really bad about the same time.

“He called us on March 25, 1989. He said he was going to move back home and we talked him out of that. His back was bad. He told me once in 1989 that his back was so bad he just wanted to swat people.” And still, his father didn’t want him to give up and move home, although his mother worried.

Cool recalled that Silas had made “a mistake” in applying for disability for his back, and never got any compensation from the government. So the family had started to support him. “I think we’ve probably given him at least $75,000 over the years,” his father said. “Silas was just doing everything he could for his back pain. He had magnetic belts he put on, and massagers, and he lay down a lot. He told me one doctor said he just had to live with it. He came back here and we took him up to a hospital, and they didn’t make us feel very confident. Since then, he just didn’t go to any doctors.”

Despite the chronic pain he seemed to be in, Silas didn’t take any prescription medication, relying, his father said, on vitamins and health food supplements.

It seemed impossible to O’Leary that a man could be as disengaged from the world as Silas Cool had been and not have someone notice. He pushed a little harder, “He
never
exhibited any behavior as a child that would concern you—or your wife? Never had any psychiatric care?”

Daniel Cool was adamant that Silas had never been under psychiatric care. Steve O’Leary got the impression that this would have been shameful for his family. No, his father insisted. Silas had been fine.
Fine.
“No—No counselors. No problems. I hear he was eating in soup kitchens out there?” his father said uncomfortably.

“Yes—to save money,” O’Leary said.

This was difficult for the old man; he had tried his best to see that his son had enough to get by on.

“Did Silas ever seem depressed or angry?” O’Leary asked.

“No. Oh, one time we went out 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.”