April Smith - Judas Horse

When Mike Donnato discovered the tape of the phone conversation with Stone, and realized that Rooney Berwick had failed to report for work the past three days, the off-site was put under lockdown, and L.A. County sheriff’s deputies dispatched to his residence.

The Villa de Andalusia on Harper Avenue in West Hollywood is one of those garden courtyard apartments built in the 1920s. It would seem romantic if you were a nineteen-year-old would-be actress just off the bus, until you met your neighbors — a bleached-blond lesbian bartender and Rooney Berwick.

The bartender has a soulful, heart-shaped face, is covered below the neck with body tattoos, and is also nine months pregnant. She illegally sublets apartment 1A, Mrs. Berwick’s old place, while Rooney lives over the garage. Neither one of them would loan you a cup of sugar.

Nobody is answering in the garage apartment, so the deputies pound on 1A. The tattooed bartender comes out snarling and refuses to unlock the metal security door.

“Ruby Berwick?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Do you know where she is, ma’am?”

“She doesn’t live here.”

“What about her son, Rooney Berwick?”

“He says he works for the FBI, but that’s too weird for words.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue.”

The deputy thanks her and walks past a fountain holding pools of scummy water to join his partner on the landing outside the cheaply built garage apartment. The door is locked. A bundle of mail is stuck in the slot, yellowed by the sun. Forced entry is required.

A couple of jabs with a crowbar splinters the thin veneer of the door, and then the entire lock assembly gives way with a groan. There seems to be weight on the other side, like sandbags, preventing them from opening it. Old people drop while answering the bell…. Sick people collapse before getting help…. But as they push against the door, a tearing sound like bandages from skin alerts the officers to the disturbing fact that it has been sealed with duct tape from the inside.

When they enter the grubby studio apartment, the deputies notice the temperature is elevated to over ninety degrees. All the windows are shut and there’s an ominous smell. Propped on a chair where nobody could miss it is a three-foot drawing of a skull on poster board, with handwritten words that say DANGER! CARBON DIOXIDE! RUBY “MOM” BERWICK, REST IN PEACE.

A Superman comic book from 1965 is taped open to a page on which the Man of Steel is spiraling into space, fist raised. “He knows what he must do!” the caption reads. An empty vial of Percocet and cans of beer have been discarded on the floor.

The bathroom door is locked, and again taped from inside. Once they gain entry, the deputies see the amber plastic doors that enclose the shower-tub have also been sealed, along with the bathroom window. Clearly, the intention was to create an airless chamber. But what of the two mysterious blue plastic milk cartons stamped AMBROSE, with a clock and a partially burned candle set on top?

Inside the tub is the fully clothed body of a decomposing white man, about 190 pounds, long white hair, lying in a fetal position on its side. Near the feet are the bodies of four pug dogs in similar states of decomposition. Fluid has collected in the bottom of the tub.

These five beings died together from lack of oxygen — but how? Sealing a chamber and burning a candle doesn’t suck the air out of a room. After the origin of the milk cartons has been identified as the Ambrose Dairy, where, it is learned, the deceased’s mother worked for thirty years, the coroner will rule that death resulted from environmental hypoxia caused by exogenous carbon dioxide exposure: dry ice.

Rooney Berwick had returned to the landmark drive-in dairy and purchased two blocks of dry ice (frozen CO2), commonly used to handle milk products. As a tech, he knew carbon dioxide vapor would drift toward the ground, and therefore he placed the blocks of dry ice inside the tub. Then he got high, laid back, and watched the clock as the blocks smoked and shrank, disappearing into an invisible toxic gas.

Eventually, deprived of oxygen, his heart would stop. The props he used from the Ambrose Dairy to effect his death expressed, with subconscious elegance, the attachment and rage he felt for his mother. At the last, he might have been quite comfortable lying down with his dogs, entombed by loneliness that had finally become a rock-hard cocoon.

But the genius part of Rooney’s suicide was not the methodology. The genius part was to be found on the computer, left in screen-saver mode on Mrs. Berwick’s Formica and chrome dining table, no doubt where little Rooney used to eat his mom’s kielbasa and cabbage.

Staring at the deputies is the FAN home page with a brand-new link—“In Memoriam — Ruby Berwick, Beloved Mother, and Rooney Berwick, Son”—which takes the visitor to pages and pages of classified documents on Operation Wildcat, stolen by the deceased and put on the Internet for all the world to see.

Even more brilliant was to post the ID picture Rooney took that day at the off-site: “Darcy DeGuzman, aka FBI Special Agent Ana Grey.”

He burned the Bureau but good.

Galloway’s response was unhesitating: “Get Ana out now.”

In Quantico, Virginia, the hostage rescue team is put on standby. Out at Andrews Air Force Base, a CF-5 is loaded up with helicopters and light armored vehicles to be on scene within twelve hours.

Local FBI SWAT teams from Salt Lake, Seattle, and Los Angeles are called up as a west regional asset. Donnato, Galloway, and Angelo are on a commercial flight, and Peter Abbott on a jet from D.C. to Portland, where, in the Operation Wildcat command center, agents monitoring Dick Stone’s surveillance system are carefully watching the movements of those in the house, waiting to see if Special Agent Ana Grey has holed up in the sewing room — the Room of Unfinished Dreams — signaling an emergency.

Within hours, warrants for the search and seizure of unregistered automatic weapons have been signed by a local magistrate, giving probable cause to investigate Dick Stone, living at Willamette Hazelnut Farm under the false identity of Julius Emerson Phelps, for firearms violations.

If you are serving a warrant for guns, you want to isolate the suspects from the location and their access to those guns. At the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, the ATF did not intercept the key players while they were away from the compound, which led to catastrophe. The Bureau would not want to repeat that mistake; on the other hand, in hours of watching the surveillance cameras, it becomes clear not only that nobody is about to leave the farm for a trip to Wal-Mart but that two other hulking players have arrived — Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man — which indicates that while Stone is preparing for his Big One, the Bureau had best get ready for its.

Under cover of darkness, a perimeter is established around the farm. Snipers are out there gathering intel, reporting on movement, describing the buildings and their entry and exit points. Beyond the perimeter, in vans equipped with monitors that show the same surveillance images as at the command center, SWAT team leaders huddle over drawings of the interior Ana Grey had made for Donnato, revising the scenario for a controlled dynamic entry — contingency planning that had been in place since the very day she walked in and activated when it became clear that she had disappeared somewhere between the psychiatrist’s office and the pickup by her handler in Portland. By first light, the snipers have found their final positions of cover and concealment, and an SOG helicopter is readied for takeoff in a distant field.