Chapter Three
Do I regret Stephen Blaise, too? Hell no, I don’t regret him at all. He ran ACHC Wyoming. Hell, he was even in charge of the division that oversaw my daddy’s case back then. Think he was my mom’s boss’s boss at some point. If you want to talk about people who should be on death row, I bet that’s where he is right now, down in hell’s death row. I killed three people, but that man killed thousands. The policies he approved, the claims he denied? There was an internal memo that went around a few years back that he’d written about how that year’s performance reviews would focus on claims denial rates. Not to get them down, to get them up, you know, save money for the company.
Ain’t that violence, right there? On an industrial scale? How many people killed by indirect violence is equivalent to one person killed by direct violence? If an executive tells his underlings that they’ll be fired if they don’t make sure more people die of preventable causes, how many of those deaths are morally equivalent to that executive just going to the hospital with a gun and executing one of those people in their hospital bed?
I bet that motherfucker was a guitar player, too.
The planning was easy enough, after I’d picked him. I guess there’s a million other men I could have picked, and that’s kind of depressing to realize. But I picked him, because of ACHC and everything they did to us. You know, at the time – and it was dumb of me to do it this way – I figured if I was gonna send a message, really send a message, I might as well also pick someone I had a personal reason to go after as well. I think now I shouldn’t have done that, not just because it could have gotten me caught – you know, cops always look for personal connections – but also because it kind of…I don’t know, made it impure in a way. Like I was looking for revenge, not because I genuinely believed that I was sending a message.
But planning-wise, all I had to do was think through things logically, step by step. Backwards planning is how the Army manuals talk about doing it, kind of one approach to doing proofs like a mathematician would. Sun Tzu probably has something about this too. The point though – what do you want done? What’s your objective? Then, you just look at what your constraints are, and you gotta look at them in detail. Every obstacle, every barrier, every resource. Once you have all that, everything just falls into place, you just follow everything through to its natural conclusion – if this is a barrier, how do I get past it? If I try to do it this way, what will probably happen?
The cop shows ain’t accurate, but there’s always a glimmer of truth behind it all. Means, motive, opportunity, that’s what they say. Well, I turned it around. I needed means. I needed an opportunity. That meant finding out where he’d be, when he’d be there, and where I could be. Means?
Easy. My daddy had this old Remington 700 that my husband and I still used as a deer rifle sometimes. His own daddy, my grandpa, had bought it after he got back from Vietnam, where he’d carried its military version as a sniper. You might think an old rifle like that would be distinctive, but it was convenient – everybody and their cousin has one, it fires a dirt-common caliber, and there was no record associated with it. Handed down for fifty years in one family, like that, whoever sold it originally retired a long time ago, their records locked in some dusty attic if not shredded and lost a long time ago. No crimes, no ballistic records, nothing.
Opportunity got harder. Finding out where he’d be and all that. First off, I had to use a lot of common sense.
And then the rest of the planning was the stuff that everyone knows about that you just use common sense for. Remember how I said trust no one? That also applies to electronics, phone, computer, all that. The Internet’s spoiled people. I turned to libraries. You don’t have to check out a reference, just read it there. Bring your kid, too, get her reading books young and thinking for herself as soon as possible. Or I guess maybe don’t – after all, I was reading young and an educated woman scares people, right?
Anyway, all the electronics, you can’t trust any of it. Gotta leave the phone at home. It’s got GPS tracking. Can’t use any electronics you own. The FBI can’t find out you looked up old CIA manuals on survival, evasion, resistance, and escape from subpoenaing Google if you did it in your local library, or that you looked up what kinds of evidence the police can recover from a crime scene with modern tools. Incidentally, it’s a lot. They got high-res cameras that they can use to count pores or examine skin texture, and software that automatically studies the way you walk or matches facial features based on bones and shit. You know, it’s scary how good they are at identifying people now. I looked it all up, and worked out how I was going to get around it all if I needed to.
The biggest trick really is that you have to learn to hate patterns. That’s the hardest thing for people to do, we love following patterns, habits. I acted like I was being hunted already, because I knew I was going to be. I acted – hell, actually, I acted the way I did when I had a stalker, in a lot of ways. That was back in college. I don’t know what I did, but this guy – we were in the same economics class – developed this, I guess, this thing for me. Started popping up at places around campus where I was, you know, casually bumping into me and all that. He was nice enough at first.
…I don’t know. He started taking to wanting to do everything with me, always wanting to know where I’d be or what I was doing, and we weren’t that close, you know? Fuck, thinking about it still gives me a little anxiety. Anyway, my point is that I stopped doing things predictably for a long time. No patterns. Different coffee shops, different times, that kind of thing, right? Well, I used a different library every time that I could – thank Christ for the public library system. Went at different times of day, too.
Of course, using libraries at all is a pattern – you know, once they cotton onto that then they’re going to go through every library’s footage. But the longer you make it take, the more footage they have to review, the harder it is for them to confirm it, you know? The more likely it is that there’s some hiccups, that there’s a glitch, or that records were destroyed after long enough. You have to seize every damn advantage you can when you’re going up against that 0.1% that wields 90% of the power in our country.
It took me a few months. Social media, am I right? He kept his profile on private, but it wasn’t hard to follow him. I made a thirst trap Instagram using a fake email address and some photos of a woman from Eastern Europe in lingerie and managed to get a bunch of mutuals with him. Then I requested to follow him and a day later I could see all his posts.
Every Veterans Day weekend, like clockwork, he posted photos of his annual deer hunt. Posing with an eight-point buck here or smiling with a new skeletonized AR-15 with a night vision scope and armor-piercing rounds, like he was some Navy SEAL and bin Laden had been reincarnated as a deer. I wonder how many deer he ever ran into that were wearing Kevlar.
He never actually posted the locations, though, that took a little bit of detective work. A couple of times he tagged friends he went hunting with. Their own posts narrowed it down a little for me. Most importantly, it let me figure out that he always hunted in the same place every year.
The rest was looking at the details of the photos from year to year. There’s a whole community of people on the internet who just sleuth through photos and look at details to figure out where the photos were taken. No, of course I wasn’t stupid enough to ask them to identify where the photos were taken for me – I would’ve been in prison long ago if I had – but I looked through their forums and I saw how they did it. I don’t remember the specifics anymore, but I remember using the mountains I could see in the background to triangulate where he was. I had to use metadata in the photos too – they were taken on a particular model of iPhone, and the angle lens was important.
So I went out there that year, night before, with my daddy’s old deer rifle. To Blaise’s favorite little hunting ground. I don’t know what was so special about it to him. It’s a long-ass drive from Cheyenne, you know, I think I probably came close to turning around three or four times. You know, there’s something psychotic about driving four hours just to kill someone. I know, someone’s gonna say it’s psychotic to kill someone in general, but I mean, extra-psychotic about it. I saw something on the internet once where people were talking about the worst things they ever did for sex, and one guy was saying he drove eight hours roundtrip to bang a girl he was talking to from the next town over, and I was like, “That’s psychotic”. Which do you think makes it more psychotic?
I don’t actually know what I was thinking about for the drive. I’d planned it all out pretty careful. It was November, so pretty cold, there was plenty of snow along the way. You know, Wyoming is a pretty damn high state, think we’re just barely second to Colorado. Snow comes early and often, and once it’s there, it lingers. The state does a good job of plowing the major roads, I-25 and the state roads, but it can still be treacherous. Anyway, I’d gotten up past Lander and I was heading into the reservation. Yeah, Wind River, where the Arapaho and Shoshone got put by the U.S. government. You want to talk about another travesty of our national values, look into the history of the reservation, go talk to the Indians.
Anyway, yeah, I was getting gas on the rez, and I was thinking about buying a pack of cigarettes and I was thinking about the last time I’d been out there. My daddy always had a preference for hunting out in the mountains, he grew up out in Hoback. That’s where my grandpa was born and raised, on a homestead that my family eventually sold when my daddy moved out to the oil fields. Guess it rubbed off on me, whenever I need to clear my head or whatever and if I can, I try to get out there. My husband prefers hunting on the plains for convenience’s sake. He always thinks I’m crazy for going out west so far, you know, and I don’t do it often, I usually hunt on the plains, too. But it always makes me feel close to my father, somehow. I guess that’s pretty stupid, but I do it when I’m upset. Just old memories, I guess. Anyway, it had been a while since the last time I’d been out there, not because I didn’t want to go, but just because it was so damn hard to find a day or two to just be able to go out there. But I always stop in at that gas station, on Black Coal Road, since it’s the only gas station for a ways in either direction and anyway it’s pretty cheap.
And I was thinking about how I would like to teach my daughter to hunt out there, when she’s old enough. The same land that I learned on, the same land my daddy learned on, and the same that Grandpa learned on, all the way back, you know? Back to when my family first come out to Wyoming, on their way to Oregon before great-great-great-granddad, or however many greats removed he was, struck gold in the Wind River mountains and decided they were gonna make a home of it here instead of pressing on across the mountains and settling in the Willamette Valley. And that almost got me to turn around. I would have, too, probably, if it weren’t for the fact that there was an Argent Health ad in the window of the gas station. Peace of mind, that’s what it was advertising. And it got me thinking about how I got to know my grandpa, and my daughter wouldn’t get to know her grandpa, because of them and all their lies. Peace of mind – all ACHC, all any of those health insurance companies give their customers is the peace of the grave, after a painful life and a painful death.
I think Dad would have been glad I used his old rifle. I got out there real early, built a campfire near my car and stood downwind for a while to kill my scent. It’s an old trick to help with stalking deer, you know, makes it harder for them to realize there’s a human nearby. There’s high-tech stuff these days, ways to kill your scent for a hundred bucks or so, but smoke still works just as well. I know, Blaise couldn’t smell me, but if the rangers brought out scent hounds to try to find me, it couldn’t hurt. Then I hiked on out to his favorite hunting ground.
It's funny, going after Blaise was pretty much like hunting a deer. He didn’t use any corporate security. Maybe he thought he was safe because of anonymity, because of how few people knew that he was the orchestrator of so much misery in the state of Wyoming. He lived out in Jackson Hole, where all the rich folk live. Maybe that was another reason that he thought that he was safe, all the security measures he could rely on from his billionaire neighbors.
You know what’s funny is, after a while, you kind of lose the tension. At least, I did. You know, I was nervous, my stomach all in knots when I was there. I’d gone hunting a million times, but my heart was hammering when I first got there and laid down. I was all amped up – it’s a good thing he didn’t show up then, I was liable to miss.
But after a few hours, I don’t know, the adrenaline was gone. You know, he was so long in coming that I think I had sunk cost fallacy going for me. Spent half the damn day waiting for this guy, I ain’t about to leave before he gets here. But yeah, I mean, by mid-morning I was just bored. I was sitting up against this tree, bundled up in all my hunting gear. Not what I would have ever expected, you know, being bored in a situation like that, but I was.
While I was waiting, I spent the time thinking about all the times I’d gone hunting with my family when I was younger, like I mentioned. My daddy and grandpa took me on my first hunt when I was…hmm, I think something around when I was eight. I didn’t have a gun – I mean, Dad first taught me to shoot on this old .22, but I didn’t have a gun with me when he took me with him that day. He was just teaching me the basic skills, you know, tracking and all the old tricks. That part was real cool – how to start fires, all of that.
You’d have to ask Mom why, but for some reason she let me watch Bambi for the first time like a week before Dad took me out. So when we actually got up into the blind, I got so upset and I kept stopping him from hurting the deer. I was crying, you know, bawling in this blind with him the first time I saw a deer show up, and of course the deer ran off immediately.
I don’t know how he had any patience with me, I must have scared off a dozen deer that day. He was trying to explain to me how we needed the food, but you know, I was eight, that didn’t mean anything to me since I’d never really gone hungry in my life. Because, you know, my daddy hadn’t taken me out hunting before, so we always had a freezer full of meat for the winter. Dad got a little annoyed at me – you know, he had a standing bet every year with grandpa about who would bag the biggest deer or who would hit their permit quota fastest – and he lost bad that year.
He kept taking me, though. Taught me how to dress the meat so that it don’t spoil – drain all the blood, you know, get the intestines and offal out without accidentally tainting the meat, roasting the edible organs with a little salt on a camp pan. After he was sure I’d stop trying to save the deer, then he gave teaching me how to get the actual kill a second shot. You know, how to stalk a deer, how to set up blinds, how to lay in wait and read the wind, how to make myself invisible. You know, you can sneak right up on a deer if you move slow and careful enough, close enough to touch them if you wanted. As long as they don’t smell you and you don’t move when they’re looking at you. You just have to account for all the angles and have patience and you can sneak right up on them. On anyone, really. Killing a person ain’t much different than killing a deer.
Blaise and his cronies came hiking in around midday and split up to go get in their blinds. That’s how you could tell that they weren’t doing it for any real reason other than for show – it was like hiking to them, just a few hours out in nature. Arrive late in the day, not really all that important if they bagged a deer or not. I was more pissed at myself about that, though – I’d shown up real early, figuring they’d aim to be in position by dawn like I would have. Well, anyway, when he split off on his own…that old Remington 700 didn’t have a fiber optic scope or a skeletonized frame or an adjustable bipod or a fiberglass sling like his souped-up rifle did, but it did its job cleaner than any of his victims ever got.
It's funny looking back and realizing how much planning I did, and how little I actually knew back then. Escaping was the scariest thing I can remember. I don’t think they ever knew I was there. It took them a while to even realize that their friend was dying, I think. At first they thought someone had saw a deer and shot it, I guess. Then they realized that he’d been shot and they were scrambling for their sat phones. But man, how afraid I was. Every memory I have from after taking that shot has this sharp edge to it and makes my lungs start burning a little, and my ears hurt. It was real cold that day – I mean, you know, early November in the Tetons, of course it was going to be – and I remember feeling like every breath was stabbing me in the lungs after a while. And you know how when you run in the cold, your ears start to ache real bad? Happens to me every time, even if I’m wearing a watch cap.
Anyway, you know, it was dumb how scared I was, but I heard a helicopter twenty minutes after I shot him, so you can kind of see it from my point of view. I thought the cops were out with searchlights and dogs looking for me. Every time I heard a noise I was flat on the ground because I thought the rangers were after me.
It's also kind of funny thinking back about how reflexive some actions are. You know, I racked the bolt on my gun? I scooped up the shell casing on my way out, but I wasn’t even really aware of the fact that I’d loaded a new round. Just as natural as breathing. I was methodical, too, I crawled a good three hundred yards before I even stood up, just to get some distance without drawing attention to my shooting spot. You know, I didn’t want any of his buddies remembering weird rustling in the woods right after the gunshot or something to give the cops a direction and place to start looking. If they could point to a specific direction, that cuts the search area down by something like twelve times, right? Thirty-degree wedge instead of a three-sixty circle.
But my arms and legs were cramping hard, all stiff and cold from laying down for so long. Well, you try laying in the woods for eight hours. And crawling is a hard workout, when you’re flat on the cold ground and your elbows and knees keep hitting rocks and pebbles and you’re cradling a rifle in your arms and trying not to catch the barrel on any vines or branches. Had to stop to take breaks now and then, and that was hard too, because I wanted to get as far away as I could fast, but I made myself wait and keep crawling. I remember the smell of the gunpowder for some reason, too. I don’t know how that got into my memories, but it’s there. I don’t know how to describe it. I swear in books I’ve seen it described as an ozone smell, you know, but I don’t think that’s right. I guess I don’t know what ozone smells like. But that kind of sharp, not really unpleasant smell. You ever shot a gun? You can kind of taste it, it don’t smell like wood smoke or the kind of smoke people are used to.
Once I figured I’d gotten far enough, I stood up, then immediately went flat again on account of hearing the helicopter. My grandpa told me about escape and evasion from when he was in the Army, and one of the things he said – I’ll always remember this, and I don’t know why – is that people’s facial recognition is crazy good. Good enough that if you don’t want a helicopter to see you, you can’t ever look at it, because if the person in the helicopter is looking in your area and your face is up, it’ll pop right out of the woods at them. Then after it was gone I started moving again, got up and started scrambling out over the rocks and the hills.
Even then, I didn’t take the direct route. I could have, but I didn’t know that they weren’t even looking for me. I doubled back a dozen times to lay false trails. I even took off my pants and boots and waded in a stream for an hour – okay, probably more like a few minutes, but it felt like an hour – to try to help kill my scent, and that just slowed me down more because I was shivering so hard. I think that’s the dumb thing about the whole thing with Blaise – you know, I still don’t even know if anything I did would have actually worked in real life, because I was hiding from basically no one. It was all shit I learned from old CIA manuals or whatever, so probably it all would have worked because the Army wouldn’t be teaching it otherwise, right? But I hope there were at least some bears or coyotes or something watching. Wolves, you know, looking at each other and asking each other: “What the hell is this crazy chick doing, zigzagging backwards up a stream? Is that something we should be doing?”
It took me half the day to get back to my car and by the time I got back home, the news was out. ACHC exec, killed in a hunting accident. It took the cops so long to get out there that I was back home making hot chocolate when they first started looking around. The only people who’d hurried had been the medics. They brought in a helicopter with flight surgeons and all to get him out of the woods, that was what I’d heard that had gotten me so paranoid. No expenses spared for dear old CEO. Not sure why they bothered when half his head was missing, but there you go. We have unlimited resources for those beyond help if they’re rich enough, right?
I guess I do actually regret his kids. I saw pictures of them, you know? At the funeral and all that. He had a daughter and a son, like my parents. Older sister, younger brother. You know, they’ll grow up without a dad, and that’s got to be hard. I guess they’ll have money – rich CEO, they’ll never want for anything. But you know, I’m sure they loved him. Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but I can see them asking when daddy’s coming home, bewildered at his absence, bitter when other kids have what they don’t have. I don’t actually know what their mom does, I guess she was probably a housewife. Trophy wife for Blaise, maybe. But I guess she’s going to have a rough lot, too, two kids to raise on her own…no, actually, I don’t think so. I guess they’re rich enough to have a nanny, so she can work and all. But she still had to bury a husband. The kids will still have to grow up without a father.
I had both parents growing up, but I have friends who didn’t. And I can’t even imagine what growing up without my daddy would have been like. I mean, watching him die was hard, real hard, but I was already a grown adult when he passed. I guess if he’d died when I was young – oil field accident or something, say – then I wouldn’t have learned how to hunt or anything. Maybe grandpa would have started teaching me, but he passed when I was ten.
And it wasn’t their fault. It’s not their fault that their dad was a piece of shit. I guess they’ll probably see me the same way. Maybe they’ll feel just as bad for my daughter after the execution: “Not her fault that her mom was a piece of shit.” My husband and I always wanted a son, too.
But you know, it was self-defense. Their dad was committing violence against everyone in Wyoming, same as his buddies and bosses were against everyone in the United States. At the end of the day, the way his family suffered – because of me – was the way millions of people were suffering in America. What about their families? Was Blaise’s family’s happiness worth so much more than us? If you can spare a million people that pain, is it right, moral, ethical, to avoid causing that harm to one person?
If you ask the millionaires, yes. They’ll argue that Blaise never took a life with his own hands. Because I guess murder is legal when the weapon is bureaucracy and the motive is profit.
This was the end of our first interview.