Chapter Four
It’s good to see you again, too. Hear I’m headed for a transfer soon? Apparently the Marshals don’t like me being here in the county jail. I guess they figure it’s not secure enough for little old me. I think I’m headed to Englewood, down in Denver. So, you know, make sure you drive to the right place next time.
Honestly, I don’t know. Jail ain’t awful, I guess. I mean, it ain’t great. They keep me alone, off in my own cell. People are always watching me. I spend a lot of time thinking. I get a lot of letters, funny enough. It’s a wild mix, people praising me or thanking me or telling me how awful I am. I guess this must be what a celebrity feels like, huh? If I’d known it was gonna get me letters from men telling me they masturbated to pictures of me, I wouldn’t have ever picked up that rifle. Shit, I’d probably have become a nun. I mean, how are you even supposed to react to that? Like what do you think they’re expecting me to do, send them a letter saying thank you? Like, Jesus, what I want to do is get a restraining order.
Anyway, how’ve you been? Yeah, right, I know. You want to get to it, then?
Okay.
We were talking about Blaise. Stephen Blaise, ACHC executive. I’ve been thinking about him a lot since the last time we talked. He’s been back in my dreams more, more than he was at least. I guess not him, really. His kids and wife, mostly. I’d thought about sending them flowers, you know that? As though flowers would be a good enough apology or something, wipe away my debt. I guess you wanted to know about what happened afterwards.
Well, honestly? After I got home that night, I took a long shower and made myself some hot chocolate. With the whipped cream on top and little marshmallows in it. Then I curled up under a blanket on the couch and I was watching the news and listening to the coverage – which, actually wasn’t all that big. It was a little deflating, you know? But a CEO dying in a hunting accident isn’t really big news. There also wasn’t that much information, which I guess is only natural a few hours after an accidental death.
I spent a while cleaning the gun and doing laundry. Kind of the mundane, practical shit, you know? Chores. My hands were shaking for days afterwards. My husband and daughter were asleep, so was my Mom, so I was being pretty quiet. And I was freaking out, of course. You know, it was kind of really hitting me, what I’d just done. And I mean, of course I was second-guessing myself. You know, had I done the right thing? Was I doing the right thing? I kept playing it around in my head, thinking about his family, his widow. Thinking about how I’d feel if I were his widow, if my husband had died like that. And his kids. That was the hardest part, I think. You know, on some level, even a parasite doesn’t think of himself as a parasite. Blaise probably was deluding himself into thinking he was providing a good life for his family, just doing his job, hurting nobody.
I laid low for a few days. I was too tired to go to church the next day. Honestly, it felt kind of – like it’d be wrong for me to go to church after something like that, too, if that makes sense. Like I needed time to get right with things, cleanse my soul as best as I could so I wouldn’t sully something sacred. I spent a while working on that.
At home, I told my husband that I hadn’t bagged any deer – you know, I’d told him I wanted to go hunting that day, so he and my mom were taking care of our daughter. I kept an eye on the news but tried to keep to my usual routine. Playdates, coding, all that. I kept seeing the look on his face through my scope before I shot. Serene, you know? He was grinning at something. Maybe one of his friends had said something to him over the radio. Maybe he was thinking about his kids. I almost stopped, I almost didn’t pull the trigger when I saw that. It surprised me when the rifle kicked. And then…I mean, I still dream about it sometimes. The way he fell.
Ms. Eversmann here lapsed into silence for a moment, until I prompted her to continue.
The news didn’t cover it much – police asking for information, no evidence, no suspects. Tragic hunting accident. I didn’t believe it at first, I had pictures in my head that there was a CSI team out there in clean suits searching for DNA on everything. Of course, I’d deleted the Instagram account I’d used to follow him and follow back, but I remember paranoia about that too – would anyone remember that account? Any of his friends? Would they notice the account was gone? But no knock came at my door, and the more time that went by, the more I realized that no one was looking for me. But you know something?
More than anything, I was getting more and more angry. A man had died, and for what? Nothing. It should have mattered. His kids were gonna grow up without a father, his wife was crying every night the same way my mother did when he killed my dad.
And I hadn’t set out to kill him for myself. There wasn’t some sense of personal satisfaction in any of this. I know, I know, it feels like there was some element of, you know, personal revenge for my father dying of cancer. And maybe that did play a part in me picking Blaise, but it honestly wasn’t the point.
I guess I was going to get away with murder, but I didn’t want to get away with murder. You know, I didn’t want Blaise dead – I wanted an executive dead. And part of the problem was that people didn’t realize it was murder. It was an accident, some horrified hunter who had accidentally shot someone he hadn’t meant to, if he’d even known he was there – maybe it was a hunter who’d missed a shot, the bullet had happened to hit the executive. Oops.
I think that was why I was feeling so low afterward. I mean, yes, there was the fact that I’d taken a life. A human life, really. I guess that didn’t bother me so much, though, as his family. They bothered me, knowing how they were probably feeling. But – and this probably makes me seem like a psychopath or something – but the other thing that bothered me wasn’t that I’d actually killed him, it was why I’d taken that life. His death was meaningless if people didn’t know it was because he was an executive. He’d died for nothing if that wasn’t true, and that didn’t sit right with me. I guess that’s kind of fucked up for me, isn’t it? Turning a man into a symbol. But I felt like – if he had to die, he should have died for a reason.
I feel like I should stop here to really be clear: I do regret Blaise’s death. I really do. I regret all of them. Not that I killed them, but that it was even necessary. That the legal system has been warped by the courts and by Henry Ford’s legacy until it gave people like Blaise the legal sanction, and the corporate imperative, to murder people.
But he was still a human being, just like me, just like you. He had his dreams, he had his memories that no one will ever have. Little moments of pride, little moments of sorrow, intimate moments here and there that defined a life. I don’t know, my husband once told me about how he feels when he’s laying in bed and I’m brushing my hair and he’s watching the light on my hair. How’s that Tennessee Williams poem go, “In silence, I have watched you comb your hair; intimate the silence, dim and warm, we have not long to love, a night, a day”?
Those little private moments, he had them, I’m sure. Peaceful contentment, joy, crying on the steps. Universal humanity, you know, the triumph and tragedy. Was it the exact same as mine? No, I don’t think he ever cried on a park bench because he was wondering if he was going to be able to keep a roof over his newborn daughter’s head, but I’m sure there were things he cried about or wanted to cry about in private, in the dark or in the shower. He was more than an ideal in a suit, and I killed all of it, not just the ideal.
But he was also an ideal in a suit, and he chose that.
But I think – as much as I was upset about taking Blaise’s life, ending all his possibilities, I was even more upset that it might be for nothing.
Anyway, you know what happened next. I told them. I mean, anonymously, of course. I sent the news an anonymous letter, detailing the moral crimes he was complicit in, citing the laws that he had bent to keep his actions, his policies legal.
When Ted Kaczynski was caught, he was caught because his brother recognized his writing style. It was as distinctive as a fingerprint, I guess. Remember rule one? You don’t even have to confide in someone you think you can trust for them to give you up.
So I tried to be very simple and neutral. I used simple, declarative statements. Subject, verb, object. I used common words, nothing elaborate. I won’t bother trying to reproduce it here, it took a lot of editing on my part and I ain’t gonna remember it correctly, but you can just look it up if you want to see it. Wrote it with my left hand since I’m right-handed, using a generic ballpoint pen on printer paper I got from a print shop with no camera.
The response was instant. Unsatisfying, too. There was a lot of debate on if it was some opportunist trying to capitalize on it for whatever reasons people construct hoaxes, or if it was genuine. I think that detracted a lot from the impact I had wanted – you know, whether or not it was a hoax, whether or not it was a hunting accident. Obviously, if it was and this was just someone trying to take credit, it wasn’t like the hunter was going to come forward.
And then that was it. The media coverage went back down as people moved onto the latest thing that the media was using to distract them from their lives. Draw their attention to some point of misery, draw their attention to some political gaffe, draw their attention to some feel-good story, never let our attentions linger on something long enough for it to really start to spark charge.
Like I was saying. It’s the firehose. I didn’t really appreciate it, but I was naïve with that first time. And I think that was when I realized how much of a change was really needed. It was probably my own mistake – using a hunting round in a forest. You know, it was too plausible that it was a hunting accident. That someone was trying to take advantage of a tragic accident when they didn’t have the courage to actually do it themselves. I didn’t know at the time that the FBI was investigating it after the note, of course – apparently, the implication that there might be escalated or continued violence was enough to bring in federal scrutiny.
Part of me wonders – if I’d left the exact same note after a homeless man died, would the escalated or continued violence implied warrant federal attention? Somehow, I ain’t too sure that it would. Protect the rich, let the poor burn, right? They frame it as “efficient use of limited resources”, but it’s just like that helicopter.
Apparently, the investigator at the time was out of the Salt Lake City field office. I only met the guy towards the end. Agent Rutherford. I’d buy him a drink if I could, he was damned diligent. Apparently he was convinced about the authenticity of the note, figured that it was someone who used to work for ACHC, started digging into recently fired employees. Barking up the wrong tree, but it was good guesswork when he had no evidence.
In the meantime, I was back to what I’d been doing. Taking care of my daughter, hitting deadlines for the job at the tech company. My husband took up some of the slack when he noticed I seemed stressed or sick. He never knew what I’d been doing, what I’d done. Rule One. But it was hard. We took a vow to each other, you know? Mingled our souls, brought a new soul into the world. I cried so many times in private when he wasn’t there. I remember just cradling our daughter and feeding her a few nights afterward, just ugly sobbing while I fed her because something made me start thinking about Blaise and I couldn’t stop thinking about him, about the way he’d been smiling when I shot him, and then he came back in from work, saw me, and just took our daughter and the bottle and fed her. Then he drew me a bath and cooked dinner. But I couldn’t, you know, tell him.
You know the next weekend after Blaise died, he took out my daddy’s hunting rifle and shot a deer with it? I guess my daughter had gotten her heart set on venison when I told them I was gonna go hunting, was disappointed that I didn’t bring any deer back. And my daughter’s got her daddy wrapped around her little finger, so he couldn’t let her be disappointed. Brought home the meat and we had venison for a week. My daughter loves venison, guess it’s a family trait. God, I hope I can have a venison steak for my last meal. Asparagus, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes on the side. Can you have alcohol with your last meal? A nice glass of bourbon. I don’t need anything fancy or anything, no top shelf stuff. Glass of Jim Beam or something.
But anyway, yeah, after I killed Blaise it became obvious that I needed to kill someone else. Yeah, yeah, the definition of insanity. Everyone claims Einstein said that, right? But I hadn’t done it a second time yet, and anyway, Einstein respected the scientific method. The scientific method says you have to validate experimental results by doing the experiment again. So I really had no choice, if you think about it.
Of course, I wasn’t really trying to replicate the results. So I decided to change things up. You know, it was healthcare, but it was oil, and it was the government, and it was all of them. Banks, tech, all of them. And I figured that…I mean, let’s be honest, maybe it was because he was a health insurance exec, right? I mean, to the broader society, you gotta think about what a health insurance exec is. Like, they’re basically ticks. You’ve got the doctors and nurses, you’ve got the patients, and you’ve got the health insurance companies fixed on the underbelly, sucking blood out of the whole thing and making the whole thing sick so they can get big. Does anyone really care if a tick gets its head squished? Other than the other ticks and the person doing the squishing, I guess.
Well, the next obvious target would have been oil. That would’ve shaken things up a lot. But I also thought that might make it a little too obvious. I mean, yeah, the intersection of oil workers and people fucked over by health insurance is basically the same set, but still.
So I figured I’d go out of state. Take it national, as it were. And that led me to Landon Greeley.