Free A Rage to Kill by Ann Rule Page A

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