Carnival of Shadows (23 page)

“You kept your head,” the agent said. “Most people panic in such situations.”

“Did a couple of years in the army,” Travis said.

“I thought it might be something like that,” the agent said.

“So, what was the deal with the guy? I was sat right beside him. He seemed very nervous, and then he got mighty scared when you pulled up outside the diner.”

“You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow, I’m sure,” the agent said.

And with that, he shook Travis’s hand, thanked him once more for his assistance, and left.

Travis made a point of finding out what happened the following day.

The man’s name was Donald Gerritty. He hailed from Sterling, Colorado. He’d killed his wife. Strangled her and then tried to make it look like she’d hung herself. Soon as questions started being asked by the Sterling Police Department, Donald Gerritty took off. He just got in his car, hit I-76, and headed northeast. The moment he crossed the Nebraska state line at Julesburg, it became a federal matter, and Special Agents Norman Hiscox and Dennis Whyte had taken up the pursuit. Gerritty had made it all of two hundred miles, all the way to Kearney, and whether he was aware of having been followed for all of those two hundred miles was not clear from the small article that the newspaper had afforded his flight. Regardless, Hiscox and Whyte had found him in that diner, and rather than face the consequences of what he had done, Gerritty had decided to end his own life. How he had been in possession of a gun was not reported, but he had shot himself in the restroom of that diner and that was the end of that.

Hiscox knew what had really happened. So did Whyte. Michael Travis did not know which agent was which, and there was no picture of them. There was just a small, grainy monochrome image of Donald Gerritty looking considerably younger and less afraid than he had the day before.

But Travis’s curiosity went beyond the immediate whys and wherefores of the death of Gerritty. He wanted to know about the death of the wife. Why had Gerritty killed her? What had been his reasoning? Was it premeditated or spur of the moment? Did he honestly believe he could get away with killing her, or had the murder been nothing more than a sudden and inexplicable response to some stimuli?

On the subsequent Monday morning, February 27, Michael Travis took a bus to Lincoln. He located the FBI office and introduced himself. He said he wished to apply. They took his application, but informed him that the minimum age for acceptance into the training program was twenty-three. He would have to wait until the tenth of May for his answer.

Travis did wait until the tenth of May, and he did receive his answer. It was the answer he’d hoped for, and within a week he had begun a career that had—so far—lasted eight years.

At the start, those first few weeks in the newly established Kansas City unit, there were merely four or five of them, each pulled from different offices across the States. The meetings, the discussions, the initial debates regarding their purpose there, did serve to establish one thing: that the Bureau was looking at something very new.

There were angles and perspectives to all things, and the Bureau’s attitude—as expressed by the head of the training program, Section Chief Frank Gale—was that the failure to appreciate every single one of those angles and perspectives was the primary reason for the failure of a case.

Frank Gale was a man of certainty, both in what he said and what he did. Physically, he was no taller than Travis, but he
seemed
taller. He carried himself with authority, and though he smiled often, he nevertheless managed to instill respect and a sense of unquestioning compliance in his charges. Never one to say something unless it needed to be said, Gale was a very experienced Bureau veteran, and immediately Travis had no doubt that he could trust what he said.

“You are here as the devil’s advocate, Mr. Travis,” Gale said on their first day together. “You are here, very simply, because you challenge everything that is put in front of you, even those things we take for granted, even those things we
know
are true. I know you see yourself as a realist, but you are more the
un
realist.”

Travis had not responded, nor asked questions. He believed that everything would unfold in its own good time.

“These men with you,” Gale went on. “Perhaps they joined the Bureau for the same reason as yourself, perhaps not. That does not concern us. What concerns us is what we are beginning to call a
situational dynamic
. You have to understand that this is all theoretical, but it is the director’s wish that we explore all such areas of the human condition, certainly as it relates to the apprehension of criminals. To best something, you have to understand it, no? Possibly not in every case. One does not need to know the mind of a tiger to shoot it, but knowing the mind of a tiger perhaps gives you an advantage. The way it thinks, where it hunts, how it sees you as a potential threat, how it evades you, the instinctive methods it employs to escape capture. That is what we are looking into, Mr. Travis, and that is why you are here. In fact, when I mentioned the fact that some of you had come to the attention of the director personally, it was you I was talking about.”

“The director himself wants me here?” Travis asked, the surprise in his voice all too evident.

“Oh yes,” Gale said. “He most definitely wants all of you here. This is being overseen by myself, and even though I might not be running the day-to-day activities of this unit, the reports and findings will all come to me, and then there’s only one or two pay grades above me before those reports and findings reach the director himself. As you know, he is a stickler for administrative exactitude, and even though this is a somewhat nebulous and uncharted territory, he feels that an investment of time and resources could be very worthwhile.”

“So, can I ask what this unit is called?” Travis asked.

“Simply Unit X. That is our unofficial name. It merely means
experimental
.”

“And do we have a mission statement, so to speak?”

Gale smiled knowingly. “You remind me of Clyde Tolson. Same need to know. Same need to put a label on everything. Our mission statement, as you so eloquently put it, Mr. Travis, is to ask every question we can think of, to challenge everything we see, to try to find patterns, seeming coincidences that can then be substantiated, to recognize similarities in motive, intent, decision, and action. Really, we are here to try to discover if there is some way to understand the darkest and most destructive aspects of the human mind.”

“And our findings will be studied by the director personally?”

“Of course they will. He was the one who requested this unit be established, and he is quite prepared to fund whatever is required to obtain results.”

“And do you know what results he is after?”

“The truth, Mr. Travis. As always, he wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

And so the work began—work that was continuing even then, work that would perhaps continue for as long as there was a Bureau, as long as there were subjects to interview, crimes to investigate, patterns to follow, lines to pursue.

And Travis had been right there at the forward edge of the thing, though every step of the way he had found himself challenging what he saw, being challenged in return.

Looking back on those initial months, recalling the reports he wrote—knowing all the while that they would ultimately find their way to the desk of Director Hoover himself—he at once recognized the differences between himself and some of the others who were brought on to the team. Travis could divide them into three camps: the hopers, the deniers, the abstainers. The hopers were those who wanted to believe that there were connections through everything, and—as such—every case they studied, every answer they interpreted, every report they wrote simply served to highlight the almost-childlike and naive view that life possessed predictable and quantifiable
reason
. The deniers were the opposite and perhaps feared the possibility that there was reason and rationale behind all things. They did not want to see connections; they did not want to find out that cause resulted in effect, that every decision and action possessed an identifiable and attributable consequence. And then there was Travis, the abstainer, or—as Chief Gale had called him—the devil’s advocate. Soon it was evident why Travis was there, for the collected reports of all investigations and studies were brought to him, and his task was to determine where the hopers were hoping too much, where the deniers were denying too much, and how the middle ground might best be navigated.

Travis spent five years in that building, working with an ever-changing cast of characters, directly and indirectly involved in some of the most significant and high-profile investigations that the Bureau had undertaken. Travis was among those who interviewed the bank robbers, the killers, the terrorists, the political subversives, the reactionaries and would-be revolutionaries. From individuals connected to the Hollow Nickel Case to the Brink’s Robbery, from Baby Face Nelson’s compadres to Gerhard Puff and George Heroux, Travis had crisscrossed the country with his notebook, his tape recorder, his unquenchable thirst for answers. He had interviewed Angelo LaMarca in the fall of 1956 after LaMarca’s conviction for the kidnapping and murder of the Weinberger baby. Had he not been there in Seneca Falls, he would have been down in Nassau, Florida, for LaMarca was due to be executed the very next day. In his stead, there would be some other member of the X Unit, asking questions, trying to establish some further understanding from LaMarca about what had happened, his motives, his rationale, the thought processes that took place, the reason he believed that the opportunist kidnapping of a baby and a request for two thousand dollars in ransom money would have solved any problems at all.

In January of 1957, Hoover came to visit. It was Friday the eleventh, the day of Jack Graham’s execution in Colorado for the November ’55 sabotage of United Airlines Flight 629. With twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a blasting cap, a sixty-minute “off-type” timing device and a battery, Graham had blown a DC-6B out of the sky above Longmont, Colorado. He had killed forty-four people, five of them United Airlines crew members, one of them a baby. Travis had interviewed Graham at Colorado State Penitentiary just three months earlier, once again stringing together some semblance of a biography, trying to get to grips with how Graham had become the person he was. Had the man been born with a destructive impulse, an impulse that drove him relentlessly toward some preordained and unalterable conclusion, or had there been factors—familial, environmental, social, cultural, even pathological—that had contributed to such an end?

Where were their exhaustive investigations taking them? What was Unit X learning, and how could it contribute to a more effective Bureau? This was what Hoover wanted to know, and this was what he asked Special Agent Michael Travis when they were introduced.

Hoover’s manner was as Travis had expected. Despite his immediate proximity, the director seemed to be ever distant. Even as he shook Travis’s hand, Travis felt as if he was being surveyed, inspected, weighed. Hoover’s notorious unpredictability, his severity, his ability to make a snap decision about someone’s character that could then never be reversed, was legend, but Travis did not fear meeting the director. In truth, he welcomed it.

Travis stood in the presence of a man he had long respected and admired and yet felt unnerved by his presence. His loyalty to Hoover was unquestioning, and yet even as Hoover spoke to him, Travis felt a degree of suspicion in Hoover’s manner. He could have been wrong, but Travis felt as if Hoover was looking for some reason not to like him, as if Hoover wanted to justify some sort of basic and inherent distrust of all men.

“As you know,” Hoover explained in the brief conversation they shared, “I established the Bureau laboratory in 1932, all of twenty-five years ago. It has served its purpose, no doubt, but its purpose is very specific, very tangible, very functional. It does not matter how many bullets or knives or dead bodies we look at, such things do not help us to understand the mind. Hence we now have this unit, Unit X, which I believe might ultimately be called the Behavioral Science Division. You are a new viewpoint, young man, a new, fresh, vital viewpoint required to keep us right there at the cutting edge of law enforcement.”

Travis listened but did not speak. It was customary, certainly with Hoover, not to speak unless specifically invited to do so.

“I have read some of the summaries and reports you have written, Special Agent Travis, as has Mr. Tolson, and we have been impressed with your precision and directness. However, you lack an element of imagination. You lack the degree of foresight that would make so much of what we are doing here so much more real and applicable. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis replied.

“What I hope to accomplish, young man, is a view into the criminal mind, you see? I want to see behind the eyes of the criminal. I want to understand why the murderer kills, why the bank robber is incapable of any constructive contribution to society, why the subversive Communist sees reason in the most unreasonable political ideology. I want to know what they are going to do before they do it.”

“I understand, sir.”

“But do you believe it is possible, Special Agent Travis?” Hoover asked.

“Yes, sir,” Travis lied. “I believe everything is possible.”

“Now, is that a well meant but meaningless aphorism designed to placate me, Agent Travis, or is that what you really think?”

Travis looked at Hoover directly. “I am a realist by nature, sir, and I do not believe that my nature will ever fundamentally change. I do not need to believe in something to make it happen, nor do I need to believe in something to have it be true. There are many things I do not understand, and there are many things I do not
need
to understand. I know what questions need to be asked, and I know what you are looking for. My every waking moment is dedicated to giving you as much useful and usable information as can be isolated and documented. I am here to challenge everything, and I will continue to challenge it.”